Paying Hookers For Sex, the origins of money

Veblen had said that the original private property was women, those women captured in tribal warfare and kept as concubines.

And this makes sense too. I mean if you assigned them to do women's work, then some would excel at this and they would be respected and welcomed into the tribe. This was not the intent in capturing them. And it would create problems with their own women.

So these new women have to be kept separated. And so all they can be used for is as concubines. So then male social status revolves around access to these concubines.

But maybe Veblen wasn't seeing the entire picture. Maybe it was after money was invented for paying women, that these male hierarchies developed to decide who has access to them.

It gets into the basis of the dividing women into two categories. These concubines are the ones who are not mothers, wives, sisters, or daughters.

So quickly a man figures out that if he is to be respected he needs to be pulling in a fair delta more money than the P4P women. If he has that, then the women will really respect him.

So it looks like a good stripper can do about $200k per year. Here on TUSCL the number thrown about has been $350k per year for a man to be respected.

So did the whole money and finance enterprise start with the need to pay hookers for sex?

And I forgot to mention, this thread is in honor of the return of Dougster.

SJG

doxyspotting.com

Find The Others: Audio Interview With Peter J Carroll youtube.com

To summarize, I think a man finds pride in doing his work and really does not need much.

Women don't look at it this way, for one thing because of aging.

And so you find men want to get huge amounts of accumulated money and to live without doing much, just so that they can impress women.

Hence you get money, banking, and remote ownership.

SJG

doxyspotting.com

When I was a kid, marbles were currency. No doubt in ancient history we, the human race traded fancy stones to get what we want, including women.

You're a funny guy, SJG!

I said once and I'll continue to say it - you don't know very much about women. You also don't seem to want to touch on the fact that the equation is two-fold. As long as men (and horny lesbians) offer to buy it, it will always be for sale. We sure as fuck help to make it that way.

In my observation, once a girl is divested of some stupid delusions, and once she no longer lives with her parents, she is plenty ready to spread her legs. It takes little. She just doesn't want to be treated as disposable.

So guys think they are paying women for sex, but they are missing the point. What they are paying for is sex without a relational context. Read most of the posts on this board. Guys really thing that these women only want to have sex because they get money. This is completely incorrect. The money pays their bills and builds their retirement nest egg. But what the women want is more than that. But they have no choice but to take it as it is offered to them.

Am I really incorrect Lopaw, about heterosexual women?

I for one certainly would not want to be handing money to a girl who did not basically like me. To my knowledge I have only rarely done this.

But most men, unless completely corrupted, want to do meaningful work, they want to do it all the time and for their whole lives, and they are happy to live off of what they get paid.

Problem is, once women turned to sex work, they could demand much more money. They often don't take pride in the work itself. They often hold pity and contempt for their clients, and so they jack up their fees until they are much higher, like about 4x that of a working man.

So from this, you find that men also want to make huge amounts of money, by basically doing nothing. That way they earn the respect of women.

Am I incorrect, about heterosexual women?

Marbles can be play money. But the earliest real money would have been things like gold. Or if not that, then food or stone tools, useful stuff.

Anyway, so Veblen was in part correct that the origins of property was women, those captured in tribal warfare and held as concubines. But, it started with the women putting themselves in that mode, and building up large financial holdings.

SJG

doxyspotting.com

History of the Acculation of Wealth and Power:

A man is happy to work for his bread each day. But women try to get ahead of the situation by accumulating money. So men then try to go even beyond them, to gain their respect.

SJG

doxyspotting.com

"The original shekel had as its purpose payment for sacred prostitution at the temple of Ishtar, which was the temple of life and death."

stim.com

SJG

doxyspotting.com

Lady Love, re-mastered, and with backing track youtube.com

en.wikipedia.org

lietaer.com

csul.iii.com

"So farmers fulfilled their religious and social obligations by bringing their contributions of wheat to the temple, and receiving in exchange a shekel coin, entitling them to a visit with the temple prostitutes at the festival time. All this also must be understood in its cultural context: The sacred prostitutes were representatives of the goddess, and intercourse with them was intercourse with the goddess of fertility herself, nothing to take lightly. "

