Contents of spoon-archives/bataille.archive/papers/Addict.txt

Chapter Six Seduction, Transgression, Addiction Every philosophy expresses the experience of the philosopher. There is no truth so obvious, no argument so compelling, that it cannot be staved off indefinitely by a professional. I believe, finally, what I need to believe, and write, finally, what I need to write: either what I need to hear so badly that I reach for the desperate expedient of saying it to myself on the printed page, or what I am constrained to defend because of what I am. The arguments I then enunciate, if any, give the positions thus arrived at the patina of objective respectability, but the oomph of the position has nothing to do with arguments. When Quine says that he has a taste for desert landscapes, for example, he is much closer to the heart of his ontology than when he actually argues about what there is. I. I have been taught about reality by a hard teacher, a teacher that left me nowhere to squirm, so that I had to sit and listen: alcoholism and drug addiction. I started smoking marijuana when I was fourteen, and I smoked every day (and, most days, several times a day) for fifteen years. I drank alcoholically, that is, without being able to control my drinking once I had started, for at least ten years. I had various encounters with cocaine (including crack), LSD and a variety of other drugs. My father died at age 49 from the combined effect of addictions (though he was sober when he died, of emphysema). One of my brothers was killed in a PCP-related murder; another brother died of a heroine overdose; yet another did five years in the state pen for a heroine-driven armed robbery. I have lost jobs, flipped cars, and so forth. I say this not to arouse your pity (though what the heck, pity if you like; better yet, send cash), but to emphasize the extent of the craziness, and the extent of my motivation to stop what I was doing. Any fool could see that I ought to stop using drugs and alcohol, and only an idiot would continue. Indeed, what stunned me continually, besides the substances, was the weakness of my will. From the teenager who viewed himself as the Nietzschean overman, ready to give the world a dose of Will to Power, I had become a person who could not stop himself from pouring vodka down his throat. By the end, when I was drinking secretly all day, every day, I hated myself for drinking and drugging; but I hated myself more for what those acts showed about my strength: namely, that I didn't have any. I wanted to stop. Indeed, I wanted nothing else so much as to stop. And I could continue to want to stop even as I was raising the bottle to my lips. My body seemed to be operating independently of my will. Now this experience, the experience of being out of control, of having one's will broken is, I assert, in germ, the most profound and also the most typical experience of which human beings are capable. It is the experience of coming up against what is real. Even the most powerful will in the world, and even if that will is attached to the most powerful intellect and the most powerful body, has a tiny field of action, supposing for a moment that the notion that it has any field of action at all is not an illusion. My ability to shift a weight, to move from one place to another, to acquire things or to dispose of them, could increase a thousandfold and still be minuscule in proportion to the world in general. And my exercise of such capacities as I do have to lift, to travel, to acquire, and so forth, is both fixed by and articulated within the way things are. To travel by plane I must get to the airport, take the scheduled flight, and so on, and on. If it is by the free exercise of will that I travel, I do so under ubiquitous constraint. Everywhere my will turns, it runs up against reality like a brick wall. In fact, so powerful are these constraints that I literally cannot will what I know reality does not allow me the hope of accomplishing: I can no more try to jump over the moon than I can jump over the moon. This fact allows my will to be approximately proportioned to my capacities, so that the limitations of the latter do not rise constantly to consciousness. I cannot jump over the moon, or even over my desk, so I can forget that I cannot, and take pleasure in the fact that I can hop a foot into the air and shoot a basketball. There is nothing wrong with the pleasure. But such pleasures are bought at the cost of forgetfulness; every pleasure we take at the exercise of our capacities is the avoidance of a million pains at our incapacities. Every little capacity we have is a tiny zone carved out of a crushing universe. It is this that allows us to feel "free." The freedom we enjoy is the product of a massive forgetting, and what is forgotten is the real. To feel free is to forget the world. We live our lives in a continual pattern of pushing against the world and having the world push back against us. The manner and direction of our pushing is our situation. Among other things, this dynamic is the source of great pleasure. For example, this structure is displayed with crystalline purity in the act of weight-lifting. I go to the gym and lift weights for several purposes: to look good, improve my health, and so forth. But fundamentally, I go there not to accomplish any particular purpose, but simply to push at the weights, and to be pushed at by the weights. And I suspect that other people respond as I do, or they could not keep coming back again and again. I need, first of all, to feel myself as a person who is capable of making things happen, but I need, even more I think, to feel myself to be a person who is incapable of making things happen. I work each set to failure; that is, I am only finished when I can no longer move the weight. To feel oneself lifting a weight is to feel the world resisting one's will. To seek the experience of lifting weights until one can no longer move the weight is to seek the experience of this resistance, and to take pleasure in reality, that