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)

___________________________

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.

___________________________

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

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

____

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

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.

_________________

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.

_________________

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

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
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)

__________

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.

The poet awakens in us a searing, living memory of our ancestral scope. His “edge” is a line of horizon that renders facile all notions of homo sapiens as guardians of the axis mundi, and of earth, indeed, the cosmos, as “home.” How much more so does Trakl’s edge obliterate fantasies of an unscathed exit, such as heaven or rebirth? How infinitesimally puny does the ostensible cognitive fizzle known as “enlightenment” appear against the cosmic catastrophe. This is ancestral anamnesis. It means: remember, remember! Remember what you are!

The German original:

Geistliche Dämmerung
Georg Trakl

Stille begegnet am Saum des Waldes
Ein dunkles Wild;
Am Hügel endet leise der Abendwind,

Verstummt die Klage der Amsel
Und die sanften Flöten des Herbstes
Schweigen im Rohr.

Auf schwarzer Wolke
Befährst du trunken von Mohn
Den nächtigen Weiher,

Den Sternenhimmel.
Immer tönt der Schwester mondene Stimme
Durch die geistliche Nacht.

Painting by Victoria Veedell.

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. For the corpse is the truth of the biological individual, its consummate superfluity. It is only through the passage into irredeemable waste that the individual is marked with the delible trace of its excess. It is because life is pure surplus that the child of “Laughter”—standing by the side of of his quietly weeping mother and transfixed by the stinking ruins of his father—is gripped by convulsions of horror that explode into the peals of mirth, as uncompromising as orgasm. “Laughter” is, in part, a contribution to the theory of mourning. Laughter is a communion with the dead, since death is not the object of laughter: it is death itself that finds a voice when we laugh. Laughter is that which is lost to discourse, the hemorrhaging of pragmatics into excitation and filth.

Image source

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

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. Over a thirty-five year period, the structure and context of my practice have gone from extraordinarily expansive to extraordinarily compressed. I used to sit with the gargantuan doctrinal apparatus of “Buddhism” swirling around my head. Now I sit in stillness and silence. Sometimes my attention is on my breathing body; sometimes it is on the resplendent array of arising and passing phenomena. That’s it.

I wonder if this line from expansiveness to compression has any end to it. Maybe it will turn out to be more like a circle. Maybe at some point I’ll start adding things back into my practice. Somehow I doubt that. Compression and simplicity feel real to me, while the lovely but baroque accoutrements of doctrine and tradition feel burdensome. In any case, my practice is now in the mode of emptying.

Because I teach and write about meditation, this mode brings me face-to-face with a certain conundrum: how do I talk about meditation? For over thirty-five years I have had no qualms whatsoever about using a Buddhist framework to do so. Lately, that framework strikes me as deeply problematic. More and more it appears to be coercive – it says in advance what happens (or should happen) during meditation practice; it prescribes too many rules about how the meditative life should be led; it is moralizing, and, hence, for many, demoralizing; it is run through by a powerful current of asceticism. Two aspects of employing a Buddhist framework are particularly disturbing to me. The first is that it usurps the practitioner’s actual, lived, experienced process. That is, time and time again I have heard people use the same formulaic, doctrinal vocabulary to talk about meditative practice and the meditative life as a whole. Some see in such speech patterns evidence of “entering the stream” or maturing on “the path.” I see it, rather, as a disturbing symptom. I see the employment of borrowed language as a sign of evasion, of taking comfort in the warm embrace of community at the expense of the very purpose that that community is (ostensibly) meant to serve, namely, the combustion of delusion. I see it as a sign that someone is subscribing to a program, rather than engaging a potentially excoriating – and, to a great extent, lonely – practice of self-and-reality-knowing.

That is why I encourage people, as Thoreau put it, to keep language close to the bone. Let the language come out of the knowing – out of your bodily experience – and not the other way around. Because each of us has a particular perspective on “the knowing,” our language will be, at least to some degree, unique to each of us. It will be fresher, richer, more vibrant, and more honest than the borrowed language of Buddhism or any other pre-established framework allows.

Yet, still, I have to talk about these things. What language should I use? One possibility is the language of poetry. Doesn’t, for instance, Wallace Stevens’s poem “The Snowman” capture more about whatever it is we’re up to in sitting than cumbersome Buddhist technical language?

For the listener, who listens in the snow sitting,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

What the hell needs to be added to that?

As part of my ongoing experiment of fusing meditation and poetry, I offer you the following poem by Georg Trakl (1887-1914), called “A Winter Evening.” I will analyze it vis-à-vis meditation practice in a future post. I hope you’ll do the same now, after reading it. (Relatedly: see my others post on Trakl, and my post on Wallace Stevens’s “The Sail of Ulysses.”)

A Winter Evening
Georg Trakl
translated by Glenn Wallis

Snow falling on the window,
Long sounds the evening bell.
For many is the table laid.
And the house is abundant.

Some, from their wanderings,
Come to the door on dark paths.
Golden blooms the tree of grace
From out of the earth’s cool sap.

A wanderer enters silently;
Pain has turned the threshold to stone.
There, glistening in pure radiance
On the table: bread and wine.

Ein Winterabend
Georg Trakl

Wenn der Schnee ans Fenster fällt,
Lang die Abendglocke läutet,
Vielen ist der Tisch bereitet
Und das Haus ist wohlbestellt.

Mancher auf der Wanderschaft
Kommt ans Tor auf dunklen Pfaden.
Golden blüht der Baum der Gnaden
Aus der Erde kühlem Saft.

