They Don't Write Letters Like This Anymore

To Génica Athansiou

November 24, 1940

My very dear Génica,

You must find heroin at all costs and you must risk death to get it to me here.  This is where matters stand.  The Initiates have real instruments of torture, as I have already told you, and they use them from a distance to mutilate me while I sleep, each night a little more.  If it is difficult to procure heroin or opium, it is solely because of me and because they know that it is the one thing that would restore my strength and make me fit to struggle against Evil.  But the most serious aspect of the affair is that all my friends, including you, have rebelled, have taken up arms in Paris, have used force to get heroin for me, and that they extracted it from all of you by magic, and that they then caused you to lose consciousness of your rebellion and that they have weighed down your shoulders

        your heads

and the backs of your necks with leaden spells in order to enslave you, for it is thus that the common people are avenged and it is the common people who are now in power and who feed on my suffering here.  Search your memory and you will see that some part of the use you have made of your time eludes you.   Génica, we must leave this world, but first the Kingdom of the Other World must come, and we need armed troops in great numbers.  So that the Bohemians can enter this world in number as one disembarks from a ship I must have heroin so that I can open all the hidden doors and destroy the spells of Satan which are keeping them out and keeping me prisoner here.

    I count on you and I embrace you.

    Antonin Artaud

Two nights ago you thought you had a dream that brought you to Marseilles, boulevard Perrier, but in reality you were having a vision from Paris of a real scene which was taking place in Marseilles, in which one of the gods of Evil went forth with his armies.  These armies were cut to pieces by the Bohemians who reappear at night but some of their soldiers were loitering in Saumur, in Toulon, and in Paris in the vicinity of the Vieux-Colombier.

Comments

[Nicholas]

This is the 1940s version of the 3 am caller.

[N]

...Indeed it has bean a very long time...lettuce hope time marches on an tramples the next occurance before it blinds my right eye as upon the last reading I have plucketh out the left one...