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Preface: Once Upon a Time, Not Long Ago, O . . .

Artaud Speaks:

When O was a young girl, above all she wanted a man to take care of her.

In her dream, the city was the repository of all dreams.

A city that was always decaying. In the center of this city, her father had hung himself.

This can’t be true, O thought, because I’ve never had a father.

In her dream, she searched for her father.

She knew that it was a dumb thing for her to do because he was dead.

Since she wasn’t dumb, O thought, she must be trying to find him so that she could escape from the house in which she was living, which was run by a woman.

O went to a private detective. He called O a dame.

“I’m looking for my father.”

The private eye, who in one reality was a friend of O’s, replied that the case was an easy one.

O liked that she was easy.

And so they began. First, according to his instructions, O told him all that she knew about the mystery. It took her several days to recount all the details.

At that time it was summertime in Dallas. All yellow.

O didn’t remember anything in or about the first period. Of her childhood.

After not remembering, she remembered the jewels. When her mother had died, a jewel case had been opened. The case, consisting of one tray, had insides of red velvet. O knew that this was also her mother’s cunt.

O was given a jewel which was green.

O didn’t know where that jewel was now. What had happened to it. Here was the mystery of which she had spoken.

The private eye pursued the matter. A couple of days later, he came up with her father’s name.

“Oli.”

The name meant nothing to her.

“Your father’s name is Oli. Furthermore, your father killed your mother.”

That’s possible, O thought, as if thinking was dismissing.

The detective continued to give her details about her father: he was from Iowa and of Danish blood.

All of this could be true because what could she in all possibility know?

When O woke up out of her insane dream, she remembered that her mother had died eight days before Christmas. Despite the note lying beside the dead body in which the location of the family’s white poodle was revealed, the cops were convinced that the mother had been murdered. By a man unknown. Since it was now Christmas, these cops had no intention of investigating a murder when they could be returning to their families, Christmas warmth, and holiday.

O realized, for the first time in her life, that her father could have murdered her mother. According to the only member of her father’s family she had ever met, a roly-poly first cousin whose daughter picked up Bowery bums for sexual purposes (according to him), her father had murdered someone who had been trespassing on his yacht.

Then, her father had disappeared.

O became scared. If her father had killed her mother, he could slaughter her. Perhaps that’s what her life had been about.

During this period of time, O lived and stayed alive by dreaming. One of the reveries concerned the most evil man in the world.

It was at a fancy resort that was located in the country, far from the city: O stood on one of the stony platforms or giant records that jutted out of a huge cliff. Shrubbery was growing out of parts of the rock. Each record lay directly over and under another record, except for the top and the bottom. The one on which O perched thrust farther than the others into a sky that was empty, for this record was a stage.

In the first act of this play, O learned that evil had entered the land. That the father, who was equivalent to evil, was successfully stealing or appropriating his son’s possessions. Both of them were standing behind O. Then, the father began to torture his son. He inflicted pain physically. O actually saw this older man point three different machine guns at her. Each of them was different. O understood that he wanted to scare, rather than shoot, her.

He laughed. And then disappeared.

O hated him more than it was possible to hate anyone.

Either the next day or some days later, the young woman began to search for the older man. She and his son were partners, co-mercenaries, in this venture; in fact, it was the son who taught O that to be a successful detective, one has to get rid of fear.

For some reason unknown to O, she was always frightened of people.

The father left one clue to his whereabouts. DN.

Nobody seemed to know whether DN was the initials of someone, of something, whether the letters were part of a language no human could understand. O and the son believed that DN was the name of a coffee joint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . They entered a deserted western town. The coffee joint they found in the loneliness, whose name was a street, within all the yellow, didn’t have a name . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . They traveled to a ranch. The main building, which at first they didn’t notice because it wasn’t noticeable, was one-story, white peeling paint. In its right side, a cafe-in-the-wall.

A girl was feeding her dog-horse, ‘cause it was as large as a large horse, a plate of raw hamburger. She used to be married to the son; now she was living on this ranch and happy.

This is the second clue.

One didn’t need to find any more because the man for whom she had been looking walked right up to her. In all that openness, there was no one but those two. O realized that all that had happened to her had happened only because she was attracted to this man. To this father. And she hated him because he was violent.

It was at this point that O began to teach him how to change violence into pleasure.

Now O decided that she wanted to go where she had never been before:

O Speaks:

The revolution had yet to begin in China. At that time, the word revolution meant nothing to us because the same governments owned everything. There seemed nowhere left to go. All of my friends, including me, before we reached old age, were dying and, until we died, living in ways that were unbearable because that’s what living was. Unbearable.

I had no interest in politics.

