Antonin Artaud

MANIFESTO IN A CLEAR LANGUAGE


If I believe neither in Evil nor in Good, if I feel such a strong inclination to destroy, if there is nothing in the order of principles to which I can reasonably accede, the underlying reason is in my flesh.
I destroy because for me everything that proceeds from reason is untrustworthy. I believe only in the evidence of what stirs my marrow, not in the evidence of what addresses itself to my reason. I have found levels in the realm of the nerve.more.....

Antonin Artaud | UbuWeb Sound
Artaud biography rages around Paris Artaud biography, by Moe Spencer

from The Nerve Meter, Diary from Hell, and Situation of the Flesh at The Spirit and Flesh Sacred Texts Online Library

"I have aspired no further than the clockwork of the soul, I have transcribed only the pain of an abortive adjustment.

I am a total abyss. Those who believe me capable of a whole pain, a beautiful pain, a dense and fleshy anguish, an anguish which is a mixture of objects, an effervescent grinding of forces rather than a suspended point.

-and yet with restless, uprooting impulses which come from the confrontation of my forces with these abysses of offered finality ...

and there is nothing left but the voluminous abysses, the immobility, the cold-

in short, those who attributed to me more life, who thought me at an earlier stage in the fall of the self, who believed me immersed in a tormented noise, in a violent darkness with which I struggled

-are lost in the shadows of a man. ...