White smoke

Another pope.

ADDRESS TO THE POPE
October 1, 1946

I renounce baptism.
I shit on the name “Christian.”
I jack off on the cross. (But masturbation has never been one of my habits, Pius XII, and will never be. Maybe you should begin to understand me.)
It was I and not Jesus Christ who was crucified on Golgotha, for I rose up against God and his Christ
because I am a man

and because God and his Christ are only ideas

who in fact bear the filthy mark of the hand of man;

and for me these ideas have never existed.

Now free to take credit from the last practicing catholics for the existence of a beyond, which I control all the means to make them confess that it emerges from a fold of their filthy gut,

and who is the catholic incristed in the vehme, the holy vehme and its incurable orthodoxy, who has not, especially in these last few years, learned to make or remake abdominally as well as cervically, and by a strange nasal rhinitis to which the entire sex has been invited for two thousand years,

has not learned, I say, to make or re-make,

Jesus-christ.

And it would be useless, Pius XII, to quibble that all this is not in your name, for you, yes you, Pius XII, have this movement in your throat and in your nose, especially when you say mass, and there would be no need to feel around your navel so much to find that you fornicate a never ending anathema (let there be my seed by the grace of God) between your plexus and your gut.

But that is not why I am writing you.

I am writing you because you know who I am, and it is well known to all the police that Artaud Antonin was just an enormous and derisory Punchinello secret, a universal stage whisper, that was forcefully withheld from me alone, me Antonin Artaud, by threat of straight jackets, cells, poison, electric shock, strangling, estrapades, beatings and assassination. That, Pius XII, was my life for nine years.

This secret is that Antonin Artaud is entranced, kept prisoner by a dark, sinister and villainous magic, from where things are said and felt dramatically and even melodramatically, and from where they are felt and said objectively and scientifically. This secret is that the mind, the brain, the consciousness and most of all in fact the body of Artaud are paralyzed, restrained and enchained by methods among which electric shock is a mechanical application and prussic acid or potassium cyanide or insulin a sort of botanical or physiological transposition, - let us suppose.

What exactly constitutes these methods, Pius XII, I will tell you again differently and more precisely.

It remains that you and the congregation of the Holy Office are deeply involved in my assault and subsequent arrest in a public place in Dublin as well as my imprisonment in Dublin and my nine-year internment in France.

And I was arrested, imprisoned and poisoned from September 1937 till May 1946 for exactly the same reasons that I was arrested, flagellated, crucified and thrown in a pile of manure in Jerusalem a little more than two thousand years ago.

Indeed, I say, much more than two thousand years ago.

For this number, two thousand years, represents the 2,000 years of historical life since the death of the crucified of Golgotha till today. Historical, that is to say officially gathered, recorded and inventoried. For in fact time on that day brought about a terrible leap to things, and I remember perfectly well, Pius XII, once out of the pile of manure where I had remained for three and one-half days in the expectation of feeling my death to decide to get up, not so much the memory of pain, but of the obscene insult of having been publicly stripped and whipped by special order of the priests, of the beatings and blows on my face, of rods striking my back from the anonymous populace who hated me for no other reason than that I was Antonin Artaud (and that was my name two thousand years ago as well as today), and thus the horrible memory of so many wretched hands beating my face, me, who did not know them and had done nothing against them, made me vomit so horribly that I felt myself explode, my chest physically explode, and history has not preserved the memory of the dark period that followed.

And I was poisoned to death from 1937 to 1940 by order of the French Sûreté Générale as well as its intelligence service, the Soviet GPU and the Vatican Police.

But if I died two thousand and some years ago on a cross, then I fucking guarantee that this time I won’t be kept in an asylum cell, a military block house or a prison shit house, and my conscience will not be at peace nor will the Manes of the corpse that I am be pacified until I have roasted you and your upright prick, yes you, Pius XII, your upright prick, with a few of your Bohemian or Moldavian monks, on the high altar of St. Peter’s in Rome and the more tendentiously priestly and occult one of St. John Lateran.

Antonin Artaud

Artaud's 'Address to the Dalai Lama' was a bit more upbeat:
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Address to the Dalai Lama

O Great Lama! We are your most faithful servants. Direct your light on us in a language our contaminated European spirits can understand and, if need be, transform our Spirit, make for us a spirit entirely turned towards those perfect summits where the Spirit of Man no longer suffers!

Make for us a Spirit without habits, a spirit truly frozen in the Spirit, or a Spirit with purer habits - indeed your own, if they truly serve for freedom.

We are surrounded by coarse popes, literati, critics, dogs. Our spirit is among the dogs, who think always with the ground, who think hopelessly in the present.

Lama, teach us the material levitation of the body and how we may no longer be held by the ground!

For you know full well, O Acceptable Pope! O Pope in the True Spirit! to what transparent liberation of the soul, to what freedom of the Spirit in the Spirit, that we refer.

It is with the inner eye that I look at you, O Pope, at the summit of interiority. It is inwardly that I resemble you: self, impulse, idea, lip, levitation, dream, cry, renunciation of ideas, suspended between all forms and hoping for no more than the wind.


Letter to the Schools of the Buddha

You who are disincarnate, who know at what point in its carnal trajectory, its insensitive coming and going, that the soul finds the absolute verb, the new speech, the interior ground; you who know how one returns to oneself in thought and how the spirit can save itself from itself; you who are interior to yourselves; you for whom the spirit is no longer on the carnal plane: here there are hands for whom taking is not everything, brains that see further than a forest of roofs, the glare of façades, cog-wheel people and the workings of fire and marble. Advancing is this people of iron; advancing are words written with the speed of light; advancing towards each other with the force of bullets are the sexes: what will change in the avenues of the soul? in the spasms of the heart? in the despair of the spirit?

So hurl into the water all the blank white men who arrive with their little heads and well-behaved minds. It is necessary that these dogs hear us; we are not speaking of ancient human ills. Our spirit suffers from needs other than those inherent in life. We are suffering from corruption, from the corruption of reason.

Logical Europe endlessly smashes the spirit between the hammers of two terms. She wrenches it open and shuts it down. This strangulation has gone far enough; for too long have we been suffering beneath the harness. The Spirit is larger than the spirit, the metamorphoses of life are manifold. Like you, we abhor progress: come and tear down our houses!

While our scribes still continue to write, our journalists to natter on, our critics to drone away, our politicians to hold forth and our judicial assassins to hatch their crimes in peace, we know what life really is. Our writers, thinkers, doctors and scribblers know exactly how to make a mess of life. While all these scribes drool upon us, whether from habit or compulsion, spiritual emasculation or a failure to apprehend nuance, in this dull sludge, on these turning grounds where the highly esteemed spirit of man is endlessly shifting around, we have harnessed thought the best. Come. Save us from these worms. Invent new houses for us.

Antonin Artaud

La Révolution Surréaliste, no.3, 15 April, 1925

Antonin Artaud’s Adresse au Dalai-Lama and Lettre aux ecoles du Bouddha were first published in La Revolution Surrealiste no.3, on 15 April 1925 in Paris. In the same issue were an Address to the Pope and a Letter to the Directors of the Insane Asylums. The issue was subtitled: “1925: End of the Christian Era,” and was illustrated by Giorgio de Chirico, Paul Klee, Andre Masson, Man Ray and Dede Sunbeam. Editorship of the following issue, no. 4, was taken over by Andre Breton. (Translated by Stephen Batchelor, 1993.)