I am keeping your poem. Send me everything you do.
Believe, I beg you, in my warmest sentiments.
Jacques Rivière
ANTONIN ARTAUD TO JACQUES RIVIÈRE
Paris, May 7, 1924
Very dear sir,
To return to an argument which is already old, it is enough to imagine a moment that the impossibility of expressing myself applies to the most vital needs of my life, to my most urgent contingencies—and to the suffering which follows: Understand that it is not for lack of desperate eagerness that I renounce myself. I am available to poetry. It is only because of chance external circumstances that I do not realize myself. It is enough for me that people believe I have possibilities of crystallizations of things in me, in forms and with the necessary words.
I had to wait all this time to be in a position to send you this slender note which is clear for want of being well written. You may draw from it the obvious conclusions.
One thing in your letter remains a little obscure to me: that is the use to which you intend to put the poem I sent you. You put your finger on an aspect of myself: Literature as such interests me only a very little, but if by chance you decided to publish it, send me the proofs, I beg of you; it is very important for me to change two or three words.
All my good thoughts.
Antonin Artaud
JACQUES RIVIÈRE TO ANTONIN ARTAUD
May 24, 1924
Dear Sir,
An idea has come to me which I resisted for a while, but which decidedly attracts me. Think it over in turn. I hope it pleases you. It must in any case be worked out in detail.
Why shouldn’t we publish the letters you have written me? I have just reread again that of January 29 which is utterly remarkable.
There would be only a little effort of transposition to make. I mean that we would give fictitious names to the signer and the addressee. Perhaps I could write a reply along the lines of the one I sent you, but more developed and less personal. Perhaps also we could introduce a fragment of your poems or of your essay on Uccello? The whole would form a little epistolary novel that would be most curious.
Give me your opinion, and meanwhile believe me sincerely yours.
Jacques Rivière
ANTONIN ARTAUD TO JACQUES RIVIÈRE
May 25, 1924
Dear Sir,
Why lie, why seek to place on the literary level a thing which is the very cry of life, why give the appearances of fiction to what is made of the ineradicable substance of the soul, which is like the plaint of reality? Yes, your idea pleases me, it delights me, it overwhelms me, but on condition that we give to whoever reads the book the impression that it isn’t a fabricated work. We have the right to lie, but not about the essence of ourselves. I don’t insist on signing the letters with my name. But it is absolutely vital that the reader think he has the elements of a lived story in hand. It would be necessary to publish my letters from the first to the last and for that to go back to the month of June 1923. The reader must have all the elements of the debate at his disposal.
A man possesses himself in fitful flashes, and even when he possesses himself, he doesn’t completely attain himself. He does not realize that constant cohesion of his forces without which any true creation is impossible. Yet that man exists. I mean that he has a distinct reality which enhances him. Do we mean to condemn him to nothingness on the pretext that he can give only fragments of himself? You yourself do not think so and the proof of this is the importance you attach to these fragments. For a long time I have had the intention of proposing collecting them to you. This, to tell you with what satisfaction I welcome the idea you propose to me.
I am perfectly aware of the halts and jolts in my poems, jolts which touch the very essence of my inspiration and which stem from my indelible powerlessness to concentrate on an object. Through physiological weakness, a weakness which touches the very substance of what is commonly called the soul and which is the emanation of our nervous force coagulated around objects. But the whole era suffers from this weakness. Examples: Tristan Tzara, André Breton, Pierre Reverdy. But their soul is not physiologically stricken, not substantially; it is not wounded at all the points where it joins something else, it is not outside of thought; then whence comes this sickness, is it really the air of the times, a miracle floating in the air, a cosmic and evil prodigy, or the discovery of a new world, a real broadening of reality? It is nonetheless true that they do not suffer, and that I do suffer, not only in my mind but in my flesh and in my everyday soul. That want of application to the object which characterizes all literature is in me a want of application to life. I can truly say that I am not in the world, and this is not a mere pose of the mind. My last poems seem to me to show definite progress. Are they really unpublishable as a whole? But no matter, I prefer to show myself as I am, in my nonexistence and my rootlessness. One could in any case publish long extracts from them. I believe that most of the stanzas taken as units are good. You yourself will choose these fragments, you will arrange the letters. Here I am no longer a judge. But what I chiefly insist on is that an ambiguity not be introduced concerning the nature of the phenomena which I cite for my defense. The reader must believe in a real sickness which touches the essence of the being and its central possibilities of expression, and which applies to a whole life.
