Antonin Artaud

Moon

Bitter tasting tonight,
Jealous of some obscene tart,
Dark, cavernous, dirty with clouds
Floating between the moon and us.

Rancorous moon on the sea,
It was a cheerless moon,
Like a sick man's thoughts,
On the nature of the universe.

In the fabled dark
Where the moon had risen,
Summer's calm,
Stretched out in it's hazy foliage.

The Bad Dreamer

My dreams are mostly liquid. I am immersed in sorts of nauseous waters where the blood-red films toss and turn. I never rise up to the level of certain impressions, whether in my dreams or real life. I am never settled in the continuity of my life. My dreams are offered no escape, no refuge or guide. Truly the rankness of severed limbs. Besides, I am too resigned about my thought to be interested in anything that goes on in it. I ask for one thing only: to be locked away in my thought for good. And as to the physical appearance of my dreams, I told you, a liquid.

He gives words to mental states perfectly, he describes this as death approaching, I relate it to chronic anxiety.

Who in the heart?

Who in the heart of some anxiety at the bottom of certain dreams, has not known death as a marvellous disruptive feeling which could never be confused with anything else of a mental order? One must have experienced this exhausting crescendo of anguish which comes over in waves and then swells one up as if or forced by some unbearable bellows. Anguish which draws near and withdraws, each time stronger  more ponderous and replete. This is the body itself, having reached the limit of its strength and distension, and yet must go on. It is a sort of suction cup on the soul, whose acridity spreads like acid into the furthermost bounds of the senses.

Anais Nin was friends with Antonin Artaud, apparently he wanted to have her as a lover but she declined his advances. She speaks about him "Then he offered to burn everything else for me, to dedicate himself to me. I deserved a black holocaust. What would Artaud burn for me? I did not ask. And I knew that just as Allendy's magic was too white, Artaud's was black, poisonous, dangerous"

What I wrote in my diary last week..

I'm staying out on my parents farm today. I love escaping here and the calmness I feel when I am here. I like sitting with the animals and talking to them and noticing them communicating back in their own way. I sat in the rain for ages listening to the birds and my music in the background feeling uplifted and more free than I have felt in ages. I know a lot of change is going to happen soon, a lot of heart breaking change but I think if I am able to hold onto this feeling of calm I can face and survive these changes without any black neurosis touching me.

I have just finished reading Anais Nin's diary volume one, here are some parts I loved.

"I must relive my life in the dream. The dream is my only life. I see in the echoes and reverberations and transfiguration which alone keep wonder pure. Otherwise all magic is lost. Otherwise life shows it's deformities and the homeliness becomes rust. My drug, covering all things with a mist of smoke, deforming and transforming as the night does. All matter must be fused this way through the lens of my vice or the rust of living would slow down my rhythm to a sob"

I can relate to Anais's writing a lot. I also feel like I spend half my life in the real word and the other half within my dreams and fantasies. If I didn't have this dream world to escape to sometimes I feel that the mundane nature of reality would bore me down and eventually break me. So it is a necessity for me to read, write and indulge in dreaming to keep this world as part of me.

"Flesh touching flesh generates a perfume while the friction of words generates only pain and division. To formulate without destroying the mind, without tampering, without killing, without withering. That is what I have learnt by living, that delicacy and awe of the senses, that respect for the perfume. It will become my law in writing. All that was pushed into clarity and rationality, withered. The beautiful living and moving, dark things that I destroyed in passing from the nebulous realms off pure dreaming to the realization of the dream"

That is Anais writing about why she can not completely connect with the act of psychoanalysis.

Sometimes I think it is better to remain secretive in the way we think and act. To have everything we do rationalized and analytically picked apart for subconscious motives seems to kill the mysterious parts of ourselves. The parts we keep hidden behind veils, maybe these parts should remain behind veils? Sometimes it's just nice to watch a shadow move and dance without knowing what exactly that shadow belongs to and what is blocking the shine of the light.

I love how Anais says that as a writer you live twice, once while moving, speaking, interacting and later through introspective. It's true but not just through writing, we live lots of different lives through our memories and as they become hazy and stained with time who knows what we actually lived or what we dreamed, It all just flows into one beautiful mess caught in our mind's eye.