Wednesday 27 November 1946 at twenty-three hours in the evening
beings that have not swallowed the nail,
but have swallowed the point,
and have held themselves between the hard and the soft,

those one cannot disintricate
because if one looks for them in the breath
they take refuge in the body,
and if one looks for them at one point on the body
they claim to be braided there in breath,
lightning gashing the body
like a negation of body,
having more body than all breath.

They collect in the body,
outside of the one who controls this body
and for them has not left it,
being neither intelligent enough to reign over its mental nature,
nor sufficiently this suffering body to be all this body,
in time, the extent of time,
nor old enough in itself to be as old as this body,
nor vegetatively ingenerate enough to be all this innate body,
nor anteccedently
                                im-planted enough
to be what this body
                                is,
nor instinctively
                                supple enough
to be its sempiternal ascent,
and which, to finally flee the whip,
takes refuge not in being or life,
heart, soul consciousness, mind,
but in the strength of the body itself,
latent, in process of rising,
not in pure volition,
but in lightning or the whip,
in the surface inert in fact,
in the flagellation of fact,
in the reputation  between fact and surface,
the depths of the erected
surface (it’s the super-brother of detecting)
in the etection of the surface
the thickness of the incorporated is made,
the inert of the body raised by it,
of the body in the process of getting up,
the thickness of the body in tapult, projected by catapult,
molar that volition extracted from itself like an evil.

 

 

Ideas don’t come without limbs, and so these are no longer ideas but
        limbs, limbs fighting among themselves.

The mental world was never anything but that which remains from a
        hellish trampling of organs while the man who wore them is no
        more.

It is thought from below which leads,
there is no criterion of spirit, of judgement,
spirit is no longer anything but an adventitious memory,
the more a body is a body, the farther it is from spirit and from its con-
        sciousness,
and the more merit it has in body,
and the more the idea of merit escapes,
with its value and its quality,
and the more the life of the body proper prevents it from differentiating
        itself
against value and quality
between value and quality,
and drives to despair the quality of existing;
and the more the body radiates wholly in the oblivion of intrinsic value,
and of the spirit of quality,
and the more it radiates and becomes concrete,
in that the body wanted to squeeze itself out and collect, in order to
         become wholly body, in the hatred of spirituality.
The principle of she-yoga is seated on the eternal happiness of swallow-
         ing the pain of others.

What body is is the emaciation of the matter of oneself,
achieved by oneself;
what has not been achieved in the pain of the self
falls at the hour of death,
until becoming pure spirit, and that a part of the body becomes the evil
         matter of pure spirit.

lo menedi
bardar
ta zerubida

lo menedida
bardar
la ter
tupi
bahelechi
bertoch

na menezucht
bordi
menucht
saba
dezuda

dezuda ravi

Thus perish the spirits of all those who have never wanted to take the
trouble of having a body, and want in spite of everthing to have the
freedom of the city under the reign of truly solidified bodies.
For nothing bestializes a being like the taste for eternal happiness, the
search for eternal happiness at any price, and miss Lucifer is that
whore who never wanted to leave eternal happiness.

But now the old cosmic prospection of god will no longer occur.

The famous total dimension is to become as a simple man as strong as
all infinity.

 

 

What’s going to happen is that men are going to show their instincts
repressed for so long,

and I my true language;

a ta aishena
shoma
shora
borozi
bare

a cane of red ulcer
with a fart fiber penis.

opotambo
zorim
nietecta
opotembech ari nicto

And the nail will remain nail throughout all eternity, when the Portici
she-mute of my sensations passes and my body remains intact.

insulpici de talpiquante
a la piquante e salapice

 

Thus it is that the processional serpent of all bodies, with its mask of red
spasm, falls to the ground beneath my feet;
and this mask it came back to me, as though not having deserved it.

And I said in the middle of the void,
void of the seven eternities:
The self is not the body, it is the body that is the self,

The Mass grips the Orient like the Occident,
more the Orient where it does not take place than the Occident where
it does,
the proofs being that it is to the extreme point of the summit of the
Himalayas that the obscene priests of Rome, Jerusalem and
Lebanon
will have to go to finish guzzling the benefice of their daily assassina-
tions of the human body.

archina
ne coco rabila
co rabila
e caca rila

archeta
ne capsa rifila
ca rifila
e carta chila

archita
ne corto chifila
corti fila
e capsa chila

Translation:
Haven’t they decorticated the patibulary
cavities of my skull enough
and drawn down the burned hides
of their million damned souls
upon themselves.

The Mass rests on the human orifice,
it takes place on the slope of that bone,
through which man a deloused virgin
pukes.

