The Theatre of Cruelty forces the audience to see what it is eating, what it is, what it makes and embodies and becomes. By cruelty, I do not mean to cause pain as the Grand Irrealist, de Sade, did, but to use that kind of cold, clear violence to shatter each and every pasteboard mask of Text and Language and Meaning. To tell a story in the realm of the spirit, and make even the groundlings gasp along.
We do not use a fourth wall at the Jarry Theatre. The audience is the fourth wall. The players could be any of them, but for the simplest of Sophoklean symbols and devices: A whip, a pram, a large blue egg. The new “strobe-lights” the American Eastman has made for darkroom photography are used upon my stage at the Jarry. All this, and more.
It is raw catharsis I seek from the audience, raw pity, raw fear that make raw ekstasis when the two chemicals combine in the sweat, the tears. You mock me, and hold onto illusions, but you drove your own nails. God demands you have done with your own judgment. Even He cannot compare with your pallid ideological mask.
Our true home, the next world, the Middle World, depends on no variable we understand. Our consciousness must break its jaw to begin to get it down.
It is above hunger, sex, agony, exaltation. It comes in the form of a different hunger, not for ideas, but for Realities. Alfred Jarry knew that. He poked just as much fun at Science as the expatriate American Charles Fort does now! Jarry said that laughter happens when you comprehend an apparent contradiction...
Like war, or half the things we think we know, or our social training. The Theatre can free us from that, shock us hard enough to remember that we’re people. But it can’t be done by employing the old means.
~*~
Roger and me, we went our own way when we opened the Jarry, though we knew no true Surrealist ever joins any organization that calls itself one. Many of the old gang sneer at us now, while they gobble up American dollars.
Yet . . . somehow, Journal, people are coming to our plays. The best minds of Europe come to our plays, and while they sneer at the ‘wretched’ Boris Yvain busts in every alcove (his statues all look like they could talk, or scream) they leave and write about the plays we run here.
We are being discussed, as a kind of proving ground. Not théâtre réfusé, as the critics in the Journal Paris slapped it with their broad wet brush . . . But Théâtre de la Cruâté, as I feel it should be known.
In between all that comes the perfume of roses and tobacco, the rustle of fans, the touch of rounded arms and the laughter. And the wine. Like when I first came to Paris, and worked all the time alongside those ivy-covered old men. Like when the world still moved in a straight line, and anything was still possible.
~*~
All pathos is cruelty. All Tragedy is cruel. The eagle eats Prometheus’ liver. Antigone is shut up in a stone tomb. Yet no one makes full use of this catharsis. Until us. The hand of Notice has struck the hour. Our hour.
But this newest play, oh this great thing... It is the thread which has run through Western civilization itself, an Exquisite Corpse made of many different parts of volumes, redacted and edited and redacted again.
It takes multifaceted eyes to read it, a fly’s eyes. I have taken the mushrooms that Gide brought me back from Mexico and done this thing, with my “Girl Friday” flitting about wondering if I should lose my senses and act the wild ape.
But when I sat before the mirror and began to arrange this work, as a composer might arrange an older score, when I looked at my own face I was young again, a devil, a rakehell, head thrown up and long arms outstretched in a gesture of power and pride.
My eyes blazed fiercely when I read, that day. The tragedy was conventional enough, but what I finally puzzled out between the lines was something I could use.
I saw the hidden picture in the play. I saw the theatre’s double. I saw the Yellow Sign.
They still think me mad, and I am. Mad to explore the hidden relations of Power, the true alchemic knowledge of the Earth, the groaning gulfs in Science that Fort and Crowley and the lot of them skewer in print.
He who laughs last laughs longest in the madhouse. The Imperial Dynasty of America needs a brake, a budge, a lance to pierce the bloat, to dilate the Void inside, the dead parts of the Void, and trumpet the fart of Art that blows the whole museum apart, explodes the prison of cross and box and angle that binds all Mind. Mind is the thing which I am, and it is I, and it wants to GET OUT.
~*~
These days, a witch-hunt means not that one should be roasted at the stake, but roasted instead by electric shocks and chemicals. All my life, I have been locked away for speaking my mind, and living it. My parents could not cure me, nor the doctors, so they kept locking me away.
From the old disease, the baby-disease that could not be cured, they gave me a worse one: Laudanum, that stopped my headaches and the way my face twisted out of countenance, stopped the screams and the sleepwalking, but left me with itself, embalmed with that which will kill me in the end.
From smaller institutions, I graduated to the Army, a very large one. The Army let me back out.
I ran to the footlights, to Paris. But I did not understand myself to be cured. I was never sick. I never wanted to kill myself, but every time I ever visited the ward psychiatrist, I wanted to hang myself because I needed to cut his throat and they wouldn’t let me.
Those avenues are of no use now (the “real world” Papa made so much of when he used his mouth and not his belt to speak.)
I cannot tell anyone that Carcosa really has started to take notice of Paris again, that the saber-rattling armies of the world shall themselves rise and tremble before the Pallid Mask. It will be my last jape, my last experiment, my last big leap, to send Him away myself. The native son of Hastur’s nighted city shall come in the New Dawn, and the stars of Earth shall turn black. And it is the Surrealists who render Him irrelevant.
