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THE ARTAUD TEASER
edited by Splicer
stolen shamelessly from The Artaud Anthology
published by City Lights
Antonin Artaud was a French surrealist poet and philosopher.
He worked extensively in experimental theater and in the
pioneering of the French film industry. He is considered to
be the "Grandaddy of Psychadelia" for his exploits with
peyote in Mexico in the 30's.
His writing defines the consciousness of that which straddles
the line between genius and madness. These are a few samples
of his writing from The Artaud Anthology, a collection of his
works published by City Lights. I am hoping that this
exposure will spur many of you to go out and buy the book, or
check it out from a library. If you buy it, I'll feel less
guilty about putting it into circulation without permission,
but most of all, this is very important work by a great
thinker that deserves more limelight than has been afforded
to him as yet.
This collection contains four pieces: Description of a
Physical State, Fragments of a Journal in Hell, Inquest, and
fragments of Electroshock.
ARTAUD CHRONOLOGY:
1896: born in Marseille, September 4
1920: comes to Paris
1924-1927: takes part in surrealism; activity as a stage and
film actor
1927-1936: break with surrealism; development of ideas of
the Theater of Cruelty; attempted realization of
said theater with performance of The Cenci
1936: January-November in Mexico, experiments with peyote,
return to france, condition shaky
1937: Travel to Ireland. Aboard a boat, he is
straightjacketed after threatening damage to himself,
and sent by the police back to France
1937-1946: many stays at hospitals (in Rouen, Paris, and
Rodez) Release after nine years and returns to
Paris
1947: lecture in the Theatre du Vieux Columbier, January 13
1948: dies at the Hospice d'Ivry (Paris) March 4
Enjoy!
DESCRIPTION OF A PHYSICAL STATE
Antonin Artaud
Corrosive sensation in the limbs,
muscles as if twisted, then laid open; brittle feeling of
being made of glass; wincing and cringing at any move or sound.
Unconscious incoherence of steps, of getstures, of movements.
Willpower constantly inhibited in even the simplest gestures,
renunciation of simple gestures,
overwhelming and CENTRAL fatigue, sort of a dark horse
fatigue running for something or other. Body motions run haywire
in sort of death exhaustion, mind fatigued at simplest muscular
tension like gesture of grasping -- unconsciously clinging to
something,
holding it together by constant will power.
A fatigue of cosmic Creation, sensation of the body being
dragged on and on, feeling unbeleivable fragility become splitting
pain,
state of numbness, sort of localized numbness on skin surface
which does not hinder a single motion but alters nevertheless that
internal feeling in your limbs so that the mere act of standing
vertical is achieved only at the price of a victorious struggle.
Localized (in all probability) on the skin surface but felt
like the radical suppression of a limb, transmitting to the brain
no more than images of bloody old cottons pulled out in the shape
of arms and legs, images of distant and dislocated members. Sort
of inward breakdown of entire nervous system.
Giddiness in motion, some kind of oblique dizziness
accompanying each attempted effort, heat coagulation enclosing the
whole skull area or detatching itself bit by bit, moving slabs of
heat.
Painful exascerbation of the skull, bladelike pressure on the
nerves, back of neck determined to suffer, temples turning into
glass or marble, head stamped on by horse's hooves.
So now it is high time to speak of the disembodiment of
reality, this sort of breakdown which, one would think, is applied
to a self-multiplication proliferating among things and the
perceptions of them in our mind, which is where they do belong.
This instantaneous classification of things in the brain
cells and not so much in their particularly logical order but in
their own sentimental affective order,
(which is no longer done):
These things no more smell, no more sex. But their
logical order is sometimes broken precisely because they do lack
this emotional smell. Words decay at the unconscious command of
the brain, all words for whatever and no matter what mental
operation, especially those which have to do with the most
habitual and active states of mind.
Translated by David Rattray
Typed by Splicer
FRAGMENTS OF A JOURNAL IN HELL
Antonin Artaud
Neither my screaming nor my fever is really mine. My secondary
faculties (these elements of my mind and soul are hidden) are
disintegrating, but just imagine how they are hanging on.
Something halfway between the typical atmosphere I breathe and the
tip of my reality.
I hunger less for food than some kind of elementary consciousness.
That knot of life where thought-emission hangs.
A knot of central suffocation.
