THE ARTAUD TEASER edited by Splicer stolen shamelessly from The Artaud Anthology published by City Lights Antonin Artaud was a French surrealist poet and philosopher. He worked extensively in experimental theater and in the pioneering of the French film industry. He is considered to be the "Grandaddy of Psychadelia" for his exploits with peyote in Mexico in the 30's. His writing defines the consciousness of that which straddles the line between genius and madness. These are a few samples of his writing from The Artaud Anthology, a collection of his works published by City Lights. I am hoping that this exposure will spur many of you to go out and buy the book, or check it out from a library. If you buy it, I'll feel less guilty about putting it into circulation without permission, but most of all, this is very important work by a great thinker that deserves more limelight than has been afforded to him as yet. This collection contains four pieces: Description of a Physical State, Fragments of a Journal in Hell, Inquest, and fragments of Electroshock. ARTAUD CHRONOLOGY: 1896: born in Marseille, September 4 1920: comes to Paris 1924-1927: takes part in surrealism; activity as a stage and film actor 1927-1936: break with surrealism; development of ideas of the Theater of Cruelty; attempted realization of said theater with performance of The Cenci 1936: January-November in Mexico, experiments with peyote, return to france, condition shaky 1937: Travel to Ireland. Aboard a boat, he is straightjacketed after threatening damage to himself, and sent by the police back to France 1937-1946: many stays at hospitals (in Rouen, Paris, and Rodez) Release after nine years and returns to Paris 1947: lecture in the Theatre du Vieux Columbier, January 13 1948: dies at the Hospice d'Ivry (Paris) March 4 Enjoy! DESCRIPTION OF A PHYSICAL STATE Antonin Artaud Corrosive sensation in the limbs, muscles as if twisted, then laid open; brittle feeling of being made of glass; wincing and cringing at any move or sound. Unconscious incoherence of steps, of getstures, of movements. Willpower constantly inhibited in even the simplest gestures, renunciation of simple gestures, overwhelming and CENTRAL fatigue, sort of a dark horse fatigue running for something or other. Body motions run haywire in sort of death exhaustion, mind fatigued at simplest muscular tension like gesture of grasping -- unconsciously clinging to something, holding it together by constant will power. A fatigue of cosmic Creation, sensation of the body being dragged on and on, feeling unbeleivable fragility become splitting pain, state of numbness, sort of localized numbness on skin surface which does not hinder a single motion but alters nevertheless that internal feeling in your limbs so that the mere act of standing vertical is achieved only at the price of a victorious struggle. Localized (in all probability) on the skin surface but felt like the radical suppression of a limb, transmitting to the brain no more than images of bloody old cottons pulled out in the shape of arms and legs, images of distant and dislocated members. Sort of inward breakdown of entire nervous system. Giddiness in motion, some kind of oblique dizziness accompanying each attempted effort, heat coagulation enclosing the whole skull area or detatching itself bit by bit, moving slabs of heat. Painful exascerbation of the skull, bladelike pressure on the nerves, back of neck determined to suffer, temples turning into glass or marble, head stamped on by horse's hooves. So now it is high time to speak of the disembodiment of reality, this sort of breakdown which, one would think, is applied to a self-multiplication proliferating among things and the perceptions of them in our mind, which is where they do belong. This instantaneous classification of things in the brain cells and not so much in their particularly logical order but in their own sentimental affective order, (which is no longer done): These things no more smell, no more sex. But their logical order is sometimes broken precisely because they do lack this emotional smell. Words decay at the unconscious command of the brain, all words for whatever and no matter what mental operation, especially those which have to do with the most habitual and active states of mind. Translated by David Rattray Typed by Splicer FRAGMENTS OF A JOURNAL IN HELL Antonin Artaud Neither my screaming nor my fever is really mine. My secondary faculties (these elements of my mind and soul are hidden) are disintegrating, but just imagine how they are hanging on. Something halfway between the typical atmosphere I breathe and the tip of my reality. I hunger less for food than some kind of elementary consciousness. That knot of life where thought-emission hangs. A knot of central suffocation. Simply to find basis in some unambiguous truth, that is, one which would depend on one unique razor's edge. This problem of the emancipation of my conscious being is no longer presented in its exclusively excruciating aspect. I feel new factors intervening in the process by which my life is being denatured, and that I have something like a new awareness of my intimate loss. 