Artaud Sitemap

January 13, 2003

Ego, Blood and Spirit

Table of Contents

Metaphors / Daddy / Cut / The Thin People / I Am Vertical / Bee Poems / November Graveyard / Mirror / Apprehensions / Eyemote / Guestbook / Lady Lazarus /In Plaster / Mirror / Black Rook in Rainy Weather / Mary's Song / Getting There / Ariel / Fever 103 / Elm / The Moon and the Yew Tree / The Bee Keeper's Daughter / Firesong //Sheep in Fog/ Lorelei / Stings / The Bee Meeting / Burning the Letters / Words/Balloons/The Queen's Complaint/Moonrise/Sonnet to Satan/Thalidomide/ Maenad/Edge/ Last Words/All the Dead Dears /The Death of Myth Making/

Emerson: The Oversoul

Emerson: The Poet

The Antonin Artaud

Ego, Blood and Spirit

Site Map

The following is a post script to Antonin Artaud's Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society (see Artaud Anthology edited by Jack Hirschman. City Light Books San Francisco.1965. Page 139.)(translated by Mary Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti):

"Van Gogh did not die of a condition of delirium proper

but of having bodily become the field of a problem

that the iniquitous spirit of mankind has debated since the

beginning of time,the predominance of flesh over spirit, or body

over flesh or the mind over one or the other.

And where in this delirious thinking is there room for the human ego?"

"Van Gogh searched for his (ego) during his entire lifetime, and with a strange energy and determination.

And he did not commit suicide in a fit of insanity, in terror of not succeeding;

on the contrary, he had just succeeded and had just discovered what he was and who he was, when the collective consciousness of society punished him for tearing himself away from it, and suicided him."

	"And it happened to Van Gogh as it usually happens, during an orgy, a mass, an absolution or any other rite of consecration, possession, succubation or incubation.	Antonin Artaud
	So it introduced itself into his body,

"And it happened to Van Gogh as it usually happens, during an orgy, a mass, an absolution or any other rite of consecration, possession, succubation or incubation.

Antonin Artaud

So it introduced itself into his body,

this society

absolved

consecrated

sanctified

and possessed of the devil"

"effaced the supernatural consciousness he had just acquired,
and like a flood of black crows in the fibers of his internal tree,

"effaced the supernatural consciousness he had just acquired,

and like a flood of black crows in the fibers of his internal tree,

submerged him in a last swell
and, taking his place,

killed him."

For it is the anatomical logic of modern man to never have been able to live nor think of living except as one possessed."

-Antonin Artaud.Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society (see Artaud Anthology edited by Jack Hirschman. City Light Books San Francisco.1965. Page 139.)(translated by Mary Beach and Lawrence Ferlinghetti)