Simply to find basis in some unambiguous truth, that is, one which
would depend on one unique razor's edge.
This problem of the emancipation of my conscious being is no
longer presented in its exclusively excruciating aspect. I feel new
factors intervening in the process by which my life is being denatured,
and that I have something like a new awareness of my intimate loss.
I see in the fact that the die is cast and I am plunging into the
affirmation of a guessed-at-truth, however risky, my entire reason for
being alive.
Sometimes I linger for hours over the impression some idea or
sound has made on me. My emotion does not develop in time, it has no
temporal sequence at all. The ebb and flow of my soul are in perfect
accord with the absolute ideality of mind.
To confront the metaphysical system I made for myself as a
consequence of this void I carry within me.
From this pain rooted in me like a wedge, at the center of my
purest reality, at the point of my sensibility where the two worlds of
body and mind are joined, I learn to distract myself by the effect of a
false suggestion.
For in the space of that minut the illumination of a lie can last,
I manufacture a notion of escape; I rush off in any wrong direction my
blood takes. I close the eyes of my intelligence and open my mouth to
the speech of the unspoken; I give myself the illusion of a system
whose vocabulary escapes me. But from this minute of error there
remains the feeling that I have snatched something real from the
unknown. I beleive in spontaneous bewitchments. It is impossible that
I shall not some day discover a truth somewhere on the routes my blood
carries me.
Paralysis is gaining, so I am less and less able to turn about. I
no longer have any support, any base... I search for myself I don't
know where. My mind is no longer able to go in the directions my
emotions and the fantasies welling up in me send it. I feel castrated
even in my slightest impulses. I am finally able to see the light
through myself only by means of an utter renunciation of my
intelligence and feeling. It must be understood that it is the living
man in me who is affected, and that this paralysis stifling me is at
the center -- not of my feeling I am a predestined man, but of my usual
personality. I am definately set apart from life. My torment is as
subtle and refined as it is harsh. It costs me mad efforts of
imagination, increased tenfold by the grip of this stifling asphyxia,
to succeed in thinking my ills. And if I keep on and perservere in
this pursuit, in my need to fix once and for all the state of my
suffocation...
You were wrong to mention this paralysis that threatens me. It
really is threatening and gaining on me every day. It already exists,
and like a horrible reality. Certainly I still (but for how long?) do
as I please with the limbs of my body, but it has been a long time
since I had any control over my mind and so my unconscious controls me
altogether, by impulses coming up from my nervous rages and the tornado
of my blood. Hurried and rapid images which speak to me only in words
of anger and blind hate but are over as fast as a knife stabbing, or
lightning in congested sky.
I am stigmatized by an urgent death, so that actual death holds no
terrors for me.
I have a feeling the despair these dreadful forms advancing on me
bring with them is alive. It slips into this life-knot beyond which
the routes of eternity extend. It is really eternal separation. They
slip their knife into this center where I feel myself human; they sever
the vital connections by which I am joined to the dream of my lucid
reality
Forms of a capital despair (really essential)
Crossroads of separations,
Crossroads of the awareness of my flesh,
Abandoned by my body,
Abandoned by every possible human feeling.
I cannot compare it to anything but the state known at the heart
of delirium during a grave illness.
It is this contradiction between my inner facility and my external
difficulty which creates the torment I am dying of.
Let time march on and the social convulsions of the world ravage
the thoughts of men, I am still immune from all thought immersed in
phenomena. Just leave me to my extinguished clouds, my immortal
impotence, my unreasonable hopes. But I want it understood that I will
not abdicate a single one of my errors. If I used poor judgement, my
flesh was at fault; but these illuminations my mind allows to filter
through hour after hour are my flesh, whose blood is sheathed in
lightning.
He speaks to me of Narcissism and my answer to him is, we are
speaking about my life. This is no ego but the cult of flesh, with the
whole weight and substance of this word Flesh. Things do not move me
except as they affect my flesh and coincide with it at the exact point
where they stir it, and not beyond that point. Nothing moves me or
interests me except what addresses itself directly to the body. And
now he speaks to me about the Self. My answer to him is the Ego and
the Self are two distinct terms and not to be confused; in fact it is
precisely this pair of determinants which, balancing each other,
maintain the body's equilibrium.