is, in one's incapacity. What is experienced at the edge of one's capacity is, despite the artificiality of the environment, experienced as real because of its resistance to will. And to experience the real consciously is to have an authentic experience, which, as Emerson and Thoreau say, is what we crave. Now as I say, we devote most of our technological effort, for example, not to "improving the quality of life" per se, but to ameliorating our sense of situation, to desituating ourselves. We yearn for this as an escape from danger and animality, but we yearn also, and perhaps more deeply, for situation. Indeed, this book is an expression of the latter yearning. And so is weight-lifting, which is motivated by the desire to embed oneself totally in situation, to explore the limits of will and the limits of bodily action in response to will. A gym is a device for testing these capacities with absolute specificity and systematicity: one moves from exercise to exercise, testing one or another muscle, or driving each muscle to failure. Now exercise is addictive. And what addicts is not the exercise of will as one pushes out against the weight, but the failure of will as the weight pushes back. It is resistance, and, finally, failure in the face of resistance that floods the brain with endorphins. That is, it is not the exercise of power that addicts, but the response of the world to the exercise of power, the demonstration of one's powerlessness. The encounter with the real is the encounter with one's own failure, and failure always "brings home the reality" of situation. Pushing the weight away from one's body in, say, the bench press, is the attempt to push the world away from oneself, to shift the burden of the real by an act of personal power. The grunt of weight-lifter, his concentration and aggressiveness, are expressions of personal power, and measurements of it. But one goes to the gym knowing that one will fail, or indeed intending to fail, in the sense that one will end up trying to lift the weight one more time than one can actually lift it, or trying to lift five more pounds than one can lift. And thus, it is not the power of strength that addicts one to lifting; it is the powerlessness of failure. One presses against the world, but only for the purpose of feeling the world press back even harder. Indeed, this dynamic informs and infests every human perversity and addiction. For example, as I think I've said, I enjoy thunderstorms. Every time I see one coming up, I hope that it is extremely intense. This, I think, is in part because of the illusion of safety, and the reality of protection from the weather, created by a climate-controlled house. The intensity of a storm, its loudness and so forth, teach me or suggest to me that I am vulnerable to the world: are, for me, a ritual enactment of the limits of my will. Here we see precisely the same dynamic as with weight-lifting, but now on a cultural or collective scale: the building of homes such as I live in is a pushing out of the world, a lifting of the weight of reality. The storm is reality pressing back. Thus, too, we all enjoy natural disasters, when they are depicted on television. Here, without actually being crushed by, say, the earthquake, or burned alive by the fire, I get a sense of the limitations of my will; I feel the limits of human power. Thus, in all these cases, I get the pleasure of "letting go," the pleasure of "the burn" or utter exhaustion, when my will no longer operates. That will can be experienced as a burden is one of the dominant themes that is played out in human history. Sex, too, plays in the same space. The mating ritual is an elaborate drama of power between the sexes. A man (let us say) tries to bend a woman to his will, tests the limits of his power in the arena of her body. He wants her resistance, indeed is perhaps incapable of sexual desire where there is no resistance; at any rate, each resistance intensifies desire and each sort of resistance calls forth a certain sort of desire. Thus sex can become an incredibly elaborate ritualized enactment of resistances and the overcoming of resistances: all the impedimenta of bondage and discipline are designed to bring this dynamic to a fever pitch. But sex culminates in a loss of self, a letting go of will, which men enact in the most literal physical sense: orgasm makes men limp; the culmination of passion is precisely loss of power and loss of desire. The dynamic that finds expression in all these ways takes on a peculiar form in the case of substance abuse. Notice that abused substances, as are barbells, are pieces of the external world. And notice that the addict moves these substances around until he is incapable of moving anything; I always drank toward oblivion, toward the final loss of will, toward death. Alcohol, cocaine and so forth are toxic, poisonous. "Substance abuse" is a particularly thorough expression of the dynamic of resistance, for it issues not in the temporary oblivion and loss of will of orgasm, but in an oblivion and loss of will that permeate one's life. In addiction, the zone of the exercise of my will narrowed to almost nothing, or perhaps, really to nothing. For here it was my own body that I could not control. The same lesson can be learned from physical handicaps, grinding sickness, and so forth. To experience myself as an addict was to experience myself as real: to experience myself as recalcitrant to the activity of my own will. Here, the weight I am pushing is myself, the ritual enactment of resistance takes place internally, precisely in one's own relation to one's will. For that is one mark of the real: its recalcitrance to human will. It is a fact that if I stroll in front of a Mack truck which is traveling at sixty miles an hour, I will pop. That is a pretty good demonstration that Mack trucks are real. If I could will the thing away at the last second, I could not even entertain myself with that activity, because the truck would be, and I would know it to be, a figment of my imagination. Now of