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230 A Body of Vision realm of the affective imponderable, the image provided by my nerves takes the form of the highest intellectuality, which I refuse to strip of its quality of intellectuality. And so it is that I watch the formation of a concept which carries within it the actual fulguration of things, a concept which arrives upon me with a sound of creation. No image satisfies me unless it is at the same time Knowledge, unless it carries with it its substance as well as its lucidity.237 Artaud says, then, that energy, expressed as fulguration and the sound of creation, is the substance and the lucidity ofan idea. Artaud longs for the energized body. He complains about the moments when the flesh loses its electric charge and when he can no longer sense the activity of thinking in the coils of his nerves. He values only those moments when flesh and matter transmute alchemicallyinto energy. He proclaims that his fundamental task is to form a new body, the redeemed body, the body spiritualized by energy. He longs to become a flesh angel. Above all else there is the wholeness of the nerves. A wholeness that includes all of consciousness, and the secret pathways of the mind in the flesh. But what am I in relation to this theory of the Flesh or, moreaccurately, of Existence? I am a man who has lost his life and who is seeking by every means to restore it to its place. I am in some sense the Generator of my own vitality: a vitality which is more precious to me than consciousness, for that which in other men is merely the way to be a Man is in me allof Reason ... But I must inspect this meaning of flesh which is to give me a metaphysics of Being, and the definitive understandingof Life. For me the word Flesh means above all apprehension, hair standing on end, flesh laid bare with all the intellectual profundity of this spectacle of pure flesh and all its consequences for the senses, that is, for the sentiments . And sentiment means presentiment, that is, direct understanding,communication turned insight out and illumined from within. There is a mind in the flesh, but a mind quick as lightning. And yet the excitement of the flesh partakes of the high substance of the mind.238 The final paragraph describes as well as any text I know the Gnostic conception of the spiritualized flesh, the angelized flesh, flesh that has become immediate understanding—understanding as quick as lightning. Artaud saw his task in life as the formation of the angelized body. He recoils from the defiled body, the body of excrement. He seeks the redeemed body, the body made intelligent by its electric energy. Against the body made base by its lusts, he longs for the body divested of organs and transformed into a bodyof energy as if by alchemy. Through this alchemical conversion, he hoped, body and mind would be made one, thought and flesh would be united. Thus, in Gnosticism and Antonin Artaud 231 the great work of his life's end, To Have Done with the Judgment of God, Artaud writes: Man is sick because he is badly constructed. We must decide to strip him in order to scratch out this animalcule which makes him itch to death, god, and with god his organs. For tie me down ifyou want to, But there is nothing more useless than an organ. When you have given him a body without organs, then you will have delivered him from all his automatisms and restored him to his true liberty. Then you will teach him again to dance inside out as in the deliriumof dance halls and that inside out will be his true side out.239 An alternative Artaud imagined for the form of this new body was the complete body, possessing both male and female attributes. It is as though Artaud concluded that if the body without organs cannot be realized, then perhaps the body that is not incomplete, as real bodies are, might be. He gave a section of Artaud The Momo the revealing title "Execration of the Father-Mother"240 ; and elsewhere, in Indian Culture, he speculates on the meaning of the sun's being swallowed whole, the gangrenous legs and shield bones arising underground that he witnessed at the Tarahumara rite: It means that daddy-mommyno longer buggers the innate pederast, the filthy tusk holes of...

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