For seeing life is but a motion of Limbs, the begining whereof is in some principall part within; why may we not say, that all Automata (Engines that move themselves by springs and wheeles as doth a watch) have an artificiall life? For what is the Heart, but a Spring; and the Nerves, but so many Strings; and the Joynts, but so many Wheeles, giving motion to the whole Body, such as was intended by the Artificer?
[Flash 9 is required to listen to audio.]
almost makes me cry.
114. PROJECT: STEEL CATHEDRAL INCLUDING MINOR CATHEDRALS
FOR A MILLION PEOPLE, NEW YORK CITY, N.Y. 1926.
“Mouth”
Georges Bataille
(first printed as a Dictionary entry in Documents, second year, 5 [1930]:299.)
The mouth is the beginning or, if one prefers, the prow of animals; in the most characteristic cases, it is the most living part, in other words, the most terrifying for neighboring animals. But man does not have a simple architecture like beasts, and it is not even possible to say where he begins. He possibly starts at the top of the skull, but the top of the skull is an insignificant part, incapable of catching one’s attention; it is the eyes or the forehead that play the meaningful role of an animal’s jaws.
Among civilized men, the mouth has even lost the relatively prominent character that it still has among primitive men. However, the violent meaning of the mouth is conserved in a latent state; it suddenly regains the upper hand with a literally cannibalistic expression such as mouth of fire [bouche à feu], applied to the cannons men use to kill each other. And on important occasions human life is still bestially concentrated in the mouth: rage makes men grind their teeth, while terror and atrocious suffering turn the mouth into the organ of rending screams. On the subject it is easy to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck in such a way that the mouth becomes, as much as possible, an extension of the spinal column, in other words, in the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals. As if explosive impulses were to spurt directly out of the body through the mouth, in the form of screams. This fact highlights both the importance of the mouth in animal physiology or even psychology, and the general importance of the superior or anterior extremity of the body, the orifice of profound physical impulses; one sees at the same time that a man can liberate these impulses in at least two different ways, in the brain or in the mouth, but that as soon as these impulses become violent, he is obliged to resort to the bestial way of liberating them. Whence the narrow constipation of a strictly human attitude, the magisterial look of the face with a closed mouth, as beautiful as a safe.
“Angel Locking the Damned in Hell,” Folio 39, Winchester Psalter, c. 1161. mineral pigment on vellum.
Words to follow. For now:
1 Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishook,
or press down its tongue with a cord?
2 Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook?
3 Will it make many supplications to you?
4 Will it speak soft words to you?
…
10 No one is so fierce as to dare to stir it up.
Who can stand before it?
11 Who can confront it and be safe?
– under the whole heaven, who?
12 I will not keep silence concerning its limbs,
or its mighty strength, or its splendid frame.
13 Who can penetrate its double coat of mail?
14 Who can open the doors of its face?
There is terror all around its teeth.
15 Its back is made of shields in rows,
shut up closely with a seal.
16 One is so near to another that no air can come between them.
17 They are joined to one another;
they clasp each other and cannot be separated.
18 Its sneezes flash forth light,
and its eyes are like the eyelids of the dawn.
19 From its mouth go flaming torches;
sparks of fire leap out.
20 Out of its nostrils comes smoke,
as from a boiling pot and burning rushes.
21 Its breath kindles coals,
and a large flame comes out of its mouth.
22 In its neck abides strength,
and terror dances before it.
23 The folds of its flesh cling together;
it is firmly cast and immovable.
24 Its heart is as hard as stone,
as hard as the lower millstone.
…
30 Its underparts are like sharp potsherds;
it spreads itself like a threshing sledge on the mire.
31 It makes the deep boil like a pot;
it makes the sea like a pot of ointment.
32 It leaves a shining wake behind it;
one would think the deep to be white-haired.
33 On earth it has no equal,
a creature without fear.
34 It surveys everything that is lofty;
it is king over all that are proud.
(Job 41)
Francesco Ligozzi, 1620, Florence, Dante and Virgil in Hell, oil painted on pietra paesina.
“…red flames stand out against a dark ocher background seamed with black arborescences and dotted with pale blurs—the naked bodies of the damned. There seems to be a clear case of complicity here between the subterranean levels of suffering and the genesis of a stone that itself comes from the depths of the earth, roasted in the heat of some nonhuman furnace. It is no longer a matter of a painter’s whim exploiting a strange material. Instead we have an encounter between a subject and a medium which might be called a demonstration of that subject” (Caillois, The Writing of Stones, “‘Pierres-aux-masures,’ or Ruin and Landscape Marbles,” p. 32).
