The point of this video, and Dr Krauss's book, is to explain how "something came from nothing". The question of how something came from nothing is a philosophical question, the very deepest question actually, which is intended to address a specific problem, namely why is there a Universe in the first place? Why is there something rather than nothing? What it boils down to is, that unless there is an eternal first cause, all existence at some point had an absolute beginning from absolutely nothing. This of course is impossible; an eternal first cause is the only plausible answer, but scientists and many philosophers have a big problem with an eternal first cause; namely that it opens the door to a Creator. Therefore, no matter that all of the evidence points to time, space matter and energy having an absolute beginning, or the absurdity in trying to prove something came from nothing, they stubbornly refuse to accept this conclusion, because it is incompatible with their philosophical predispositions.

The purpose of Dr Krauss's book is, in his words, to "make it plausible to consider God as unnecessary". He attempts to do this by demonstrating that something can come from nothing after all. Yet, that isn't what he accomplishes in the book. What has done is claim that the concept of nothing is a scientific problem, and then redefine the meaning of the word to a nonstandard definition. Under his new definition, nothing is empty space, or a quantum vacuum. In his words, "nothing is unstable". What he has done is make "nothing" into "something", that something being the laws of quantum mechanics. When pressed as to where those laws come from, he postulates a multiverse. He provides no explanation as to the origin of the multiverse. In short, he has not solved the original problem, and therefore has not "made it plausible to consider God as unnecessary". He has simply shown that, when the laws of quantum mechanics are operating, strange things can happen. Laws are "something", and a multiverse to explain those laws is "something", so therefore, he has not answered the question of how something came from nothing.

>> ^shinyblurry:

So, again, the question is not answered. In his book, some chapters of his book are: "Nothing is something" and "Nothing is unstable". He has redefined nothing as empty space or a quantum vaccum, and when pressed, he offers up a multiverse, but fails to explain where to multiverse came from. Nothing is not something, it is not unstable, it is not empty space, it is not a quantum vacuum, and it is not a multiverse. Nothing is nothing. From nothing, nothing comes. It has no states, no properties, no existence.

The question is answered, it's just not what you want to hear. You are insisting that he explain how the universe sprang forth from a state that he never asserts as having existed.

It would be like me saying I originated from a fertilized egg and summarizing the human gestation process and then you saying, "Eggs have shells and yolks and come out of chickens! Where did the chicken come from and why don't we ever see eggshells during birth?"

Also, a creator is not compatible with your definition of nothing, either. If absolute, immaterial, spaceless, timeless nothingness was the precursor, then there would be no God to create a universe.

I'll direct you to his own words. Here is Kraus talking about redefining what the word nothing means:

"And I guess most importantly that the question why is there something rather than nothing is really a scientific question, not a religious or philosophical question, because both nothing and something are scientific concepts, and our discoveries over the past 30 years have completely changed what we mean by nothing.

In particular, nothing is unstable. Nothing can create something all the time due to the laws of quantum mechanics, and it's - it's fascinatingly interesting. And what I wanted to do was use the hook of this question, which I think as I say has provoked religious people, as well as scientists, to encourage people to try and understand the amazing universe that we actually live in."

Here is Krauss describing how empty space could create the Universe:

Empty space is a boiling, bubbling brew of virtual particles that pop in and out of existence in a time scale so short that you can't even measure them. Now, that sounds of course like counting angels on the head of a pin; if you can't measure them, then it doesn't sound like it's science, but in fact you can't measure them directly.

But we can measure their effects indirectly. These particles that are popping in and out of existence actually affect the properties of atoms and nuclei and actually are responsible for most of the mass inside your body. And in fact, really one of the things that motivated this book was the most profound discovery in recent times, and you even alluded to it in the last segment, the discovery that most of the energy of the universe actually resides in empty space.

You take space, get rid of all the particles, all the radiation, and it actually carries energy, and that notion that in fact empty space - once you allow gravity into the game, what seems impossible is possible. It sounds like it would violate the conservation of energy for you to start with nothing and end up with lots of stuff, but the great thing about gravity is it's a little trickier.

Gravity allows positive energy and negative energy, and out of nothing you can create positive energy particles, and as long as a gravitational attraction produces enough negative energy, the sum of their energy can be zero. And in fact when we look out at the universe and try and measure its total energy, we come up with zero.

I like to think of it as the difference between, say, a savvy stockbroker and an embezzler. The savvy stockbroker will buy stocks on margin with more money than they have, and as long as they get that money back in there before anyone notices, and in fact if the stocks go up, they end with money where they didn't have any before, whereas the embezzler, of course, is discovered.

Well, the universe is a savvy stockbroker. It can borrow energy, and if there's no gravity, it gets rid of it back before anyone notices. But if gravity is there, it can actually create stuff where there was none before. And you can actually create enough stuff to account for everything we see in the universe.

But, you know, it's more than that because some people would say, and I've had this discussion with theologians and others, well, you know, just empty space isn't nothing. You know, there's space. How did the space get there? But the amazing thing is, once you apply in fact quantum mechanics to gravity, as you were beginning to allude again in the last segment, then it's possible, in fact it's implied, that space itself can be created where there was nothing before, that literally whole universes can pop out of nothing by the laws of quantum mechanics.

And in fact the question why is there something rather than nothing then becomes sort of trite because nothing is unstable. It will always produce something. The more interesting or surprising question might be why is there nothing. But of course if we ask that question, well, we wouldn't be here if that was true.

-----------------------------------------

What he said in this video is completely misleading; I'll show you his slight of hand. When he says you can take away everything, even the laws and still get a Universe, he has redefined "absolutely nothing" as a complete absence of this Universe, but not as we will see, a complete absence of anything. To explain the laws of quantum mechanics popping into existence, he postulates an external entity: the multiverse:

Well, you know, that's something I deal with at the end of the book because, you know, it's not a concept that I'm pretty fond of, but it - we seemed to be driven there by our theories, and it does suggest the last bit, because some people, indeed when I debate this question of nothing, they say, well, look, you can get rid of space. You can get rid of stuff in space, the first kind of nothing. You can even get rid of space, but you still have the laws. Who created the laws?

Well, it turns out that we've been driven both from ideas from cosmology - from a theory called inflation or even string theory - that suggests there may be extra dimensions - to the possibility that our universe isn't unique, and more over, that the laws of physics in our universe may just be accidental. They may have arisen spontaneously, and they don't have to be the way they are. But if they were any different, we wouldn't be here to ask the question. It's called the entropic idea, and it's not - it's - it may be right.

It's not an idea I find very attractive, but it may be right. And if it is, then it suggests that even the very laws themselves are not fundamental. They arose spontaneously in our universe, and they're very different in other universes. And in some sense, if you wish, the multiverse plays the role of what you might call a prime mover or a god. It exists outside of our universe.

So, again, the question is not answered. In his book, some chapters of his book are: "Nothing is something" and "Nothing is unstable". He has redefined nothing as empty space or a quantum vaccum, and when pressed, he offers up a multiverse, but fails to explain where the multiverse came from. Nothing is not something, it is not unstable, it is not empty space, it is not a quantum vacuum, and it is not a multiverse. Nothing is nothing. From nothing, nothing comes. It has no states, no properties, no existence. He has not explained how something came from nothing. All he has done is redefine nothing into something. Of course something can come from something. All he doing is playing a masquarade with definitions





>> ^xxovercastxx:
16:08-16:38

"...you could start with absolutely nothing; that means, unlike the Cardinal said and unlike some people argue, no particles, but not even empty space -- no space whatsoever, and maybe even no laws governing that space and we can plausibly understand how you could arrive, without any miracles, without any need for a creator, without any supernatural creation, you could produce everything we see."

16:08-16:38

"...you could start with absolutely nothing; that means, unlike the Cardinal said and unlike some people argue, no particles, but not even empty space -- no space whatsoever, and maybe even no laws governing that space and we can plausibly understand how you could arrive, without any miracles, without any need for a creator, without any supernatural creation, you could produce everything we see."

>> ^Deano:
What's the logic for God existing given the complete lack of evidence?

Well, first you must ask yourself why you think there is no evidence for God. Logically, if God exists, the entire Universe is evidence for God. The question is, how would you tell the difference? How do you know what a God created Universe would or wouldn't look like? If you can't tell the difference, why would you rule it out? Why is it absurd to believe that the Universe was intelligently caused?

People get confused thinking that because science has described the mechanisms of how the Universe works, that this description somehow rules out an Agent. That would be like saying that describing the brush strokes of a painting rules out a painter. The real question is how did the Universe get here?

As I showed in my reply to Gallowflak, Dr Krauss got something from nothing by simply redefining what nothing means. He got something from nothing by redefining nothing as something..specifically empty space (which isnt actually empty) or a quantum vacuum (which has states and properties). That isn't nothing, and more importantly, none of this answers the question of how something came from nothing.

You see, when it comes to origins you have only two alternatives. Either there is a first cause of the Universe which began from *absolutely nothing*, or the first cause is eternal. Logically, from nothing, nothing comes. Therefore the first cause of the Universe must be eternal. We can also deduce many other things from this conclusion, such as that this cause is timeless, spaceless, immaterial, enormously powerful, and transcendent. Timeless and spaceless and immaterial, because time, space and matter had a beginning, enormously powerful for obvious reasons, and transcendent because whatever causes the Universe is necessarily greater than the Universe. You can also draw an inference to a personal cause from here.

There are many logical arguments for the existence of God. There is also evidence, such as the evidence from fine-tuning or information in DNA. Take your pick.

>> ^Gallowflak:
This problem is covered in the discussion. If the answers to the questions we have about physics were amenable to common sense, physicists would not be necessary. The nature of modern physics, whether at the very small or very large scales, is so deeply alien to the minds we have, because of the environment in which they developed, that to intuitively grasp these concepts is impossible. At these extremes, things cease to be comprehensible to us.

Natural philosophy is done. Mere logic no longer has any use in answering these questions. It is a waste of everyone's time and undeserving of conversation.

You can inject God into whatever crevices of human ignorance yet remain, but it's very difficult to take that seriously.

I never thought I would see an atheist use the words "mere logic", but there it is. You do realize that logic is all you have to justify your own rationality, don't you? If logic isn't good enough to understand reality, then rationality is not actually rational. Therefore, you have no basis for anything you believe, true or false. If you're intellectually honest, don't sit there and grandstand on this idea, but take it to its logical conclusion.