course, there are some things that may be recalcitrant to my will that do not straightforwardly exist. For example, I cannot will Hamlet forward into action before the last act. So (though I could go on from this into an ontology, and though I won't) we might say that recalcitrance to will is a necessary though not sufficient condition for reality. More, it is a typical mark of the real, a sign that something is going on. Thus, every experience of powerlessness, every awareness of limits imposed upon one, is experienced as the impingement of the real. Compulsion is powerlessness over one's own body; obsession is powerlessness over one's own mind. (They are, finally, the same thing.) When the recalcitrance and poignancy that one usually experiences in relation to the external world comes to be experienced in relation to oneself, then one has become, to oneself, part of the world; one has become real to oneself. To experience oneself as powerless over oneself is to experience oneself as fully real: it is to experience oneself in exactly the same way that one experiences "external" objects. It is no accident that every mystical discipline that has as its goal the identification of the self with the other, of subject and object, person and world, starts with a letting go of will. To let go of one's will is to experience oneself as one with things. And though I have tried to let go of will in this mystical fashion, I have found that the fact that one lets go of will by an act of will is an embarrassment to the experience one is cultivating. It is better, as far as this is concerned, to have one's will humbled: to have it demonstrated to one that one is part of the external world in an experience of oneself as out of one's own control. Thus, the experience of addiction leads to what seems to be an odd sort of confusion between the inner and the outer, a confusion in which the self is external to itself, in which the self is other. In addiction, the distinction between what is internal and what is external to oneself breaks down. For example, addiction often carries with it the burden of certain sorts of secrecies. I drank for years secretly. I am not sure who knew what about my drinking, but I expended prodigious efforts to keep anyone from knowing anything. This was an attempt, in a certain way, to keep myself outside the real by refusing to allow myself to leak into the real. That is, my drinking was somehow not fully actual if I was the only one who knew about it. Thus, I had a stake in an absolute distinction of myself from situation, a stake which motivated me to drink more, since the experience of disorientation is at once a letting go into willessness and a flight from reality. It was seeing this distinction break down precisely at the moment of its greatest distance that taught me how to stop drinking. That is, at the end of a drunk, and also at the end of drunks, just before death or recovery, the distinction between the inner and the outer breaks down. Telling lies becomes lying to oneself; passing out is merging into the world. Thus, to practice secrecy is to learn publicity. The self at its greatest intensity becomes external to itself and is experienced as a thing among other things. Zen and Taoist monks have, for centuries, used drunkenness as a propaedeutic to mystical experience, as well as a recreation. For notice that the state of inebriation is precisely the humbling of the will: a "letting go." I experience my will as the barrier between myself and myself; I yearn to allow myself to do what I would do if I were incapable of controlling myself. And to achieve that, substance abuse is the best means known to man. I want, for example, to break through the constraints of society, perhaps at a party. But the intolerable thing about the "constraints of society" is that, unless I am in prison or something, I do not experience them as constraints placed on me by society, but as constraints placed on me by the operation of my own will. Why can't I dance like a madman, or scream at the top of my lungs, or piss on the cat? Not because you'll stop me, but because I can't allow myself to. Georges Bataille puts the point like this: The truth of taboos is the truth of our human attitude. We must know, we can know that prohibitions are not imposed from without. This is clear to us in the anguish we feel when we are violating the taboo, especially at the moment when our feelings hang in the balance, when the taboo still holds good and yet we are yielding to the impulsion it forbids. If we observe the taboo, if we submit to it, we are no longer conscious of it. But in the act of violating it we feel the anguish of mind without which the taboo could not exist: that is the experience of sin. That experience leads to the completed transgression, the successful transgression which, in maintaining the prohibition, maintains it in order to benefit by it. The inner experience of eroticism demands from the subject a sensitiveness to the anguish at the heart of the taboo no less than the desire which leads him to infringe it. This is religious sensibility, and it always links desire closely with terror, intense pleasure and anguish. Transgression does not free the transgressor of the taboo. On the contrary, to transgress is to acknowledge the power of the taboo, a power that is in the transgressor if it is power at all. The consciousness of this power, and the simultaneous necessity of its transgression, is, for Bataille, anguish and the religious sensibility. One can only overcome the values that have a life within oneself, and in this overcoming, the value is re-inscribed. Yet the causation of taboo and transgression is mutual and simultaneous. The taboo is incomprehensible without the sensibility of transgression. We need no values to protect us from things that we do not feel possible for ourselves as transgressions. Thus, the taboo inscribes the transgression also. What is seductive for us gathers taboos around it, and what is taboo gains, in being prohibited, a seductive