stim.com

SJG

doxyspotting.com

playing like Robin Trower, need to do it in two parts youtube.com

sociosite.net

" It is difficult to see how an institution of ownership could have arisen in the early days of predatory life through the seizure of goods, but the case is different with the seizure of persons. Captives are items that do not fit into the scheme of communal consumption, and their appropriation by their individual captor works no manifest detriment to the group. At the same time these captives continue to be obviously distinct from their captor in point of individuality, and so are not readily brought in under the quasi-personal fringe. The captives taken under rude conditions are chiefly women. There are good reasons for this. Except where there is a slave class of men, the women are more useful, as well as more easily controlled, in the primitive group. Their labor is worth more to the group than their maintenance, and as they do not carry weapons, they are less formidable than men captives would be. They serve the purpose of trophies very effectually, and it is therefore worth while for their captor to trace and keep in evidence his relation to them as their captor. To this end he maintains an attitude of dominance and coercion toward women captured by him; and, as being the insignia of his prowess, he does not suffer them to stand at the beck and call of rival warriors. They are fit subjects for command and constraint; it ministers to both his honor and his vanity to domineer over them, and their utility in this respect is very great. But his domineering over them is the evidence of his prowess, and it is incompatible with their utility as trophies that other men should take the liberties with his women which serve as evidence of the coercive relation of captor.

When the practice hardens into custom, the captor comes to exercise a customary right to exclusive use and abuse over the women he has seized; and this customary right of use and abuse over an object which is obviously not an organic part of his person constitutes the relation of ownership, as naively apprehended. After this usage of capture has found its way into the habits of the community, the women so held in constraint and in evidence will commonly fall into a conventionally recognized marriage relation with their captor. The result is a new form of marriage, in which the man is master. This ownership-marriage seems to be the original both of private property and of the patriarchal household. Both of these great institutions are, accordingly, of an emulative origin. The varying details of the development whereby ownership extends to other persons than captured women cannot be taken up here; neither can the further growth of the marriage institution that came into vogue at the same time with ownership. Probably at a point in the economic evolution not far subsequent to the definitive installation of the institution of ownership-marriage comes, as its consequence, the ownership of consumable goods. The women held in servile marriage not only render personal service to their master, but they are also employed in the production of articles of use. All the noncombatant or ignoble members of the community are habitually so employed. And when the habit of looking upon and claiming the persons identified with my invidious interest, or subservient to me, as "mine" has become an accepted and integral part of men's habits of thought, it becomes a relatively easy matter to extend this newly achieved concept of ownership to the products of the labor performed by the persons so held in ownership. And the same propensity for emulation which bears so great a part in shaping the original institution of ownership extends its action to the new category of things owned. Not only are the products of the women's labor claimed and valued for their serviceability in furthering the comfort and fullness of life of the master, but they are valuable also as a conspicuous evidence of his possessing many and efficient servants, and they are therefore useful as an evidence of his superior force. The appropriation and accumulation of consumable goods could scarcely have come into vogue as a direct outgrowth of the primitive horde-communism, but it comes in as an easy and unobtrusive consequence of the ownership of persons. "

Veblen 1898

So Veblen was partly right, property originated by taking women captive. And he repeats this in Theory of the Leisure Class. But I feel that he misunderstands the extent to which women initiated the arrangements themselves by trying to accumulate wealth via prostitution, and then how this lead to men accumulating wealth to earn their respect.

In any advent, I don't think you will ever be able to separate religion, wealth accumulation, and the origins of money, from female prostitution.

SJG

doxyspotting.com

guy writes that he wore out his 8 track player with this song. It is indeed that kind of a song. youtube.com

Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899, full text online. Veblen was partly correct, in my opinion. I feel that he was correct in seeing women as the original form of private property, but he was incorrect in not understanding how much all of this was being driven by the practice of female prostitution. And then, although he paved the way for this, he did not see how much religion has always been tied to the worship of money, as well as being based on prostitution, like we know today.

gutenberg.org

en.wikipedia.org

SJG

doxyspotting.com

" Ironically, Mesopotamian religious practices gave birth to the prostitution trade, as women in Ishtar’s service would help men who offered money to her temples with the ‘sacred’ powers of their bodies. Achieving a priority of communication with the goddess from their fertility, only women enjoyed this religious position. Thus Ishtar temples became knowledge centers concerning birth, birth control, and sexuality. Priestesses became the nurses and sacred sex therapists of these early societies. Men of all rank could hire these women and, in turn, make an offering to the goddess from whose temple the prostitute came. "

sabotagetimes.com

SJG

Tijuana Sweeties c2.staticflickr.com

Robin Trower, live 2005 youtube.com

Title: The Theory of the Leisure Class

Author: Thorstein Veblen

Year of Publication: 1899

gutenberg.org

good overview: en.wikipedia.org

"Women, therefore, are the greatest indicators of a man’s socio-economic standing in his respective community."

