The Furthur Festival – Review

The Furthur Festival

by Arthur Rimbaud; Translation by Jamie Kiffel

Joy! Joy and death! Momento mori, final fulfillment, revellers in the music of the ecstatic sigh. The last breath; the psychotropic dance. My eyes grin wide.

I followed the existentials to their crux, their orgy of decomposition. They smile bedecked in bones, skeletal secrets made obvious. Flesh is inconsequential. And the sound! Garlands of tones, drumbeats as “Planet Drum,” the earth solidifies in a single heartbeat, foretold of stopping only with mad bears, grinning death’s masks! My brothers and sisters whirling, carefree in their discovery of the ultimate, drumming circle within. They shout, “Cherie! Cherie!” for it is dear, that instant of universal dying. And they unify, glittering, painted, so grateful.

They chant in reality’s chorus. “Not fade away, not fade away.” No break, no end, the ring flies round in smoky hallucinations, religious liqueurs drop glimpses, windows of fleshlessness on the pink tongues. Named in perfect metaphor, “Black Crowes” signal shadows of transcendence, eclipsing the glaring grotesque, the physical cravings. Metamorphose, “Rat-Dog”! Your soul climbs ever above the grimy earth, you scuttle through the Métro, hoping toward the soft, wicker bed of your next existence.

The poppy pipe is passed; in purest elation I feel only winged, not deeply bedded in the morphias ground. My taste is raised, my senses heightened, the swirling, rainbow flag is raised! I see a pinwheel, moving, approaching, I am far beyond the grasping tendrils of the opium flower.

We wander out, carrying the jubilation, the frenzied death. My lust is real, I want to fill my earthly body for I know it now, I understand hunger and I do not fear its trap. They know, they come to me, with the fruits of the earth wrapped in warm, flat breads. I eat and I drool and the moment apogees and I collapse, I am totality, I have truly moved finer, forth, and “furthur.”