kagablog

outside the window the snow of oblivion falls. the sky is steel and the canals (grachten) are frozen shut. the children play on the frozen surfaces. amid the ritual of total destruction, based upon the blinding light of death, our verdict comes too gently. like an innocent-looking letter bomb that announces our execution when we open it to read its message. such is the harvest of this perverted heaven.

in this hazy twilight i am reading bataille’s diary concerning the departure of his beloved laure, whose slow death the year before still torments him, and whose ghost still haunts him. this is bataille without his “blue of noon”, stripped naked in other words, with knives in his fists plunging into the wild interpretation of the senses.

“Standing in front of her grave i was so overcome with pain and sorrow that I held myself in my own arms without knowing why: at this very moment, I felt as if I had split in two and was strangling her … suddenly a terrible softness gripped me just like when the obstacles separating two people disappear.”
(September 14, 1939)

We are told by Bataille that this is a document “violently dominated by tears and death”. Indeed it is a sanguine manuscript haf-strangeld (by convulsions, gaps, lapses, amputated sentences and crossed-out passages) as he reveals what language cannot and will never be able to reveal as it approaches the unintelligible. It is the mute universum of death versus the particularism of a man who has made a crystal ball of his perversions and who has branded them into his chest.

As we read these desperate plots to kill his already dead wife we can compare this intrigue to that of a performance. Isn’t a performance a beckoning to the mirror of the dead in order to shed off the forgotten unforgotten? The performance work of Zyklus, for examle, is an evocation of past sequences as inhuman remedies for a time which speaks too much.

Let me tell you something: everything that has ever worked in our performances - every tiny shimmer, glistening wound or “terrible softness” - occured not by design but by the hand of the dead.

And this also means that every enemy atmosphere, dull event or entertaining imagery was a failure of our being able to breathe with the dead.

“On the threshold of glory,
I found death masquerading as nudity,
Complete with Garters and black silk
stockings.
Whoever met anything more human,
Whoever tolerated a more terrible fury?
Yet this fury took me by the hand, and took me
into hell.”
(June 3, 1940)

This “resurrection work” of Zyklus (which are unearthings of such obscure angels, death rattles and sudden rays of light) is akin to Bataille in that we both believe in a hiatus, an opening to the holy (transgressive) touch of death. Here we find that the only medicine for the fever of possession is an eclipse of the reason/speech object and “placing it in the shadow of the reality it expresses”. In other words a desire to asphyxiate the modern reality in order to unsmother its message, and to allow death to become the center of that which is never a whole. We conclude with a vision of the thunderous volume in the shudder of the alphasiac touch…

ZYKLUS/Le Chien 25/2/94