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{antonin artaud: an impossible mind} stephen r. killeen At the age of thirty-one I discovered exuberance, style of flesh and consciousness, an impossible mind containing an intolerable truth. I discovered Antonin Artaud: poet, actor, philosopher, madman, genius. Reading the writings of Artaud was a life-altering discovery?not because of his reputation, not because of his diction, his mastery of language, his catastrophic images, or his tremendous nerve, but because I was reading his mind. The splendors of his catatonic mind became my refuge. His unrestrained, metaphysical chants seeped through previously impermeable layers of my brain until I became delirious, mad?and the further I read, the further enraged my viscera became, rendered delicate and inflamed for weeks, until finally exploding forth into my own Manifesto of a Schizophrenic; my greatest work. Artaud had massacred my apprehension, my timidness, my perceptions and the falseness of my ego. His non-conformist ideas infused me with a voice, a sense of power, detonated an incommunicable means of expressionism. He gave me the decision to continue on, and quest to pursue the totality of my own mind, to make literature a lucid manifestation of my self. Antonin Artaud spent 9 years confined to an insane asylum; held captive physically, but his genius could never be contained. Nothing so pure can be. His genius transcended beyond the bourgeois oppression of art, beyond the psychiatrists? reach, beyond jealous rivals, and beyond the walls of any madhouse. Who else could write the ineffable pains of life, drawing pain so luminously with words that your mind constructs a film screen to display the awful images? Who else could stage pain so theatrically and spiritually, with such vigor, and make it so monumental and terrible that you believe it is your own? Every other writer seems to fall short in comparison. It is as though Artaud was gifted with an extra sense, one dedicated to the description of pain, one almost supranatural in character and agonized tones?a sense so passionate and compassionate that suicide becomes a profoundly clear and humanitarian action. Society tried to correct the genius of Artaud with the authority of his psychiatrist?s thumb. They tried to stampede over his mind, body and spirit, and subjected him to grueling electroshock therapy in an effort to remove his will, his difference, his poetic nature. For years they interrogated him, morning after morning, but he never broke down. In the end, all they succeeded in was pushing him to create even greater works of art, with more potent images and vaster understanding than ever before. Artaud unleashed his ferocity when he wrote, ?I myself spent nine years in an insane asylum and I never had the obsession of suicide, but I know that each conversation with a psychiatrist, every morning at the time of his visit, made me want to hang myself, realizing that I would not be able to cut his throat.? When I first read Artaud?s essay, van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society, I was astonished by the intimacy. I was immediately struck by the power with which he explained van Gogh, his paintings and his psyche. It was as though Artaud had somehow tapped into Vincent van Gogh?s inner circuit of consciousness, his élan vital, and used the same language as the ill-fated painter. There is no question van Gogh was a genius, as Artaud so eloquently proved in his essay. However, the insights Artaud provides about madness and genius and his theories of suicide are quite remarkable on their own. ?There are no ghosts in the paintings of van Gogh, no visions, no hallucinations. This is the torrid truth of the sun at two o?clock in the afternoon. A slow generative nightmare gradually becoming clear. Without nightmare and without result. But the suffering of the prenatal is there. It is the wet gleam of a meadow, of the stalk of a slip of wheat which is there to be extradited. And for which nature will one day answer. As society will also for his untimely death.? I remember repeating the word ?Brilliant? in my head as I read Artaud?s reasoning, however misused that word has now become. The extraordinary narration of Artaud put van Gogh?s life and death into perspective for me. ?Besides, one does not commit suicide by oneself. No one has ever been born by oneself. No one dies by oneself either.? He linked art with madness in a way I had previously never experienced, or thought possible. During his time, Antonin Artaud also created a Theatre of Cruelty, a theatre like no other. Artaud?s concepts for theatre differed greatly from those in practice in France and the rest of the Western world?so greatly in fact, so ahead of their time that he never achieved the success that his theatre so richly deserved. His Theatre of Cruelty Manifesto begins: ?We cannot go on prostituting the idea of the theatre, whose only value lies in its excruciating, magical connection with reality and with danger.? People simply weren?t prepared for, or able to accept, his unconventional methods and fantastic ideas. However, I don?t believe that Artaud sought acceptance by the mainstream, in theatre or in any of his other artistic endeavors. He was driven to provoke, not to appease. His goal seemed to be an essential union of audience and actors, a new kind of relationship in which the audience was necessary to the performance. In this guttural, seductive bond of voices and gestures, all distance would be removed between stage and patrons, all separation eradicated. Artaud was a true dissident of theatre for wanting to move past the contemporary psychological theatre of the West and into a beautiful, hybrid Eastern theatre of the hallucinogenic. Artaud?s letters to his friends, fellow artists and editors reveal a wealth of intriguing ideas and intense emotions. They are more than mere letters. They are immensities, cries of passion and revolt. They are glimpses of a mind possessed, portraits of a man determined to show his soul. They are monuments to genius. And Artaud was extremely prolific in his letter writing, which can be viewed as an art unto itself. Artaud?s poems are often surrealistic and sometimes use language that he created himself?a language that I am unable to explain, other than to say that it?s based on the sonorous quality of the words, like verbal hieroglyphs. He left it in the hands of the reader to find the rhythm and meter with which they should be read, and sometimes used plays on words within the chants themselves. And so begins The Return of Artaud, Le Momo: ?The anchored mind, screwed into me by the psycho-lubricious thrust of heaven is the one that thinks every temptation, every desire, every inhibition. O dedi A dada orzoura O dou zoura A dada skizi O kaya O kaya pontoura O ponoura A pena Poni? Of all his poems, I found the ones written just prior to his death to be the most powerful and genuine. It is as though Artaud had a poetic revelation when he wrote To Have Done with the Judgment of God, which is an exceptionally inventive, stream of consciousness radio play that failed to make it onto radio while he was alive, despite Artaud?s relentless persistence to have it broadcast. The radiophonic play itself was revolutionary, apocalyptic, and incomparable to anything being done on radio at the time or since. It is a tribute to free thought: ?Is God a being? If he is one, he is shit. If he is not one he does not exist.? And it was yet another bloody conflict Artaud?s genius had with society and its frigid censors. Artaud has inspired many generations of artists, actors and people of theatre. He was a true visionary of his age, but he also transcended all space, time, all caverns of thought and disrepute. Like a feral jackal he stalked the unknown, unexplored realms and states of mind in search of his true self, and in doing so, managed to share his own anatomy, his higher thoughts and soul with us, his readers, in ways that border on the occult in their brilliance. Antonin Artaud, my mind salutes yours. |
