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| Suwanee, Georgia. Photo by me, November 2025. |
A storm approached, diving south from the Great Lakes, on Sunday at sunset.
Winter howled and then bit early on Monday with afternoon highs in the upper thirties and wind of forty miles per hour. Occasional snow flurries fell through the afternoon on the strong northwest wind and I watched from the windows like an excited child. It was one of the earliest times I can remember snow this far south outside of the Georgia mountains. In the early 1990s there was a Thanksgiving with snow showers the entire day that left a dusting, but snow on November 10th is quite exceptional in the Piedmont region. More significant and accumulating snow was common in the mountains including Brasstown Bald at 4,784 feet which had a Tuesday morning low of eleven degrees and a high for the second day in a row in the upper 20s. It was not quite so cold here at 1,000 feet with a morning low of twenty-six degrees. The first frost was at the beginning of the month and now the first freeze is out of the way too.
It was cold enough for quilt weather. I pulled out a quilt made by my grandmother in the early 1970s. I think of my grandparent's 1800's Victorian house and I remember how cold it was in winter in that bedroom I sometimes slept in during the 1970s. The disorder of the quilt is comforting to me.
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| Rimbaud as a man and boy. |
Yesterday was the also the anniversary
of the death of gay poet and miscreant Arthur Rimbaud. He died of
bone cancer in Marseilles one hundred and thirty-four years ago at
the age of thirty-seven. I did not remember the occasion, but he had
crossed my mind while retrieving the Christmas tree from storage in
the garage. Unbeknownst to me it was the day he died. Sometimes life
is strange that way.
I do not fully understand Rimbaud
leaving Europe and never writing again for a life in exile in Yemen
at twenty-six when he had such a gift. He was part poet, lover and
explorer. It sounds romantic, but his life was not easy and his death
was a miserable one. I suspect there was some self hatred, plenty of
disenchantment and perhaps he was a misanthrope, but who is to know
for sure? There are likely abundant numbers of modern mind readers
who would like to pathologize him instead of simply enjoying his art.
I am content with not knowing everything in his heart and letting his exile
be a mystery.
“For a long time I boasted that I was master of all possible landscapes and I thought the great figures of modern painting and poetry were laughable.
What I liked were: absurd paintings, pictures over doorways, stage sets, carnival backdrops, billboards, bright-colored prints; old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings, the kind of novels our grandmothers read, fairy tales, little children’s books, old operas, silly old songs, the nave rhythms of country rimes.
I dreamed of Crusades, voyages of discovery that nobody had heard of, republics without histories, religious wars stamped out, revolutions in morals, movements of races and continents: I used to believe in every kind of magic.”
Season In Hell, Delirum II, Alchemy of the Word - Arthur Rimbaud
Or I do understand him.
Alchemy of the Word (Altered Video Version) (video, 16 min, color, sound, 1987)
This video above reminds me of something that would have been shown on Andy Warhol's Fifteen Minutes MTV show during the same period in the 1980s.
I would love to see the original version of this film from 1975.
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