IVRY
Remembering Artaud on his passing day
Ivry is a poem I wrote of the death of Antonin Artaud, on this day in 1948. This video, opening with his beautiful face in Carl Dryer’s Passion of Joan of Arc, is a recording of the poem with Soundwalk Collective. Imagining his body dying in his room, on September 4, 1948, in the Asylum in Ivry, as his soul keeps on walking.
Below are his baby shoes, which I held in my hand. They were shown to me in 2018, by his late nephew, while visiting in the South of France Such sacred little objects, such dark yet divine footsteps.
Happy Labor Day week-end everyone. Step lightly….
Thank you very much for your thoughtful amplification.
I’ve watched this many times since I first watched it before going to sleep last night. It haunted my dreams and all day it’s haunted me. Annoyingly, I lack language for music so can’t name the extraordinary thing that happens in the song but it has to do with the way it begins like a child’s song or story (like “Goodnight Moon”: “In the great green room there was a telephone and a red balloon . . . “). The almost childlike tune (this is where my lack of language for sound is limiting and frustrating) becomes a kind of tick-tock rocking swaying and the words of the poem mirror that, swaying from one thing to its opposite, evoking a dialectic. Here are some examples in which the language enacts and matches the pendulum like motion of one thing then another, something and it’s opposite:
A room like any other/ a room like no other
A burgeoning flame/ a flower
In the joyous/ dead of night
Where he sits asleep/ with his eyes wide open
Dead hands/ revived
So scorned/ adorned
Form/reform
The cross/ and the sword
By the end, it’s as if one has been lulled into a trance, one step then another, until one feels something like a palpitation. It’s so visceral and the images from the film marry with it in an amazing way.
I think it’s an especially hard thing to write about because the power of it is so trancelike.
I didn’t and don’t think I can do justice to the power of the piece but I wanted to try to say something, if only to honor and applaud it. An amazing piece, Patti. Thank you for creating it and for sharing it.
With warmth to all, as ever,
Robin