Antonin Artaud
WHO IN THE HEART…
Who, in the heart of some anxiety at the bottom of certain
dreams, has not known death as a marvellous, disruptive feeling which could
never be confused with anything else of a mental order? One must have
experienced this exhausting crescendo of anguish which comes over one in waves
and then swells one up as if forced by some unbearable bellows. Anguish which
draws near then withdraws, each time stronger, more ponderous and replete. This
is the body itself, having reached the limit of its strength and distension,
and yet must go on. It is a sort of suction cup on the soul, whose acridity
spreads like acid into the furthermost bounds of the senses. And the soul
cannot even fall back on a breakdown. For this distension itself is false.
Death is not so easily satisfied. In the order of physical experience, this
distension is like an inverted image of the contraction which takes possession
of the mind over the whole extent of the
living body.
This held-in gasp is the last, really the last. It is time
for taking stock. The moment we have feared, dreaded and dreamt about so much
has arrived. One is going to die, this is true. One watches and measures one’s
breath. And time unfurls completely, in all its intensity, and is resolved in
such a way it is bound to dissolve without a trace.
Die, dogged bone. They are well aware your thought is not
complete or finished and whatever way you turn you have not even started thinking.
Little matter. The fear that battens down on you is drawing
and quartering you in exact proportion to this impossibility. For you well know
we must cross to the other side and nothing in you is prepared for this, not
even this body, especially this body you will take leave of without ever
forgetting its substance, density or impossible asphyxia.
And it will be just like a bad dream where you are outside
the position of your body, having none the less dragged it this far, making you
suffer, and enlightening you with its deafening impressions. Where the
perspective is always larger or smaller than you, where none of the feeling of
ancient earthly orientation you bear can be satisfied any longer.
That is it, that is it forever. What is this cry, like a dog
howling in a dream, which makes your skin crawl, gives you this feeling of
grief and unnameable uneasiness making you gag in a mad drowning frenzy.
No, it
isn’t true. It isn’t true.
But the worst of it is, it is true. And at the same time
there is this feeling of desperate truth, where it seems you are going to die
again, you are going to die a second time. (You say to yourself, you say the
words, you are going to die. You are going to die. I am going to die a second time.) – At that moment some humidity,
some moisture from iron or rock or wind refreshes you unbelievably and eases
your mind, and you yourself liquefy, you get used to flowing in to death, your
new state of death. This running water is death and from the moment when you
contemplate yourself serenely and register your new sensations, it means the
great identification has begun. You died, yet here you are alive again. – ONLY
THIS TIME YOU ARE ALONE.
I have just described a sensation of anguish and dreams,
anguish worming its way into dreams and this is more or less how I imagine
agony worms its way into you and finally ends in death.
In any case, such dreams cannot lie. They do not lie. And
these sensations of death laid out end to end, this stifling, this despair,
drowsiness, desolation, and silence, don’t we see them enlarged in a dream and
suspended with the feeling that one of the facets of a new reality is forever
looking over our shoulder?
But in the depths of death or dreams, anguish begins anew.
This anguish, stretched like a rubber-band that suddenly snaps at your throat,
is neither new nor unknown. Death you slipped into unaware, your body rolling
back into a ball, this head – it had to pass through, containing life and
consciousness as it did, and consequently supreme suffocation, and consequently
the greater dismemberment – it, too, had to pass through the smallest possible
opening. But it is anguished to the limit of its pores and this head, by dint
of shaking and turning fearfully has an inkling, the feeling it is swollen and
its terror has assumed a shape and broken out in pimples under the skin.
And as there is nothing new about death after all, on the
contrary it is only too well known, for at the end of this visceral
distillation don’t we picture the panic we have already experienced? It seems
the fierceness of this despair revives certain childhood situations when death
appeared so clearly, like uninterrupted chaos. Childhood knows sudden
awakenings of the mind, intense prolongations of thought we lose again as we
grow older. Death incontestably appears in certain childhood panic-stricken
fears, in a certain spectacular, irrational terror where a feeling of
extra-human threats lurks.