Man holds the stolen stone at a certain place of the skull,
for his own it is a window (a way of being open to being),
for mine it is the niched stone,
this stone has an aura which is being,
and it is in the aura of being,
the intregal aura of being, the tide of inexhaustible will,
is it will itself, or its rape?
It is the rape of will that created this psychic sea in which every being
believes it is agitated,
and agitating,
it is thought, that aqueous stone that drags along like the cast-offs of the
most sordid mendicity
yes, thought is that obscene hooker who always wants to get screwed,
and who vampirizes in order to get it first,
and every man is that evil thought,
which pretends to be spirit, science, when it doesn’t have a body,
when it is only that foul body, rotten, syphilitic, full of sarcoptids,
green with pustules,
that man alone can split hairs over,
that foul mangy gristle, packed with rats and old farts, I mean old sins.
Now, I’ve never believed in sin, but looking at man today I feel quite
inclined to think it over again.

 

 

Friday 13 December 1946,
the espousals of my rondelles,
testicular, infantile rondelles,
through the palpatory,
intellectual lips
of the lama,
have not yet set fire to that:
have not even set fire in me:

they made my daughter Ana come out
of the charnel house of donkey piss beings,

the rampart opposite the beings that emerge from a point blossoming on
the reverse side of bodies;
and for one night that’s already someting.

 

 

Compenetration,
penetration,
my language,
melange,
my language,
coming together,

no space,
no infinity,
no far away,
no register,
no ensemble,
no in general,
no total,
no harmony;

everything downstream
but not me,

no contact,

no brushing against,
no coming togehter,
no penetration,

no compenetration,
no copulation,
pulation,

To bring into contact
the principle molecules
and to force them
to break one upon the other
the cunt, sworn
by means of a series of repeated propulsions
which obey the tempo of a dance
of which the sexual act
is only a bestial
and aborted caricature.

Now I’m the father-mother,
neither father nor mother,
neither man nor woman

I’ve always been there,
always been body,
always been man.

Things are not seen from the height of the spirit over the body
but made by the body,
and on its level,
far more infinite than that of any spirit.

 

 

Without law
other than
that of an
extremely
tenebrous,
scrupulous
and obstinate
equity.

Not to forget
the mug
of Lucifer
beneath his Father Eternal
make-up,
sneering through the bars.

 

 

Electricity is a body, a weight,
the pestling of a face,
the compressed magnet of a repressed surface from the outside of a
blow,
at the outskirts of this blow,
blue fist blow of my green hand of despair and anger, one day that
facing this blow
the hole that I was going to deliver to things
snapped up my hand
not to stay clear of an attack
but to be the master,
at last.

 

 

They bore holes,
they do more than hollow out notions, values,
they stifle slowly calculated proposals, like one says that a wound sup-
purates,
they do not raise themselves from their body
to enter consciousness,
for what is the spirit without the body?
A dishrag of dead jism.
They do not enter into the “mentous,” they do not believe there is a body
called intelligence or science,
anymore than a body named god,
for they no longer see anything in the heavens,
then they understand the heavens,
they no longer believe that things are a void crossed by animal ideas,
they only understand what we do not understand,
and understand that we can no longer understand and perceive what we
see,
for the body is too cramped there,
but the body is not over there, in the future that it swells with all that it
will be,
and it is perhaps in fact thus that god took  man’s property from him
who, like god, does not exist, there where he has not yet made him-
self,
it is only god who can be made there where he has never worked, at
making himself, nor at existing,
thus it is that, not having worked, god took from humanity and its
future, and its past.
The seeds were ill-planted.
I don’t know what he did, or from where he came out to kill, infect and
assassinate,
but my brain is not sick over it, no, my brain is carved by this lowly coal-
trimmer work that god night and day indulges in on my corpse of
humanity, the remains of my body hunted down from everywhere
by the luxuriant vegetation of all the microbes, all the cheese mites,
and the crab lice by means of which god eats me, thus probing me
thoroughly.
because there isn’t just god, but men on the carcass of Artaud the cunt.

 

 

The extreme point of mysticism,
I hold it now in the real and in my body,
like a toilet broom.

For me, living man, I am a city besieged by the army of the dead,
intercepted by their charnel houses,
cut off from all external objects, while I am the external of a dead man,
me,
and those who attack me
are outside,
and it is in the inside that they agitate,
it is in the inside of my body that they cut the thread of the nervous
antenna, through which I must scold their bodies.
(Old cinematography of catastrophy with which the illusion still dresses
me,
prompted by old escapes from hell,
giving man another bread to browse;
for the bread with which I am ulcerated at this time is that of the infa-
mous eroticism that beings hurl at me.)

I strike a blow,
the other, from inside my body, at the farthest exterior of the earth
responds to it with, an imbeciling fluid,
crossed with the abject cross of beings who do not know who has made
time and who,
beings draw themselves from my interior,

but to what extent?