I believe I have said enough to be understood; publish this last letter. I realize as I end it that it can serve as a summing-up and conclusion of the debate for the part which concerns me.
Believe, dear sir, in my feelings of great and affectionate gratitude.
Antonin Artaud
ANTONIN ARTAUD TO JACQUES RIVIÈRE
June 6, 1924
Dear Sir,
[…]
My whole mental life is traversed by petty doubts and peremptory certainties which express themselves in lucid and coherent words. And my weaknesses are of a more tremulous structure, they are themselves immature and badly formulated. They are living roots, roots of anguish which touch the heart of my life; but they do not have the disarray of life, one does not sense the cosmic breath of a soul shaken to its foundations. They are from a mind which has not thought out its weakness; otherwise, it would have translated it into dense and active words. And there, sir, is the whole problem—to have the inseparable reality in oneself, and the material clarity of a feeling, to have it said to a point where it is impossible for it not to express itself, to have a wealth of words, of schooled turns of phrase, which could join in, serve the game; and then, at the moment the soul begins to organize its riches, its discoveries, that revelation; in that unconscious minute when the thing is on the point of emanating, a superior and ill will attacks the soul like vitriol, attacks the mass of word-and-image, attacks the mass of feeling, and leaves me gasping at the very threshold of life.
And this will, now—suppose I feel its passing physically, that it shakes me with sudden unforeseen electricity, a repeated electricity. Suppose that each of my instants of thinking is on certain days shaken by these profound tornadoes whose existence cannot be suspected from the outside. And tell me whether any literary work at all is compatible with such states. What brain could hold up under them? What personality would not disintegrate? If only I had the force, I would sometimes treat myself to the luxury of mentally submitting some famous mind, some old or young writer who produces, and whose nascent thought is accepted as authority, to the maceration of so urgent a suffering, in order to see what would be left of him. One must not be in a hurry to judge men, one must give them the benefit of a doubt to the point of absurdity, to the dregs. These hazarded works which often seem to you the product of a mind not yet in possession of itself, which will perhaps never possess itself—who knows what brain they conceal, what power of life, what thinking fever which circumstances alone have reduced. Enough of me and my unborn works, I ask nothing more than to feel my intellect.
Antonin Artaud
JACQUES RIVIÈRE TO ANTONIN ARTAUD
Dear Sir,
Perhaps I substituted myself a little indiscreetly, with my ideas, my prejudices, for your suffering, your singularity. Perhaps I prattled where I should have understood and pitied. I wanted to reassure you, to cure you. That comes no doubt from the kind of rage with which I always react, for my part, toward life. In my struggle to live, I will admit defeat only with my last breath.
Your last letters, in which the word “soul” comes to replace several times the word “mind,” waken in me even graver, but more embarrassed, sympathy than the first ones. I feel, I touch a profound and private misery; I remain in suspense before illnesses which I can but glimpse. But perhaps this disconcerted attitude will bring you more aid and encouragement than my previous ratiocinations.
And yet! Have I no means of understanding your torments? You say “a man possesses himself only in fitful flashes, and even when he possesses himself, he does not completely attain himself.” This man is you; but I can see that it is also me. I know nothing resembling your “tornadoes,” nor that “ill will” which “attacks the soul from outside” and its powers of expression. But for all that it is in general, less painful, the sensation of my own inferiority I sometimes have is nonetheless clear.
