o hand in hand

i went looking for a quote by antonin artaud and i found one:

"I believe in spontaneous bewitchments. It is impossible that I shall not some day discover a truth somewhere on the routes my blood carries me."

(from "Fragments of a Journey in Hell," trans. David Rattray in Artaud Anthology, p. 41)

... i've been kind of gloomy all day, and i've resorted to a familiar (albeit a bit peculiar) fantasy of mine: to stop being myself. this is an indulgence i only allow when my actions become repulsively habitual. or to be even more confusing: when i sense myself being typically "myself" in one way or another. the outcome is always dismal and predictable.

my brain has been on a groundhog day-esque loop the past few days, and i think the problem is that my life is playing out too closely to my inner logic.

i picked up artaud thinking that his thought maintains an interesting relationship to my fantasy. in artaud, one is jettisoned out of one's self, and the results are usually a compelling mix of the profound and the diabolical.

what i've been imagining bears slightly different characteristics. artaud is an irrevocable pessimist at times (e.g. "...I have chosen the domain of sorrow and shadow..."), and yet he seems so exciting, and so artistically applicable that it makes his life of addiction and madness all the more tragic. so-- to lay all my cards on the table-- i wish for an idealized version of artaud's "journey into hell." i wonder what kind of pleasure could be found in such a state. not a "state of grace," perhaps. more like a barrage of unpredicatable tickling. sometimes i get so bogged down with opinions and inclinations that i become dull as a receptor. the forces trapped within me and crudely branded "myself" become a trail of chains. all the good stuff enters my dumb flesh only to exit without sufficient shaking and strutting.