ARTAUD
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D Press 2000 Sebastopol
Special thanks to
Elizabeth Marshall
Tod Hundelson
Claude Smith
Kelly Lamont
Afterword
John Bennett
More of Another Artaud can be found in the dPress archive
www.dpress.net
The reader must believe
that it is a matter of an actual sickness
and not a phenomena of the age,
of a sickness which is related
to the essence of a human being
and his actual possibilities of expression
and which is involved
in an entire life.Artaud Chronology
1941: born in Santa Clara, California, November 21
1941: adopted by parents in Berkeley
1947: moves to Oakland
1959: returns to Berkeley to attend University of California
1960-61: takes part in SLATE debates, which leads to
the formation of Free Speech Movement
1963: committed to Napa State Mental Intitution
1965: reporter for Berkeley Barb; attends Berkeley Poetry
Conference; meets poets of Peace & Gladness
1967: self-exciled to Alaskan wilderness
1974: after finding the chill in his bones, he establishes
Fourwinds Bookstore & Café in Ellensburg, Wash.
1988: Mind transmission from Sogyul Rinpoche
1996: moves to Pagosa Springs, Colorado, to be near
Tara Mandala Retreat Center
1998: returns to California to caretake elderly parents
I AM VIRGIN TO MY POEM
Gurgling, puking blood
a toothbrush jammed through my cheek
bricks tied to my ankles
a guitar string around my neck
a fireplug exploding in my heart
my fingers pinched in a car door
a cat clawing my eye
trampled under foot
stumbling through piss and shit
with my head through a ladder
I will step on a crack
and sacrifice myself to the immaculate
conception of things
sooner or later.
POLUTION OF THE PSYCHE
I am in a room with a door you can go through but I can't. You are in a room with a door I can go through but you can't. Now I see your face in another place and hear the echo of your laugh. I'm trying to say what I feel, but a mist surrounds me, and I know there is somewhere I want to go, so I cruise the limits of the visible.
I feel a barrier, wierd, yet familiar to the touch. No birds are singing. Is this some kind of warning? I pass a car burning beside the road where I meet a crone, who claims she is the guardian of the way. She throws bones in the dust and asks me who I am, why I have trouble making up my mind.
I know if I pass, I cannot return, but what more can I loose? I change. I have no eyes. I have no sex. I am grotesque. Hostility saturates me. I see everything underground. I try to communicate, but I can't stop your laughter from mocking me.
DESCRIPTION OF A MENTAL STATE
From afar, floating fragments of gray matter, my voice, distorted, but distinguishable from sundered notes of ancient melodies. Whispers, but louder, still my voice, my name called, ah, this sound like a weary violin sustaining a single note, acid penetrating the marrow of my mind, where having dissolved the particulars of articulation, it begins to crystalize the metaphors of cringing stone.
Petrified, ghostfrost of noun and verb, green and red ore, soothe the direct object of my desire, until agony curls and constricts the fibers of my unborn thought, the fetus of perpetual irritation.
THE THIRD HOLY NIGHT
The Dreams of December 26 through the morning of December 27 reveal the themes of June 2000. The Virtue to contemplate arising out of Gemini is Perseverance, which becomes Faithfulness. Challenges to this virtue are betrayal and incapacitation.
Simon Says. Trying to remember the game, while at a philosophy lecture. Lecture hall scene: I have beem invited to lecture (like Artaud in the Théatre du Vieu Colombier on January 13, 1947), and in the middle of the talk I begin to play "Simon Says." I am sitting in the front row on the left, playing with Styrofoam pellets, which move around like the dancing metal screws in the Brothers Quay film The Secret of Crocodiles. Magnetic gyrations.
The lecture hall is a science lab with a large demonstration table in the front like in the Lawrence Chemistry Lab at U.C. Berkeley. I am trying to remember my poems, but I don't have my manuscripts.
My daughter, Lulu, is with me, and I look through the pages of her notebooks for some Dumpty.
Racing around on a motorcycle, a girl on a skateboard is holding onto me. Up a steep grade, the cycle lugs to a halt and then begins a chaotic descent, another vehicle in pursuit, a chase around streets resembling ant trails.
A sequence of dreaming that is totally abstract pictures, colors and forms, and I am lucid but surprised there isn't some kind of narrative.
Dakini Card #34—Burning Bush/Lineage Tree. Completeness of occult preparation. Opportunity and direct contact with spirituality. Insight. Revelation. Faith.