power. Thus, to transgress simultaneously draws us into the social space of values and releases us into the space beyond or before sociality. To get drunk is to experience the relaxation of the faculty of self-control or internalized taboo, which is also the state sought through meditation. Finally, what one seeks through intoxication (and, on Bataille's account, eroticism, and the religious) is oblivion, or death: one seeks literally to become an inanimate object, that is, to become a thing among things. The only possible irony of this activity is that one is already a thing among things, that the will that is experienced as importunate and irresistible is, in fact, pathetically limited. But as I say, we experience the exercise of power within the tiny limits of our capacity much more vividly than we experience the huge extent of what we cannot affect by any act of will. Vice, then, forces us into the real precisely by seducing us into oblivion. Every seduction, in fact, is an invitation to oblivion, and an appeal to the need of the seduced for self- forgetting. Socrates famously argued that no man desires what is evil, that evil is always the result of ignorance. That is true to this extent: falling into evil is always a letting go of oneself, always a seduction. Bataille writes: What I have been saying refers to this void and nothing else. But the void opens at a specific point. Death, for instance, may open it: the corpse into which death infuses absence, the putrefaction associated with this absence. I can link my revulsion at the decay (my imagination suggests it, not my memory, so profoundly is it a forbidden object for me) with the feelings that obscenity arouse in me. I can tell myself that repugnance and horror are the mainsprings of my desire, that such desire is only aroused as long as its object causes a chasm no less deep than death to yawn within me, and that this desire originates in its opposite, horror. (Erotism, p. 59) Desire in this sense is a chasm, something into which we tumble, and our desire for desire springs from a need to tumble into this chasm. To fall into evil is to let go into and finally to let go even of desire, to be "swept away." And to tumble into evil is always experienced, hence, as a loss of freedom, or at any rate as a loss of will; of course, that is precisely what we need. But Socrates's view is false for this reason: that we all, more or less openly, desire to be seduced by vice, to let ourselves go. There is nothing, no horror in the horrible history of humanity, of which each of us is not capable, if only we could be seduced in the right way. Montaigne once remarked with true profundity that there was no crime that he could not imagine himself committing. To be able to say that is to have experienced vice, though not necessarily to have met vice without resistance. Evil, since the garden, has always appeared as a seduction. And we have need of it, now as always: it is the only cure for the surfeit of will of which we seem to ourselves to suffer. To allow oneself to do evil can be to relax into the nature of things, not because the nature of things is evil, but because evil can constitute an allowance to be. We have constrained ourselves, or we experience ourselves as the constrainers of ourselves and of one another. Thus we must transgress, and we must allow ourselves to be transgressed. As I have argued, or rather asserted, values can only be constructed in a negation of reality, values always tell us that what exists is inadequate, by telling us what ought to be. Thus every self-conscious transgression of one's own values is an affirmation of what is. In this sense, transgression is sacrament, to transgress one's own values is to say yes: the particular yes that is a letting go into seduction, an allowing of oneself to be seduced. As Bataille saw, seduction connects transgression and death as a oneness with bodies: "Eroticism . . . is assenting to life up to the point of death" (Erotism, p. 11). This is why we need our vices, need our crimes, need more or less every horror that has ever been perpetrated. And, by the way, we also need our horror in response to transgression, in that we need something to transgress. The odd thing about the structure of addiction is that when one comes no longer to experience the use of alcohol, say, as a transgression of values, one loses one's compulsion to drink. That is, when I found that I could not stop drinking, I could stop drinking. The addiction, for me, was a cycle of attempted impositions of will followed by the inevitable seduction into vice. But as soon as I acknowledged that I simply had no will in the matter, as soon as I acknowledged, hence, that drinking could not be a seduction or a transgression, I no longer had to drink. This was fortunate for me, I think, because though oblivion and death are seductive, or rather, are the seductive per se, I found myself, and find myself, with an impulse to remain alive. And I would not have long remained alive as I was going. Thus, I had to proceed to other transgressions, petty though they may be, transgressions such as writing philosophy that cannot be published in philosophy journals. II. Bataille connects transgression to the religious sensibility, and many of these notions are thematized in Tantrism, an Indian movement that has taken place both within Buddhism and Hinduism (as well as outside of both in local cults in India and Nepal), and which is associated with the worship of Kali, the dark goddess of creative destruction and consort of Siva, a god given to Dionysian violations. I think it is fair to say that all the cults and movements which derive from the incredibly powerful source of the Vedas and the Upanishads (Tantrism does so derive, though it also possesses elements of the aboriginal goddess-worship of the sub-continent) are characterized by ecstatic monism. The fundamental thought of all Vedic teachings is that there is only one thing: Brahman, which could be understood as a god, or as the Absolute: the one thing that truly