I had just returned from the Horn of Africa where I was researching an article on Rimbaud who had been there in the 1880s<\/p>\n
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It had been a fascinating but ultimately depressing experience<\/p>\n
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The people that I had met were on the whole friendly but were involved in endless conflicts with the neighbours<\/p>\n
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My French was good so I did not find it hard to get by although half the population seemed to be stoned and were often to be found during the hot hours just stretched out on their mats doing very little<\/p>\n
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Rimbaud had been in the first wave of the colonists and the now decrepit buildings built less than a hundred years ago were rotting slowly in the sun<\/p>\n
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I had stayed at a coffee traders house and shared my retreat with a number of other families.<\/p>\n
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The house fine its day was decaying and anything of value had been looted during the passing years although to my complete surprise the beautiful bannisters that adorned the sweeping staircase had been left largely alone<\/p>\n
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Also on the main landing there were three windows of coloured glass<\/p>\n
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Red orange and amber<\/p>\n
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These were almost pristine save for the dust that had become ingrained into the sensitive glass<\/p>\n
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I was told that they still served a purpose<\/p>\n
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That was to filter the raw afternoon sun which I would imagine was their purpose in the first place<\/p>\n
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That and decoration<\/p>\n
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My room was opposite these windows and this is where I first contracted the fever that forced me to leave the country<\/p>\n
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I was warned that my fever although not serious would leave me in a kind of hallucinatory state for a while where I would imagine myself elsewhere<\/p>\n
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These dreams would be vivid in nature and could last a matter of seconds or longer<\/p>\n
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\u00a0I would recall an incident or a dream from years past with total clarity<\/p>\n
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It was a strange and often alarming feeling<\/p>\n
When I was in my twenties I fell in with a group of hippies as we toured around Greece<\/p>\n
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I was popular as I was a poet and had an understanding of the art and I was often asked to explain the works of Baudelaire and other symbolist poets<\/p>\n
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For some reason we stopped in Salonika and set up a commune of sorts at an old farm which had been owned by the late grandfather of Glass a French\/Greek teacher who had tagged along with us<\/p>\n
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The strange thing was that his grandfather had also owned a few shops in a small town some five miles from the outskirts of the city<\/p>\n
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I say shops but they were really just buildings with shop fronts and had not traded for years<\/p>\n
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But amongst these ghost shops was a mausoleum open to the street with the tombs of eight members of a family enclosed within<\/p>\n
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Only ornate rusted railings protected their final resting places from the street although I could not see that anybody had tried to force entry<\/p>\n
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We often spent time in the mausoleum smoking grass and drinking lightly<\/p>\n
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I was frequently asked to read poetry from my copy of Baudelaire\u2019s works that I always carried with me<\/p>\n
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This request nearly always came from a French boy who was known as Jack who claimed that he was directly related to Germain Nouveau the French poet who had known Rimbaud<\/p>\n
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I had no reason to disbelieve him as he shared the same facial features and brooding dark looks as Nouveau<\/p>\n
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Although we had a right to visit the mausoleum we were on occasions asked to leave by the local cops<\/p>\n
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Maybe it was because of the use of drugs or that they thought that we were disturbing the dead<\/p>\n
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But we would return and the self same cops that had asked us to leave would pass by without incident<\/p>\n
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Whilst in the mausoleum I studied the tombs that were dated between 1839 and 1944 and housed members of the same family<\/p>\n
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The smallest and most recent was that of a Christina Theorakis who died in 1944 at the hands of the German\u2019s<\/p>\n
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Her tomb seemed a little out of place within the confines of the ancient mausoleum and I was told later by a local priest that she had been shot along with twenty-four other people in revenge for the death of a German officer who had been murdered by partisan\u2019s operating nearby<\/p>\n
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He further told me that her sister hung herself in her father\u2019s orchard on finding the body of her brother who had also been shot to death during a fire fight with the invaders<\/p>\n
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For some reason she was buried nearby and went to her grave ignorant of the death of her sister who had been executed on the same day<\/p>\n
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The story brought tears to my eyes and although I was not writing much poetry at the time I scribbled some lines down which later became\u00a0Khat Kitten<\/em>\u00a0one of my most popular poems<\/p>\n \n I have been warned not to visit Africa again as now that I have become infected by this strange fever I will only worsen the condition if I return<\/p>\n \n In one way this saddens me as although hard these African trips fascinated me and disgusted me at the same time<\/p>\n \n In 1891 a mortally ill Rimbaud left Africa for the last time towards his native France<\/p>\n \n He had lived and travelled in isolation for many years and only returned when death was near<\/p>\n \n During my Greek years an American boy called Andrew said to me that we all ultimately return to the womb<\/p>\n \n Whether that is true or not is an open question as I believe in the case of Rimbaud he was trying to return to Africa and that his final communication was to a steamship company describing his disablement and the requirements for his journey<\/p>\n \n Although my travel is a little restricted I know that I will recover and will be able to travel again unlike Rimbaud who lies quietly in his grave in Charleville next to his sister Vitalie<\/p>\n \n The inscription on his grave reads\u00a0Priez pour lui<\/em>\u00a0which I think is quite apt for Rimbaud when you consider his work and his nomadic life<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had just returned from the Horn of Africa where I was researching an article on Rimbaud who had been there in the 1880s It had been a fascinating but ultimately depressing experience The people that I had met were on the whole friendly but were involved in endless conflicts with the neighbours My French […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6834"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6834"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6834\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6834"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6834"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stuartmillerosborne.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6834"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}