Jacobi, in conversation, summer 2017: “Writing is a disease. In a social arrangement that was not pathological, there would be no writers: Primitive man wrote no books. Yes, we say this is because he did not have the technology to do so, but he had symbolic systems, he had language: All the materials were there, and he would have written if he had need of writing.”
Bataille, paraphrased from Sur Nietzsche: If I had ascended to the summit of which I speak, I would not be writing this book.
Henry Miller, loosely remembered from Tropic of Cancer: Loneliness is essential to an artist. Not just solitude. Loneliness.
In each of these, the presupposition of a particularly impoverished type of individualism: Jacobi and Miller may be forgiven for this, but Bataille already lay the groundwork for a better notion before he made the absurd statement paraphrased above:
Communication: Non-metaphorical melding of two selves: Personal boundaries made permeable, piel picado: Fundamental action of evil, of the longing to burn of which Bataille speaks so often and which is so apparent in his every word.
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Bataille’s idiosyncratic burning, image of wild-eyed evil determined to sacrifice itself to itself, highest height of life-affirmation: He himself provides the cipher by which this notion may be dismantled: He has no community but Nietzsche. He writes, like Nietzsche, to “all and none,” that is, to free spirits, of which he assumes there are none but himself. All is none: Writing in such a framework can only be self-immolation. Remember Jacobi, above.
But even Zarathustra, god of fire, must come down from the mountain. The central question: When Zarathustra descended to gather disciples, did he also descend from Bataille’s metaphorical summit, that mythic Beyond Morals? Or was his physical descent also a metaphorical ascension?
Bataille’s “descent”: Gathering resources to fuel one’s immolation.
His “summit”: Burning, ecstasy beyond moral, aimless expenditure, sublimation.
Zarathustra gathered himself atop the mountain, that he may ascend to the village below and burn there, just as Jesus accumulated in the desert the spiritual self-sureness that he needed to set fire to himself and his disciples, a process which culminated directly after his death, in the Book of Acts, when the Holy Spirit descends to the disciples as fire and makes their tongues into fire.
Zarathustra and Jesus understood this fundamental rule of fire: One stick cannot make nearly so large a fire as a faggot arranged in a cone, the tops leaning together, air funneled from bottom to top, primitive ascension-machine.
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According to an acquaintance, Bataille laughed constantly, and his laughter was often tinged with sarcasm, though he angrily swears off such laughter in Sur Nietzsche. Imagine him sitting alone in a third-floor flat on the Rue d’Ascension, he chugs a jar of brandy, he screams into the empty room, “May the arrow shoot farther than the bow!”, he grits his teeth futilely against the echo, he leans out in the darkness and refills his jar…
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Bataille: “Nietzsche wrote ‘with his blood.’ Whoever wants to critique him or, better yet, to test him, must bleed as well.”
The Crucified: “Wherever three or more are gathered,” wine will become my blood.
Image of the blood-circulation-machine, bleeders gathered in a circle, bowl of rum in the middle, they bleed, they drink, they bleed again, ever more blood is spilled and taken, hotter with each cycle, it burns in their stomachs, incites them to multiply it, blood begets blood begets…
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Which ascends to higher frenzy: The solitary drunk, or the blood-circulation-machine?
The resignation to loneliness in Bataille, Nietzsche, Jacobi implies a slavery to the very morals they denounce, a self-imposed inability to ascend to the very heights they praise. The position of prophet--see Zarathustra, see the beginning of “The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade,” see Jacobi’s constant future tense--is the saddest position that any of these three could inhabit: Who better to enact their ideas than the creators themselves? But no: “Those of whom I speak are not yet alive, may they one day find this and do what I cannot.”
Do we not cringe at the shame that oozes from such pronouncements; do we not feel ourselves at the edge of a sob? The implication: “I am diseased, but someday one will come who is not diseased…” That special shame of the isolated Eunuch:
The solitary stick burns faintly, is easily blown out by wind, splits in half with unburned ends. The faggot-cone burns completely, with every gust of wind the fire grows. To cause a forest fire is the worry of the solitary stick: It does not want to infect its surroundings. To the faggot-cone, a forest fire is an orgy.
