Desperately, I work,
seeking the unity of man and the world!
On coordinated levels of knowledge,
political action, and limitless contemplation!

I have to go back to this truth:
that life implicates a beyond of light, of beloved chance.

My madness—or rather my extreme wisdom—
nevertheless reveals this to me:
this beloved chance had to be a support when my immediate chance
–beloved being—left me, itself had the nature of chance.

Normally we deny this nature…
Hence the necessity of a reduction to reason,
of an infinite confidence in systems that eliminate chance
(pure reason is itself deductible to the need to eliminate chance
–which theories of probability apparently do).

–excerpt On Nietzsche by Georges Bataille, trans. by Stuart Kendall p. 115

Difficulty sleeping last night.  Realization dawns that the heart arrhythmia correction procedure was a bigger deal than I initially thought.  Uncorrected, how long before a pacemaker would have been needed?  Why me?  Why the good fortune of access to this level of medical treatment?  There is no why.  Just a concatenation of circumstances, chained cause and effect of life that we call “luck.”  Stated more baldly: blind chance.

Bataille labels this aspect of life, “beloved chance.”  He writes that one is somewhat mad or extremely wise to recognize this dimension of experience.  We usually deny the wild chance of our tenure here, by relying upon systems constructed by our reason.  Reason, by definition, locks a desired outcome down to a “certainty.”

Mad or wise?

Mad and wise?