Quoting Papi_Chulo from memory, "Strippers are likes sports cars, they are impractical."

SJG

Secrets of Hermes Trismegistus: Aeon Byte Gnostic Radio youtube.com this guy is hilarious!

socialist.net

" For Marx’s peers, “this primitive accumulation plays approximately the same role in political economy as original sin does in theology” (Karl Marx, Capital, Volume One, Penguin Classics edition, p873). For the bourgeoisie, their privileged position in society is as unquestionably natural, divine, and eternal as the motion of the planets, resulting from the hand and will of God himself. If there is evil or injustice in the world, it is not the fault of capitalism, but because of the mistakes of our ancestors, many generations ago. "

" The real origins of capitalist accumulation, however, as Marx notes, are far from this “peaceful” and “natural” ideal that the bourgeoisie imagines. Whilst accumulation and inequality may flow from capitalist relations themselves once established, “in actual history,” as Marx explains, “it is a notorious fact that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, in short, force, play the greatest part” (p874) in establishing such relations in the first place. “As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.” (p874) "

Ishtar was the goddess of love and war, symbolized by the planet Venus, and was born anew as a maiden every morning only to become a ‘whore’ every evening – the etymology of the word lying in the Indo-European root meaning ‘desire.’

sabotagetimes.com

SJG

Religion and Money khm.uio.no

How Religion Contributes To Wealth And Poverty huffingtonpost.com this is actually a much deeper subject than this author could ever imagine.

gift economy? geoffreyholsclaw.net

Bataille mockingbird.creighton.edu

mitpress.mit.edu

en.wikipedia.org

" ...the extension of economic growth itself requires the overturning of economic principles—the overturning of the ethics that grounds them. Changing from the perspectives of restrictive economy to those of general economy actually accomplishes a Copernican transformation: a reversal of thinking—and of ethics. If a part of wealth (subject to a rough estimate) is doomed to destruction or at least to unproductive use without any possible profit, it is logical, even inescapable, to surrender commodities without return. Henceforth, leaving aside pure and simple dissipation, analogous to the construction of the Pyramids, the possibility of pursuing growth is itself subordinated to giving: The industrial development of the entire world demands of Americans that they lucidly grasp the necessity, for an economy such as theirs, of having a margin of profitless operations. An immense industrial network cannot be managed in the same way that one changes a tire... It expresses a circuit of cosmic energy on which it depends, which it cannot limit, and whose laws it cannot ignore without consequences. Woe to those who, to the very end, insist on regulating the movement that exceeds them with the narrow mind of the mechanic who changes a tire. " mitpress.mit.edu

" He first analyzes the fears and fascination, the prohibitions and the transgressions attached to the realm of eroticism as so many expressions of the "uselessness" of erotic life. It is just this expenditure of excess energy that demarcates the realm of human autonomy, of independence relative to .useful" ends. The study of eroticism therefore leads naturally to the examination of human sovereignty, in which Bataille defines the sovereign individual as one who consumes and does not labor, creating a life beyond the realm of utility.Georges Bataille, a philosopher and novelist sui generis, died in 1962. "

csul.iii.com

52 page PDF static1.squarespace.com

from page 27

" That as a rule an organism has at its disposal greater energy resources than are necessary for the operations that sustain life (functional activities and, in animals, essential muscular exercises, the search for food) is evident from functions like growth and reproduction. " 353 pages monoskop.org