In any case, no the problem is not covered in the discussion. What Dr. Krauss is referring to when he is talking about "nothing", is not actually nothing as it is defined in the dictionary. Nothing is the word that he is using to refer to an entity, that entity being empty space or a quantum vacuum. Neither of those things are actually "nothing"; they are something. Empty space is not really empty, and a quantum vacuum has states and properties. Nothing is a universal negation; it has no states, no properties, no existence. What Dr Krauss is referring to is something, not nothing.

So his entire argument is invalid. He has not explained how something comes from nothing, he has simply redefined the word "nothing" and then claimed the Universe came from *that*. The essential question remains unanswered. The fact is, if you're not dealing with an eternal first cause, then you have to say that something came from a *literal* nothing, not a quantum vacuum or empty space, but nothing at all. I'm sorry to inform you but logic still applies in this situation, and logic tells us that this outcome is worse than magic. Philosophy is still alive and well.

I'll also note that in your reply you are just quoting what the Dr said in the video verbatim, saying that your own reasoning facilities are useless for understanding this problem. That you must rely on this authority to tell you what reality is, and even worse, that discussing it any further is a waste of time! Friend, put down the kool aid for a moment and realize the complete absurdity inherent in trying to prove something came from nothing. The real issue is, astrophysicists absolutely hate that all of their evidence points to the Universe having a beginning. They were much, much happier when they could still believe the Universe is eternal. That was very assuring to their atheistic predispositions, but this newer evidence of a beginning to the Universe is disturbing them. Since they can never admit the first cause of the Universe is eternal, because that opens the door for God, they are left with trying to prove something came from nothing. They are stubbornly and absurdly trying to prove the impossible because they cannot admit to where the evidence is leading them. In other words, they're as blindly dogmatic as you accuse me of being.

Read here for actual science:

http://www.ctc.cam.ac.uk/stephen70/talks/swh70_vilenkin.pdf

Huh... that's weird. I just get the empty box with the pqueue banner at the top and the VS tools underneath. Tried a force reload to avoid the cache too. I'll ask around and see if there's anyone else for whom it doesn't appear. I wonder if it was a hiccup on the CDN such that one or more thumbnails didn't get copied to my local node. I've seen missing thumbnails like that before - an empty space and no "update thumbnail" link because Videosift has a thumbnail that just didn't get displayed somehow. The thing that's particularly annoying is that with nothing in that thumbnail space, there's nothing to click on to expand the video for watching.

In reply to this comment by dag:
I can see it showing up in Beggar's Canyon just fine for me.
In reply to this comment by jonny:
Sorry to trouble your weekend, but can you see any reason why the thumbnail for this video doesn't show up on list pages?

Frome the above link

Some people were interested in hearing my Bohemian Rhapsody lead vocal track by itself. Here is the lead vocal and double vocal tracks solo'd with all the plugins turned off. There is no processing on this recording with the exception of a master limiter to keep it from peaking. That means no compression, no reverb and no auto-tune. This is basically my voice into an Audio Technica AT-4033 into a DBX 386 into pro tools.

I edited out the large empty spaces for obvious reasons

I’m going to respond to your last comment in two parts. The first part regards the god argument in which you have mischaracterized me as being closed minded and of having a bias. I can easily show that I am neither and this is my view on the whole god thing so you can at least understand my view if for nothing else. The second part I will address my primary contention against your methods of argument.

I am willing to listen, however, on its face the statement "I don't care about the whole god argument" indicates both bias and closed-mindedness. It also shows an intellectual incuriousity.

I admit that I don’t believe in a god or gods, or even advanced aliens. I just don’t see any reason to believe any of it. This doesn’t mean that I am saying that god doesn’t exist; I’m saying “I don’t know, but I highly doubt it and I don’t buy it.” What do you find confusing about that?

We have no real reason to suppose from direct evidence that a god, or gods, exist. Do all effects have a cause? Do all causes have an effect? If yes, why do you suppose it’s a god who caused all of the effects that you attribute him to such as the “fine tuning” or “the appearance of design”, why can’t it be something else? By resting on a god hypothesis as the answer to mysterious phenomenon, you are precluding all other answers that are just as good as a god, that have the same amount of direct evidence.

Scientific evidence indicates that time, space, matter and energy all had a finite beginning, making the cause of the Universe timeless, spaceless, unimaginably powerful and transcendent. Those are all attributes of God, and fit an unembodied mind. The fine tuning, information in DNA and appearance of design all point to a creator. Logic itself tells us that the first cause of the Universe must be eternal because nothing comes from nothing and you can't have an infinite regress of causes. Frankly I think it is ridiculous to believe that Universes just happen by themselves, and especially, as the greatest minds of our time are suggesting, out of nothing. Can't you see that when someone says that, it means the emperor has no clothes?

Does the god that you believe in have a cause? If not, how so? By what mechanisms does your god exist but without having had a cause? How can your belief be proven and why should anyone believe it based on rational information? What evidence is there that compels you to believe that your god indeed doesn’t have a cause? These are the kinds of questions that I think you should be asking for yourself. If you resort to “just needing to have faith” as an answer then you are actively avoiding exercising critical thinking faculties.

God is eternal, and He has no beginning or end, so no He doesn't have a cause. A God that was caused by something else wouldn't be God. My evidence is from logic which demands an eternal first cause. Otherwise, you're left explaing how you get something from nothing, which is logically absurd.

Unlike you, I don’t see the appearance of design in the complexity of biological systems or in anything found in nature. I study evolutionary biology, astrophysics, and chemistry for myself because I find it the mechanisms fascinating, not because I’m trying to disprove god.

Biologists must constantly keep in mind that what they see was not designed but rather evolved.

Francis Crick Nobel Laureate
What Mad Pursuit p.138 1988

Biology is the study of complicated things that give the appearance of having been designed for a purpose.

Richard Dawkins
The Blind Watchmaker p.1

Even hardcore skeptics concede there is an appearance of design.

There is inherent beauty in all of it and it’s a shame that most people are ignorant of what we do actually know. While I’m open to the idea that a god designed the system then put it in motion, there just isn’t direct phenomenological evidence that suggest that’s what happened.

The information in DNA is direct evidence that a higher intelligence designed the system.

There is enough information that we do know about speciation to suggest that evolution through natural selection does happen, is happening, and will continue to happen. The genetic code is enough to suggest common ancestry between all living things in a tree like family lineage.

natural selection can weed out some of the complexity and so slow down the information decay that results in speciation. it may have a stabilizing effect, but it does not promote speciation. it is not a creative force as many people have suggested.

Roger Lewin Science magazine 1982

The genetic code also suggests a common designer. As far as your tree claim, you need to research the cambrian explosion. It is quite a let down for gradualists, unfortunately. All the major body types, including the phylum Chordata (thats our phylum), were there from the beginning. We actually have less diversity today, not more.

(on the cambrian explosion)
And we find many of them already in an advanced state of evolution, the very first time they appear. It is as though they were just planted there, without any evolutionary history. Needless to say, this appearance of sudden planting has delighted creationists.

Richard Dawkins - The Blind Watchmaker 1986 p.229

Certainly, we do not know yet exactly how the whole process of DNA or RNA reproduction started, but if we postulate that a god started the process without sufficient evidence, only on the basis that there is no better answer, then we can also postulate that it was an advanced inter-dimensional race of ancients who populate planets with the seed of genetic mechanisms. If we don’t have the answer to how the mechanism got the whole thing started, what’s the difference between those two different origin hypotheses?

I don't postulate that God 'started the process'. I postulate that God spontaneously created everything. You rule out God apriori and thus you accept this just-so story about how life got here. In your eyes, it must have happened. Interpreting the evidence to fit the conclusion isn't very scientific, is it?

Also unlike you, I don’t see what you call “fine tuning” and I also study all sorts of physics, my favorite being astrophysics personally. The term “fine tuning” implies that something above the system changed some dials to a perfect goldilocks range to support what we have right now. This is an interesting idea however I find it to be more prudent to see it the other way around; that what has formed, has only formed because the conditions allow for it, that the environment dictates what can exist. Wherever you look at an environment and find life, you find life that fits into that environment and we also see that when environments change, so to do species change to adapt to the new conditions. We never see an environment change to fit the species.

I don't think you're understanding the fine tuning argument. Many of those finely tuned values, if even moved an inch, would make life impossible in this Universe. Not just improbable, but impossible. The fine tuning is extremely fortuitous to an incomprehensible degree. The odds of these values randomly converging is virtually impossible. For instance, for physical life to exist, the mass density of the Universe must be fine tuned to better than one part in 10 to the 60th power. For space-energy density, it is 10 to the 120th power. That's just two out of dozens of values.

You claim that we haven’t seen macro-evolution taking place? Are you sure about that, how exactly do you know this is true, where did you read this? How do you know that what you are calling macro-evolution is the same thing as what evolutionary biologists call macro-evolution? The fact of the matter is that the fossil record has nothing to say about the most recent research on macro-evolution. It’s a fascinating material and I would suggest that you get out there and find it for yourself. Talk Origins has as list of the studies done on macro-evolution, you can start there if you like.

Yes, evolutionists are trying to dump the fossil record in favor of genetic evidence because the fossil record is actually evidence against their theories. As I've said, common genetics also indicate common designer.

Darwin made a great discovery, that creatures can adapt to environmental conditions. That's something that has hard scientific evidence. What didn't have any evidence was his extrapolation from that to the theory of all life having a common ancestor. He was counting on the fossil record to prove his case but it didn't, which is why he said this:

innumerable transitional forms must have existed but why do we not find them embedded in countless numbers in the crust of the earth? ..why is not every geological formation and every stratum full of such intermediate links?

Geologoy assuredly does not reveal any such finely graduated organic chain, and this perhaps is the greatest objection which can be urged against my theory.

Charles Darwin
Origin of the Species

Here we are 150 years later with billions of fossils and there still isn't any evidence. If Darwin was right, we should have indisputable proof that one species changed into another, but we don't. All we have is a smattering of highly contested transitionals which are all "more or less" closely related, but no true ancestors. When the facts don't match the theory it is time to throw that theory away, but the theory of evolution is the cornerstone of the secular worldview, and it isn't going to die without a fight, no matter how loudly the facts cry out against it.

The question becomes, if there was/is a designer, what was designed first, the creature or the environment? To me, you are suggesting that humans were designed first in the mind of god, and then the environment was finely tuned in order to sustain the idea that god already had for us. Don’t you think this is a little bit too egotistical of a view? If that’s true, what makes everything else necessary? I don’t know if you study astrophysics or astronomy at all but there is a massive amount of stuff out there that has nothing to do with us and if we’re a part of god’s plan, he sure did create a lot of waste.

