hypnos: Story of the Eye

by Georges Bataille

ADULTS ONLY! KIDS YOU STAY AWAY!

take the sex act and strip away the burden of reality and what do you have?

take two characters and make them fuck. you are the author and they are your puppets. they will do anything you want. does fucking equal life? can fucking be a form of transgression? so be it, make it so. add another character. a menage! subtract that character, the poor thing. have your characters fuck right next to her cold hanging corpse. they are fucking death! add another character, a sophisticated gent of the old school (the school of Salo, of course). now add a bullfighter and a bullfight. some bull testes. a dead bullfighter. a dangling eye. ok, now add a sexy young catholic priest. ~~fuck~~ blow him. then kill him! play with his eyeball. now run away! a happy ending?

these are not spoilers. dear reader, you are dealing with abstractions. abstractions cannot be spoiled. you can look at them and your eye will see what it wants to see.

when is a novel not a novel? when is a narrative an anti-narrative?

when is an egg not an egg? an eye not an eye? when is urine a golden shower of life-affirming transgression?

your surface is like glass, Story of the Eye. eye see right through it. the glass is fractured; the images are compartmentalized. the images become symbols and metaphors. symbols of and metaphors for... what? eye see a metaphor. i make it my own. i take it in my hands and turn it into whatever i please. i turn it into an egg. the egg is life and i fuck it. i fuck life with my great staring eye. the eye is a looking-glass and i turn it towards myself. your surface becomes a mirror, Story of the Eye. it asks me: what is pornography? a series of living symbols and metaphors, profane and sacred acts, bodies devoid of purpose beyond the violence of movement, the slap and tickle of separating and colliding, sex as a sublime sort of personalized violence? violence is sex with no happy ending? eye see a symbol. it is a testicle, a lonely testicle cast out from its body. what does it mean? does it mean transgression? it is a sphere, like an eye, like an egg, a delicious egg. i eat the testicle.

Synesthesia, from the ancient Greek σύν (syn), "together," and αἴσθησις(aisthēsis), "sensation," is a neurological condition in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway.

"I realized there was a perfect coincidence of images tied to analogous upheavals... I was astonished at having unknowingly substituted a perfectly obscene image for a vision apparently devoid of any sexual implication."

ha! apparently. do you think you are talking to a child?

i went to a sex party on halloween. it was interesting watching people having sex in different costumes. who is who and what is what? is that even a real dick? in their minds were people imagining themselves as a vampire ballerina, and so trying to think like one? a hunky zombie? a werewolf biker chick? how do such things think, how do they fuck? were their costumes a projection of their inner selves and so now they were able to fuck like they fucked in their dreams? my costume: Nite Owl.

after that sex party, we went to another one. hey, it was halloween and that is certainly a time for no regrets. this party was different. less classy and far more extreme. a hair-raisingly brutal s&m scene took place. degradation a-go-go. the debased miss was degraded beyond belief and i saw things that eye will never be able to un-see. belts and fists and spit and constant slapping and constant demeaning and sex = violence and it doesn't end there. the crowd was mesmerized. i wondered, what is happening in that girl's mind? is this sex performing some kind of function beyond my understanding? was her degradation something that somehow lifted her to her own private, transgressive heaven? was this public transgression somehow empowering? i looked at my male companion and he looked back at me; our eyes met and we both understood in that moment that we were seeing something that neither of us were equipped to understand. we were both deeply uncomfortable. or so i thought. but is that what he was really thinking? did he look at me and see weakness, perhaps even fear - the fear of the unknown, the fear of true transgression? his costume: Doctor Manhattan. i looked at my female companion. she was rapt; she did not see me; she did not return my gaze. was she seeing herself down on that floor? was the debased miss a living symbol of all that she had put away when she entered her rigid bourgeois existence? when she finally looked back at the two of us, did she see living shells of hollow men - or the means for further transgression? her costume: The Silk Spectre.

a series of gruesome tableau! an accumulation of transgressions! le petit mort! vivre la vie! oh the banality of trangression! oh the profundity of banality! there is no there there! i see a church and eye burn it! i see my mother, my father, and they are symbols of all that i long to destroy! and other cliches! i take refuge in madness! these eyes have seen it all! they have seen nothing!

she places the egg inside of her. it is a good feeling. the feeling of life? she places an eyeball inside of her. it is a good feeling. what does that eye see? does it see life, or living death? her opening is an opening; it is literal and figurative; she takes the transgression inside of her and becomes it.

they thrust their sabers into the bull. they make an opening, more than one. the bull is enraged, engorged. colored pieces of cloth turn a blood sport into a swirling dance of death. and other cliches. the bullfighter's stiff steel finishes the dance; he makes a bloody cleft into living tissue. the crowd roars. what are they seeing? debasement, transgression, an atrocity, a holy thing? eye do not know. but i don't like it.

you read the book but it is not a book, not really. it is a thesis. what is its purpose? to lay bare the world, i suppose. each act, each object, each symbol and metaphor... open to your own interpretation. come one, come all! cum! cum! cum! yawn. i know the world already. eye am a camera.