The Dung among the Head

The Dung among the Head
Georges Bataille

For sake the dung among the head
I detonate I execrate the sky
the clouds expectorate
it’s bitter to immensity
my eyes are pigs
my heart is ink
my balls become dead suns

the fallen stars gone fathomless grown grave
I weep my language leaks
it imports no immensity’s a round
and rolled and bound in sound
I passion death petition it
in Holy Father’s butchery.

(Translated by Mark Daniel Cohen)

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From Library Journal
Georges Bataille (1897-1962), French avant-garde critic, editor, and novelist, is best known for provocative “erotic” novels and offbeat philosophical theories. His overlooked poetry… mingles religious and scatological imagery. Nonbelieving, anti-Puritan, aspiring to freedom of thought without “moral and social constraint,” Bataille’s world is one in which love and passion are obstacles to openness of mind. Using X-rated erotic motifs, Bataille turns visceral functions into a “headless bird with wings that beat the night;” idealism becomes the “funereal immodesty of dead bones,” and stars “anguish beyond compare.” Like the better-known Jean-Paul Sartre, Bataille fends off “self-annihilation” by envisioning a beleaguered and austere existence: “the immense universe is death/ I am the fever/ the desire.” Confronting “the void,” Bataille bravely concludes, “I was grimacing and laughing, lips wide apart, teeth naked.” This is the audacious, frightful side of surrealism.? (Frank Allen)

From Publishers Weekly.
Bataille’s poetry is definitely the poetry of a philosopher, but it is also a poetry with an obsessively erotic, often scatological edge, frequently pushing the boundary of what is or isn’t obscene. Bataille believed that everything relates to the workings of desire and death in sexuality, but he also believed that poetry was the product of “hate” (and other extreme emotions), just as much as erotic pleasure accedes to self-annihilation. But Bataille was interested in actual action, not just disengaged hypothesis concerning the sexual act. Bataille produced some of the most transcendent, pointedly filthy literature of the century.

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Painting: Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966), “The Artist’s Wife (Annette),” 1961.

What

What Is The Word
Samuel Beckett

folly—
folly for to—
for to—
what is the word—
folly from this—
all this—
folly from all this—
given—
folly given all this—
seeing—
folly seeing all this—
this—
what is the word—
this this—
this this here—
all this this here—
folly given all this—
seeing—
folly seeing all this this here—
for to—
what is the word—
see—
glimpse—
seem to glimpse—
need to seem to glimpse—
folly for to need to seem to glimpse—
what—
what is the word—
and where—
folly for to need to seem to glimpse what where—
where—
what is the word—
there—
over there—
away over there—
afar—
afar away over there—
afaint—
afaint afar away over there what—
what—
what is the word—
seeing all this—
all this this—
all this this here—
folly for to see what—
glimpse—
seem to glimpse—
need to seem to glimpse—
afaint afar away over there what—
folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what—
what—
what is the word—

what is the word

_____________

[Something like a comment. By Glenn Wallis.]

What is the word

That is not a question, is it? Notice the lack of punctuation. A question mark would be nice, though, wouldn’t it? We could read it as a persistent probing for a word, for the word, for the right word. We could then join in on the fun, and perhaps even accomplish something: “What is the word I am looking for? Ah, yes…” But here is no “I,” no agent, no someone, and  no some thing to get.  And here, too, is no “?” for us to doodle with.

We could place a period at the end. Then, it is a declarative statement. It is an answer. “What” is the word. I found the word I was looking for: it is “what.” But then I wonder: an answer to what question; an answer to what?

What folly.

This here, this this here—is this not enough for us, this this? This what? This what. This what? This—. How much this would be enough? What word could we use to say?  Do you have the right word?                           What is enough

The poet may have been suffering from aphasia when he wrote the poem. Yet, it captures a life-long obsession, or concern—of his, of ours: to name the unnamable. But the unnamable is not some

What folly. What folly for to need to seem to glimpse afaint afar away over there what—

_____

The poet’s sort-of-friend, E.M. Cioran, says that “a sudden silence in the middle of a conversation suddenly brings us back to essentials: it reveals how dearly we must pay for the invention of speech.” I wonder if being still, cultivated, practiced stillness, “meditation,” could do the same. I would, though, as a working hypothesis, rephrase Cioran:

A sudden silence in the midst of this reveals         what

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Painting: Alberto Giacometti (1906-1966); no title

Nature

Nature
Michel Houellebecq

I have no time for those pompous imbeciles
Who go into ecstasies before bunnies’ burrows
Because nature is ugly, tedious and hostile;
It has no message to transmit to humans.

How pleasant, at the wheel of a powerful Mercedes,
To drive through solitary and grandiose places;
Subtly manipulating the gearstick.
You dominate the hills, the rivers, and all things.

The forests, so close, glitter in the sun
And seem to reflect ancient knowledges;
In the depths of their valleys must lie such marvels,
After a few hours you are taken in;

Leaving the car, the irritations begin;
You stumble into the middle of a repugnant mess,
An abject universe, deprived of all meaning
Made of stones and brambles, flies and snakes.

You miss the parking-lots and the smell of petrol,
The serene, gentle glint of the nickel counters;
It’s too late. It’s too cold. The night begins. The forest enfolds you in its cruel dream.

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Comment (from this meditator’s perspective).

Nature is not our home. Contrary to the idealistic yearnings of homo sapiens ape, nature is not our home. Nature is nothing. Nature is not even nature. It is what we call stones and brambles, flies and snakes, amassed imaginatively into an hallucinatory whole. Let’s include blood and veins vita vivum and neurons and brains and tongues igniting stratovolcanos of  impulse and thought and word. Let us call this blast of vim that unfolds in-through-with-alongside of consciousness “nature,” if we like. But the mere spewing of the sound “nature” does not domesticate chaos as “home.” It does not even render it a beneficent way station.  “Nature” names the vortex of dissolution. “Home,” like Eden and Oz, names a fantasy—pulsing with the desperate fury of ancestral yearning—for human paradise.

How can we know this? Look to where the poet is pointing, and proceed from there. Since you are reading this, there must still be some time.

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Photograph: Stag Rock Study 4 (Black Water) by Steen Doessing.

Why I Cannot Write (or Save my Life)

Why I Cannot Write (or Save my Life)
Glenn Wallis

There is in language an adumbration of lie—
Guile to speech what rank is to the pack,
Order a goon of cackling gutturals
Deceit a stream pure as the Ganges

Is vile. I seek syllables
Taut as sinew, sweet and succulent as meat on the bone, words
Clear as the whooper of a swan, sentences
Sharp as a seagull’s solemn caw.

But I am Icarus, seared by the sun, fallen from the sky.
Just look at me, flapping my plumage like a silkie
Flopping my wings that are no wings at
All but naked arms.

Dropped through the air
Like an unfettered sail
To the lush field where
The ancients slaughtered goats
In blood-soaked sacrifice,
Goats whose throats
Gurgled consonants when slit,
I lie abashed awing oooing ohing howling sense-

less vowels in the grass.

Spectral Twilight

Spectral Twilight
Georg Trakl

Silence at the forest’s edge encounters
A dark beast;
On the hill, evening’s breeze quietly fades,

The plaint of the blackbird hushes
And the gentle flutes of autumn
Fall silent in the reeds.

You float on black clouds
Drunk on poppies
The nocturnal pond,

The starry sky.
Forever sounds the lunar voice of the sister
Through the spectral night.

(Translated by Glenn Wallis)

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My commentary.

It is the silence of matter annihilating the sacred dream—mind’s weft, the works of the yearning spirit.

Are you not a dark beast? Did you think your were a god? For the gods are the wind and their naming. Silence is a mode of mute beasts, who live in the forest, our home, of timber, stone, and shit.

The gentle flutes of autumn fall silent in the reeds; the beast and the blackbird respond.

Languidly, we gaze into the nocturnal pond, beguiled by our own reflection. We see ourselves everywhere. The danger here, though, is more than the willfulness of our human narcissism. Hovering above the earth in the black wisdom of our “knowing,” that poppy of forever makes us drunk.

But the poet has the kindness to remind us that the night is spectral. Long before forever, every star in the nocturnal pond will burn out. Our heaven, once lit, however dimly, by our pale lunar sister, will become perfect darkness. The resplendent glories of heaven and earth will become coal-like husks of collapsed matter. Stellar corpses will lumber, for one final instant, through space. Then, the last atom will dissolve.

Laugh and Laugh

Laughter
Georges Bataille

Laugh and laugh
at the sun
at the nettles
at the stones
at the ducks

at the rain
at the pee-pee of the pope
at mommy
at a coffin full of shit.