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Hyperstition: The faggot-cone spreads its flame with each unpredictable gust, and each new flamer intensifies the fire, speed on speed, gathering space and strength unto desertification, and the morel mushroom and the aspen, which can only grow after fire, emerge from the atoms of the faggot-cone writ large…
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The diffuse Eunuch, scattered over the world in Germany, France, Ukraine, Peru, Mozambique, India, when its various fires touch…
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Ironic distance is sand to fire. The flaming bowel wants to erupt: Sardonic embarrassment is the gluten-free cereal to its burning Celiac. It is a straitjacket. It is the shell of a hermit crab. It is the repetition of a dead prayer. It is ankle weights, earplugs, polarized sunglasses, decaf coffee, filter to life’s cigarette.
Irony is the disgusting screaming baby of Shame. Born wearing a pair of knock-off RayBan aviators, pack of clove cigs soggy in afterbirth...Shame had to get a C-section because Irony was leaning against the wall of the womb, joking sarcastic about any overeager baby that would dare curl up in the middle...
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As I stand at the threshold of leaving everyone I love, leaving the language I love, I prepare for a descent, for the death of this iteration of me, for hypersensitivity: Now I will have to worry about breezes. Though you burn inside me, stacked in a cone, I will have to worry about breezes.
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“A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunk girl that vomits onto the floor and neglects the bowl provided for that purpose, a sobbing accountant, a pot of mustard represent the confusion which serves as love’s vehicle.”
A fine list, Georges. I must add: A plane, a car, the funereal procession of good-byes, talk of the future. Friends offer to cook me dinner as a warden offers a last meal, all indulgent: Tomorrow comes to play the role of death’s door, and “I’ll see you on the other side” becomes life’s chorus. Such faith...there may be atheists in foxholes, but there are none in airports.
Talk of the future…the prophet plays the saddest role...one cannot become a prophet but by complete hatred of the present, hatred to the point of disembodiment, to the point of reverie. We try to pour as much of ourselves into each other as we can, revelry to the point of insanity, so that there will be something of the past in its future, something detectable...one cannot become a prophet but by complete love for the past-to-be; hatred for the fact that it must be, for a while, the present; love, that is, for the present, and hatred for its trajectory. Parting celebration as butt-plug in the anus of time...
What is love? Baby hurt me, hurt me more; refuse to see me, reject me; show some faith.
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Love is mutual destruction in the creation of a third, a fourth, a fifth; the duo conceived as a room walled with mirrors; have you noticed that, when you begin to love someone, their face changes? That it never stops?
The distant, the ironically cocooned: By their unchanging face shall thee know them. What is this but the stability of breeder virtue, but the new form of oldest moralism, but hatred of life--not simply negation, but hatred--to the point of retreat; what is it but constant descent, grovelling in defensive neutralizing numbing delusions of superiority…
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“I’ll miss you” == “I’ll miss who I am in conjunction with you; to leave you is to be pressed down, to descend; I know that I will grow colder in your absence.”
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How sad these lives must have been, how full of horror and despair, of anguish, to be filled with convictions which require love, which require communicative immolation, and to have locked themselves in shameful isolation, in deceptive guilt, on illusory heights! Doomed to dream of all-consuming fire, to be capable of it, but to be covered in sand exactly as the flagellant covers over with scars…
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My throat tightens, so I must write this rather than speak it; soon my eyes will cloud, and it will be locked inside me, so I must write it quick: What anguish to know, as one with no such illusions, that I will have to take on their role, that I am at waiting in the wings of that dim-lit stage, not in any sense which implies a brilliance similar to theirs, but in a sense which only implies their loneliness, their solitary burn, their incubation...if only I can ensure that my incubation is temporary in a way that theirs was not...oh, in a way that Jacobi’s could be, can be, while Nietzsche’s and Bataille’s were terminal...to be a prophet is the saddest of roles, and worse: It is the prophet’s own knowledge which births that sadness. How much more when one can be prophet of nothing but that sadness? There is no divine promise, no coming generation that may be conceived as a palliative; there is no goal, no hope: How funny that the preconditions of immolation are met at the threshold of its impossibility, how perfect, how stupid…
One cannot predict the Übermensch, the summiter, the revolutionary. What could be more idiotic than the messianic nihilist? The prophet must enact their prophecy or else accept that they are a deplorable liar, a self-deceived opiate obliviously masquerading as the apomorphine of the masses, a guilt-crippled delusional cockroach.
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