MARILYN MANSON ON THE RAG
Billy Blake wanders in the chartered streets
crying weep weep weep
Sylvia Plath lies in a basement
her cunt full of worms
Williams Carlos Williams crawls
to his Asphodel
Dylan Thomas slashes his eye
Francois Villon thrashes on the scaffold
and the Old Gray Poet
mad blind gay
SEES
all the stars and all the grains of sand
all the bacteria in the shit pile
are children born trembling
DELIVERY SYSTEM
We flow into each other, stream
through, all the doors thrown open.
The only way to fly.
NO LONGER IN MY BODY
after dinner
brandy
cigars
hash
coke
LSD
coffee
Talking Plato and Aristotle
Appearance and Ideas
SOUL OF THE ANTI-POET
Spring into movement like 111 or 666—
it's all in the wrist.
Take your hat off, and stand alone.
Wipe that smirk off your chops.
Don't fart.
Salute the sun.
The mucus of life is before you.
Eat up!
WHO IS WORTHY OF BEING SLASHED?
A blind shadow looms
on the door of my tongue
casting a shrine to nothing.
THE POEM ARTAUD WROTE
IN MAY, 1932, AFTER MEETING HITLER
AT THE ROMANISCHE CAFÉ
AND SPIKING HIS TEA WITH PSILICYBIN
Communism is stupid
hi hi hi hi
Communism is stupid
Facism is good
Facism is good
jo jo jo jo
Communism is stupid
Communism is stupid
hi hi hi hi
YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE!!
PLEASE, AVOID PANIC BUYING!!
SHOP AS USUAL.
CRAZY MONKEY
Good weather for ego hunting—
lots of weird animals in the mind,
the mind itself a crazy monkey.
JUST AS IT IS
I watch
with mystic
horror the sun
darken and
shimmer
through violet
haze
dream green
nights
and watch
distances shatter into foam
while feeling
slow kisses in
the midst of
calm
ROOTS OF ANGUISH
The future and the past
are shadows,
and the calendar
masks a cannibal.
Why assume the sun
will rise tomorrow?
Why assume
October's final night
will not trick us
and repeat—
29, 30, 31, 29, 30, 31
for a thousand years?
I LIKED IKE WHEN I WAS EIGHT
The Incredible Bureau does not discriminate
between polished shoes and Greek statues,
and I didn't always talk with a stutter,
and I didn't always live in a gutter.
COMMITMENT
It appearing to the Court on this day
the above-named defendant appeared to answer
a charge of committing an obscene act
It appearing that the said Judge
in it appearing that on that date
a doubt aroused as to the sanity of said defendant
dismissed criminal proceedings in said action
and certified the above-named
to the above-entitled Court
for hearing and examination by said Court
to determine the question of the sanity
of the said defendant; and the attorneys
for defense and prosecution stipulated
that the doctor's reports could be received
in evidence and the Court considered the evidence
presented upon the issue of the present sanity
of said defendant to be insane
It is THEREFORE ORDERED
ADJUDGED AND DECREED
that the said defendant be committed and confined
as an insane person until such time as he shall
become sane
INFLUENCES BETWEEN 1959-65
Edward Teller
Julian Huxley
Jean Renoir
Pablo Casals
Willard van Orman Quine
Richard Alpert
Allen Ginsberg
Mario Savio
FAVORITE HAUNTS OF A BYGONE ERA IN BERKELEY
Continental Books
Big Daddy's (Creed's) Bookstore
Farrell's Bookstore
the Green Door
the Stew Den
Robbie's Cafeteria
the Steppenwolf
the Blind Lemon
the Albatros
the Piccolo (The Med)
the Jabberwocky
Cinema Guild/Studio
the Garden Spot
Cody’s Books on the Ave
N0 O ZONE
deadly rays
not easy to kiss these off
bodies piled in heaps
arguing over the sky
howls coming from shrouds
totally dismal
the darker it gets
something serious
seriously out of control
maximum out of control
a landscape of refrigerators
wrecked cars and black feathers
SELF-REPLICATING ROBOTS
dearth decay division disaster
we are using up the planet to create robots
tape hiss follows me
I'm sure a dæmon is eating my wiring
AT EVERY LEVEL OF MONTEZUMA'S CONSCIOUSNESS
Spirit O Spool
did you punch him for his licoriceship?
did her blondness run out in cold
thick drops?
did I fork a virgin zero from the globe?
foul the cherub cheek winds?
clog my veins with abuse of 4/4 time?
Pawing through the hospital dumpster
I find an aluminum Xmas tree
decorated with gauze and syringes
Insanity and murder, devastation and cruelty
fatal epidemics and contagion
O Furies, I look for you
bringing my Great Plan
Behold the new born terror!
Behold all things new!