I can feel the ground slipping out from under my thought, and I am
forced to contemplate these terms I use, unsupported by their intimate
meaning or personal substratum in me. Even better than that, the point
whereby this substratum seems to connect with my life becomes all of a
sudden strangely tangible and virtual for me. I am struck by the idea
of an unexpected and fixed space where normally all is movements,
communication, interferences, trajectory.
But this erosion which subverts the very basis of my thought in
its most urgent communications with the intelligence and the
instinctual parts of the mind does not take place in the domain of an
intangible abstraction, where only higher faculties of the intellect
would participate. More than the mind which holds together, bristling
with points, it is the nervous trajectory of thought which this erosion
subverts and perverts. It is in the limbs and the blood that this
absence and this standstill are especially felt.
A terrible cold,
An atrocious abstinance,
The limbo of a nightmare of bone and muscles, with the sensation
of stomach fuctions snapping like a flag in the phosphorescences of the
storm.
Larval images that are pushed as if by a finger and have no
relationship to any material thing.
I am human by my hands and my feet, my guts, my meat heart, my
stomach whose knots fasten me to the rot of life.
They speak to me of words but this thing has nothing to do with
words; it is a question of the mind's duration.
It should not be imagined that the soul has nothing to do with
this bark of words peeling off. Life is there, alongside the mind, and
the human being is inside the circle this mind turns on, and joined to
it by a multitude of fibers...
No, all the physical rendings, all the diminuations of physical
activity and this vexation at feeling dependent on one's body, and this
body itself weighed down with marble and resting on a poor support, do
not equal the anguish which comes from being deprived of physical
knowledge and the sense of one's own interior balance. When the soul
lacks a language or language a mind, and the rupture ploughs a vast
furrow of despair and blood in the sensory field, this is the greatest
pain; for it subverts not only the bark or the skeleton, but the very
STUFF of the body. In losing this erratic spark which one felt WAS,
there is this abyss consuming the entire field of the possible
universe, and this feeling of uselessness that is like the knot of
death. This uselessness is like the moral tone of this abyss and of
its intense stupifaction, and the physical color of it is the taste of
blood spurting in cascades from the orifices of the skull.
There is no use telling me this cutthroat is inside me: I am part
of life, I represent the destiny that elects me, and it is impossible
that all eartly life would count me in with it at a given moment, for
by its very nature it threatens the life-principle.
There is a certain thing above all human activity: it is the
example of this monotonous crucifixion, this crucifixion wherein the
soul is forever being lost.
The cord which connects my intelligence, which preoccupies me,
with the unconscious, which feeds me, reveals me more and more subtle
fibers at the heart of its tree-like tissue. And it is a new life
being born, a life which is more and more profound, eloquent, deep
rooted.
Nothing precise can ever be reported by this soul which is
strangling itself, for the torment which kills it, flays it fiber by
fiber, takes place below the mind's threshold, below the threshold of
what language can say; since the very connection (of what constitutes
this soul and keeps it mentally together) is getting torn open little
by little as life calls it toward unbroken lucidity. And there will
never be lucidity concerning this passion, this kind of cyclical and
fundamental martyrdom. And yet it does live, but its duration is here
and there eclipsed, the fleeting keeps mingling with the fixed, and the
chaos with this incisive language of a lucidity without duration. This
curse could be highly instructive for the depths it fills, but this
world will never learn.
The emotion brought about by the blooming of a form, the
adaptation of my bodily fluids to the virtuality of a discourse at all
is a state much more precious to me than the gratification of my
activity.
It is the touchstone of certain spiritual lies.
This sort of backward step the mind takes when consciousness
stares it in the face, to search for the emotion of being alive. That
emotion, situated outside the particular spot where the mind looked for
it, and emerging with its density rich in forms and densely flowing;
that emotion which gives the overwhelming sound of matter to the
spirit, the entire soul passing into its ardent fire. But what
delights the soul even more than fire is the limpidity, the facility,
the natural and glacial candor of this too fresh matter which breathes
both hot and cold.
He is the one who knows what the appearance of this matter
signifies and what underground massacre was the price of its unfolding.
This material is the standard of a nothingness, which does not know
itself.
When I think of myself, my thought seeks itself in the ether of a
new dimension. I am on the moon as others are sitting at their
balcony. I am part of the gravitation of the planets in the fissures
of my mind.
Life will perpetuate itself, events will go on happening,
spiritual conflicts will be resolved, and I will play no part in them.
I have nothing to hope for on either side, moral or physical. For me
there is perpetual sorrow and shadow, the night of the soul, and I have
no voice to cry out.
Cast your riches far from this numb body, for it is insensible to
the seasons of the spirit or the flesh.
I have chosen the domain of sorrow and shadow as others have
chosen that of the glow and the accumulation of things.
I do not labor within the scope of my domain.
My only labor is eternity itself
Translated by David Rattray
Typed by Splicer
INQUEST
Antonin Artaud
YOU LIVE, YOU DIE. WHAT HAS FREE WILL GOT TO DO WITH IT ALL?
IT SEEMS YOU KILL YOURSELF THE WAY YOU HAVE A DREAM.
THIS IS NO MORAL QUESTION WE ARE ASKING:
IS SUICIDE A SOLUTION?
No, suicide is still a hypothesis. I claim the right to be
skeptical about suicide, just as I am skeptical about all the rest of
reality. For the moment, and pending further orders, one must be
frightfully skeptical, not about existence itself, which anybody at all
can grasp, but rather about the inward agitation and profound feelings
in things, in acts, in reality. I beleive in nothing I am not joined
to by the tangible and meteoric umbilical cord of my own thoughts.
Even so, too many meteors are out of action. And I am vexed by other
man's sentient blueprints of existance, and I resolutely abominate all
reality. Suicide is no more than the fabulous and distant conquest of
clear-thinking men, but suicide itself as a state of being is
absolutely incomprehensible to me. An invalid doing himself in would
be utterly without representational value, but the state of a soul of a
man who planned his suicide well, down to the material circumstances,
the exact minute of undoing, would be marvelous. I have no idea what
things really are, no idea of human state; nothing of this world turns
for me, nothing turns in me. Being alive, I suffer horribly. I fail
to reach any existing state. And most certainly I died long ago; my
suicide has already taken place. That is, I have already been
suicided. But what you think of is an anterior state of suicide, a
suicide that would make us retrace our steps on the yonder side of
existence rather than the side of death. For that would be the only
suicide that might make sense to me. I feel no hunger for death; I
simply hunger not to be, never to have dropped into this sink of
imbecilities, abdications, renunciations, and obtuse contacts which
make up the conscious self of Antonin Artaud and are even weaker than
he is. The conscious self of this wandering invalid, who from time to
time keeps trying to exhibit his shadow, which he himself spat on a
long time ago; this self on crutches, limping along; this virtual,
impossible self which nevertheless is part of reality. None like him
ever felt his weakness, yet his weakness is the most important weakness
of all mankind. To be destroyed, not to exist.
Translated by David Rattroy
Typed by Splicer
ELECTROSHOCK
(fragments)
Antonin Artaud
And so, on the surface of daily life, consciousness forms beings
and bodies that one can see gathering and colliding in the atmosphere,
to distinguish their personalities. And these bodies form hideous
cabals where every eventuality comes into the world to argue against
what is beyond appeal.
I am not Andre Breton and I did not go to Baltimore but this is
what I saw on the banks of the Hudson.
I died at Rodez under electroshock.
I died. Legally and medically died.
Electroshock coma lasts fifteen minutes. A half an hour or more
and then the patient breathes.
Now one hour after the shock I still had not awakened and had
stopped breathing. Surprised at my abnormal rigidity, an attendant had
gone to get the physician in charge, who after examining me with a
stethoscope found no more signs of life in me.
I have personal memories of my death at that moment, but it is not
on those that I base my testimony as to the fact.
I limit myself strictly to the details furnished me by Dr. Jean
Dequeker, a young intern at the Rodez asylum, who had them from the
lips of Dr. Ferdiere himself.
And the latter asserts that he thought me dead that day, and that
he had already sent for two asylum attendants to instruct them on the
removal of my corpse to the morgue, since an hour and a half after
shock I had still not come to myself.
And it seems that just at the moment that these attendants arrived
to take my body out, it gave a slight shudder, after which I was
suddenly wide awake.
Personally I have a different recollection of the affair.
But I kept this recollection to myself, and secret, until the day
when Dr. Jean Dequeker on the outside confirmed it to me.
And this recollection is that everything which Dr. Jean Dequeker
told me, I had seen, but not from this side of the world but from the
other, and quite simply from the cell where the shock took place and
under its ceiling; although for moments there was neither cell nor
ceiling for me, but rather a rod above my body, floating in the air
like a sort of fluidified balloon suspended between my body and the
ceiling.
And I shall indeed never forget in any possible life the horrible
passage of this sphincter of revulsion and asphyxia, through which the
criminal mob of beings forces the patient in extremis before letting go
of him. At the bedside of a dying man there are more than 10,000
beings, and I took note of this at that moment.
There is a conscious unanimity among all these beings, who are
unwilling to let the dead man come back to life before he has paid them
by giving up his corpse totally and absolutely; for existence will not
give even his inert body back to him, in fact especially his body.
And what do you expect a dead man to do with the body in the
grave?
At such a time, "I am you and your consciousness is me," is what
all the beings say: salesmen, druggists, grocers, subway conductors,
sextons, knifegrinders, railroad gatekeepers, shopkeepers, bankers,
priests, factory managers, educators, scientists, doctors,
not one of them missing at the crucial moment.
Pity that no other dead person outside myself should have returned
to confirm the matter, for generally the dead do not return.
The electroshock accomplished, this one didn't run its course, as
had the first two.
I felt that it wasn't going away.
And my whole inward body, the whole lie of this inward electric
body which for a certain number of centuries has been the burden of
every human being, turned inside out, became in me like an immense
turning outward in flames, monads of nothingness bristling to the
limits of an existance held prisoner in my lead body, which could
neither get out of its lead body nor stand up like a lead soldier.
I could no longer be my body, I didn't want to be this breath
turning to death all around it, until its extreme dissolution.
Thus wrung out and twisted, fiber on fiber, I felt myself to be
the hideous corridor of an impossible revulsion. And I know not what
suspension of the void invaded me with its groping blind spots,
but I was that void,
and in suspension,
as for my soul, I was nothing more than a spasm among several chokings.
Where to go and how to get out was the only one thought leaping in
my throat blocked and secured on all sides.
Every wall of charred meat assured me
it would be neither through the soul nor the mind,
all that is of a former world,
this is what each heartbeat told me.
It is the body that will remain
without the mind,
the mind, i.e., the patient.
N.B. Cool dry pluton in its encounter with hot black pluton:
that's me.
*
He affirms that his sin
was in wishing a place
in the mother of the fathermother
and bullshitting the holy ghost to render it
favorable to his plans
This sin consisted of a
temptation visited upon me to pass the breath
of my heart through a tube
to both sides of the surface
to consent to the worm
and to leer of my own free will
like a knifeblade
at my own soft flop
at the flop world
at the total exhaustion of the body
in front of a
galastralgical
gluttonous curiosity
bloated on the pus of the notorious father,
white pus of blood curdled in laughter;
and to have taken after this child's sweet laughter
who sacrifices himself for life,
his whole rosy body seized by
love in his alterboy's vestements;
and gives the zob or nob of strength
to the thick being
spreads over the rice
baby who
is laughing at
the surprised blood
of his whole life
as an
eggwhite emptied then
volatized in the
gas of the holy ghost
*
The night of the 10 earthquaked cities,
of the Irish who were dismissed and who returned,
of the 300 houses collapsed,
of the 100,000 corpses left unburied,
of the Tibetans of abominations paid by the saw of the virgin mother,
of the mouths gagged and charred,
of the grey-suited beards,
of the newsreel images: vessels opened on the high seas,
losing their crew like tons of cargo
flaming out of their jagged portholes,
then of the anti-flesh inventions,
of sexuality observed over the truncated shoulder
of the dolmen which I myself am when I amass my
slaughtered totems,
which I've just resuscitated
*
It is I who commited suicide one day
and tore my body from myself
and battle against what is left of it
and wish forever to come back to myself
who have founded a false world in the mean time:
this one
*
When consciousness overflows a body, there is also a body
detatching itself from consciousness,
no,
there is a body overflowing the body this consciousness came from,
and the whole of this new body is consciousness:
Think hard and long about someone you...
1) the vampire with its arms folded in my left ball
2) the woman with the supported nape
3) the grey devil
4) the black father
a laying-on of black crablice
5) and finally last night
at the New Athens
the great revealation concerning the whole system of forming
god in the slimey eggwhite of my left ball
after the revealation of the antichrist abyss.
