Saturday, November 12, 2011

Paul Bowles



Paul Bowles
__________________

“I personally
am content to see
everything in the
process of decay”
—Paul Bowles,
Pages from Cold Point

Djami

Rimbaud is ambivalent and sarcastic, cynical
verging on macabre. His attitude of non-involvement
as silent observer, even a calculating opportunist with a SM demonic streak. After Verlaine and the Parnassians can one blame him?

Tarominaesque

Newly discovered photos take by Rimbaud tell us more than maybe the Parnassians would have liked to know about being an exiled gay voyant. Rimbaud buys a Leica in Tangiers for his new picturesque poetry. Wilhelm von Gloeden had some Rimbaud prints in his library that survived.

Zeiss Ikon

Later a Zeiss Ikon starts capturing Djami on the Palais Jami Hotel rooftop. Djami’s primitiveness which Rimbaud always tried to preserve was a power which magnetized Rimbaud submerged the civilization he hated in Europe, releasing him into the archaic.

Perfect Backwardness

A force so potent that he fell prey to being obsessed with Djami, a boy of the most perfect backwardness exciting in his purity. Living proof that one can return to one’s archaic beginnings. Djami was Rimbaud’s passport back into time and the omnipresent desert.

Young Djami

Djami was sixteen when Rimbaud met him, handsome & olive-skinned. A strong body with big hands like Rimbaud, a face with a broken nose. His goodlooks linked him back to colonial times, Morocco & early Italy. He dressed traditionally—baggy white trousers and chandrisi plus woolen djellaba over his naked skin, and flat stomach under his cloak.

Arcadian Touch

The small prints that Rimbaud had made of Djami back then evoked nostalgia with their sepia and faded edges, zigzag cut. The relationships between westerners and moroccan youth, tales of initiation, libidinous codes meeting, connecting, creating…

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