see page 223 Madame Edwarda

page 228 Madame Edwarda

Madame Edwarda Anguish only is sovereign absolute. The sovereign is a king no more: it dwells low-hiding in big cities. It knits itself up in silence, obscuring its sorrow. Crouching thick-wrapped, there it waits, lies waiting for the advent of him who shall strike a general terror; but meanwhile and even so its sorrow scornfully mocks at all that comes to pass, at all there is. There - I had come to a street comer - there a foul dizzying anguish got its nails into me (perhaps because I'd been staring at a pair of furtive whores sneaking down the stair of a urinal) . A great urge to heave myself dry always comes over me at such moments. I feel I have got to make myself naked, or strip naked the whores I covet: it's in stale flesh's tepid warmth I always suppose I'll find relief. But this time I soothed my guts with the weaker remedy: I asked for a pemod at the counter, drank the glass in one gulp, and then went on and on, from zinc counter to zinc counter, drinking until . . . The night was done falling. I began to wander among those streets - the propitious ones - which run between the boulevard Poisonniere and the rue Saint-Denis. Loneliness and the dark strung my drunken excitement tighter and tighter. I wanted to be laid as bare as was the night there in those empty streets: I slipped off my pants and moved on, carrying them draped over my arm. Numb, I coasted on a wave of overpowering freedom, I sensed that I'd got bigger. In my hand I held my straight-risen sex. (The beginning is tough. My way of teIling about these things is raw. I could have avoided that and still made it sound plausible. It would have seemed 'likely', detours would have been to my advantage. But this is how it has to be, there is no beginning by scuttling in sidewise. I continue . . . and it gets tougher.) Not wanting trouble, I got back into my pants and headed toward the Mirrors. I entered the place and found myself in the light again. Amidst a swarm of girls, Madame Edwarda, naked, looked bored to death. Ravishing, she was the sort I had a taste for. So I picked her. She came and sat down beside me. I hardly took the time to reply when the waiter asked what it was to be, I clutched Edwarda, she surrendered herself: our two mouths met in a sickly kiss. The room was packed with men and women, and that was the wasteland where the game was played. Then, at a certain moment, her hand slid, I burst, suddenly, like a pane of glass shattering, flooding my Madame Edwarda 229 clothes. My hands were holding Madame Edwarda's buttocks and 1 felt her break in two at the same instant: and in her starting, roving eyes, terror, and in her throat, a long-drawn whistled rasp. Then 1 remembered my desire for infamy, or rather that it was infamous 1 had at all costs to be. 1 made out laughter filtering through the tumult of voices, of glare, of smoke. But nothing mattered any more. 1 squeezed Edwarda in my arms; immediately, icebound, 1 felt smitten within by a new shock. From very high above a kind of stillness swept down upon me and froze me. It was as though 1 were borne aloft in a flight of headless and unbodied angels shaped from the broad swooping of wings, but it was simpler than that. 1 became unhappy and felt painfully forsaken, as one is when in the presence of GOD. It was worse and more of a letdown than too much to drink. And right away 1 was filled with unbearable sadness to think that this very grandeur descending upon me was withering away the pleasure 1 hoped to have with Edwarda. 1 told myself 1 was being ridiculous. Edwarda and 1 having exchanged not one word, 1 was assailed by a huge uneasiness. 1 couldn't breathe so much as a hint of the state 1 was in, a wintry night had locked round me. Struggling, 1 wanted to kick the table and send the glasses flying, to raise the bloody roof, but that table wouldn't budge, it must have been bolted to the floor. 1 don't suppose a drunk can ever have to face anything more comical. Everything swam out of sight. Madame Edwarda was gone, so was the room. 1 was pulled out of my dazed confusion by an only too human voice. Madame Edwarda's thin voice, like her slender body, was obscene: '1 guess what you want is to see the old rag and ruin,' she said. Hanging on to the tabletop with both hands, 1 twisted around toward her. She was seated, she held one leg stuck up in the air, to open her crack yet wider she used fingers to draw the folds of skin apart. And so Madame Edwarda's 'old rag and ruin' loured at me, hairy and pink, just as full of life as some loathsome squid. 'Why,' 1 stammered in a subdued tone, 'why are you doing that?' 'You can see for yourself,' she said, 'I'm GOD. ' 'I'm going crazy -' 'Oh, no you don't, you've got to see, look . . .' Her harsh, scraping voice mellowed, she became almost childlike in order to say, with a lassitude, with the infinite smile of abandon: 'Oh, listen, fellow! The fun I've had . . .' She had not shifted from her position, her leg was still cocked in the air. And her tone was commanding: 'Come here.' 