Artaud

http://www.hydra.umn.edu/artaud/gobbets.html

I have never been able to stand someone meddling with the lines of a great poet from a semantical, historical, archeological or mythological point of view -
lines of poetry are not explained.

(For Georges le Breton: Letter, Rodez March 7, 1946)

It's the penetral spider's web,
the onor hairess
from or-or the sail,
the anal plate of anileyou.
(You take nothing from it, god,
because it's me.
You never took anything like that from me.
I am writing it here for the first time.
I am finding it for the first time.)

(The Return of Artaud the Mômo)

Who am I?
Where do I come from?
I am Antonin Artaud
and if I say it
as I know how to say it
immediately
you will see my present body
fly into pieces
and under ten thousand
notorious aspects
a new body
will be assembled
in which you will never again
be able
to forget me.

(Post-Scriptum)

• Antonin Artaud, Four Texts, tr. Clayton Eshleman and Norman Glass, Los Angeles 1982, p. 10, 21, 92
  "To Georges Le Breton" appeared first as "Letter on Nerval" in Margins no. 27 (1975) and was reprinted in Oleander (1976). "Artaud the Mômo" has been published in three different versions, first in Caterpillar no. 18 (1972), the second in Sparrow no. 34 (1975). "The Theatre of Cruelty first appeared in Oasis no. 19 (1977) and was reprinted in New Wilderness Letter no. 9 (1980).

It has not been definitively proved that the language of words is the best possible language. And it seems that on the stage, which is above all a space to fill and a place where something happens, the language of words may have to give way before a language of signs whose objective aspect is the one that has the most immediate impact on us.
Considered in this light, the objective work of the mise en scnène assumes a kind of intellectual dignity from the effacement of words behind gestures and from the fact that the esthetic, plastic part of theater drops its role of decorative intermediary in order to become, in the proper sense of the word, a directly communicative language.

• Antonin Artaud, The Theater and its Double, New York 1958, p. 107

I, Antonin Artaud, am my son,
my father, my mother,

my self;
leveller of the imbecile periplum rooted
to the family tree:
the periplum papamummy
and infant wee,

  crud from the ass of granmummy
and much more than pa and ma.

• "Here Lies", in: Jack Hirschman ed., Artaud Anthology, San Francisco 1965, p. 238