Phoebe’s breasts heaved towards me. The gesture was lost on me, but she had plenty to waste. In that way, perhaps, she was risking nothing.
•
Two summers in a row, I taught a one-day performance art workshop for teens. Television news would have you convinced that teens are layabouts, glued to TikTok, with no productive futures ahead of them. But these teens aspired towards college and reasonably well-paid careers as animators, marketers, and designers. In the moments before the workshop began, and during restroom breaks, they talked about their college application portfolios. They poured hours into their studios—grey rooms for the making of sculpture or glowing screens for the drawing of digital beasts—in the hope that the outcome could get them somewhere, could accomplish something. Outside the studio, they volunteered, took challenging courses, worked part-time jobs for ‘real world experience,’ and played sports.
If our society is a disease, then the will to productivity is a primary symptom. Hannibal Lecter knew this. In Silence of the Lambs, the fictional cannibal psychiatrist accuses FBI Agent Clarice Starling of having no curiosity beyond that required for “getting out… getting anywhere… getting all the way to the FBI.” Michael Greene sees the emptiness of productivity, too. In his 1995 book, Bataille’s Wound, he quotes early 20th century French writer Georges Bataille:
“[I]f you happen to cling to stuffy goals within limits, where no one is at stake but yourself, your life will be that of most people, it will be ‘deprived of the marvelous.'”
If I am gathering together, all too rapidly, Phoebe, Lecter, Starling, Greene, and Bataille, then good.
Great.
Fantastic.
All the better.
•
Phoebe wants to gather her fellow students in the round, place one student at the center, and badger the centerpoint with questions. When the student at the center gives the wrong answer to a question, she proposes that we beat the victim and ridicule him. I am getting the sense she is now the teacher and I am now the student. I am ready to take up the center.
•
God is dead but not like a person, and not like the fiddle-leafed fig you overwatered, but like an essay on climate change. God is dead like an op-ed on higher ed. God is dead like Roseanne. Like the dream of American industry. God is dead like Gen-X self-sufficiency, Millennial irony, and Gen-Z cringe. She’s dead like Katy Perry’s “Woman’s World.” She’s dead like the idea of Bernie saving us all. She’s only alive if you jump her with cables hooked to the sun and, even then, only for brief moments. God is dead unless you force her to live.
Now, we have the sequin. Not a flat sequin, and not a paillette—
and if you don’t know what a paillette is,
but you can name more than one German philosopher,
I regret to inform you that you, too,
are dead—
but the faceted sequin. So small and yet capable of, then and again, pulsing out a blinding light. I keep sequin garments but wear them rarely. In closets and chests, they remind me that it is possible to be a blinding sun, to give God life, to take that life away, to burn up in a conflagration of fag nonsense, to be full of shimmering waste.
•
Next to Phoebe is a young Black gay boy. Their relationship is immediately legible. On this very homophobic campus, in this very segregated city, who other than Phoebe might cast a big enough shadow as to serve as shelter? Who, if not the 16 year-old with her breasts jacked up to her ears, with her hair dyed a blonde so bright that the discipline of biology is shamed?
I just know her stylist used dollar bills instead of foils.
Her face is wide and clear. Her eyes look straight into my own and she is not intimidated by my age, my accomplishments, my position. She is smart and smart about it. She can turn anyone inside out. Who wouldn’t hide in the wake of her force?
I want to hide in her wake, as well, but I won’t allow myself that cowardice a second time. Instead, I commit to an impossible uselessness: I write.
•
Bataille’s Wound isn’t Michael Greene’s take on Bataille but, he tells us, something closer to Bataille’s thoughts decomposed within Greene’s life.
“When I write in the first person, this should not be taken as something other than Bataille’s thought, for I am able to say something akin to what Catherine said of Heathcliff, what Bataille himself wrote of Nietzsche, and what Nietzsche wrote of every name in history: I am Bataille. And being Bataille, I am also Nietzsche, also every name in history; and, so, history is over, and it is necessary to begin again.” 1
Maybe he would say it is unimportant or, more correctly, important in a way we must relinquish, to know who is or isn’t writing in these pages. We orbit one another in a whipping procession. Our centerpoint is but an anchor for the gravity of another. Greene is asking us for a kind of psychosis, maybe, a kind of accepting of sensations into ourselves without the organizing principle of a subject. Bataille and Greene are names for waves in the ocean; false observations.
This is sacrificial, not in the sense that a Christian might mean it—relinquishing something in honor of God. Nor is it the New Age dissolving of self into some happy-go-lucky confluence of crystals and manifestation TikToks. Those lines of thought disbelieve in the impossible. What Greene sacrifices is history, is the idea that a decision has already been made and one can now sit back and simply be. Being is decision for Greene.
