A
t
a
time
when
life
itself
is in decline, there has never been so much
talk about civilization and culture. And there is a strange correla
-
tion between this universal collapse of life at the root of our present-day
demoralization and our concern for a culture that has never tallied with
life but is made to tyrannize life.
Before saying anything further about culture, I consider the world is
hungry and does not care about culture, and people artificially want
to turn these thoughts away from hunger and direct them towards
culture.
The most pressing thing seems to me not so much to defend a culture
whose existence never stopped a man worrying about going hungry
or about a better life, but to derive from what we term culture ideas,
whose living power is the same as hunger.
Above all, we need to live and believe in what keeps us alive, to
believe something keeps us alive, nor should every product of the
mysterious recesses of the self be referred back to our grossly creature
concerns.
What I mean is this: our immediate need is to eat, but it is even more
important not to waste the pure energy of being hungry simply on
satisfying that immediate need.
If confusion is a sign of the times, I see a schism between things
and words underlying this confusion, between ideas and the signs that
represent them.
We are not short of philosophical systems; their number and con
-
tradictions are a characteristic of our ancient French and European
culture. But where do we see that life, our lives, have been affected by
these systems?
I would not go so far as to say philosophical systems ought to be
directly or immediately applied, but we ought to choose between the
following:
Either these systems are a part of us and we are so steeped in them
we live them; therefore, what use are books? Or we are not steeped in
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4
them and they are not worth living. In that case what difference would
their disappearance make?
I must insist on this idea of an active culture, a kind of second
wind growing within us like a new organ, civilization as applied
culture, governing even our subtlest acts, the spirit alive in things. The
distinction between civilization and culture is artificial, for these two
words apply to one and the same act.
We judge a civilized man by the way he behaves – he thinks as he
behaves. But we are already confused about the words “civilized man”.
Everyone regards a cultured, civilized man as someone informed about
systems, who thinks in systems, forms, signs and representations.
In other words, a monster who has developed to an absurd degree
that faculty of ours for deriving thoughts from actions instead of
making actions coincide with thoughts.
If our lives lack fire and fervour, that is to say continual magic, this is
because we choose to observe our actions, losing ourselves in meditation
on their imagined form, instead of being motivated by them.
This faculty is exclusively human. I would even venture to say it
was the infection of humanity which marred ideas that ought to have
remained sacred. Far from believing man invented the supernatural
and the divine, I think it was man’s eternal meddling that ended up in
corrupting the divine.
At a time when nothing holds together in life any longer, when
we must revise all our ideas about life, this painful separation is the
reason why things take revenge on us, and the poetry we no longer
have within us and are no longer able to rediscover in things suddenly
emerges on the adverse side. Hence the unprecedented number of
crimes whose pointless perversity can only be explained by our
inability to master life.
Although theatre is made as an outlet for our repressions, a kind of
horrible poetry is also expressed in bizarre acts, where changes in the
facts of life show its intensity undiminished, needing only to be better
directed.
But however we may cry out for magic, at heart we are afraid of
pursuing life wholly under the sign of real magic.
Thus our deep-rooted lack of culture is surprised at certain awe-
inspiring anomalies; for example, on an island out of contact with
present-day civilization, the mere passage of a ship carrying only
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5
healthy passengers can induce the outbreak of diseases unknown on
that island but peculiar to our countries: shingles, influenza, grippe,
rheumatism, sinusitis and polyneuritis.
Similarly, if we think Negroes smell, we are unaware that everywhere
except in Europe, we, the whites, smell. I might even say we smell a
white smell, white in the same way as we speak of “the whites”.
Just as iron turns white-hot, so we could say everything extreme is
white. For Asians, white has become a mark of final decomposition.
Having said this, we can begin to form an idea of culture, above all a
protest.
A protest against the insane constriction imposed on the idea of
culture by reducing it to a kind of incredible Pantheon, producing an
idolatry of culture and acting in the same way as idolatrous religions,
which put their gods in Pantheons.
A protest against our idea of a separate culture, as if there were
culture on the one hand and life on the other, as if true culture were
not a rarefied way of understanding and exercising life.
Let them burn down the library at Alexandria. There are powers
above and beyond papyri. We may be temporarily deprived of the ability
to rediscover these powers, but we will never eliminate their energy. It
is also a good thing too many facilities should disappear, and forms
ought to be forgotten, then timeless, spaceless culture constrained by
our nervous capacities will reappear with renewed energy. And it is
only right that cataclysms should occur from time to time, prompting
us to return to nature, that is to say, to rediscover life. The old totems –
animals, rocks, objects charged with lightning, costumes impregnated
with bestiality and everything that serves to catch, tap and direct forces
– are dead to us, since we only know how to derive artistic or static
profit from them, seeking gratification, not action.
