ANTONIN ARTAUD: NOAH’S ARK OUTSIDE TIME
*
by
S. Giora Shoham
Tel Aviv University
ABSTRACT
Antonin Artaud – painter, poet, cineast, and philosopher – was one of
the greatest innovators of all time. However, he was also badly mishandled
by the psychiatric establishment. Looking like a young god, he was
institutionalized in 1937 and abused by electric shocks. By 1947, he looked
like an old man – toothless, shriveled, dilapidated, and demented. He
committed suicide like his idol van Gogh, who had undergone a similar
ordeal. In considering the case of Artaud, this article claims that deviance
mates with genius but that too much deviance or too much genius is likely to
encounter the savage stigma of society.
The Big Bang made God deaf.
Anonymous
Et qu’est-ce qu’un aliéné authentique? C’est
un homme qui a préféré devenir fou dans le sens où
socialement,
on l’entend, que de forfaire á une certaine idée
superieure de l’honneur humain.
1
Antonin Artaud (
1947
)
Van Gogh: Le Suicidé de la Société
INTRODUCTION
We intend to establish in the present paper the deviance, madness, and genius
of Antonin Artaud as an anchor for our thesis concerning the link between
insanity, deviance, and innovation. Artaud was born in 1896 and died in 1948. He
was one of the founders of the surrealist movement; a poet, painter, cineast,
playwright, theater director, and theoretician. His essays
The Theatre of
Cruelty and
The Theatre and its Double had a strong impact on the
French theater. He was in and out of mental institutions for the last ten years
of his life. A 1937 portrait of him shows a young, glowing face, with the proud
beauty of a god. In contrast, a 1947 photograph is of an old man, with a
wrinkled, twisted face, his mouth gaping and his eyes opaque – compliments of
electric shocks and psychiatric drugs, the side effects of which were worse than
the symptoms of his disease. His identification with Vincent van Gogh was one of
brotherhood in art and misery. His
[end page 203]
essay on van Gogh was one of his most
sensitive and profound works since his identification with his subject was
complete; like van Gogh, he committed suicide.
Basically, Artaud’s thesis is that society defends itself from great
innovators by labeling them mad. In
The Theatre and its Double, Artaud (
1958
) ingrained his dualistic, rather Gnostic, belief that the theater reflects
life, yet must liberate itself by expressing the primary instincts of sex and
cruelty, engaging in fetishistic rituals, wearing tribal masks, and accompanying
the scenes with primitive music. As such it was supposed to have a layer of
therapeutic psychodrama. Artaud used lavishly onomatopoeia and gibberish, but
required the actors to concentrate on what they were saying and make their
replicas with maximum force. His ideas influenced such giants as Roger Blin,
Jean-Louis Barraux, Julien Beck, and Samuel Becket, and through them European
and world drama. Like his idol Vincent van Gogh, he opted for maximum
authenticity, for rejection of the generalized, and certainly petrifying,
others. Both of them opted for the ostracism and misunderstanding suffered by
the creative innovator since importance lies in the process of art, not in
material and social rewards. However, since we consider art to be a
communicative process, if only with a single kindred soul, at the end of his
life Artaud ceased being an artist. Vincent van Gogh did not sell even one
painting (maybe just one) during his lifetime, yet he never ceased to seek
dialogue through his art with someone who would understand it.
Per contra,
Artaud invited all the "who’s who" in cultural Paris to a theater
hall and howled at them with bloodcurdling shrieks. With this non-communicative
event, he labeled himself a mad, pitiful has-been.
Artaud revealed himself to be an existential phenomenologist by trying to
cope with the essence of the self and to reach the core of the "pure
self" by phenomenological reduction. Like his alter ego Vincent van Gogh,
he saw himself as the suffering Christ, despised by the demiurgical
"others," the
Wiedergeists, the double-dealing hypocrites.
Artaud (
1986:191
) said:
Mais il y a quelqu’un qui m’a toujours aimé pour tout ce que j’avais
de bon ainsi en moi, non seulement dans mon corps mais dans mon âme (et
il n’y a que quelques années que je sais que cet amour et allé à l’hystérie
de la folie occulte et de la haine pour mon individu), ce quelqu’un s’appelle
Dieu et Jésus-Christ. Car tous les prêtres eurent toujours la plus
excessive tendresse pour ma dévotion et ma piété: je ne savais pas tout
d’abord mais j’ai su il y a quelques années que toutes les messes de
la terre étaient axées sur ma piété.
2
Well, when Vincent van Gogh depicted himself in one of his paintings as St.
Lazarus and as the savior, nobody saw his paintings. But when Artaud claimed
that masses were held in churches all over the world for his piety, he was quite
well-known, or rather notoriously known, in Paris, and a statement like this
guaranteed him the tag of insanity.
Artaud deplored the existential loneliness of man. Artaud
(
1986:213
) wrote:
[end page 204]
Lettre du 7 Avril 1928, page 295: Ma solitude à moi est sans nom et
sans bornes, et elle se double de cette horreur de penser que j’ai
toujours en réalité été seul, que ma vie ne s’est pas complétée
pendant cinq ans de la vie d’un être fait pour moi et qui m’avait
pénétré. Je considère maintenant que to m’as toujours été
étrangère.3
Man is a Tantalus who cannot be saved from his punishment: he is destined
never to achieve what he longs for. Moreover, while the fox has his lair and the
bird its nest, man has no place to repose from his misery. Yet again, like van
Gogh, Artaud never ceased to seek, indeed crave, a dialogue. He was always
attuned to the other, any other, who might open a window into his soul. He never
aimed at superficial rapport with the exterior of the other; only a deep
dialogue with his inner self would satisfy him.
These Buberian "I-Thou" dialogues were rare indeed. Most of the
time Artaud was frustrated and retreated expectantly into his lonely corner, or
he became immersed in a catatonic stupor. Artaud understood that the theater is
a means for structuring mythogenes which lend meaning to the lives both of
performer and spectator, just as the paintings of van Gogh mythogenically linked
the artist and his audience over time and space, and revealed some important
insight, to both. Artaud was a retreatist, who courted annihilation within
history. He possessed a lifelong interest in
Unio Mystica. He studied the
doctrines of Ruysbroeck, San Juan de la Cruz, and Jacob Böehme. We may guess
that it was when he could no longer contain the ever-widening horizons of his
being that van Gogh committed suicide. Yet for Artaud, suicide was an
alternative to seeking union with the all-embracing unity in entirely unknown
circumstances, the ultimate adventure in face of the unfathomable. He believed,
and wrote to his friend Riviere, that in order to grasp the meaning of being,
one must annihilate one’s cognition, perceptions, and nervous energy (
Artaud
1986
).
Artaud was certainly eccentric, deviant, bizarre, and what is commonly known
as "mad," yet we wish to ascertain what effect all this had on him and
to what insights and creative domains it brought him. Admittedly, being mad
revealed to him the meaning of the world. Hence, insanity for him delineated the
limits of understanding, yet for the stigmatizing others such reaching out
towards the normative boundaries of comprehension constituted madness, since the
agencies of social control take deviant and antisocial behavior as a main
indication of insanity. Artaud’s writings are as explosive as van Gogh’s
paintings. Still, the work of van Gogh was structured and very communicative,
whereas Artaud opted for intellectual anarchy, which in the last analysis cannot
be communicative, and therefore does not amount to art.