'Do you mean,' 1 protested, 'in front of all these people?' 'Sure,' she said, 'why not?' 1 was shaking, 1 looked at her: motionless, she smiled back so sweetly that 1 shook. At last, reeling, 1 sank down on my knees and feverishly pressed my lips to that running, teeming wound. Her bare thigh caressingly nudged my ear, 1 thought 1 heard a sound of roaring seasurge, it is the same sound you hear 230 Eroticism when you put your ear to a large conch shell. In the brothel's boisterous chaos and in the atmosphere of corroding absurdity I was breathing (it seemed to me that I was choking, I was flushed, I was sweating) I hung strangely suspended, quite as though at that same point we, Edwarda and I, were losing ourselves in a wind-freighted night, on the edge of the ocean. I heard another voice, a woman's but mannish. She was a robust and handsome person, respectably got up. 'Well now, my children,' in an easy, deep tone, 'up you go.' The second in command of the house collected my money. I rose and followed Madame Edwarda whose tranquil nakedness was already traversing the room. But this so ordinary passage between the close-set tables, through the dense press of clients and girls, this vulgar ritual of 'the lady going up' with the man who wants her in tow, was, at that moment, nothing short of an hallucinating solemnity for me: Madame Edwarda's sharp heels clicking on the tiled floor, the smooth advance of her long obscene body, the acrid smell I drank in, the smell of a woman in the throes of joy, of that pale body . . . Madame Edwarda went on ahead of me, raised up unto the very clouds . . . The room's noisy unheeding of her happiness, of the measured gravity of her step, was royal consecration and triumphal holiday: death itself was guest at the feast, was there in what whorehouse nudity terms the pig-sticker's stab . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the mirrors wherewith the room's walls were everywhere sheathed and the ceiling too, cast mUltiple reflections of an animal coupling, but, at each least movement, our bursting hearts would strain wideopen to welcome 'the emptiness of heaven'. Making that love liberated us at last. On our feet, we stood gazing soberly at each other: Madame Edwarda held me spellbound, never had I seen a prettier girl - nor one more naked. Her eyes fastened steadily upon me, she removed a pair of white silk stockings from a bureau drawer, she sat on the edge of the bed and drew them on. The delirious joy of being naked possessed her: once again she parted her legs, opened her crack, the pungent odour of her flesh and mine commingled flung us both into the same heart's utter exhaustion. She put on a white bolero, beneath a domino cloak she disguised her nakedness. The domino's hood cowled her head, a black velvet mask, fitted with a beard of lace, hid her face. So arrayed, she sprang away from me, saying: 'Now let's go.' 'Go? Do they let you go out?' I asked. 'Hurry up, fifi,' she replied gaily, 'you can't go out undressed.' She tossed me my clothes and helped me climb into them, and as she did so, from her caprice, there now and then passed a sly exchange, a nasty little wink darting between her flesh and mine. We went down a narrow stairway, encountered nobody but the Madame Edwarda 23 1 chambermaid. Brought to a halt by the abrupt darkness of the street, I was startled to discover Edwarda rushing away, swathed in black. She ran, eluded me, was off, the mask she wore was turning her into an animal. Though the air wasn't cold, I shivered. Edwarda, something alien; above our heads, a starry sky, mad and void. I thought I was going to stagger, to fall, but didn't, and kept walking. At that hour of the night the street was deserted. Suddenly gone wild, mute, Edwarda raced on alone. The Porte Saint-Denis loomed before her, she stopped. I stopped too, she waited for me underneath the arch - unmoving, exactly under the arch. She was entirely black, simply there, as distressing as an emptiness, a hole. I realized she wasn't frolicking, wasn't joking, and indeed that, beneath the garment enfolding her, she was mindless: rapt, absent. Then all the drunken exhilaration drained out of me, then I knew that She had not lied, that She was GOD. Her presence had about it the unintelligible out-and-out simplicity of a stone - right in the middle of the city I had the feeling of being in the mountains at night time, lost in a lifeless, hollow solitude. I felt that I was free of Her - I was alone, as if fa ce to face with black rock. I trembled, seeing before me what in all this world is most barren, most bleak. In no way did the comic horror of my situation escape me: She, the sight of whom petrified me now, the instant before had . . . And the transformation had occurred in the way something glides. In Madame Edwarda, grief - a grief without tears or pain - had glided into a