Saint Bataille

soft laws, hard passion
—Sade

Beneath her peignoir, she was sniggering.

“Down on your knees.

“These are my hairy parts.

“Admire.

“Merde, don’t touch...

“Now touch.

“Your tongue—thrust.

“Lick.”

Tatty little brothel on rue St. Denis.

B went there weekly, which meant discipline.

Fighting the compulsion to go every day.

He was on his knees.

Wrists bound behind his back with one of her scented scarves.

(B couldn’t identify the scent; his sinuses were always congested.)

“Enough.

“Lick there now.

“My asshole.

“Here, I spread it.

“We call it le petit...

“I can see you like that.

“My name is God.”

B knew very well her name was God.

It was the name with which he’d christened her.

For almost a year he had been visiting God weekly in her brothel dungeon.

Which was a sacrifice.

If he wanted to go more often, why didn’t he?

It couldn’t be money.

B was profligate with what little he had.

“Reckless expenditure” was a cardinal rule, allied in its way to gift-giving, the Potlatch.

B, punctilious even in his off-hours, said:

“Why le petit, not la petite?”

“You know why,” God said.

“I don’t.

“Tell me.”

“Shut your cunty mouth, Merde.

“Lick.”

Variations of this exchange God improvised every visit.

From where B, wrists bound behind his back, knelt stiffly at le petit de Dieu in the brothel dungeon on rue St. Denis, he could, through the small grubby window above him, see the fabled Centre Pompidou.

(Which in fact was not yet constructed; but fact is not a factor here.)

The once-controversial, now weirdly comfortable architecture was constructed by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers in 1977.

Neither Piano nor Rogers is French.

So much for all-inclusive French chauvinism ascribed to Gaul by its detractors.

“How does it taste?” she said.

B gathered himself. “What?”

“How does it taste?

“My hairy parts.

“Le petit?”

“Like a baboon,” B erupted.

“Like the knobby, shit-smeared hole of a baboon.”

God laughed harshly, the gold tooth in the center of her mouth glittered.

God wore black kid leather gauntlets extending up her slender arms.

Her thick straw-colored hair was long enough for her to sit on.

Instead she gathered it in a loose bun at the top of her head, exposing her slender neck and small ears.

She threaded a lavender rose through her hair.

Like other Parisian prostitutes, she modeled herself on Toulouse-Lautrec’s iconic Moulin Rouge can-can dancer La Goulue.

The popular replications of La Goulue.

She—God—was as supple as La Goulue, with her shapely legs in black stockings and the red heart embroidered on the seat of her knickers.

B, groveling on the stone floor, wasn’t the least bit supple but he was intensely game.

Outside it was pouring with rain.

God in her mauve peignoir, flourishing yellow hair piled high, face powdered ivory like a Geisha, lit cigarette in her carmine lips, was spread-eagled on a red divan, elevated on a low platform.

Her pertinent orifices were exposed and moist.

B had removed his jacket and shoes but not his shirt, necktie, trousers, or black silk socks and garters.

With his stiff back, bound wrists, trick knee, garters and tuberculosis, groveling on the moldy dungeon floor beneath God, he was the very synecdoche of abjection.

Nonetheless, he was enraged.

One miserable, bloodshot eye was fastened on the Centre Pompidou which he could make out through the rain in the near distance.

Through the squalid little window.

All the art that’s fit to eat.

Rend, savage, lacerate, pulverize, obliterate...

If B had anything to say about it.

Stiff-shouldered, sex-mad, phthisic librarian.

B worked fifteen hours a week in the Bibliothèque Nationale.

Not sex-mad, sex-in-the-head-mad.

Death-mad n’est-ce-pas.

B boasted of having masturbated beside his mother’s corpse.

He grew orgasmic just contemplating the infamous 1905 photo of the young Chinese being mutilated in the so-called torture of the hundred pieces.

“The young and seductive Chinese man reduced to the work of the executioner, I adored,” B wrote.

“He communicated his incommunicable pain to me, which was precisely what I was seeking, not so as to take pleasure in it, but in order to ruin in me that which is opposed to ruin.”

Ruin in him that which is opposed to ruin.

Dehumanize him.

“Humanity” being insupportable.

Make him sovereign by dehumanizing him.

Isolate the most obscenely erotic desire from conventional pleasure.

Sovereign was another of B’s crucial emblems.

Like his tormented, dehumanized, sovereign models Artaud and Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Sade.

B had instructed Madame God to call him “Sade.”

But who was Sade to God?

Instead she called him “Filth.”

Merde.

Which was fine with B, the excremental vision being yet another principle of his life and work.

Like Luther of the Reformation, B was impacted, impossibly constipated, hence his perhaps excessive valuation of joyous evacuation, reckless expen-diture.

Why then did he restrict himself to divine punishment before God just once a week?

Possibly because reckless expenditure represented his Sadean version.

Inhabiting the sovereign Marquis daily was a sweet punishment he must deny himself.

Remnant Roman Catholic in him.

Cartesian side.

Through the merde and incessant rain B could just see the Centre Pompidou, grown more popular with contemporary museum-goers than the somber, palatial Louvre.

The Centre Pompidou featured this month the dolls of Bellmer, the drawings of Masson, the just-discovered Henry Darger, and Pierre Klossowski (brother of Balthus, biographer of Sade).

Mad all, with the possible exception of Masson.

Featured also was the extreme makeover of Orlan, utterly mad.

As well as the paintings of the Surrealist autocrat Andre Breton.

Tireless (un-mad) advocate of the idealized dream.

B’s lifetime enemy.

B detested idealism and equally detested those who thought otherwise.

Breton with his shock of sable hair and broad forehead never missed a photo-op.

There was no end to photos of the Surrealists taken en-masse, with Breton’s large head always in or near the center.

Moreover, Breton was a moralist, a closet-Christian.

Which B professed to detest most of all.

When B’s mistress, whom he abused, died of consumption and her mother wished to have a priest administer last rites, B erupted.

He would, he said, throttle any priest who dared enter his house.

This from the pale male who’d earlier converted to Roman Catholicism, spent a year as a Benedictine novice, and cherished self-denial no less than reckless expenditure.

Except on the rare occasions when he ingested opium and thus briefly loved his enemies, B’s hate lacerated him, kept him thrashing in his bed at night.

Why then didn’t he ingest opium more frequently?

Fearful of addiction?

No. Loving his enemies discomfited him.

Loving of any kind discomfited him.

Moreover, opium depressed his crucial sex-in-the-head urge.

Beneath the invariable suit and tie.

Beneath the pale, stiff, placid exterior which epitomized the French haut bourgeois, resided Bataille the abject, debauched, utterly unregenerate hater.

Battler.

On behalf of his sacred knobby, shit-smeared hole.

On behalf of what Sartre (another long-time enemy) called Le Néant.

B, infinitely wrathful in his hairshirt and necktie, stubbornly, recklessly charting his phenomenology of no thing.

God didn’t give a shit.

Still in his necktie and garters, still shackled, but on his back now on the damp, moldy floor under her “throne” with its cutaway, bidet-like seat, God was pissing him.

“Open your mouth, Merde,” God sang through her lit cigarette (Gitanes, sans filtre), one supple, black-stockinged leg askance.

“Swallow God’s gift.”