Mad Burn of Chance
How can one avoid knowing once
—then again, and endlessly—
the lie of the objects for which we burn?
Nevertheless, in this senseless darkness,
more distant than every nonsense, than every collapse,
passion still lacerates me to “communicate” to those I love
the news of this nightfall, as if this “communication,” and none other,
were the sole measure of so great a love.
Thus reborn —endlessly here —the mad fulguration of chance
—demanding— from us, as a precondition, the understanding of the lie,
of the nonsense that it is.
–excerpt On Nietzsche, by Georges Bataille, trans. by Stuart Kendall p. 160
I had no idea that I’d be up to posting anything today. Yesterday I tested positive for Covid. Not knowing how sick I might become, I prepared these lines from Bataille’s rumination about life. If my mind was to be disrupted by sickness, words sharpened to a point which I doubt I could match on my own, could be offered as a more than sufficient post.
Objects for which we burn, that deceive us,– what are they?
youth
good health
affluence
influence
spouse
children
Nothing seems more durable once achieved, and yet the passage of time, and chance removes every one of these from our grasp. In the long run there’s only distant darkness, nightfall, And yet, and yet,– we nevertheless reach out to those we love, to others, knowing that all is to be lost, that time and chance is to burn everything as if exposed to a stroke of lightning…
fulgurare: to flash with lightning.