I'm saying He created all of it at the same time, in six days as Genesis describes. Why is the Universe so large? It could be for a number of reasons, such as that it gives us room to grow. If we were just hitting some sort of wall in space, it would also be a wall in knowledge that we could acquire. If it wasn't as large and complex as it is, we wouldn't be where we are today. Why are solid objects actually mostly composed of empty space? Isn't God wasting all of that space? Or is it integral to His design? Does the fact that almost everything is made up of empty space reduce the significance of solid objects? The size of the Universe doesn't say anything about our importance relative to it. The Heavens also declare the glory of God:

Psalm 19:1-2

The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament sheweth his handywork.

Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night sheweth knowledge.

To me, if the Christian beliefs are the most accurate representation of reality, god isn’t a very good designer. There millions of ways that he could have done a better job if he is all powerful. Of course, you can revert back to, “we can’t know the mind of god”, or “god works in mysterious ways”, but those aren’t answers, they are just ways of maintaining a pre-existing belief by silencing further inquisition.

Have you ever created a Universe? If not, how then would you know what a superior design would look like?

“Unless you can demonstrate a purely naturalistic origin of the Universe, you have no case against Agency.“

Agency needs to prove itself and so far it isn’t doing a very good job. Science as a whole isn’t making a case against agency and neither am I by suggesting that there are likely to be naturalistic causes. Agency simply isn’t necessary. That is what I think that you don’t understand. It’s that I don’t accept the case for agency until agency can be proven. A suspended judgment is better than an accepted unverifiable and untestable claim.

You can rule out the necessity of Agency when you can explain origins. To say that it is not necessary when you don't know what caused the Universe is not something you can determine.

If you are in any way the kind of person who culturally relates to Christianity then there is nothing that anyone can do for you. It is very difficult to have an intellectually honest conversation with someone whose basis for belief is deeply tied to a sense of culture or social belonging. Challenging your beliefs is synonymous to asking you to become someone else if your beliefs are tightly woven into your identity. The only thing I can ask of you is to ask yourself if what you believe determines how you will process new information that comes to you.

I'll give you a little background on me. I grew up without any religion, and until a few years ago, I was an agnostic materialist who didn't see any evidence for God or spirit. Growing up, I hoped to become an astronomer. I have studied all the things you have mentioned, and although I am just a layman, I know quite a bit about biology, astronomy, physics, etc. Like you, I assumed because of my indoctrination in school and society, that the theory of evolution and other metaphysical theories were well supported by hard evidence. When I became a Christian, I was willing to incorporate these theories into my worldview. It is only upon investigation of the actual facts that I was shocked to find there not only is there no real evidence, but that much of what I had been taught in school was either grossly inaccurate, intentionally misleading, or outright fradulent.

So, you're not dealing with someone who grew up outside of your worldview, who feels threatened by it and is trying to tear it down. You're talking with someone who was heavily invested in it, and even willing to compromise with it, and has turned away from it because of my research, not in spite of it. If it was true, I would want to know about it. Since it isn't, I don't believe in it.

At the very least, you can see now that I am not diametrically opposed to the idea of a creator or agency behind everything. The notion is interesting but I don’t believe that there is enough real credible information to suggest that it’s true.

You are more openminded than I originally gave you credit for, but you definitely have a huge evidence filter made out of your presuppositions.

There are enough logical arguments against the idea of a god or gods existing that the whole notion is worth dismissing.

The only logical argument of any value that the atheists have is the argument from evil, and that has been soundly debunked by plantigas free will defense. Feel free to bring one up though, because I have never seen an atheist offer any positive evidence for his position. "Worth dismissing" = close minded and biased, btw.

If there is as god or gods, they aren’t doing a very good job of making themselves known or knowable.

Do you think that is why 93 percent of the world believes that God exists?

The simple fact is that naturalistic explanations are more useful ideas than any god concept because they provide both predictions that we can verify and help us make decisions about where to study next. No god hypothesis has ever provided either, therefore, in the pursuit of knowledge; the idea of god is useless.

Did you know that the idea that we can suss out laws by investigating their secondary causes is a Christian idea, based on the premise that God created an orderly universe governed by laws? Did you know that modern science got its start in Christian europe? Doesn't seem so useless to me. Science now must assume a little thing called "uniformity in nature" to even do science without the belief that there is a Creator upholding these laws. How do you get absolute laws in an ever changing Universe? What is the evidence the future will be like the past? Can you explain it?

Now you see why naturalistic explanations are predominate in science as the default standard.

It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counterintuitive, no matter how mystifying to the unitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine foot in the door.

Richard Lewontin, Harvard
New York Review of Books 1/9/97

No evidence would be sufficient to create a change in mind; that it is not a commitment to evidence, but a commitment to naturalism. ...Because there are no alternatives, we would almost have to accept natural selection as the explanation of life on this planet even if there were no evidence for it.

Steven Pinker MIT
How the mind works p.182

I have faith and belief myself... I believe that nothing beyond those natural laws is needed. I have no evidence for this. It is simply what I have faith in and what I believe.

Isaac Asimov

I see why you say that, and now you know why you believe that, because those who teach you these ideas are doing exactly what I have been saying all along. Suppressing the truth.


>> ^IAmTheBlurr:

Hopefully it works now?
>> ^Lawdeedaw:
Hrm, doesn't show up... This one didn't either--until I cut out the empty spaces in the embed code...
http://videosift.com/video/Honey-Trap-1
Not sure if it's just my region.

Hrm, doesn't show up... This one didn't either--until I cut out the empty spaces in the embed code...

http://videosift.com/video/Honey-Trap-1

Not sure if it's just my region.

I've always wondered if you would not just pop up in the middle of empty space if you time travelled without compensating for the fact that the earth is moving through at what like 1500 M/s through the solar system? And the solar system is orbiting the galactic centre. And the galaxy is moving away from all other galaxies (or vice-versa) as spacetime itself apparently expands. It all depends on how you think about frame of reference WRT your model of time-travel.

Like in Back to the Future, they travelled 30 years at a time. And they appeared to "portal/shunt" as opposed to "tunnel". It seems to me on a gut level like a portal or shunt would probably just dump you into empty space a fraction of a light year behind or ahead of the solar system if you jumped 30 years. A wormhole (Doctor Who or Bill and Ted style) is easier to imagine as being connected to the same "place" (according to what frame of reference I can't mentally peg down) in both times.

>> ^MichaelL:

When CGI is used right, it is awesome. With new facial mo cap techniques it can even look almost lifelike. But yes there are certainly times (to often these days) that CG is used as a crutch to carry a film, such as the newer Starwars movies. Actors spent so much time on green sets where cars were just green foam blocks they sat on and they spend almost their entire time talking to nothing, it produced only bad acting and painfully unrealistic CG characters.

I think Avatar was a success because there was very little 'actor to cg' interaction. Most the areas were sets instead of green screen so actors could immerse themselves into their part much better. Sure there was plenty of green screen in the movie. The forest areas, riding on the raptors,etc but it was just the right mix.

I'm to much an old school B movie fan. If you can do something with actual sets and miniatures, with only CG where you really cant do it otherwise, you'll have a much better movie than actors spending all their time sitting on blue foam talking to empty space.