vacant silence. Nonetheless, I wanted to find out: this woman, so naked just a moment ago, who lightheartedly had called me 'fifi' . . . I crossed in her direction, anguish warned me to go no farther, but I didn't stop. Unspeaking, she slipped away, retreating toward the pillar on the left. Two paces separated me from that monumental gate. When I passed under the stone overhead, the domino vanished soundlessly. I paused, listening, holding my breath. I was amazed that I could grasp it all so clearly: when she had run off I had known that, no matter what, she had had to run, to dash under the arch, and when she had stopped, that she had been hung in a sort of trance, an absence, far out of range and beyond the possibility of any laughter. I couldn't see her any longer: a deathly darkness sank down from the vault. Without having given it a second's thought, I 'knew' that a season of agony was beginning for me. I consented to suffer, I desired to suffer, to go farther, as far as the 'emptiness' itself, even were I to be stricken, destroyed, no matter. I knew, I wanted that knowing, for I lusted after her secret and did not for one instant doubt that it was death's kingdom. I moaned underneath the stone roof, then, terrified, I laughed: 'Of all men, the sole to traverse the nothingness of this arch!' I trembled at the 232 Eroticism thought she might fly, vanish for ever. 1 trembled as 1 accepted that, but from imagining it 1 became crazed: 1 leaped to the pillar and spun round it. As quickly 1 circled the other pillar on the right: she was gone. But 1 couldn't believe it. 1 remained woestruck before the portal and 1 was sinking into the last despair when upon the far side of the avenue 1 spied the domino, immobile, just faintly visible in the shadow: she was standing upright, entranced still, planted in front of the ranged tables and chairs of a cafe shut up for the night. 1 drew near her: she seemed gone out of her mind, some foreign existence, the creature apparently of another world and, in the streets of this one, less than a phantom, less than a lingering mist. Softly she withdrew before me until in her retreat she touched against a table on the empty terrace. A little noise. As if ! had waked her, in a lifeless voice she enquired: 'Where am I?' Desperate, 1 pointed to the empty sky curved above us. She looked up and for a brief moment stood still, her eyes vague behind the mask, her gaze lost in the fields of stars. 1 supported her, it was in an unhealthy way she was clutching the domino, with both hands pulling it tight around her. She began to shake, to convulse. She was suffering. 1 though she was crying but it was as if the world and the distress in her, strangling her, were preventing her from giving way to sobs. She wrenched away from me, gripped by a shapeless disgust; suddenly lunatic, she darted forward, stopped short, whirled her cloak high, displayed her behind, snapped her rump up with a quick jerk of her spine, then came back and hurled herself at me. A gale of dark savagery blew up inside her, raging, she tore and hammered at my face, hit with clenched fists, swept away by a demented impulse to violence. 1 tottered and fell. She fled. 1 was still getting to my feet - was actually still on my knees - when she returned. She shouted in a ravelled, impossible voice, she screamed at the sky and, horrified, her whirling arms flailing at vacant air: '1 can't stand any more,' she shrilled, 'but you, you fake priest. 1 shit on you -' That broken voice ended in a rattle, her outstretched hands groped blindly, then she collapsed. Down, she writhed, shaken by respiratory spasms. 1 bent over her and had to rip the lace from the mask, for she was chewing and trying to swallow it. Her thrashings had left her naked, her breasts spilled through her bolero . . . 1 saw her flat, pallid belly, and above her stockings, her hairy crack yawned astart. This nakedness now had the absence of meaning and at the same time the overabundant meaning of death-shrouds. Strangest of all - and most disturbing - was the silence that ensnared Edwarda - owing to the pain she was in, further communication was impossible and 1 let myself be absorbed into this unutterable barrenness - into this black night hour of the being's core no less a desert nor less hostile than the empty skies. The way her body flopped like a fish, the ignoble rage expressed by Madame Edwarda 233 the ill written on her features - cindered the life in me, dried it down to the lees of revulsion. (Let me explain myself. No use laying it all up to irony when I say of Madame Edwarda that she is GOD. But GOD figured as a public whore and gone crazy - that, viewed through the optic of 'philosophy', makes no sense at all. I don't mind having my sorrow derided if derided it has to be, he only will grasp me aright whose heart holds a wound that is an incurable wound, who never, for anything, in any way, would be cured of it . . . And what man, if so wounded, would