Antonin Artaud Writes About The Artist Vincent Van Gogh Poem by Santiago Mutis Durán

How to write letters to the dead
How to awaken them how to feel
their luminous breathing and the gold
of their outraged warm turbulent blood
Two souls that are burnt
in love, in the intelligence
Two glowing firebrands - alive - in the darkness

An orchard, a garden under the light of God
and a body that falls in the vertigo of His absence

Antonin Artaud has written a book about Vincent van Gogh
For years I hid it without reading it
like an amulet
It is bewildering and natural
and also outrageous
Natural, because it advances with the strength
- plentiful and difficult - of truth
Outrageous, for the same reason
Artaud says
all that is necessary to know about Van Gogh
to feel alive the spring of his soul
the incandescent transparency of his prayer
the impossible purity
of his limits of his inexistent frontiers with the world
The book is much more than perfect
it is the only honest lesson that man
can bequeath us
It is not an essay nor art criticism
nor literature
it simply takes up its place
displaces it - says Pellegrini
It is not possible to be more clear more direct more fruitful.
It is not possible to love more.
Artaud wrathfully defends
the flame that lives in Van Gogh
against the cruelty that saves nothing
against the presumptuous psychiatry - cold
and brutal - because he believes normal the surrender
and the decline
because it is tolerant and ambiguous
paternalistic and cowardly and a dark spot
and without genius without ardent nobility
without delirious love
for those who cannot hold back their tears
facing the horror or paradise
Against all that is inhuman Artaud stands up angrily
lucid diaphanous turbulent
like water boiling
Wise and serene he says about Van Gogh - my friend -
'he gave back the water of painting to nature'
He also points out the weapon that mortally
wounded him: 'those that said one day:
and that's enough Van Gogh; to your grave'.
And they bought his soul, his infinity and his bones
His words are troubled, luminous
incessant, always menaced
always in combat or softly
moved in the face of greatness, of the entreaty
of the fire of this sweet and terrible night
that is every soul.
Artaud denounces
the lustful and greedy for reality corpse
people institutions a world for auction.
'Scum', he shouted to his psychiatrist, 'pig'
'obscene', 'you have the stigma in your mug'.
Artaud tore out the word from the pillory
he made sap with it, splendid life, sacred
injury against treason.
Van Gogh, as Reverón the mad one, is a chaste man
who preferred becoming 'crazy
rather than betraying a superior idea of human honor'
He cast aside evil
he confined himself outdoors, far
from the 'unanimous filth' where men triumph
- who are a pack of hounds, a turbulent mob -
to simply paint a 'landscape after nature'
Pure and simple heroism says Artaud

To discover oneself, to conquer oneself
to illumine oneself - with the light of the communion -
in contact with the powers of the earth
always convulsed simple wretched terrifying
turned by Van Gogh into that 'dirty rag
soaked in blood till it trickles wine'

The insurrection blurred by the tears
burning, with incandescent borders
like a flash of lighting, or purplish blue
in the eyes of a frightening angel
of his sleepless intensity, of his exalted
and loved clairvoyance,
of his insubordination
with which he joins prodigies and stones on the road

Against human negligence against his consternation
the inflamed soul of Artaud will commit a crime
will set fire to his shadow as to a torch
like star he will sacrifice himself
by his own humanitarian hands

The genius of Artaud is - like that of Van Gogh
the most uncommon,
the scarcest:

it is the genius of not betraying.

Translation: 2005, Nicolás Suescún