Really, he's competent enough to escape from multiple armed kidnappers, several kids and at least one adult who all just left him alone and unrestrained while they all went into another, non adjoining room so he could escape unnoticed, but he can't show police where the property full of racists, guns, and torture devices he escaped on foot from is? And local police don't know the fat ginger racist in a red truck with "I hate black people" tattooed on his forearm by name?
Sounds pretty fishy to me.

Inappropriate channel assignments, so
*nochannel
Maybe *news (likely fake news) *equality and *controversy, but certainly not for kids and not related to the military war on terror. Also not a lynching.

What a douche.
I wish that diplomat had reverted to his MMA training and knocked Trump out instinctually.
Can someone please, please knock this feckless and feculent, piss faced failure off his high horse?
*quality example of unrestrained narcissism personified

Truth is truth....and this is not truth, or is at least intentionally misleading.
As mentioned above, the parties totally switched positions with the Republican Southern strategy. She's either ignorant, or intentionally misleading.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southern_strategy

What rich earn their money with "hard" work? Few if any, they more often make it by paying hard workers less than they are due, often by contract. (At least that's certainly true for many, including Trump)
Killing babies, nope. Embryos aren't babies. Babies can live outside a womb. >99.999% of abortions don't meet that requirement, and the few that do are only allowed to save the mother's life.
Oppressing business owners, nope, just stopping them from abusing their workers, customers, and environment. That only oppresses oppressors, and I'm more than fine with that considering how they act when unrestrained.
Allowing illegal immigrants in....nope, but offering far more work visas, absolutely. "Proper vetting" is meaningless, unless you agree to use the term as intended by the intelligence community, in which case democrats are totally on board...but not with a Muslim ban until Trump can figure something out, that's never....and totally unconstitutional.
Get rid of capitalism....did you see their candidate? Even Sanders didn't want that, but he was too hostile to unfettered capitalism for democrats....just duh.

Why do you see people mentioning the switch? Because you, and this woman, are trying to pretend it didn't happen....but it clearly, unequivocally, undeniably did. Take some American history and you'll learn.

Edit: what's funny is, had there been no southern strategy and swap of ideals as she and you imply, democrats would be your party, supporting all the right wing strategies you support.

Didn't watch the video, but did skim the comments... Christ...

First off, moving to Canada and any other decent first world nation be it New Zealand, Australia, the UK, Iceland, Netherlands, Canada etc... not as easy as just packing up and moving. You need a very narrow set of skills to move to those countries. We looked into all this countries, and all of their entry requirements exceeded what we had to offer them. People always say if you don't like it leave, but that ignores several facts. It isn't we don't like it, we just think it can be improved, change isn't bad. Humanity isn't bad. Caring for those less fortunate isn't bad. Guaranteeing everyone a minimum level of affordable health care isn't bad. Working to insure that all workers get a living wage (the way we used to have before the employers/owners started getting greedy and redistributing more wealth to themselves), isn't a bad goal, in fact it's a very good thing. The famed clip from the Newsroom's first episode when he goes on about how America isn't great anymore but it used to be...

Of course the whole concept of American exceptionalism, or any nation exceptionalism is flawed. We are all humans on this planet. Being American doesn't make you superior to somebody born in China or Mexico, Ethiopia, Syria or anywhere else. Location of birth is an accident of timing... and if it is divine intervention by God that placed you here instead of Ethiopia where you may have starved to death with an inflated malnourished belly despite all your prayers, then God is an ass and not worth serving. So if he's not an ass, then it is pure accident that you are here and not there. To think oneself superior and better than somebody in another nation because of their location of birth, and the religion that comes with that location, is insanity. And I draw that all ways. The Muslims who despise Christianity for not being the true faith, and Christians who despise Islam for not being the true faith. You are your faith by accident of birth, be it location and/or parentage etc... all of which is getting away from the point. Which is simply that to say that Chinese worker doesn't deserve a job manufacturing something that you think you should be building is asinine and not respectful of their humanity and a complete lack of any sort of empathy. Christ, I have Aspergers and I have more empathy in my farts than the entire Tea Party Christian Right.

Yes we need to respect the individual, but "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one"... and that quote is in context and not just a cherry pick sample. If it benefits just one and damages the many, then it is not a good thing. Most every faith in the world has some variation of the Golden Rule, to treat others the way you want others (not that specific person, but people as a general whole) to treat you. Christianity's Christ went further and said the greatest commandment was love, to show love to one another. Greed and selfishness is not love. Collectivism has many faults as well, but it isn't tyranny, and is certainly better for society as a whole in the long run than unrestrained greed motivated individualism. Like Pink Floyd's song, On the Turning Away, says, we are all "just a world we all must share". We can't turn away from the coldness inside towards others. We need to lift all of humanity up. Perhaps showing the Muslims love instead of hate and bigotry would convince them that perhaps Christianity isn't the enemy, that perhaps it is the answer, but showing them hate, and bigotry... and denying refugees trying to flee a horrible civil war is bigotry and hatred, and the fact that a rather disturbingly large percentage of the right can't see that isn't bigotry and hatred is scary beyond measure. I again find it amazing that people could lack that much empathy without a neurological disorder.

