Trees do not exist: nobody has ever seen one. We see something we identify and name as “a tree,” but what we call a tree is always something else than what we assume. Suppose we touch the tree instead of staring at it: free from its twofold visual enclosure – from its numeric and objectual reduction to an individual object with figure and volume – the tree explodes into a multiplicity of sensorial sensations. In other words touching the bark, the leaves, etc. transforms the tree into a non-tree: a perceptual meshwork. But it simultaneously transforms us: we unbecome the over-visual subjects we ordinarily are (to the detriment of all our other senses) and, overwhelmed by the many sensations of which we are but a transitory intersection, we start to hesitate about how exactly to name this and that part of the tree… or is it something else now: the branches of another tree, a colony of lichens, a butterfly? We have lost our sight and our language and at the same time lost ourselves. We have become pure surface. Skin.
Similarly, Artaud dreams of the body as an infinite and multiple surface of sensations and affects. Of an animist transversal body, defined by its capacity of affecting and being affected by other bodies, and free to explore the Real in continuity with it and free of the Symbolic tutelage that language forces it to enter when we say “this is a hand,” “this is my leg,” etc. He dreams of a body we do not see but which awaits that we dive into it, or that we let it dance – like the indigenous bodies that still have the cosmos inscribed on them.
Artaud writes(*):
The human body is an electric battery / . . . which is made / . . . to absorb / through its voltaic displacements / the erratic dispositions / of the infinite . . . / . . . [W]e make the body eat, / we make it drink, / not to make it dance.
In short, Artaud dreams of a “pure body” – not a “pure soul,” but a “pure body”.
For the soul is just a vain chimera.
He writes:
[T]hat is the one which has always shitted us, / that one / which could never be a body . . . and titles itself soul, / too coward to reach the body, / it is that one, that runaway of the human skeleton, / . . . which has raised itself to an alleged empyreal / to become divine, / that one, / that carrion made out of a nausea, / of the excrescences of nothingness, / which has never been able to write a single book / while pretending to have written them all.
Artaud dreams of the body we can be:
I blow hard, / compact, / opaque, / frenetic, / vaultless forms, / in the limbs / of my body not yet formed.
For
We have not been born yet, / we are not yet in the world, / there is no world yet.
(*) All translations are my own.
Eugène Carrière, The Sleep (1897)