edited by Splicer
stolen shamelessly from The Artaud Anthology
published by City Lights
Simply to find basis in some unambiguous truth, that is, one which
would depend on one unique razor's edge.
I see in the fact that the die is cast and I am plunging into the
affirmation of a guessed-at-truth, however risky, my entire reason for
being alive.
Sometimes I linger for hours over the impression some idea or
sound has made on me. My emotion does not develop in time, it has no
temporal sequence at all. The ebb and flow of my soul are in perfect
accord with the absolute ideality of mind.
I can feel the ground slipping out from under my thought, and I am
forced to contemplate these terms I use, unsupported by their intimate
meaning or personal substratum in me. Even better than that, the point
whereby this substratum seems to connect with my life becomes all of a
sudden strangely tangible and virtual for me. I am struck by the idea
of an unexpected and fixed space where normally all is movements,
communication, interferences, trajectory.
But this erosion which subverts the very basis of my thought in
its most urgent communications with the intelligence and the
instinctual parts of the mind does not take place in the domain of an
intangible abstraction, where only higher faculties of the intellect
would participate. More than the mind which holds together, bristling
with points, it is the nervous trajectory of thought which this erosion
subverts and perverts. It is in the limbs and the blood that this
absence and this standstill are especially felt.
A terrible cold,
An atrocious abstinance,
The limbo of a nightmare of bone and muscles, with the sensation
of stomach fuctions snapping like a flag in the phosphorescences of the
storm.
Larval images that are pushed as if by a finger and have no
relationship to any material thing.
ELECTROSHOCK
(fragments)
Antonin Artaud
And so, on the surface of daily life, consciousness forms beings
and bodies that one can see gathering and colliding in the atmosphere,
to distinguish their personalities. And these bodies form hideous
cabals where every eventuality comes into the world to argue against
what is beyond appeal.
I am not Andre Breton and I did not go to Baltimore but this is
what I saw on the banks of the Hudson.
N.B. Cool dry pluton in its encounter with hot black pluton:
that's me.
*
He affirms that his sin
was in wishing a place
in the mother of the fathermother
and bullshitting the holy ghost to render it
favorable to his plans
This sin consisted of a
temptation visited upon me to pass the breath
of my heart through a tube
to both sides of the surface
to consent to the worm
and to leer of my own free will
like a knifeblade
at my own soft flop
at the flop world
at the total exhaustion of the body
in front of a
galastralgical
gluttonous curiosity
bloated on the pus of the notorious father,
white pus of blood curdled in laughter;
and to have taken after this child's sweet laughter
who sacrifices himself for life,
his whole rosy body seized by
love in his alterboy's vestements;
and gives the zob or nob of strength
to the thick being
spreads over the rice
baby who
is laughing at
the surprised blood
of his whole life
as an
eggwhite emptied then
volatized in the
gas of the holy ghost
*
The night of the 10 earthquaked cities,
of the Irish who were dismissed and who returned,
of the 300 houses collapsed,
of the 100,000 corpses left unburied,
of the Tibetans of abominations paid by the saw of the virgin mother,
of the mouths gagged and charred,
of the grey-suited beards,
of the newsreel images: vessels opened on the high seas,
losing their crew like tons of cargo
flaming out of their jagged portholes,
then of the anti-flesh inventions,
of sexuality observed over the truncated shoulder
of the dolmen which I myself am when I amass my
slaughtered totems,
which I've just resuscitated
*
It is I who commited suicide one day
and tore my body from myself
and battle against what is left of it
and wish forever to come back to myself
who have founded a false world in the mean time:
this one
*
When consciousness overflows a body, there is also a body
detatching itself from consciousness,
no,
there is a body overflowing the body this consciousness came from,
and the whole of this new body is consciousness:
Think hard and long about someone you...
1) the vampire with its arms folded in my left ball
2) the woman with the supported nape
3) the grey devil
4) the black father
a laying-on of black crablice
5) and finally last night
at the New Athens
the great revealation concerning the whole system of forming
god in the slimey eggwhite of my left ball
after the revealation of the antichrist abyss.
The life we lead is a front for all which the frightful criminal
filthymindedness of some of us has left us.
A grotesque masquerade of acts and sentiments.