I had come to China as I usually came: I had been following a guy.

I had believed we were in love.

It didn’t matter, the name of this unknown city to which I came. All the unknown cities, in China, held slums that looked exactly like each other: each one a labyrinth, a dream, in which streets wound into streets which disappeared in more streets and every street went nowhere. For every sign had disappeared.

The poor ate whatever they could put their hands on.

Right before the revolution, the Chinese government told its people that the recession was over. This lie made the poor unable to distinguish between economic viability and disability. Some of them walked around with needles sticking out of their bodies.

Many of the women were whoring for money.

W, my boyfriend, said that if I loved him, I would whore for him. I knew that W got off on women who were prostitutes. I didn’t know whether or not he had deep feelings for me and, if so, what those feelings were. I used to wonder, again and again, why I ran after men who didn’t care for me.

It was my mother, not my father, who dominated my waking life. When she was alive, my mother didn’t notice or, if she had to, hated me. She wanted me to be nothing, or something worse, because my appearance in her womb, not yet in the world, caused her husband to leave her. So my mother, who was ravishingly beautiful, charming, and a liar, had told me. While she was alive.

Absence isn’t the name of the father only.

Every whorehouse is childhood.

The one in which W placed me was named Ange.

Outside the whorehouse, men fear women who are beautiful and run away from them; a ravishing woman who’s with a man must bear a scar that isn’t physical. My mother was weak in this way; her weakness turned into my fate.

Inside the brothel, the women, however they actually look, are always beautiful to men. Because they fulfill their fantasies. In this way, what was known as the male regime, in the territory named women’s bodies, separated its reason from its fantasy.

Since I was the only white girl in this brothel, the others there, including the Madam, who had once been a male, hated me. They sneered at my characteristics, such as my politeness. What they really detested was that economic necessity hadn’t driven me into prostitution. To them, the word love had no meaning. But I didn’t become a whore because I loved W so much I’d do anything for him. Anything to convince him to love me. A love I was beginning to know I would never receive. I entered the brothel of my own free will, so that I could become nothing, because, I believed, only when I was nothing would I begin to see.

I had no idea what I was doing.

When I entered the house, Madam took away all of my possessions, even my tiny black reading glasses. It was as if she was a prison matron. She said that, because I was white, I thought that I deserved to possess commodities. Such as happiness. That I was too pale, too delicate to be able to bear living in this place.

The other girls thought that I could leave the cathouse whenever I wanted.

But I couldn’t walk away, because inside the whorehouse I was nobody. There was nobody to walk away.

I was now a child: if I ridded myself of childhood, there would be nothing left of me.

Later on, the girls would accept me as a whore. Then I would start to wish that I loved a man who loved me.

There were many prescients in the slum. The whores, in their spare hours, visited these fortune-tellers. Though I soon started accompanying my friends, I was too scared to say anything to these women, most of whom had once been in the business. I would stand in the shadows and rarely ask anything, for I didn’t want to confess anything about myself. When I, at last, did inquire about a future, I asked as if there were no such thing. I felt safe knowing only the details of daily life, johns and defecations, all that was a dream.

As if dreams couldn’t be real.

Fortune-tellers wandered around the streets outside Ange.

The one fortune, mine, which I remember, was based on the card of the Hanged Man:

The woman who was reading the cards still took tricks.

“Does that mean that I’m going to suicide?” I asked.

“Oh, no, O. This card says that you’re a dead person who’s alive. You’re a zombie.”

But I knew better. I knew that the Hanged Man, or Gérard de Nerval, was my father and every man I fucked was him.

My father was the owner of Death, of the cathouse. Sitting in his realm of absence, he surveyed all that wasn’t.

The cards showed me clearly that I hated him. When a message travels from the invisible to the visible world, that messenger is emotion. My anger, a messenger, would lead to revolution. Revolutions are dangerous to everyone.

But the cards said worse. They told us, the whores, that the revolution, which was just about to happen, had to fail, due to its own nature or origin. As soon as it failed, as soon as sovereignty, be it reigning or revolutionary, disappeared, as soon as sovereignty ate its own head as if it were a snake, when the streets turned to poverty and decay, but a different poverty and decay, all my dreams, which were me, would be shattered.

“And then,” the fortune-teller said, “you’ll find yourself on a pirate ship.”

The cards that I remember told me that my future is freedom.

“But what’ll I do when there’s no one in the world who loves me? When all existence is only freedom?”

The cards proceeded to show images of stress, illness, disease . . .

1 had been in the cathouse for a month. W hadn’t once visited me, for he had never cared about me.

I was a whore because I was alone.

The fortune-teller had told me that I would be 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,” 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:

Everywhere he went, Nerval would 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.