is. This monism immediately raises the question of the ontological status of the things we encounter in this world. For what we seem to encounter in this world is a plurality of things, a many, a "blooming, buzzing confusion." And as that phrase of William James indicates, this world of things is in constant change, change which would be beneath the dignity of, and conceptually incompatible with, Brahman as the Absolute. In the similar cosmology of the Eleatics, for example, it was proven that motion was impossible. Thus, despite the world-affirming tone of the early Upanishads, the orthodox development of Hindu philosophy through Shankara's Vedanta was the history of a careful distinction between Brahman and maya, the veil of appearance, or samsara, the cycle of becoming. Maya's primordial sense is "illusion," or better, "magic trick." If there is only one thing, but appear to be many things, then what causes this appearance must be a feat of legerdemain. Then Vedantic spiritual discipline would consist in a penetration of maya to Brahman: a withdrawal from and renunciation of the apparent world for the immersion in the One Thing That Is. Such an immersion would be, simultaneously, an escape from samsara, an escape from becoming and into being, often expressed or symbolized as an escape from the cycle of reincarnation. Now I would not presume to refute thousands of years of philosophy in a paragraph, or rather I would, but not before saying I would not. But it is worth pointing out that this distinction between Brahman and maya is a mess. If there is only one thing, and that thing is the unchanging Absolute, then the fact that we are embedded in a world of flying appearances is incomprehensible. Whence these appearances, and whereto? And whence, and whereto, myself as the experiencer of these appearances? Just as Vedanta had to distinguish carefully between Brahman and maya, it had to distinguish carefully between the apparent self, the self as separate from what is (from the rest of maya as well as from Brahman), and the true self: Atman. The Chandogya Upanishad says, first of all, that "this whole world is Brahman" and famously adds Tat tvam asi: "that art thou." You are Brahman, and hence you are the world. Now this motivated philosophers to say that maya is unreal, and that the self that lives in maya is unreal. Inside, underneath, or transcending the apparent world and the apparent self that experiences it is the real world and the real self that experiences that. Thus Hinduism developed into a world-negating doctrine and a guide to escape (moksa, or the nirvana of the Buddhists). But of course, these passages (and hundreds more in the same spirit) admit of a very different reading. They are most naturally read as suggesting that nothing could be more real than this world, that this world is perfectly real, absolutely real, that this world is Brahman. In other words, the basic Upanishadic doctrine of monism could be used to motivate a meticulous distinction of appearance from reality, or it could be used to motivate an absolute identification of the two. And note that the drawing of distinctions of this type is, in fact, incompatible with the monism that motivated the distinctions in the first place. That is, the claim that there is only one thing does not comport very well with meticulously sorting things into categories. The presence even of illusions such as maya and samsara and the phenomenal self is incompatible with Vedic monism. Tantrism (at least in certain of its aspects and expressions) can be understood as a return to the primordial monism of the Upanishads. For Tantra asserts the reality of the world around us, and renounces any mode of escape or evasion. In the history of world religions, only Taoism approaches the Tantric cults in affirmation of the world. Though maya can be rendered as "trick or illusion," it is also the magic of Brahman, the way Brahman is manifest, Brahman's power or female aspect or shakti. That is why Tantrism has taken the form of goddess worship: to worship the goddess is to worship Brahman in and as the universe, renouncing all escape, denial, evasion. It is a worship of shakti, the power and mystery of this real world. There is no way out of the universe; we can only go more and more deeply in. In traditional Vedic ethics, there are four ends of human life: artha, or material wealth, kama, or sensual gratification, dharma, or obedience to law and moral duty, and moksa, release or liberation. Vedantic thought tended to range these ends in a hierarchy, and relate them to social classes, so that the highest persons pursue what is the ultimate goal of human life: moksa. The brahmin is supposed to renounce the other purposes in the pursuit of moksa, which is, precisely, a liberation from these other aspects of human life. On the other hand, it is not surprising, given the world-affirming basis of Tantrism, that Tantrism also affirms all the human desires. Just as the Absolute is the contingent, liberation is wealth, is sex, is right action. One does not achieve liberation by transcending the normal range of human desires, i.e. by ascetic discipline, but by immersion in one's humanity. One finds enlightenment precisely where one already is, in what one already does. The only nirvana we seek is the nirvana we already have. As Heinrich Zimmer puts it: "the ideal of Tantrism is to achieve illumination precisely by means of those very objects which the earlier sages sought to banish from their consciousness." We do not seek to find the Brahman behind the maya, the samsara, the apparent self, but precisely within them; for we are always within them. The illusion, for Tantrism, is not maya;, maya is shakti, reality manifest, the power of the real. The illusion, rather, is ego, or what I have been calling will, the experience of separation from the world, that operates in persons as the feeling that we can or should exercise power over the world. But even this illusion, finally, is to be experienced, is to be savored; it can only be