Our ideas are only the leftovers of a breath,
breath of our choked and trussed lungs.
Which is to say for example that if the arterial tension of man is
12,
it could be 12 times 12 if it were not constrained and squashed
down some place so as not to surpass this sordid level.
And damned if some physician doesn't come telling me that this is
called hypertension and it is not good to be in a state of
hypertension.
As for me, I answer that we are all in a state of hypertension,
we can't lose an atom without the risk of immediately becoming a
skeleton again; while life is an incredible proliferation,
the atom, once hatched, proceeds to lay another, which in fact
immediately explodes another.
The human body is a battlefield where we would do well to return.
Now there is nothingness, now death, now putrefaction, now
ressurection: to wait for I don't know what apacolypse beyond that,
what explosion of what beyond in order to get straightened out
with things,
is a dirty joke.
Have to grab life by the balls right now.
Who is the man who decided to live with the notion he was not
being fitted for the coffin?
Who, on the other hand, is the man who thinks he still may profit
by his own death?
Try as they may to make us beleive it, we gain no profit from the
notion that we will be dead men, going back to the dead, taking our
places in the legion of the dead, letting our limbs seperate from our
selves, and falling down in a heap of the serical charnal houses
(liquids).
One doesn't die because one has to die,
one dies because it is a wrinkle forced on the
consciousness
one day
not so long ago.
For one doesn't die in order to come back and remake one's life,
but only in order to give up life and get rid of whatever life one had.
And whoever dies, dies because he wanted the coffin.
He accepted one day this spasm of being put through the coffin --
a forced acceptance perhaps, but effective nonetheless,
and no man dies without consenting to it.
Consciousness lives before birth. It lives somewhere, if only for
an hour.
All living consciounesses have existed, I don't know in what
sphere or what abyss.
And these abysms consciousness rediscovers here.
What good in fact would the unconscious be if it were not to
contain, in the very depths of itself, this pre-world, which is not one
anyway, but merely the old burden, rejecte (by others than ourselves),
of everything which the consciosness could not or would not allow,
cannot or will not admit, not under our own control but under the
control within us of this other who is not who is not the double or
counterpart of the self, who is not the the immanent derma of all that
the conscious self envelops, and who is not the being that it is not
and will become or will not become, but really and palpably an other, a
sort of false spy-glove that keeps it under surveillance from morning
to night in the hope that consciousness will put it on.
And this other is no more than what all the others are who have
always wanted a finger in every person's consciousness.
Psychoanalysis has written a book on the failure of the old
Baudelaire, whose life did not precede him by 100 years but rather by
this sort of secular infinity of time which came back to him when he
lost his speech and learned and tried to say it, but who beleived him,
and who beleives the affirmations of great poets who have become sick
trying to dominate life? For Baudelaire did not die of syphillis, as
has been said, he died from the absolute lack of belief attatched to
the incredible discoveries he had made in his syphillis and repeated in
his aphasia.
When he learned it, then he tried saying it,
that he had lost one of his selves in Thebes, 4,000 years before
Jesus Christ.
And that this self was that of an old king.
When he discovered and tried saying that he was not and never had
been Mumbledepeg,
but on the contrary that poet in a paradise alley where they were
mending poetry, in Brittany, long before the Druids ever settled there.
And the skeleton of th human cock, against all onomatopoeia and
reason, in order to rediscover life, found
a sound without echo or cry,
without shadow or double in life,
without the old yoke of the organ that accounts for the five
senses,
one day, much later, when the time came for the consciousness of
the masses, and the sound of his poetry was the inert weight of planks,
the horrible squishing of those six planks they could never fit his
corpse into.
For to cure Charles Baudelaire, it would have been necessary to
surround him with only a few organisms
enough
never to be afraid of facing a delirium in order to
rediscover truth.
Therefore psychoanalysis was unable not to fear reality, however
monstrous it might seem, and not to reject -- in the dream-symbols
representing it -- the whole sadistic machinery of crime, the weaver of
a vital stuff which Charles Baudelaire wished to mend, and for the sake
of which I ask that, for who knows how much time to come, the few men
who are its victims continue, as they are condemned prisoners born to
be fated scapegoats.
Translated by David Rattray
Typed by Splicer