[Music]
Awake.
Shake dreams from your hair.
Am I pretty child?
Am I sweet one?
Choose the day and choose the sign of your day.
Take the day's identity.
First thing you see.
[Music]
A vast radiant beach and cool jewel.
[Music]
Couples naked, raised down.
This is KZSU Stanford.
[Music]
Welcome to entitled opinions.
My name is Robert Harrison.
We're coming to you from the Stanford campus.
[Music]
No eternal rewards will forgive us now for wasting the dawn.
[Music]
Henry David Thoreau puts it a little differently than Arthur Hambou,
but to the same effect, I quote,
"That man who does not believe that each day contains an earlier,
more sacred, and a rural hour than he has yet profaned,
has disappeared of life.
Little is to be expected of that day to which we are not awakened by our genius.
Who is the genius?
He's the one who cleanses the doors of perception and wakes you up to the dawn,
or better to the more a rural hour that proceeds the dawn.
Hambou called it "Luh and Deceeble, the unspeakable hour."
Here's how he describes it in a letter on the summer solstice 1872.
At three in the morning the candle went pale,
all the birds cry at once in the trees, it is over.
No more work.
I have to look at the trees and sky,
seas by that unspeakable hour, the first of the morning.
My bones are re-clothed with a new and amorous body.
If we're on a quest for anything here on entitled opinions,
it's the new and amorous body.
[Music]
Here is what Hambou had to say about the genius or genie in his prose poem "Jinni."
He is affection and the present because he has made the house open to the frothy winter and to the murmur of summer.
He is affection in the future, the force and the love which we standing in rage and boredom see passing in the stormy sky among banners of ecstasy.
He is love, marvelous and unexpected reason and eternity.
We have all known the terror of his yielding and our own.
O delight in our health and passion for him, him who loves us for his infinite life.
O his breaths, his heads, his raceings, the terrible swiftness of form and of perfected action.
O free-cundity of the mind and immensity of the universe, his body, the dreamed of redemption,
the shattering of grace, meeting with new violence.
His sight, his sight, all the old kneeling and pains lifted at his passing.
His day, the abolition of all audible and moving suffering in more intense music.
His step, migrations more enormous than the old invasions.
O him and us, pride more benign than wasted charities.
He has known us all and has loved us all.
May we know this winter night from promontory to promontory, from the tumultuous pole to the country house,
how to hail him and see him and to send him on his way and beneath the tides and at the top of the deserts of snow,
to follow his sight, his breath, his body, his day.
That is the genius, the one who dawns in us when we are fully awake.
And if you don't believe me, ask Charlie, as in Charles Bodle, I quote,
"There are days when a man wakes up with a young and vigorous genius.
His eyelids barely released from the slumber that seal them.
The external world offers itself to him in powerful relief with a distinctiveness of contours and a wondrous richness of colors.
The moral universe opens its vast perspectives full of new charities."
So there you go, the hour of genius dawning on us or dawning in us.
Let's quote Henry David one last time.
"Morning is when I am awake and there is dawn in me.
To be awake is to be alive and I have never yet met a man who was quite awake.
How could I have looked him in the face?"
If the row could have met a humble about ten years after he, the row died in 1862,
he would not have been able to look him in the eyes because if there was ever a person who was fully awake for a year or two in his life,
it was Arthur Hambault in his late teens.
We all still marvel at Hambault because we know how miraculously awake he was when he wrote illuminations and some of his other wondrous poems,
as awake as Dante when he wrote Pardizo.
It's taken us a long time to finally do a show on Hambault, but here we are in the pulsing underworld of KZSU,
ready to take the plunge.
I am joined today by Dr. Rebecca Peckron, who was my guest on entitled "Pinience One Year ago" when she and I engaged in conversation about Edgar Allan Poe.
Only the best for Rebecca Peckron.
Rebecca got a BA in comparative literature here at Stanford in 2005 before going on to Johns Hopkins University,
where she earned a doctorate from the Hopkins Humanities Center with a dissertation called "Kurrstautille Poetic Approaches to Immortality, Baudlea, and After."
After here includes Hambault and Maladmea among others.
Rebecca Peckron currently lives in San Francisco, where she's working on her first work of fiction. Becky, welcome back to the program.
Thanks for having me, Robert, and really happy to be here.
I'd like to also welcome someone else who joins us in the recording booth today, Ansofi Bean.
Ansofi is a Stanford undergraduate majoring in comparative literature.
She's from France and is with us today to read some of Hambault's poem in the French original Ansofi welcome.
Thank you so much, Robert. I'm really excited as well to be reading some poems in French.
Well, thank you for coming because I know it's a busy time of year.
It's the end of the academic year. We appreciate you taking the time out for this.
It's my pleasure. Great. So, Becky, if you want to say anything about my intro before I ask you my opening question by all means.
I just love that poem, Don, that you read and we didn't read it all of it, but you quoted it at the very end.
You have these images of the poet chasing the dawn and through the city.
I love the idea of the unveiling and the stripping bear, which gets to that particular way of being awake.
That is almost sometimes like a lucid dream.
I wanted to just, since we're talking about being awake, it makes me think of the very last line of that poem where he says.
When I woke it was already noon, which kind of blurs that boundary between awake and dreaming, because his way of being awake is so unclouded.
I wanted to talk about something that he said, if I'm both a great critic of poets who had come before him, and one of the things that he said about them is that they were not yet wide awake, but also that they were not yet in the fullness of the great dream.
