ANTONIN ARTAUD:
I say what I have seen and believe; and whoever says I have not seen what I have seen, I will immediately rip off his head.
For I am an unpardonable brute and shall be until Time is no longer Time.
Neither Heaven nor Earth, if they exist, can do anything against this brutality they have imposed on me, perhaps so I might serve them . . . who knows?
In any case to be torn away from them.
I see what is with certainty. If necessary, I will create whatever does not exist.
For a long time now I have felt the Void, but have refused to hurl myself into the Void.
I have been as cowardly as everything I see.
When I believed I was refusing the world, I now know I was refusing the Void.
For I know the world does not exist and I know how it does not exist.
Until now, my suffering consisted in refusing the Void.
The Void was already within me.
I know I wished the Void to enlighten me, and I refused to let myself be enlightened.
If I was made into a pyre, it was to cure me of being in this world.
And the world took all I had.
I struggled to try and exist, to try to consent to the forms (all the forms) with which the delirious illusion of being in this world had clothed all reality.
I no longer wish to be possessed by Illusions.
Dead to the world; dead to what the world is for everyone else, fallen, finally fallen, fallen, rising up in the void I once refused, I have a body that suffers the world and disgorges reality.
I have had enough of this lunar movement making me name what I refuse and refuse what I have named.
I must end it. I must make a final break with this world which a Being in me, this Being I can no longer name because if he returns, I will fall into the Void, this Being has always refused.
It is done. I really fell into the Void, since everything - making up this world - had achieve its aim of making me despair.
For you know you are no longer in this world only when you see this world has really abandoned you.
Dead, the others are not separated: they still hover around their corpses.
And I know how the dead have been hovering around their corpses for the exact thirty-three Centuries my Double has been incessantly turning.
So, no longer existing, I see what is.
I really identified with this Being, this Being that ceased to exist.
And this Being revealed everything to me.
I knew it, but could not say it, and I can start to say it now, because I have left reality behind.
A truly Desperate man is talking to you, who never knew the happiness of being in this world until he left it and became absolutely separated from it.
The others have not been separated, although dead. They still hover around their corpses.
I am not dead, but I am separated.
