A child is born in the gray-green wastes of provincial France. Baptized in dirty brown water, he emits anguished howls, howls railing against the drab god who dwells in this drab church in the drabbest town in the drabbest country on the drabbest continent on the drabbest planet hurtling around a drab, dying, jaundiced star. He is a brilliant child, lorded over by a devout and thin-lipped mother, his soldier-man father far away, feeling the warm Mediterranean breezes billowing off the Algerian coast or the cold Black Sea gales battering Crimea like so many Russian shells. He writes his precocious poems on safe subjects but within his putridly intelligent soul he longs for vulgarity and violence and shit and cum and all that’s awful and lovely and terrible and grand in this little world.
He was the master of screamingly vulgar eroticism and exotically crystalline visions of the world that could be. With matted hair and beautifully awful words, he captured the anguished soul of a country near starvation and battered by humiliating Teutonic mortars and shells. He felt the sting of a lover’s rejection and a lover’s bullets; they entered him in a train station, that horrible zone where men mount machines and the machines explode in hot clouds of messy, steaming desire. At the peak of his powers, he abandoned that world entirely to run guns out of Ethiopia, living an entirely new life under the baking African sun, embedding himself in this world, a proper middle-aged businessman who returned to his provincial bourgeois origins like a homing pigeon, albeit amidst the markets and hyenas of Harar. Becoming ill, he was rushed back to the loathed fatherland and died in France’s unwholesome and syphillitic bosom, age thirty-seven.
One-hundred-and-sixty-nine years after his birth, children like him are born every day — but will they ever live his life? The children now must know his life. There are so many fetters now, and they must ignore them. They cannot live how Arthur did, but to never try and dare and push and shove and rage, to give in at the first sign of turmoil, to retreat into a sunless interior kingdom of fatalistic acceptance — that is the same as dying. We must flee whatever this is and create something else. We must journey to the strangest places within and without ourselves. We must become the drunken boat.