Reverent contemplativeness is the Hanged Man in the realm of Nerval. Contemplativeness is the act of turning inside out, reversing, traveling the road into the land of the dead while being and remaining alive. Contemplativeness is seeming to do nothing. In other words, the Hanged Man card, to me, represents the slight possibility that this society in which human identity depends upon possessing rather than on being possessed, that this society in which I’m living, could change.
Gérard de Nerval was a sailor who descended into oblivion and, as he did, wrote against oblivion. He hated his own cockhead and so he descended into the Cocytus, into oblivion, three times, until his cockhead floated bloody on those waters. In other words, he hung himself.
O Speaks:
I spent day after day walking the streets, looking for W, whom I would never again find.
The Letter Continues:
I am Gérard de Nerval who hung himself 12:00 P.M. on a Thursday by his own hands. The other one died in Paris or announced that his death was going to happen, he announced that he was going to die from loneliness.
I, Gérard de Nerval, who write in the teeth of the utilitarian concept of the universe, will hang myself from an apron string tied to a grating. There will be nothing left.
At this moment, I, Gérard de Nerval, want to talk about the difference between hanging and the Hanged Man:
I, Antonin Artaud, hung myself and I haven’t died.
I’m living in a slum in China and I’m going to become sexual.
O Speaks:
If W’s not around, I don’t want to be a whore.
Artaud Speaks:
I entered the brothel so that I could meet O. The Madam stopped me to ask where I was going. I said that I was going to serve O.
She told me that I had to give her money before I could be with O. Because I didn’t have any money I was thrown out of the whorehouse.
I found myself in a marketplace where everything was being sold for everything else. Some of the poor who were there didn’t have any limbs. Others were willing to do anything sexually for money. The children said that a third of them would die, the next harvest, if there weren’t enough beans. I decided that I had to stop the hell in which I was living.
I knew that they had thrown me out of the whorehouse because I refused to give O money.
I wanted O to love me.
Their denial of my sexuality planted in me the seeds of rebellion. There would be other women and men like me in that slum. Ones who would do whatever had to be done in order to change everything.
O Speaks:
I no longer want to be a whore.
Artaud Speaks:
It was at this time that the revolutionaries, both male and female, met in what light came from the quarter-moon.
“We’re poor,” they said. “We need to get our hands on weapons.”
“A white man just gave us some money for weapons, probably just to save his own neck.”
Though I had no interest in such tools, I agreed to undertake the machine-gun delivery, dangerous at the least, in return for the exact amount of cash I needed to buy O so that I could give her her freedom.
In this way, I cut my cockhead off, and blood from a heart I had never known started to flow.
O Speaks:
How long will this reign of masochism continue?
Artaud Addresses This Version of His Letter to O:
Everywhere he went, Nerval would take with him a scummy apron string that had once belonged to the Queen of Sheba. Nerval told me this. Or it was one of the corset laces of Madame de Maintenon. Or of Marguerite de Valois.
From this apron string, which was tied to a grating, he hung himself. The grating, black, partly broken, and stained by hound excretion, was located at the bottom of the stone stairs which lead to the rue de la Tuerie. There’s a straight drop from that stair platform downward.
As Nerval swung there, a raven hovered over, as if it were sitting on his head, and cawed repeatedly, “I’m thirsty.”
They were probably the only words the old bird knew.
I, Antonin Artaud, am now an owner, for I own the language of suicide.
Why did Gérard de Nerval hang himself from an open string? Why is this society which is China insane?
To learn why Gérard madly offed himself, I shall enter his soul:
Gérard was a man like me. He wrote this:
. . . le dernier, vaincu par ton génie, (Jehovah)
Qui, du fond des enfers, criait: “O tyrannie!”
Gérard was le dernier because, when he wrote that, he was just about to suicide, he was writing his own suicide note to God the Tyrant, whose very existence was putting Gérard in hell. That is, Gérard suicided because of the existence of God: Gérard opposed the tyrant God by cutting off his own head. For God is the head, le génie. Gérard cut off his own head with a woman’s apron string, so now he is a woman, so now he has a hole between his arms. Every soul is nothing. The soul of Gérard de Nerval has taught me that nothingness is the abyss of horror out of which consciousness always awakes in order to go out into something in order to exist.
A hole of the body, which every man but not woman including Gérard de Nerval and myself has to make, is the abyss of the mouth.
I have found this language, which is why I can write this letter to you, O. You see, Gérard, who was naked like you are, gave me a language that doesn’t lie, for it spurted out of the hole of his body.
You’re naked so I know you’ve got a body.
When Gérard cut off his head, he made all that was interior in him exterior: today all that’s interior is becoming exterior and this is what I call revolution, and those humans who are holes are the leaders of this revolution.
I have gotten to know Gérard de Nerval, and he was a revolutionary both before and after he hung himself from an apron string. He hung himself from a woman’s string in order to protest against political control. Suicide is only a protest against control. I repeat that. After he castrated himself, language came pouring out of him.
I am evidence that this is true.
Now I am Gérard de Nerval after he castrated himself because consciousness in the form of language is now pouring out of me and hurting me and so I can be with you. I shall own you, O.
O Speaks:
Now I knew W would never come back to me and take me out of the brothel.
Being aware that he would never love me was equal to knowing that he never had.
I was no longer safe, so I became sick. I hovered at death.
It was at this time that the student revolutionaries, more professionally armed than any of the cops around them, burst into the English Embassy, which was located next to the slum. Though paying in serious injury and death, they successfully demolished the government building.
When my health returned, I learned that W was a part owner of the cathouse. I had known that he was rich. I no longer cared what W felt about me: all I wanted was for him to be absent from me.
I wanted W to remain absent from me: I didn’t want anything to change.
It was W who had first