Artaud identified with van Gogh and felt an inner affinity with him. Yet
essentially he wrote about himself since his experience with insanity was very
similar to van Gogh’s, and both regarded psychiatry and mental asylums as
tools of social control, and not of therapy. In his essay
Van Gogh: Le
Suicidé de la Société, Artaud (
1947
) projected his own experiences and
longings – as well as his structured mythogenes – onto
[end page 205]
van Gogh and his art
so that the mythogenes were Artaud’s while they also related to van Gogh and
their common
Weltauschauungen. Like van Gogh, Artaud saw himself as a
martyr of his art and its lack of appreciation by the gross, coarse, and
non-refined vulgarians and their artistic institutions. Artaud (
1986
) called van
Gogh an organist of an enclosed storm. This poetic metaphor is apt and forceful,
but describes Artaud himself and his contained non-communication more than the
expressive torrent of van Gogh’s work. Artaud was also convinced that his
suffering was sublimated into art, as a theurgic means to transcendence. In his
surrealistic, poetic style, Artaud (
1947:50-51
) denoted van Gogh’s paintings
as "old sins, which have not yet been absolved." Their absolution
would seemingly be effected by their extasis from history onto the synchronic
Authentic Domain in transcendence. Artaud projected on van Gogh his own
experiences of stigma, ostracism, and the stifling of his excellence during the
nine years of his incarceration in mental institutions. It is as if the
authorities told him, like they might have told van Gogh, as follows:
Ceux qui un jour lui ont dit:
Et maintenant, assez, van Gogh, à la tombe, nous en avons assez de ton
génie, quant à l’infini, c’est pour nour l’infini.
4
It brings to mind the ostracizers in the Agora of Athens, who were in the
process of voting to expel Aristides, who was wandering amongst them
incognito
in the marketplace, from the polis, being fed up with hearing all the time how
clever, good, righteous, and talented Aristides was. Hence, both van Gogh and
Artaud "preferred" to become mad rather than forfeit their superior
conception of human dignity (
Artaud 1947
). They did not want to conform to the
slavish rules of the asylum so they could be declared "cured" and
released. They preferred to stay inside the institution rather then feign
acceptance of the draconian, petrifying, humiliating routines of the mental
hospital. The danger afforded by "madmen" like van Gogh and Artaud to
the vulgarians of mediocrity and "total institutions" was their
greater lucidity, their ability to see farther, to feel deeper than the average
run-of-the-mill.
Artaud (
1947
), however, used the explosive metaphor that van Gogh’s art was
like an artistic atomic bomb, uncontainable by the power elites; consequently,
their way of defending themselves was to declare van Gogh mad. This is in line
with the anti-psychiatric claim that the stigma of madness is a means of social
control. Like van Gogh, Artaud’s love affairs were total, absolute, and hence
impossible. He also regarded art as a goal in itself and not as a means to any
material aim. Art is communication through an epistemic wall, which only the
creative energy of a van Gogh can effect (
Artaud
1947
).
Another painter with whom Artaud identified was Paolo Uccello (1397-1475),
the Florentine painter of the early fifteenth century. He was a marginal figure
of Renaissance art. He was more Gothic than Renaissance, and his personality was
split between intellectualism and art (
Borsi and Borsi 1994
). He was a genius
alienated from the main current of the Renaissance art of his time, which was
dominated by Brunelleschi,
[end page 206]
Masaccio, and Donatello – so much so, that Alberti
did not include him in his directory of artists,
De Pictura. Precisely
this alienation attracted Artaud. One of his alter egos was Paul des Oiseaus,
Paul of the Birds (Uccello in Italian is a bird). He had birds in his soul, that
ever longed to be liberated. Like Uccello, Artaud had a psychosomatic, rather
Gnostic, dualism in his personality. He actually recognized in himself two
entities: one dominated by the Gnostic demiurgos, and therefore suspended in an
unbearable temporality, and the other in the mystical realm of the spirits
envisaged by Christian mystics like Jacob Böehme, Ruysbroeck, and San Juan de
la Cruz. He saw himself ever vacillating between these dualities, always within
the intersection of phenomena and not within them. Hence, he is mostly marginal
to both dualities and alienated from human groups and institutions, like his two
role models. Yet, the very suffering, the ostracism by the generalized others,
and the clashes with the stigmatizing and depriving groups may be sublimated
into profound creativity.
The relationship, however, between pain and creativity is not linear but
curvilinear. Some suffering may be enriching, but too much may break the artist,
which it actually did both to van Gogh and Artaud. Not only the bourgeoisie
rejects the "mad" outsiders, but society itself, aided by its
controlling agents, fights the "insane," creative innovators, and the
deviants which expand man’s limits of awareness and which widen their own, and
others’, normative being and conception of aesthetics. The bourgeois begrudges
the creative individuals for being creative, which he is not. Hence, he ever
pushes them in line and if they dare not comply, they pay dearly, with their
wellbeing, freedom, and sometimes with their very lives. Such agencies of social
control are the crows in van Gogh’s last painting, pumping dark lead into the
clouds and blood into the earth. Artaud’s main concern was his crusade against
the psychiatric establishment and its total institutions. He realized that
madness is culture-bound, yet he demanded to know what justified declaring van
Gogh insane and committing him to a mental institution – this in a world where
one eats vaginas cooked in green sauce, where around most of the globe anarchy
reigns supreme, and in the so-called orderly western world, government
corruption is rife, white-collar crime is the rule, and the bourgeoisie is as
dishonest and hypocritical as ever (
Artaud [1976]
1982
).
Per contra, all van Gogh did was to put his hand in the fire, as the most
ardent, indeed ultimate, manifestation of love for Kee Vos, his widowed cousin.
She, of course, interpreted it in her bourgeois fashion as violent madness. The
cutting of his ear lobe was a sacrificial offering to an estranged would-be
interlocutor who proved to be a traitor: Paul Gauguin. Van Gogh longed for an
"I-Thou" Buberian dialogue with him, whereas Gauguin intended it to be
an "I-It" manipulation. Van Gogh intended the sacrificial self
mutilation, like all sacrifices, to magically reverse the dire course of events
and induce Gauguin to stay in Arles in order to organize an artists’ commune,
with him as prophet, absolute ruler, and aesthetic pace-setter. The xenophobic
mob of Arles could never have surmised the mythogenic significance of van Gogh’s
act and demanded his commitment to a "mad house" where his brain would
be numbed with electroshocks. To "cure" a "madman" by
psychiatric drugs often means to stifle him into submission by conditioning
[end page 207]
him
like a Pavlovian dog or to singe his psyche into a zombie-like stupor, like
Orwell’s Winston in
1984, who was tortured into agreeing that two plus
two were five.
