Monday, November 1, 2010

Nonsensical Non-Sense


I have enough sense to love the nonsensical logic of Bataille. Some of his thoughts are so incomplete and fragmented, but when he gets it, he gets it.

"Thus one notes that the earth, by turning, makes animals and men have coitus, and (because the result is as much the cause as that which provokes it) that animals and men make the earth turn by having coitus. It is the mechanical combination or transformation of these movements that the alchemists sought as the philosopher's stone. It is through the use of this magically valued combination that one can determine the present position of men in the midst of the elements. An abandoned shoe, a rotten tooth, a snub nose, the cook spitting in the soup of his masters are to love what a battle flag is to nationality. An umbrella, a sexagenarian, a seminarian, the smell of rotten eggs, the hollow eyes of judges are the roots that nourish love. A dog devouring the stomach of a goose, a drunken vomiting woman, a slobbering accountant, a jar of mustard represent the confusion that serves as the vehicle of love. A man who finds himself among others is irritated because he does not know why he is not one of the others. In bed next to a girl he loves, he forgets that he does not know why he is himself instead of the body he touches. Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms. Love or infantile rage, or a provincial dowager's vanity, or clerical pornography, or the diamond of a soprano bewilder individuals forgotten in dusty apartments. They can very well try to find each other; they will never find anything but parodic images, and they will fall asleep as empty as mirrors. The absent and inert girl hanging dreamless from my arms is no more foreign to me than the door or window through which I can look or pass. I rediscover indifference (allowing her to leave me) when I fall asleep, through an inability to love what happens. It is impossible for her to know whom she will discover when I hold her, because she obstinately attains a complete forgetting. The planetary systems that turn in space like rapid disks, and whose centers also move, describing an infinitely larger circle, only move away continuously from their own position in order to return it, completing their rotation.

Movement is a figure of love, incapable of stopping at a particular being, and rapidly passing from one to another. (See what I mean? He gets it!) - Georges Bataille, Solar Anus

I find his travels into the dark recesses of the human psyche disturbing and fascinating all at the same time. It takes equal amounts of courage, curiosity and stupidity to allow yourself to descend into insanity. I think it's brave to not only explore these dark corners of the mind, but to speak what you find there. Most people spend a great deal of time and energy repressing and dismissing negative characteristics of human nature, and Bataille lays every last rotten morsle on the table.

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