I think a lot of times that we see in his poetry is him doing both a waking kind of dream that almost has a hallucinatory type of quality.
In fact, that letter that I read from 1872, where he's up all night, and it's three in the morning, the endy-seable.
You can imagine him writing poems in a kind of dream state, but he says it's three o'clock, and now it's time to stop because I have to look out at the trees and the birds, and now he is fully awake to the day, which is not the same as being in a dream state.
But as you mentioned, there are sometimes when you're so wide awake to the world that the world appears as if it's hallucinating on you.
That's exactly right, and he says something to that effect, we get something of that effect in a passage from the season in health that I actually brought with me, which is Rembo writes, "I grew accustomed to pure hallucination.
I would see very clearly," and I think that clarity is really important, but I would see very clearly a mosque instead of a factory, a school for drummers taught by angels, coaches on the roadways of the sky, a sitting room at the bottom of the lake.
So this is a poetry and a psychology of perception, and the transformations that take place in perception when you are in a state, which I'm calling awake, but we can find other words for in the Humbulls corpus.
It's what William Blake perhaps meant when he said, "When the doors of perception are cleansed, the world appears as it truly is namely infinite."
That's exactly it.
And infinite doesn't mean that it goes on forever, it means that it can take all sorts of forms, a combination of forms that don't appear to ordinary perception.
That's exactly right.
So I think both of us are kind of aware of the challenge it represents to do a show on Humbull, if only because it's corpus, but he has such an iconic status in our culture around the world.
And a lot of people are going to be tuning in very curiously, but why don't I ask you to start by saying just a few words about this iconic superstar status that he has and what it might be due to?
So Humbull has found a particular kind of reception with rock stars, contemporary rock stars, and he has a very rock and roll attitude.
And I think that that is probably the main thing that draws them to him.
But I also think that, and I'll say this again and again, that Humbull's lifestyle is not divorced from his poetry.
And I think that's a part and parcel of the same thing.
So when I say they're attracted to his lifestyle, that means also they're attracted to his poetry.
And they're so attracted to his poetry that you would have actually someone like Jim Morrison from the doors, writing Wallace Falle, who was an ambush translator to say thank you for this translation.
That is not a letter, I think Wallace Falle was expecting.
He received it in 1966, never heard of Jim Morrison and then he asked his students, "Any of you heard of this guy?"
And say, "Are you crazy? That's even worse?" 1966.
So people that we don't normally think of as being big readers of 19th century French poetry are particularly drawn to Vambo.
That includes Bob Dylan.
That list includes Kurt Corbain and one of my artists I really like Patty Smith.
And Patty Smith is beyond in love with Gumbo.
She's moved on to fully obsessed or maybe even possessed by him.
She's got the Kool-Aid down.
Oh man, I brought a quotation from an interview with her, if you want.
So she writes, "When I was 16 working in a non-union factory in a small Jersey town, my salvation and respite from my dismal surroundings was a battered copy of Arthur Grombo's Illuminations, which I kept in my back pocket."
She says that the book became the Bible of her life.
And so...
Along with her, there's the beat generation, the Kerouax and Allen Ginsburg.
And Henry Miller has two books on Haimbo. He has a prose book and also a novel.
A nice and two. I mean, if you're saying Henry Miller.
And here we're just speaking about the Americans.
So the list goes on.
But since our time is somewhat limited, why don't I ask you to elaborate a little bit about what you said about the way his life and his poetry are inextricable one from the other?
And why don't we say something about his life? Because many of us know the biography, but there's a lot that we really should recount in order to orient ourselves here.
Sure. And when we're talking about Grombo, we're always thinking of his punk rock of Ol'Neskron.
And you really see that in his biography.
And so I'm just going to start with some, I guess, basic facts and you can stop me if I'm...
If you want at any point.
He's born in 1854 and a small town called Shalvio. His mother is from a farming family.
And his father is an army captain.
And something...
So just to kind of get a sense of what types of personalities these two people have.
His mother is a very strict, very religious woman. She believes that happiness lies in fulfilling one's duties.
Whereas Grombo's father is quite different actually and actually has even a bit of a literary bent.
I don't know if you would call it literary, but certainly a gift for storytelling.
He'll spend most of his military career in Algeria, but he compiles Arab jokes.
He translated the Quran. He has a long dissertation about military speeches.
And so that's an important part of understanding whoever the two major influences in his life.
And I would even cite his father as a major influence even though he does leave the family when Grombo's only six years old.
And that...
Never to return, I believe.
Never to return and actually his mother insisted on being called widow or rebel.
Even though her husband was still alive, it was just humiliating.
I love it.
And the biographer has not been gentle on Madame Grombo.
They have not.
And they don't know why I read one biography.
I said her husband was thrilled to be back digging the trenches and in the color on everything after big with his wife.
So she seems like a very severe person.
Psycho analysts would have a field day with this object that Grombo's father left in the house.
He left an eight hundred seventy page book of Grommer, in which Grombo's father had written,
quote, "Grommer is the basis and foundation of all human knowledge."
And so you can imagine this massive book sitting in the house.
And we know that Humboldt went back to it at least during his childhood where he added notes of his own or slipped in little pieces of paper of his own.
But this symbol of the father that was still extremely present for him, and that legacy that was obviously still very present for him is extremely interesting.
