II

The midsized and sleepy town of Charleville in the French Ardennes is famed for a tri-annual puppet festival and for being the birthplace of short-lived decadent poet Arthur Rimbaud. The river Meuse slices through the city in several friendly meanders; the houses are covered in slate, the people are tough, the industry dinosauric. Our subject was seen circumnavigating the city and checking into campsite ‘Le Mont Olympe’, next to the river, in the heart of town. Place Nr 121 was appointed to him. It was here that he erected his firm canvas tent he had lovingly given many names in the past: Waldheim, Château Rêve and, lastly, the Traveling Den. An air mattress was inflated with a car battery-operated air pump, after which he threw a comfortable pillow inside, zipped up and left for the city on foot.

Poet death, your art is done… We should go and see the place. “Why not!” we had said. So we did. To prove nothing. Prove nothingness. Go see the town of the prodigy, the wild-haired gypsy libertine… the Scummiest Man ever to Shine! Restless soul, dead before his untimely death…  And not to Paris, again, to feel the aftermath of Parisian Orgies and the Commune… stumbling in on sulfuric, purple velvet plasma, spiritualists, on Montgolfier egos and anarchists, the putrid clouds of perfume and pretense… No, we go see the country village of the cradle, to take in the earth, the dirt, see the tomb of the Muse of the Meuse, the corruptor of raptors. Not to the place where he went up and down in a cloud of the Green Fairy and opiates, but to the rural place where he was taught how to drink, fight, fuck and steal. The place where his visions became living ghosts. The place he loathed and got him to the unknown and beyond!