“When I decide, the decisive current of the universe, the entire universe, courses through me. My outbreak—my decisions—like any volcano, involves the cumulative pressure of the globe and the empty draw of the sky.” 2
His is an insistence that life begins at scratch. There are no truths to receive, no ancient, untroubled wisdom to claim. To live is to return to Bataille, to Nietzsche, to all the rest who are so famous that they need not be mentioned, and decide again.
And, then, a decision:
“I am, and, what is more, I demand to be, not only in spite of the ocean of improbability out of which I emerge, but in front of the other sea towards which I stream […] [this decision] is what I am, my idiotic, even insane depths—my instinctive body, my gratuitous exigency, my animal impulse to exist.” 3
There’s no reason for Michael Greene to be, and no reason for me to be. There’s no reason for me to write this except that I want to dump more words into the sea where Greene, Bataille, and Nietzsche’s words slosh around, corrode, get gulped up.
“I prefer being laughable to being nothing.” 4
•
Pumpkin
Maude
Backsplash
Oleander
Jockstrap
Moncton
Vaulted
•
Nonsense is not Michael Greene’s objective but what occurs to him in moments of living. Nonsense is itself the center of rational thought. Consider: you look into a sequin and the light burns your eye. It embarrasses you, or it makes you blink. You begin to piece apart what is here and what it is doing. You track the source of the light which strikes the sequin, consider the focal properties of its reflective surface.
“What is it?”
“What does it mean?”
“How can I use it?”
These rational thoughts, Greene argues, are not the anchor points from which nonsense departs but the paths of flight we take to avoid nonsense. It “exposes the folly of calculation.” It is the noontime sun to which we close our eyes.
There is no story to tell you about nonsense.
•
“It’s about sex, too.”
I’ve been simple. The classroom table, a collision of four modular tables, placed Phoebe across from me. A competitor or mirror; a counterpoint or negation. I stood as a teacher stands. She sat as a judge sits. She changed the meaning of both actions.
I carefully offered my prepared lesson: some thoughts on what performance, as a medium, might offer to a room full of teens who drew, sculpted, animated, or otherwise made. I offered that performance was about time, about one’s inner experience. I stole those words from Yoko Ono and Bataille, ported them into the classroom.
“It’s about sex, too.”
Phoebe leaned forward onto the table, looking me directly in the eyes and smiling. I knew she knew, as I knew, both sides of this equation. She was a teen and a girl. I was an adult and a fag. So, why the flash of sexiness? Why the forward-thrust chest, the tight tee?
It’s about sex, sure, but Phoebe wasn’t trying to seduce me. She wasn’t trying to turn me on. She was using the terms of the space and culture—a university setting in an America possessed by images of pedophilia—to give the moment some kind of risk, some kind of liveness. The fact is, it is about sex, about something confessed, documented. It is about something bureaucratic and compulsively checked-in-on. It is about establishing boundaries and the seductive possibility of crossing them. Phoebe, a teen, isn’t supposed to act so immediately sexual in an educational setting. I, an adult, am not supposed to heighten the risk by placing myself on the window ledge, one foot over, and staring back into her eyes. She has the courage to cross the boundary. I lack it.
•
“To be is to be dramatic, and everything else seems evasion. Any configuration of myself from the outside, misses my being as communication; overlooks or degrades my dramatic capacity to decide. One has the authority to choose because one is dramatic.” 5
•
Bataille’s Wound is divided into short sections which map—more or less—onto the main themes of Bataille’s oeuvre: things sacrificed, fetid and fêted. Inside each section are aphorisms, quotes, poems, and brief asides which lack a main text. An early section, “Bataille’s Optics,” looks towards the sun as the starting point of all vision. After all, without the exuberant explosion that irradiates our planet, we’d have no reason for eyes—though life itself becomes unlikely at that point.
Greene compares the sun to a man with his throat slashed, much as Bataille compares the sun to a bull mid-sacrifice. It is a finite explosion, irreversible and immensely consequential. Greene’s thought, he says, emerges from Bataille’s, and I find both images convincing. I find both deceptive, as well.
The man and the bull are important to one another, and the sun is important to both. But none of us matter to the sun. Not that the sun has thoughts or feelings, but in a broader sense, we can have very little impact on the sun, except for the way the Earth’s gravity might pull a few molecules this way or that. If the sun is such a spectacular display, it is also one which is indifferent to the reactions of its onlookers. A man whose throat has been slashed can see the vomiting witnesses. The sun sees nothing and, in this, denies us an image of ourselves.
