#sansraison

KOBH #0071 — Cloud, Sydney •

Reason, Rimbaud and Strange Flavour — Sans Raison #1 •

For no reason, this prose-poem by Arthur Rimbaud has been circling through my head like an earworm:

To a Reason

A tap of your finger on the drum releases all sounds and initiates the new harmony.

    A step of yours is the conscription of the new men and their marching orders.

     You look away: the new love!

     You look back,—the new love!

     “Change our fates, shoot down the plagues, beginning with time,” the children sing to you. “Build wherever you can the substance of our fortunes and our wishes,” they beg you.

     Arriving from always, you’ll go away everywhere.

(Translation from the French by John Ashbery, original text available here).

Eschew intellectual evaluation of the piece and simply savour the words and rhythm— semble in Chinese cuisine, when tasting notes are required and the response is 怪味 — “strange flavour”. Indeed, strange flavour is a bona fide cuisine category. Intriguing, surprising, pleasing but unfamiliar.

To describe my response to “To A Reason”— “We had the experience but missed the meaning” (cf TS Eliot “Dry Salvages”).

Reviewing a raft of images, a number of them are thematically unconnected but nevertheless pleasing to my eye. So, I created a new series nodding at Rimbaud’s poem, entitled “Sans raison” or “For no reason” to share them. 

The above image happens to visually rhyme with the series I am currently reviewing that is centred on Paris, intended for a book. 

The cloud is magnificent — who would need to divine a particular semantic purpose for a cloud?