Like you, I set aside the convenient symbol of inspiration so as to explain the alternatives through which I pass. It is a question of something more profound, more “substantial” if I may dare divert the word from its meaning, than a fortunate wind which might come to me, or not, from the depths of my mind; it is a question of stages through which I travel in my own reality. Not voluntarily, alas! but in a purely accidental way.
There is this that is remarkable: that the very fact of my existence, as you note in your case, is never for me the object of a serious doubt; something of myself always remains for me, but more often than not it is something poor, awkward, infirm and almost suspect. At these moments I do not lose every idea of my complete reality; but sometimes every hope of ever reconquering it. It is like a roof over me which might stay in the air by a miracle, and which I could see no means of reconstructing myself.
My feelings, my ideas—the same ones as usual—succeed each other with a slight air of fantasy; they are so weakened, so hypothetical that they seem to belong to pure philosophical speculation, they are still there, nevertheless, but they look at me as though to make me admire their absence.
Proust has described the “intermittences of the heart”; someone ought to describe the intermittences of the being.
Obviously there are, for these disappearances of the soul, physiological causes which are often easy enough to determine. You speak of the soul as “the coagulation of our nervous force”; you say that it can be “physiologically stricken.” I think like you that it is deeply dependent on our nervous system. Yet its crises are so capricious that at certain moments I understand that one might be tempted to look, as you do, for a mystical explanation of the “ill will” from outside which tries relentlessly to diminish it.
In any case it is a fact, I believe, that a whole category of men is subject to oscillation of their level of being. How many times, placing ourselves mechanically in a familiar psychological attitude, have we discovered that it went beyond us, or rather that we had surreptitiously become insufficient to it! How many times has our usual character suddenly seemed artificial to us, and even fictitious, through the absence of spiritual or “essential” resources which were to nourish it!
Where does our being go, and from whence does it return, that all psychology down to our time has pretended to consider it as a constant? It is a practically insoluble problem, unless one has recourse to a religious dogma, like that of Grace, for example. I admire our age for daring to ask it (I am thinking of Proust and Pirandello, in whom it is implicit) and still leaving in the question mark, restricting itself to anguish.
“A soul physiologically stricken.” It is a terrible heritage. Yet I believe that in a certain way, that of penetration, it can also be a privilege. It is also the only means we have in us of understanding ourselves a little, of seeing ourselves at any rate. He who does not know depression, who has never felt his soul broken into by the body, invaded by his weakness, is incapable of perceiving any truth about man; one must go down, see what lies behind; one must be no longer able to move, nor hope, nor believe, in order to realize its truth. How shall we distinguish our intellectual or moral mechanisms, if we are not temporarily deprived of them? It must be the consolation of those who in this way test this slow death that they are the only ones to know a little what life is made of.
And then the “maceration of so urgent a suffering” prevents the ridiculous cloud of vanity from rising up in them. You wrote me: “I have to cure myself of the judgment of others, all the distance which separates me from myself.” Such is the utility of that “distance”: It “cures one of the judgment of others”; it prevents us from doing anything to attract it, to accommodate ourselves to it; it conserves us pure and despite the variations of our reality, it assures us a superior degree of identity for ourselves.
Naturally, health is the only admissible ideal, the only one to which my conception of a man has a right to aspire; but when it is given all at once in a being, it hides half the world from him.
I have let myself go on again, in spite of myself, in comforting you, trying to show you how much, even in the matter of existence, the “normal state” may be precarious. I wish with all my heart that the stages I have been describing may be accessible to you, as much in the ascending direction as in the other. A moment of plenitude, of being equal to yourself—why, after all, should it be forbidden you, if you already have this courage to desire it. There is absolute peril only for him who lets himself go; there is total death only for him who develops a taste for dying.
I beg you to believe in my absolute sympathy.
