Eulogy to pain

Suffering in its blatant aspects is attractive; other people’s pain draws attention, has the power to infuse variable doses of courage. It makes me think: how would I behave in the same situation…would I be just as stoic, just as heroic? Would I let my spirits sink, would I try to run away? We all know there are times in life during which the unfathomable depths of spirit are measured by our ability to withstand the spectacle – and only that – of the tortures men without scruples or motivated by best intentions inflict on other helpless men. Among these, most defenseless of the defenseless, the crazies, the alienated of every species. Among them, the anonymous stories of individuals without any other qualities than that of being guilty of being different and irreducible, of torments experienced that have left no traces in the cold reviews of the doctors who have tried to cure them. These would not have even the slightest resonance with us if among the cries and laments we did not also hear something else: the true word that unexpectedly reaches out to slap us – making us doubly embarrassed, both for the slothfulness that distinguishes us and for the force of the impact – body and soul.
Antonin Artaud was one of these, prisoner of a visionary strength and passion without which I, healthy by chance, free without any particular merit, would have been less free, my existence infinitely less attractive, if not for the length of the spectacle witnessed. He belonged to a race of artists that have become extinct over time, substituted by art professionals made up of individuals chosen by a selection committee that bears a sinister resemblance to the medical institution charged with casting judgment on the health or sickness of men like Artaud. Artists, it is worth remembering, battling principally with themselves, indifferent to society and ignored by it up until the day in which, having being declared insane, society itself felt it necessary to cure them, to bring them back into the ranks, to inflict experiments upon them, the incomprehensible results of which continue to prove the sick right, the doctors, tormentors or unknown Muses, wrong.