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Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor? What scent of old wood hovers, what softened sound from outside fills the air? Will you ever bring a better gift for the world than the breathing respect that you carry wherever you go right now? Are you waiting for time to show you some better thoughts? When you turn around, starting here, lift this new glimpse that you found; carry into evening all that you want from this day. This interval you spent reading or hearing this, keep it for life–– What can anyone give you greater than now, starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?
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This is a perfect moment.
It's a perfect moment for many reasons, but especially because you and I are waking up from our sleepwalking, thumb-sucking, dumb-clucking collusion with the masters of delusion and destruction. . Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow, we are waking up. . Their wars and tortures, their crimes against nature, extinctions of species their engineered diseases. . Their spying and lying in the name of the father, sterilizing seeds and trademarking water. . Molestations of God, celebrations of shame, mangling our dreams and defiling our names. . Their ruthless commercials and blood-sucking hustles, their endless rehearsals for the end of the world. . Thanks to them, from whom the painful blessings flow, we are waking up. . Their painful blessings are cracking open more and more gashes in the sour and shrunken mass hallucination that is mistakenly called "reality." And through the fractures, ripe eternity is flooding in; news of our souls' true home is pouring in; our allies from the other side of the veil are swarming in, inspiring us to become smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier. . We are waking up. . As heaven and earth come together, as the dreamtime and daytime merge, we register the jolting and exhilarating fact that we are in charge -- you and I are in charge -- of imagining and discovering and animating a brash new world. Not in some distant time or faraway place, but right here and right now. . As we stand on this brink, as we dance on this verge, we cannot let the ruling fools of the dying world consummate their curses. We've got to rise up and fight their deranged logic; defy, resist, and prevent their tragic magic; uncork our sacred rage and supercharge it. . But overthrowing the psychopathic leaders is not enough. Protesting the well-dressed planet-rapers is not enough. We cannot afford to be consumed with our anger; cannot be obsessed and possessed by their danger. . Our mysterious animal bodies crave delight and fertility. Our ancient imaginations demand ever-fresh tastes of infinity. . In the new culture we are hatching, we need lusty compassion and euphoric duty, lyrical logic and insurrectionary beauty. In the new alliance we are mobilizing, we need radical curiosity and reverent pranks, voracious listening and altruistic banks. . In the new covenant that we are midwifing, We will ridicule the cult of doom and gloom. We will embrace the cause of zoom and bloom. We will outfox the banality of evil and hate; we will summon the chutzpah to praise and create. No matter how upside-down it all may appear, we will have no fear because we know this big secret: . All of creation is conspiring to shower us with catalytic blessings. Life is crazily in love with us --brazenly and innocently in love with us. Our destinies always bring us exactly what we need to liberate us from our suffering. . The winds and the tides are on our side, forever and ever, amen. The birds and snakes are scheming to make us their sacred soul mates. . The sun and the moon and the stars remember our real names, and our ancestors pray for us while we're dreaming. . We have guardian angels and thousands of teachers provocateurs with designs to unleash us helpers and saviors we can't even imagine brothers and sisters who want us to blossom . Thanks to them, from whom the blissful blessings flow, we are waking up. . The roads they pave us the places they save us the tomatoes they grow us the rivers they flow us . Their mysterious stories and morning glories Their loaves and fishes granting our wishes . The songs they sing us The gifts they bring us the secrets they show us above and below us . Thanks to them, from whom the blissful blessings flow, we are waking up. . Breathe out the jive Breathe in the love . Breathe out the history Breathe in the mystery . Breathe out the grandiosity Breathe in the generosity The Poverty of Organisms or Limited Systems and the Excess Wealth of Living Nature
''Minds accustomed to seeing the development of productive forces as the ideal end of activity refuse to recognize that the energy which constitutes wealth, must ultimately be spent lavishly (without return), and that a series of profitable operations has absolutely no other effect than the squandering of profits.” “...I am postponing, for a short time, the exposition of my analysis of anxiety.
And yet that is the crucial analysis that alone can adequately circumscribe the opposition of the two political methods: that of fear and the anxious search for solution, combining the pursuit of freedom with the imperatives that are the most opposed to freedom; and that of freedom of mind, which issues from the global resources of life, a freedom for which, instantly everything is resolved, everything is rich -- in other words, everything that is commensurate with the universe. I insist on the fact that, to freedom of mind, the search for a solution is an exuberance, superfluity; this gives it an incomparable force. To solve the political problems becomes difficult for those who allow anxiety alone to pose them. It is necessary for anxiety to pose them. But their solution demands at a certain point the removal of this anxiety. The meaning of the political proposals at the end of the volume, is linked to this lucid attitude.” George Bataille, Preface to The Accursed Share” "Man’s disregard for the material basis of his life still causes him to err in a serious way. Humanity exploits given material resources, but by restricting them as it does to a resolution of the immediate difficulties it encounters (a revolution which it has hastily had to define as an ideal), it assigns to the forces it employs an end which they cannot have. Beyond our immediate ends, man’s activity in fact pursues the useless and infinite fulfillment of the universe.1
1. Of the materiality of the universe, which doubtless, in its proximate and remote aspects, is never anything but a beyond of thought. Fulfillment designates that which fulfills itself, not that which is fulfilled. Infinite is in opposition both to the limited determination and to the assigned end." Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share “...Economic activity, considered as a whole, is conceived in terms of particular operations with limited ends. The mind generalizes by composing the aggregate of these operations. Economic science merely generalizes the isolated situation; it restricts its object to operations carried out with a view to a limited end, that of economic man. It does not take into consideration a play of energy that no particular end limits; the play of living matter in general, involved in the movement of light of which it is the result.”
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share ''We see movies in which people are represented as being in love who never talk with one another, who fall into bed without ever discussing their bodies, their sexual needs, their likes and dislikes. Indeed, the message received from the mass media is that knowledge makes love less compelling; that it is ignorance that gives love its erotic and transgressive edge.
These messages are often brought to us by profiteering producers who have no clue about the art of loving, who substitute their mystified visions because they do not really know how to genuinely portray loving interaction." — all about love: New Visions” by Bell Hooks “One must know what one wants to be,” the eighteenth-century French mathematician Émilie du Châtelet wrote in weighing the nature of genius. “In the latter endeavors irresolution produces false steps, and in the life of the mind confused ideas.”
“On the surface of the globe, for living matter in general, energy is always in excess; the question is always posed in terms of extravagance. The choice is limited to how the wealth is squandered. It is to the particular living being, or limited population of living beings, that the problem of necessity presents itself. But man is not just the separate being that contends with the living world and with other men for his share of resources. The general movement of exudation (of waste) of living matter impels him, and he cannot stop it; moreover, being at the summit, his sovereignty in the living world identifies him with this movement; it destines him, in a privileged way, to that glorious operation, to useless consumption. If he denies this, as he is consciously urged to do by the consciousness of a necessity, of an indigence inherent in separate beings (which are constantly short of resources, which are nothing but eternally needy individuals), his denial does not alter the global movement of energy in the least: The latter cannot accumulate limitlessly in the productive forces; eventually, like a river into the sea, it is bound to escape us and be lost to us.”
Georges Bataille, The Accursed Share |