To invade others, tell them how to live their lives, to force democracy on them if they aren't ready, to insult them and belittle their faith, and all that isn't world building. It isn't reaching out with empathy. It's hate. It's bigotry and as noted by artician, it's what helps drive people to fly into buildings. They know that they know that their faith is the right one, and the lack of empathy to see that people of the Muslim faith have just as much faith in their religion as Christians have in theirs, that they have the same amount of knowledge and comfort from god that they are the correct faith, is what drives extremism.

And oh my god the guns. Guns would have saved the Jews. American mainland can't be invaded because too many people own guns... ask the Branch Davidians how well having not only military grade weapons but also training on how to use them worked for them against a slightly militarized police force, let alone an actual military. Yes, it would be incredibly hard, and resistance would probably eventually wear any invading force down the way the Taliban wore the Soviets down, or the Viet Cong did against the US Military might. So perhaps that can be counted as a victory, but would be long fought. Look, I support gun ownership. All I really call for is 1) allowing the CDC get back to it's job of collecting the data and finding out what's really going on with gun violence, and 2) closing the gun show loophole unless the CDC's investigation shows that it has zero effect, 3) you have to have a legal ID to own a gun and can't be on the no fly list, 4) the existing background checks kept the same, but also add a drug test, the right wants drug tests for welfare, then we should be testing for gun owenrship too. (I see little reason for "assault weapons" but aside from perhaps having perhaps a slightly better background check, I don't know if a ban yet needs to be called for, but I'm in the middle here.) Once we have have better data points from the CDC then we can really tackle the issue of gun violence. Yes, it will take years to get those answers, but I find it insane that the Republicans refuse to allow the investigation to go on, which says to me that they are afraid of what the data will show.

Unless you are nearly a pure Native American, then you are a refugee to the US.

The primary problem here and around the world is poverty and lack of proper education. This drives people to crime and extremism in religion which makes them susceptible to acting out terrorist acts, be it in the name of Allah (as is the public perceived norm) or Christ (ala the Planed Parenthood terrorist attack, the 2011 Norway attacks, etc). We need to address the growing income and wealth gaps. The way to doing that isn't by giving those at the top even more tax breaks and losing regulations (which is funny thing to complain about, too many regulations here in the US, meanwhile the same people complain about the low quality Chinese goods that aren't safe due to low regulations and poor labor conditions etc). We need to push education, and proper STEM programs, not deflated science trying to force Creationism in via so called "Intelligent Design" or "teaching the controversy" stick to the actual science. Don't object to the "new math" if it's teaching better fundamentals of understanding what the numbers are actually doing even if it doesn't teach the shortcuts we were taught... and lots of the stuff people complain about is just the fact we don't skip right to the shortcut that works. Yes, it works, but it helps if they better understand the underlying fundamentals of the numbers and the actual math. Again, change isn't a bad thing, to object just because you don't understand or don't like it compared to the simplified shortcut we all learned doesn't make it bad. Reading also needs pushed, and understanding of logical fallacies and logical and faulty thinking.

I believe that a post scarcity world is impossible due to the nature of humanity. There are far too many greedy people that will never want the world to get to that point. However, that should be the noble goal. Post scarcity society has many issues, but perhaps by the time we actually got there we'd be able to solve them.

TLDR: Basically it all comes down to empathy. To view everything as the others view it. I get the fear and panic and all that the right has, and not just because I once upon a time was a right wing evangelical Christian who called those who received food stamps lazy bums, who said that Democrats and the liberals just wanted to keep the poor trapped so they would always need help. Yes, I was there and that helps, but I can still empathize with them without that past. I've never been a Muslim raised in a nation dominated by Islam, but I can still empathize with the way they see what the US is doing to them, the way they have to see people like Donald Trump and the scary amount of Americans that support him. It's easy to see why some are driven to extremism. I can empathize with that Mexican who just wants a better life and knows that Mexico can't give it to him so he has to risk it all to try and immigrate to the US. I can empathize with the Chinese worker who has been given an opportunity to build something, to escape the poverty... for while perhaps still poverty, less poverty than before, and I'm thankful that I got that opportunity, and I'm sorry that somebody in the US doesn't get to do it, but I'm a human too. Empathy. Learn it. It can be learned, neurological disorder or not.