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. To confront the metaphysical system I made for myself as a consequence of this void I carry within me. From this pain rooted in me like a wedge, at the center of my purest reality, at the point of my sensibility where the two worlds of body and mind are joined, I learn to distract myself by the effect of a false suggestion. For in the space of that minut the illumination of a lie can last, I manufacture a notion of escape; I rush off in any wrong direction my blood takes. I close the eyes of my intelligence and open my mouth to the speech of the unspoken; I give myself the illusion of a system whose vocabulary escapes me. But from this minute of error there remains the feeling that I have snatched something real from the unknown. I beleive in spontaneous bewitchments. It is impossible that I shall not some day discover a truth somewhere on the routes my blood carries me. Paralysis is gaining, so I am less and less able to turn about. I no longer have any support, any base... I search for myself I don't know where. My mind is no longer able to go in the directions my emotions and the fantasies welling up in me send it. I feel castrated even in my slightest impulses. I am finally able to see the light through myself only by means of an utter renunciation of my intelligence and feeling. It must be understood that it is the living man in me who is affected, and that this paralysis stifling me is at the center -- not of my feeling I am a predestined man, but of my usual personality. I am definately set apart from life. My torment is as subtle and refined as it is harsh. It costs me mad efforts of imagination, increased tenfold by the grip of this stifling asphyxia, to succeed in thinking my ills. And if I keep on and perservere in this pursuit, in my need to fix once and for all the state of my suffocation... You were wrong to mention this paralysis that threatens me. It really is threatening and gaining on me every day. It already exists, and like a horrible reality. Certainly I still (but for how long?) do as I please with the limbs of my body, but it has been a long time since I had any control over my mind and so my unconscious controls me altogether, by impulses coming up from my nervous rages and the tornado of my blood. Hurried and rapid images which speak to me only in words of anger and blind hate but are over as fast as a knife stabbing, or lightning in congested sky. I am stigmatized by an urgent death, so that actual death holds no terrors for me. I have a feeling the despair these dreadful forms advancing on me bring with them is alive. It slips into this life-knot beyond which the routes of eternity extend. It is really eternal separation. They slip their knife into this center where I feel myself human; they sever the vital connections by which I am joined to the dream of my lucid reality Forms of a capital despair (really essential) Crossroads of separations, Crossroads of the awareness of my flesh, Abandoned by my body, Abandoned by every possible human feeling. I cannot compare it to anything but the state known at the heart of delirium during a grave illness. It is this contradiction between my inner facility and my external difficulty which creates the torment I am dying of. Let time march on and the social convulsions of the world ravage the thoughts of men, I am still immune from all thought immersed in phenomena. Just leave me to my extinguished clouds, my immortal impotence, my unreasonable hopes. But I want it understood that I will not abdicate a single one of my errors. If I used poor judgement, my flesh was at fault; but these illuminations my mind allows to filter through hour after hour are my flesh, whose blood is sheathed in lightning. He speaks to me of Narcissism and my answer to him is, we are speaking about my life. This is no ego but the cult of flesh, with the whole weight and substance of this word Flesh. Things do not move me except as they affect my flesh and coincide with it at the exact point where they stir it, and not beyond that point. Nothing moves me or interests me except what addresses itself directly to the body. And now he speaks to me about the Self. My answer to him is the Ego and the Self are two distinct terms and not to be confused; in fact it is precisely this pair of determinants which, balancing each other, maintain the body's equilibrium. 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. I am human by my hands and my feet, my guts, my meat heart, my stomach whose knots fasten me to the rot of life. They speak to me of words but this thing has nothing to do with words; it is a question of the mind's duration. It should not be imagined that the soul has nothing to do with this bark of words peeling off. Life is there, alongside the mind, and the human being is inside the circle this mind turns on, and joined to it by a multitude of fibers... No, all the physical rendings, all the diminuations of physical activity and this vexation at feeling dependent on one's body, and this body itself weighed down with marble and resting on a poor support, do not equal the anguish which comes from being deprived of physical knowledge and the sense of one's own interior balance. When the soul lacks a language or language