Because our 2012 Forum will be examining Consciousness and the Brain, I have chosen to talk about the enfant terrible of French poetry, Arthur Rimbaud (20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891).

Rimbaud is credited with being the first person to express the idea “Je est un autre” – I is another.  This led to the development by Hegel, Sartre and others of the concept of “the Other” : the Self requires the Other to define itself.

Rimbaud, during the brief period in his late teens when he wrote all his poetry,was acutely aware of the workings of his own mind. He said he could watch his own ideas developing.

He also had Synaesthesia, a blending of some of the senses, which, in his case, enabled him to see letters of the alphabet in colour. 

He wrote a poem called “Vowels’ , which illustrates his abilty to see letters in colour, an ability which I myself, as a Synaesthete, share.

This is his poem:

                                     Voyelles

A black, E white, I red, U green, O blue: vowels

Someday I’ll talk about your secret birth-cries,

A, black velvet jacket of brilliant flies

That buzz around the stenches of the cruel,

Gulfs of shadow: E, candour of mists, of tents,

Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of parsley:

I, purples, bloody salivas, smiles of the lonely

With lips of anger or drunk with penitence:

U, waves, divine shudders of viridian seas,

Peace of pastures, cattle-filled, peace of furrows

Formed on broad studious brows by alchemy:

O, supreme Clarion, full of strange stridencies,

Silences crossed by worlds and by Angels:

O, the Omega, violet ray of her Eyes!