Jacques Rivière
Correspondence with Jacques Rivière (1886–1925), May 1, 1923–March 22, 1924; with the poem “Cry.” Art and Literature 6 (Autumn 1965).
HENRI MICHAUX
(1899–1984)
INTRODUCTION TO AN EXHIBITION CATALOGUE
Is a statement really necessary? Isn’t it obvious that I paint so as to leave words behind, to put an end to the irritating question of how and why? Could it really be that I draw because I see so clearly this thing or that thing? Not at all. Quite the contrary. I do it to be perplexed again. And I am delighted if there are traps. I look for surprises. To know always would bore me. It would upset me. Must I at least be aware of what’s been going on? Not even. Others will see it in another way and will perhaps be better placed to do so. Do I have a purpose? It doesn’t matter. It is not what I want which must happen to me, but what tries to happen in spite of me … and happens incompletely, which is not serious. Once the work were finished I should be afraid that it might finish me too and bury me. Watch out for that. I try to rouse that which is not absolutely static within me and which may thus (who knows?) break out suddenly, a suddenly new and living movement. It is this movement which I insist must take place, this improvised, spontaneous movement. I should like to paint the inner ferment, not just paint with it or thanks to it. Why always be in such a hurry to make use of it then to have done with it? Why so much haste to be done with this agitation, with this sprouting forth? Remain rather in their afflux. Prefer their irruption to everything else. Irruption and Inundation … that is what appealed to me, I think, in watercolor. Water, too much water, floods of water will deceive, will upset the object of my attention (if I have one), drown it quickly, wake me up finally, force me, really force me to make sensational volte-faces. At this point it seems to me that I will have returned to the sources of myself, miraculously dissolving all the rigidity which has so dangerously installed itself within me.
* * *
Now about the blots. I have said too much already. I bet that’s what they are waiting for, the blots. Well, I hate them. I love the water, but them—no.
They disgust me. I am never rid of them until I have made them jump, run, climb, clamber down again. In themselves they are abhorrent to me and really only blots, which tell me nothing. (I have never been able to see anything at all in a “Rorschach Test.”) So I fight them, whip them, I should like to be done at once with their prostrate stupidity, galvanize them, bewilder them, exasperate them, ally them monstrously with everything that moves in the unnamable crowd of beings, of nonbeings with a rage for being, to everything, insatiable desires or knots of force, which are destined never to take form, here or elsewhere. With their troop I busy myself with curing the blots. The blots are a provocation. I meet it. Quickly. One must act quickly with those big limp ones which are apt to go wallowing everywhere. The crucial minute comes quickly. Quickly, before they extend their realm of abjectness and vomiting. Unbearable blots.
If I’m a tachiste, I’m one who can’t stand taches.1
* * *
Mescaline drawings. About these, yes, I ought to make a statement (again…). They do in fact happen differently. Strange, strange experience of mescaline, stranger than any drawing could be, even if it were to cover a whole wall with its pointed lines. When one first becomes conscious of internal images (and of external phenomena as well), it is only with a certain limited quantity of consciousness, a certain restricted speed of consciousnesses succeeding each other and making “contact.”
Mescaline multiplies, sharpens, accelerates, intensifies the inward moments of becoming conscious. You watch their extraordinary flood, mesmerized, uncomprehending. With your eyes shut, you are in the presence of an immense world. Nothing has prepared you for this. You don’t recognize it. Tremendously present, active, colored, swarming in tiny islands very close together with no empty space (the tiny islands are one of the surest signs of the second stage), teeming, vibrating but stationary, festering with ornaments, saturating the space which still remains immeasurable, which keeps coming to life in seethings, twistings, intertwinings, in unpreventable accumulations. You would swear that you are inside it, rather than the contrary—it is so big, so frightfully, magnificently, stellarly big,2 all-important, ungovernable, beyond your ability to act. One would swear that it is true, an autonomous world, extragalactic perhaps, attained miraculously, the reverse or rather the obverse of this one.
Collected French Translations: Prose Page 31