Georges Bataille
STORY OF THE EYE by Lord Auch Translated by Joachim Neugroschel
CITY LIGHTS BOOKS San Francisco
Originally published in France in 1928 as Histoire de l'oeil
© 1967 by Jean Jacques Pauvert, Paris © This translation Urizen Books, 1977 First City Lights Edition 1987
Cover photograph and design by Gent Sturgeon and Rex Ray
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bataille, Georges, 1897-1962. Story of the eye.
Translation of: Histoire de l'oeil. I. Title.
PQ2603 .A695H4813 1987 843'.912 87-9242 ISBN: 0-87286-209-7
City Lights Books are available to bookstores through our primary distributor: Subterranean Company.P.O. Box 160,265 S. 5th St., Monroe, OR 97456.541-847-5274. Toll-free orders 800-274-7826. FAX 541-847-6018. Our books are also available through library
jobbers and regional distributors. For personal orders and catalogs, please write to City Lights Books, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.
CITY LIGHTS BOOKS are edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Nancy J.Peters and published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133.
� Contents
Translator'snote .......................... vii Part One: THE TALE ....................... 1 Part Two: COINCIDENCES. . ................ 87 WC.-Preface to Story of the Eye
from Le Petit: 1943 . ..................... 97 Outline of a sequel ....................... 102
I Translator's Note
Story of the Eye was George Bataille's first novel, and there were four editions, the first in 1928. The other three, known as the "new version," came out in 1940, 1941, and 1967. The "new ver­ sion" differs so thoroughly in all details from the first edition that one can justifiably speak of two distinct books. Indeed, the Gallimard publication of the complete works includes both versions in its opening volume.
This American translation is based on the
vii
original version, but the "Outline for a Sequel" comes from the fourth edition.
Of all the editions, only the final, posthum- 0us one bore the author's name. The other three were credited to Lord Auch, a pseudonym ex­
plained in Bataille's short prose piece Le Petit (1943). (This section from Le Petit is included at the end of this volume.)
J.N.
� Part One THE TALE
viii
I CHAPTER ONE The Cat's Eye
I grew up very much alone, and as far back as I recall I was frightened of anything sexual. I was nearly sixteen when I met Simone, a girl my own age, at the beach in X. Our families being distantly related, we quickly grew intimate. Three days after our first meeting, Simone and I were alone in her villa. She was wearing a black pinafore with a starched white collar. I began realizing that she shared my anxiety at seeing her, and I felt even more anxious that day because I hoped she would be stark naked under the pinafore.
3
GEORGES BATAILLE
Story of the Eye
without even touching one another. But when her mother came home, I was sitting in a low armchair, and I took advantage of the moment when the girl tenderly snuggled in her mother's arms: I lifted the back of her pinafore, unseen, and thrust my hand under her cunt between her two burning legs.
I dashed home, eager to jerk off some more, and the next day there were such dark rings around my eyes that Simone, after peering at me for a while, buried her head in my shoulder and said earnestly: "I don't want you to jerk off any­
more without me."
Thus a love life started between the girl and myself, and it was so intimate and so driven that we could hardly let a week go by without meeting. And yet we virtually never talked about it. I realized that her feelings at seeing me were the same as mine at seeing her, but I found it difficult to have things
out. I remember that one day, when we were in a car tooling along at top speed, we crashed into a cyclist, an apparently very young and very pretty girl. Her head was almost totally ripped off by the wheels. For a long time , we were parked a few yards beyond without getting out, fully absorbed in the
sight of the corpse. The horror and despair at so much bloody flesh, nauseating in part, and in part very beautiful, was fairly equivalent to our usual impression upon seeing one another. Simone was tall and lovely. She was usually very natural; there
She had black silk stockings on covering her knees, but I was unable to see as far up as the cunt (this name, which I always used with Simone, is, I think, by far the loveliest of the names for the va­ gina). It merely struck me that by slightly lifting the pinafore from behind, I might see her private parts unveiled.
Now in the corner of a hallway there was a saucer of milk for the cat. "Milk is for the pussy, isn't it?" said Simone. "Do you dare me to sit in the saucer?"
"I dare you," I answered, almost breathless.
The day was extremely hot. Simone put the saucer on a small bench, planted herself before me, and, with her eyes fixed on me, she sat down without my being able to see her burning buttocks under the skirt, dipping into the cool milk. The blood shot to Ply head, and I stood before her awhile, immobile and trembling, as she eyed my stiff cock bulging in my pants. Then I lay down at her feet without her stirring, and for the first time, I saw her "pink and dark" flesh cooling in the white milk. We remained motionless, on and on, both of us equally overwhelmed . . . .
Suddenly, she got up, and I saw the milk dripping down her thighs to the stockings. She wiped herself evenly with a handkerchief as she stood over my head with one foot on the small bench, and I vigorously rubbed my cock through the pants while writhing amorously on the floor. We reached orgasm at almost the same instant
4
5
GEORGES BATAILLE
Story of the Eye
was nothing heartbreaking in her eyes or her voice. But on a sensual level, she so bluntly craved any upheaval that the faintest call from the senses gave her a look directly suggestive of all things linked to
deep sexuality, such as blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty. I first saw her mute and absolute spasm (which I shared) the day she sat down in the saucer of milk. True, we only exchanged fixed stares at analogous moments. But we never calmed down or played except in the brief relaxed minutes
after an orgasm. I ought to say, nevertheless, that we waited a
long time before copulating. We merely took any opportunity to indulge in unusual acts. We did not lack modesty-on the contrary-but something urgently drove us to defy modesty together as immodestly as possible. Thus, no sooner had she asked me never to jerk off again by myself (we had met on top of a cliff), than she pulled down my
pants and had me stretch out on the ground. She tucked her dress up, mounted my belly with her back towards my face, and let herself go, while I thrust my finger, lubricated with my young jizm, into her cunt. Next, she lay down with her head under my cock between my legs, and thrusting her cunt in the air, she brought her body down towards me, while I raised my head to the level of that cunt:
her knees found support on my shoulders.
"Yes," I answered, "but with you like this, it'll get on your dress and your face."
, again, this time with fine white come.
Meanwhile, the smell of the sea mixed with the smell of wet linen, our naked bodies, and the come. Evening was gathering, and we stayed in that extraordinary position, tranquil and motion­ less, when all at once we heard steps crumpling the grass.
"Please don't move, please," Simone begged.
The steps halted, but it was impossible to see who was approaching. Our breathing had stopped together. Simone's ass, raised aloft, did strike me as an all-powerful entreaty, perfect as it was, with its two narrow, delicate buttocks and its deep crevice; and I never doubted for an instant that the unknown man or woman would soon give
in and feel compelled to jerk off endlessly while watching that ass. Now the steps resumed, faster this time, almost running, and suddenly a ravish­ ing blond girl loomed into view: Marcelle, the pur­ est and most poignant of our friends. But we were too strongly contracted in our dreadful positions to move even a hair's breadth, and it was our un­
happy friend who suddenly collapsed and huddled in the grass amid sobs. Only now did we tear loose from our extravagant embrace to hurl ourselves upon a self-abandoned body. Simone hiked up the
6
7
"ean't you pee up to my cunt?" she said.
"So what," she concluded. And I did as she said but no sooner was I done than I flooded her
I
GEORGES BATAILLE
Story of the Eye
skirt, ripped off the panties, and drunkenly showed me a new cunt, as lovely and pure as her own: I kissed it furiously while jerking off Simone, whose legs closed around the hips of that strange Mar­ celle, who no longer hid anything but her sobs.
"Marcelle," I exclaimed, "please, please don't cry. I want you to kiss me on the mouth . . . ." Simone, for her part, stroked the girl's lovely smooth hair, covering her body with fond
kisses.
Meanwhile the sky had turned quite thun­ dery, and with nightfall, huge raindrops began plopping down, bringing relief from the harshness of a torrid, airless day. The sea was loudly raging, outroared by long rumbles of thunder, while flashes of lightning, bright as day, kept brusquely revealing the two pleasured cunts of the now silent girls. A brutal frenzy drove our three bodies. Two young mouths fought over my ass, my balls, and my cock, but I still kept pushing apart female legs wet with saliva and come, splaying them as if writhing out of a monster's grip, and yet that monster was nothing but the utter violence of my movements. The hot rain was finally pouring down and streaming over our fully exposed bodies. Huge booms of thunder shook us, heightening our fury, wresting forth our cries of rage, which each flash accompanied with a glimpse of our sexual parts. Simone had found a mud puddle, and was smear­ ing herself wildly: she wasjerking off with the earth
and coming violently, whipped by the downpour, my head locked in her soil-covered legs, her face wallowing in the puddle, where she was brutally churning Marcelle's cunt, one arm around Mar­ celle's hips, the hand yanking the thigh, forcing
8
9
it open.
� CHAPTER TWO The Antique
Wardrobe
That was the period when Simone devel­ oped a mania for breaking eggs with her ass. She would do a headstand on an armchair in the par­ lor, her back against the chair's back, her legs bent
towards me, while I jerked off in order to come in her face. I would put the egg right on the hole in her ass, and she would skillfully amuse herself by shaking it in the deep crack of her buttocks. The moment my jizm shot out and trickled down her
eyes, her buttocks would squeeze together and she
would come while I smeared my face abundantly in her ass.
Very soon, of course, her mother, who might enter the villa parlor at any moment, did catch us in our unusual act. But still, the first time this fine woman stumbled upon us, she was con­ tent, despite having led an exemplary life, to gape wordlessly, so that we did not notice a thing. I sup­ pose she was too flabbergasted to speak. But when we were done and trying to clean up the mess, we noticed her standing in the doorway.
"Pretend there's no one there," Simone told me, and she went on wiping her ass.
And indeed, we blithely strolled out as though the woman had been reduced to a family portrait.
A few days later, however, when Simone was doing gymnastics with me in the rafters of a gar­ age, she pissed on her mother, who had the misfor­ tune to stop underneath without seeing her. The sad widow got out of the way and gaped at us with such dismal eyes and such a desperate expression that she egged us on, that is to say, simply with Simone bursting into laughter, crouching on all fours on the beams and exposing her cunt to my face, I uncovered that cunt completely and jerked off while looking at it.
More than a week had passed without our seeing Marcelle, when we ran into her on the street one day. The blonde girl, timid and naively pious,
10
11
Story of the Eye
GEORGES BATAILLE
Story of the Eye
blushed so deeply at seeing us, that Simone embraced her with uncommon tenderness.
"Please forgive me, Marcelle," she mur­ mured. "What happened the other day was absurd, but that doesn't mean we can't be friends now. I promise we'll never lay a hand on you again."
Marcelle, who had an unusual lack of will­ power, agreed to join us for tea with some friends at our place. But instead of tea, we drank quanti­ tites of chilled champagne.
The sight of Marcelle blushing had com­ pletely overwhelmed us. We understood one an­ other, Simone and I, and we were certain that from now on nothing would make us shrink from achiev­ ing our ends. Besides Marcelle, there were three other pretty girls and two boys here. The oldest of the eight being not quite seventeen, the beverage soon took effect; but aside from Simone and myself, they were not as excited as we wanted them to be. A phonograph rescued us from our predica­ ment. Simone, dancing a frenzied Charleston by
herself, showed everyone her legs up to her cunt, and when the other girls were asked to dance a solo in the same way, they were in too good a mood to require coaxing. They did have panties on, but the panties bound the cunt laxly without hiding much. Only Marcelle, intoxicated and silent, refused to dance.