Now totemism acts because it moves, it is made to be enacted. All true
culture rests on totemism’s primitive, barbarous means, whose wild, that
is to say, completely spontaneous life is what I mean to worship.
It was our Western idea of art and the profits we sought to derive
from it that made us lose true culture. Art and culture cannot agree,
contrary to worldwide usage!
True culture acts through power and exaltation, while the European
ideal of art aims to cast us into a frame of mind distinct from the
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6
power present in its exaltation. It is a useless, lazy idea and soon leads
to death. The Serpent Quetzalcoatl’s multiple coils give us a sense of
harmony because they express balance, the twists and turns of sleeping
power. The intensity of the form is only there to attract and captivate a
power which, in music, produces an agonizing range of sound.
The gods that sleep in the museums: the Fire God with his incense
burner resembling an Inquisition tripod, Tlaloc, one of the many Water
Gods with his green granite walls, the Mother Goddess of the Waters,
the Mother Goddess of the Flowers, the unchanging expression echoing
from beneath many layers of water of the Goddess robed in green jade,
the blissful, enrapt expression, features crackling with incense, where
atoms of sunlight circle around the Mother Goddess of the Flowers.
This world of obligatory servitude where stone comes to life because
it has been properly carved, a world of organically civilized men – I
mean those whose vital organs also awaken – this human world enters
into us, we participate in the dance of the gods without turning round
or looking back under penalty of becoming, like ourselves, crumbling
figures of salt.
In Mexico, so long as we are talking about Mexico, there is no art
and things are used. And the people are continually exalted.
Unlike our idea of art, which is inert and disinterested, a genuine
culture conceives of art as something magical and violently egoistical,
that is, self-interested. For the Mexicans collect the
Manas
, the powers
lying dormant in all forms, which cannot be released by meditation on
forms for their own sake, but only arise from a magical identity with these
forms. And the ancient Totems exist to stimulate the communication.
It is difficult, when everything impels us to fall into a sleep, during
which we look about us with fixed, attentive eyes, to wake up and to
look about as though in a dream, with eyes that no longer know what
use they are and whose gaze is turned inwards.
This is how our strange idea of a disinterested action came into
being, tough and active nonetheless, the more violent for having skirted
around the temptation to rest.
All true effigies have a double, a shadowed self. And art fails the
moment a sculptor believes that as he models he liberates a kind of
shadow whose existence will unsettle him.
Like all magic cultures displayed in appropriate hieroglyphics, true
theatre has its own shadows. Furthermore, of all languages and all arts,
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it is the only one whose shadows have shattered their limitations. From
the first, we might say its shadows would not tolerate limitations.
Our fossilized idea of theatre is tied in with our fossilized idea of
a shadowless culture where, whatever way we turn, our minds meet
nothing but emptiness while space is full.
But true theatre, because it moves and makes use of living instruments,
goes on stirring up shadows, while life endlessly stumbles along. An
actor does not repeat the same gestures twice, but he gesticulates,
moves and, although he brutalizes forms, as he destroys them he is
united with what lives on behind and after them, producing their
continuation.
Theatre, which is nothing, but uses all languages (gestures, words,
sound, fire and screams), is to be found precisely at the point where the
mind needs a language to bring about its manifestations.
And confining theatre to one language, speech, written words,
music, lighting or sound, heralds its imminent ruin, since choosing one
single language proves the inclinations we have for the facilities of that
language. But one effect of a single language’s limitations is that it
dries up.
For theatre, just as for culture, the problem remains to designate and
direct shadows. And theatre, not confined to any fixed language or
form, destroys false shadows because of this, and prepares the way for
another shadowed birth, uniting the true spectacle of life around it.
To shatter language in order to contact life means creating or
recreating theatre. The crucial thing is not to believe this action must
remain sacred, that is to say, set apart. And the main thing is to believe
not that anyone can do it but that one needs to prepare for it.
This leads us to reject man’s usual limitations and powers and
infinitely extends the frontiers of what we call reality.
We must believe in life’s meaning renewed by theatre, where man
fearlessly makes himself master of the unborn, gives birth to it. And
everything unborn can still be brought to life, provided we are not
satisfied with remaining simple recording instruments.
Moreover, when we say the word
life
, we understand this is not life
recognized by externals, by facts, but the kind of frail moving source
forms never attain. And if there is one truly infernal and damned thing
left today, it is our artistic dallying with forms, instead of being like
those tortured at the stake, signalling through the flames.
