https://jacket2.org/commentary/artaud-arrives-paris
Photo: Édouard Toulouse, editor of Demain
From the latest Artaud installment:
A handful of Artaud’s poems were published in Demain including “Night,” which appeared in the issue pictured above, in 1921. In this poem we glimpse a bit of the journal’s ethos, including the advice to approach reading and ideas slowly, a sentiment which Bernard Baillaud situates in opposition “to the rapid reading speed imposed on [the reader]. Far from representing a constraint or form of self-censorship tending to force a choice among the headlines, this method allowed for everything to be read.” Reader as flaneur as slow movement advocate. In “Night,” Artaud declares:
Poet, those things preying on your mind
Have nothing to do with the moon,
The rain is cool
the belly is good.
Deep down in the swollen sheets
Where the whole night breathes,
The poet feels his hair
Proliferate and grow.[4]
Here the poet relishes in the body and pleasure. The slow accretion of time becomes the subject of observation. Imagine how much you’d have to slow down your focus to feel your hair growing. For the review, this calculated pacing was a protection against “hasty and excessive information, from too much empty documentation, and from futility in all walks of life.”[5]