I hear your voice in your works which are now made digital and available instantaneously all over the world. Some of your writings can be seen in the University of Florida library by special request. I want to take a look at those writings one day. I imagine the history-smell of the paper. I hear your father’s gunshot, sense your tears for Radiguet, absorb your movies that play frame-by-frame like a million paintings, ponder your three Orpheus tales, your addictions, your profound influences—the mythical orgy of muses through which you, Picasso, Satie, Radiguet, Stravinsky, Picasso, Nijinsky, and all the rest informed the 'Luminous years of Paris.'
I stand in awe at the wake of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s poetics spilling forward over your opium-fueled drunken boat—siren-drawn by the echoes of a space-sparrow’s eternal song across an ocean of absurdest symbolism. Paul Verlaine smacked Arthur Rimbaud with a fish. Then he shot him in the hand with a gun—perhaps the same proverbial hand where many years later in a dark cinema somewhere in France, the painted mouth of Cocteau’s poet spoke out in 'The Blood of a Poet', became a statue, told our protagonist to enter a mirror, and concluded when the poet shot himself in the head.
Me: Jean, what was that you said about Radiguet in an interview in the Paris Review?
Cocteau: If I remember correctly, (I’m dead, you know…) “…he said we should imitate the great classics. We would miss. And that miss would be our originality.”
Me: What is a fact we can be absolutely certain of regarding your life’s work?
Cocteau: “There's no such thing as love; only its proofs.”
Tom Miller
I stand in awe at the wake of Verlaine and Rimbaud’s poetics spilling forward over your opium-fueled drunken boat—siren-drawn by the echoes of a space-sparrow’s eternal song across an ocean of absurdest symbolism. Paul Verlaine smacked Arthur Rimbaud with a fish. Then he shot him in the hand with a gun—perhaps the same proverbial hand where many years later in a dark cinema somewhere in France, the painted mouth of Cocteau’s poet spoke out in 'The Blood of a Poet', became a statue, told our protagonist to enter a mirror, and concluded when the poet shot himself in the head.
Me: Jean, what was that you said about Radiguet in an interview in the Paris Review?
Cocteau: If I remember correctly, (I’m dead, you know…) “…he said we should imitate the great classics. We would miss. And that miss would be our originality.”
Me: What is a fact we can be absolutely certain of regarding your life’s work?
Cocteau: “There's no such thing as love; only its proofs.”
Tom Miller
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