him out of the brothel. Into those streets which I had started to explore by myself.
A bird was flying through the sky.
His girlfriend was as white as me. But she was beautiful and rich. As soon as I met her, I knew that I didn’t exist for her, in the same way that I didn’t exist for W, that she didn’t know how to love. She was one of those owners. She was somebody.
I could love W, which she never could, but what did he want? Did he want all that I would be able to give him?
After dinner, he brought his girlfriend and me back to the brothel and he tied me to my bed. Needles inserted into the flesh just below the lower lashes kept the eyes open. In front of me, W made love to her. First with his fingers. Delicately playing with her outer labia. They turned from pale pink to blood-red. Opened to my eyes as his fingers disappeared. Some were in her mouth. He was bending her over and then he turned around, her cunt juice dripping so much that I could see it on his fingertips, and put his cock, which was in my mind, into that cunt that must have been open, wanting, screaming for pleasure, whether she loved him or not, she was being fucked inserted thrust into pummeled bruised and all that comes out is pleasure, the body is pleasure, I have known pleasure, and I am watching the endless pleasure, as it comes again again again, that I have known and now I am being refused.
Rich, she could never know what my pleasure was, and so I changed.
Throughout all of the dinner and the sex I was forced, also by myself, to watch, I was wearing the red lipstick that my mother had worn. My mother always walked around her house naked, touching her own body. She wore her menstrual blood on her mouth. In her house there were no men, for my father had left her before I was born.
Since I never knew you, every man I fuck is you. Daddy. Every cock goes into my cunt which, since I never knew you, is a river named Cocytus. I said that I’m only going to tell the truth: When you, Cock of all Cocks, you, the only lay in the world, and I know for I’m supposed to live, not die, for sex, when you took a leave of absence ejaculated disappeared skipped out and vanished before I was born, you threw me, and I hadn’t yet been born, into even another world.
The name of that world was China.
Who can understand China’s teeming populaces, its children, its marching student soldiers?
Artaud Rewrites His First Letter to Georges Le Breton:
I am a violent being, full of fiery storms and other catastrophic phenomena. As yet I can’t do more than begin this letter, begin it again and again, because I have to eat myself, my own body is my only food, in order to write. But I don’t want to talk about myself. I want to discuss Gérard de Nerval. He made living: a living world. He made a living world out of myth and magic. The realm of myth and magic that he contacted was that of a Funeral. His own death and funeral.
I’ll talk about death, my death, later.
The Tarot card in the realm of Nerval is the Hanged Man. Heidegger, under the same sign, reversed himself and turned away from Hitler. Trying “to come to terms with his . . . past in the Nazi movement,” he explained that “the very possibility of taking action” or “the will to rule and dominate” was “a kind of original sin, of which he found himself guilty.” Instead of Dasein, he placed emphasis on Sein, or an essentially reverent contemplativeness, one that might open and keep open the possibility of a new paganism in which no sovereignty could arise, no sovereignty out of the ashes of Hitler’s aborted revolution.
Reverent contemplativeness is the Hanged Man in the realm of Nerval. Contemplativeness is the act of turning inside out, reversing, traveling the road into the land of the dead while being and remaining alive. Contemplativeness is seeming to do nothing. In other words, the Hanged Man card, to me, represents the slight possibility that this society in which human identity depends upon possessing rather than on being possessed, that this society in which I’m living, could change.
Gérard de Nerval was a sailor who descended into oblivion and, as he did, wrote against oblivion. He hated his own cockhead and so he descended into the Cocytus, into oblivion, three times, until his cockhead floated bloody on those waters. In other words, he hung himself.
O Speaks:
I spent day after day walking the streets, looking for W, whom I would never again find.
The Letter Continues:
I am Gérard de Nerval who hung himself 12:00 P.M. on a Thursday by his own hands. The other one died in Paris or announced that his death was going to happen, he announced that he was going to die from loneliness.
I, Gérard de Nerval, who write in the teeth of the utilitarian concept of the universe, will hang myself from an apron string tied to a grating. There will be nothing left.
At this moment, I, Gérard de Nerval, want to talk about the difference between hanging and the Hanged Man:
I, Antonin Artaud, hung myself and I haven’t died.
I’m living in a slum in China and I’m going to become sexual.
O Speaks:
If W’s not around, I don’t want to be a whore.
Artaud Speaks:
I entered the brothel so that I could meet O. The Madam stopped me to ask where I was going. I said that I was going to serve O.
She told me that I had to give her money before I could be with O. Because I didn’t have any money I was thrown out of the whorehouse.
I found myself in a marketplace where everything was being sold for everything else. Some of the poor who were there didn’t have any limbs. Others were willing to do anything sexually for money. The children said that a third of them would die, the next harvest, if there weren’t enough beans. I decided that I had to stop the hell in which I was living.
I knew that they had thrown me out of the whorehouse because I refused to give O money.
I wanted O to love me.
Their denial of my sexuality planted in me the seeds of rebellion. There would be other women and men like me in that slum. Ones who would do whatever had to be done in order to change everything.
O Speaks:
I no longer want to be a whore.
Artaud Speaks:
It was at this time that the revolutionaries, both male and female, met in what light came from the quarter-moon.
“We’re poor,” they said. “We need to get our hands on weapons.”
“A white man just gave us some money for weapons, probably just to save his own neck.”
Though I had no interest in such tools, I agreed to undertake the machine-gun delivery, dangerous at the least, in return for the exact amount of cash I needed to buy O so that I could give her her freedom.
In this way, I cut my cockhead off, and blood from a heart I had never known started to flow.
O Speaks:
How long will this reign of masochism continue?
Artaud Addresses This Version of His Letter to O:
