Mysticism and Contamination
the left-hand of the sacred
Reading/launch in NYC tomorrow with Kyra Simone and Daniel Poppick for my new book, Confetti.
***Little note: Thank you, as always, for subscribing and for reading. I’m going to be changing things up. Paid subscribers will now get more frequent posts, 1-2 per week, along with at least one audio offering per month (a conversation, sampling, reading).*****
What does it mean to be free? To let someone else be free? What do our sources say about us? Who we read and how we read them, who others read and how they read them? What readings are we imposing on others? When are we forcing others to read us as we read ourselves? During World War II, Georges Bataille wrote a trilogy of books on a mysticism founded on the death of god, a search for the sacred in an increasingly profane society, and a mysticism without the promise of salvation or the notion of completeness or wholeness in the distance. A kind of shattered, up-close mysticism which strove for freedom. And what is that? Bataille’s a thinker of what’s leftover and what’s left out, and the spaces those residues create, which are neither comfy nor safe.
I just taught a class on this mystical strain of Bataille’s thought, and spent most of September rereading and thinking about his relationship to mysticism, violence, the sacred, communication, and community and also his strange relationship to and miming of…Nietzsche. Bataille’s Nietzsche is the late Nietzsche, the silent one who threw his arms around the Turin horse and never again wrote. Bataille shows Nietzsche down on the ground, so close to this world that he’s dazzled, made mad and silent. Not separate, but in it, and putting the self at risk.
For Bataille, silence doesn’t mean a lack of speech but another kind of noise, a noise that interrupts a more ordinary buzz, and the tragedy of Nietzsche, he says, is the tragedy of a night emerging from an excess of light. Too much of the heights. At the summit, a decline. The sun splits, as in the myth of Icarus. Wings melt! Bataille’s is a mysticism of contamination, a search for Dionysus, the god who exuberantly affirms life as tragedy, in an increasingly utilitarian society….