take with him a scummy apron string that had once belonged to the Queen of Sheba. Nerval told me this. Or it was one of the corset laces of Madame de Maintenon. Or of Marguerite de Valois.
From this apron string, which was tied to a grating, he hung himself. The grating, black, partly broken, and stained by hound excretion, was located at the bottom of the stone stairs which lead to the rue de la Tuerie. There’s a straight drop from that stair platform downward.
As Nerval swung there, a raven hovered over, as if it were sitting on his head, and cawed repeatedly, “I’m thirsty.”
They were probably the only words the old bird knew.
I, Antonin Artaud, am now an owner, for I own the language of suicide.
Why did Gérard de Nerval hang himself from an open string? Why is this society which is China insane?
To learn why Gérard madly offed himself, I shall enter his soul:
Gérard was a man like me. He wrote this:
. . . le dernier, vaincu par ton génie, (Jehovah)
Qui, du fond des enfers, criait: “O tyrannie!”
Gérard was le dernier because, when he wrote that, he was just about to suicide, he was writing his own suicide note to God the Tyrant, whose very existence was putting Gérard in hell. That is, Gérard suicided because of the existence of God: Gérard opposed the tyrant God by cutting off his own head. For God is the head, le génie. Gérard cut off his own head with a woman’s apron string, so now he is a woman, so now he has a hole between his arms. Every soul is nothing. The soul of Gérard de Nerval has taught me that nothingness is the abyss of horror out of which consciousness always awakes in order to go out into something in order to exist.
A hole of the body, which every man but not woman including Gérard de Nerval and myself has to make, is the abyss of the mouth.
I have found this language, which is why I can write this letter to you, O. You see, Gérard, who was naked like you are, gave me a language that doesn’t lie, for it spurted out of the hole of his body.
You’re naked so I know you’ve got a body.
When Gérard cut off his head, he made all that was interior in him exterior: today all that’s interior is becoming exterior and this is what I call revolution, and those humans who are holes are the leaders of this revolution.
I have gotten to know Gérard de Nerval, and he was a revolutionary both before and after he hung himself from an apron string. He hung himself from a woman’s string in order to protest against political control. Suicide is only a protest against control. I repeat that. After he castrated himself, language came pouring out of him.
I am evidence that this is true.
Now I am Gérard de Nerval after he castrated himself because consciousness in the form of language is now pouring out of me and hurting me and so I can be with you. I shall own you, O.
O Speaks:
Now I knew W would never come back to me and take me out of the brothel.
Being aware that he would never love me was equal to knowing that he never had.
I was no longer safe, so I became sick. I hovered at death.
It was at this time that the student revolutionaries, more professionally armed than any of the cops around them, burst into the English Embassy, which was located next to the slum. Though paying in serious injury and death, they successfully demolished the government building.
When my health returned, I learned that W was a part owner of the cathouse. I had known that he was rich. I no longer cared what W felt about me: all I wanted was for him to be absent from me.
I wanted W to remain absent from me: I didn’t want anything to change.
It was W who had first given the terrorists the money to buy weapons. Perhaps he hadn’t known why. Perhaps there was a need in him to disrupt and destroy. I didn’t know W and I don’t. When the revolutionary raid on the English had succeeded, probably he had become frightened. For the first time in his life he had realized that to be rich and white is to be vulnerable. So when the revolutionaries returned to him to ask for more funds he refused.
They started to beat him up. They almost killed him.
As soon as I learned what had taken place, I stopped hating W for not returning my love.
In a skirmish prior to the explosion of the English Embassy, a young boy who had run guns for the revolutionaries had one of his arms severely injured.
With the other hand holding the money that he had earned by working for the terrorists, he walked into the brothel. He found the Madam and gave her the amount she had requested as the price of my purchase.
I knew nothing about the purchase of my freedom.
Behind my bedroom door, Artaud told me that he had come back for me.
“I’m still sick. I don’t want to see anyone.”
He forced himself into my room, so I hit him. He fell down to the floor on the arm that had been broken. When he cried out, I was surprised.
“You’re just a boy, so how could you be hurting so badly?”
His arm was bent the wrong way for a human.
Now I understood that someone could hurt more than me. Reaching down, I lifted up his body, on to my thigh, as much as I was able. I only wanted to fuck with him. Pain, for him at that moment, was the same as sexual pleasure. For me, every area of my skin was an orifice; therefore, each part of his body could do and did everything to mine.
We wondered at our bodies.
Artaud Rewrites His Letter:
When I saw O, I wanted to protect her because she worships her cunt.
O Speaks:
1 never saw Artaud again.
Weakened not only by the beating but also by the desertion of his rich girlfriend, W began to go mad.
He learned that the young boy and I had fallen in love. He began to follow Artaud through the slum’s streets, which now reeked of more and more revolutionaries, and into alleyways which were blind. In one of those, he shot the young poet and left him for dead.
In those days, there were too many bodies for there to be such a thing as murder.
When I heard this, I no longer cared what happened to W. I quit that whorehouse. For me, there were no more men left in the world.
I had been searching for my father, in a dream, and found a young and insane boy, who was then killed.
I stood on the edge of a new world.
in the Days of Dreaming
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