FRAGMENTS OF A JOURNAL IN HELL

Antonin Artaud

Neither my screaming nor my fever is really mine. My secondary faculties (these elements of my mind and soul are hidden) are disintegrating, but just imagine how they are hanging on.

Something halfway between the typical atmosphere I breathe and the tip of my reality.

I hunger less for food than some kind of elementary consciousness. That knot of life where thought-emission hangs. A knot of central
suffocation.

Simply to find basis in some unambiguous truth, that is, one which would depend on one unique razor's edge.

This problem of the emancipation of my conscious being is no longer presented in its exclusively excruciating aspect. I feel new factors intervening in the process by which my life is being denatured, and that I have something like a new awareness of my intimate loss.

I see in the fact that the die is cast and I am plunging into the affirmation of a guessed-at-truth, however risky, my entire reason for being alive.

Sometimes I linger for hours over the impression some idea or sound has made on me. My emotion does not develop in time, it has no temporal sequence at all. The ebb and flow of my soul are in perfect accord with the absolute ideality of mind.

To confront the metaphysical system I made for myself as a consequence of this void I carry within me.

From this pain rooted in me like a wedge, at the center of my purest reality, at the point of my sensibility where the two worlds of body and mind are joined, I learn to distract myself by the effect of a false suggestion.

For in the space of that minut the illumination of a lie can last, I manufacture a notion of escape; I rush off in any wrong direction my blood takes. I close the eyes of my intelligence and open my mouth to the speech of the unspoken; I give myself the illusion of a system whose vocabulary escapes me. But from this minute of error there remains the feeling that I have snatched something real from the unknown. I beleive in spontaneous bewitchments. It is impossible that I shall not some day discover a truth somewhere on the routes my blood carries me.

Paralysis is gaining, so I am less and less able to turn about. I no longer have any support, any base... I search for myself I don't know where. My mind is no longer able to go in the directions my emotions and the fantasies welling up in me send it. I feel castrated even in my slightest impulses. I am finally able to see the light through myself only by means of an utter renunciation of my intelligence and feeling. It must be understood that it is the living man in me who is affected, and that this paralysis stifling me is at the center -- not of my feeling I am a predestined man, but of my usual personality. I am definately set apart from life. My torment is as subtle and refined as it is harsh. It costs me mad efforts of imagination, increased tenfold by the grip of this stifling asphyxia, to succeed in thinking my ills. And if I keep on and perservere in this pursuit, in my need to fix once and for all the state of my suffocation...

You were wrong to mention this paralysis that threatens me. It really is threatening and gaining on me every day. It already exists, and like a horrible reality. Certainly I still (but for how long?) do as I please with the limbs of my body, but it has been a long time since I had any control over my mind and so my unconscious controls me altogether, by impulses coming up from my nervous rages and the tornado of my blood. Hurried and rapid images which speak to me only in words of anger and blind hate but are over as fast as a knife stabbing, or lightning in congested sky.

I am stigmatized by an urgent death, so that actual death holds no terrors for me.

I have a feeling the despair these dreadful forms advancing on me bring with them is alive. It slips into this life-knot beyond which the routes of eternity extend. It is really eternal separation. They slip their knife into this center where I feel myself human; they sever the vital connections by which I am joined to the dream of my lucid reality

Forms of a capital despair (really essential)

Crossroads of the awareness of my flesh,
Abandoned by my body,
Abandoned by every possible human feeling.
I cannot compare it to anything but the state known at the heart of delirium during a grave illness.

It is this contradiction between my inner facility and my external difficulty which creates the torment I am dying of. Let time march on and the social convulsions of the world ravage the thoughts of men, I am still immune from all thought immersed in phenomena. Just leave me to my extinguished clouds, my immortal impotence, my unreasonable hopes. But I want it understood that I will not abdicate a single one of my errors. If I used poor judgement, my flesh was at fault; but these illuminations my mind allows to filter through hour after hour are my flesh, whose blood is sheathed in lightning.

He speaks to me of Narcissism and my answer to him is, we are speaking about my life. This is no ego but the cult of flesh, with the whole weight and substance of this word Flesh. Things do not move me except as they affect my flesh and coincide with it at the exact point where they stir it, and not beyond that point. Nothing moves me or interests me except what addresses itself directly to the body. And now he speaks to me about the Self. My answer to him is the Ego and the Self are two distinct terms and not to be confused; in fact it is precisely this pair of determinants which, balancing each other, maintain the body's equilibrium.