A society engaged in this kind of atrocity should be regarded as an
instrument of organized crime (
Artaud [1976] 1982
). Hence, Artaud preferred to
remain "sick" and not forfeit his superior lucidity, yet the
"total institution" and its repressive "treatment" exerted
its toll. Artaud entered the mental hospital with radiant eyes, glowing skin,
and the countenance of a god. After nine years he became a wrinkled old man with
hollow cheeks, a toothless mouth, and blank, opaque eyes. Artaud was the
authentic anti-psychiatric writer since he experienced the atrocities of the
mental asylum on himself, unlike Michel Foucault, R. D. Laing, and Thomas Szasz
who just wrote about them. Psychiatrists are the Orwellian "thought
police" curbing rebellious creativity (
Artaud [1976]
1982
). In order to
cache their impotence, psychiatrists invent ridiculous terminology, which
explains nothing and serves to further stigmatize, segregate, and alienate their
patients (
Artaud [1976] 1982
). Hence, the hospitals for the insane perpetuate
their inmates’ affliction, with the side effects of the "treatments"
being much worse then the original symptoms. The psychiatrists are the enemies
of their patients’ ingenuity, and their claim that their charges renounce
their unique individuality, which might well be the basis of their creative
innovation, is the most frequent cause of their suicidal despair (
Artaud [1976]
1982
). Artaud realized what more and more modern researchers and scholars have
been discovering: that mental illness is a concept of sickness generated by the
"poisoned tongues" of psychiatrists (
Artaud
1986
).
One must be desperately honest in one’s quest to examine one’s
ontological boundaries. Then madness could be instrumental. Insanity could widen
and deepen our consciousness, yet many times the mad pay the price of their
inner enlightenment by religious condemnation. The church, the rabbinate, and
the ulema do not intend to relinquish their monopoly of revelation through their
institutions; the madman’s "private" revelation is hence shunned and
condemned. Also, the psychiatrists wish to show their proficiency in
"curing" the insane by burning their brains in the process. However,
the only way to fight insanity is to be authentic and refuse to curb one’s
insights for the price of complacent well-being.
Artaud (
1986:7,
30
) goes a step farther than the Cartesian "
je pense,
donc je suis" by postulating: "
Je suis dans mon corps."
5
He thus expresses one of the most mind-boggling paradoxes of human existence:
why has my body been chosen to be the channel of cosmic awareness, and does
every human being feel the same, and how can this paradox be solved? Artaud was
most susceptible to solipsism since his eccentricity and deviance set him apart,
and the psychiatric drugs and electroshocks reduced his ability and desire to
communicate with his surroundings, an ability and desire which were meager to
begin with.
[end page 208]
THE SELF BY HIMSELF
Solipsism was reinforced from time immemorial by the fact that man felt
himself to be the direct and immediate channel of cosmic awareness. The fact
that other men also feel themselves to be the cognitive center of the universe
can only be inferred through hearsay, vicariously. There is no logical way to
disprove the patently megalomanic claims of the solipsist. Descartes and
Leibnitz did not find a logical way out of solipsism and had to recruit God to
extricate them from their quandary. Schopenhauer admitted his inability to
refute the arguments of the solipsist and in desperation suggested that he be
committed to a lunatic asylum. On one level, the trap of solipsism may be
avoided by postulating that all life forms have an inner awareness of the
holistic transcendence. On a deeper level, however, there is the question of why
the body – the interactive
Atzmi and the regulating
Iti – was
chosen to serve as a sole perceptive channel of the universe. This meta-dilemma,
the insoluble paradox of man’s relationship to transcendence, is a
metaphysical projection of man’s Sisyphean and Tantalic developmental prime
movers, which likewise drew their continuity from the inherent impossibility of
their fulfillment. This paradox supplies the transcendental push for the
developmental quest of a Sisyphus to control the object and of a Tantalus to
reach towards it. The core dialectics of Sisyphean quests and Tantalic longings
are thus cathected towards transcendence in the form of an insoluble paradox.
The logical "law of contradiction" does not seem to apply to this
paradox. The "I" who has been chosen to perceive the whole universe is
both a totality and a specific unity. Hence the paradox constitutes both an
"I" and a "not I," and yet is our metaphysical prime mover.
A possible solution to this dilemma may be in the fact that the law of
contradiction applies only to the separant vector and to its either/or,
computer-like binary application. The paradox, on the other hand, takes in both
the separant and participant vectors, which together constitute a
system-in-balance between the separant quest for being and the participant
longing for nothingness as wholeness. Thus, the law of contradiction in logic
becomes a special case of this paradox. The latter is more comprehensive once it
is based on the dialectics of the vectors inherent in the actual development of
personality (see
Shoham 1979
).
The relationship between the prime movers of the self and the transcendental
paradox is presented graphically in
Figure
One
. The self-object relationship is
fueled by the dialectics of the Tantalic longing and the Sisyphean quests, which
generate the core energy and prime movers of the self-object dyad and hence form
the thing-in-itself or the elusive, Kantean
ding-an-sich. The
self-transcendence dyad is sustained by the search for the solution to the
insoluble paradox of a cosmic awareness that flows to a specific body. Both
these relationships are close to the participant pole of the self interaction
(transcendence and object), whereas the transcendence-object relationship is
located on the separant pole of this interaction. The latter is also extraneous
to the self and thus constitutes its infernal other, its
Weidergeist or
demiurgos.
As the self and
demiurgos are separated and alienated from each other,
the separant, least-interest principle governs their relationship. Hence, if the
self’s quests are too apparent, the demiurgal least-interest principle is
liable to frustrate them. Man’s quest should not be overt but rather
clandestine and secret. This is ordained by the appearance of the light within
the mind, evading the hostile demiurgal archons. The whole of the Kabala
constitutes
Kochma Nisteret,
[end page 209]
the secret doctrine, while the Mishna says
that "abundance (plenty) be found only in things which the eye cannot
perceive,"
6
implying that the
demiurgos will strive to
control those things that are physically apparent and deprive man of them.
Kierkegaard also postulated that the apparent outside is falsehood, and truth is
clandestine. Conversely, the
demiurgos will try to make man’s fears and
apprehensions come true. Therefore, Rabbi Nachman of Brazlav’s principle
counsel to his followers was: "All of life is a narrow bridge but above all
one should not be afraid."
7
This could be interpreted as a
warning against divulging one’s fears to the
demiurgos in case he
causes them to come true as a macabre, self-fulfilling prophecy.
In Gnosis, solipsism is an attribute of the
demiurgos. In the
Hypostasis
of the Archons, Samael the chief archon (a synonym for the
demiurgos)
declares: "I am God, there is none [except] me." When he said this, he
sinned against the All, and reprimanded him, "you err Samael" (quoted
in
Foerster 1969
). Ialdbaoth, who in Gnosis represents the Creator-God, declares
his solipsism as follows: "I am Father and God and there is none above
me," to which his mother Sophia Prunikos replies: "Do not lie,
Ialdabaoth; there is above thee the father of all, the first Man and Man the Son
of Man" (quoted in
Jonas 2001
). The efforts of the
demiurgos to
present exclusivity are frustrated by the messengers of the light and even by
his own mother, attesting to the existence of the Godhead and his creatures. The
internalization of the suffering of the other, so that it is felt within our
inner self, is not only a basis for an existentialist system of morals but also
constitutes a direct inner-consciousness "proof" of the existence of
the other.
