Like Georges Bataille ? Who wrote hundred of pages to say he wasn't able to even begin it, to articulate even a few words about what the fuss that project was about ? To such an extent the impossibility to express the project become the expression of the project itself ?
There are people like him who seem to start top-down: they are struck by the Project from the very beginning and then their life devolve into expressing it.
Others start bottom-up: they start writing about their own life, writing about the fact they are writing and gradually get into the project. That's what happen to Philip Roth.
So, did the Project grab hold of you ?
Any other dudes beyond Bataille & Roth by the way ?
bump, don't you have any kind of intensity my gays ?
I find it's much harder to create than to consume, I am at a point where I have to appreciate the artistry of even the worst producers of slop (beats producers, genre novelist) because at least they sit down and do something. I'm a well rounded enough person in terms of subjects, I can probably sit down and read a surprising variety of stuff and at least somewhat parse where it's going but then sitting down to write a novel myself seems like an insane task. I've been trying to do more creative stuff but it's such an uphill battle compared to just consuming.
idk, maybe someday. maybe my part to play is smaller than that.
I'm a gay too, see for yourself:
>To Joséphine, May 31, 2015
>
>I wrote this two weeks ago. Of course, you don't have the context, so you understand nothing. Everything is going as planned.
>
>I know where I stand (I am crying right now). I have reached the point in literature where the novelist's ramp tilts for one whose life has always been fiction. For survival, I am naturally forced to consider myself as the writer who writes about the writer. By default, my only option now. You should get The Facts by Philip Roth. You dread your new power. I am just trying to hang on. I start strong. I move fast. I am a sign. A monkey fallen into a cannon, boom, I try to grab the branches of the canopy but catch only its gaps. I travel at the speed of light. Time has frozen. I am already among the stars and I am still in the cannon. I eat a banana. My eyes shine in the darkness. The only objective perspective left to me is to write a novel. I am a guy writing a novel, out of survival. But the novel demands that I simply be who I am. So, I am already a character of fiction. And the story is particularly striking because this character tries to get out of fiction. To do this, he writes a novel with a girl. This novel is very interesting also because what the girl does not know - while the boy strives to make her understand, is that this novel will only be that of his life, of everything he thought and lived, this novel about that he will tell to her will simply be this conversation. The whole challenge of this novel consists of evoking in the girl even a slight thrill of the multiversal slide - making her understand that indeed she has truly lived For Whom the Bell Tolls, and that she is a girl of the It in the simple brilliance of "just that". Don't hear the Bell, but you answer the call - she will know she rings when she understands why she matters. So thinks the boy. And when he thinks about this situation, he is quite satisfied, it’s a neat trick. Rolling on itself; its own cause. But suddenly he truly remembers; he remembers that before that he exchanged the length of a novel via SMS. And the novelist then feels sucked into his book. Not during writing. After. Before. It's written black on white: time no longer exists.
>From this perspective on the world, the perplexing perplexity. And each exit from the novel will only make the fiction more serious.
>In the Deluge, the World has nothing left but to float.
>To Joséphine, in September of the same year
>
>At 1:30 in the morning, I am still sitting at my desk. I think about what you represent for me. I think about what you no longer represent as well. And I do not believe at all in the representative power of language as it will come into play here, and it depends neither on me nor on you but on this obscure force that takes the name "us two" while I start thus giving it shape. It's like a debate, but instead of exchanging truths, we exchange feelings. And as in a debate, we believe we are seizing a piece of ground, but we only push the opposing position to move.
>It's late, and I think back to last night. The moon shone brightly and emitted that cold light to become clear and the air was mild enough not to be hot. The buzzing of the high tension line accompanied the fixity of the stars in the livid sky. I thought of you. I thought I was seizing life. What a beautiful night. I thought about all that we can do, all the places where one can be to enjoy and settle into the comfort of such an evening, all the bar terraces where one can finish getting drunk under the yellow lights, the parks where one can settle and the bluish shadows of the clumps that populate them and which invite us to lie down. But yesterday at this time as at the same today, I was simply sitting at my desk, letting my gaze wander in the window frame and contemplating life beyond, just as now I content myself, without looking further, to write here what was, on the other side of the window, simply there that night. And in entering this domain, hoisting myself over the gates, in pushing aside the branches of the bushes, I simply have the impression of extending a shadow without having the leisure to observe the body that gives it shape.