penetrated by moving toward it as powerfully as possible: sexually, for instance. For Tantrism, too, though it is a logical extension of monism, is also capable of acknowledging plurality: of acknowledging the self and the other. If one lost one's ego or will in a total identification with the universe, one would not be in a position to enjoy the gratifications that life offers. As Ramakrishna, the great Tantric master of the nineteenth century, put it: "The devotee of God wants to eat sugar, not become sugar." Here, plurality and unity are seen to be mutually interdependent; if we are to affirm the reality of maya, we must affirm of the one thing that is, that it is manifest in each of the many things that are. This point is emphasized in a discussion of Tibetan Buddhist Tantra by Chogyam Trungpa, Rinpoche: [W]e are concerned with what actual reality is. Is reality a gap, a crack, or is reality a big sheet of cloth, all-pervasive? In the non-theistic tradition of Buddhist tantra, when we begin to have a relationship with the world, we do not try to make sure the world is part of us. In fact, the question of separation does not come up at all. According to the non-theistic tradition, we do not believe ourselves to be creatures. We are some kind of being - or nonbeing, for that matter - but we were never created, and therefore we are not particularly creatures. Nevertheless, there is a sense of continuity, without hysteria, without panic, without any congratulatory remarks or attempts to smooth things out. The world exists and we exist. We and the world are separate from that point of view - but so what? We could regard the separateness as part of the continuity rather than trying to deny it. As I said in the first chapter, "realism" in the sense used here is not, or anyhow is not meant to be, a philosophical system or structure of assertions: it is a bodily posture of openness to things. I think that attitude is perfectly expressed here by Trungpa. In some sense, the question of unity and plurality is abstract; the lived experience of real things in a real world is more important. Any principle compromises the affirmation, because it calls us into a loyalty to our interpretation of the world rather than to the world. This overcoming of principles could be expressed as a contradiction: our distinctness from the world is our identity with it. And that is just to say that we are situated, are embedded; our separateness from the world, our eating of sugar, is our identity with the world, our existence among things like sugar. The sugar is enjoyed precisely as it becomes identical with us, or gets incorporated within us, but we enjoy the world only as it ingests us. To be ingested, we must be distinct. As Trungpa also says: The maha ati practitioner [one who is on the final stage of the Tantric path] sees a completely naked world, at the level of marrow, rather than skin or flesh or even bones. In the lower yanas [vehicles], we develop lots of idioms and terms, and that makes us feel better because we have lots of things to talk about, such as compassion or emptiness or wisdom. But in fact, that becomes a way of avoiding the actual naked reality of life. The deep affirmation of the real in Tantrism takes a most profound ritual form, a form relevant to our present concern. For Tantric ritual is a formalized transgression. Tantric ritual consists of doing what is forbidden. As I have said, the seduction into evil or vice may be, finally, a letting go into things, an affirmation of what is. And Tantrism, in pursuit of religious experience precisely as such affirmation, practices such seduction systematically. The five "forbidden things" of Vedic ethics become precisely the sacraments of Tantrism: wine, meat, fish, parched grain, and sexual intercourse. The Kama Sutra, for example, is not, or is not only, a sex manual, but a guide to sex as sacrament, and hence a guide to being seduced by reality. Since reality is shakti, Tantric sex involves identifying a woman as shakti, and then experiencing her completely, in every way possible. What is female, hence, is what is real, and, for a man, losing oneself in sex becomes losing oneself in the real; embedding oneself in a woman is embedding oneself in the real; loving a woman is loving the real; spilling seed in a woman is participating in the mystery of creation which she embodies. The erotic art and literature of India is vast and profound: sex, including transgressive sex - group sex, homosexual sex, sex with eunuchs, and so forth - becomes sacramental. This is not to say that it is no longer savored as pleasurable; indeed, the sacrament consists in a deeper and deeper pleasure in the body. Tantrism prescribes a systematic violation of all that the culture within which it is embedded holds most dear: a destruction or suspension of values in an affirmation of desire and the body. The Guhyasama Tantra provides one of the most extreme examples, simply by inverting or negating the strictest tenets of Buddhism: "Kill all living beings, let your words be lies, take what is not given, and enjoy the ladies." After quoting that passage, Indra Sinha goes on to summarize the passages that follow: The text "suggests that the sadhaka should take a radiantly lovely sixteen- year old girl, scent her with perfumes and deck her with ornaments, and then have intercourse with her, worshipping her [as an embodiment of shakti] with, and offering to the gods, the four essences of his body: excrement, urine, semen, and blood: if he does this, he will become the equal of a buddha." With absolute systematicity, then, Tantrism becomes a celebration of the obscene and despised, and what is above all obscene and despised is whatever reminds us of the body. Using bodily fluids as holy water is an affirmation of embodiment, and that affirmation is what most truly transgresses Buddhism. The great scholar of Tantrism Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) wrote that "He who realizes the truth of the body can then come to know the truth of the