~*~
I can travel there, when I draw the Yellow Sign and meditate within it, using a variation of Crowley’s Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram. I am...
~*~
I blink, and I am back in Carcosa, in a single room that takes up most of the top rung in a shaky roof-warren. The hookah stirs the mosquito-nets and the sails of the street-cars squitch sideways between mossy buildings far below, like ghosts in the yellow mist.
The King’s tatters cannot reach me here. Yet. I sharpen the pencil with my teeth and find the first word. The silver light grows strange.
Below me, in the streets, the fog swirls with colors unseen on Earth. Pasty-faced babies wearing the larval clay of the Pallid Mask, grown from the sperm samples of children during the last War, squitter and yap in elaborate carriages.
Their Nurses, too, wear waxen, pasty masks, and pay more attention to the THUD THUD THUD of the Carrionmen pounding their shields as they march by in the street in slow lock step. Their own Masks are smiling, and made of beaten gold, but the faces behind the false faces pulse warm and white and hot-gangrenous-sick as the boiling bodies of maggots, changing... Changing. Into what, I never want to know.
Out in the flat field beyond the square, a circle of six crosses is sunk deep in the foul, drooling embrace of the sick, singing soil. The sun passes over the heart of the omphalos and illuminates it. One man stands at each Station of the Sun, and the Seventh is a slaughtered horse who leads a hollow man to the center of the circle, to the wild wail of a trumpet and the beat of a long drum.
The men walk in slow lockstep around the horse, and its naked zombi-rider. The crosses burn to ash, but the angles are not extinguished. The spell has only sunken into the land.
I have ensconced the Prince’s armor in the prop room at the Jarry Theatre, and there is a ring in the helmet that bears the Yellow Sign. We will be spared by the holocaust that is to come, when the King lets loose the waters of Lake Hali onto the Earth, and turns every living thing to marble but the ones his Rapture wishes to spare.
We will be spared anyway. Me and everyone I can round up into the Jarry. T
hey will listen. When the sky opens, they will listen, and not be left behind.
Listen...
~*~
B-ROLL:
ACT 2, SCENE 3
THE PHANTOM OF THE PAST
(folio page is missing)
CASSILDA
Midnight sounds from those misty spires of Home,
My street, Street of the Four Winds. Fog rolls
against my windows, down from the clouds
That roll and break upon the shores of Lake Hali,
Far above us, so deep it goes all the way,
To the distant sky-kingdom of Terra,
Which the new people who come here from there
call Earth.
It is thamaturges, mostly,
which come to Carcosa, men
With big impressive names,
and withered limbs, and squints,
who go about on canes,
and continually exclaim
at everything they see.
Once in a while, a woman comes.
One such told me that a new land
on Earth has been found, which
the Travellers say shall be called
the Imperial Dynasty
of America.
I dream this Imperium, mighty as a river,
in my sleep, its towers taller than the tallest
Temple of the Conqueror Worm which mad
King Hastur caused to be built ,
in the last days, when we
Were small, when everything was smoke
and blood and lightning, every man,
woman and child for themselves.
Or so Mother, and Nanna, told me.
Nanna, Mother’s Mother, didn’t believe
in dreams. Nanna believed in what
she could see. I believed in something I
could see very few places, though,
Love. No love in the surly little lout Josephus
I was supposed to marry, to mix the poison blood
of Hastur, with our own. I swore I would renege,
Come what may.
~*~
ON A HILL, ADOLESCENT JOSEPHUS GUARDS FLOCK OF SHEEP BY NIGHT. JOSEPHUS POKES AT A SMALL FIRE WITH A STICK, OUTSIDE TENT, DRAWING SIGILS IN THE CHARCOAL.
JOSEPHUS
Goaded by my blind, hateful mother Venissia,
Father’s blood sacrifice, I’m told, was most
Of his Parliament, and the royal family.
Even in the spring sunshine, words drop
Like poison, as death-bed sweat
Absorbs into a sheet, yellows,
Spreads. ‘Lord Hastur, we cry your mercy!’
the song goes in our new refugee kingdom,
And the King rumbles back, ‘None of you matter.’
Goaded by my own rightful ambition,
I keep loathsome Ubu’s sheep upon
this hill, sleep here, eat here, bathe
in this foetid river, where
the changing expression
of my own eyes makes
A face like mine, but whiter,
So thin I barely recognize.
Diamonds flame above my brow.
Oh Thou, who burn’st in heart
for those who burn In Hell,
whose fires thyself shall feed
in turn; How long be crying,
‘Mercy on them, God!’
Why, who art thou to teach
and me to learn?
Let the red dawn surmise what we shall do,
When this blue starlight dies,
and All is through.
~*~
A-ROLL:
I read the news yesterday. I’m not sure how much of it can be trusted, or what percentage of actual news is contained between the words, the lines, all the words that say so many things at once the message gets lost between them, eaten and shit out and eaten again, down the social ladder until the news and the things that consume the news only hold the barest semblance of the Devonian slime, not even human at all.
