However mistaken historians or doctors may have been about the
plague, I think one might agree on the idea of the disease as a kind of
psychic entity, not carried by a virus. If we were to analyse closely all the
facts on contagious plagues given in history or contained in archives,
we would have difficulty in singling out one properly established
occurrence of contagious contact, and the example Boccaccio cites
of swine that died because they sniffed at sheets in which the
plague-ridden had been wrapped scarcely suggests more than a kind of strange
affinity between swine flesh and the nature of the plague, something
which would have to be gone into very thoroughly.
(…)
One notes that the only two organs really affected and
injured by the plague, the brain and lungs, are both dependent on
consciousness or the will. We can stop breathing or thinking, speed
up our breath, induce any rhythm we choose, make it conscious or
unconscious at will, bring about a balance between both kinds of
breathing; automatic, under direct control of the sympathetic nerve,
and the other, which obeys each new conscious mental reflex.
We can also speed up, slow down or accent our thoughts. We can
regulate the subconscious interplay of the mind. We cannot control the
filtering of the fluids by the liver, the redistribution of the blood within
the anatomy by the heart and arteries, control digestion, stop or speed
up the elimination of substances in the intestines.
Hence the plague seems to make its presence known in those places,
to have a liking for all those physical localities where human will-power,
consciousness and thought are at hand or in a position to occur.
(…)
Whereas plague imagery related to an advanced state of physical
disorganization is like the last outbursts of waning mental strength, the
imagery of poetry in the theatre is a mental power which, beginning
its trajectory in the tangible, dispenses with reality. Once launched in
fury, an actor needs infinitely more virtue to stop himself committing a
crime than a murderer needs to perpetrate his crime, and this is where,
in their pointlessness, these acts of stage feeling appear as something
infinitely more valid than those feelings worked out in life.
(…)
Any true feeling cannot in reality be expressed. To do so is to betray it.
To express it, however, is to conceal it. True expression conceals what it exhibits.
It pits the the mind against nature’s real vacuum, by creating in reaction
a kind of fullness of thought. Or rather it creates a vacuum in thought,
in relation to the manifest illusion of nature. Any strong feeling produces an idea
of emptiness within us, and lucid language which prevents this emptiness also
prevents poetry appearing in thought. For this reason an image, an allegory,
a form disguising what it means to reveal, has more meaning to the mind than
the enlightenment brought about by words or their analysis.
(Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 1938)
