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