April 10, 2017“There is in every madman a misunderstood genius whose idea, shining in his head, frightened people, and for whom delirium was the only solution to the strangulation that life had prepared for him.”
–Antonin Artaud
My first encounter, if one can call it that, with Antonin Artaud, was with a scene of a film entitled The Passion of Joan of Arc. Handsome and still, he looked at something the rest of the camera crew could not see…in his robe, in a black and white scene he commanded time to travel at his desired speed…and I, being eleven years old, understood, that some men, were beyond understanding in all their alluring glory.
Antonin Artaud was a French playwright, artist, and actor who was sent to sanatoriums for his eccentric mannerisms, severed from his loved ones for up to four years at a time. He was drafted into the army at age eighteen but his incessant sleepwalking episodes caused his dismissal. Back in the loony bins, his restless mind was quieted with laudanum by countless doctors, which eventually led to his burning love affair with any and all opiates. The Theater and Its Double, his most famous publication, achieved him notoriety, whilst already attracting much attention as actor, surrealist playwright, and being a figure of visionary in experimental theater. The curious concept of the “Theater of Cruelty” was introduced in his manifesto, advocating that drama should travel from concentrated literary form to one incorporating all the senses. Artaud believed sincerely that if you confronted your most vile desires, an unclenching would occur from the grasp of hypocrisy and awareness of the true unconsciousness self would emerge. This concept was quite challenging and was to be considered a penetrating vehicle of transition for established thought. Insomuch that artist and rock stars took their cue from it.
When he was not in the rubber rooms, he bummed the streets and frequented one room after another in cheap hotels. He was running fast then faster from his own demons of madness and slowly but surely was becoming undone, largely due to the side effects of the drugs he consumed. Other writers, playwrights, and theater companies reached out for help to no avail. His lips had darkened from the deadly kiss of laudanum. Artaud began performing dramatic variations of his death only to be booed and laughed off stage.
Antonin began to submerge himself in the desire to sink deeper into his own theories concerning the depths of his psyche that he ended up in Mexico putting himself into peyote parties. Mad outbursts during lectures about himself obeying orders from Jesus Christ got his ass chained up and transported back to his home country. He then did five years of sheer terror in an insane asylum being subjected to electroshock therapy, in hopes of dispelling his obsession with witchcraft incantations. In the remaining five years of his life, he had become financially secure due to the sale of his manuscripts at auctions which afforded a slightly better life in a halfway house–which were written while he was boxed in. This time summoned praise for his previously unrecognized genius, and he then began with the opiates again. In the ultimate irony, he ended up in the heaven he so yearned for, days of constant opiates for they had to administer morphine as much as was needed to appease his dire pain due to colon cancer. This is where I should make a stab at how, until the end of his days, was an insufferable pain in the ass, but…I won’t. He was forty-two when he passed in the year of 1948.
Now, a man, I still hold back the tears when I see the dark priest with more passion than this Joan of Arc. I wonder…what did you see, Antonin? Whatever it was, it must have broken you. Broken men are attracted to that which breaks, in hopes to understand themselves better. As if ever, could they be put back together again.
You tried and you succeeded. And while you tried, fools thought you failed. Let me see that which transcends me elsewhere, even if it breaks me. With the strength of a hundred lightning bolts and the courage of a dozen dragons, let me appear the failure while I surrender to success.
Farewell, Opium eater and thanks for your cosmic confessions.
Hail Artaud!
∞