You know that it's beyond interesting because if you think of what's entailed there, Grommer is the basis and foundation of all human knowledge.
It struck me that Humboldt subverted all the basic conventions, poetic conventions that he inherited from the French tradition,
in his behavior, he was outrageous, and yet the one thing that remains perfectly intact in his poetry,
the most revolutionary poetry of his time is Grommer.
He is not one of these avant-gardeists who does the facile thing, which is to undermine, you know, the very foundation's Grommer.
I'm wondering if that has something to do with a paternal legacy of his.
It could very well have something to do with it, and that paternal legacy too, we know that later in his life, Humboldt, would give the name of his father or his father's regiment when he was forced to make up identities.
So there is this residue or something about his father that always really stuck with him.
And his father was in Algeria, a lot, he was a traveler, and we will talk later about the role that was traveling, journeying, nomadism.
It seems that I think it would be completely wrong headed to see his relation to his father as edible conflict.
I think that rather he follows in many ways he's trying to follow his father's footsteps by being an adventurer, and someone quite taken with the, we used to be called the Orient, Africa,
and the East, and so forth. Anyway, we...
Yeah, there is that sense too, where we have Grombo constantly seeking after something.
And he's this way of chasing this thing he can ever have again, and if there's a way of going to locales that are very similar to the places his father would have been.
And we have to think of him, maybe this thing that he's really looking for is this absent father.
There's one way of reading his biography that we could...
Well, maybe we can get into that when we look at some of the poems, which are quest poems or journey poems, and even the dawn poem, which we both refer to now, maybe we'll have an occasion to read the whole thing for our listeners.
Yeah.
But maybe a few other things, items that we really must cover in the biography.
That's right, so something that we should always keep in mind is that Grombo is an incredibly talented linguist, and that began even in his very,
very early age. He had won prizes, especially in Latin.
And even when he's young too in his childhood, we can already see this kind of mischievous, conniving personality, developing, where he is so talented that he were priced.
We'll write his classmates homework in Latin, but can imitate their styles very convincingly.
So there's a whole classroom full of Grombo's homework. Everybody's doing great. Thanks to his business early business sense.
I hope they held onto them probably worth the fortune.
So, just before his 16th birthday is Grombo's first attempt to try to get to Paris.
And he doesn't quite have the money for a full-trained fair, so he stoves away for the last part of the ride.
And as soon as he arrives in the Paris station, he's arrested and taken to prison, and he might not have been taken to prison if he'd been more polite.
But this is where that rock and roll attitude comes in.
Anybody who asked him any questions, including the judge, they got what was coming to them.
So, if you spent a few weeks in prison, that was right as the Prussians actually were about getting ready to march on Paris, 1870s, a pretty huge year in French history.
But he winds up, finally, getting sent back home to his mother.
And later, actually, he would change the dates of some of his poems and say that they were written from this prison as a way of making him seem more political, or as if he were had been arrested for his politics, but he was actually just there because he didn't have enough money for the train ticket.
I think there's a suggestion that he might have been less if not raped.
That's in this first part. He said that he had to defend his virtue, which I think is a very nice way of putting what had probably happened to him at that initial imprisonment.
He was still very young, and his first time really out of Charlottesville.
So, that is a tragic piece of that story.
And after that, after returning to Charlottesville, he continued to try to run away several times.
You do feel a little bit of sympathy for his mom because he was obviously someone who was very difficult to control.
He kind of very strong willed.
He would go back to Paris for two weeks after the siege.
And so, he led himself in. They'd never met before. And she all says, "What are you doing?"
And he says, "I'm having a nice dream."
So, that gives you an idea of his attitude.
He did not respect private property or really feel that there were any barriers to him doing exactly what he wanted to do.
But the thing that kept being an issue for him was that he didn't have enough money to sustain these stays in Paris.
So, I think on that trip, for example, he wound up walking back to Charlottesville and has 150 miles, which he just did on foot.
That's nothing compared to what he walked later in life when I think he walked from Moscow back to Paris or something.
And he crossed the Alps by foot too.
Yes, so he's someone who is constantly moving around and not intimidated by distance as very determined to get where he's going.
So, he'll come back briefly right before the fall of the commune and be involved with some child soldiers, actually part of an epidemic.
A lot of young boys were running away to join the commune and they would form these armies.
These old folk, Paul, do the lost boys. It was a key example of one of those armies.
And many of those children, seven between seven and sixteen, seventeen years old, would also be executed and imprisoned after the fall of the commune.
So, that was a very scary, very real fate that I'm going to manage to avoid a return to Charlottesville right before that happens.
So, he'll finally have a successful trip to Paris.
And by that I mean one that he can kind of sustain has the budget to sustain after writing to Berlin.
And that happens.
Who was the violin?
Vowtland.
I know, of course.
I stand in for my listeners.
Oh no, of course.
Vowtland was then hanging out with a lot of the Parnassian poets, but he's a great poet in Paris who with whom
Rambo was already familiar from reading his poetry back in Charlottesville.
And so, finally, Rambo writes to Berlin sends him a few of his poems.
And he gets this, when I find such a beautiful invitation where,
Vowtland writes him back and he says, "Come dear great soul.
We await you.
We desire you."
And there weren't many people saying that to Vowtland at that point in his life.
Certainly not his mother.
And so I think this is a real kindness, this greeting with open arms and Vowtland immediately.
And this really profound way understood what Rambo was doing.
And he invites him to Paris with open arms.
