Quite a nice online translation of Illuminations. Many of the descriptions are of London, e.g.., the Thames, 'wide as an arm of the sea'.
Rimbaud as ontological nomad, centreless, passing through a series of masks and incarnations - 'I am an Other', the familiar is pre-empted by the foreign, and the only way to outmanoeuvre this foreigness is to actively embrace it, to claim it as one's project: 'becoming Other'.
In the Rimbaudian universe, one contingent alteration truns the world on its axis - 'A tap with your finger on the drum releases all sounds and begins the newharmony'. A stray detail reconfigures the whole field of experience. The self is no longer anchored.; decentred, it awaits the clinamen, the meaningless intrusion that might lend it temporary vitality or density.
Rimbaud flees to Africa, so that he might live, like T.E. LAwrence inside what is (for the European) an objective correlative of his own centreless, featureless Being - the vast anonymity of this dry continent, its utter Otherness. The desert bleaches the clothes and the mind. Rimbaud becomes a commodity trader - a mere medium, a point of exchange, a node where abstractions meet.