universe." It will hardly be surprising, therefore, that the various Tantric movements incorporate intoxication into their rituals. These rituals are always seductions into vice; one feels oneself spinning out of one's own control and into an ecstatic identification with the world. The Kulanarva-tantra says that "The adept should drink, drink, and drink again until he falls to the ground. If he gets up and drinks again, he will be freed from rebirth. His happiness enchants the goddess, Lord Bhairava delights in his swooning, his vomiting pleases the gods." To be freed from the wheel of reincarnation is, precisely, to be freed of consciousness, freed from the faculty of judgement. The Guhyasama Tantra also says this: "Perfection can be attained easily by satisfying all desires." It goes without saying that this is a flat contradiction of every sort of asceticism. And of course asceticism dominates orthodox Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism. But notice that, as ethics is a systematic rejection of reality, asceticism is a systematic rejection of oneself as real. That is, one seeks to purge or mortify, or really to kill, oneself, and one starts with one's desires, particularly, or perhaps only, such desires as remind one that one is an animal and a body. The Tantric sacraments are designed to show that enlightenment is found in the satisfaction of desire, that is, in total commitment to embodiment and the systematic violation of principles. Tantric sexual practices, for example, are designed to bring desire to fever pitch, to intensify desire to the greatest possible extent. For example, the adept may be told to leave his cock in his shakti's cunt for hours without coming. To repeat, every claim about what ought to be the case is an expression of hatred and fear toward what is in fact the case. Thus, every ethical prohibition is a negation of this world, a flight from maya. That is fine, indeed is necessary, if this world is an illusion, a despicable barrier between us and what really is. But if maya is Brahman, if we live right now inside the highest reality there is, then it is ethics, not transgressions of ethics, that are the deepest danger. If maya is Brahman, then enlightenment consists of seduction into transgression: wine and sex are not to be feared, banned, loathed, but engaged in as a worship of that which is most high, that is, of Kali, the destroyer, that is, of this world. (Kali appears in art wearing a girdle of human heads.) To make a sacrament of transgression is as deep as religion has ever gone into what it is to be human. The sanctity of transgression, and hence the sanctity of the world, is a theme of many religions. There are, in India, several transgressive cults, both within popular Hinduism and without. The epic of India, the Mahabharata is to a large extent the epic of ritual transgression. The Pandavas, the brothers who are the heroes of the epic, are in some sense incarnated virtues. Yudishtira, their leader, for example, is supposed to be incapable of speaking an untruth. Arjuna, the war chieftain, scrupulously observes the chivalrous code of warfare. But in the climactic battle with the evil Kauravas, Krishna, who is an incarnation of the Supreme Lord, and thus in some sense the author of the ethics which the Pandavas symbolize, urges each of the Pandavas to violate his most sacred principles in order to win the war. Yudishtira, for example, lies to his former teacher Drona, telling him that his (Drona's) son has been killed. Drona, who drops his arms, is then himself killed in his moment of vulnerability. Arjuna is urged by Krishna to kill Karna (who is Arjuna's brother), when Karna's chariot becomes stuck in mud, a clear violation of the rules of warfare. Thus, the plot finally resolves into a long transgression of ethics by the Supreme Lord himself, for the purpose of gaining the world. The power of transgression is also thematized in Native American religions. Lame Deer, for example, says that he needed precisely transgression to become holy: Sickness, jail, poverty, getting drunk - I had to experience all that myself. Sinning makes the world go round. You can't be so stuck up, so inhuman that you want to be pure, your soul wrapped up in a plastic bag, all the time. You have to be God and the devil, both of them. Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the turmoil, not shielding yourself from it. It means experiencing life in all its phases. It means not being afraid of cutting up and playing the fool now and then. That's sacred too. Nature, the Great Spirit - they are not perfect. The world couldn't stand that perfection. The spirit has a good side and a bad side. Sometimes the bad side gives me more knowledge than the good side. (Lame Deer Seeker of Visions, p. 76) Here, first of all, transgression is not enclosed into the context of ceremony. Lame Deer describes in detail, for instance, a five- state crime spree. That was, among other things, a way of finding out about life and about the world. It was an affirmation of the world in its imperfection, as is Lame Deer's spiritual practice in its entirety. Barbara Tedlock describes the function of the heyoka, or "contrary" in Sioux ceremonial as follows: During a heyoka impersonation, the new heyoka does many foolish things, such as riding backwards so that he's coming when he's really going; if the weather is hot he covers himself with blankets and shivers as if with cold, and he always says `yes' when he means `no.' These actions, while they expose him to the ridicule of the unthinking, have important meaning. As Lame Deer expressed it: "fooling around, a clown is really performing a spiritual ceremony." As Tedlock goes on to argue, the function of the sacred clown in Native American ceremony is to make people laugh, which `opens them to immediate experience'. Tedlock describes an Eskimo custom to the effect that a ceremony cannot begin until everyone has laughed, that is, until everyone has been opened by comedic transgression into situation. Pueblo clowns, writes