A Song Idea

This Sun, called 4-Movement, this is our Sun, the one in which

we now live.66

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

Did wander darkling in the eternal space,

Rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

Swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went—and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

Of this their desolation; and all hearts

Were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light:

…never had his suffering, his inner agony corresponded so well to his vision of the world around him. The landscape he called 'The Mountain of Signs' seemed to be the very reflection of his tortured self. 

And they did live by watchfires—and the thrones,

The palaces of crowned kings—the huts,

The habitations of all things which dwell,

Were burnt for beacons; cities were consum'd,

And here is its sign, how the Sun fell into the fire, into the divine hearth, there at Teotihuacan.67

It was also the Sun of our Lord Quetzalcoatl in Tula.

And men were gather'd round their blazing homes

To look once more into each other's face;

Happy were those who dwelt within the eye

Of the volcanos, and their mountain-torch:

The tangle of lines, the crevices in the rocks represented the accidents of his own substance and brought him nearer to that petrifaction he had hoped would put an end to his physiological and metaphysical anguish;

A fearful hope was all the world contain'd;

Forests were set on fire—but hour by hour

They fell and faded—and the crackling trunks

Extinguish'd with a crash—and all was black.

at last he might become the equivalent of a natural phenomenon"

The brows of men by the despairing light

Wore an unearthly aspect, as by fits

The flashes fell upon them; some lay down

And hid their eyes and wept; and some did rest

Their chins upon their clenched hands, and smil'd;

The fifth Sun, its sign 4-Movement, is called the Sun of Move

ment because it moves and follows its path.

And others hurried to and fro, and fed

Their funeral piles with fuel, and look'd up

With mad disquietude on the dull sky,

He marveled at the landscape signs which seemed to be able to transform into spectacular shapes.

The pall of a past world; and then again

With curses cast them down upon the dust,

And gnash'd their teeth and howl'd: the wild birds shriek'd

And, terrified, did flutter on the ground,

And as the elders continue to say, under this sun there will be

earthquakes and hunger, and then our end shall come.68

And flap their useless wings; the wildest brutes

Came tame and tremulous; and vipers crawl'd

And twin'd themselves among the multitude,

Hissing, but stingless—they were slain for food.

He was overwhelmed by the expressivity of the landscape which appeared in haunting hybrid forms or twisted and tortured human configurations:"This naked man who being tortured ... I saw him nailed to a rock and worked on by forms which the sun made volatile ...

And War, which for a moment was no more,

Did glut himself again: a meal was bought

With blood, and each sate sullenly apart

Gorging himself in gloom: no love was left;

We live HERE on the earth (stamping in the mud floor)

We are all fruits of the earth

The earth sustains us

All earth was but one thought—and that was death

Immediate and inglorious; and the pang

Of famine fed upon all entrails—men

Died, and their bones were tombless as their flesh;

I saw in the mountain a naked man leaning out of a large window. His head was nothing but a huge hole, a kind of circular cavity in which the sun and moon appeared by turns, according to the time of the day" (Selected Writings 379).

The meagre by the meagre were devour'd,

Even dogs assail'd their masters, all save one,

And he was faithful to a corse, and kept

The birds and beasts and famish'd men at bay,

Till hunger clung them, or the dropping dead

Lur'd their lank jaws; himself sought out no food,

But with a piteous and perpetual moan,

And a quick desolate cry, licking the hand

Which answer'd not with a caress—he died.

We grow here, on the earth and lower

And when we die we wither in the earth

The crowd was famish'd by degrees; but two

Of an enormous city did survive,

And they were enemies: they met beside

The dying embers of an altar-place

Where had been heap'd a mass of holy things

For an unholy usage; they rak'd up,

And shivering scrap'd with their cold skeleton hands

The feeble ashes, and their feeble breath

Blew for a little life, and made a flame

We are ALL FRUITS of the earth (stamping in the mud floor)

Which was a mockery; then they lifted up

Their eyes as it grew lighter, and beheld

Each other's aspects—saw, and shriek'd, and died—

Even of their mutual hideousness they died,

Unknowing who he was upon whose brow

Famine had written Fiend. The world was void,

The populous and the powerful was a lump,

Seasonless, herbless, treeless, manless, lifeless—

A lump of death—a chaos of hard clay.

Artaud began to imagine his own body as some kind of "inner landscape" (Peyote 47) and picture it as "ill- assembled heap of organs" like "a vast landscape of ice on the point of breaking up" (Peyote 46). His body became "friable" and "inert," "as earth with its rocks can be" (Peyote 45), not only a "dislocated assemblage" but also a piece of "damaged geology" (Peyote 45).

The rivers, lakes and ocean all stood still,

And nothing stirr'd within their silent depths;

Ships sailorless lay rotting on the sea,

And their masts fell down piecemeal: as they dropp'd

They slept on the abyss without a surge—

The waves were dead; the tides were in their grave,

The moon, their mistress, had expir'd before;

The winds were wither'd in the stagnant air,

And the clouds perish'd; Darkness had no need

Of aid from them—She was the Universe. 

We eat the earth

Then the earth eats us

Anyhow, I hope that the texts came across as somewhat thematically cohesive to you. If you have any feedback or suggestions of how I should represent this sonically, please let me know.