Nick Land’s comment (from The Thirst for Annihilation).

This poem introduces three of the most crucial themes traversing Bataille’s writing: laughter, excrement, and death. Such “themes” are suspended only momentarily at the lip of philosophical intelligibility, and then released into a euphoric immolation upon the burn-core of literature, disintegrating into a senseless heterogeneous mass. His texts obsessively reiterate that the decomposed body is excremental, and that the only sufficient response to death is laughter. The corpse not only dissolves into a noxious base matter analogous to excrement, it is also in fact defecated as waste by the life of the species.

Poems of Air

Poems of Air
Mark Strand

The poems of air are slowly dying;
too light for the page, too faint, too far away,
the ones we’ve called The Moon, The Stars, The Sun,
sink into the sea or slide behind the cooling trees
at the field’s edge. The grace of light is everywhere.

Some summer day or winter night the poems will cease.
No one will weep, no one will look at the sky.
A heavy mist will fill the valleys,
an indelible dark will rain on the hills,
and nothing, not a single bird, will sing.

______________________________

On Mark Strand
On Antony

Epitomes

In his short story, “Homage to Hemingway,” Julian Barnes has his writing-instructor protagonist use Finnish composer Sibelius (1865-1957, as I learn from the somewhat frazzled fictional instructor), as an example of a particular process; that, namely, from complexity to simplicity, or perhaps better said, from expansiveness to compression.

Seven symphonies… They start – the first two – with the great melodic expansiveness. You hear a lot of Tchaikovsky, a bit of Bruckner, Dvorak, perhaps, anyway, the great 19th century European symphonic tradition. Then the Third – shorter, just as melodic, and yet more restrained, held back, moving in a new direction. Then the great Fourth, austere, forbidding, granitic, the work where he most engages with modernism… Then the Fifth, Sixth, and that epitome of compression the Seventh. To my doubtless fallible years, one of the things Sibelius is asking, from the Third to the Seventh, is: What is melody? How far can we compress it, reduce it to a phrase, even, but make that phrase as charged and memorable as some Big Tune from the good old days? Music that seems to question itself and its underlying justification even as it beguiles you. (The New Yorker, July 4, 2011, p.63.)

I am interested in exploring the same matter with meditation. That is, to what extent can we compress meditation? how can we reduce it to its “epitome”?

When I read Barnes’s story, it made me think of how I have followed a similar process in terms of meditation practice.

On Not Improving

I get e-mails from people asking me to clarify the categories that I use to arrange material on this blog, namely, meditation, language, and poetry. Why, they ask, do I include a link to Ulrich Baer’s blog on photography under the rubric “meditation?” Or why is a post on the difficulties of teaching categorized under “language?” The short and, perhaps, obvious answer, is that each of these categories is an aspect of the same thing. Each contributes to the warp and weft of the human expression that I am interested in exploring here. All three, in my understanding, involve similar activities, such as looking and seeing, letting-lie–before-one, caring, taking to heart.  As I write this though, I realize just how unsure I am about the matter myself. For now, I’ll file it away under “future posts.”

On the way to an answer, I’d like to share a comment that the poet Paul Muldoon made in response to a heckling audience member at one of his readings. The heckler was apparently badgering Muldoon for doing something other than “poetry.” I want to give Muldoon’s response verbatim, but with a slight alteration. Wherever Muldoon says “poetry,” I will substitute “meditation.” (A few additional changes will be made to make the grammar work.) First, though, here is the lead-in comment by Nick Laird, the author of the piece from which I am quoting. Laird rights: “Poetry isn’t improving: it doesn’t lead anywhere except back toward ourselves” (The New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011/Volume LVIII, Number 11, p. 66). So, our first substitution summarizes 2500 years of meditation teaching: “Meditation isn’t improving: it doesn’t lead anywhere except back toward ourselves.”

Tinian

Tinian
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843)
Translated by Glenn Wallis

Sweet it is to be nourished by the beauty
Of the world, and to feel life as do
The demi-gods or patriarchs sitting
In judgment. But they are not equal
To everything around them, especially life, humming
With heat and the echoes’ shade
As if gathered together at the heart
Of the blaze. It is a golden desert. Or like the fire steel
That strikes the life-warming hearth,
And then the night—strikes sparks out of the polished stone
Of day. And at dusk a lyre still sounds. Against the sea sizzles