Solipsism in Judaism can be traced to Ecclesiastes (2:25), which says:
"For who can eat and who can feel except for me?" (The faulty and
erroneous King James translation is misleading). Here is the claim that only ego
can feel the world through his senses. The Talmus goes on to say: "Every
man should say that the world was created for Him"
8
Another
solipsistic statement is made in the Talmud about one of its sages, Hanina Ben
Dossa: "Each day a divine voice proclaims that all the world feeds itself
for my son Hanina."
9
This tradition is continued by Rabbi Ezra, the
thirteenth-century Spanish Kabbalist, who says: "Man is comprised of all
the spiritual entities… Man is comprised of all things and his soul is linked
to the Supernal Soul" (quoted in
Idel 1988
). A more solipsistic view is
expressed by the Kabalist Menachem Recanati who says: "Since man is
comprised of all the essences, his power is great and so is his perfection; when
he directs his intention and knowledge to draw downwards and cause the emanation
out of the ‘Nought of Thought’"(quoted in
Idel 1988
). Kordovero, the
sixteenth-century Safedean Kabbalist, states: "Wherever thou standest there
are all the worlds" (quoted in
Scholem 1987
). This solipsism was further
developed by Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav, the Hasidic sage whose doctrines were
largely based on Lurianic Kabala, who claimed that his self and the world were
one; hence, he could influence the decision making of the Russian Czar (
Green
1981
). The way out of this solipsism, as envisaged both by Kierkegaard and Rabbi
Nachman, lies in the internalization of an other’s pain and suffering within
ego’s inner self. This dynamic serves as a basis for a
[end page 210]
new existentialist
morality and, as I shall later elaborate, makes for a partial way out of
solipsism.
Indeed, solipsism, and the extrication from it, is a focal concern of
existentialism. Sartre succeeded partially in extricating his philosophy from
the solipsistic impasse by postulating a transcendental ego common to all beings
(
Sartre [1957] 1972
). In his metaphysical novelette
La Femme Adultere,
Camus (
1962
) describes with incomparable virtuosity how a young, dejected wife
discovers through an ecstatic revelation that her inner self and the spiritual
core of all life form and objects partake in a universal unity. Yet this solves
only part of the problem. Neither Sartre nor Camus dealt with the question of
why ego’s specific bio-psycho-social configuration was chosen to be the unique
channel of cosmic awareness. Kierkegaard, who was aware of the utility and force
of the problem, posited that this paradox of the choice of a given body serves
as the conduit for universal consciousness. This paradox is insoluble precisely
because, by interpolation, every individual has the same or a similar sense of
uniqueness and choice. Thus, this insoluble paradox becomes the basic motivation
for man’s metaphysical quests, supplementing his Tantalic longing and
Sisyphean searches, which interact dialectically as prime movers of his core
self. This may serve as a pragmatic experiential solution for solipsism, which
is at least more feasible than any
a priori search for a solution, which
invariably would end in a
cul-de-sac.
My solution for the dilemma of solipsism necessitates a unity of
transcendence. In fact, it constitutes a "proof" of a metaphysical
holism. Otherwise, we should be confronted with a "scandal" of the
multiplicity of consciousness and the absurdity of multiple solipsisms (
Merleau-Ponty
[1962] 1994
). Indeed, how could one account for the feeling of each psyche that
it has been chosen as the sole duct for the awareness of the universe, without
assuming that all life forms are hooked kaleidoscopically to a single
consciousness? As for the paradox of my bio-psycho-social configuration having
been chosen as the unique channel for cosmic awareness, it serves as our prime
motivation to search for a transcendental meaning to our existence. Moreover,
having extrapolated the existence of a unique transcendence from this paradox,
it might well be that each individual has been programmed to feel unique
vis-à-vis
the other. This is a simulation of the situation of a unique Godhead faced with
a
demiurgos. Whatever the purpose of the creation of an infinity of
different life forms and objects, our metaphysical programmer maximizes his
returns by ensuring an infinity of unique creatures faced by demiurgal others,
who thus become multiple images of their creator.
PAIN
Figure Two
recapitulates the triangle of prime movers. The dialectical core
quests are motivated by a lack – an insatiable Sisyphean hunger for domination
of the object and an unquenchable Tantalic thirst for a merger with it. The
metaphysical prime mover is man’s unattainable quest to solve the solipsistic
paradox. Finally, the relationship between the man-God-object triad and the
God-object dyad is one of self-other
[end page 211]
conflict and Godhead-
demiurgos
strife. If these three relationships are abstracted, there is lack, strife, and
frustration, which are perceived by the individual as varying in dosages and
kinds of pains. Hence, the universal emotive principle is pain. This was
expounded by Freud in his pleasure principle, according to which pleasure is the
reduction of frustration, irritation, and pain. Freud confined the pleasure
principle to intrapsychic dynamics, whereas here pain is regarded as governing
both the temporal and transcendental relationship of man. Moreover, our
programming in its remarkable ability to utilize a very limited number of
parameters – the four nucleotides of genetics, the two core personality
vectors – to control and activate creation, utilizes pain not only to activate
man but also to preserve him and regulate his relationships. Thus, pain guards
the organism against injury, it serves as a communicative medium, it prods man
to seek creativity and revelation, and, when internalized by ego, it forms a
basis for an existentialist system of ethics. In existentialism, this is marked
by the Heidegger's
angst und sorge and by Kierkegaard’s description of
human existence as characterized by "fear and trembling." Life is
visited by varying degrees of deprivational interaction, yet its motivating
efficiency is curvilinear. A moderate dosage of deprivational interaction prods
us to act and create, but too much of it crushes us under the Sisyphean stone or
the Tantalic rock, in the earlier version of the myth. One cannot create if
afflicted by unbearable agony. For revelation, one should "let pain
flower," as Kierkegaard counseled, but a crushing blow damns the flow of
grace and prevents it from reaching the victim.
Lack, pain, and frustration are ordained by the developmental phases of the
human child and adolescent. The fetus is accustomed to a soft, self-sufficient
coziness in the womb, only to be expelled into a world of changing temperatures,
hard surfaces, and erratic feeding and care by the breast-mother. In early
orality we feel an Edenic pantheistic togetherness with our surroundings, only
to be confined into the scar tissue of the ego boundary and the loneliness of
later orality. Within the family fold, the adolescent usually enjoys an
unconditional forgiveness for almost everything he says or does, until the
sacrificial rites of passage of the Isaac syndrome thrust him into the cruel
"rat race" of socioeconomic competition and full normative and legal
responsibility. The openness of the infant and the adolescent expectations of an
I-Thou encounter with his surroundings are usually frustrated and meet with an
I-It response. Hence, man’s relationship with his surroundings is
characterized by a deprivational interaction, interspersed with occasional
spells of grace. Mytho-empirically, this is represented by Acheron, the Greek
river of woe, surrounding hell. Man’s communication with his infernal others,
to extend Sartre’s metaphor, takes place through a flow of agony. Moreover,
man does not initially know that "hell is other people." On the
contrary! He is conditioned by previous developmental phases to expect a
welcoming and comforting other, only to have his innocence bruised, scarred,
raped by the I-It other. According to Lurianic Kabala, God also created the
world in order to give and to share his flowing grace. However, the breaking of
the vessels caused him to lose control over it and since then he has been
confronted by the
Sitra Achara – the
Weidergeist. Man in his
struggle with his infernal other thus reflects an image of God in his conflict
with the
demiurgos.
