Antonin Artaud

Letter to Henri Paristo

October 9, 1945


Dear Sir,

Yes, I shall be very happy to let you publish the last letters I wrote you.  But two days ago I wrote you a new letter which I would like you to add to the Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara.  I think it will interest you because of everything that is in it.  I am working on two books: Surrealism and the End of the Christian Era, and more importantly, Measure without Measure, in which I try to find a new language: to be that big clumsy puppy who walks with his legs apart carrying his heart perpetually between his thighs, rather than the crane who sweeps her bottom from side to side to show it off.

orka ta kana izera
kani zera tabitra

For the indefinite is a press

ora bulda nerkita

which crushes even itself until it forces out the very blood of the infinite, not as a state, but as a being.

Tell me whether you received my last letter.


Yours,

Antonin Artaud



P.S.  There is at the moment a matter of absurd possession which fills the entire earth.  It is being conducted by a number of sects of initiates which I know very well and which I have been pursuing for at least thirty years, that is, since a certain day in the spring of 1915 when I was knifed in the back by two pimps in the Cours Devilliers in Marseilles, in front of the Eglise des Reformes.  I was then nineteen years old.  I was just passing the drugstore at the corner of the Cours Devilliers and the boulevard de la Madeleine when I noticed two suspicious-looking characters who were prowling around me as if they were about to attack me; I did not know them and one of them smiled at me as if to say, 'You have nothing to fear from us, you are not the one we are looking for.'  Then I saw his face change, and in place of the man who was smiling at me I saw in the same body a mask of bestiality which struck me because it seemed not to belong to this man, and I felt a terrible twisting spasm pass over him.  'Who am I and what do I want?'  he seemed to say to himself suddenly.  'This man is not my enemy, I do not know him, and I am not going to hurt him.'  And he walked away.  I was starting to walk up the boulevard de la Madeleine when I felt the air behind me shake as if something were being torn; and I thought, 'It is the soul of the pimp which is being torn,' and before I had time to turn around I felt the blade of a knife tear the back of my heart from behind near the top of the shoulder blade, less than an inch from the spinal column.  And I was sure that before the blow a body had fallen behind me, and I fell to the ground myself, but I thought, 'This is not yet my last hour...'




trns. by Helen Weaver

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