And this is, I think, just a gorgeous invitation.
And it changes Rambo's life because he's been trying, as do you think, trying and failing to get to Paris,
where he really believes is where he needs to be to do his work.
And this will finally enable him to stay there.
Vowtland now is 10 years older than Rambo, recently married.
That's right.
With child now.
His wife, yes, gives birth the letter comes in September and his wife gives birth in October.
So he's a new dad and he's a new, relatively new husband.
And he's just moved in with his in-laws because of his own involvement in the commune.
He was a sensor for opposition, the opposition papers during the commune.
So he's just moved in with his in-laws and he invites Rambo to stay with his in-laws.
And that lasts about a hot minute because Rambo is a terrible influence on Vowtland.
The worst.
So all they do is drink and get high together.
And I have a very funny quote from Vowtland's wife who says, "Senskhan Bose, a rival for Len,
has been dressing in the most casual manner.
He has taken to wearing his horrible scarves and floppy hats again.
Sometimes he went for a whole week without changing his clothes or having shoes cleaned."
How dare he.
And it was going to get worse after that.
She had no idea it was in store for her.
I do feel bad for her though because he was legitimately a terrible abuse of a husband.
So I do have a lot of sympathy for her.
- So her hair on fire. - He set her hair on fire because apparently the coffee was too cold.
And also through his infant son against the wall in a rage.
So pretty legitimately violent person.
And the things that he would do to her later are just so horrible anyway.
So after only six months of kind of bumping around together in the Latin Quarter,
Vowtland asks Vowtland to go back to Charlottesville because he really needs to make things better with his wife.
Because the relationship between Vowtland and Vowtland is, first of all, it's romantic.
And people are starting to talk.
And there is a scandal, not to mention there's that scandal, but not to mention the public drunkenness and all the drugs and everything.
And Vowtland is very easily persuaded both by his wife and by a Venbo.
He does not have much of a will of his own.
It seems.
So anyway, after only six months in Paris for lenses,
and I'm going to please return to Charlottesville, just give me enough time to patch things up with my wife and then you can come back.
And by this point, too, I should say, Vowtland is not living with Vowtland's family anymore.
He's found other places to live.
So Vowtland stays away for a few months, comes back.
And then in July, Vowtland goes out for medicine and his wife and runs into Vowtland's street.
And Vowtland says, "Let's go to Brussels."
And Vowtland says, "Okay."
And so the two of them run away.
And his wife has to learn that he's not coming back with medicine for her.
And they stay for a little while.
And Vowtland is before taking a ferry to London where they live for a little while together.
And all of their movements are followed from around the time they get into Brussels by the police or taking notes.
Somewhat because of Vowtland's involvement with the commune,
Vowtland, they also believe, was involved in the commune.
So they were just keeping very close watch on these two characters.
And also because they were homosexuals.
I mean, it was such a scandal to have Vowtland in 10 years.
I'm both senior walking around.
And Vowtland is a teenager at this time.
So this is not, obviously, these are much less open-minded times that we live in today.
So it was quite scandalous.
And so that's their time in London is going, "Okay."
Vowtland returns a few times to Charlottesville, which he does throughout his life,
and I think it's very interesting. He's such an adventure and a voyage,
but funnily enough, as much as he doesn't like his mother,
still returns to her house over and over and over throughout these periods.
And I actually find it very interesting that in the nine and a half years between his first desk in 1870,
when he tries to go to Paris, and when he finally leaves Europe, which would be later in 1880,
he actually lives at the family farm for almost five years, and almost never misses Christmas.
So that is also illuminating in some regards.
So Hambou and Vowtland are now living in London together.
And what happens is this, there's a very famous incident where they get any terrible fight.
And the beginning of the fight, apparently, is that Hambou makes fun of Vowtland,
who is coming home with a fish and a bottle of oil.
And both things he looks ridiculous, and I'm sure it's a mean-spirited teasing.
I don't know, but he is a povacata.
Hambou knows how to get under people's skin, and he does know how to incite people to anger.
There are a lot of people who are angry with him all the time.
So some sort of teasing, and what happens is Vowtland leaves Vowtland and heads for Brussels.
And basically writes Gambou, what is effectively a suicide note.
Gambou's mother also receives a suicide note from Vowtland, which I think is very interesting.
And then finally, Vowtland, when he gets to Brussels, sends Gambou a note that says he can come to see him,
because Vowtland has been sending him letters, apologizing.
So Vowtland at this stage is completely spinning his wheels.
He hasn't decided whether or not he'll go back to Paris.
He tries to join the Spanish Army.
He's thinking still that he's going to reconcile with his wife, which is just delusional.
And he also gets blasted drunk, just beyond anything else.
So by the time Gambou arrives in town, he doesn't know which way is up.
What winds up happening is that Vowtland doesn't want Gambou to come to Paris with him.
He's thinking he's still might try to reconcile with his wife.
He winds up shooting Gambou, actually, in the wrist.
And it's really funny because they also don't, at that moment, nobody complains about the noise.
There's not a police report file.
They just bring Gambou to the hospital.
Nobody takes the gun away from Vowtland also at that juncture.
They all just go to the train station.
Vambou's going to get on a train to Paris.
But while they're standing on the platform, Vowtland, who still has his gun,
looks like he's going to pull it out of his jacket.
And so Gambou runs for the police only at that point.
And Vowtland is arrested.
