I would even say that this infection of the human which contaminates ideas that should have remained divine, far from believing that man invented the supernatural and the divine, I think it is man's age old intervention which has ultimately corrupted the divine within him.
Artaud, Preface to The Theatre and its Double
We like the writings of mad poets. We like how their words are made to go about naked of nuance. There is no pausing in their stark usage, except perhaps, only a slight hesitation where they gather their resources, and then are pushed on to achieve a formulation that is starker still. We are grateful to the mad poets because they extract simple and absolute forms from that which we had previously considered a tangle of complication.
We do not seek meaning in the mad poets' writings. We know that their intent is meaningless, beyond even themselves. Even so, we are drawn to them because their speech resounds outside of meaning. They head out through the territories of semantic saturation in the direction of pure word sound.
Under the tutelage of the mad poets we become able to discern something else than meaning in words, as they are being used as such. We see that differential patterns of significant points appear in a discursive field wherever meaning has been abstracted. This pattern then replaces the ordinary procedures of meaning production in subjective response, and organises a different order of interaction with the words as objects.
These points of significance are the intense features of the scene, they are immediately recognisable by mad poets. Intense features draw attention at the moment meaning is suspended, they are thus visited and revisited as if they had previously been forgotten; they are compulsively returned to; they are rediscovered and newly venerated.
They attract, over time, reinvented rituals and reinterpretations of the rituals. In the movement between these constant points there is described a territory, there is demonstrated a pattern.
It is not meaning that we find compelling in the mad poets’ words so much as a pattern of engagement with the world. The pattern is an apparently random outcome of discreet objects being connected together. But the sense of arbitrariness is supplanted when we observe that it is the same points, the same word objects, that are revisited over and over.
The compulsive pattern is interpreted by psychologists as being the result of compulsive repetition, of semantic saturation, but really it is the opposite of this, it is constitutive of meaningfulness. Meaning is the result of repeatedly energised circuits of meaninglessness... and not the other way round. The mad poets’ writings uncover the basic forms of perception which are otherwise lost in the complexity of social interaction. Their use of meaninglessness reintroduces us to the ground of meaning.
The simple shadows cast by Artaud’s words are similar in effect to those that neolithic structures make upon the landscape. The shapes thrown are basic, rudimentary, primitive and therefore eternal, generative, irreducible.
We find the found forms in their works, in the pattern described in their works. And in their works they found the forms they found within themselves. In their works, the stone circles and the poetic injunctions, we find what they found in them.
They found the found forms, and in them, we too find the found forms. They arrived at the patterns inherent to speech and to structure from which they set out when making speech, and making structure.
And in reading them, we too arrive back where they started, before they commenced their works, before they found the found forms. In reading them, we find again in them the forms and patterns which we too must set out from. We find the found forms of ourselves. The circle, the excavation, the erection, the line.
We do not find meaning in patterns, we only find pattern. It is because we have pattern that we are able to construct meaning. We make in the world the forms with which we are imbued. We repeat the patterns in the world which we find within ourselves. We recognise these forms and know the founded depth of ourselves through them.
We recognise the forms. And we recognise ourselves through the forms. We externalise the patterns which are most agreeable to us, and we reconstruct them in the world as territories, architecture, places. We reconstruct found places in order to return to them. And the shapes that we carve into the external world are the repeating patterns by which we appropriate both the external world and ourselves.
The found patterns that we find in the world support our further engagements with it. Patterned place engages depatterned space. From realisation of our basic pattern we elaborate and reconstruct a second patterning. From mapping the second pattern onto the first we begin to develop recursive meaning.
The layering of patterns over patterns constitutes the social victory of meaning. It is this victory that the old mad poets seek to overturn. They strip layers from discourse and reduce utterance to a pre-communicative form. Their mad project extracts words from meaningful use, transforming them into pure objects. From them, we learn that wherever we positively experience meaninglessness in discourse, we also reencounter our original construction as for-themselves, pattern-responsive beings.