Tedlock, often wore enormous dildoes during ceremonies, and among the Maidu of California, a clown accompanies the shaman during the most holy ceremonies, parodying and ridiculing him as the ceremony is performed. We westerners, too, have our ritualized transgressions, our clowns, and so forth. Rock stars, comedians, and, for that matter, artists, are allowed to ridicule our leaders and institutions, and to engage in public displays of debauchery. This performs a religious function for us in that it keeps our lives and our worship, always threatening to come unmoored from the world in imagination, open to what is. To laugh is precisely to open oneself, and humor is often, or perhaps always, transgressive. That is why humorlessness is always suspicious: solemnity is, in this sense, blasphemy. To take the world seriously always shows that one invests the world with meaning, that is, that one flees its contingency and bizarreness into the world of principles and concepts. For that reason, genuine profundity is always found in the company of playfulness. To be playful is to let go, it is to seduce and to be seduced, though perhaps in a small way. Finally, solemnity is the virtue from which we may someday perish, while playfulness is the vice that may yet redeem us. Kali destroys, but more importantly, and connectedly, Kali plays. The treatment of transgression as sacrament is not supposed to solemnify sex or drinking; it is supposed to add joy to sacrament. Kali enjoys seducing us, and we, in turn, enjoy being seduced; the Kama Sutra is a guide to pleasure. The opening into and affirmation of what is real is, finally, a joy, though perhaps I have been setting it out as a torture: a shock, an impalement, and so forth. But finally, seeking reality is a joy because it is already all around us; it is what we cannot help but find. Seeking reality is a joy because we are ourselves real, and to affirm reality is to affirm ourselves. The world, finally, is where we frolic. One can only truly play if one can forget oneself; self- loathing is the highest and deepest barrier to self-forgetting. Vice seduces us to self-forgetting, but, finally, calls us back into self-loathing. Transgression as sacrament, however, gives us to forget ourselves, and allows us to play in and with the world; it releases us from the tyranny of our own judgements. It calls us to a love of the world and to a love of each other: a sexual love, perhaps, and a sexual play as a celebration of embodiment. When we are seduced into self-forgetting, the first thing we forget is our seriousness. Human beings, again, may someday perish from a surfeit of seriousness, and no event is more fearful than forgetting how to play. To play in the world is to pay tribute to the world's reality, for to play, too, is to be seduced by the real. There is no deeper form of self-forgetting than to lose oneself in a game, or in the creation of a work of art. And notice: these things require stuff: we need swings, playing cards, canvas, and so forth. Play is immersion in things, and hence itself sacramental, or rather, sacred. Even vice is play, or begins as play, and that shows what is unsatisfactory about vice: it is not carefree enough, is not playful enough, is enslaving. A transgression that has ceased to be play has become a vice, and is inimical to the life of the person whose vice it is. All destruction and all creation are desirable if only they can remain playful, for then can they lend us the joy of self-forgetting. It would be sweet to become sugar; on the other hand sugar itself is sweet and to experience its sweetness by taste is to experience the joy of self-forgetting. One does not need, hence, to become sugar, as long as one is capable enjoying the taste of sugar. But if one is perishing from a surfeit of sugar, becoming sugar may finally be the only way out. For finally, the only way out of vice is deeper into it; the only way out of the world is into the world entirely. The only "cure" for vice is the final seduction: an absolute allowance of the vice to be, which is an absolute allowance of myself to be vicious. To stop being an alcoholic, I need, finally, to dissolve into a puddle of alcohol: to acknowledge that I am, always was, and always will be an alcoholic: that my will is useless. That is, at this point I can no longer enjoy the taste of alcohol, and the only seduction that remains is oneness: I've got to become alcohol: to allow myself to be alcoholic. To do that is to expunge my will, not by an act of will, but by an acknowledgement that my will has already been destroyed. To drink oneself into the depths of alcoholism is to engage in a sacrament until one dies, or oneself becomes a sacrament. To have one's will broken is not precisely to be seduced, which is accompanied by the sensation of letting one's will go, but it is, nevertheless, a leaving behind of will. To be an alcoholic, then, is to be broken: to have one's will broken, like a wild horse whose wildness must be destroyed. And it is to be broken by the world, by reality, that is, by the sacred. If that sounds painful, I'm here to tell you that it is, excruciatingly so. But I am also here to report that there is the corresponding joy of self-forgetting, that having one's will broken is an invitation to play. That one affirms the world, not by an act of will, but because the world extorts affirmation from one: that is the greatest happiness I have known, or of which I take myself to be capable. Every aspect in which the real demands from us acknowledgement is an invitation to use the real to play; every self-forgetting is a letting-go of seriousness, an opportunity to dance. That is why the vices, finally, become sacraments: because they bring our seriousness near the surface, where it can be drawn off. They teach us the pleasure of letting go through the pain of holding on. They expunge our will by inflating our will to monstrous proportions. They allow us to let go by forcing us to let go.

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