THE SITUATION OF THE FLESH

Antonin Artaud

I am reflecting on life. All the systems I could devise would never equal these cries by a man occupied in rebuilding his life. I can conceive a system in which the whole man would be involved, man with his physical body and the summits, the intellectual projection of his mind. It seems to me one must above all reckon with man's incomprehensible magnetism and with what, for want of a more telling phrase, I am forced to call his life-force. My reason will certainly one day have to receive these unformulated forces exteriorly shaped like a cry which are besieging me, and they may then supplant higher thought. There are intellectual cries, cries which stem from the marrow's delicacy. This is what I personally call the Flesh. I do not separate my thought from my life. With each of my tongue's vibrations I retrace all the paths of my thought through my flesh. One must have been deprived of life, of the nervous irradiation of existence, of the conscious fulfilment of our nerves, to realise to what extent the Sensation and Knowledge of all thought is secreted in the nervous energy within our bones. Also how mistaken are those who bank on intelligence and pure intellect. Above all, there is the completeness of the nerves. Completeness which contains all consciousness and the magic ways of the mind through the flesh. But what am I in the midst of this theory about the Flesh or more correctly, Existence ? I am a man who has lost his life and who is seeking every way of re-integrating it in its proper place. In some measure I am the Generator of my own vitality. Vitality which is more precious to me than consciousness, for what in other men is only the means of being Human is all of Reason to me. In the course of this research buried in the limbo of my consciousness, I thought I felt explosions, like the shock of magic stones or the sudden petrification of fires. Fires like imperceptible truths, miraculously vitalised. But one must walk slowly along the road of dead stones,especially someone who has lost his understanding of words. It is this indescribable knowledge which explodes in gradual thrusts. And whoever possesses it does not understand it. But the Angels also do not understand, for all real knowledge is obscure. Clear Mind is a property of matter, I mean the Mind, at a given moment, is clear. But I must look into this aspect of the flesh which is supposed to give me a metaphysics of Being and a positive understanding of Life. For me, whoever says Flesh says apprehension above all, hair standing on end, flesh exposed, with all the intellectual depth of this show of pure flesh and all its sensory consequences, that is, feeling. Whoever says feeling also says intuition, that is, direct knowledge, inverted communications enlightened from within. There is a mind in the flesh, but a mind as quick as lightning. And yet the agitation of the flesh partakes ·of the mind's higher matter. Yet whoever says flesh also says sensibility. Sensibility, that is, assimilation, but an intimate, secret, profound, total, assimilation of my own pain and as a result sole, unique knowledge of this pain.

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