At dawn, my pain rises with red cheeks and covers my body with a wild and opulent absence of flowers. Everything is lily, lilac, arias of freesias for me, inaudible hymn of iris and trumpet of amaryllis, I have everything I do not have, lack celebrates with me the inexpressible ecstasies of satisfaction, I have your invisible and heavy hands upon my breasts, I am an almond tree that burns without rest.
—
Hélène Cixous Manna: For the Mandelstams for the Mandelasm
The beauty of the world is the mouth of a labyrinth. The unwary individual who on entering takes a few steps is soon unable to find the opening. Worn out, with nothing to eat or drink, in the dark, separated from his dear ones, and from everything he loves and is accustomed to, he walks on without knowing anything or hoping anything, incapable even of discovering whether he is really going forward or merely turning round on the same spot. But this affliction is as nothing compared with the danger threatening him. For if he does not lose courage, if he goes on walking, it is absolutely certain that he will finally arrive at the center of the labyrinth. And there God is waiting to eat him.
—
Simone Weil, “Forms of the Implicit Love of God
my heart is black ink my sex is a dead sun [III 87].
—
Georges Bataille. Oeuvres Complètes. via Nick Land in The Thirst for Annihilation.