Vowtland, Vowtland, Vowtland, who's been arrested for the war.
Vowtland, Vowtland, who's been arrested for the war.
Vowtland, who's been arrested for the war.
And he's been arrested for the war.
For a little while.
But then I think he sank back into his drunken vices.
Yes.
I think they got the better of him in the end.
Yeah.
Every time he saw a handboy, it just was an instant recall.
It was really--
I know such a jisela buez.
[LAUGHS]
But you know, it was really striking because shocking
really for a relationship of that intensity and the level
of intimacy that they had not only connecting physically
but also poetically intellectually.
The fact that this incident was the very--
maybe it's lovely that this was the kind of thing that
ended it for them.
But if I remember only Sal Verlin one more time after that
now was in 1875 was the last time he saw Verlin.
Well, Becky, we might not get another chance to return to the
Verlin-Hambot relationship.
But there's one of my most favorite poems or part of the poem
in the corpus is from Ilumina Siombe Yee.
I love that poem.
I should read that.
And this is interesting because it was such a tumultuous
relationship.
But obviously it had every now and then these kind of oasis
moments of calm and serenity, equanimity.
And this poem, Vayay, number one, is something that I believe is
describing a moment of calm between the two of them.
Perhaps we could hear it in French and Sophie and then I can read
the English translation.
Wonderful.
Thank you.
(muffled speaking in foreign language)
It's not going to be nearly as beautiful in English, but it is the illuminated rest,
neither fever nor linger on the bed or on the grass.
It is the friend, neither strong nor weak, the friend.
It is the beloved, neither tormenting nor tormented, the beloved.
Air in the world, not sought after, life.
Was it this then and the dream freshness?
So I thought that is such a beautiful moment of repose and tenderness that Humboldt captured there,
because so many of the scenes, the biography with its violence,
can kind of eclipse that relationship that was so important to both of them.
And I think that was so crucial for Humboldt to do his poetry,
to have Verlin as a witness, and as in some ways a disciple.
Verlin was the first person to really, in some ways, believe in Humboldt's vision.
And he had tutors, and he had people at school who recognize that he was intelligent,
but Verlin really understood Humboldt's vision in a way that other people at the time did not.
Theodore de Volvue is a great example.
He was ahead of the Parnacian poets, and he completely missed what was original,
what was valuable, what was earth shaking, and Humboldt's poetry,
but Verlin saw him for who he was right away.
Is it fair to say that Humboldt stops writing poetry once he is estranged
or detached from Verlin?
I know that we know that he goes back to Shadow of V. Le Tris certain point,
and he writes, "Un sis on, Alfeir, I believe it was after the Brussels incident."
Yes, exactly.
That for me has always been his idea of the poetry, this season in hell that he writes.
It's not clear. People say that he wrote the bulk of the illuminations after.
And sis on, Alfeir, others say, "No, it's not..."
We don't really know, but the fact is that at around age,
19 or 20 at the latest, he does not write another word of poetry for the rest of his life, as far as we know.
And won't speak about that period of his life really very much,
either when he's questioned about that, his poetic life later, he almost renounces it.
Oh, for sure.
And so it is something to try to think of what Verlin was for him,
and it's not to say that he couldn't have written without him, but certainly it would have been very different,
and there was an energizing force that Verlin brought to Hambou's work that he couldn't have had without him.
So earlier, you were mentioning this passion for voyage and discovery,
and this nomadic thing that he might have inherited from his father, his father,
by the way, always leaving home, coming back only briefly, and then leaving again.
Do you think maybe his engagement with poetry was an extended journey that led in his mind nowhere
and that he had to take other types of journeys and engage in different kinds of quests?
And then there was this kind of Dolores Disenchantment at a certain point.
It could be.
We find he just grows so fast.
I think of him like a child who's always outgrowing his pants,
and he just devours things, and even when you think about Verlin, who just devours and spits out,
and all the books that he read when he was young,
he just exhausts the local libraries, exhaust all the languages,
and then kind of throw it away.
And I see poetry as a part of that where he's constantly pushing for whatever the new horizon is.
Later in his life, he tries to learn all these languages.
He's traveling all over the world, and it just feels like nothing can satisfy whatever this thirst that he has,
which is for the new, but also for a certain type of experience.
And he just outgrow things very quickly.
And he gives a name to that, no?
What he says he's looking for, he'll call it different things at different points,
but the one I really like is Love, Lévi, the true life.
And he says that that is really the thing that he's seeking after when we ask,
"What is he trying to find?"
He had a, there was a prose piece of his that was actually loss.
That's called the spiritual hunt.
And I'm always, everyone's so sorry that this was something that actually,
Verlin's wife had destroyed, but you really get the feeling that what he was looking for was something spiritual.
A form of, I think we said before Robert, when we've talked about a kind of presence and a way of being in the world,
that wasn't otherwise available to him that Empoetry was one of the first channels that he took to try to get there.
Yeah, you, you call it the true life.
You can call it this state of being wide awake.
You can call it the state of being possessed by the genius or inhabited by your genius.
You could call it what he calls it in his famous Let Duvoyon, the letter of the seer which he writes early on,
I think at 17 to his, his school teacher, where he says that he's going to access the unknown.
He's going to practice as systematic immense deregulation of all the senses, dehe glum on the two lissons.
Exactly.
And through this deregulation that he will be able to penetrate the unknown and the dawn in a certain sense,
the old poem, which probably read the dawn poem, to give a sense of what a chase that leads maybe,
that maybe advantages in thin air of how it relates to this search for the true life.
