Rimbaud for President

These are the wild and wooly days of post-modern America where gigantic poets and smaller, humanly sized politicians roam the earth in search of animal skins, ivory, and collectible NFT’s, and where yet another presidential candidate is currently trying to worm his way into the electoral college.

It’s possible that Abraham Lincoln really did not want to be Abraham Lincoln, had he lived in this age, hoping to be almost anyone else, just like the rest of us, going about our daily lives in daydream, reverie, narcosis, sleep, and then finally to ‘the market of silence’, a phrase I’ve borrowed from a book I’m reading titled, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa 1880-91 by Charles Nicholl, a phrase not attributable to Rimbaud but to another Frenchman, Pinchard, who became friendly with Rimbaud in Harare (now Ethiopia) when both were employed by a coffee-grower there named Bardey, a rabid French colonialist.

The strange twists and turns history takes! Unfathomable even in the light of reality, of which there is very little. Not even Einstein understood it, though it’s said he often frequented Christian Science churches and reading rooms in New York and New Jersey, reportedly saying once to a church official, “You people don’t know what you have in that book” (meaning Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy). And for years now, having been raised by Christian Scientist’s to love god and go to Sunday School every Sunday, I now regard Christian Science as science-fiction, though perhaps Einstein was correct and that I’m mistakenly exercising my right as an individual member of the city-state to examine all my pathologies.

My Time Magazine Person of the Year is Marcus Aurelius who never said, ‘Real Estate Developers almost always Overpromise and Underdeliver’, which in a weird way is a criticism of capitalism, but might have said, being a keen observer of human nature, ‘Only I control myself,’ a form of subsistence thinking I find more and more attractive as I age.

In any case, while getting dressed this morning I looked down on my socks and posed several questions: ‘do you socks ever wonder which foot will this guy put me on first, his left foot or his right? Does this guy believe in the notion of birth-order, that the first sock put on in the morning equals the oldest child who will ultimately lead the other sock to adulthood’?

Does Rimbaud’s famous phrase, Je est une autre, equal Rimbaud? Or does Rimbaud equal his famous phrase?

I don’t know, I really don’t know. All I do know is that the groundswell of the worm in RFK Jr’s brain is beginning to be felt from sea to shining sea.

‘In The Hall of the Music Concourse’, (painting in progress), 24” x 18”, oil, acrylic, paint sticks, Spring 2024.