Slash and Burn

The gods to whom we sacrifice are themselves sacrifice, tears wept to the point of dying.

Poetic genius is not verbal talent (verbal talent is neccesary, since it is a question of words, but if often leads one astray): it is the divining of ruins secretly expected, in order that so many immutable things become undone, lose themselves, communicate.

Remembering the question from the last blog, asked with respect to Bataille: what does the poet sacrifice? This, perhaps, is the wrong question, for the slipping word is not merely a strategy among others in the poet’s armory. Even if it is a question of writing of this silence or this forest, it is still not a question of making this word or that slip, but a slippage of the whole of meaning, of the economy of sense. This, of course, counts only for the Bataillean poet, who is unconcerned with literary reputation. This is the poet who would sacrifice sense itself, and sacrifice herself just as sense is sacrificed.

I wrote – crudely, quickly – of a component of language which refuses to allow itself to be taken up into the idea. The philosopher, perhaps, regards it as only the remnant of language – a kind of appendix or vestigial tail (this is a characiture …). But for the poet, it is, this same richness, the very richness of language, it is what cannot be removed from language; it is the plenitude which remains when language is no longer employed to make sense (sense and non-sense must be thought together, sense opening against a background of non-sense and non-sense struggling in turn to present itself in its withdrawal as the ‘richness’ in question …)

It is this material element, which, in the articulation of sense, allows language to sacrifice itself, which the poem offers to the sacrificial fire. The ‘matter’ of the word (the vestigal tail, the remnant …) is the poet’s fuel. It is akin to the wicker man or the potlatch which, through its destruction, points to the world which burns within our world (towards our burning world …). If Bataille writes of a ‘sovereign silence’, this is not the silence one might see and not say. It is not a question, here, of ineffability. A sovereign silence arises from the interruption of the struggle between sense and non-sense.

Heraclitus associates what he draws the logos close to a kind of cosmic fire, which periodically scorches the cosmos only to let it be reborn again, like those tribes who slash and burn the forest in order to renew the fertility of its soil.

Let’s say I am the Bataillean poet who writes the word fire (I admit, I haven’t clarified this at all …) The sentence slips. The poem, transforming itself into a thing, would enter the flames, giving itself up, yielding itself to the flames. A blazing poem, pure sacrifice. A blazing incarnation of thought without determinable content: a thinking born and killed over and again in the crucible of the poem.

For a moment, then, it appears the poem is the salamander who lives in the flames. What is sacrificed? The dream that the poem can reach pure immediacy – that it can achieve, by itself, the silence, the forest … It is not, then the immediate which commits itself to sacrifice, but the dream of recapturing the world in the poem. It is mimesis, understood crudely as the representation of the world, of the shackling of language to a shackled understanding of the world. Then the Bataillean poet is the enemy of the novelist whose ambition is to represent the world back to itself. One might say this: at some level or another, the novelist fears the poet – for in the poet’s words, the novelist knows there is a flame which might leap across to the pages of his own book. Bataille’s poem is on fire. It is not the torch that would illumine the night, but the night itself that burns. And Bataille? The salamander in the flames. The one who lives from his death, his continual dying.

Set the novel aflame. Watch five hundred pages crinkle and burn. The poem has been awoken in the novel. A poem that is language, that is the matter, the dregs of language, which has been set aflame. Nietzsche: Night itself is a sun.

Perhaps it is possible to write of an autopoetry – of a fire which is always burning in the words one normally pushes around like coins. It is as though the currency we most trust, the general equivalent which mediates all value, transformed itself into the unexchangeable. ‘Fire is an exchange for all goods’ Heraclitus writes; yes, but it is the exchange which ruins exchange, which replaces coin with the destruction of coins, where the coin is valuable because it destroys itsely. Autopoetry – because sacrifice is automatic, because it is ongoing and the poem is only one site of the great sacrifice that the world also is.

It is said whoever sees God dies. The poem turning itself towards the immediate comes face to face with what sets it aflame. Face to face? But the poem does not have a face which could bear the face of the burning world. Heidegger says somewhere when we walk through a forest we walk through the word forest. The Bataillean poet, as she walks, awakens a conflagration in the ideal trees. The forest is burning – not the real forest, with its shade and its brightness: it is the word forest that is on fire. But the fire spreads from the world to the page and then from the page of the poem to every page in every books …

Holderlin: ‘Now come, fire’. Come, then, in the poem which puts fire to the names in order to reveal an experience which burns at the heart of the flames. Heraclitus allows that physis itself is fire; that beings burn in the light of what withdraws as they come to presence. To which one might say: everything that exists is sacrificed at every moment. Further: there is only sacrifice. What there is is sacrifice. And perhaps the word ‘is’ is sacrificed (it is there the poem lives, opening up a difference in the ‘is’ and as the ‘is’ …)

Hear the roaring of the logos, and know the fire which burns in all things. What does the poet sacrifice? The world, the poem – but isn’t the poet herself sacrificed (but then it is not a question of the poet’s accomplishing anything – doesn’t sacrifice begin as soon as everything begins? Doesn’t a poem – or the movement of a sacrificial poetry – burn within the most sober sentence? And in the place of the poet (occupying her place), do you, the reader, burn in turn?

Perhaps this is how Bataille’s Inner Experience gives itself to be read (this is how what there is gives itself to be experienced in its pages)…. Thus, as for Heraclitus, the cosmos is killed and reborn from fire, but now it is the fire of the poem that is the crucible from which everything dies and rebegins. Blanchot: ‘I am alive. No, you are dead’.