The gods to whom we sacrifice are themselves sacrifice, tears wept to the point of dying.
Bataille's the only Western philosopher to really understand sacrifice, haven't I told W. that? His work a kind of touchstone to me.
Poetry is the only sacrifice whose fire we can maintain, renew: W. read that in my notebook. But what does the poet sacrifice? That of which the poet would speak, perhaps - the world, in its living immediacy. The real world is substituted by an ideal one; the world rises anew on the page.
But then poetry depends upon more than signification. Isn't it the weight of language - its rhythms, its sonorities - which are the poet's chance?
What does the poet sacrifice? A second answer: the dream that language would be merely the outward garment of thought. Poetry rebels against the instrumental notion of language, its enslavement to the order of signification. Non serviam: that's the poet's motto, Bataille said.
Heidegger says somewhere when we walk through a forest we walk through the word forest. The Bataillean poet, as she walks, awakens a conflagration in the ideal trees. The forest is burning – not the real forest, with its shade and its clearings: it is the word forest that is on fire. But the fire spreads from the the page of the poem to every page in every book ...
The poem, then, is akin to a sacrificial fire. The heaviness of language is the poet's fuel. Bataille's poem is on fire. It is not the torch that would illumine the night, but the night itself that burns. And the poet? The salamander in the flames. The one who lives from her death, her continual dying. And in the place of the poet (occupying her place), the reader burns in turn.
What happens when I write about him?, W. says. What, when I fill the blog with my nonsense? Isn't it enough that I've ruined his real life? Why do I want to ruin his ideal one, too?