Greene points to something along these lines when he describes the sun’s constant self-destruction, and the small fraction of solar energy which makes contact with Earth. The vast majority of the sun’s energy is, in his terms, wasted. Shouldn’t we ask, though, if those breakout solar rays matter elsewhere? Couldn’t we ask about our Earthcentrism? Wouldn’t it be better if we asked how to quantify and qualify the sun’s impacts on a galactic scale?
No.
To calculate the sun, trace an ethnography of its outer space utility, is to insist that the sun is still about us somehow. It still serves us, in some way. These projects try to make the sun into a confirmation of our intelligence or a benevolent giver of life.
The sun is terrific because it is the limit of our meaning.
•
I am consumed at times with the image of myself eating poison ivy. The poison ivy in my garden has spread this year—in part inevitable, in part because I cut back the shrubs which shaded it in previous years. It reaches for the light so that its quiet flowers might swell into fruits. Birds, for whom poison ivy presents no risk, will eat the berries and shit out seeds across the neighborhood. Stray cats, groundhogs, and the occasional squirrel will push through the plant’s hairy branches, totally un-reactive. Humans are one of the few species for whom poison ivy provokes a rash; in some, a severe manifestation of welts. According to botanists, the chemical which produces the effect—urushiol—may have evolved as a microbial defense.6 Like the sun, poison ivy has nothing to do with us.
I imagine placing the leaves on my tongue, knowing that the immediate reaction I feel is probably psychosomatic. I imagine my bite crushing the leaves, and my saliva spreading the urushiol across my lips and gums. It spreads on my teeth, too, but they do not react. My teeth have nothing to do with me.
Then, I make the decision and swallow.
•
It could be said that my thoughts on Phoebe are not careful, that I am not serious enough. Shouldn’t I ask about the mental health of a teen who seems so bent on getting a rise out of others? Couldn’t I ask after the culture which treats young women as over-sexed by default? Wouldn’t I be better off asking questions that lead with concern?
No.
Whatever illness or ill-conceived notion might have made these actions and words possible for Phoebe, they do not eliminate the possibility that—in those moments—she was existing on the live edge of something. Here, almost certainly, is where Greene—and by extension, Bataille—and by extension, almost certainly me—say the most unpopular thing we’ve got to say:
Vibrant living is quite horrific. It is the groan of death, the bird flattened under a car tire, the urushiol inflaming every organ until I am exploded outward like a venomous star. It is being too excited, for someone your age, about the careless lift of a helium balloon. It is laughing after you fall down the stairs and, just ever so narrowly, miss breaking your neck. Perhaps none of those things are, in a moral sense, good. Perhaps, in a sociological sense, it is very irresponsible to ask about these things without also building guides, trainings, bulletins, and podcasts to prevent them from ever happening again. Even in a psychoanalytic framework, we are encouraged to reduce these excesses into something economic, something repeatable.
We must place sequins in the eyes of scientists.
•
The aphorism is a drunk Sunday afternoon, sleepy on a sunny patch of a public park.
•
“The least project brings an end to the game—and I am, lacking play, brought back to the prison of useful objects, loaded with meaning.”7
•
Words are like solar emanations—something which arises from a body but which is not the body of its origin. What ray of sun could convey the full madness of a burning star?
“Me makes too much sense; it obscures the confusion which wrecks me. If the word me worked, I would be like some other me.”8
•
I am disturbed by Bataille’s Wound, not because it introduces novel horror into my life but because it does not hide life’s horror behind discourses of renewal, reclamation, revolution, or rebirth. Greene’s words hold my feet to the sun and I am reminded that this life is it. I am continually expending my only finite exsanguination, my only urushiol explosion, my only tangential immolation. The time put into writing these words cannot be recovered. But the desire to recover that time is also a desire to make it infinite and meaningless.
Bataille’s Wound wound me up, gave me energy to waste, so I’ve come here to waste and not to explain. This book is lonely like the sun. It seeks to ignite others. It turns us into timber, kindling, faggots.
- Michael Greene, Bataille’s Wound, 1 ↩︎
- ibid., 3 ↩︎
- ibid., 29 ↩︎
- ibid. ↩︎
- ibid., 72 ↩︎
- https://www.si.edu/stories/poison-ivy-primer ↩︎
- Georges Bataille, Inner Experience, 201 ↩︎
- Greene, 8 ↩︎
Dani Lamorte
Dani Lamorte is a Pittsburgh-based artist who writes, performs, and makes photographic images. Dani’s first book of essays, Nobody's Psychic: Finding & Losing Yourself, is forthcoming from the University Press of Kentucky.