Sure, would you like to read that, should we read the dawn poem now maybe?
Maybe the dawn poem, maybe Ansofi can read it in French first.
It's a great way to see what is possible to read the same thing.
I'm very happy to read the same thing that I would like to read.
Beautiful.
Thank you.
So English, I have kissed the summer dawn.
That's how I would translate it rather than I have embraced the summer dawn.
With all due respect to Foulty, I have held the summer dawn in my arms.
No.
I have kissed the summer dawn.
Nothing moved as yet on the forehead of the palaces.
The water was dead.
Swarms of shadows refused to leave the road to the wood.
I walked along, awakening the warm alive air.
Stones looked up and wings rose up silently.
The first occurrence in the path already filled with cool white shimmerings was a flower,
which told me its name.
I laughed at the blonde waterfall which tumbled down through the pine trees.
At its silver top, I recognized the goddess.
Then I took off her veils, one by one.
In the path where I waked my arms, in the field where I gave away her name on the cock
in the city, that fled between steeples and domes and running like a thief along the marble
warves, I chased her.
Where the road mounts near a laurel wood, I wrapped her all in her veils and felt something
of the immensity of her body.
Dawn and the child collapsed at the edge of the wood.
On waking, it was noon.
This is so beautiful.
I love him lifting the veils, clearing the veils away to have that clarified cleansed vision
that we talked about earlier.
I also love this as a metaphor for writing as well.
The experience or sensation or the moment that escapes representation kind of refuses the
author.
He keeps chasing after it, can't quite grasp all of it if I think so.
Do you think so?
Because it does begin with this strong affirmation.
I have embraced the summer dawn.
It's not this constant Apollo and Daphne thing where the poet is reaching for the nymph
turns into the laurel of poetry.
I think here there's some real phenomenologically immersion in, but what is the dawn?
It dissipates into nothingness.
When the dream is over, it reveals itself as having had an insubstantial core, but when it
was there, in this presence there was a substantial presence indeed.
This is what the D.E. Rehachlum multisolce is trying to get at.
He also says that this is die partite, this search for life may be.
The true life he thinks that it might be possible for him to get to it, but then there's
also the question of pulling it back and being able to speak about it.
And those are two different things for Hambo.
He says the poet is the thief of fire.
And that means that the poet is really going to another world or another place and then trying
to bring back whatever it is that he's found or been able to experience or encounter.
And dawn might be something that also falls along those lines as well.
The idea of the quest and the search, this idea of seeking, is a thing that we see come up again and again in Hambo's poetry.
Another great poem that I'm thinking of is "Lebato Ive", the drunken boat.
And this was the poem he wrote, expecting all the people in Paris to just to wow them.
This is before he arrived.
He sent the poem ahead of himself.
This is the poem he sent to Verlin when Verlin invited him there for the first time.
So he's very young.
But this is a seeking poem.
It's a poem about voyage and a quest.
And it's one of my favorite poems of his.
I'll say, and I still get chills when I read it.
There are certain passages that I think when he says you have to be born a poet and Hambo does say he thinks you have to be born a poet.
I think this is the type of thing that he's talking about.
If you're an author, I would read a fumble very carefully because he can really rattle you that way.
But the thing about this poem and about his doctrine of what it means to be a poet is when he says,
"Jure, in the famous letter, I is another.
I is not self identical.
Here in the poem there is not a self that's related to the poet.
It's the boat itself which is speaking without a subject.
And as you know, when he sent this poem to Bon Ville,
Bon Ville wrote back and told him, "You should not begin it."
With the boat you should say, you should say, "Jure, take home."
I don't know what he said.
It was, I was like a drunken boat, which of course it misses the insurrectional power of this amazing poem.
Exactly. I'm so happy that Bon Ville did not take Bon Ville's advice because that would have taken all of the blood out of this poem to have it start that way.
I am like a drunken boat.
So when I say that Verlein recognized my own boat, "Jesus is what I'm talking about because there were so many other people who missed it."
And who didn't understand his innovation.
And this is one of them.
This getting rid of the subject being able to inhabit other people, other things even in another poem.
He's, it's a poem about a closet and he's talking about a closet which may have some interesting
connections now when we talk about being in the closet from that standpoint.
But yeah, that was an incredibly innovative way of approaching the subject.
Why don't we hear a few stances from Le Beto Yves, at least in French because it's one of the iconic poems in the corpus.
And it's one of your favorites, one of my, I bet you it's Anso Fisfay, I don't know anyone who knows how well it is.
And doesn't love that poem.
Anso Fisfay, would you mind reading maybe, let's say the first three stances and the last three stances of the poem?
Of course, so I'll start with the first three.
Le Beto Yves.
It's the first three in the past.
The first three are the pre-poseable.
The third is the "Cluenuees" or "Poto de Colleur."
The last is the "Toulie de Cipage."
The first is the "Ble Flamel" or "Couten d'Eggle.
The first is the "Bells" or "Fleav" or "Lecet des Sono," or "Ujulverle."
The first is the "Poucure de Marais."
And the last three stances.
The first is the "Poucure de Marais."
The "Poucure de Marais."
Great.
Thank you.
So what I love about one of the last stances of that poem was just
Campbell was talking about if he'd ever returned to Europe,
not Campbell, but the boat is thinking if it would ever
return to Europe.