Finally, Simone, pretending to be dead drunk, crumbled a tablecloth and, lifting it up, she offered to make a bet.
"I bet," she said, "that I can pee into the tablecloth in front of everyone."
It was basically a ridiculous party of mostly turbulent and boastful youngsters. One of the boys challenged her, and it was agreed that the winner would fix the penalty . . . . Naturally, Simone did not waver for an instant, she richly soaked the
tablecloth. But this stunning act visibly rattled her to the quick, so that all the young fools started gasping.
"Since the winner decides the penalty," said Simone to the loser, "I am now going to pull down your pants in front of everyone."
Which happened without a hitch. When his pants were off, his shirt was likewise removed (to keep him from looking ridiculous). All the same, nothing serious had occurred yet: Simone had scarcely run a light hand over her young friend, who was dazzled, drunk, and naked, yet all she
could think of was Marcelle, who for several mo­ ments now had been begging me to let her leave.
"We promised we wouldn't touch you, Mar­ celle. Why do you want to leave?"
"Just because," she replied stubbornly, a violent rage gradually coming over her.
All at once, to everyone's horror, Simone fell upon the floor. A convulsion shook her harder and harder, her clothes were in disarray, her ass stuck in the air, as though she were having an epi­ lectic fit. But rolling about at the foot of the boy she
12
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GEORGES BATAILLE
Story of the Eye
had undressed, she mumbled almost inarticulately: "Piss on me . . . Piss on my cunt . . ." she
repeated, with a kind of thirst. Marcelle gaped at this spectacle: she blushed
again, her face was blood-red. But then she said to me, without even seeing me, that she wanted to take off her dress. I half tore it off, and hard upon it, her underwear. All she had left was her stockings and belt, and after I fingered her cunt a bit and kissed her on the mouth, she glided across the room to a large antique bridal wardrobe, where she shut herself in after whispering a few words to Simone .
She wanted to j erk off in the wardrobe and was pleading to be left in peace.
I ought to say that we were all very drunk and completely bowled over by what had been going on. The naked boy was being sucked by a girl. Simone, standing with her dress tucked up, was rubbing her bare cunt against the wardrobe, in wh ich a girl was audibly j e rking off with b rutal gasps. All at once, something incredible happened, a strange swish of water, followed by a trickle and a stream from under the wardrobe door: poor Mar­ celle was pissing in her wardrobe while jerking off. But the explosion of totally drunken guffaws that ensued rapidly degenerated into a debauche of tumbling bodies, lofty legs and asses, wet skirts and come. Guffaws emerged like foolish and involun-
tary hiccups but scarcely managed to interrupt a brutal onslaught on cunts and cocks. And yet soon we could hear Marcelle dismally sobbing alone, louder and louder, in the makeshift pissoir that was
now her prison.
Half an hour later, when I was less drunk, it dawned on me that I ought to let Marcelle out of her wardrobe: the unhappy girl, naked now, was in a dreadful state. She was trembling and shivering feverishly. Upon seeing me, she displayed a sickly but violent terror. After all, I was pale, smeared with blood, my clothes askew. Behind me, in
unspeakable disorder, ill bodies, brazenly stripped, were sprawled about. During the orgy, shards of glass had left deep bleeding cuts in two of us. A young girl was throwing up, and all of us had exploded in such wild fits of laughter at some point or other that we had wet our clothes, an armchair, or the floor. The resulting stench of blood, sperm, urine, and vomit made me almost recoil in horror,
but the inhuman shriek from Marcelle's throat was far more terrifying. I must say, however, that Simone was sleeping tranquilly by now, her belly up, her hand still on her beaver, her pacified face almost smiling.
Marcelle, staggering wildly across the room with shrieks and snarls, looked at me again. She flinched back as though I were a hideous ghost in a
14
15
GEORGES BATAILLE
nightmare, and she collapsed in a jeremiad of howls that grew more and more inhuman.
Astonishingly, this litany brought me to my I senses. People were running up, it was inevitable. But I never for an instant dreamt of fleeing or les­ sening the scandal. On the contrary, I resolutely strode to the door and flung it open. What a spec­ tacle, whatjoy! One can readily picture the cries of dismay, the desperate shrieks, the exaggerated threats of the parents entering the room! Criminal
court, prison , the guillotine were evoked with fiery yells and spasmodic curses. Our friends themselves began howling and sobbing in a delirium of tearful screams; they sounded as if they had been set afire as live torches. Simone exulted with me!
And yet, what an atrocity! It seemed as if nothing could terminate the tragicomical frenzy of these lunatics, for Marcelle, still naked, kept ges­ ticulating, and her agonizing shrieks of pain expressed unbearable terror and moral suffering; we watched her bite her mother's face amid arms vainly trying to subdue her.
Indeed, by bursting in, the parents man­ aged to wipe out the last shreds of reason, and in the end, the police had to be called, with all the neighbors witnessing the outrageous scandal.
16
CHAPTER THREE
Marcelle's Smell
My own parents had not turned up that evening with the pack. Nevertheless, I judged it prudent to decamp and elude the wrath of an awful father the epitome of a senile Catholic general. I
enter�d our villa by the back door and filched a certain amount of money. Next, quite convinced they would look for me everywhere but there, I took a bath in my father's bedroom. Finally, by around ten o'clock, I was out in the open countr�,
having left the following note on my mothers night table: "I beseech you not to send the pol�ce after me for I am carrying a gun, and the fIrst
17
GEORGES BATAILLE
StoryoftheEye
bullet will be for the policeman, the second for myself. "
I have never had any aptitude for what is known as striking a pose, and in this circumstance in particular, I only wished to keep my family at bay, for they relentlessly hated scandal. Still, hav­ ing written the note with the greatest levity and not without laughing, I thought it might not be such a bad idea to pocket my father's revolver.
I walked along the seashore most of the night, but without getting very far from X because of all the windings of the coast. I was merely trying to soothe a violent agitation, a strange, spectral delirium in which, Willy-nilly, phantasms of Simone and Marcelle took shape with gruesome expres­ sions. Little by little, I even thought I might kill myself, and, taking the revolver in hand, I man­ aged to lose any sense of words like hope or des­ pair. But in my weariness, I realized that my life had to have some meaning all the same, and would have one if only certain events, defined as desirable, were to occur. I finally accepted being so extraordinarily haunted by the names Simone and Marcelle. Since it was no use laughing, I could keep going only by accepting or feigning to imagine a phantastic compromise that would confusedly link my most disconcerting moves to theirs.
I slept in a wood during the day, and at nightfall I went to Simone's place: I passed through
the garden by climbing over the wall. My friend's bedroom was lit, and so I cast some pebbles through the window. A few seconds later she came down and almost wordlessly we headed towards
the beach. We were delighted to see one another again. It was dark out, and from time to time I lifted her dress and took hold of her cunt, but it didn't make me come-quite the opposite. She sat down and I stretched out at her feet. I soon felt that
I could not keep back my sobs, and I really cried for a long time on the sand.
"What's wrong?" asked Simone.
And she gave me a playful kick. Her foot struck the gun in my pocket and a fearful bang made us shriek at the same time. I wasn't wounded but I was up on my feet as though in a different world. Simone stood before me, frighteningly pale.
That evening we didn't even think ofjerking each other off, but we remained in an endless embrace, mouth to mouth, something we had never done before.
This is how I lived for several days: Simone and I would come home late at night and sleep in her room, where I would stay locked in until the following night. Simone would bring me food. Her mother, having no authority over her (the day of
the scandal, she had gone for a walk the instant she heard the shrieks), accepted the situation without even trying to fathom the mystery. As for the ser­ vants, money had for some time been ensuring
18
19
GEORGES BATAILLE
Story of the Eye
their devotion to Simone. In fact,
cumstances of Marcelle's confinement and even the name of the sanitarium. From the very first day, ness,
getting to her, day, brusquely slipped away:
taken with a violent desire to fuck. But we no longer thought it could be done without Marcelle, whose piercing cries kept grating our ears, were linked to our most violent desires. Thus it was that our sexual dream kept changing into a night­ mare. Marcelle's smile,
sense of shame that made her redden and, fully red, lovely blond buttocks to impure hands, mouths,
made her lock herself in the wardrobe to jerk off with such abandon that she could not help pissing-all these things warped our desires, that they endlessly racked us. Simone,
duct during the scandal had been more obscene than ever (sprawled out, herself, Simone could not forget that the unforeseen orgasm provoked by her own brazenness,
celle's howls and the nakedness of her writhing limbs, had ever managed to picture before. And her cunt would not open to me unless Marcelle's ghost,
ing, zenness overwhelming and far-reaching, sacrilege were to render everything generally dreadful and infamous.
At any rate, (nothing resembles them more than the days of flood and storm or even the suffocating gaseous
all we wo the lonel
when I tr
but dreamy
"
, '
Marcelle!" "What are you talking about?" I asked,
appOinted, She came back affectionately and said in a
gentle, when she sees us . . . making it."
,
Obviously Simone and I were sometimes
"Listen,
20
21
"You're totally insane, I m not interested-here,
a housewife and mother! I'll only do it with
legs, watered her body, to the unchaste and faintly murmuring spurt on her skin. After thus flooding her cunt,
jizm all over her face. Full of muck, in a liberating frenzy. She deeply inhaled our pun­ gent and happy odor: "You smell like Marcelle " she buoyantly confided after a hefty climax, nose under my wet ass.
and when
I felt a hot,
GEORGES BATAILLE
eruptions of volcanoes, and they never turn active except, like storms or volcanoes, with something of catastrophe or disaster)-those hearbreaking re­ gions, like Simone, in an abandon presaging only violence, allowed me to stare hypnotically, were I nothing for me now but the profound, subterra­
CHAPTER FOUR
nean empire of a Marcelle who was tormented in prison and at the mercy of nightmares. There was only one thing I understood: how utterly the orgasms ravaged the girl's face with sobs inter­ rupted by horrible shrieks.
And Simone, for her part, no longer viewed the hot, acrid come that she caused to spurt from my cock without seeing it muck up Marcelle's mouth and cunt.
"You could smack her face with your come," she confided to me, while smearing her cunt-"till it Sizzles," as she put it.
A Sunspot
Other girls and boys no longer interested us. All we could think of was Marcelle, and already we childishly imagined her hanging herself, the
secret burial, the funeral apparitions. Finally, one evening, after getting the precise information, we took our bicycles and pedaled off to the sanitarium where our friend was confined. In less than an hour, we had ridden the twenty kilometers separat­
ing us from a sort of castle within a walled park on an isolated cliff overlooking the sea. We had learned that Marcelle was in Room 8, but obviously
22
23
.:
1
we would have to get inside the building to find her. Now all we could hope for was to climb in her window after sawing through the bars, and we were at a loss how to identify her window among thirty others, when our attention was drawn to a strange apparition. We had scaled the wall and were now in the park, among trees buffeted by a violent gust, when we spied a second-story window opening and a shadow holding a sheet and fastening it to one of the bars. The sheet promptly smacked in the gusts, and the window was shut before we could recog­ nize the shadow.
It is hard to imagine the harrowing racket of that vast white sheet caught in the squall. It greatly outroared the fury of the sea or the wind in the trees. That was the first time I saw Simone racked by anything but her own lewdness: she huddled against me with a beating heart and gaped at the huge phantom raging in the night as though dementia itself had hoisted its colors on this lugu­ brious chateau.
