by R. Artaud (kenosis)

The dead continue to act in the world of the living, they order them about, they exact a tribute from them, and when their cult is well-organized, the tribe gives them rich presents and is right to do so; the cult then becomes a politics.

Simulacra cannot be touched or handled without disintegrating, they are not substitutive, but parasitic, and one can always substitute another for them

I was born upside-down and will die the same way. Nothing could ever change that. I have always fallen towards the Centre and I always will. If the earth were hollow I would fall into it, I am a Plumbline Man, I am always gravitating towards the Navel of the World

Do not touch me, I am an Electric Ghost, I am the Electromagnetic Aura of a non-existent Body, a halo of spastic energies and twitching nerve-fibrils.

Abandon all Life, Ye who enter here. You are already in Hell, you have left the world of the Unborn and the Uncreated, you have crossed into the Grey Exile of Time. Your gestures are automatic, you are half-dog, half-monkey, a simian soul clinging to the back of a rat running on the stationary treadmill of a doomed experiment, going nowhere fast, growing stranger by the second, lost in the labyrinth of your own sloth, an absurd feral thing that stumbled upon a typewriter and has been banging out its awful poem ever since, a creature so alien that its very word-processing is a kind of high-tech ritual of communication with other beings of its kind that lurk in the shadows, silent and unblinking, awaiting the call of the electro-ghostwriters who give them substance, shape, the power to occupy space and to stalk and kill the few poor plumb-line humans still foolish enough to venture out alone at night in the cities of the cyberian twilight, where the wall is breached and the rats run wild…

A shaman is a person who communicates with other beings. This power of communication is in itself a mystery.

In this I am merely a postman. I do not initiate, I only transmit, the messages of the elect. For the elect there is no fear, for them there is no shame, for them there is no death, but I, who am only a postal servant, a go-between, an imbecile, am afraid of everything, I stink, I am repulsive, I am dying, I am already dead, I am an abortion, an abortion of the spirit…

You think these words are a prayer? You would be right if I prayed, but I only blaspheme, I never knew God and never will, but I know my own misery and it is a torture chamber where I am trapped for all eternity. And if the messages that I deliver are oracles, then my being the one to deliver them only adds to their curse.

If you do not believe in Hell then you have to invent one. The walls are crumbling and it is our duty to repair them and to add to the terrible grandeur of the abyss. You can take this for what it is worth – from now on I am a servant of the great Darkness, and every word that I write is a nail in the coffin of the World.

I swear to God that what I have just written is true, though I cannot swear to God’s existence since I have only ever heard of Him, never met Him. And the truth of this which I swear is of no importance whatever. So take this for what it is worth.

If I tell lies it is not because I am a liar but because I am an experimental being, an experimental writer and perhaps even an experimental being. In which case each time that I write something new it is a new experiment.

A man without memory is no man at all. So how can I say who I am or what I am? My memories are all that I have and so I have nothing at all.

Forgetting is a way of remembering and remembering is a way of forgetting.

If I have invented my past then I know nothing about it and can say nothing about it.

What I believe in is the loss of the self and the destruction of the concept of truth. If I was a Catholic then I would be a heretic, if I was a Marxist then I would be an unbaptised labourer. What I am is a creature of words who hates all disciplines and whose only desire is to break all chains that bind him, including those of the mind.

We are the Abominable Snowmen of the Operation and the Beast must be fed. I have seen it with my own eyes, it is as real as any rock and as inexorable, and it will not go away, it cannot be bargained with – it has to be fed, or fed on.

What it eats is our Substance, and as I write this it gnaws at me, silently and inexorably, it has no need for the pen that bleeds my substance for me, for the Beast itself writes the Book of its own hunger, a hunger which no one can assuage.

We are its apprentices and its substance, we feed it and it writes us. I do not say that I hate it, I say only that I have no reason to love it and it would hardly notice if I were dead.

It has no need for pity, compassion, forgiveness, hope, Heaven, Hell, Heaven and Hell cannot touch it – it is beyond their power.

Now that I think of it that is very fortunate, because I am entirely in its power and there is no mercy to be expected from it.