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188 A Body of Vision whose work bears witness to the ambition, however. He has the cultural importance he does exactly because his work is exemplary of a fundamental drive that has motivated some of this century's greatest art. Almost everything that I have said of Artaud's conception of a totalizing, all-inclusive Book of Consciousness applies equally well to Ezra Pound, and most of it applies, with only slight qualifications, to Stan Brakhage. For years Brakhage has muttered occasionally of a massive project that would comprise several films that he has already done and several that he has yet to do. He has from time to time changed the list of completed works that this extended film cycle would include, but he has always included The Scenes from Under Childhood and The Weir-Falcon Saga and usually the films in the Sincerity series and those in the Duplicity series. That these are works that present the development of the inward life of the subject suggests that Brakhage's The Book of Film (as he proposes to call this massive cycle) would be nothing other than The Book of Consciousness. There is even an Artaudian echo in Brakhage's commentary on the project, for he often sounds as though he considers the project as doomed to remain incomplete. Furthermore, Artaud embodies the paradigm of the exacerbated sensibility ; so the role in which he casts the artist, and himself, is that of the exemplary sufferer. His works form a phenomenology of suffering and a typology of its forms. Artaud's writings display an astounding lack of description or even understanding of the emotions, which probably has to do with an alienation induced by his paranoid schizophrenia. But certainly Artaud was no psychologist; he mostly succeeded in avoiding psychological judgments, and when he did make them, they were pretty poor. His strength lay instead in the extremely precise description of his pain and suffering; nowhere else can we find so detailed a record of the self-observations of a mind in pain than in the writings of Artaud.Artaud's inventory of self-consciousness is as minute and compendious as Hegel's—and, like Hegel, Artaud depicts the Mind at the Ultimate as being at one with Matter, as taking all that is material into Itself. But unlike Hegel's, Artaud's survey turns up no means of overcoming the UnhappyConsciousness. Not even those occasions when Mind and Matter become identified with one another provides Artaud any respite from pain. Artaud's self-analysis led to no cessation of suffering, not even to a temporary palliative.Self-observation produces no benefit other than painful self-knowledge—the knowledge that the self is nothing other than one who is suffering, nothing but a monad ofpain. His tortured works are more than a literature of a human being in extremis and more than a portrayal of mind at the end of its tether. The one constant of Artaud's writing is the sense that all thought, no matter what its The Body Electric 189 condition, is torment—that simply having a mind, no matter what its situation or condition, results in suffering. Artaud kept pointing out that thinking is always out of control; and simply to feel it moving and changing, in arabesques that one has not the power to shape, is excruciating. Likewise, to experience the insuperable incongruity between language and thought is gruesome. Feeling what our culture, because of the enduring influence of traditional metaphysics, lacks language to express caused him no end of torment . And what, above all else, he felt but could not express was the carnality of thinking. It is this last topic especially that made Artaud so influential on artists of the 1960s and makes him so important to our inquiry. Artaud's basicconviction about the agonizing incongruitybetween language and thought was that language could not convey "the intellectual apprehensions ofthe flesh." Real thought is of the nature of intense, searing physical sensations and the convulsive intensity of feeling, so thinking cannot be given verbal form. This was the basis of Artaud's polemic against literature. The formal beauty of a work of art always betrays the intense suffering that fuelled its making; so beauty disenfranchises the flesh. This conviction is another basis for the anti-art animusthat has been so strong since the 1960s. In the war between inert words and the searing intensity ofthinking flesh, Artaud was clearly on the side of the flesh...

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