Antonin Artaud Quotes

Written poetry is worth reading once, and then should be destroyed. Let the dead poets make way for others. Those who live, live off the dead. It is almost impossible to be a doctor and an honest man, but it is obscenely impossible to be a psychiatrist without at the same time bearing the stamp of the most incontestable madness: that of being unable to resist that old atavistic reflex of the mass of humanity, which makes any man of science who is absorbed by this mass a kind of natural and inborn enemy of all genius. But how is one to make a scientist understand that there is something unalterably deranged about differential calculus, quantum theory, or the obscene and so inanely liturgical ordeals of the precession of the equinoxes. And war is wonderful, isn't it? For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been preparing for and are preparing for this way step by step. In order to defend this senseless manufacture from all competition that could not fail to arise on all sides. I prefer the people who eat off the bare earth the delirium from which they were born. 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. I now feel capable of evaluating the evidence. There is for me an evidence in the realm of pure flesh which has nothing to do with the evidence of reason. The eternal conflict between reason and the heart is decided in my very flesh, but in my flesh irrigated by nerves... So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastiness. [defines a madman as] a man who preferred to become mad,in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. Theater of Cruelty means a theater difficult and cruel for myself first of all. And, on the level of performance, it is not the cruelty we can exercise upon each other by hacking at each other's bodies, carving up our personal anatomies, or, like Assyrian emperors, sending parcels of human ears, noses, or neatly detached nostrils through the mail, but the much more terrible and necessary cruelty which things can exercise against us. We are not free. And the sky can still fall on our heads. And the theater has been cr The actor is merely a crude empiricist, a practitioner guided by vague instinct. A real theatrical experience shakes the calm of the senses, liberates the compressed unconscious and drives towards a kind of potential revolt . . . If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself, but to put myself back together again. Suicide will be for me only one means of violently reconquering myself, of brutally invading my being, of anticipating the unpredictable approaches of God. By suicide, I reintroduce my design in nature, I shall for the first time give things the shape of my will. Poetry is a dissociating and anarchic force which through analogy, associations and imagery, thrives on the destruction of known relationships. If I commit suicide, it will not be to destroy myself but to put myself back together again. This is why true beauty never strikes us directly. The setting sun is beautiful because of all it makes us lose. And what is an authentic madman? It is a man who preferred to become mad, in the socially accepted sense of the word, rather than forfeit a certain superior idea of human honor. So society has strangled in its asylums all those it wanted to get rid of or protect itself from, because they refused to become its accomplices in certain great nastinesses. For a madman is also a man whom society did not want to hear and whom it wanted to prevent from uttering certain intolerable truths. I myself am an absolute abyss. In consciousness dwells the wondrous, with it man attains the realm beyond the material, and the Peyote tells us, where to find it. I know each conversation with a psychiatrist in the morning made me want to hang myself because I knew I could not strangle him. We have the right to lie, but not about the heart of the matter. We do not die because we have to die; we die because one day, and not so long ago, our consciousness was forced to deem it necessary. Actors are athletes of the heart. Cruelty signifies rigor, implacable intention and decision, irreversible and absolute determination, The idea of a detached art, of poetry as a charm which exists only to distract our leisure, is a decadent idea and an unmistakable symptom of our power to castrate. And if there is still one hellish, truly accursed thing in our time, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like victims burnt at the stake, signaling through the flames. We must wash literature off ourselves. We want to be men above all, to be human. I have need of angels. Enough hell has swallowed me for too many years. But finally understand this--I have burned up one hundred thousand human lives already, from the strength of my pain. The actor is an athlete of the heart. The true theater, because it moves and makes use of living instruments, continues to stir up shadows where life has never ceased to grope its way.