Godlike Moments
The supreme being,
the sovereign deity,
the god of heaven,
is generally only a more powerful god
of the same nature as the others.
The gods are simply mythical spirits,
without any substratum of reality.
The spirit that is not subordinated to the reality
of a mortal body is a god,
is purely divine (sacred).
Insofar as he is himself a spirit,
man is divine (sacred),
but he is not supremely so,
since he is real.
-excerpt The Theory of Religion by Georges Bataille, p. 37
What is it about drag racing, what compulsion draws us to dedicate the best of one’s attention, the last measure of one’s stamina, of our life-force and a substantial portion of one’s financial resources — to build, to work tenaciously to tune a race car to traverse 1320 foot quarter mile ever more quickly? Each tenth of a second hard won, the elusive goal never reached, — a collaboration and melding of man and machine… How is it that some of us are captivated, compelled by a madness, a love for the indescribable sensation of a gforce wave at the hit of a starting line launch, then a mad barely-straight-line dance on asphalt across the finish line? Is this not too proximate to primal forces hardly contained — becoming godlike for fleeting seconds as space and time are compressed, as the human spirit is released from the limit of the real?
*The header image is of one of one of the concessions serving fans and racers for many years at Great Lakes Drag-a-way in Union Grove, Wisconsin.
