Osiris Oliphant

“The unity of man and nature is the fundamental principle of a sound society.”
― Charles Fourier

“Each time I happen to recall—nostalgically—the surrealist rebellion as expressed in its original purity and intransigence, it is the personality of Antonin Artaud that stands out in its dark magnificence, it is a certain intonation in his voice that injects specks of gold into his whispering voice. … Antonin Artaud: I do not have to account in his stead for what he has experienced nor for what he has suffered. … I know that Antonin Artaud saw, the way Rimbaud, as well as Novalis and Arnim before him, had spoken of seeing. It is of little consequence, ever since the publication of Aurelia, that what was seen this way does not coincide with what is objectively visible. The real tragedy is that the society to which we are less and less honored to belong persists in making it an inexpiable crime to have gone over to the other side of the looking glass. In the name of everything that is more than ever close to my heart, I cheer the return to freedom of Antonin Artaud in a world where freedom itself must be reinvented. Beyond all the mundane denials, I place all my faith in Antonin Artaud, that man of prodigies.”
― André Breton

“To Fortune:

Thou purblind puppet for a Tradesmans stall,
Thou limping Lady of the Hospital;

Empress of Epicures and belly-gods,
With whom I vow to live and die at odds;

Thou mole-eye'd, owl-eye'd, Countess for a spittle,
That gives to some too much, to me too little;

Thou whirly-gig, and ratsbane of my life,
Which by thy wheel dost seem some wheelwrights wife;

Thou make-bate to a discontented mind,
Thou water-bubble, wasteful puff of wind;

Thou flying-feather of a woodcocks wing,
Thou Heathenish and very Pagan thing;

Thou Misers friend, thou worthy Gallants foe,
Thou scurvy Ballad of I wale in woe;

Thou that all discontentment dost provoke,
Thou worse to me then this Tobacco smoke;

Thou that Rage, Fury, Envy dost importune,
I'll tickle thee, thou scurvy minded Fortune.”
― Samuel Rowlands, The Melancholie Knight

“You know very well, Dr. Ferdière, that what you call my 'delusions' are nothing more than my thoughts. You call them delusions because they do not fit into the ledger of your bourgeois sanity. You have spent your life studying books to learn the names of diseases, but you have never spent a single second inside the fire that produces them. You are a clerk of the mind, standing outside the door with a clipboard, pretending you know what is happening inside the furnace.”
― Antonin Artaud