There is a demonstrated bias towards equity investment domestically which is probably what Adam Smith was talking about, which is rather different to tax havens and global supply chains which would not have been as feasible back in the 18th century.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_bias_puzzle

Chomsky is also not really correct as Adam Smith does use it in the more general sense that it is referred to today in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. That it took me a couple of minutes to contradict this video with wikipedia does not bode well for the fact checking of TYT.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_hand#Other_uses_of_the_phrase_by_Smith

I think it's also worth pointing out that Smith's position wasn't that of unrestrained market activity. The general principle of the invisible hand is sound if you accept that point. As far as his actual position on the role of government, it's open to interpretation. It's also worth pointing out that you can't expect a concept to not need some adjustment after 250 years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith#As_a_symbol_of_free_market_economics

OK, then you owe your unrestrained right to do so to intelligent thoughtful (some slave owning) imperfect men that voted to secure it from legal interference.

Far N cali.

It's curious how opponents of "free market capitalism" lend so much of their imagination conjuring twisted fantasies of its cruelty, yet spare none of it for all the likely productive solutions that would thrive in such an unrestrained collaborative environment.

Freedom is so scary...

@dag @Fletch @LarsaruS

I think you're all forgetting that Hitler was a master of propaganda, and those statements affirming Christianity were just that. Hitler used a facade of piousness to cement his power with a predominantly Christian populace. Feel free to disagree, but then you have to deal with statements which he made to party loyalists, like these:

"National Socialism and religion cannot exist together....
"The heaviest blow that ever struck humanity was the coming of Christianity. Bolshevism is Christianity's illegitimate child. Both are inventions of the Jew. The deliberate lie in the matter of religion was introduced into the world by Christianity....
"Let it not be said that Christianity brought man the life of the soul, for that evolution was in the natural order of things." (p 6 & 7)

Night of July 11-12th 1941

"Christianity is a rebellion against natural law, a protest against nature. Taken to its logical extreme, Christianity would mean the systematic cultivation of the human failure." (p 43)

October 10th 1941

"The reason why the ancient world was so pure, light and serene was that it knew nothing of the two great scourges: the pox and Christianity."

19th October, 1941, night

Doesn't seem like such a warrior for christ now, does he? The cult of personality that fletch is talking about just makes my point. When man tries to get rid of God, he just replaces God with himself. Human beings have the natural desire to worship, whether it is something like money, or power, or celebrity, or themselves, everyone who doesn't know the true God has at least one idol in their life they pay homage too.

To say there is no connection between atheism and communism is absurd. Atheism was at the roots of it, and that according to the communists themselves:

"Atheism is the natural and inseparable part of Communism"

"Our program necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism"

Lenin

“With disdain I will throw my gauntlet full in the fact of the world and see the collapse of this pygmy giant. Then will I wander god-like and victorious through the ruins of the world. And giving my words an active force, I will feel equal to the Creator.”

Karl Marx

“The first requisite for the happiness of the people is the abolition of religion”

Karl Marx

So you see there is a connection between atheism and the atheistic regimes that committed uncounted atrocities. Fletch, you're even denial about the definition of atheism, which is the denial of any deity according to the dictionary. A famous quote says that "without God everything is permissable". And that is the logical connection, that a man unrestrained by any thought of ultimate accountability can justify any kind of moral action to himself. Consider this quote from Joel Marks, the professor of philosophy at the University of New Haven

“This philosopher has been laboring under an unexamined assumption, namely that there is such a thing as right and wrong. I now believe there isn’t…The long and short of it is that I became convinced that atheism implies amorality; and since I am an atheist, I must therefore embrace amorality…I experienced my shocking epiphany that religious fundamentalists are correct; without God there is no morality. But they are incorrect, I still believe, about there being a God. Hence, I believe, there is no morality.

Even though words like “sinful” and “evil” come naturally to the tongue as say a description of child molesting. They do not describe any actual properties of anything. There are no literal sins in the world because there is no literal God…nothing is literally right or wrong because there is no Morality"

Please note, I am not saying atheists cannot be moral; I am simply saying that an amoral viewpoint can be a causal factor in committing atrocities, just as much as any zealout. Psychopaths suppress what they know is right and wrong, and dictators ordain it.

It goes back to my original point. It is human nature that is the problem, the corruption of which I attribute to sin. A moral person will be moral in every circumstance, whereas an immoral person will be immoral in every circumstance. You cannot chop it up to specific beliefs of methodologies..they only diagnose the symptom and not the cause.