The life we lead is a front for all which the frightful criminal
filthymindedness of some of us has left us.
A grotesque masquerade of acts and sentiments.
Our ideas are only the leftovers of a breath,
breath of our choked and trussed lungs.
Which is to say for example that if the arterial tension of man is
12,
it could be 12 times 12 if it were not constrained and squashed
down some place so as not to surpass this sordid level.
And damned if some physician doesn't come telling me that this is
called hypertension and it is not good to be in a state of
hypertension.
As for me, I answer that we are all in a state of hypertension,
we can't lose an atom without the risk of immediately becoming a
skeleton again; while life is an incredible proliferation,
the atom, once hatched, proceeds to lay another, which in fact
immediately explodes another.
The human body is a battlefield where we would do well to return.
Now there is nothingness, now death, now putrefaction, now
ressurection: to wait for I don't know what apacolypse beyond that,
what explosion of what beyond in order to get straightened out
with things,
is a dirty joke.
Have to grab life by the balls right now.
Who is the man who decided to live with the notion he was not
being fitted for the coffin?
Who, on the other hand, is the man who thinks he still may profit
by his own death?
Try as they may to make us beleive it, we gain no profit from the
notion that we will be dead men, going back to the dead, taking our
places in the legion of the dead, letting our limbs seperate from our
selves, and falling down in a heap of the serical charnal houses
(liquids).
One doesn't die because one has to die,
one dies because it is a wrinkle forced on the
consciousness
one day
not so long ago.
For one doesn't die in order to come back and remake one's life,
but only in order to give up life and get rid of whatever life one had.
And whoever dies, dies because he wanted the coffin.
He accepted one day this spasm of being put through the coffin --
a forced acceptance perhaps, but effective nonetheless,
and no man dies without consenting to it.
Consciousness lives before birth. It lives somewhere, if only for
an hour.
All living consciounesses have existed, I don't know in what
sphere or what abyss.
And these abysms consciousness rediscovers here.
What good in fact would the unconscious be if it were not to
contain, in the very depths of itself, this pre-world, which is not one
anyway, but merely the old burden, rejecte (by others than ourselves),
of everything which the consciosness could not or would not allow,
cannot or will not admit, not under our own control but under the
control within us of this other who is not who is not the double or
counterpart of the self, who is not the the immanent derma of all that
the conscious self envelops, and who is not the being that it is not
and will become or will not become, but really and palpably an other, a
sort of false spy-glove that keeps it under surveillance from morning
to night in the hope that consciousness will put it on.
And this other is no more than what all the others are who have
always wanted a finger in every person's consciousness.
Psychoanalysis has written a book on the failure of the old
Baudelaire, whose life did not precede him by 100 years but rather by
this sort of secular infinity of time which came back to him when he
lost his speech and learned and tried to say it, but who beleived him,
and who beleives the affirmations of great poets who have become sick
trying to dominate life? For Baudelaire did not die of syphillis, as
has been said, he died from the absolute lack of belief attatched to
the incredible discoveries he had made in his syphillis and repeated in
his aphasia.
When he learned it, then he tried saying it,
that he had lost one of his selves in Thebes, 4,000 years before
Jesus Christ.
And that this self was that of an old king.
When he discovered and tried saying that he was not and never had
been Mumbledepeg,
but on the contrary that poet in a paradise alley where they were
mending poetry, in Brittany, long before the Druids ever settled there.
And the skeleton of th human cock, against all onomatopoeia and
reason, in order to rediscover life, found
a sound without echo or cry,
without shadow or double in life,
without the old yoke of the organ that accounts for the five
senses,
one day, much later, when the time came for the consciousness of
the masses, and the sound of his poetry was the inert weight of planks,
the horrible squishing of those six planks they could never fit his
corpse into.
For to cure Charles Baudelaire, it would have been necessary to
surround him with only a few organisms
enough
never to be afraid of facing a delirium in order to
rediscover truth.
Therefore psychoanalysis was unable not to fear reality, however
monstrous it might seem, and not to reject -- in the dream-symbols
representing it -- the whole sadistic machinery of crime, the weaver of
a vital stuff which Charles Baudelaire wished to mend, and for the sake
of which I ask that, for who knows how much time to come, the few men
who are its victims continue, as they are condemned prisoners born to
be fated scapegoats.
Translated by David Rattray
Typed by Splicer