And there's this image of a puddle and a child releasing what we can
imagine is like a little paper boat into this puddle as fragile
as my butterfly, I'm all right.
And I see in that image the child tremble dreaming after his
father, or thinking of his father, it's this image of nostalgia,
this image of home, when Rambo keeps going back home through all of his
voyages.
This is that image for me.
I think it's such a beautiful way to end this poem that is otherwise
so ferocious.
But the uncannyness is that he hasn't really left home yet.
I mean, he's been to Paris and back, but he hasn't gone to Paris to
meet Vertlin's been six months.
So it's already kind of a projective nostalgia, almost as if he's
actually experienced a voyage, a substantial voyage in the writing of the
poem that he becomes homesick.
And what's even incredible on that front, Robert, is to think too that he wrote this
poem.
People say this all the time about this poem, but it bears repeating.
He had never seen the ocean.
He had never left a small town and he wrote this beautiful,
it's filled with this beautiful imagery of the ocean and the waves.
And he'd never left this small town before.
So if I were to ask you, which of the four elements,
Campbell was most allied to or that he had his allegiance to the most?
Water is strong candidate.
Water is a very strong candidate.
We also see that in his o'fili.
O'fili, yeah.
And memoir is a beautiful poem where he's on the river.
It's a childhood memory of being with his mother and siblings.
And he sees the boat with this old man on it.
And he was kind of a figure for a care on the ferryman to the underworld.
So yeah, water is also in Imanasian.
He has, I think, about bridges with the water.
And there's something about the reflective surface of water, which has this divine
superficiality about it. The literary critic Jean-Pierre Gisad wrote a famous book in the '70s on Hambou.
And he talked about the illuminations as a cosaw,
these screens without depth.
So in that sense, there's a watery element.
But you think maybe fire might be a stronger candidate, right?
There is a lot of, of course,
when you think of a descent into hell, that's very,
of a very fiery imagery.
When he says that the poet is a thief of fire,
that's another phrase that we could use to support the fire thesis.
But I have to say, we see all four elements, honestly,
in his poetry coming out.
And honestly, the one I think he, I think the two that would be tied
for where his alliance would be, water, and its ubiquity as well,
that is in every person kind of going in all of these, these different places,
which I think would have appealed to him.
But also, and I know you would agree with me on this one, is the earth.
Yeah, I, I think, you know, when we did that show on Edgar Allan Poe,
we, we talked about Edgar Allan Poe as an extraterrestrial,
that there's very few extraterrestrials of that sort.
And Jimy Hendrix was another one that we brought in, and I think kind of bow.
And I still believe that, that there was, there was something extraterrestrial
about this kid who managed to have such vision and write such poetry.
But at the same time, I think he was so earthbound,
and you see this throughout his life and his biography,
where I'm thinking about early poem of his solesesion or sensation,
where he speaks about walking across the earth, barefooted, you know,
walking on the grass, letting the wind,
they, his bare head, the wind is also an air spirit, by the way.
And then he says, "Lamu, en fi ní mamonta há dal lám."
This infinite love will well up or come up into my soul.
And where is it going to be coming up from?
It's going to come up from the earth, and it was not coming down from the sky,
or the heavens, it was coming up from the earth, this infinite love,
which I think sustained him.
And as you know, I've written a little bit of Hambou,
and I believe that this earth element is also what swallows him up later
in life in his moment of disillusionment when he writes a season in hell,
where he actually descends into this humic earth element that also is the place
where the dead carry on their active afterlife, and make all sorts of demands on their descendants
to remain loyal to the cause, to the family, to the clan.
And I believe that in Cezano, Fett is just a direct confrontation with his ancestry,
where these ancestors now are just pulling him down into the darkness of this earth,
and saying, "Leave all the crap, all that poetry is up for you. You are one of ours,
and you have to think about hard work, money, saving, parsimony."
And he says, "I belong to a race of people who know nothing about revolt."
And shortly thereafter, he leaves, and his only concern is just astonishing to read those letters from Africa.
All he cares about is making money, saving money, parsimony,
and he becomes his mother's, you know, the son that she always wanted him to be amazing.
Yeah, and you know, that conflict was there.
You could even see it in his very, very early childhood writings.
I came across a little journal of his from when he was in elementary school or something like that.
It's a story. I was a prince. I lived in a castle.
But then it very quickly becomes this description of how much money his mother had
and how much money his father had very detailed accounting of their kind of more commercial, very bourgeois description of their status.
And there's this real conflict that we can see maybe represented in his mother and being where exactly he was the son she always wanted in the very end.
And his father more of the adventure kind of poet.
And yeah, one has to say that he was true to his wanderlust to the very end because although his whole system of values changes radically,
and he holds on grimly, you know, to his belt with the gold in it when he's coming back from Africa,
he nevertheless was continuing to be nomadic and voyaging.
He's the first person I think to go into certain places in Ethiopia.
That's right.
And he was not just a homebound person after that.
No, he traveled quite a bit and worked as a trader, a slave trader, coffee, perfume.
And as you said, even was the first European to explore some African territories, which is completely incredible.
And that voyage to the very end, I like that you say that, Robert, because one of my favorite things that makes me that I think is so indicative of that voyaging spirit is actually a letter that he dictated the day before he died to his sister.
And so he died as rock stars often do very young at the age of 37 only.
