envoie xxx des visages xxx ce sont des temps d effroi mon dieu cette nuit pour la premire fois je suis rest veille dans le noir les yeux brlants des images de souffrance humaine dfilant sans arrt devant moi j ai dj xxx mort les pieds plants dans ta terre les yeux levs vers ton ciel j ai parfois le visage inond de larmes le soir aussi lorsque couche dans mon lit je me recueille en toi mon dieu des larmes de gratitude m inondent parfois le visage et c est ma prire would it all be absurd or might it make some kind of sense i ve made myself sick wondering about it i awake in the morning just the way millions do millions of boys girls infants and old men their slumber dissipated forever these millions those slumbers have no meaning a hidden meaning hidden yes obviously but if nothing has any meaning there s no point in my doing anything i ll beg off i ll use any deceitful means to get out of it in the end i ll have to let go and sell myself to meaninglessness nonsense that is man s killer the one who tortures and kills not a glimmer of hope left but if there is a meaning today i don t know what it is tomorrow tomorrow who can tell me am i going to find out what it is no i can t conceive of any meaning other than my anguish and as for that i know all about it and for the time being nonsense monsieur nonsense is writing and understands that he is mad it s atrocious but his madness this meaninglessness how serious it has become all of a sudden might that indeed be meaningful my life has only a meaning insofar as i lack one oh but let me be mad make something of all this he who is able to understand it he who is dying and there the living self is knowing not why it s teeth chattering in the lashing wind the immensity the night engulfs it and all on purpose that living self is there just in order not to know but as for god god if he knew would be a swine he would entirely grasp the idea but what would there be of the human about him beyond beyond everything and yet farther and even farther still himself in an ecstasy above emptiness cognitive activity god comes to be known in ways that originate in god solely god is nothing if he is not in every sense the surpassing of god in the sense of common everyday being in the sense of dread horror and impurity and finally in the sense of nothing he is mystery indeed he is the absolute mystery divine disclosure is in direct proportion to the degree of divine concealment intensification of revelation equals to increasing of god s hiddenness descent of the deus absconditus vere tu es deus absconditus the unreservedly open spirit open to death to torment to joy the open spirit open and dying suffering and dying and happy stands in a certain veiled light that light is divine and the cry that breaks from a twisted mouth may perhaps twist him who utters it but what he speaks is an immense alleluia flung into endless silence and lost there shall my only victory be available in conscience why is absence the proof when i demand palpable presence there is enough light to enlighten the elect and enough darkness to humble them there is enough darkness to blind the reprobate and enough clarity to condemn them and make them without excuse our perception is subject to the fissure of concupiscence woestruck am i realising that the light cast on this chiaroscuro world is partial and selective division election and predestination enabled by grace or left to one s own device anguish is only sovereign absolute the sovereign is a king no more it dwells in low biding in big cities it knits itself up in silence obscuring its sorrow crouching thick wrapped there it waits lies waiting for the advent of him who shall strike a general terror but meanwhile and even so its sorrow scornfully mocks at all that comes to pass and all there is from very high above a kind of stillness swept down upon me and froze me it was as though i were borne aloft in a flight of headless and unbodied angels shaped from the broad swooping of wings but it was simpler than that i became unhappy and felt painfully forsaken as one is when in the presence of god she was seated she held one leg stuck up in the air to open her crack yet wider she used fingers to draw the folds of skin apart and so her old rag and ruin lured at me hairy and pink just as full of life as some loathsome squid why i stammered in a subdued tone why are you doing that you can see for yourself she said i m god no use laying it all up to irony when i say of here that she is god but god figured as a public whore and gone crazy that viewed through the optic of philosophy makes no sense at all i don t mind having sorrow derided if derided it has to be he only will grasp me aright whose heart holds a wound that is an incurable wound who never for anything in any way would be cured of it and what man if so wounded would ever be willing to die of any other hurt if there is nothing that surpasses our powers and our understanding if we do not acknowledge something greater than ourselves greater than we are despite ourselves something which at all costs must not be then we do not reach the insensate moment towards we strive with all this is in our power and which at the same time we exert with all our power to stave off i can utter no word o my god unless i be permitted by thee and can move in no direction until i obtain thy sanction it is thou o my god who hast called me into being through the power of thy might and hast endued me with thy grace to manifest thy cause the act whereby being existence is bestowed upon us is an unbearable surpassing of being an act no less unbearable than that of dying and since in death being is take away from us at the same time it is given to us we must seek for it in the feeling of dying in those unbearable moments when it seems to us that we are dying because the existence in us during these interludes exists through nothing but a sustaining and ruinous excess when the fullness of horror and that of joy coincide as i waited for annihilation all that subsisted in me seemed to me to be the dross over which man s life tarries diabolus absconditus the conjunction of intellect and psychotropic altered senses supported by insistent and archaic sounds credit for tremendous revelation goes in all humility to g bataille1