>Whether I look at the Good Life beyond what my eyes see, whether I rest my gaze on the trees in my garden or on the window panes and the edges of the carpentry, whether I remember my life or live the memory, I do not feel the same distances, and I discover you in multiple proximities. I want to bury my nose in your neck and pull you closer to me to feel your body and make you feel mine. And I also want to have another iced tea in this sweltering heat and hear you tell me in great detail the story of your heart breaking against a heart that is not mine, and which does not find its match in the passion full of discomforts that you extend to it. And I would love to feel you by my side, to be able to give us accomplice perspectives on the novel, to write paragraphs for fun and then cross them out right after, but I love trying to talk to you about the novel and see you tear the fabric of the dream when you frown and reduce the situation to a baffled distance, for then I write "she frowns". Imagine. "Joséphine in the novel – A Guide to Autopoiesis – Gallimard". Ten thousand copies. Joséphine exposed, Joséphine celebrated, Joséphine criticized and known and understood, Joséphine spun and slapped by the novel, spun and slapped by life, Joséphine stripped and left naked in the storm she has reaped! Come on, Joséphine, I'm kidding, cross out, cross out! That's not a good life. It's simply letting art lead its life in such a way that it leads us to art, it's, sewn by the threads the future passes down to us, the only way – the needle plunging and emerging from the hem like a wave – to live life without regrets or fears of seeing the thread escape the eye. It's sewing patterns in symmetry of lives, but it's also taking a step back to catch a glance at the whole tapestry. And it's at that moment, intimately, that we could possess the work.
>But here the possibility of such a step back is not conceivable, nor that of not being the magical animals living in the orchard of the tapestry, nor yet for me, not to be the trompe l'oeil of the character coming out of the decor or to be the painter who, in the heart of the night, is devoured by the crocodiles he painted in the morning. We are really the oil spread with a palette knife on the canvas, a novel is really being reproduced in which, without realizing it, we have been sliding from the beginning. After all, if I announce to you like that, when we are sitting in the shade of the parasols, that we are characters and that the scene of a novel is being written by our bodies thus sheltered from the sun, what to think, if not that this surreal situation has a most literary scent?
>For you, this way of doing must seem most arbitrary and forced, but for me, it comes from further away and is charged with meanings that are for my life the wheels on which it continues its momentum. And even if you wanted to let yourself be taken by the game, you would feel deprived and unequal, not knowing what follow-up to give to the action; even if you were suddenly charged with the burden of a performance that must be perfect and occurs only once, even if you had to be the diver who descends into the fault, you would remain paralyzed by the thickness of the depths, you would feel yourself falling in your fall through the darkness, towards the hypothesis of a seabed so soft and so viscous that you might already be sinking into it – and to increase the pressure, I would say "paralysis leads the action".
it's difficult to say something when you don't have anything to say.
Or in programmatic terms, it's difficult to program anything that doesn't do anything
But consider this bash one-liner
>s='s=47%s47;printf "$s" "$s"';printf "$s" "$s"
open Terminal.app and copy paste it. You observe this:
>s='s=47%s47;printf "$s" "$s"';printf "$s" "$s"
>A quine program, or quine, is a program that outputs its own source code when run. A quine is not allowed to “step outside itself” by, for example, printing out the contents of the file in which it is contained or using introspective capabilities to print its own representation. Instead, it must compute its own source code.
Interesting post OP. I am prone to wild projects that are always impractically grand, but I usually at least begin them, and make some headway, learn something unexpected, realize the project was absurd, and begin a new project.
In this way I have written a few decent essays and poems, but they are pithy scraps of the ghost project that always haunts me.
I am dogged by an uncontrolable curiosity that dives deep into random arts and subjects. I have acquired quite a bit of skill but very few people are interested in my work, alas.
it's frustrating to me why girls are so into this Bataille guy. like most translations of this guy's books in my language are done by women. I kept seeing comments about his books on various socials, how it got them excited etc. and when I check their profiles and it's all comments by women. women are fricking degenerates man.
Women in the west had to suffer generations of horrible tyrant fathers and husbands. The memory of this is still very much alive and feminism, at its heart, is the independent spirit of the better woman fleeing the bondage spirit of the inferior man. Of course not every feminist or even most are describable in this way, many are now driven by hedonic pleasure, but if you wish to comprehend women, you must think of the intelligent, big-hearted woman married off to a drunkard who saddles her with children he ignores and occasionally accuses her of cheating in rage, and tears up her "unladylike" books and, like her father before, stands over her, the image of derranged and pointless human rage, as if he were her Lord and not her failed student. And you must have sympathy for her.
nice
>Women in the west had to suffer generations of horrible tyrant fathers and husbands.
In protestant cultures.
>In England, for example, the system of primogeniture (where the eldest son inherits the entirety of a landed estate) often left daughters with little to no inheritance
What if it wasn't the West that was degenerate but America ?