I know that's hard to believe with the biography that I recounted, but he dies at the age of only 37 from a tumor in his like, which his sister had possibly died of a similar tumor earlier.
And just before he dies, he dictates his letter to his sister.
So he's kind of at this point.
He's so ill that reality, place and time, it become very confused.
And so on as death, but he dictates to his sister this caravan of ivory that he has.
It's imaginary.
And asks for passage to the Suez to write, it's a letter to an imaginary shipping company that he's imagining this voyage that he'll take at the very end of his life.
So when you say that he continues to voyage and that he voyages until the very end, that is literally true.
Yeah, I was just thinking when you were talking about that tumor in his leg or I don't know if it was gangrene, I always remember being a form of gangrene, which might be a different thing.
The point being is that Hambos legs were everything.
There is no Hambo without his legs, his legs took him everywhere.
He walked all across Europe more than once and they were the means of his locomotion and his voyage and his nomadism.
And of course once he has his leg amputated, that comes to a quick end.
And of course what you're saying also evokes the passion he had not just for journeying, but also departing.
And the only thing about departure that holds infinite promise for him, you know, until the end.
Maybe because his father was always leaving the home, but that's a low life way of psychoanalyzing him.
But departure has a strong presence certainly in his poetry.
And maybe we want to end our show with a poem that has to do with departure, but before we read that poem, I want to ask you Becky about what you find most compelling.
In Hambos vision, which is the right of the poet, if not each and every one of us to other lives.
You want to say something about that?
I do.
I do Robert, you're bringing up some of my favorite lines from Hambos poetry.
And that is actually in daily from deliriums number two.
Delirium being in his own, it's a season in Hambos.
Exactly.
So I can read those lines.
Please, please.
So I'm going to cut some pieces out.
So this is a chopped up version of the lines that I'm really interested in.
Hambo writes, "I became a fabulous opera.
I saw that all beings are faded to happiness.
That action is not life, but a sort of waste of strength, morality is weakness of the brain.
Every being seems to me to be entitled to several other lives.
And I find these lines absolutely breathtaking.
So this opera that he becomes is, the poet becomes a channel for several other voices all at once.
And I really love, and I really like, and I also think the idea of being entitled to several other lives we can interpret in several ways.
The first of which is the right that we all have to second and third, and maybe fourth acts in a single life, as Gambo does.
So he has his first act as a poet, and the second act as an explorer.
And that's something I really love, this idea that we can pick up and start over again, which is what you find in his journey.
Always the possibility of starting over, a new act, something new on the horizon.
And the other reason I like this idea of having other lives is because we can think about it in terms of playing several different roles all at once.
So that at any given moment you're not just an engineer or a waiter, but that you can have a secret.
And I think that's something particularly important to keep in mind in the climate that we live in today where we're encouraged to reduce our identities to something that is consistent across space and time, easily digestible via social media channels.
That doesn't change based on the context. And that's something that's very important to me because I think when being entitled to several other lives to me means being entitled to secrets, being entitled to being a different person when I'm in Paris than when I'm in San Francisco.
And I think those ideas can be incredibly empowering. And as a poet or as a writer, I think the idea of being entitled to the experiences of others and the experiences and their voices.
And I think is also for me sometimes a hard thing to feel that I can speak for another person, but I'm going to view of it, I think, as he would go in to Jill's apartment and make himself at home is that he's very feels very entitled to these other voices and other lives.
And maybe that's the essence of the famous phrase, "I" is another.
Which Bob Dylan particularly attached to, he found that illuminating that I is another person which is from his Le Todivoiled.
And that is one of his key insights this divided itself. And that had somewhat existed before I think Baudelaire and maybe even Poe had helped him get there. This idea of the self watching itself.
He says it's wrong to say, "I think," one should rather say, "I am thought," or "I am being thought," depending on how you translate that.
And that gives you some idea of the radical revolution in thinking and perception that Reimbo was really going after because when he says, "It's wrong to say I think," he's speaking directly to Descartes, who is the founder of Western philosophy, and particularly French philosophy.
And he's most famous for saying, "I think they're for him." And so Reimbo says, "It is wrong to say I think." This is challenging the subject right from the get-go. And we see that again in Beto Iifla when he becomes a boat.
And so many other places, and that's what that idea of other lives means to me.
Great. Well, I want to remind our listeners we've been speaking with Dr. Rebecca Peckron, who is a graduate from Stanford and also a PhD from Johns Hopkins University.
I want to thank Anso Feibbean, who has been reading the French original for us. And what we might end with, Becky is this poem, "Dipa," this departure poem that you selected for us.
And perhaps maybe I'll read it in English, and then we'll end with a reading of it in French. So then we'll go silent. So let me thank you now for coming on again to entitled opinions. We'll get you back in the future.
Thank you so much, Robert. I really enjoyed talking with you. Thank you, too, also Anso Feibbean. Thank you for letting me read. Yeah, well, you're not done yet. Hold tight.
This poem is called "Dipaature," seen enough, the vision met itself in every kind of air had enough, noises of cities in the evening, in the sunlight and forever.
Known enough, the halting of life, oh, noises and visions.
Departure into new affection and sound.
"Dipa," I said, "Dipa is a good one, and a good one."
I said, "Rimmer d'Iville, le suer, e oce lae, et tu draw."
I said, "Cun, le za, et le gi."
"Rimmer, e vis room, d'Ipaard, le f'ex room, et le b'Rigna f."
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(wind howling)