Dark poet, the breast of a virgin
haunts you,
bitter poet, life boils
and the city burns,
and the sky sucks up its rain,
your pen scratches at the heart of life.

Forest, forest, eyes swarm
over the multiple pine seeds;
hair of the storm, poets
ride off on horses, on dogs.

Eyes rage, tongues curl,
the sky rushes into nostrils
like a nourishing blue milk;
women, hard vinegar hearts,
I am hanging from your mouths.

—Antonin Artaud

The tree and its rustling 
forest somber with summons with cries 
eats the dark heart of the night. 

Vinegar and milk, the sky, the sea, 
the dense mass of the firmament, 
everything’s conspiring this trembling 
that lurks in the dense heart of shadow. 

A heart that’s had it, a hard star 
split in two and bursting in the sky, 
the limpid sky that cracks 
at the summons of the pealing sun, 
makes the same sound, makes the same sound 
as the night and the tree in the center of the wind.

from Artaud Anthology

from Artaud Anthology

from Artaud Anthology

Antonin Artaud by Georges Pastier (1947)

Antonin Artaud
In Theory, Process and Praxis or, for Fun and Prophet

The Seashell and the Clergyman, 1927
by Germaine Dulac
screenplay by Antonin Artaud

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

“The Seashell and the Clergyman penetrates the skin of material reality and plunges the viewer into an unstable landscape where the image cannot be trusted. Remarkably, Artaud not only subverts the physical, surface image, but also its interconnection with other images. The result is a complex, multi-layered film, so semiotically unstable that images dissolve into one another both visually and ‘semantically’, truly investing in film’s ability to act upon the subconscious.”

Lee Jamieson