ANTONIN ARTAUDTo find oneself jolted to an extreme, lit by the unreal, with, in a corner of
oneself, fragments of the real world.
...A kind of constant displacement of the normal level of reality.
...The unconscious has no power to crystallize, to any degree whatsoever, the
fixed unbroken point of automatism.
...Are you acquainted with that sensitivity hanging in mid-air, that kind of vital-
ity terrifying and split in two, that indispensable point of cohesion to which being
no longer rises, that place of menace, that place that hurls you to the ground?
...Here’s someone with no place hardening in his mind, who doesn’t all of a sud-
den find his soul on his left, on the side of the heart. Here’s someone for whom life
is not a fixed point, for whom the soul has no sections, nor the mind beginnings.
...If only you could taste your nothingness, if you could find repose in your
nothingness, and if this nothingness would not be a kind of being and not really
death either.
It’s so hard not to exist any more, not to be something any more. Real
su√ering is to feel the movement of thought within oneself. But when thought is
a fixed point, it is certainly not a su√ering.
I am at the point where I no longer touch life, but with all the appetites still
within me, and the insistent titillation of being. I have nothing to do now but
make myself over.
—mary ann caws and patricia terry
Love with No Letup
This triangle of water athirst
this unwritten road
Madam, and the sight of your masts
upon this sea I drown in
The messages of your hair
the gunshot of your lips
this storm that seizes me
in the wake of your eyes.