Artaud, My Grandfather, and Me

4 Generations Make Up A Family

After posting my last essay on The Body Without Organs, my grandfather forwarded me a book of poems he’d written in conversation with Artaud’s Cahiers de Rodez. I am forever awestruck of our overlapping academic interests, as no one in my family herded me towards Artaud. I discovered his work on my own, there was something in my DNA, growing up with my Grandparents, that led me to him. My grandfather wrote these poems in French, and my grandmother translated them to English. Seven years later, I offer my own thoughts and mediations on their work together, here.

The volume opens with my favorite Artaud quote - Je suis toujours Artaud. C’est de moi que tout vient. / I am always Artaud. It is from me that everything comes.

What else can any artist say for themselves? Our work forever sprung from the vessel of our own ideation, our own body, our own self. No work is ever created in a vacuum of pure lighting struck God seed. Think of Rilke locked in his tower, fevered up isolation, oozing the Sonnets to Orpheus from nothing but himself. This is a separate idea from the Artist as Isolated Genius. To be sure, the singularity rises up from collective life. Who would Artaud be, without a sickly childhood, eventual madness, many dead brothers and sisters? Time swirls around us, the future impossible without the past, the present a push and pull between now and then, and the past irrelevant if we discount our future and present selves.

The titles of the poems, in bold, are lines from Artaud’s notebooks. My grandfathers poems follow in italics, and I offer my thoughts following in plain text.

I know nothing

and I don’t wish to want to know

We haven’t been able to know all the countries from maps, guides or the atlas,

but we have experienced them in frescos and our endeavor.

The future will not be outdone.

It’s purity that lives in the air.

I evoke it—I mean—I would like to evoke

that purity that sleeps in the air.

But the winds go everywhere

and I cannot evoke more than an illusion of purity,

a song in which tenderness is sometimes akin to a taste for crime,

or grating despair. But the purity of writing one pure word

is always to undertake an honorable quest,

and one impossible to achieve

with an ordinary pen.

I need a pen come down from a consciousness way above

the limits of the everyday,

above this habitual world,

fresh as an unknown flower.

Once we have disturbed the mystery,

seeking sometimes to distort it,

to contain it,

something--maybe a drop of ink--comes between

the mind and the quest

possessing this purity in its hand.

I know nothing / and I don’t wish to want to know. Artaud’s primary concern was mysticism, how to bring to life the guttural nothingness of being.

My grandfather lays this concern out straight away: We haven’t been able to know all the countries from maps, guides or the atlas, / but we have experienced them in frescos and our endeavor. / The future will not be outdone./ It’s purity that lives in the air. / I evoke it—I mean—I would like to evoke / that purity that sleeps in the air.

Regardless of visiting every place in the world, experiencing what it’s like everywhere for everyone, we can access a pure feeling of human knowledge any time we look at an art work, or through the creation of work. The labor of creation gives to us a worldly relationship, one which is unfounded in any other way. Think of Jung’s universal subconscious, how every culture’s fairytales have the same moral parables. Or how work from different bodies in certain generations carries the same feeling. I’m sure you’ve had a moment at some point where another Artist produces a work, and you’re like, yes- wait- I was making that too.

It’s purity that lives in the air. / I evoke it — I mean, I would like to evoke. / That purity that sleeps in the air. What is behind the veil? That secret reality we are all trying to scrape open. A deep yearning for the simple truth of life, which sleeps in the air, nonplussed to announce itself to the rest of us, who are left writhing screaming crying throwing up in attempt to grasp it: But the winds go everywhere / and I cannot evoke more than an illusion of purity, / a song in which tenderness is sometimes akin to a taste for crime, / or grating despair. A song in which tenderness is sometimes akin to a taste for crime. Does it not feel like tenderness is out of fashion, that to be empathetic towards another human being, or nature, is not extended to anyone / anything separate from our own caste / needs / wants / desires.

To borrow a phrase from Deleuze and Guittari — il se rabat sur — it falls back on, meaning, not falling back into a void or well, but a crashing into, coming to a discordant head. Tenderness, il se rabat sur, a society of individuals - two separate streams pushed apart via bureaucracy, hierarchy, and capital. That sense of pure being that Artaud is grasping at calls for the opposite, a wrecking ball to the rebattement.

A unification of all and nature. But the purity of writing one pure word / is always to undertake an honorable quest, / and one impossible to achieve / with an ordinary pen. / I need a pen come down from a consciousness way above / the limits of the everyday, / above this habitual world, / fresh as an unknown flower.

Here we encounter a return to the idea of the mystical, that which we yearn to know and never will. Everyday existence shrouds the unknowable via the bodily distractions of eat, sleep, shit and the societal distractions of work, labor, socialize. We desire that God seed lightning strike, to bestow upon our consciousness the true way to be, in order to transmute this unknowable knowledge into our earthly lives, thus transmuting us to a higher consciousness, a more free existence. To be sure, this is impossible to achieve, we can only hope to inch closer, shedding the limits of the everyday, above this habitual world, fresh as an unknown flower.