Like the rending of a membrane near at hand, like the
lifting of a veil which is the world – still unformed and unsafe.
Who has no memory of extraordinary enlargements of a wholly
mentally real order, which did not amaze us at the time and which were given,
truly delivered to the wilderness of our childhood senses? These extensions
were impregnated with perfect knowledge, pervading everything, crystal-clear
and eternal.
But what strange thoughts it emphasises, from what
disintegrated meteorite does it reconstitute human atoms.
The child sees recognisable throngs of ancestors in which he
notes the origins of all known man-to-man likenesses. The world of appearance
swells and overflows into the imperceptible and unknown. But an overshadowing
of life occurs and henceforth such states never recur unless graced with the
help of wholly abnormal clearsight due, for example, to drugs.
Hence the immense usefulness of these narcotics to free and
heighten the mind. True or false from the standpoint of a reality we have seen
we could set small store by, this reality being only one of the most transitory
and least recognizable facets of infinite reality, this reality being the same
as matter and decaying with it and from a mental standpoint narcotics regain
their higher dignity which makes them the closest and most useful aids to
death. (1)
This death bound hand and foot, wherein the soul writhes in
trying finally to regain a complete, porous state,
where everything is not shock, nor the jagged edges, the
delirious confusion of endless rationalisations, mingling in the fibres of a
simultaneously unbearable and harmonious jumble,
where everything is not sickness,
where the smallest place is not ceaselessly reserved for the
greatest hunger, hungering after unrestricted space which would be definitive
this time,
where this paroxysmal pressure suddenly breaks through the
feeling of a new level,
where from the depths of a nameless jumble this writhing,
snorting soul feels able, as in dreams, to become awakened to a clearer world
and after having bored through it knows not what barrier – finds itself in
luminosity where it stretches its limbs at last and where the world’s
partitions seem infinitely fragile.
This soul could be reborn, however it is not reborn. For
although eased, it still feels it is dreaming, it still has not transformed
itself into that dream state with which it is unable to identify.
At this instant in his mortal daydream, living man arrives
before the great wall of impossible identification and brutally withdraws his
soul.
He is then thrown back onto the naked level of his senses,
in groundless light.
Outside the infinite musicality of nerve waves, a prey to
the boundless hunger of the air, to absolute cold.
(1) I affirm – and stick to the idea that death is not
outside the field of the mind and that, within certain limitations, is knowable
and approachable by a certain sensibility.
Everything in the order of the written word which abandons
the field of clear, orderly perception, everything which aims at reversing
appearances and introduces doubt about the position of mental images and their
relationship to one another, everything which provokes confusion without
destroying the strength of our emergent thought, everything which disrupts the
relationship between things by giving this agitated thought an even greater
aspect of truth and violence – all these offer death a loophole and put us in
touch with certain more acute states of mind in the throes of which death
expresses itself.
That is why all who dream without regretting their dreams,
without bringing back this feeling of atrocious nostalgia after diving down
into the fertile unconscious, are swine. A dream is the truth. All dreams are
true. I have a feeling of harshness, of landscapes as if sculpted, pieces of
wavy ground covered with a sort of cool sand which means:
“Regret, disappointment, abandonment, separation, when will
we meet again?”
Nothing resembles love so much as the appeal of certain
dream landscapes, the encirclement of certain hills by a clay-like material
whose forms seem moulded onto our thoughts.
When will we meet again? When will the earthy taste of your
lips return again to touch my anxious mind? The earth is like some kind of
whirlwind of mortal lips. Before us, life scoops out a pit of all our missed
caresses. What must we do with this angel at our side, whose apparition never
happened? Will all our sensations forever be intellectual and will our dreams
never succeed in kindling a soul whose feelings will help us die. What is this
death where we are alone for ever, where love never shows us the way?
Translation Victor Corti
