The Blue Hour in Rimbaud

(Picture: DS)

(23.11.2022) And Nina replied like a girl not being too eager to go on schoolstrike with him. But in fact it was Rimbaud’s reply. To his own vision, to his own inventing of a boy envsioning a day in the countryside, spent with his girl, to which Nina (but actually Rimbaud) simply replied, at the end of the poem, and perhaps disillusioning the boy, but perhaps not: ›but what about work?‹.
Which means that Rimbaud, at tender age – but the Rimbaud age is roughly seventeen to nineteen – knew something about disillusion. Because in Nina’s Replies, in this one poem (written 15 August 1870), he knew how to stage disillusion. But also vision. And the visionary, at tender age, this means, knew about himself staging vision (and disillusion), and from the beginning, this means, there was not only Rimbaud the visionary, but also Rimbaud knowing that also vision as well as the visionary is or was staged. In words; by words. And the simple, but profound truth that Rimbaud had found early, is, that all of this is possible in words. By means of language. And stimulated by books, journals, or conversation.

One) The Logic of Language, or The Blue Hour in Rimbaud

The interesting thing is that Nina’s Replies, written in 1870, has a ›blue morning‹. While Rimbaud actually only in 1872 ›invented‹ the blue hour (in poetry). And if we realize that, we can realize the logic of language at play – in Rimbaud. The logic of language having its own dynamics, but perhaps it is more accurate to say that such logic and dynamic is blossoming in a poet, willing to act as a medium of language.
What do we mean by logic here? It is the fact that language, after the term of a ›blue morning‹ has come up, simply offers to think of saying ›the morning hour‹ (or the ›hour of morning‹), after which it is not too difficult to find another combination of words, namely ›the blue hour‹ (or ›hours‹, as has Rimbaud in his poem Est-elle almée…? (Is she a dancer…?) of 1872.
And if this can be observed in Rimbaud, it may be possible that also other poets, writers, but also painters, might have been able to find and use such combination of words. And although Rimbaud might have been the one to have coined the expression of the ›blue hour‹, others of which we may know of or not, may have been able to coin it too, independently (and we will come to that later).
What we see is Rimbaud, working with impressions that someone who has lived in the countryside may naturally dispose of in 1870, staging the vision of a beautiful, idyllic, ecstatic, unforgettable day in the countryside in his 1870 poem, and turning to stage the vision of a city waking up at dawn in his July of 1872 poem (also a summer poem), and it may be that the urban poem is also inspired by the vision of a city waking up in artificial light in the early morning hour, while the blue morning in the countryside may be rather the bluish light of early dawning. The more famous poem Sensation, by the way, has ›blue summer evenings‹, and was written somewhat earlier than Nina’s Replies, and, as it appears, in the spring of 1870.

Two) Linguistic Archeology

It is also interesting to note that, just about the time of the Rimbaud age – Rimbaud himself being seventeen to nineteen –, just in the decades before 1870 and in the years afterwards, scholars had been discussing the historicity of colors and color perceptions, and these scholars had turned to what may be called linguistic archeology, because they had turned to ancient writers, to study their use of color designations, and of course they had turned namely to Homer. And in Homer, as in the Bible, there seems to be the color of blue just lacking.
At the time of Homer, we may say, language had another logic. Someone who wanted to refer to the light of morning or evening had other choices, and we know – and it is irritating still today – that the Greeks as the Romans seem to have tended to avoid the color blue, perhaps because this color was associated with mourning (which may stimulate other choices, if a ›rosy-fingered dawn‹ had to be described, for example). At the time of Rimbaud it was also a question of, perhaps, natural history being the explanation for a change, an evolution in color perception and designation, but the idea that the Greeks and Romans could simply not perceive the color blue seems outdated today.

Three) Linguistic Geographies

In fact we do refer to various histories and geographies of language today, if we are using variations of ›blue‹: the famous ›azure‹ has Arabic roots, while ›blue‹ has actually not come down from the Greeks or Romans to us, but from more barbaric languages. And still the Greeks have left marks: with ›cyan‹ for example, and other terms.
Rimbaud, the traveller, a vision that also is transmitted to us by means of books, namely biographies, could use the word ›blue‹ to refer to the shadow of a mosque. And we may conclude with saying that, after the Rimbaud age has passed, actually little has or does change. Because we experience the world in words, through words, and even when faced with the actual blue shadow of a mosque in distant lands, we dispose of a logic of language that has been basically transmitted to us in childhood and youth. It may be enriched, our logic, the logic we dispose of, it may expand, as our sense of designating colors (which is, strangely, as it seems, rather stimulated by language than by our senses), but the beautiful insight may be, here, that language, words, books may keep on be stimulating, and also stimulate the coming back of the Rimbaud age at any age, while actual reality might offer more sensations to our senses, but in the end, rather repetitions of things we already knew at childhood age. Like disillusion, like vision, to name some of the most basic ones.

Further reading:
Anton Marty, Die Frage nach der geschichtlichen Entwicklung des Farbensinnes, Vienna 1879 [sums up the discussions in linguistic archeology]

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