I can feel the ground slipping out from under my thought, and I am forced to contemplate these terms I use, unsupported by their intimate meaning or personal substratum in me. Even better than that, the point whereby this substratum seems to connect with my life becomes all of a sudden strangely tangible and virtual for me. I am struck by the idea of an unexpected and fixed space where normally all is movements, communication, interferences, trajectory. But this erosion which subverts the very basis of my thought in its most urgent communications with the intelligence and the instinctual parts of the mind does not take place in the domain of an intangible abstraction, where only higher faculties of the intellect would participate. More than the mind which holds together, bristling with points, it is the nervous trajectory of thought which this erosion subverts and perverts. It is in the limbs and the blood that this absence and this standstill are especially felt.

A terrible cold,
An atrocious abstinance,
The limbo of a nightmare of bone and muscles, with the sensation of stomach fuctions snapping like a flag in the phosphorescences of the storm.

Larval images that are pushed as if by a finger and have no relationship to any material thing.

I am human by my hands and my feet, my guts, my meat heart, my stomach whose knots fasten me to the rot of life.

They speak to me of words but this thing has nothing to do with words; it is a question of the mind's duration. It should not be imagined that the soul has nothing to do with this bark of words peeling off. Life is there, alongside the mind, and the human being is inside the circle this mind turns on, and joined to it by a multitude of fibers...

No, all the physical rendings, all the diminuations of physical activity and this vexation at feeling dependent on one's body, and this body itself weighed down with marble and resting on a poor support, do not equal the anguish which comes from being deprived of physical knowledge and the sense of one's own interior balance. When the soul lacks a language or language a mind, and the rupture ploughs a vast furrow of despair and blood in the sensory field, this is the greatest pain; for it subverts not only the bark or the skeleton, but the very STUFF of the body. In losing this erratic spark which one felt WAS, there is this abyss consuming the entire field of the possible universe, and this feeling of uselessness that is like the knot of death. This uselessness is like the moral tone of this abyss and of its intense stupifaction, and the physical color of it is the taste of blood spurting in cascades from the orifices of the skull.

There is no use telling me this cutthroat is inside me: I am part of life, I represent the destiny that elects me, and it is impossible that all eartly life would count me in with it at a given moment, for by its very nature it threatens the life-principle. There is a certain thing above all human activity: it is the example of this monotonous crucifixion, this crucifixion wherein the soul is forever being lost.

The cord which connects my intelligence, which preoccupies me, with the unconscious, which feeds me, reveals me more and more subtle fibers at the heart of its tree-like tissue. And it is a new life being born, a life which is more and more profound, eloquent, deep rooted.

Nothing precise can ever be reported by this soul which is strangling itself, for the torment which kills it, flays it fiber by fiber, takes place below the mind's threshold, below the threshold of what language can say; since the very connection (of what constitutes this soul and keeps it mentally together) is getting torn open little by little as life calls it toward unbroken lucidity. And there will never be lucidity concerning this passion, this kind of cyclical and fundamental martyrdom. And yet it does live, but its duration is here and there eclipsed, the fleeting keeps mingling with the fixed, and the chaos with this incisive language of a lucidity without duration. This curse could be highly instructive for the depths it fills, but this world will never learn.

The emotion brought about by the blooming of a form, the adaptation of my bodily fluids to the virtuality of a discourse at all is a state much more precious to me than the gratification of my activity.

It is the touchstone of certain spiritual lies.

This sort of backward step the mind takes when consciousness stares it in the face, to search for the emotion of being alive. That emotion, situated outside the particular spot where the mind looked for it, and emerging with its density rich in forms and densely flowing; that emotion which gives the overwhelming sound of matter to the spirit, the entire soul passing into its ardent fire. But what delights the soul even more than fire is the limpidity, the facility, the natural and glacial candor of this too fresh matter which breathes both hot and cold.

He is the one who knows what the appearance of this matter signifies and what underground massacre was the price of its unfolding. This material is the standard of a nothingness, which does not know itself.

When I think of myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a new dimension. I am on the moon as others are sitting at their balcony. I am part of the gravitation of the planets in the fissures of my mind.

Life will perpetuate itself, events will go on happening, spiritual conflicts will be resolved, and I will play no part in them. I have nothing to hope for on either side, moral or physical. For me there is perpetual sorrow and shadow, the night of the soul, and I have no voice to cry out.

Cast your riches far from this numb body, for it is insensible to the seasons of the spirit or the flesh.

I have chosen the domain of sorrow and shadow as others have chosen that of the glow and the accumulation of things. I do not labor within the scope of my domain. My only labor is eternity itself.