a mind, and the rupture ploughs a vast furrow of despair and blood in the sensory field, this is the greatest pain; for it subverts not only the bark or the skeleton, but the very STUFF of the body. In losing this erratic spark which one felt WAS, there is this abyss consuming the entire field of the possible universe, and this feeling of uselessness that is like the knot of death. This uselessness is like the moral tone of this abyss and of its intense stupifaction, and the physical color of it is the taste of blood spurting in cascades from the orifices of the skull. There is no use telling me this cutthroat is inside me: I am part of life, I represent the destiny that elects me, and it is impossible that all eartly life would count me in with it at a given moment, for by its very nature it threatens the life-principle. There is a certain thing above all human activity: it is the example of this monotonous crucifixion, this crucifixion wherein the soul is forever being lost. The cord which connects my intelligence, which preoccupies me, with the unconscious, which feeds me, reveals me more and more subtle fibers at the heart of its tree-like tissue. And it is a new life being born, a life which is more and more profound, eloquent, deep rooted. Nothing precise can ever be reported by this soul which is strangling itself, for the torment which kills it, flays it fiber by fiber, takes place below the mind's threshold, below the threshold of what language can say; since the very connection (of what constitutes this soul and keeps it mentally together) is getting torn open little by little as life calls it toward unbroken lucidity. And there will never be lucidity concerning this passion, this kind of cyclical and fundamental martyrdom. And yet it does live, but its duration is here and there eclipsed, the fleeting keeps mingling with the fixed, and the chaos with this incisive language of a lucidity without duration. This curse could be highly instructive for the depths it fills, but this world will never learn. The emotion brought about by the blooming of a form, the adaptation of my bodily fluids to the virtuality of a discourse at all is a state much more precious to me than the gratification of my activity. It is the touchstone of certain spiritual lies. This sort of backward step the mind takes when consciousness stares it in the face, to search for the emotion of being alive. That emotion, situated outside the particular spot where the mind looked for it, and emerging with its density rich in forms and densely flowing; that emotion which gives the overwhelming sound of matter to the spirit, the entire soul passing into its ardent fire. But what delights the soul even more than fire is the limpidity, the facility, the natural and glacial candor of this too fresh matter which breathes both hot and cold. He is the one who knows what the appearance of this matter signifies and what underground massacre was the price of its unfolding. This material is the standard of a nothingness, which does not know itself. When I think of myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new dimension. I am on the moon as others are sitting at their balcony. I am part of the gravitation of the planets in the fissures of my mind. Life will perpetuate itself, events will go on happening, spiritual conflicts will be resolved, and I will play no part in them. I have nothing to hope for on either side, moral or physical. For me there is perpetual sorrow and shadow, the night of the soul, and I have no voice to cry out. Cast your riches far from this numb body, for it is insensible to the seasons of the spirit or the flesh. I have chosen the domain of sorrow and shadow as others have chosen that of the glow and the accumulation of things. I do not labor within the scope of my domain. My only labor is eternity itself Translated by David Rattray Typed by Splicer INQUEST Antonin Artaud YOU LIVE, YOU DIE. WHAT HAS FREE WILL GOT TO DO WITH IT ALL? IT SEEMS YOU KILL YOURSELF THE WAY YOU HAVE A DREAM. THIS IS NO MORAL QUESTION WE ARE ASKING: IS SUICIDE A SOLUTION? No, suicide is still a hypothesis. I claim the right to be skeptical about suicide, just as I am skeptical about all the rest of reality. For the moment, and pending further orders, one must be frightfully skeptical, not about existence itself, which anybody at all can grasp, but rather about the inward agitation and profound feelings in things, in acts, in reality. I beleive in nothing I am not joined to by the tangible and meteoric umbilical cord of my own thoughts. Even so, too many meteors are out of action. And I am vexed by other man's sentient blueprints of existance, and I resolutely abominate all reality. Suicide is no more than the fabulous and distant conquest of clear-thinking men, but suicide itself as a state of being is absolutely incomprehensible to me. An invalid doing himself in would be utterly without representational value, but the state of a soul of a man who planned his suicide well, down to the material circumstances, the exact minute of undoing, would be marvelous. I have no idea what things really are, no idea of human state; nothing of this world turns for me, nothing turns in me. Being alive, I