Quoting Bataille:
>This experience exists, although we must make this basic reservation in advance, it exists in the form of a project, and even in the form of a textbook. Treatises on these circumstances exist everywhere. Books with the aim of communicating experience, of facilitating, therefore, the path to- ward it, exist everywhere. Of course, I'm not saying that these books should not have existed; I'm not saying that the mystics, having had their experience, having perhaps felt the need to describe it, should have thrown their books into the fire: I suppose, however, that they have all been tempted to measure the authenticity of their experience. I imagine that the problem that I'm looking to raise today must have been a sort of dominant problem for them.
>There is something repugnant, perfectly sickening even, in the fact of wanting to communicate the experience not because one can escape the possibility of communicating it – the need to communicate it is too strong – but because, while communicating it, one communicates it to others as a project, one communicates it to others while indicating to them the path that they can follow, one communicates it to others already as the embryo of a degradation of the experience.
^ That last paragraph: that's what I'm talking about.
Having been there, and on top of the notion of Quine I mentioned above, I may elaborate:
I think what Bataille alludes to is the limits of language, not in what it fails to grasp, but what it fails to induce. This isn't a matter of representation but of incarnation. Note that these limits are distinct from the limits of what's conceivable, since the will to communicate this experience – that project – burns in the flame-carrier even though the wall of expression bars his route. And the main reason for this is that we're all different interpreters of what appears to be the same language – even to former version of ourselves – what may singularize this flame-carrier is that he has found the fixed-point that turned him into its own Quine. What fuels his obsession is transmitting this experience to others, and that experience consist in biting your own tail. Now that explains why this experience transcends language as it goes beyond refering to objects: each word must be carefully set with respect to the interpreter that will churn it in an empty, indirect self-reference to what amounts to a black box to the outside (by the way the text I quote above comes from a book titled "The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge").
If you are serious about this Project, you have to go full neurological psy-op, and that would amount to founding something akin to psycho-history. Psycho because you're targeting individuals, history because there is no way you'd be able to pull this off without englobing all of history in this Project – or conversely, if you manage to bootstrap it, it eventually will.
This is what Bataille means when he says:
>I am not a philosopher, but a saint, maybe a madman.
-Georges Bataille, Method of Meditation, note 6
>The day I began writing Guilty, September 5, 1939, I abandoned an intention that, even abandoned, set the ensemble of writings that I assembled apart. Before beginning to write in this way, the project that I had formed (if you will: that I was unable to reject) was the following: I believed myself drawn to found a religion, at least in a paradoxical way.
-Georges Bataille, lEuvres completes, 6:373
Let's turn to Roth now, specifically The Facts, a Novelist's Autobiography:
On the first page, a quote from a previous book:
>And as he spoke I was thinking, the kind of stories that people turn life into, the kind of lives that people turn stories into.
>Nathan Zuckerman, in The Counterlife
Mmmhh, see what I mean ?
>Over fifty you need ways of making yourself visible to yourself. A moment comes, as it did for me some months back, when I was all at once in a state of helpless confusion and could not understand any longer what once was obvious to me: why I do what I do, why I live where I live, why I share my life with the one I do. My desk had become a frightening, foreign place and, unlike similar moments earlier in life when the old strategies didn’t work anymore—either for the pragmatic business of daily living, those problems that everybody faces, or for the specialized problems of writing—and I had energetically resolved on a course of renewal, I came to believe that I just could not make myself over yet again. Far from feeling capable of remaking myself, I felt myself coming undone.
>I’m talking about a breakdown. Although there’s no need to delve into particulars here, I will tell you that in the spring of 1987, at the height of a ten-year period of creativity, what was to have been minor surgery turned into a prolonged physical ordeal that led to an extreme depression that carried me right to the edge of emotional and mental dissolution. It was in the period of post-crack-up meditation, with the clarity attending the remission of an illness, that I began, quite involuntarily, to focus virtually all my waking attention on worlds from which I had lived at a distance for decades—remembering where I had started out from and how it had all begun. If you lose something, you say, “Okay, let’s retrace the steps.
>I came in the house, took off my coat, went into the kitchen,” etc., etc. In order to recover what I had lost I had to go back to the moment of origin. I found no one moment of origin but a series of moments, a history of multiple origins, and that’s what I have written here in the effort to repossess life. I hadn’t ever mapped out my life like this but rather, as I’ve said, had looked only for what could be transformed. Here, so as to fall back into my former life, to retrieve my vitality, to transform myself into myself, I began rendering experience untransformed.
100%
weird turn, interesting thread