.

free after I journeyed into the land of the dead.

      I was trying to get rid of loneliness and nothing would ever rid me of loneliness until I got rid of myself.

      Artaud Speaks:

      O said, “I want to go where I’ve never been before.”

      I was living in a room that was in the slum. I was still sane.

      I was just a boy. All I saw was the poverty of those slums. In order to counteract the poverty that was without and within me, I ran to poetry. Especially to the poetry of Gérard de Nerval, who wanted to stop his own suffering, to transform himself, but instead hanged himself from a rusty picture nail.

      I had no life. I only loved those poets who were criminals. I began to write letters to people I didn’t know, to those poets, not in order to communicate with them. To do something else.

      Dear Georges, I wrote.

      I have just read, in Fontane magazine, two articles by you on Gérard de Nerval which made a strange impression on me.

      I am a limitless series of natural disasters and all of these disasters have been unnaturally repressed. For this reason I am kin to Gérard de Nerval who hanged himself in a street alley during the hours of a night.

      Suicide is only a protest against control.

      Artaud

      The alleyways were lying all around me. They ran every which way, so haphazardly that they stopped. There was the brothel.

      I would watch man after man walk through its doors. Men went to this brothel, not in order to have the sexual intercourse they could have on the outside, but to enact elaborate and tortuous fantasies which, one day, I’ll be able to describe to you.

      I’ll be able when there’s human pleasure in this world.

      Day after day I would look through one of my windows into one of theirs. There I first saw O, who was naked. My eye would follow her, as much as it could, trying to clear away for her everything that was before and behind her.

      I would die for her. Whenever a man hangs himself, his cock becomes so immense that for the first time he knows that he has a cock.

      One day O came out of the brothel. I saw her stand on the edge of its doorway and look away. Obviously she was terrified. Finally, one of her feet peeped over the door-frame’s bottom. I had no idea what was mirrored in those eyes. Three times her feet darted back and forth across that doorstep.

      As soon as she was fully outside, she began to turn in the same ways the winds do through the sky. Perhaps she was meeting the outside, the sky, for the first time. Perhaps, in the staleness of the brothel, O had been a she and now she was another she who wasn’t distinct from air. I watched this girl begin to breathe. I watched her encounter poverty for the first time, the streets that my body was daily touching. The streets whose inhabitants ate whatever they could and, when they no longer could eat, died.

      These streets reminded O of her childhood. For when she was a child she had always been alone. Even though she’d a half-sister, who was now married to a European armaments millionaire. Every summer O’s mother, so she would never have to see her, sent O to a posh summer camp. A camp of girls.

      There the girls passed through the latest dances in each other’s arms in the hour before they were ordered in to dinner while O watched them. She knew that she couldn’t dance. For the first time in her life, in the whorehouse, O was safe because, here, there were no humans.

      In the whorehouse she had become naked.

      Now that O felt safe, she had the strength to return to her childhood. To poverty. I watched O walk down street after street, searching for who she would be. I knew that when she had found what she had to find she would belong to me.

      O Speaks:

      The first time W and I slept together I knew that he didn’t love me. But I didn’t know why. The nausea and confusion that resulted left me shreds of belief to which I could cling: I clung to belief that in the future W might start to love me.

      Like a child who’s not able to believe that her mother doesn’t care about her.

      I remained in that brothel. One day W came back to tell me that he wanted me to meet the woman he adored even more than his own life. To meet her, he was going to take me out of the brothel for the day.

      They had been together many years before he met me. He said. That she had left him. It had been his fault: he wasn’t good to her. She returned to him in China, and now he wanted to be as good to her as it was possible for a human to be.

      Though she had come back to him, she still wasn’t sure whether she wanted to be with him, and this made him love her more.

      I didn’t know who I was to W, why he was telling me about the woman he worshiped.

      I could cling to my nausea. Maybe nausea, then, is something. A man’s body. I followed 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,”