suffer horribly. I fail to reach any existing state. And most certainly I died long ago; my suicide has already taken place. That is, I have already been suicided. But what you think of is an anterior state of suicide, a suicide that would make us retrace our steps on the yonder side of existence rather than the side of death. For that would be the only suicide that might make sense to me. I feel no hunger for death; I simply hunger not to be, never to have dropped into this sink of imbecilities, abdications, renunciations, and obtuse contacts which make up the conscious self of Antonin Artaud and are even weaker than he is. The conscious self of this wandering invalid, who from time to time keeps trying to exhibit his shadow, which he himself spat on a long time ago; this self on crutches, limping along; this virtual, impossible self which nevertheless is part of reality. None like him ever felt his weakness, yet his weakness is the most important weakness of all mankind. To be destroyed, not to exist. Translated by David Rattroy Typed by Splicer 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. I died at Rodez under electroshock. I died. Legally and medically died. Electroshock coma lasts fifteen minutes. A half an hour or more and then the patient breathes. Now one hour after the shock I still had not awakened and had stopped breathing. Surprised at my abnormal rigidity, an attendant had gone to get the physician in charge, who after examining me with a stethoscope found no more signs of life in me. I have personal memories of my death at that moment, but it is not on those that I base my testimony as to the fact. I limit myself strictly to the details furnished me by Dr. Jean Dequeker, a young intern at the Rodez asylum, who had them from the lips of Dr. Ferdiere himself. And the latter asserts that he thought me dead that day, and that he had already sent for two asylum attendants to instruct them on the removal of my corpse to the morgue, since an hour and a half after shock I had still not come to myself. And it seems that just at the moment that these attendants arrived to take my body out, it gave a slight shudder, after which I was suddenly wide awake. Personally I have a different recollection of the affair. But I kept this recollection to myself, and secret, until the day when Dr. Jean Dequeker on the outside confirmed it to me. And this recollection is that everything which Dr. Jean Dequeker told me, I had seen, but not from this side of the world but from the other, and quite simply from the cell where the shock took place and under its ceiling; although for moments there was neither cell nor ceiling for me, but rather a rod above my body, floating in the air like a sort of fluidified balloon suspended between my body and the ceiling. And I shall indeed never forget in any possible life the horrible passage of this sphincter of revulsion and asphyxia, through which the criminal mob of beings forces the patient in extremis before letting go of him. At the bedside of a dying man there are more than 10,000 beings, and I took note of this at that moment. There is a conscious unanimity among all these beings, who are unwilling to let the dead man come back to life before he has paid them by giving up his corpse totally and absolutely; for existence will not give even his inert body back to him, in fact especially his body. And what do you expect a dead man to do with the body in the grave? At such a time, "I am you and your consciousness is me," is what all the beings say: salesmen, druggists, grocers, subway conductors, sextons, knifegrinders, railroad gatekeepers, shopkeepers, bankers, priests, factory managers, educators, scientists, doctors, not one of them missing at the crucial moment. Pity that no other dead person outside myself should have returned to confirm the matter, for generally the dead do not return. The electroshock accomplished, this one didn't run its course, as had the first two. I felt that it wasn't going away. And my whole inward body, the whole lie of this inward electric body which for a certain number of centuries has been the burden of every human being, turned inside out, became in me like an immense turning outward in flames, monads of nothingness bristling to the limits of an existance held prisoner in my lead body, which could neither get out of its lead body nor stand up like a lead soldier. I could no longer be my body, I didn't want to be this breath turning to death all around it, until its extreme dissolution. Thus wrung out and twisted, fiber on fiber, I felt myself to be the hideous corridor of an impossible revulsion. And I know not what suspension of the void invaded me with its groping blind spots, but I was that void, and in suspension, as for my soul, I was nothing more than a spasm among several chokings. Where to go and how to get out was the only one thought leaping in my throat blocked and secured on all sides. Every wall of charred meat assured me it would be neither through the soul nor the mind, all that is of a former world, this is what each heartbeat told me. It is the body that will remain without the mind, the mind, i.e., the patient. 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