AG: Well, there is a precedent for the kind of manic excitement and nervous neurological Ong-ed [sic] prophecy (of Philip Lamantia), and his big inspiration, aside from (Arthur) Rimbaud (who’s everybody’s big inspiration) was Antonin Artaud – a sort of 20th Century Rimbaud, whose biography you can check out – madhouses and shock and heroin and France.. He was a movie-actor, a theatre man, but most (of all) an extraordinary poet, and an extraordinary…
Student: Allen
AG: Yes?
Student: There’s a very fine movie that’s showing at the University…where he does some very good acting in “The Passion of Joan of Arc”
[Editorial/transcriber’s note (regarding the initial copy of this tape – “here (at this point), the quality of the original audiotape further deteriorates”]
AG: …(which is) maybe a little long to get through. I haven’t done this too often. I’ll read a fragment of it, or in and out of it. He was in the bughouse, and he conceived that the natural state of man is free from all conditioning, free from papa and mama,, free from birth, free from earth, free from time, male and female, and that.. well, let him explain it himself. What’s interesting is that the poetry passes from intelligible vocables to pure sound. He’s one of the few poets who mixed straight declamatory excited language with self-originated mantric mouthings..
[Allen begins reading at length from Artaud’s classic 1947 work, “The Indian Culture“] –
“..And now,/ let me tell you/ all of you,/ you’ve always made me shit/ Why don’t you go fuck/ a prickly pussy/crab lice/of eternity/ Never again will I have anything to do with the ones who swallow the iron stud of life./ One day soon after I lost my mama-tit,/I met up with the ones who swallowed the iron stud of life/ and one of them wrestled me under him,/and god poured me back to it./ (THE BASTARD.)/ So that’s how they/yanked papa-mammy/ and the frying fat of je in it /Chri/ out of me, out of the sex/ the center of the great strangulation/which was yanked from this cross…”…”And that’s how:/ the great mystery of the Indian Culture/is to bring the world back to zero/always…”/…
“Commentary… “They came, all the bastards,/ after the great dissonance/sounded from top to bottom./ 1) EGG-face/ (whisper this)/ Don’t you know /that the state of /EGG/ was the /anti-Artaud/state/ par excellence/ and for poisoning Artaud/ there’s nothing/ like whipping up/ a good omlette/in the spaces//targeting in on the/ jelly bulls-eye point/ that Artaud/seeking to make man/ has fled/like a horrible plague/and it is this point/ they put back in him/nothing, I say, like a good stuffed omlette/poison, cyanide, and capers,/ hurled through the air to his zone/ to discombobulate Artaud/ in the anathema of his bones/HANGING FROM THE INNER CADAVER/ and 2) palaouette pulling/ largalalouette cawling/ 3) tuban tititarting /with the head of the head ogling you/ 4) homunculus frontal/ punch/ from the pinch whoring you…”…. “Artaud/ who knew that there was no mind/ but only body/ which is re-made like the broken dentures of the gears of a corpse..”… “All true language/ is incomprehensible/ like the click of clacked teeth;/ or the clap (whorehouse)/ of the grinding of the femur (grinding, bloody, fake)/ as the son-in-law is/ From the pain sought from the bone…”….
“Conclusion”/ As for me, uncomplicated/ Antonin Artaud,/ no one can touch me/ when one is only a man/ or/ a god/ I don’t believe in father/ in mother/ got no papa-mammy/nature/ mind/or god,/devil/ body/ or being/life/ or nothingness/nothing inside or out/and above all no mouth to mouth being/that sewer drilled with teeth/where man who sucks his substance/ from me/ looks at me all the time/ waiting to get hold of a papa-mammy/and remake an existence/free of me/over and above my corpse/taken/from the void/itself/ and sniffed at/ from time/to time/ I speak/ from above/ time/ as if time/were not fried/were not this dry fry/of all the crumble/of the beginning/setting out once more in their coffins.”
I think this may have been written as a.. post/commentary to a series of shock-treatments in Rodez asylum (like), where, in another essay [“Van Gogh, the Man Suicided By Society”] he claims that, because of society, he was “suicided” (or killed, or died), lived in a death state for several hours and then returned from death. So this is his commentary on the experience of returning from death, and so he is, actually, in a sense, speaking above time. If you want to take that experience as a literal experience (which he did) When taken as a literal experience, it gave him so much hysteric power that he terrified all Paris in the (19)40’s, and became a great poet-hero, influencing Roger Blin, an actor, and influencing “Children of Paradise” (“Les Enfants du Paradis“), the movie, and…
Student: How was that?
AG: Pardon?
Student: How did he influence Les Enfants du Paradis?
AG: He just influenced all the actors (and his main thing was theatre) to get them somehow off their ass (in)to another head – just as a person – everybody saw him on the streets, everybody talked to him, nobody…
Student: This was during the Occupation then? (that) all this was happening?
AG: (19) 44, I think it would have been. [Editor’s note: Marcel Carne’s Les Enfants du Paradis was released in France in 1945, and in the United States (under the title “Children of Paradise”) in 1946]
Student: Allen?
[side one of the tape ends here – to be continued]
(An audio recording of this particular class (Ginsberg on Artaud part one) is available (starting at approximately thirty-one-and-a-half-minutes in, and running through to approximately forty-two-and-three-quarter minutes) – here)