Wanderer tritt still herein;
Schmerz versteinerte die Schwelle.
Da erglänzt in reiner Helle
Auf dem Tische Brot und Wein.

___________________________

Some Sibelius: ” the great Fourth, austere, forbidding, granitic.”

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.”

If you have ever been foolish/courageous enough to try to teach other people meditation, I imagine that you, like me, have also been accused of doing “something other than meditation”– what you are doing is not “Buddhist” enough, not “spiritual” enough, too “masculine,” and so on.

Okay, here goes. “Paul Muldoon”/”Glenn Wallis” responding to the heckler now:

It doesn’t come naturally to me to defend this practice as meditation. As a concept, I see it like this: the word “meditation,” as you know, means “cultivating,” so this is a construct in the world…One is trying to construct something that will help us to make sense of things, and the construct, or building even, let’s say, space, a clearing, a momentary stay against confusion, which, when we enter, we have some clarification, however slight, and when we leave it, something, however slight, has been clarified. We have been helped in some way to make sense of the world.

So that is what meditation means to me. I need to be provoked by it. I can’t quite accept what seems to be a fairly conventional notion of meditation as that which bolsters us up in what we already know. I am less interested in that than in meditation that puts us in a difficult position and makes us think again about how things are, and that is almost an article of faith.

Another article of faith…has to do with unknowing, and that, I think, connects it to many experiences that could be described as “spiritual” experiences, and I know you are all familiar with those, or one has a sense of giving oneself over to something beyond oneself, something one doesn’t quite understand; and only when one does that, and only in a spirit of humility, is there half the chance that one will come out the other side knowing anything at all in some minor way. So I think I am really pleased that you enter these discussions in the spirit of unknowing, because that is the spirit in which we all engage in the business of trying to meditate. (The New York Review of Books, June 23, 2011/Volume LVIII, Number 11, p. 66)

So, what exactly are we talking about here – meditation? language? poetry? I guess the answer, for now, is: yes.

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

The crack of the hunt. But the Egyptian sits bare-chested
In perpetual song—her joints gouty from toil—
She sits in the forest, around a fire. Signifying the
Sound conscience of the firmament’s clouds and seas
A brook gurgles through Scotland or past the lake
Of Lombardy. Boys, accustomed to a life
As fresh as pearls, play among the figures
Of their masters or of corpses; and around the crown
Of the tower can be heard the coo of the swallows’ soft
Cry. For something of these boys remains
In faithful books, and something,
In the bounds of space within the forms of time.

No, truly, the day
Fashions no
Human forms. Like Jacob’s Ladder, though,
The Elysian is a lasting vision.
But when the created day is ignited
And the rod that diverts
Lightning glistens with the hour
Of heavenly dew’s ascent,
The most high must feel
Itself to be among the mortals, too.
That is why they build their homes
And the workshops hum
And the ship glides over the stream.

For when the juice of the vine,
That mild plant, seeks shade,
And the grapes grow under the cool
Vault of the leaves
It is strength to men
Fragrance to girls; and bees,
Drunk from the scent,
Are driven in a frenzy
Toward the spirit of the sun resting
Like a nursing child.

[To be continued.]

_________________

I came across this poem in D. E. Sattler’s Frankfurter Hölderlin Ausgabe (Band 8, Seite 1005, Σ285). Sattler gives the title as “Tinian.” This epithet causes some confusion. This “Tinian” is not, for instance, the well-known Hölderlin poem commonly known as “Tinian,” which begins “It’s sweet to get lost/In the holy wilderness” (=Paul Hoover’s translation of: “Suess ists zu irren/In heilger Wildnis”). Other than the title, the opening two words, and a single stanza, it has nothing in common with the “Tinian” rendered here.

I am not a Germanist, and so can’t really sort out the issue. (Indeed, I am not really all that interested in doing so.) But, in case you’d like to try, I give you here some of the facts. In his Hymns and Fragments, Richard Sieburth translates as distinct poems or fragments of poems several stanzas identical or similar to stanzas in Sattler’s “Tinian” (pages 125, 129, 155) as well as the well-known poem “Tinian” (188). Michael Hamburger, in Selected Poems and Fragments, translates the stanza beginning “Wenn nemlich der Rebe saft” (“For when the juice of the vine”) as a distinct fragment. The piece I am working on is given by Sattler as an extensive, coherent poem consisting of 156 lines. One issue to bear in mind is that Sattler’s Ausgabe is not the standard edition for Hölderlin studies–Beissner’s Grosse Stuttgarter Ausgabe is. Indeed, Sattler’s outsider status is one of the reasons I prefer him to Beissner (but that is another story). In any case, it is difficult for me to imagine that “Tinian” has never been translated as it is given in the Frankfurter Hölderlin Ausgabe. Is that possible? Or is the entire piece perhaps not so much a Hölderlin poem as one of Sattler’s many conjectures about Hölderlin’s intentions? One strong piece of evidence for this being the case is that no facsimile is given in Band 7 of Frankfurter Hölderlin Ausgabe.

Curious about this matter, I put the following questions to a dozen leading Hölderlin scholars in the U.S. and Europe: (1) is there an English transaltion of FHA “Tinian Σ285″; and (2) in your estimation, is “Tinian Σ285″ perhaps an invention of Sattler?

Not one of the scholars whom I contacted could help me resolve the issue to my satisfaction. So, I wrote Sattler himself. I will share his response–and, indeed, defense of his conjecture–as well as the complete translation, including the German text of the poem, later in the summer.