I will do it again and again,
this man,
on you,
Antonin Artaud,
said god,
the universal god of beings,
always incorrigibly foul,
and always incorrigibly there,
and who says to you:
Take that, take that,
you didn’t get me out of there yet,
I’m always there no matter what you try to do,
you haven’t defeated me and I have that:
caca, the cream of your…
it is me who gobbles up the cake you made crumb by crumb,
and I made a child out of it,
to put him in your place,
maybe one day I’ll gobble him up too, unless he has a better way than
you, and knows to bite me where I stew.

With what will I fill nothingness?

Waiting for the specter flattened against me who melts with each blow
I strike to finish his delirium.

 

 

And not like god,
but like, being, me,
this unique body,
from where all,
even god, came out,
that I have been violated for life,
insulted, offended, dirtied,
polluted, muddied, smutted,
day and night,
since I am alive,

no man at the end of his tether
who does not know how to find in Artaud
someting to remake an existence with;

that I have been a little bit everywhere martyrized;

and as to be prevented form being god that I was stabbed in the back, in
Marseilles,
stabbed in Paris,
received an iron bar blow on the spinal column in Dublin;
as being convicted of being god
and to preclude me, me, from remembering it
that I have been everywhere assassinated, poisoned, beaten to death
electrocuted,
and in order to prevent me from finding consciousness again and the
science of my capacities and my strength
and to defend myself against my persecutors;
for god is called by its real name Artaud, and the name of this kind of
unnamble thing between the abyss and nothingness,
which partakes of the nature of the abyss and notingness,
and that one does not call or name,
and it seems that it is a body too,
and that Artaud is a body too,
not the idea, but the fact of the body,
and the fact that what is nothingness is the body,
the unsoundable abyss of the face, of the inaccessible plan of the surface,
through which the abyss body shows itself;

the Tibetans, the Mongols, the Afghans listening to god
or that the abyss the infinite talks to them,
sounding
the bewildered lair of the knot through which the unconscious heart lib-
erates its own thirst from being before what we call nothingness,
say having heard in themselves rise up the syllables of this vocable:

AR-TAU.

A few initiates wanted to plead that it was there the designation of a
force but not that of an individual,
but not an initiate, in reality, who did not know that this force was that
of a man and who did not want to chain this man to forbid him to
exist, even if it entails assassinating him later.
And in reality no initiate who did not know that Antonin Artaud, born
in Marseilles September 4th 1896, was really that man who, at the
bottom of nothingness, was sleeping.

 

 

So then it is in prevention from being god
that I,
Antonin Artaud,
have been martyrized eternally,

and as being exactly this man, and the man who never wanterd any god,
and whom all the churches have always persecuted to extirpate his athe-
ism from him,

and it is in prevention from being god that I, Antonin Artaud, peti-
bourgeois from Marseilles, September  4th, 1896, have seen myself
stabbed in the back on June 10th, 1916, in Marseilles in front of the
church of the Reformed,
asphyxiated by spells throughout my entire existence,
stabbed in 1928 in Montmartre a second time in the back,
then struck in Dublin with an iron bar on the spinal column,
attacked on a ship, with in front the anchor hole wide open to let my
body through,
straight-jacketed on the same ship after the attack,
then interned,
maintained seventeen days in straight jacket with feet attached to the
bed,
kept three years in solitary confinement,
poisoned systematically for five months,
that I have suffered one month of coma under the shock of the last poi-
soning, in the Saint-Anne asylum,
finally subjected to two years of electroshock in the Rodez asylum to
lose in it the memory of my so-called supranatural self,
even though I never had two self, but one only, mine, that of a man who
never wanted to hear talk of god.
Then.
Then?
It is in prevention from being god that I have been a little everywhere
persecuted as a man throughout all my life,
here,
but I knew about it only a very short time before the beginning of my
internment,
that it was because all people believed me, me, to be this man,
suspected me of being this body,
had identified me as being this body of man from where all life came
out,

and in prevention from being this body
in which everyone always served himself
without using entrance or exit,
and felt capable of supplying himself,
and which he believed could be used to answer all his needs,
in prevention from being this body charged to provide for all the needs,
and pillaged to the point of plague,
for there is no plague nor cholera, smallpox nor syphilis,
tha the succubate,
well-organized,
cannot explain.

 

 

It is in prevention from being god
that I am day and night flooded with the sea of succubus jism,
maintainded in the gaseous placenta of the seminal alluvium of the water
mothers, with which one hundred billion harpies every night smear
my conscience to maintain me in this life,
the world it is water, air, earth, fire, aether,
but it is also the arch-ponderable of all that has always been hidden
and which is this sea of miasmas ja,
of obscene corporal suppurations
which paralyze all will;

everybody gets hauled over the coals,
but there is there a kind of ignoble tenderness
with which I am particularly favored.

