Monday brings sunshine.  “The world” continues.  The myriad outworking of cause and effect: today was inscribed in yesterday, and while we do not know what tomorrow will bring, all of it is etched faintly or deeply into this present.  It is “Coming of Age Day” (Seijin no Hi) in Japan for all females of 20 years old.  Young women celebrate by dressing in kimono finery and by taking selfies with their friends.

Meanwhile the artillery surely continues to grumble in Ukraine.  One thing always leads to another.

Some lines from yesterday’s Bataille quote still haunt me.

This being that I am is the revolt of being, undefined desire.

God was only a stage for this being,
and is now, grown through a measureless experience,
comically perched on a stake.

–excerpt On Nietzsche, Response to Jean-Paul Sartre, by Georges Bataille, Trans. by Stuart Kendall, p. 180

This is an outrageous idea.  Having read considerably of Bataille’s thought I am confident this is no loose use of language, an offhand expression, one feature of a larger landscape…  This is a “kill shot,” a precise use of language to point the mind of the reader to the center of the writer’s target.

My takeaway is:  Most acutely myself when “in revolt,” I desire to become, to experience, to understand beyond the boundary of the state of being that is familiar to me.  Therefore my dependency upon the deities approved by my family, by my church, by my country is interim, “only a stage.”  Consider the latest form of a culturally approved deity, something as ridiculous, as uproariously ironic as “God comically perched on a stake.”

There is no mistake that Bataille is referring to the Palestine carpenter Jesus, who met his fate as a common criminal, then acclaimed by his followers, God and savior.  Bataille asks that the reader consider how bizarre the notion that God, the-ground-of-all-being, a human like you and I, writhing in death throes in the mode of Roman public execution.

Bataille asserts that all of the gods, and there is a very long list, — be considered a phase of our human development.  Ought we not to laugh at our surreal stories which we have told ourselves of the gods, their myths, the fantastic tales, and the great institutions that we have built in their honor?  Consider the great golden statue of Athena by Phidias on the acropolis in Athens, the pyramids to the sun constructed by the Maya in the Yucatán Peninsula, and even the magnificent NFL stadiums in our major cities…  Then, then we need to get on with the business of bearing responsibility for ourselves, no longer in servile dependency upon any of the old gods.

Servile dependency, sacrifice, piety was “only a stage”…

Does that mean that we are alone?

You and I are not alone — because we have one another.