[end page 212]
The message here is unequivocal: man in pain reflects
a suffering God (Christ). Perfect theistic gods do not suffer. They make their
creatures suffer, either to entertain themselves like Roman Caesars watching the
throes of man and beast in the arena, or to partake vicariously in the joys and
sorrows of their creatures and thus extricate themselves from solitude in
eternity. The God of Gnosis, Kabala, as well as existentialism is a suffering
God, and hence imperfect and blemished. The Kabalist sphere of Keter, which is
an integral part of the Godhead, is denoted by the
Partzuf of
Arich
Anpin – literally "the long suffering" – while Kierkegaard’s
existentialist God is effectively involved in his creation through his suffering
son.
The suffering Christ on the Cross broadcasts an appeal for communication and
help on behalf of the blemished Godhead, and a maieutic message to man to seek
revelation. Thence, man has the choice whether to open or close himself to the
man-God’s cry of anguish. When this call of distress is felt within the inner
self, it represents the universal awareness of the Godhead. In Gnosis, the soul
was initially a part of the Godhead, but afterwards "she fell into a body
and came into this life, then she fell into the hands of the robbers." The
Gnosis "Exegesis on the Soul" continues like this:
And the insolent tossed her to one another and [defiled] her. Some used
her violently, other persuaded her by a deceitful gift. In brief, they
dishonored her. She [lost] her virginity, and played the harlot with her
body and gave herself to everyone. And the one to whom she adheres, she
thinks he is her husband. Whenever she gave herself to the insolent,
faithless adulterers that they might misuse her, then she sighed heavily and
repented. Again, when she turns her face away from these paramours she runs
to others, and they compel her to be with them and to serve them like the
lords on their couches. But from shame she no longer dares to forsake them.
But they deceive her for a long time [by behaving] in the manner of true and
genuine husbands, as if they honored her greatly, and at the end of all
these things they abandon her and go. But she becomes a poor deserted widow
who has no help – nor does she gain a hearing in her suffering; for she
has no benefit at all from them, except the defilements which they gave her
when they consorted with her. And those whom she bore by the adulterers are
deaf and blind and sickly, their heart is bemused. But when the Father who
is above in heaven visits her, and looks down upon her and sees her sighing,
with her passion and unseemliness, and repenting over her harlotry which she
has committed, and she begins to call upon his [na]me that he may help her,
[sighing] with all her heart and saying: "Deliver me, my father, for
behold, I will give account to [you], because I have forsaken my house and
have fled from my maiden chamber. Once again I turn to you" – when he
sees that she is of such a character, then will he resolve to make her
worthy that he take pity on her, for much pain has come upon her because she
abandoned her house (quoted in
Foerster 1969
).
[end
page 213]
The soul – the particle of Divinity – after falling into its demiurgal
body, was exploited, assaulted, raped, battered, manipulated, and manhandled;
yet the soul’s cry of anguish pierced the boundaries of history and reached
the Godhead.
In a like manner Isaac Yehuda Safrin, the nineteenth-century Hasid and
Kabalist, recounts his revelatory experiences. Because of their importance, I
shall quote them at length:
In 1845, on the 21st day of the Omer, I was in the town of
Dukla. I arrived there late at night, and it was dark and there was no one
to take me home, except for a tanner who came and took me into his house.
I wanted to pray
Ma’ariv and to count the Omer, but I was unable
to do it there, so I went to the Beit Midrash alone, and there I prayed
until midnight had passed. And I understood from this situation the plight
of the Shekhniah in exile, and Her suffering when She is standing in the
market of tanners. And I wept many times before the Lord of the world, out
of the depth of my heart, for the suffering of the Shekhinah. And through
my suffering and weeping, I fainted and I fell asleep for a while, and I
saw a vision of light, splendor and great brightness, in the image of a
virgin adorned with twenty-four ornaments… And she said: "Be
Strong, my son," etc. And I was suffering that I could not see but
the vision of her back and I was not worthy to receive her face. And I was
told that [this was because] I am alive, and it is written, "for no
man shall see me, and live….
It was his [R. Zevi Hirsch’s] custom regarding the matter of
holiness, to pray in order to bring upon himself a state of suffering,
uneasiness and affliction once every eve of Sabbath. This was done in
order to efface himself completely before the Sabbath, so as to be able to
receive His light, be He blessed, during the prayer and the meal of the
Sabbath [eve] with a pure, holy and clear heart. This was his custom
regarding the matter of holiness, due to his constant fear lest
arrogan
and
alien thoughts would enter his heart. Once, on the Feast of
Shavuot, hundreds of people crowded around him. Before the [morning]
prayer, with the [first] light of dawn, I entered one of his rooms, but he
did not see me, for he was pacing about the room to and fro, weeping and
causing heaven and earth to weep with him before God. And it is impossible
to write it down. And he humbled himself before God with a mighty weeping,
supplicating that he not be rejected from the light of His face… then I
was overcome by a great trembling, because of the awe of the Shekhinah,
and I opened the door and ran away (
Idel 1988:198
).
His weeping and suffering coincides with the crying and pain of the divine
presence – the
Schechina – and this brings about the revelatory
encounter between them. The pain Safrin radiated and the pain of the
Schechina
received by him made him a "flowing stream," a communicative current
of pain (
Idel 1988:85
). In his revelatory experiences
[end
page 214]
and his search for the
roots of his soul, Safrin was convinced that he was the Messiah, the son of
Joseph.
10
Indeed, his being a messiah was necessary for synchronizing
between the
Ani, the inner self, and the
Ayin, infinity, which
contains the same letters but in different order. The message here is that only
a messiah, a son of God, can serve as the mediator between the infinity (
Ayin)
of the Godhead and the historical self (
Ani). Only the man-God, who is
simultaneously both in history and outside it, can effect a union between the
Godhead and its particle (soul). Finally, Kierkegaard discusses the man-God’s
paradoxical "offense" of declaring himself to God (
Kierkegaard
1941
).
Yet through the common suffering of man and God, which coincides in the man-God,
the revelatory communion between man and God is made possible. Man suffering in
history cries from his inner self "out of the depths have I cried unto
thee, O Lord." (Psalms 130:1). This is reciprocated by the man-God’s
shriek of anguish:
"Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani?" Both cries of
pain are synchronized in Christ on the Cross. With him the suffering is
historical. The suffering of God and man integrates both history and eternity.
This is the feat accomplished by the revelatory leap of faith through the
communicative force of pain. A blemished, suffering God and man, in "fear
and trembling" in history can communicate within an ever-suffering Christ.
The savior’s kiss continuously seared the forehead of Dostoyevsky’s Grand
Inquisitor, as a painful communicative reminder of God’s presence in the here
and now. Camus’s judge-penitent’s refusal to heed the drowning girl’s cry
for help in
The Fall was the existentialist original sin because it
blocked the communication between man and transcendence. It prevented the
judge-penitent from feeling the suffering of the girl within his inner self and
communing with her by saving her. Her unanswered cry of anguish became a
free-floating scar that encapsulated both protagonists in their solipsistic
solitude.