We were motionless, Simone cowering in my arms and I half-haggard, when all at once the wind seemed to tatter the clouds, and the moon, with a revealing clarity, poured sudden light on something so bizarre and so excruciating for us that an abrupt, violent sob choked up in Simone's throat: at the center of the sheet flapping and banging in the wind, a broad wet stain glowed in the translucent moonlight . . .
A few seconds later, new black clouds plunged everything into darkness again, but I stayed on my feet, suffocating, feeling my hair in the wind, and weeping wretchedly, like Simone herself, who had collapsed in the grass, and for the first time, her body was quaking with huge, child­ like sobs.
It was our unfortunate friend, no doubt about it, it was Marcelle who had opened that light­ less window, Marcelle who had tied that stunning signal of distress to the bars of her prison. She had obviouslyjerked off in bed with such a disorder of her senses that she had entirely inundated herself, and it was then that we saw her hang the sheet from the window to let it dry.
As for myself, I was at a loss about what to do in such a park, with that bogus chateau de plaisance and its repulsively barred windows. I walked around the building, leaving Simone upset and sprawling on the grass. I had no practical goal, I just wanted to take a breath of air by myself. But then, on the side of the chateau, I stumbled upon an unbarred open window on the ground floor; I felt for the gun in my pocket and I entered cau­ tiously: it was a very ordinary parlor. An electric flashlight helped me to reach an antechamber; then a stairway. I could not distinguish anything, I did not get anywhere, the rooms were not num­ bered. Besides, I was incapable of understanding
anything, as though I were hexed: at that moment,
GEORGES BATAILLE
Story of the Eye
24
2S
_
I i
,,
'I
I could not even understand why I had the idea of removing my pants and continuing that anguish­ ing exploration only in my shirt. And yet I stripped off my clothes, piece by piece, leaving them on a chair, keeping only my shoes on. With a flashlight in my left hand and the revolver in my right hand, I wandered aimlessly, haphazardly. A rustle made me switch off my lamp quickly. I stood motionless, whiling away the time by listening to my erratic breath. Long, anxious minutes wore by without my hearing any more noise, and so I flashed my light back on, but a faint cry sent me fleeing so swiftly that I forgot my clothes on the chair.
I sensed I was being followed: so I hurriedly climbed out through the window and hid in a garden lane: but no sooner had I turned to observe what might be happening in the chateau than I spied a naked woman in the window frame; she
jumped into the park as I had done and ran off towards a thorn bush.
Nothing was more bizarre for me in those utterly thrilling moments than my nudity against the wind on the path of that unknown garden. It was as if I had left the earth, especially because the squall was as violent as ever, but warm enough to suggest a brutal entreaty. I did not know what to do with the gun which I still held in my hand, for I had no pockets left; by charging after the woman who had run past me unrecognized, I would obviously be hunting her down to kill her. The roar of the wrathful elements, the raging of the trees and the
26
sheet, also helped to prevent me from discerning anything distinct in my will or in my gestures.
All at once, I halted, out of breath: I had reached the bushes where the shadow had disap­ peared. Inflamed by my revolver, I began looking about, when suddenly it seemed as if all reality were tearing apart: a hand, moistened by saliva, had grabbed my cock and wasjerking it, a slobber­ ing, burning kiss was planted on the root of my ass,
the naked chest and legs of a woman pressed against my legs with an orgasmic jolt. I scarcely had time to spin around when come burst in the face of my wonderful Simone: clutching my revolver, I was swept up by a thrill as violent as the storm, my teeth chattered and my lips foamed, with twisted arms I gripped my gun convulsively,
and, willy-nilly, three blind, horrifying shots were fired in the direction of the chateau.
Drunk and limp, Simone and I had fled from one another and raced across the park like dogs; the squall was far too wild now for the gun­ shots to awake any of the sleeping tenants in the chateau, even if the bangs were heard on the inside. But when we instinctively looked up at Mar­ celle's window above the sheet slamming the wind, we were greatly surprised to see that one of the bullets had left a star-shaped crack in one of the
panes. The window shook, opened, and the shadow appeared a second time.
Dumbstruck, as though about to see Mar-
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GEORGES BATAILLE
Story of the Eye
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GEORGES BATAILLE
Story of the Eye
celIe bleed and fall dead in the windowframe we remained standing under the strange, ne�rlY motionless apparition. Because of the furious wind we were incapable of even making ourselves heard�
"What did you do with your clothes?" I asked Simone an instant later. She said she had been looking for me and, unable to track me down, she had finally gone to search the interior of t�e chateau; but before clambering through the wIndow, she had undressed, figuring she "would feel more free." And when she had come back out after me, terrified by me, she found that the wind had c�rried off her dress. Meanwhile, she kept observIng Marcelle, and it never crossed her mind to ask me why I was naked.
The girl in the window disappeared. A moment that seemed immense crawled by: she switched on the light in her room. Finally, she came back to breathe the open air and gaze at the ocean. Her sleek, pallid hair was caught in the wind, we could make out her features: she had not changed, but now there was something wild in her eyes, something restless, contrasting with the still childlike simplicity of her features. She looked thir­ teen rather than sixteen. Under her nightgown we could distinguish her thin but full body, firm' u�ob­ trusive, and as beautiful as her fixed stare.
When she finally caught sight of us, the sur- prIse seemed to restore life to her face. She called, but we couldn't hear. We beckoned. She blushed up to her ears. Simone, weeping almost, while I lov-
ingly caressed her forehead, sent her kisses, to which she responded without smiling. Next, Simone ran her hand down her belly to her beaver. Marcelle imitated her, and poising one foot on the
sill, she exposed a leg sheathed in a white silk stocking almost up to her blond cunt. Curiously, she was wearing a white belt and white stockings, whereas black-haired Simone, whose cunt was in my hand, was wearing a black belt and black
stockings. Meanwhile, the two girls were jerking off
with terse, brusque gestures, face to face in the howling night. They were nearly motionless, and tense, and their eyes gaped with unrestrained joy. But soon, some invtsible monstrosity appeared to be yanking Marcelle away from the bars, though
her left hand clutched them with all her might. We saw her tumble back into her delirium. And all that remained before us was an empty, glowing window, a rectangular hole piercing the opaque night, showing our aching eyes a world composed of
lightning and dawn.
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Story of the Eye
stream of light and blood, for Marcelle could climax only by drenching herself, not with blood, but with a spurt of urine that was limpid and even illuminated for me, at first violent and jerky like hiccups, then free and relaxed and coinciding with an outburst of superhuman happiness. It is not
t astonishing tha the bleakest and most leprous
aspects of a dream are merely an urging in that direction, an obstinate waiting for totaljoy, like the vision of that glowing hole, the empty window, for example, at the very moment when Marcelle lay sprawling on the floor, endlessly inundating it.
But that day, in the rainless tempest, Simone and I, our clothing lost, were forced to leave the chateau, fleeing like animals through the hostile darkness, our imaginations haunted by the despondency that was bound to take hold of Mar­ celle again, making the wretched inmate almost an embodiment of the fury and terror that kept driv­ ing our bodies to endless debauchery. We soon found our bicycles and could offer one another the irritating and theoretically unclean sight of a naked though shod body on a machine. We pedalled rapidly, without laughing or speaking, peculiarly satisfied with our mutual presences, akin to one another in the common isolation of lewd­ ness, weariness, and absurdity.
Yet we were both literally perishing of fatigue. In the middle of a slope, Simone halted, saying she had the shivers. Our faces, backs, and
I,
,!
� CHAPTER FIVE A Trickle ofBlood
Urine is deeply associated for me with salt­ peter; and lightning, I don't know why, with an antique chamber pot of unglazed earthenware, lying abandoned one rainy autumn day on the zinc roof of a provincial wash house. Since that first night at the sanitarium, those wrenching images
were closely knit, in the obscurest part of my brain, with the cunt and the drawn and dismal expression I had sometimes caught on Marcelle's face. But then, this chaotic and dreadful landscape of my imagination was suddenly inundated by a
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legs were bathed in sweat, and hands over one another, our soaked and burning bodies; despite a more and more vigorous massage, flesh and clattering teeth. I stripped off one of her stockings to wipe her body, odor recalling the beds of sickness or debauchery.
Little by little, more bearable state, and lips as a token of gratitude.
I was still extremely agitated. We had ten more kilometers to go,
we obViously had to reach X by dawn. I could barely keep upright and despaired of ever reaching the end of this ride through the impossible. We had abandoned the real world,
of dressed people, was already so remote as to seem almost beyond reach. Our personal hallucination now developed as boundlessly as perhaps the total nightmare of human society, atmosphere .
A leather seat clung to Simone's bare cunt, which was inevitablyjerked by the legs pumping up and down on the spinning pedals. Furthermore, the rear wheel vanished indefinitely to my eyes, not only in the bicycle fork but virtually in the
crevice of the cyclist's naked ass: the rapid whirling of the dusty tire was also directly comparable to both the thirst in my throat and my erection,
which ultimately had to plunge into the depths of the cunt sticking to the bicycle seat. The wind had died down somewhat, was visible. And it struck me that death was the sole outcome of my erection,
killed, sonal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, realizing in a cold state, detours, my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandes­ cence (among other things, the life and death, fulgurating.
Yet, contradiction of a prolonged state of exhaustion and an absurd rigidity of my penis. Now it was difficult for Simone to see this rigidity, because of the darkness, swift rising of my left leg, stiffness by turning the pedal. Yet I felt I could see her eyes, stantly, p o i n t o f m y b o d y, more and more vehemently on the seat, pincered between her buttocks. Like myself, she had not yet drained the tempest evoked by the shamelessness of her cunt, husky moans; she was literally torn away by joy, and her nude body was hurled upon an embank­ ment with an awful scraping of steel on the pebbles
GEORGES BATAILLE Story ofthe Eye
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GEORGES BATAILLE
and a piercing shriek.
I found her inert, he head hanging down, a thin trickle of blood running from the corner of her mouth. Horrified to the limit of my strength, I pulled up one arm, but it fell back inert. I threw myself upon the lifeless body, trembling with fear, and as I clutched it in an embrace, I was overcome with bloody spasms, my lower lip drooling and my teeth bared like a leering moron.
Meanwhile, Simone was slowly coming to: her arm touched me in an involuntary movement, and I quickly returned from the torpor overwhelm­ ing me after I had besmirched what I thought was a corpse. No injury, no bruise marked the body, which was still clad in the garter belt and a single stocking. I took her in my arms and carried her down the road, heedless of my fatigue; I walked as fast as I could because the day was just breaking, but only a superhuman effort allowed me to reach the villa and happily put my marvelous friend alive in her very own bed.
The sweat was pissing from my face and all over my body, my eyes were bloody and swollen, my ears screeching, my teeth chattering, my tem­ ples and my heart drumming away. But since I had
just rescued the person I loved most in the world, and since I thought we would soon be seeing Mar­ celle, I lay down next to Simone's body just as I was, soaked and full of coagulated dust, and soon I drifted off into vague nightmares.