@gorillaman

Obama is a fascist, a war criminal and an enemy of all humanity. The reason everyone who meets him doesn't immediately explode into murderous, unrestrainable fury is because he's charming and uses shit like this to get into their hearts.

Words have meaning. The word "fascist" doesn't apply to Obama. Hyperbole aside, how does this make him different from any other US president? It's a long line back to the last one who didn't commit war crimes while in office. Is this the first time you've noticed? Do you have a point yet?

>> ^messenger:

Yes, politicians use the media to manipulate the public. Was that really your whole point?
BTW, alcohol makes you drunk! Jack Daniels is a fascist!

Obama is a fascist, a war criminal and an enemy of all humanity. The reason everyone who meets him doesn't immediately explode into murderous, unrestrainable fury is because he's charming and uses shit like this to get into their hearts.

@Grimm - At the risk of stating the obvious, don't you think it's more logical to believe that Reagan's loyalty to big money (and ALL of his predecessors) might have played a dominant role in the degradation of American public education, rather than the fact that a Department of Education exists? Boise laid out a number of deliberate poison pills in his comment. You've merely asserted your claim without any rational other than an arbitrary number of trips around the sun.

Let's say you buy a new car, and I tell you I hate it and intend to pop the tires, break the windows and light it on fire after you go to sleep. If the next morning you wake up to find your car on fire, with popped tires and broken windows, would you take it back to the dealer and claim the car was faulty? This, in essence, is what you are doing here.

If I were you, the logical counter argument would be, "well there you go, you've made my case, a malicious or subservient (take your pick) president was able to have a hugely negative effect on education nationally. Had it been left to the states, our educational system would be a utopic wonderland."

To which I would respond, "If big money can compromise a huge government, what makes you think they couldn't eat a state house for champagne brunch?"

The problem with libertarians is that they are unwitting allies of the corporate state. They believe that getting rid of government would end authoritarianism, completely failing to understand that the kind of authoritarianism that haunts our country would prefer to be unrestrained by government too. Right libertarianism, if enacted, would indeed provide more liberty to a handful of wealthy and powerful people, but it would come at the cost of liberty to the vast majority. 1% vs 99% if you will. Sound familiar? I see no clear difference between libertarianism and social Darwinism. If you respond to any of this, I'd most like to know how you differentiate libertarianism from social Darwinism.

I think a vast amount of people would prefer the liberty of healthcare, education, roads, fire departments, police departments, schools and libraries to the liberty to dominate a labor force, the liberty to pollute the environment with impunity, the liberty to manipulate the banking system or the liberty to build bloody corporate empires on foreign shores. What makes you think the business men that took us to war in the middle east wouldn't be twice as brutal without a single shred of oversight or transparency? What makes you think deregulated labor markets wouldn't revert back to pre-regulation era slavery if given the option?

If social Darwinism is what you truly desire, then we have nothing more to say to each other. However, if you want to stop authoritarianism, then stop trying to make it easier for authoritarians to thrive. Ron Paul is a nice fella and all - an adorable little grandfatherly gnome even - and I take him at his word when he says he believes his economic hypothesis would create liberty. Unfortunately, reality begs to differ. And, sincerity is no excuse for bad ideas.

Good debate. Peace.

You can join the convo too if you like @GeeSussFreeK

Joseph Stiglitz is an advocate of more lending, in order to stimulate growth. Unrestrained lending is exactly how we got in this recession, and exactly why Stiglitz should be banned from Occupy Wall St.

>> ^NinjaInHeat:

To everyone crying out "OMGOMGOGM, DISEASE GERMS OMG NO!!!", do you have any idea of the type of shit a child will put in his/her mouth during that period in life? Something tells she'll survive this 'ordeal'. I liked the mom's remark about her turning out to be vegetarian, actually, if anything, I imagine this will prove to have a positive impact on her perception and acceptance of death as she grows up.


>> ^Skeeve:

What I want to know is, how is what she did "wrong"?
There might be some cleanliness issues that might make you consider it "wrong" but she wasn't licking it or anything (not something I would be surprised about, considering her age) so if her parents clean her up she will likely be fine.



It's a risk thing. Yes children are routinely exposed to many pathogens, but they are also immunized against the worst of them. Odds are this child will be just fine after this episode, and odds are she will also be fine unrestrained in the back seat of a car. A responsible parent should limit unnecessary risks to their child, and exposing her to zoonotic diseases is a bad move.

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,
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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
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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
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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
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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,
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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
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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
.
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.
28
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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
30
I
\
31
-j
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
32
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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
34
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
37
GEORGES BATAILLE
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
39
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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.�I
r
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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GEORGES BATAILLE
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
53
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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
54
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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GEORGES BATAILLE
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