America does not need better conditions for its everyday people. It needs to change its people to adapt to squalid, post-human conditions. America seeks to mass-produce interchangeable workers who can perform any menial task without complaint, the ultimate Product.
The new people can drive the global marketplace through various wars and exchanges of titular power, and as the surplus are cut down, so do a more malleable and less individual strain grow up in their place.
All of these we must keep busy, and invent new intrigues to further crenellate the ant-farm, make the ants run after illusory objects they think they need, objects made in the laboratory very cheaply, which in turn make them sicken and die and hasten along the purging of intellect, the draining of the divine vital essence into the endlessly-replicating machine virus.
The plants will be last to go, when every chemical in them is synthesized. The new people will breathe the new atmosphere as the old growth dies and becomes fuel. For this, the Imperial Dynasty of America has been preparing since the Great War, building the wall higher, wider.
There’s a Red under every bed, or some subhuman mongrel race that wants to eat our women and shit in our radio sets. Men once fought with their fists, swords, pistols at ten paces. Then the twin republics of America and France outlawed dueling and forced the guns to get larger, the distances to grow, the level of thought necessary to end a life to shrink, smaller, smaller, until men can be extinguished by God’s own microbes with the push of a button. Not me, my very dear Journal. Oh, not me!
All Life is suffering that eats other Life. I cast my lot with the Tarahumara, who swallow the sun in the peyote button until the black night falls on the Days of Man and we must build our own Eighth Day in the darkness after Armageddon.
I cast my lot with the wild naked native who lives without angles or boxes or gravity. I whoop and dance with them as Night falls. I want Night to stay.
A true gastronome is as insensible to suffering as a conqueror, the English say. The Aztecs understood that a conqueror cannot be swayed by suffering. Cruelty was a virtue, in some instances, according to them, the Medici, the Bonaparte....
Cruelty means cleansing blood with blood, violence with violence, every time the Beast shows itself in human nature. We are the gods our ancestors worshipped, the principle within them and us. Now we wield the smallest part of God. The thunderbolt.
Now God is obsolete, for He created a thing uglier than Him, that nailed Him through the heart, embalmed Him, strangled His breath with illusions, but could never scrape out that one boson of Him which is Us.
~*~
The Mind-thing feels Body suffering most acutely, never diminishing, as the external stimuli of the world crowd in and demand, demand, demand until I can’t breathe any more, breathe out any more, give them one more gasp of my air. I drown in myself... and then fart like a donkey, and laugh at my new, revolted kind of suffocation.
~*~
I must watch my health. The headaches come more often. I try to only take my medicine in the evening-time, and never more than half a grain. Only morphine from the chemist’s, never l’heroine that stirs my blood to such flights of fancy but no, NO. Must treat the illness. Must not make the fog come back in my eyes, the way Mother said it used to when I was small.
~*~
The way my assistant says they do now. “Filmy, and white,” young Edith Gassion chirrups at me like a hungry little Piaf-bird scolding the human who walks too near their dinner, “Like you keep slipping away, Mon Oncle.”
The girl is no relation. I hired her out of the gutter. She can type. She is fourteen, a wild alley-cat of the devil. We get along fine. Except about my medicine.
Ah oui, my little jazz-baby in her cloche hat has nearly given me more heart attacks than the heroin. But she brings coffee when I’m working, and doesn’t take half the blessed day about it. And I believe in my heart Edith must be some form of angel, for when she sings in the empty theatre while I write, my hea
dache leaves as I listen.
~*~
Edith sang last night for me, while she corrected my typescript in that long, low, empty barn where Realism finally came to be butchered like a hog. She’d given me a hard time about some money to go see a show that night, or some such thing, over breakfast, so of course she was singing that old Communard chestnut “L’Internationale.” Encore une fois, little sparrow. Oppressed urchins of the world, unite. She even made Commie songs sound beautiful.
~*~
I listened to Edith sing, and remembered that strange little shop in the Rue d’Auseil (far below the garrett on the hill from whence they dragged the mad violinist when I was a boy, it was said, his blind, bug-eyed face savaged by the suck marks of some gigantic insect.)What was that shop called... It’s not there any more, they moved or something. CARO, JEUNET ET FILS. That was it. RARE BOOKS.
~*~
The owners were not in. The boy minding the shop that day, who was called Camus or something, was a little haggard and hollow of eye. His gray suit was threadbare, his hands spindly and pale. He said Good Morning, then went back to rolling a great fruit-crate full of encyclopedias placed on a wheeled ladder, into another part of the shop.
I stayed in the front, weaving through the long, tall maze of shelves that bifurcated toward the plate-glass window looking out on the mismatched bricks in the Rue D’Auseil, the fitted flagstones of that part of the street beyond the walk.
It was Spring then, too, last spring, and the pollen made fires of histamine cause my nose to resemble a flaccid, inflamed cock. My eyes were blurring, and I could barely see one title. But I wished to rest.
There was a small armchair, toward the back of one row of shelves. An electric reading-lamp had been thoughtfully placed on an end-table beside it. The armchair itself looked as if some feral cat had attacked it every day for years.
A Season In Carcosa Page 10