Despair

So long as we have failed to eliminate any of the causes of human despair, we do not have the right to try to eliminate those means by which man tries to cleanse himself of despair.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), French theater producer, actor, theorist. General Security: The Liquidation of Opium (1925; repr. in Selected Writings, pt. 10, ed. by Susan Sontag, 1976), arguing for the free use of opium.

Life and Living

When we speak the word "life," it must be understood we are not referring to life as we know it from its surface of fact, but to that fragile, fluctuating center which forms never reach.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), French theater producer, actor, theorist. The Theater and Its Double, "Preface: The Theater and Culture" (1938; tr. 1958).

Psychiatric Institutions

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.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), French theater producer, actor, theorist. Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947; repr. in Selected Writings, pt. 33, ed. by Susan Sontag, 1976).

Scientists

But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), French theater producer, actor, theorist. Van Gogh, the Man Suicided by Society (1947; repr. in Selected Writings, pt. 33, ed. by Susan Sontag, 1976).

Theater

The theater, which is in no thing, but makes use of everything-gestures, sounds, words, screams, light, darkness-rediscovers itself at precisely the point where the mind requires a language to express its manifestations…. To break through language in order to touch life is to create or recreate the theatre.
Antonin Artaud (1896-1948), French theater producer, actor, theorist. The Theater and its Double, "Preface: The Theater and Culture" (1938; tr. 1958).

Antonin Artaud

"It is in the nature of profound things to clash and combine, to evolve from one another. Action is the very principle of life."

"Electricity is a body, a weight..." Antonin Artaud

In the early 1920s Antonin Artaud wrote a one-act surrealist play called "There Is No More Firmament". After everyday scenes, there is rising panic as the Sun gets bigger and plague breaks out, accompanied by thundering noises; someone says, "It was a magnetic phenomenon", then a loudspeaker announces, "STUPENDOUS DISCOVERY. SKY PHYSICALLY ABOLISHED. EARTH ONLY A MINUTE AWAY FROM SIRIUS. NO MORE FIRMAMENT." One actor claims it is the end of the world. Another says it is 2 worlds ramming each other. There is a chant hailing the new ruler, King Mob. A revolutionary says, "We won't see the Antichrist yet", then a scientist explains: "The molecular grouping in Sirius is everything. These two forces, ours and theirs, had to be put in touch with each other".

from Diagnosis 2012

Back in 1938, the French playwright, film actor, and state-declared madman Antonin Artaud dropped the phrase "virtual reality" in one of the blazing manifestos collected in his magnum opus, _The Theater and Its Double_.  Discussing the "mysterious identitiy of essence between alchemy and the theater,"Artaud argued that the theater creates a virtual reality - "la realite virtuell" - in which characters, objects and images take on the phantasmagoric force of alchemy's visionary internal dramas.  For Artaud, theater is no more about representing ordinary life than alchemy is about the chemical transmutation of lead into gold.  Instead, both of these symbolic rituals should catalyze the same psychological states once produced in the "archetypal, primitive theater" of the Eleusinian Mysteries and the shamanic Orphic cults of ancient Greece.  Artaud argued that, at their essential core, these ancient ritual spectacles evoked "the passionate and decisive transfusion of matter by mind" - the ultimate gnostic transmutation of reality that alchemists symbolized with the fabled philosopher's stone.

• 604 track _Just Another Transmutational Process_ MP3 (vK) by Lumukanda off of _Banteer_ on Psy Harmonics #036

Artaud wrote that the image of this spiritualized state of matter beckons to us from "the incandescent edges of the future," and that it is this brass ring that powerful art and theater are constantly striving to hook.
 - Erik Davis - _Techgnosis: Myth, Magic & Mysticism In The Age Of Information_

Artaud took peyote while in Mexico.

track _Excerpt from "Pour finir avec le jugement de dieu"_ MP3 (192k) (24:05) by Antonin Artaud

• (Recorded November 22-29, 1947)
•  1. opening text
•  2. sound effects which fade into the text performed by Maria Casarés
•  3. the dance of the Tutuguri, text
•  4. sound effects (xylophones)
•  5. La recherche de la fécalité (performed by Roger Blin)
•  6. sound effects, beating and exchanges between Roger Blin and I
•  7. La question se pose de (text performed by Paule Thévenin)
•  8. sound effects and my cry in the stairwell
•  9. conclusion, text
• 10. final sound effects

first mention of Antonin Artaud in Usenet:

From: Evol@UMass.BITNET (Evol@UMass.BITNET)
Subject: To: Hsu (sorry folks)
Newsgroups: mod.music.gaffa
Date: 1986-11-18 12:30:33 PST

WISCVM keeps bouncing the letter back to me, saying

Unknown Host:
   uicsrd.csrd.uiuc.edu

i'd love a copy of the bootleg...should i send you a tape or what?

if you're interested, i have a boot of Bauhaus at Guildford 10.18.82

it has the following songs:
third uncle, silent hedges, in fear of fear, spy in the cab, honeymoon lagartija nick, rosegarden funeral of sores, antonin artaud, passion of lovers, three shadows, in the nightime, kick in the eye, hollow hills in the night, ziggy stardust, bela lugosi's dead

and do you have any other boots that may be of interest? i've got some sisters of mercy, damned, jesus and marychain, cure...

fidelis orozco
evol%umass.bitnet@wiscvm.wisc.edu

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