Antonin Artaud 1896-1948, b. Marseille, in Dreyer's Passion of Joan of Arc 1928. About 30 when he wrote these. End of his life imprisoned for 9 years as schizophrenic, electroshock. Sontag describes him as a Gnostic. from Art and death (1925-27), in Selected writings, ed Susan Sontag, trans Helen Weaver 1976 Farrar, Straus and Giroux * from Heloise and Abelard 129-132 Dear friend, I am enormous. I cannot help it, I am a high place where the tallest masts acquire breasts instead of sails, while the women feel their sexual organs become hard as pebbles. For my part, I cannot prevent myself from feeling all these eggs rolling and pitching under the dresses as the hour and the spirit moves them. Life comes and goes and grows small across the pavement of the breasts. From one minute to the next the face of the world has changed. Wound around the fingers are the souls with their cracks of mica, and into the mica Abelard passes In short, a strictly vegetal and rustling life in which the legs move with their mechanical step and the thoughts like tall boats with their sails reefed. The passage of bodies. The mummified mind breaks loose Will the bird burst through the gate of tongues, will the breasts branch out and the small mouth resume its place? Will the seed tree break through the obdurate granite of the hand? Oh, oh, oh! how light my thought is. My mind is slender as a hand. But the fact is that Heloise also has legs. The best part is that she has legs. She also has that thing shaped like a sailor's sextant, around which all magic revolves and grazes, that thing like a sheathed sword. But above all, Heloise has a heart. a beautiful heart erect and full of branches, straining, firm, full of grain She has hands that surround books with their cartilage of honey. She has breasts of uncooked meat, so small, whose pressure drives one mad; her breasts are network of fibers. She has a thought that belongs to me, a thought that is insidious and twisted, that unwinds as from a cocoon. She has a soul. In her thought I am the flashing needle and it is her soul that accepts the needle and lets her in, and I am better with my needle than all the others in their beds, for in my bed I roll the thought and the needle in the sinuosities of her sleeping cocoon. For it is always to her that I find my way back along the thread of this love that is scattered to the world. and in my hands grow craters, grow networks of breasts, grow explosive loves which my life wins over from my sleep. But by way of what trances, what sudden starts, what gradual glidings has he arrived at this idea of the enjoyment of his mind? For the fact is that at this moment Abelard is enjoying his mind. he is enjoying it fully. He no longer thinks of himself either to the right or to the left. He is here. Everything that is happening in him belongs to him. and in him at this moment things are happening. Things that make it unnecessary for him to look for himself. This is the important point. He no longer has to stabilize his atoms. They combine of themselves, they arrange themselves into a point. His whole mind is reduced to a series of ascents and descents, but the descent is always to the center. He has things. His thoughts are beautiful leaves, level surfaces, successions of centers, clusters of contacts among which his intelligence glides without effort: it goes. For this is what intelligence is: to walk around oneself. The question no longer arises whether to be shrewd or slight and to come back to oneself from a distance, to embrace, to reject, to separate. He glides from one state to the next. He lives. And things inside him shift like grain in a sieve. He is really there. He is there like a living medallion As for Heloise, she is wearing a dress, she is beautiful outside and inside. * from Clear Abelard 132-135 No, ink, no, wind, no, reeds, banks, shores, foam, flakes. The floodgate is down. It is because the sky has a face that Abelard has a heart in which so many stars sprout supreme and make his penis grow. At the end of metaphysics is this love all paved with flesh, all burning with gems, born in the sky after so many sowings of the seed of madness. But Abelard chases the sky like bluebottle flies. Where can we go? God! Quick, the eye of a needle. The tiniest eye of a needle through which Abelard cannot come and get us. The weather is strangely fine. For it has to be fine now How clear is coitus So clear. What seeds , how avid are the heads of pleasure, how lavishly at the highest point of joy pleasure spreads her poppies. Her poppies of sound, her poppies of light and music, swiftly, like a magnetic rise of birds. Yes, Heloise, it is in you that I walk with all my philosophy Let this foam gush against the deep and radiant walls. The trees. Heloise eats fire. Opens a door. Climbs a stairway. Someone rings. Her soft crushed breasts rise. It is here. Abelard possesses it as a man. Famous belly. It is this and it is not this. Eat straw, eat fire. The kiss opens her caverns where the sea comes to die. here is this spasm in which the heavens conspire, AND IT COMES FROM ME. Without all those magic meanings, without all those secrets superimposed. She and I. We are really here. I hold her. I kiss her. A final pressure restrains me, freezes me. I feel between my thighs the Church stopping me, complaining She trembles, but he trembles much more than she. Poor man! Poor Antonin Artaud! For it is indeed he, this impotent wretch who scales the stars, who tries to pit his weakness against the cardinal points of the elements, who, out of each of the subtle or solid faces of nature, tries to create a thought that will hold * from Art and death Who, in the depths of certain kinds of anguish, at the bottom of certain dreams, has not known death as a shattering and marvelous sensation unlike anything else this suctionlike rise of anguish whose waves cover you and fill you to bursting as if driven by some intolerable bellows. An anguish which approaches and withdraws, each time more vast, each time heavier and more swollen. It is the body itself that has reached the limit of its distension and its strength and which must nevertheless go further. it is a kind of suction cup placed on the soul, whose bitterness spreads like an acid to the furthest boundaries of perception. And the soul does not even possess the ability to burst. For this distension itself is false. Death is not satisfied so cheaply. In the physical sphere, this distension is like the reverse image of a contraction which must occupy the mind over the whole extent of the living body. 121 The fear that swoops down on you tears you apart to the very limit of the impossible, for you know very well that you must cross to that other side for which nothing in you is ready, not even this body, above all this body which you will leave behind without forgetting either its substance, or its density, or its