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Robots and Mommys
Posted by homoludo on Nov 20 2007
Posted by homoludo on November 20th, 2007 filed in artaud, difference, music, theatre, writing
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In the 1940’s a Artaud, a French actor/poet and schizoanalytic philosopher wrote a piece called On Balinese Theatre.
In it he speculates on music.
“There is also the broad, pounding rhythm of the music-an extremely insistent, droning, and fragile music, in which the most precious metals seem to be ground, in which springs of water seem to gush up as if in their natural state, and armies of insects march through vegetation, in which one seems to hear captured the very sound of light, in which the sound of deep solitudes seems to be reduced to flights of crystals, etc., etc…
…all these gestures, these angular and abruptly broken attitudes, these syncopated modulations formed at the back of the throat, these musical phrases that break off short, these flappings of insect wings, these rustlings of branches, these sounds of hollow drums, these creaking of robots, these dances of animated puppets,..
“the most compelling correspondences are constantly fusing sight with sound, intellect with sensibility, the gesture of a character with the evocation of the movements of a plant, across the scream of an instrument. The sighing of a wind instrument prolongs the vibrations of vocal chords with such a sense of identity that one cannot tell whether it is the voice itself that is being sustained or the senses that have absorbed the voice from the beginning. A frolicking of joints, the musical angle which the arm makes with the forearm, a foot that falls, a knee that bends, fingers that seem to fly off the hand-all this is like a perpetual play of mirrors in which the parts of the human body seem to send each other echoes, musical phrases, in which the notes of the orchestra, the whispers of the wind instruments evoke the idea of a violent aviary where the actors themselves provide the beating wings.
“…the infinitely varied modulations of the voice, in that downpour of sound, as of a vast forest dripping and coming to life”
Some background- In 1937 Artaud came to De Valera’s Ireland on his return from Mexico.
There he had kicked his heroin habit; he was in the land of the Tarahumaras and couldn’t get any. This may have been part of his purpose. There he took peyote with the Tarahumaras Indians, had many interesting visions and adventrues and returned to France.
Back in Paris he had a staff of knotted wood he believed to have belonged to Lucifer, Jesus and St Patrick. Moral fellow that he was, he decided to bring it back and give it to the Irish people. The staff of St Patrick was a religious, sexual and artistic totem for Artaud and his purpose may have been to research the staff. Ireland was also the recent site of the 31st Eucharistic Congress, the Catholic Church’s big international do.
Artaud in ‘Joan of Arc’
He came through Dublin and went west. Remember this was a time in Ireland when membership of Communist organisations was a mortal sin.
Once in Galway, he got into various scrapes; a fight over non payment of rent in the Aran islands, baricaded himself in a guest house( I picture the landlady trying to deal with the ranting paranoid visionary), tried to storm a Jesuit house and finally spent a week in jail before being deported back to an assylum in France, where he spent most of his remaining years. Here he was treated by Jaques Lacan the father of modern philosophic psychoanalysis.
This is the type of racket his landlady would of heard. (From his banned radio play to ‘to be done with the judgement of God’ ubuweb)
This is a postcard he wrote from Eyre Square.
For me the story has everything; insanity, theatre, drugs, music, puppets, philosophy and farce in 1930’s Ireland and is the basis for my projected dub opera.
Oh yeah the mommy reference is to a famous quote from him “no mommy-pappy me”, which was his way of saying he way trying to escape the Oedipus complex. He’s also famous for his concept of the Body-Without-Organs. The person who posts the best 100 word explanation of which gets a free Cd.