I
CHAPTER SIX
Simone
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35
the period following Simone's minor accident, which only left her ill. Whenever her mother came, I would step into the bathroom. Usually, I took
the first time the woman tried to enter, she was immediately stopped by her daughter:
man in there." missed before long, and I would take my place
One of the most peaceful eras of my life was
advantage of these moments to piss or even bathe;
"Don't go in," she said, "there's a naked Each time, however, the mother was dis-
GEORGES BATAILLE
again in a chair next to the sickbed. I smoked cigarettes, went through newspapers, and if there were any items about crime or violence, I would read them aloud. From time to time, I would carry a feverish Simone to the bathroom to help her pee and then I would carefully wash her on the bidet: She was extremely weak and naturally I never stroked her seriously; but nevertheless she soon delighted in having me throw eggs int� the toilet bowl, hard-boiled eggs, which sank, and shells sucked �ut in v�rious degrees to obtain varying
levels of ImmerSIon. She would sit for a long time gazing at the eggs. Then she would settle on th� toilet to view them under her cunt between the parted thighs; and finally, she would have me flush the bowl.
Another game was to crack a fresh egg on the edge of the bidet and empty it under her: sometimes she would piss on it, sometimes she had me strip naked and swallow the raw egg from the bottom of the bidet. She did promise that as soon as she was well again, she would do the same for me and also for Marcelle.
At that time, we imagined Marcelle, with her dress tucked up, but her body covered and her feet shod: we would put her in a bath tub filled with fresh eggs, and she would pee while crushing them Simone also daydreamed about my holding Mar� celle, this time with nothing on but her garter-belt and stockings, her cunt aloft, her legs bent, and
Story of the Eye
36
her head down; Simone herself, in a bathrobe drenched in hot water and thus clinging to her body but exposing her bosom, would then get up on a white enameled chair with a cork seat. I would arouse her breasts from a distance by lifting the tips on the heated barrel of a long service revolver that had been loaded and just fired (first of all, this would shake us up, and secondly, it would give the barrel a pungent smell of powder). At the same time, she would pour a jar of dazzling white creme fraiche on Marcelle's gray anus, and she would also urinate freely in her robe or, if the robe were ajar, on Marcelle's back or head, while I could piss
on Marcelle from the other side (I would certainly piss on her breasts). Furthermore, Marcelle herself could fully inundate me if she liked, for while I held her up, her thighs would be gripping my neck. And she could also stick my cock in her mouth, and what not.
It was after such dreams that Simone would ask me to bed her down on blankets by the toilet, and she would rest her head on the rim of the bowl and fix her wide eyes on the white eggs. I myself settled comfortably next to her so that our cheeks and temples might touch. We were calmed by the long contemplation. The gulping gurgle of the flushing water always amused Simone, making her
forget her obsession and ultimately restoring her high spirits.
At last, one day at six, when the oblique
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sunshine was directly lighting the bathroom, a half-sucked egg was suddenly invaded by the water, and after filling up with a bizarre noise, it was ship­ wrecked before our very eyes. This incident was so extraordinarily meaningful to Simone that her body tautened and she had a long climax, virtually drinking my left eye between her lips. Then, with­ out leaving the eye, which was sucked as obsti­ nately as a breast, she sat down, wrenching my head toward her on the seat, and she pissed noisily on the bobbing eggs with total vigor and satisfaction.
As of now she could be regarded as cured, and she demonstrated her joy by speaking to me at length about various intimate things, whereas ordinarily she never spoke about herself or me. Smiling, she admitted that an instant ago, she had felt a strong urge to relieve herself completely, but had held back for the sake of greater pleasure. Truly, the urge bloated her belly and particularly made her cunt swell up like a ripe fruit; and when I passed my hand under the sheets and her cunt gripped it firm and tight, she remarked that she was still in the same state and that it was inordinately pleasant. Upon my asking what the word urinate reminded her of, she replied: terminate, the eyes, with a razor, something red, the sun. And egg?A calf's eye, because of the color of the head (the calf's head) and also because the white of the egg was the white of the eye, and the yolk the eyeball.
The eye, she said, was egg-shaped. She asked me to promise that when we could go outdoors, I would
38
Story of the Eye
fling eggs into the sunny air and break them with shots from my gun, and when I replied that it was out of the question, she talked on and on, trying to reason me into it. She played gaily with words, speaking about broken eggs, and then broken eyes, and her arguments became more and more unreasonable.
She added that, for her, the smell of the ass was the smell of powder, a jet of urine a "gunshot seen as a light;" each of her buttocks was a peeled hard-boiled egg. We agreed to send for hot soft­ boiled eggs without shells, for the toilet, and she promised that when she now sat on the seat, she would ease herself fully on those eggs. Her cunt was still in my hand and in the state she had described; and after her promise, a storm began brewing little by little in my innermost depth-I was reflecting more and more.
It is fair to say that the room of a bedridden invalid is j ust the right place for gradually rediscov­ ering childhood lewdness. I gently sucked Simone's breast while waiting for the soft-boiled eggs, and she ran her fingers through my hair. Her mother was the one who brought us the eggs, but I didn't even turn around, I assumed it was a maid, and I kept on sucking the breast contentedly. Nor was I ultimately disturbed when I recognized the voice, but since she remained and I couldn't pass up even one instant of my pleasure, I thought of pulling
down my pants as for a call of nature, not ostenta­ tiously, but merely hoping she would leave and
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GEORGES BATAILLE
delighted at going beyond all limits. When she finally decided to walk out and vainly ponder over her dismay elsewhere, ering,
bathroom. Simone settled on the toilet, each ate one of the hot eggs with salt. With the three that were left, ing them between her buttocks and thighs, slowly dropped them into the water one by one. Finally, white, seeing them peeled, her beautiful cunt), sion with a plopping noise akin to that of the soft­ boiled eggs.
But I ought to say that nothing of the sort ever happened between us again, exception, no further eggs ever came up in our conversations; nevertheless,
notice one or more, when our eyes met in a silent and murky in terrogation .
At any rate, thistale, thatthis
without an answer indefinitely, this unexpected answer is necessary for measuring the immensity of the void that yawned before us, without our knowledge, tainments with the eggs.
and
I
CHAPTER SEVEN
Marcelle aft and
By a sort of shared modesty, had always avoided talking about the most impor­ tant objects of our obsessions. That was why the word egg was dropped from our vocabulary, never spoke about the kind of interest we had in one another, to us. We spent all of Simone's illness in a bed­ room, to Marcelle, the end of the last class in school, talked about was the day we would return to the
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GEORGES BATAILLE
StoryoftheEye
chateau. I had prepared a small cord, a thick, knot­ ted rope, and a hacksaw, all of which Simone examined with the keenest interest, peering atten­ tively at each knot and section of the rope. I also managed to find the bicycles, which I had con­ cealed in a thicket the day of our tumble, and I meticulously oiled the various parts, the gears, ball bearings, sprockets, etc. I then attached a pair of toe-clips to my own bicycle so that I could seat one of the girls in back. Nothing could be easier, at least for the time being, than to have Marcelle living in Simone's room secretly like myself. We would simply be forced to share the bed (and we would inevitably have to use the same bathtub, etc.).
But a good six weeks passed before Simone could pedal after me reasonably well to the sanitar­ ium. Like the previous time, we left at night: in fact, I still kept out of sight during the day, and this time there was certainly every reason for remain­ ing inconspicuous. I was in a hurry to arrive at the place that I dimly regarded as a "haunted castle," due to the association of the words sanitarium and castle, and also the memory of the phantom sheet and the thought of the lunatics in a huge silent dwelling at night. But now, to my surprise, even though I was ill at ease anywhere in the world, I felt at bottom as if I were going home. And that was indeed my impression when we jumped over the park wall and saw the huge building stretching
out ahead beyond the trees: only Marcelle's win­ dow was still aglow and wide open. Taking some pebbles from a lane, we threw them into her chamber and they promptly summoned the girl, who quickly recognized us and obeyed our gesture of putting a finger on our lips. But of course we also held up the knotted rope to let her understand what we were doing this time. I hurled the cord up to her with the aid of a rock, and she threw it back after looping it around a bar. There were no diffi­ culties, the big rope was hoisted by Marcelle and fastened to the bar, and I scrambled all the way up.
Marcelle flinched when I tried to kiss her. She merely watched me very attentively as I started filing away at a bar. Since she only had a bathrobe on, I softly told her to get dressed so she could come with us. She simply turned her back to pull flesh-colored stockings over her legs, securing them on a belt of bright red ribbons that brought out an ass with a perfect shape and an exception­ ally fine skin. I continued filing, bathed in sweat because of both my effort and what I saw. Her back still towards me, Marcelle pulled a blouse over long, flat hips, whose straight lines were admirably terminated by the ass when she had one foot on a chair. She did not slip on any panties, only a pleated, gray woolen skirt and a sweater with very tiny black, white, and red checks. After stepping into flat-heeled shoes, she came over to the window
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GEORGES BATAILLE
Story of the Eye
and sat down close enough to me so that my one hand could caress her head, her lovely short hair, so sleek and so blond that it actually looked pale. She gazed at me affectionately and seemed touched by my wordless j oy at seeing her.
"Now we can get married, can't we?" she finally said, gradually won over. "It's very bad here, we suffer . . . ."
At that point, I would never have dreamt for even an instant that I could do anything but devote the rest of my life to such an unreal apparition. She let me give her a long kiss on her forehead and her eyes, and when one of her hands happened to touch my leg, she looked at me wide-eyed, but before withdrawing her hand, she ran it over my clothes absent-mindedly.
After long work, I succeeded in cutting through the filthy bar. I pulled it aside with all my strength, which left enough space for her to squeeze through. She did so, and I helped her des­ cend, climbing down underneath, which forced me to see the top of her thigh and even to touch it when I supported her. Reaching the ground, she snuggled in my arms and kissed my mouth with all her strength, while Simone, sitting at our feet, her
eyes wet with tears, flung her hands around Mar­ celle's legs, hugging her knees and thighs. At first, she only rubbed her cheek against the thigh, but
then, unable to restrain a huge surge of joy, she finally yanked the body apart, pressing her lips to the cunt, which she greedily devoured.
However, Simone and I realized that Marcelle grasped absolutely nothing of what was going on and she was actually incapable of telling one situa­ tion from another. Thus she smiled, imagining how aghast the director of the "haunted castle" would be to see her strolling through the garden with her husband. Also, she was scarcely aware of Simone's existence; mirthfully, she at times mis­ took her for a wolf because of her black hair, her silence, and because Simone's head was docilely rubbing Marcelle's thigh, like a dog nuzzling his master's leg. Nonetheless, when I spoke to Marcelle about the "haunted castle," she did not ask me to explain; she understood that this was the building where she had been wickedly locked up. And when­
