Two Illuminations

CHAPLIN ON FATH –

“As I grow older I am becoming more preoccupied with faith. We live by it more than we think and achieve by it more than we realize. I believe that faith is a precursor of all our ideas. Without faith, there never could have evolved hypothesis, theory, science or mathematics. I believe that faith is an extension of the mind. It is the key that negates the impossible. To deny faith is to refute oneself and the spirit that generates all our creative forces.

“My faith is in the unknown, in all that we do not understand by reason; I believe that what is beyond our comprehension is a simple fact in other dimensions, and that in the realm of the unknown there is an infinite power of good.”

Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography, Penguin, Harmondsworth, 1966, p.287

ILLUMINATIONS BY RIMBAUD –

“The Illuminations are an attempt to blow up all appearances, all orders, all forms of the world, which make our happiness. They are an attempt to blow up all happiness and make a work of pure unhappiness out of the debris and fragments of the explosion. But how strange! These fragments are not pieces of dirt and ugliness. They are not disgusting like pieces of blown-up body. They have a strange, fascinating beauty. They are like precious stones and broken tender whispers . . . This heap of fragments from all possible orders, which should reveal to us what lies beyond all orders of the world, beyond all happiness, rises before us like a glorious rainbow speaking to us of the sweetness of pleasure . . . How they shine, how they sparkle before us, all these diamonds and this foam, these drops of sweat and these eyes, these rays and their floating hair, these flames and this herbage of steel and emerald, these white, burning tears and these ringing, flashing dream flowers, these swarms of gold leaves, these balls of sapphire and these angels of the Illuminations!

From an essay on Rimbaud’s Illuminations by the Greek poet Demetrios Capetanakis, in: John Lehmann, Three Literary Friendships, Quartet Books, London, 1983, p. 93.