impossible asphyxia. - just then some unknown moisture from a lake of iron or stone or wind refreshes you incredibly and consoles your mind, and you flow, you create yourself by flowing to your death, to your new state of death. This water that flows is death, and from the moment that you contemplate yourself with tranquility, that you register your new sensations, it means that the great identification is beginning. You were dead and now once again you find yourself alive ­ ONLY THIS TIME YOU ARE ALONE. In any case, dreams like these cannot lie. They do not lie. And these sensations of death placed end to end, this suffocation, this despair, this torpor, this desolation, this silence, don't we see them in the magnified suspension of a dream, with this feeling that one of the faces of the new reality is perpetually behind one? But at the bottom of death or of the dream, the anguish begins again. this anguish, like a rubber band that is stretched and suddenly hits you in the throat, is neither unknown nor new. The death into which one slipped without being aware, the fetal contraction of the body, that head ­ it had to pass, that head that carried consciousness and life and consequently the supreme suffocation, and consequently the most excruciating pain ­ it also had to pass through the smallest possible opening. But it torments to the limit of the pores, and this by dint of shaking and writing with terror, has as it were the idea, the feeling that it is swollen and that its terror has taken shape, that it has burgeoned under the skin. Childhood knows sudden awakenings of the mind, intense prolongations of thought which are lost with advancing age. In certain panics known to childhood, certain monumental and unreasonable terrors which are haunted by the sense of an extra-human menace, it is incontestable that death appears like the tearing of a nearby membrane, like the lifting of a veil which is the world, as yet formless and insecure. This manacled death in which the soul writhes, straining to regain a state that is at last complete and permeable, in which everything would not be shock, the sharpness of a delirious confusion that ratiocinates endlessly upon itself, tangled in the fibers of a mixture that is both intolerable and melodious, in which everything would not be sickness, in which the smallest place would not be constantly reserved for the greatest hunger for a space that is absolute and this time definitive, in which this pressure of paroxysms would suddenly be pierced by the feeling of a new level, in which from the bottom of a nameless confusion this stirring, snorting soul would sense the possibility, as in dreams, of awakening to a clearer world, after boring through it no longer knows what barrier ­ and would find itself in a luminosity where at last its limbs would unfold and where the world's partitions would seem infinitely fragile. This soul could be reborn; yet it is not reborn; for although soothed, it feels that it is still dreaming, that it still is not used to that dream state with which it does not manage to identify itself. At this instant in his mortal reverie the living man, having arrived at the impasse of an impossible identification, withdraws his soul with a violent gesture. There he is, thrown back on the bare level of the senses, in a bottomless light. Outside the infinite musicality of nerve waves, exposed to the boundless hunger of the atmosphere, to the absolute cold. - [note to text] everything that promotes confusion without destroying the surging force of thought, everything that upsets the relations between things by giving the subverted mind an even greater vision of truth and violence, all these things provide access to death, put us in touch with those more refined states of mind which are the proper ambience of death. Dreams are true. All dreams are true. I have a sense of asperities, of landscapes that seem sculptured, of undulating stretches of ground covered with a kind of cool sad, whose meaning is: "regret, disillusionment, abandonment, separation, when shall we meet again?" Nothing resembles love so much as the appeal of certain landscapes seen in dreams, as the encircling of certain hills, of a kind of material clay whose shape is as if molded to the thought. When shall we meet again? when will the earthy taste of your lips come again to brush the anxiety of my mind? The earth is like a whirlpool of mortal lips. What are we to do with this angel at our side who has never been able to appear? Will all our sensations remain forever intellectual, and will not our dreams succeed in igniting one soul whose feeling will help us to die? What is this death in which we are forever alone, in which love does not show us the way? * from Letter to the clairvoyant 125-129 Madam, You live in a poor room, involved with life. It would be useless to expect to hear heaven murmuring in your windows. Nothing, neither your appearance nor the air, separates you from us; but some childishness more profound than experience compels us to slash away endlessly and to drive away your face, and even the attachments of your life. And I am as if naked before you. naked, immodest and naked, upright and like an apparition of myself, but without shame, for in your eye that races vertiginously through my fibers, evil is really without sin. Never have I felt so precise, so unified, so confident even beyond scruples, beyond all malice that might come from others or myself, and also so discerning. You added the tip of fire, the starry tip to the trembling thread of my hesitation. Neither judged nor judging myself, whole without effort, complete without forcing myself I scarcely needed to stir my thoughts. how do you adjust to life, you who have the gift of second sight? And that long level road down which your soul walks like a tightrope walker, and where I, I would read so clearly the future of my death. You come upon me, tiny, swept aside, rejected, and just as desperate as yourself; and you lift me up, you take me away from this place, this false space And this eye, this eye gazing at me, this single desolate gaze which is all my existence, you magnify it and turn it in on itself, and behold, a luminous burgeoning makes a bliss without shadows, revives me - I cannot help it Life was good because this clairvoyant existed. The presence of this woman was like opium to me: purer, lighter, although less substantial than opium, but deeper, more vast, and opening other portals This active state of spiritual communication, this conflagration of neighboring and tiny worlds that this woman afforded me a view of one cannot accept life unless one is large, unless one feels at the source of phenomena, at least a certain number of them Only one thing is exalting in this world: contact with the powers of the mind. But in the presence of this clairvoyant I no longer feel the need to be powerful or vast.