An answered cry for help, on the other hand, extricates both man and God from
their impending solipsism. Indeed, Kierkegaard demonstrates how the crucifixion
in an eternal present crosses timelessness and history. The Gnostic messenger,
the Kabalist
Shechina, and Kierkegaard’s Christ, who differs radically
from the Son of God of institutionalized Christianity, pierce the walls of the
demiurgal tornado with their cries of anguish and reach the covert flow of grace
within the eye of the storm. Brel’s
Ne-me quitte pas, which is a
variation on the theme of separation anxieties, is absorbed into the innermost
selves of the audience, thus effecting a direct communication with the artist.
Bosch’s Christ transmits his suffering to St. Veronica, as symbolized by the
image of his face that was imprinted on the handkerchief with which she wiped
his face. Christ’s suffering radiates from his agonized yet graceful face –
stoically calm within the gaggle of vile, ugly, cruel, stupid, covetous,
violent, and debauched faces surrounding him – until it seems to reach the
innermost serenity of St. Veronica who contemplates Christ’s image on the
handkerchief. This seems to be visible only to her since she is attuned to the
pain emanating from the man-God. The poet Nelli Sacks imagined her pain
emanating from one of the stones of the Wailing Wall. Pierre Legendre, a world
renowned legal anthropologist, confessed to this author that
"sans le
malheur je me sentirais seul" (without suffering, I feel solitude). In
Greek, sympathy is literally
[end page 215]
"common suffering." Indeed, pain
extricates both man and transcendence from their ontological loneliness.
The communicative effect of pain was recognized by the sixteenth-century
Safedean Kabalists. Abraham Halevi Baruchim woke up every midnight and wandered
in the streets shrieking in a bitter voice: "Wake up to honor God – the
Shechina
is in exile, our temple is burnt down and the people of Israel are in great
trouble" (
Scholem 1987:144
). He saw in a vision the holy presence, dressed
in black and mourning near the Wailing Wall (
Scholem
1987:144
). The circle of
Lurianic Kabalists in Safed practiced the
Tikkun Rachel, which involved
the following behavior: "They took off their shoes, dressed their heads in
mourning and cried with all their might" (
Scholem
1987:144
). In this way
they partook in the suffering of the
Shechina. The suffering of man and
the pains of God coincide within the exiled holy presence. As for the effect of
tears as a communicative medium between man and God, Haim Vital says the
following:
When a person weeps and sheds tears for [the death of] a righteous man,
he also causes tears to be shed on high, and as we find it said, as it
were, of God [Himself]: "The Lord God of Hosts will call to weeping
and mourning" etc., [or] "my soul shall weep in secret"
etc., or as it is written: "Oh, that my head were waters [and my eyes
a fountain of tears]" – namely, that I long for the act of the
lower [entities], as by their weeping below, they cause "my head to
be as waters and my eyes a fountain of tears." May they do so, and
thereby I may also weep for my dead (
Idel 1988:198
).
Pain thus almost automatically effects a dialogue between man and God.
According to Kierkegaard, the crucified Jesus effects an
extasis, in
the Greek sense, from the sequences of time, and hence his pain is continuously
manifest in the perpetuity of the present (
Kierkegaard
1968:18-19
). The
suffering of Christ is also introjected by man as pertaining to his own daily
crucifixion. Thus, Christ pierces the imminent solipsism of man by partaking in
his suffering self-image. The shriek of a normatively sacrificed Isaac meets God’s
laments, sent to the innermost being of man through the tribulations of his son
on the Cross. The suffering of God as felt by man may break his heart, yet as
Nachman of Bratzlav taught: "There is nothing so whole as a broken
heart." The calvary of Christ radiates
Lacrimae Rerum into man, but
it also fills him with the
enthousiasmos (again in the Greek sense) of
grace.
Physical pain is the tool of the
demiurgos for guarding "his
property" – the body. Without the pain incidental to bodily injury,
disease, and death, most human beings and many other creatures would probably
take their own lives. The
demiurgos thus controls a built-in safety
mechanism to keep the inmates – exiled particles of divinity – incarcerated
in their temporal prison (i.e. the body). Without pain the souls would easily
destroy their prison body and revert back to their origin in the Godhead. The
demiurgal
ananke, the coercive cosmic forces, as well as evolution, also
avail themselves of pain in order to
[end page 216]
implement their aims. If one exceeds one’s
moira, one’s fate in life, the Furies strike with a vengeance in order
to push the deviants back into line. Those who do not fit the designs of
evolution are wiped painfully yet unceremoniously out of history. Suffering and
history are true phenomena, yet pain is also instrumental in jostling man out of
his complacency in his demiurgal body and his fear of eternity (death). Man’s
revolt against his demiurgal
ananke and
moira is thus prompted by
pain, and some suffering (though not too much) is also necessary for revelation
and creativity.
Dostoyevsky says that one should be worthy of one’s suffering. In our model
this would mean that one must first experience an impasse, a fall, a breaking of
the vessels, an exile, in order to embark subsequently on the rebellious road of
creativity and revelation. This is expressed by Kierkegaard as "letting the
pain flower" and represented by Rabbi Nachman’s seeking of hardship and
suffering in order to reach a higher rung of grace.
In existentialism, suffering, if it does not crush the protagonist, leads him
to a deeper insight into himself and into his relationships with his
surroundings and with transcendence. This is the professed reason for Rabbi
Nachman’s search for
Machloikess with his surroundings, a disagreement
or quarrel, in order to experience the cathartic pain and the suffering leading
to spiritual relation. "We begin to live," said Yeats in his
autobiography, "when we have conceived life as tragedy." As for
creativity, there is Damocles who never danced so well as under the sword
hanging over his head. A Celtic myth tells of a bird that thrusts itself on a
thorn in order to sing its most beautiful song. Ezra Pound wrote his most
powerful cantos after the "braves" of Pisa imprisoned him in a cage in
the marketplace to be laughed at and spat upon by the passers by.
The conception of Kierkegaard and Rabbi Nachman as to the cleansing value of
pain was shared by Kordovero who said: "Those who suffer willingly will be
cleansed and purified… until they become as clean and pure as silver (quoted
in
Scholem 1965:45
). Suffering is thus a precedent condition ordained by the
holy presence prior to salvation (
Scholem
1965
). In Mandaean Gnosis, suffering
and exposure to "destructive lions" and to the carnivorous dragon that
surrounds the world preceded the healing and deliverance of the human soul from
its demiurgal tribulations (
Foerster 1969:224
).
The suffering of the other, as internalized by the self, brings one first to
recognize his existence as a separate entity, and enables one to sympathize and
empathize with him. This nonverbal communication, which has to be reached
through dialogue, generates with the self a flow of grace that is shared (as
inferred epistemologically by the self) with the other. This is the essence of
Dr. Rieux’s feeling of grace when he treats the sick and tries to ease their
pain, although he knows that he can never vanquish the plague. In order for the
treatment of physical and mental ills to be authentic and hence effective, the
healer must empathize with a concrete sufferer and not with an abstract or
imaginary one. Many times people "identify" with the suffering of
actors in films or characters in novels, thus avoiding the need to identify with
real sufferers or help an actual person in pain. In a like manner, the Magid
Abraham Ben Eliezer preached that "a person cannot be aroused
[end page
217]
(morally and
authentically) by a book as he may be waken and aroused by actual crying and
bitter shrieks" (
Scholem 1987:243
).
