To Have Done With the Judgement of God

by Antonin Artaud


kré                                 puc te
kré     Everything must    puk te
pek      be arranged        le
kre       to a hair             ti le
e          in fulminating      kruk
pte       order.

I learned yesterday
(I must be behind the times, or perhaps
      it's only a false rumor, one of those pieces
      of spiteful gossip that are circulated between
      sink and latrine at the hour when meals that
      have been ingurgitated one more time are
      thrown in the slop buckets),
I learned yesterday
one of the most sensational of those official
      practices of American public schools
which no doubt account for the fact that this
      country believes itself to be in the vanguard
    of progress.
It seems that, among the examinations or tests
      required of a child entering public school for
      the first time, there is the so-called seminal
      fluid or sperm test,

which consists of asking this newly entering
      child for a small amount of his sperm so it
      can be placed in a jar
and kept ready for any attempts at artificial
insemination that might later take place.
For Americans are finding more and more
      that they lack muscle and children,
that is, not workers
but soldiers,
and they want at all costs and by every possible
      means to make and manufacture soldiers
with a view to all the planetary wars which might
      later take place,
and which would be intended to demonstrate by
      the overwhelming virtues of force
the superiority of American products,
and the fruits of American sweat in all fields of
      activity and of the superiority of the possible
      dynamism of force.
Because one must produce,
one must by all possible means of activity replace
      nature wherever it can be replaced,
one must find a major field of action for human inertia,
the worker must have something to keep him busy,
new fields of activity must be created,
in which we shall see at last the reign of all the fake
manufactured products,
of all the vile synthetic substitutes
in which beautiful real nature has no part,
and must give way finally and shamefully before
      all the victorious substitute products
in which the sperm of all the artificial insemination
      factories
will make a miracle
in order to produce armies and battleships.
No more fruit, no more trees, no more vegetables,
      no more plants pharmaceutical or otherwise and
      consequently no more food,
but synthetic products to satiety,
amid the fumes,
amid the special humors of the atmosphere, on the
      particular axes of atmospheres wrenched violently
      and synthetically from the resistances of a nature
      which has known nothing of war except fear.
And war is wonderful, isn't it?
For it's war, isn't it, that the Americans have been
      preparing for and are preparing for this way step
      by step.
In order to defend this senseless manufacture from
      all competition that could not fail to arise on all
      sides,
one must have soldiers, armies, airplanes, battleships,
hence this sperm
which it seems the governments of America have had
      the effrontery to think of.
For we have more than one enemy
lying in wait for us, my son,
we, the born capitalists,
and among these enemies
Stalin's Russia
which also doesn't lack armed men.
All this is very well,
but I didn't know the Americans were such a warlike
      people.
In order to fight one must get shot at
and although I have seen many Americans at war
they always had huge armies of tanks, airplanes,
      battleships
that served as their shield.
I have seen machines fighting a lot
but only infinitely far
                  behind
them have I seen the men who directed them.
Rather than a people who feed their horses, cattle,
      and mules the last tons of real morphine they have
      left and replace it with substitutes made of smoke,
I prefer the people who eat of the bare earth the delirium
      from which they were born
I mean the Tarahumara
eating peyote off the ground
while they are born,
and who kill the sun to establish the kingdom of black
      night,
and who smash the cross so that the spaces of space can
      never again meet and cross.

And so now you are going to hear the dance of the T U T U G U R I.




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