ever she thought of it, her terror pulled her away from me as though she had seen something pass through the trees. I watched her uneasily, and since my face was already hard and somber, I too frightened her, and almost at the same instant she asked me to protect her when the Cardinal returned.
We were lying in the moonlight by the edge of a forest. We wanted to rest a while during our trip back and we especially wanted to embrace and
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GEORGES BATAILLE
stare at Marcelle. "But who is the Cardinal?" Simone asked
her.
"The man who locked me in the wardrobe," said Marcelle. �
"But why is he a cardinal?" I cried.
She replied: "Because he is the priest of the guillotine."
I now recalled Marcelle's dreadful fear when she left the wardrobe, and particularly two details: I had been wearing a blinding red carnival novelty, a Jacobine liberty cap; furthermore, because of the deep cuts in a girl I had raped, my face, clothes, hands-all parts of me were stained with blood.
Thus, in her terror, Marcelle confused a cardinal, a priest of the guillotine, with the blood­ smeared executioner wearing a liberty cap: a bizarre overlapping of piety and abomination for priests explained the confusion, which, for me, has remained attached to both my hard reality and the horror continually aroused by the compulsiveness of my actions.
CHAPTER EIGHT
.j I
The Open Eyes of t h e De adwom an
For a moment, I was totally helpless after this unexpected discovery; and so was Simone. Marcelle was now half asleep in my arms, so that we didn't know what to do. Her dress was pulled up, exposing the gray beaver between red ribbons
at the end of long thighs, and it had thereby become an extraordinary hallucination in a world so frail that a mere breath might have changed us into light. We didn't dare budge, and all we desired was for that unreal immobility to last as long as
possible, and for Marcelle to fall sound asleep. My mind reeled in some kind of exhausting
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GEORGES BATAILLE
StoryoftheEye
vertigo, have been if Simone, cheted between my eyes and Marcelle's nudity, not made a sudden, her thighs, hold back any longer.
She soaked her dress in a long convulsion that fully denuded her and promptly made me spurt a wave ofjizm in my clothes.
I stretched out in the grass,
large, the milky way, and heavenly urine across the cranial vault formed by the ring of constellations: that open crack at the summit of the sky, cal vapors shining in the immensity (in empty space, where they er's crow in total silence), eye, rock, ity. The nauseating crow of a rooster in particular coincided with my own life, that Cardinal, discordant shrieks he provoked in the wardrobe, and also because one cuts the throats of roosters.
To others, because decent people have gelded eyes. That is why they fear lewdness. They are never frightened
by the crowing of a rooster or when strolling under a starry heaven. In general, sures of the flesh" only on condition that they be insipid .
But as of then, did not care for what is known as "pleasures of the flesh" because they really are insipid; I cared only for what is classified as "dirty." On the other hand, I was not even satisfied with the usual debauchery, because the only thing it dirties is debauchery itself, lime and perfectly pure is left intact by it. My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, course, which merely serves as a backdrop.
I associate the moon with the vaginal blood of mothers,
Sickening stench . . . . I loved Marcelle without mourning her. If
she died, if I sometimes locked myself up in a cellar for hours at a time preCisely because I was thinking ab out Marcelle, pared to start all over again, ing her hair, she is dead, trophes that bring me to her at times when I least expect it. Otherwise, the least kinship now between the dead girl and
and
sa
flat ro
or my o bounci
be
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GEORGES BATAILLE
Story ofthe Eye
myself, which makes most of my days inevitably dreary.
will merely report here that Marcelle hanged herself after a dreadful incident. She rec­ ognized the huge bridal wardrobe, and her teeth started chattering: she instantly realized upon looking at me that I was the man she called the Cardinal, and when she began shrieking, there was no other way for me to stop that desperate howling than to leave the room. By the time Simone and I returned she was hanging inside the wardrobe . . . .
I cut the rope, but she was quite dead. We laid her out on the carpet. Simone saw I was get­ ting a hard-on and she startedjerking me off. I too stretched out on the carpet. It was impossible to otherwise; Simone was still a virgin, and I fucked her for the first time, next to the corpse. It was very painful for both of us, but we were glad precisely because it was painful. Simone stood up and gazed at the corpse. Marcelle had become a total stranger, and in fact, so had Simone at that moment. I no longer cared at all for either Simone or Marcelle. Even if someone had told me it was I who had just died, I would not even have been astonished, so alien were these events to me. I observed Simone, and, as I precisely recall, my only pleasure was in the smutty things Simone was doing, for the corpse was very irritating to her, as though she could not bear the thought that this
creature, so similar to her, could not feel her any­ more. The open eyes were more irritating than anything else. Even when Simone drenched the face, those eyes, extraordinarily, did not close. We were perfectly calm, all three of us, and that was the most hopeless part of it. Any boredom in the world is linked, for me, to that moment and, above all, to an obstacle as ridiculous as death. But that won't prevent me from thinking back to that time with no revulsion and even with a sense of com­ plicity. Basically, the lack of excitement made everything far more absurd, and thus Marcelle was closer to me dead than in her lifetime, inasmuch as absurd existence, so I imagine, has all the prerogatives.
As for the fact that Simone dared to piss on the corpse, whether in boredom or, at worst, in irritation: it mainly goes to prove how impossible it was for us to understand what was happening, and of course, it is no more understandable today than back then. Simone, being truly incapable of con­ ceiving death such as one normally considers it, was frightened and furiOUS, but in no way awe­ struck. Marcelle belonged to us so deeply in our isolation that we could not see her as j ust another corpse. Nothing about her death could be mea­ sured by a common standard, and the contradic­ tory impulses overtaking us in this circumstance neutralized one another, leaving us blind and, as it were, very remote from anything we touched, in a
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rI
world where gestures have no carrying power, like voices in a space that is absolutely soundless.
52
� CHAPTER NINE LewdAnimals
To avoid the bother of a police investiga­ tion, we instantly took off for Spain, where Simone was counting on our disappearing with the help of a fabulously rich Englishman, who had offered to support her and would be more likely than anyone else to show interest in our plight.
The villa was abandoned in the middle of the night. We had no trouble stealing a boat, reach­ ing an obscure point on the Spanish coast, and burning up the craft with the aid of two drums of gasoline we had taken along, as a precautionary
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measure, from the garage of the villa. Simone left me concealed in a wood during the day and went to look for the Englishman in San Sebastian. She only came back at nightfall, but driving a magnifi­ cent automobile, with suitcases full of linen and rich clothing.
Simone said that Sir Edmond would join us in Madrid and all day long he had been plying her with the most detailed questions about Marcelle's death, making her draw diagrams and sketches. Finally he had told a servant to buy a wax manne­ quin with a blonde wig; he had then laid the figure out on the floor and asked Simone to urinate on its face, on the open eyes, in the same position as she had urinated on the eyes of the corpse: during all that time, Sir Edmond had not even touched her.
However, there had been a great change in Simone after Marcelle's suicide-she kept staring into space all the time, looking as if she belonged to something other than the terrestrial world, where almost everything bored her; or if she was still attached to this world, then purely by way of orgasms, that were rare, but incomparably more violent than before. These orgasms were as differ­ ent from normal climaxes as, say, the mirth of sav­ age Africans from that of Occidentals. In fact, though the savages may sometimes laugh as mod­ erately as whites, they also have long-lasting jags,
with all parts of the body in violent release, and
GEORGES BATAILLE
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Story of the Eye
they go whirling willy-nilly, flailing their arms about wildly, shaking their bellies, necks, and chests, and chortling and gulping horribly. As for Simone, she would first open uncertain eyes, at some lewd and dismal sight . . . .
For example, Sir Edmond had a cramped, windowless pigsty, where one day he locked up a petite and scrumptious streetwalker from Madrid; wearing only cami-knickers, she collapsed in a pool of liquid manure under the bellies of the grunting swine. Once the door was shut, Simone had me fuck her on and on, in front of that door, with her ass in the mud, under a fine drizzle of rain, while Sir Edmond jerked off.
Gasping and slipping away from me, Simone grabbed her own ass in both hands and threw back her head, which banged violently against the ground; she tensed·breathlessly for a few seconds, pulling with all her might on the fingernails buried in her ass, then tore herself away at one swoop and thrashed about on the ground like a headless chicken, hurting herself with a terrible bang on the
door fittings. Sir Edmond gave her his wrist to bite on and allay the spasm that kept shaking her, and I saw that her face was smeared with saliva and blood.
After these huge fits, she always came to nestle in my arms; she settled her little ass comfort­ ably in my large hands and remained there for a
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Story of the Eye
long time without moving or speaking, huddled like a little girl, but always somber.
Sir Edmond deployed his ingenuity at pro­ viding us with obscene spectacles at random, but Simone still preferred bullfights. There were actu­ ally three things about bullfights that fascinated her: the first, when the bull comes hurtling out of the bullpen like a big rat; the second, when its horns plunge all the way into the flank of a mare; the third, when that ludicrous, raw-boned mare gallops across the arena, lashing out unseasonably and dragging a huge, vile bundle of bowels between her thighs in the most dreadful wan colors, a pearly white, pink, and gray. Simone's heart throbbed fastest when the exploding bladder dropped its mass of mare's urine on the sand in one quick plop.
She was on tenterhooks from start to finish at the bullfight, in terror (which of course mainly expressed a violent desire) at the thought of seeing the toreador hurled up by one of the monstrous lunges of the horns when the bull made its endless, blindly raging dashes at the void of colored cloths.
And there is something else I ought to say: When the bull makes its quick, brutal, thrusts over and over again into the matador's cape, barely grazing the erect line of the body, any spectator has that feeling of total and repeated lunging typical of the game of coitus. The utter nearness of death is also
felt in the same way. But these series of prodigious passes are rare. Thus, each time they occur, they unlease a veritable delirium in the arena, and it is well kn own that at such thrilling instants th e women jerk off by merely rubbing their thighs together.
Apropos bullfights, Sir Edmond once told Simone that until quite recently, certain virile Spaniards, mostly occasional amateur toreadors, used to ask the caretaker of the arena to bring them the fresh, roasted balls of one of the first bulls to be killed. They received them at their own seats, in the front row of the arena, and ate them while watching the killing of the next few bulls. Simone took a keen interest in this tale, and since we were attending the first major bullfight of the year that Sunday, she begged Sir Edmond to get her the balls of the first bull, but added one condition: they had to be raw.
"I say," objected Sir Edmond, "w?atever d� you want with raw balls? You certaInly don t intend to eat raw balls now, do you?"
"I want to have them before me on a plate," concluded Simone.
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� CHAPTER TEN Granero'8 Eye
On May 7, 1922, the toreadors La Rosa, Lalanda, and Granero were to fight in the arena of Madrid; the last two were renowned as the best matadors in Spain, and Granero was generally considered superior to L

I wish I knew the accuracy of the trackers--I think it's really interesting that a lot of the people stare *next* to the faces at empty space. I know I do the same thing.