Opening up to the suffering other is a prime communication dynamic that
extricates man from solipsism. It posits both healer and sufferer in the grace
of an authentic encounter within a present that becomes continuous, in that it
lends meaning outside sequential time both to the life of the helper and to that
of the person helped. Thus, Mother Theresa, treating the lepers of Calcutta, saw
in them the image of the suffering Son of God. This might lend a new
interpretation to St. John’s dictum: "For God so loved the world that he
gave his only Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have
everlasting life" (John 3:16). God needed communication with man about his
predicament and he needed man to effect a mending, a Kabalist
Tikkun,
through creativity and theurgic revelation. The
causa causans for the
sacrifice was, therefore, the crossing between time and eternity effected by the
crucifixion, so that the Godhead’s anguish outside of time would be heard and
heeded by man within history. As each human being or, for that matter, each
creature is epistemologically transcendental to ego, the feeling of the
suffering of the other and a readiness to respond to it is a dialogue with both
the transcendental and temporal Son of God. The covenant between the man-God and
God-man represented by any authentic dialogue is wrought by common suffering.
THE SOLIPSISM OF ARTAUD
The solipsism of Artaud was reinforced by his body-centered
Weltanschauung,
his belief that the human body, or rather his body, was the only ontological
reality. His inability and lack of desire to solve, at least for himself, the
paradox of solipsism led him to anoint himself the Bishop of Rodez; later as the
savior, he finally held the megalomanic view that he was the center of the
universe and that all Creation and its creatures were just marionettes playing
for him in a command performance.
Artaud's most ambitious goal was to reunite by somatic alchemy Man and Woman
into a self-sufficient hermaphrodite (
Artaud [1976]
1982
). Thence, the
solipsistic Artaud would not need to pursue the pain bearing love of another
person and the conflict-ridden sex between male and female, but would be a
self-satisfying Ouroboros. As for transcendence, Artaud professed a
one-upmanship on the dialectical concept of the Christian triunity and the
coincidentia
oppositorum of alchemy. His unity was completed by the annihilation of
multiplicity and the "big-crunch" like compression of all Creation
into the potential of timeless, spaceless singularity (
Artaud [1976]
1982:69-105
). Artaud was certainly an existentialist in his conception of life,
of being thrown unto death with fear and anxiety. This anxiety was both somatic
and spiritual. He could remember it, since he was sick with meningitis at the
age of five. He writes:
Je me souviens depuis l’âge de huit ans et même avant, m’être
toujours demandé qui j’étais, ce que j’étais et pourquoi vivre…
Je me demandais
[end page 218]
pouquoi j’étais là – et ce que c’était d’être
là et en quoi la question se pose et pourquoi se poser la question d’être
ou de n’être pas, lorsqu’on vit et qu’on est là… Je me demande
ce qui est Moi, non pas moi au milieu de mon corps… mais en quoi peut
consister ce moi qu se sent ce qu’on appelle être, être un être parce
que j’ai un corps? M. habitude, M. nausé, M. manie, M. dégoût, M.
crampe, M. vertige, M. fessée, M. calottes vont de pair avec M. insurgé,
M. réponse, M. larmes, M. suffoqué dans une âme scandalisée – pour
composer un moi d’enfant, une conscience petite entant, la conscience d’un
petit enfant (Artaud 1986:187).
11
He did, however, carry out a phenomenological reduction of both life and
death, and psychoanalyzed himself out of his fear of them. He followed his
alter-ego – Paolo Uccello, or as he called him in his writings, Paul of the
Birds – in what he imagined the master to have had done: He traced all the
paths of his thoughts within his body. Thence, he lived towards his death
without pain, with a slow disintegration parallel to the entropy of his body (
Artaud
1986:31
). His choice manner, however, of rebelling against death was creativity.
Like van Gogh’s painting, Artaud’s writing was an affront to death. Art and
life were synonymous. For him authentic art was not for entertainment; rather,
it must lend meaning to the life of the artist and, through him, to others who
open up to his creativity. Above all, art is not an ego-trip for applause and
recognition, but a means for dialogue, for fusion with other human beings, for
feeling their body and soul, for permitting them to breath and tremble in unison
with the artist (
Artaud 1986:190
). One also lifts oneself by authentic art onto
synchronicity, to partake of the authentic domain, where all authentic art is
stored forever, for exposure to kindred souls attuned to the artist.
"Madness" for Artaud was a means to widen and deepen his consciousness
until it soared to the Authentic Domain in transcendence (
Artaud
1986:186
).
"
Il n’y a pas d’autre issue a la pensée pure que la mort,"
12
said Artaud (
1986:38
), and he thus revealed himself as an existentialist: a
companion to Heidegger, who saw being as a
Geworfenheit zum Tod mit Angst und
Sorge, and to Camus, who regarded the dilemma whether to commit suicide or
not as the most important issue in philosophy. He was not afraid of death since
love and its sublimation into creativity confronts and thwarts the apprehension
of death (
Artaud 1986
).
A revelation induced "madness" can lead to conflict between the
artist’s new consciousness and its previous state. Yet, this changed
consciousness may be the basis for innovative creativity, and the triggered
revelation may well be the foundation of a deeper and richer art. Hence,
revelation is an energizing dialectic for creativity. Still, the relationship
between madness and creativity, as we have stated, is not linear but rather
curvilinear. Some madness may induce the widening of consciousness and fuel
revelations, which would feed creativity, but an excessive madness could be an
alternative to creativity, leading to autism, solipsism, and self-destruction;
this actually happened to both van Gogh and Artaud. Van Gogh went mad only when
he could not paint any more, but Artaud chose to renounce creativity for
madness, which he believed
[end page 219]
would expand his realm of consciousness and inner
awareness. However, he paid a price. He swallowed his tongue, so to speak (
Artaud
1986:163
). He forfeited reason and logic, and when he tried to communicate again
in the catastrophic theater hall encounter with his friends, all he could emit
were blood-curdling shrieks, which were incomprehensible, embarrassing, and
harassing to his audience. As for van Gogh, Artaud described his last painting,
Wheat
Field and Crows, in the most heartbreaking of metaphors. Since van Gogh knew
already that he would commit suicide shortly, the crows were carrying away the
evil that could not touch him anymore. Indeed, the crows were running away since
down there, on the bloodstained earth, is death, and the low skies are equally
ominous. The blood that flows from van Gogh’s gunshot wound lent the bloody
tonus to the earth, and the dim light was already leaving the field dirty with a
mixture of putrid wine and blood.
Artaud’s most interesting innovation is mytho-empirical, surrealist and
ideational; it is related to his identification with Paolo Uccello, whose fresco
of Noah’s Ark depicts it as a refuge for the mad, the deviant, and the pariah.
A
stultifera navis in the synchronic Authentic Domain outside history.
