Antonin ARTAUD (1896-1948). L.A.S., Rodez March 15, 1944, [to Mme Adrienne Régis, head supervisor of the Asile de Rodez]; 10pages in-4 in purple ink. Very long and interesting letter from Rodez, meditating on love and sex, evil and God. He fears to bother her... "I know that you understand me deeply and that you suffer; and in spirit you live in the same world as I do, but your body does not always follow you where your heart and mind go. And sometimes it precedes them and takes them where they'd never want to go. And unfortunately, in this world, we're much more bodies than minds. I too have a body, but through suffering I've learned to control it and not let it dominate me, not at any time. For the body we inhabit is evil"... Artaud refuses to see in "the sexual instinct the origin of our feelings and emotions [...] For me, love comes from the heart and goes back to the heart, and has nothing to do with the abdomen, which is its loss and death. Whoever loves sexually is condemning himself to love no more one day". Sex is "a mystery and a secret", "the essence of a sacrilegious abomination that goes back to the origins of our humanity [...] it is from lost love that we suffer". By the fall of Adam, according to Artaud, everything in us "that was heart and the loving force of the heart has been magically turned upside down and rejected towards the attraction of sex, so that we can no longer have in the heart a feeling so beautiful as it is that it is not first centered on sex, and that this instrument of ugliness and physical uselessness does not react organically before our most sublime moral sentiments". The sexual libido was "created by demons". Man's body was pure, "but it was destroyed and ransacked by evil and demons [...] in order to insult the work and thought of God". So God disappeared from the world, "God the Virgin was murdered [...] With all that was left of his soul, God managed to give rise to a soul all the same, and to introduce it into that body, in order to invite man, in time, to detach himself from that body"... But soul and body are intertwined and subjected to "a fluidic spellbinding action [...] So that to remain on God's path, anyone who today wants to think, feel or love must abstract himself from his body in the process. And it's a terrible psychological operation to live in this constant effort. It takes energy and willpower every minute of the day". And the main obstacle is sexuality, "that horrible stumbling block"... Artaud, for his part, has long since "passed this hellish cape" and "understood the insidious malice that evil uses to prevent us from loving by rejecting our passionate thoughts into the abyss of sexuality". The end of the letter is a superb meditation on Perfect Love... "Perfect Love can only be found in hearts that have renounced earthly joys because they find them too vile and petty for them, it requires for its fulfillment the coming to earth of a Regime that is the exclusive prerogative of God. Once you've experienced Divine Love, you'll never want another, because it's the only one equal to the absolute demands of your heart. Love is something that, by its very nature, needs to be renewed, and the gestures of the body are measured on earth, but those of the Heart-fire that burns in heaven are not. But the heavens are at the back of our heads and in the physical back of our hearts. There's a point there where our heads think, there's a point there where the heart emits its passionate force to love that evil has never tainted, but which dissolves organically in this world in the path of the conception of loving. So it's up to us who live to ensure that the Love in the sky above us is not decomposed as it leaves. For man only fell one day because there were too many corpses underground, and it was with their stench that the crime of sexuality was perpetrated. The force of love that comes from God cannot live in this world without the complete sacrifice of the body and the forgetting of this body of death. We are not bodies but souls, and our souls are infected by our bodies. This is what men keep forgetting, as they are dragged along by general evil. I'm only looking for a soul that can't forget Evil, because I'm not from earth but from heaven, and I'm such that now I can't forget heaven". Nouveaux écrits de Rodez (Gallimard, 1977), p.132.