hurting my brain

Antonin Artaud is nearly impossible to read. Not only was the guy insane, but he uses breakteeth words and long, complicated sentences.

By "unperverted pantomime" I mean direct Pantomime where gestures -- instead of representing words or sentences, as in our European Pantomime (a mere fifty years old!) which is merely a distortion of the mute roles of Italian comedy -- represent ideas, attitudes of mind, aspects of nature, all in an effective, concrete manner, i.e., by constantly evoking objects or natural details, like that Oriental language which represents night by a tree on which a bird that has already closed one eye is beginning to close the other. Another such abstract idea or attidute of mind could be represented by some of the innumerable symbols from Scripture, as the needle's eye through which the camel cannot pass.

It is plain that these signs constitute true hieroglyphs, in which man, to the extent that he contributes to their formation, is only a form like the rest, yet to which, because of his double nature, he adds a singular prestige.

Three sentences. Gah.

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In any case, and I hasten to say it at once, a theater which subordinates the mise en scène and production, i.e., everything in itself that is specifically theatrical, to the text, is a theater of idiots, madmen, inverts, grammarians, grocers, antipoets, and positivists, i.e., Occidentals.

Furthermore, I am well aware that the language of gestures and postures, dance and music, is less capable of analyzing a character, revealing a man's thoughts, or elucidating states of consciousness clearly and precisely than is verbal language, but who ever said the theater was created to analyze a character, to resolve the conflicts of love and duty, to wrestle with all the problems of a topical and psychological nature that monopolize our contemporary stage?

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-- from The Theater and Its Double