This Noah’s Ark contains the authentic reservoir by mythogenes of creativity
stored in synchronicity, and waiting for the "right conditions and
opportunities" to land back into history and fructify the wastelands. Mytho-empirically,
this Noah’s Ark is a structured limbo between the hell of history and timeless
paradise. The raven belongs to the powers of demiurgal evil. When released, it
did not come back. The dove came back with an olive branch – a creative
mythogenic symbol of an I-Thou dialogue with history. Also, the Midrash points
out that Noah, before coming out of the ark, forced the hand of God and squeezed
out of him a promise that he would not be molested when emerging from the ark to
resettle within history. Hence, the creative innovators, shunned and persecuted
in their lifetimes, would bequeath their creations back into history only when
the artistic power cliques and establishments did not interfere.
The process of relegating authentic creativity onto the Authentic Domain
within the mytho-empirical Noah’s Ark starts with the mythogenes of longing
and experience, which "lift" the work of art onto timeless
synchronicity. This is the artistic mythification of reality, lending
metaphysical significance to history. This is very much like the Hassidic
"worship in the concrete," which sanctifies profane reality. Artaud
understood that life can gain meaning, if at all, through
coincidentia
oppsitorum by means of art. The "philosophers’s stone" of
alchemy is the artistic achievement which transforms the commonplace into an
artistic triumph. Indeed, Artaud himself longs to partake of the transcendental
Noah’s Ark by a "
denudation epidermique" and an emergence
from his ego boundary, which is clinically known as one of the manifestations of
autistic schizophrenia.
The ontology in Noah’s Ark does not need verbal communication. It is the
mytho-empirical projection of pantheistic early orality, or rather the
metaphysical womb of the structured Authentic Domain. It stores the seeds of art
and culture to disseminate again
[end page 220]
the atrophied, degenerate, or corrupt cultures,
wiped out as dysfunctional by the pitiless decree of evolution. Artaud existed
in the spiritual ark, away from and beyond his historical body. He escaped the
drudgery of daily life and exchanged it for the moratorium of madness. His Noah’s
Ark was a place of deliverance from infernal history. It was a delving into the
"mystical orchard" from which one may not reemerge. Artaud remained in
Noah’s Ark, never returning, until his suicide.
Noah’s Ark was believed by some church fathers, notably Origen, Tertulian,
and Augustine, to be a permanent haven designated by divine wisdom to save
humanity from periodic disasters, which could not have been prevented by the
good God. This rather Manichean and Gnostic approach may have influenced Uccello,
who depicts Noah’s Ark as filled – contrary to the Scriptures – mostly
with sick, mutilated, and dejected humans, and led by an authoritarian, majestic
figure standing as if at the helm of a ship, who was in all probability the
image of Augustine himself (
Borsi and Borsi 1994:185-187
). Noah’s Ark, as a
cosmic place of refuge encapsuled outside of time, was adopted and elaborated by
Artaud, replete with a psychotic identification with Uccello. Uccello, the bird,
felt himself transformed into synchronicity outside reality. He became a Noah
saved from temporality (
Artaud 1986:39
).
Artaud was not alone in Noah’s Ark, but was flanked by the luminaries of
the Italian Baroque: Donatello and Brunelleschi (
Artaud
1986:26
). These creative
innovators, together with many others, indeed countless others since the
capacity of a timeless and spaceless capsule is infinite, cruise eternally
outside history, seeking the proper recipients of the endless varieties of
creative mythogenes stored in the Authentic Domain of Noah’s Ark. The landing
of the mythogenic dove onto a historical time and place depends on background
factors hospitable to the seedling mythogenes, enabling them to take root on
their new host. Of special importance was Uccello’s portrayal of Noah’s Ark
as a haven for deviants, contrary to the Darwinian conception of the
evolutionary selection of the fittest. This is in line with the hypothesis
hinted at by Artaud, and developed by us in the present paper, about the link
between deviance and creative innovation. If indeed the outcasts, the pariahs,
have a greater chance to see things differently, both materially and
aesthetically, and hence to innovate, the admittance of the socially divergent
into Noah’s Ark is evolutionarily functional for creativity and innovation.
Hence, the historical
stultifera navis, which was the total institutional
solution for the incarceration, indeed the elimination, of deviants, sinners,
and insane people of medieval communities, was mytho-empirically transformed
into Noah’s Ark, the ahistorical refuge of the mythogenic structures of
creative innovations.
Madness for Artaud was a means of extricating himself out of history and onto
synchronicity, the atemporal refuge of Noah’s Ark. There, with the mythogenic
innovations of the nonconformist, stigmatized, and inspired madman, he would be
stored in cultural limbo, outside history, until the olive branch in the beak of
the dove signified it was time for his innovations to land back into history,
where they would be welcome and accepted, not rejected and ignored as before.
Noah’s Ark is the mytho-empirical
[end page 221]
storage of the great innovations in art and
science, which were liable to "rock the boat," to upset the cultural
system in their time. Hence, Noah’s Ark is the mytho-empirical projection of
the Authentic Domain and serves as a storage for extreme innovations; when the
time comes for the acceptance of these innovations, they will enter the more
favorable atmosphere and be readily accepted by the artistic and cultural
institutions.
ENDNOTES
*
Direct correspondence to Professor Shlomo Shoham, Tel Aviv University,
Faculty of Law, Rmat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel 69978 (email:
shoham@post.tau.ac.il
).
1
. "What is an authentic deviant? It's a person who preferred becoming
mad in the social sense in order not to forfeit a certain superior idea of human
dignity" [Translation prepared by the author].
2
. "But there is somebody who always loved me for the good that was in
me. Not only in my body but also in my soul. This somebody is called God and Jesus Christ. All the priests had always had great tenderness for my devotion and my piety. I didn't know this but it dawned on me that all the masses in the world have been performed for my piety" [Translation prepared by the
author].
3
. "A letter from the 7th of April 1928. My solitude has no name and no
sense and it doubles from the horror of thinking that I have always been by myself and that my life has never been complete and I have always been a stranger to myself" [Translation prepared by the author].
4
. "Those who told him one day: and now, enough with you van Gogh, to
the grave, we have had enough of your genius, as for eternity, it's for us
eternity" [Translation prepared by the author].
5
. "I am in my body" [Translation prepared by the author].
6.
Talmud Ta’anit, 17.
7.
The core of Rabi Nachman’s doctrine is based on Lurianic Kabala and
hence is relevant to this contest.
8.
Talmud Sanhedrin, 37, side A.
9
. Talmud Ta’anit, 24, side A.
10.
.J.I. Safrin, Megillat Setarim (1994). Zohair Hai; p.1; Side B.
[end page 222]
11
. "I remember from the age of eight, and even before that, asking
myself always who I was, what I was I and why go on living. . . I asked myself
why I was there – why being there and what was it being there and on what one
poses the question and why pose the question of being or not being since one
lives and one is there. . . I am asking myself who is me and what is not me
within my body. . . But what consists this me, what does it feel what one calls
being, to be a being because one has a body? Me habit, me nausea, me manic, me
disgusting, me cramps, me vertigo, me shitty, me docile which goes together with
me rebellious, me answering, me tears, me stifled in a scandalized soul – to
compose a me of a child, a conscience of a small child, a small conscience of a
child" [Translation prepared by the author].
12
. "There is no other issue to the purity of thought beside death"
[Translation prepared by the author].
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[end page 224]
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