This is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen and as usual beauty occurs as pure accident. The dancing of Bobby Farrell is the perfect illustration of the passage quoted in Current 93’s The Dream of a Shadow of Smoke.
“the young man dances like a bubble, empty and gay, and shines like a dove’s neck, or the image of a rainbow, which hath no substance, and whose very imagery and colours are fantastical; and so he dances out the gaiety of his youth, and is all the while in a storm, and endures only because he is not knocked on the head by a drop of bigger rain, or crushed by the pressure of a load of indigested meat, or quenched by the disorder of an ill-placed humour.”
Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of Down and Connor, from The Exercises of Holy Dying
the sexual act is in time what the tiger is in space
/…/
the tiger is a point of extreme incandescence.
Bataille, George The Accursed Share, New York 1991, p.12 & 34
“The ‘gag-pin’ was a short rod fastened between the jaws of calves to stop them from sucking on their mothers teats. The fat and protein-rich colostrum was used for the dish ‘dance of calf.’ The calf was then nurtured with ordinary milk or slaughtered.” - From Wikipedias’ Swedish article on Gag (Munkavle).
This is what happens when we die. Heaven is a hotel corridor in Cannes, God is a supermodel and we’re all kittens.
“And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind /…/ the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, LORD God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.” Book of Revelation 4:6 – 8
I’ve come to realize that my insubstantial reproduction of pre-existent fragments of loveliness is not enough. Merely posting these found objects, which are all quite important to me, seems inadequate to the great love I feel. It needs to be voiced. I vaguely remember a line from one of C.S. Lewis’ theological musing. He compared praying to the adoration of lovers. A lover, he states, never calls the object of his true love beautiful by necessity or hoping for something in return. To him it is a truth so important that it has to be voiced, over and over again. It is an action transcending economy, the pure excess of beauty. “This is important, this means something.” I make no claims knowing what that is. I’m not trying to persuade you, or to justify my love. I try to make it real. Thought is made in the mouth, Tzara wrote in his dada manifesto on feeble love and bitter love. This is my own feeble manifest of great love.
In the deep end
I found this video in a collection of home-movies by Man Ray. I don’t know who the dancer is, if she’s acting or not, but her happiness seems so unbearably real to me. I decided it was and it made me love her. The film was silent but in a moment of weakness I decided that she should dance to the most beautiful love song I know, Scott Walkers A Lover Loves, from the Drift album.
In this scene from the Marxist vampire film Jonathan a young vampire mortifies her flesh while singing a segment from Novalis Hymnen an die Nacht in order to quiet her abnormal urges. “Wer büßt, wer büßt, der brauch kein Blut zu trinken.” Made manifest is, of course, my unabashed and perverted fascination of martyrdom. I mourn the loss of ritual sacrifice in secular culture.