I have seen myself in 1915 prey to strange phenomena.

I know now where they were coming from,
for it is in prevention from being god that I am every night honored
with the visits of one hundred thousand vampires etc.,
and it is because my body is good that it is always meticulously visited.

 

 

The current plan
(against sleep and art)
of the little Sufi multifolded in a humbug of acrid cow-dung,
for all poison is a sexual plexus.

I do not know anything more tha my sensibility of all the seconds,
those of the moments when I feel most myself and most intensely present,
awake, willful and warned.
What I know best about myself is my inalienable will, infinite as the
volume or the plain of my whole body impossible to pierce.
And concerning this point anyone or no one could care less, ever, about
another offense;
it being understood that the body of Artaud
which contains in the innate state
all that which serves to make that from which the life of silt is born;
it is from this body that they draw
something to remake reality,
something to remake themselves in reality, and to make for themselves
a reality;
whoever has squandered too much of his blood, of his sperm, of his
saliva, or of the snot from his nose,
it is inside Artaud that he comes to rebutter:
and the Tower of Butter in Tibet
is the sign of this hold of beings
on that which composes my flesh to be eaten,
is like the perpetual pig of the barometer of how much of my butter is
needed by beings, to remain in reality.

I have perhaps a thousand friends in the spheres,
in fact perhaps ten living men
who have forgotten that it was done,
who no longer knew what it was all about,
and on what life is centered,
with which crime against Artaud buried,
masturbated and annihilated,
life has always sustained itself.
I have to say to all those friends
that if beings have never forgotten how to approach Artaud by magic,
how to draw saliva from his mouth, and his shit from his coccyx, and his
sperm under his pubis,
how, from which hollow blubber lips
to turn the night around his bed,
from which opening of the teguments,
from which monstrous dilation of the pores, from which sanious flay-
ings of tissues under the teguments,
to leech onto all that is him in order to suck him bone dry,
and it is in this way that Antonin Artaud feels his testicles suppurate
in the middle of which a thousand heads circulate having perched their
paradise there,
vying with one another to sneer at him, if he does not disclose immedi-
ately where the bad spirit is lodged, which came right up to him;
— And where I am, you don’t know where I am, nor how I arrived
here.

It is in this way that they swallow Artaud, that they suck him off, that
they defecate him, that they lick him and lick their chops with him,
in this way throughout life;
and if Antonin Artaud complains,
that means he is delirious;
quick, a little electroshock to cure him of believing in spirits;
but it is precisely that Antonin Artaud does not believe in spirits, but
that he has always believed in men,
who have never known how to do anything else to buttress their igno-
ble lives than to come back to life in him,
and it is in order for that not to be known and to pursue their hideous
profits in peace,
that they had Artaud put to bed,
completely naked, in a cell, held secretly for three years,
and had him poisoned and convicted of madness,
so that he would not be able to revolt
and so that nobody would think to help him.
But Artaud can do without men, and it is all by himself that he got his
liberty back.

For magic to enter into Artaud,
it’s magic to croak in Artaud,
and that’s the way that Antonin Artaud tool his enemies prisoners,
for I, Antonin Artaud, for nine years convicted of delirium and mad-
ness, I now performed magic.

I performed it for three years in Rodez, I had performed it for three
years in Ville-Evrard, before Rodez,
and those were the sniffings and whirlings for which the doctors
reproached me.
As for magic, I take in my thick breath, and by means of my nose, of my
mouth, of my hands and of my feet I project it against everything
that obstructs me.
And how many boxes, chests, totems, grigri, partitions, surfaces, sticks,
nails, ropes, and a hundred nails, breastplates, helmets, armor plat-
ings, masks, carders, iron collars, winches, garrots, gibbets and
dials, are there now in the air
by my will projected.
I will tell you that when I will have made society give back the billion
tons of cocaine and heroin it stole from me, — with the aid of nine
small pneumatic cannons, and the cane that I have forged.

 

Me, Artaud,
worked over,
to rid me of evil,

but why not know when it will end.

I cannot know what I will do tomorrow,
I do not want to know,
but I want to know that evil will end immediately.
No, it will never end either.
So.
I am the master of the elements
and the one of events.
I don’t want to be touched anymore,
invaded
as I am by others,
I don’t want to be put to sleep by others,
sleep is an illusion in which one continues to live.

I don’t want these death pangs anymore.

I don’t want to die.

I don’t want to dream anymore.

 

from suppôts et suppliciations
(this is the last book-length work that Artaud himself edited)

Watchfiends & rack screams
works from the final period by

Antonin Artaud

edited and translated by
clayton Eshleman with bernard bador

---

 

 

 

translation by Clayton eshleman and A. James Arnold

bomb 1983