ever be willing to 'die' of any other hurt?) The awareness of my irreparable doom whilst, in that night, I knelt next to Edwarda was not less clear and not less imposing than it is now, as I write. Edwarda's sufferings dwelt in me like the quick truth of an arrow: one knows it will pierce the heart, but death will ride in with it. As I waited for annihilation, all that subsisted in me seemed to me to be the dross over which man's life tarries. Squared against a silence so black, something leaped in my heavy despair's midst. Edwarda's convulsions snatched me away from my own self, they cast my life into a desert waste 'beyond', they cast it there carelessly, callously, the way one flings a living body to the hangman. A man condemned to die, when after long hours of waiting he arrives in broad daylight at the exact spot the horror is to be wrought, observes the preparations, his too full heart beats as though to burst; upon the narrow horizon which is his, every object, every face is clad in weightiest meaning and helps tighten the vice whence there is no time left him to escape. When I saw Madame Edwarda writhing on the pavement, I entered a similar state of absorption, but I did not feel imprisoned by the change that occurred in me. The horizon before which Edwarda's sickness placed me was a fugitive one, fleeing like the object anguish seeks to attain. Torn apart, a certain power welled up in me, a power that would be mine upon condition I agree to hate myself. Ugliness was invading all of me. The vertiginous sliding which was tipping me into ruin had opened up a prospect of indifference, of concerns, of desires there was no longer any question: at this point, the fever's desiccating ecstasy was issuing out of my utter inability to check myself. (If you have to lay yourself bare, then you cannot play with words, trifle with slow-marching sentences. Should no one unclothe what I have said, I shall have written in vain. Edwarda is no dream's airy invention, the real sweat of her body soaked my handkerchief, so real was she that, led on by her, I came to want to do the leading in my turn. This book has its secret, I may not disclose it. Now more words.) Finally, the crisis subsided. Her convulsions continued a little longer, but with waning fury, she began to breathe again, her features relaxed, ceased to be hideous. Drained entirely of strength, I lay full length down on the 234 Eroticism roadway beside her. 1 covered her with my clothing. She was not heavy and 1 decided to pick her up and carry her. One of the boulevard taxi stands was not far away. She lay unstirring in my arms. 1 took time to get there, thrice 1 had to pause and rest. She came back to life as we moved along and when we reached the place she wanted to be set down. She took a step and swayed. 1 caught her, held her, held by me she got into the cab. Weakly, she said: ' . . . not yet . . . tell him to wait.' 1 told the driver to wait. Half dead from weariness, 1 climbed in too and slumped down beside Edwarda. For a long time we remained without saying anything. Madame Edwarda, the driver and 1, not budging in our seats, as though the taxi were rolling ahead. At last Edwarda spoke to me. '1 want him to take us to Les Hailes.' 1 repeated her instructions to the driver, and we started off. He took us through dimly lit streets. Calm and deliberate, Edwarda loosened the ties of her cloak, it fell away from her. She got rid of the mask too, she removed her bolero and, for her own hearing, murmured: 'Naked as a beast.' She rapped on the glass partition, had the cab stop, and got out. She walked round to the driver and when close enough to touch him, said: 'You see . . . I'm bare-arsed, Jack. Let's fuck.' Unmoving, the driver looked at that beast. Having backed off a short distance, she had raised her left leg, eager to show him her crack. Without a word and unhurriedly, the man stepped out of the car. He was thickset, solidly built. Edwarda twined herself around him, fastened her mouth upon his, and with one hand scouted about in his underwear. It was a long heavy member she dragged through his fly. She eased his trousers down to his ankles. 'Come into the back seat,' she told him. He sat down next to me. Stepping in after him, she mounted and straddled him. Carried away by voluptuousness, with her own hands she stuffed the hard stave into her hole. 1 sat there, lifeless and watching: her slithering movements were slow and cunning and plainly she gleaned a nerve-snapping pleasure from them. The driver retaliated, struggling with brute heaving vigour; bred of their naked bodies' intimacy, little by little that embrace strained to the final pitch of excess at which the heart fails. The driver fell back, spent and near to swooning. 1 switched on the overhead light in the taxi. Edwarda sat bolt upright astride the still stiff member, her head angled sharply back, her hair straying loose. Supporting her nape, 1 looked into her eyes: they gleamed white. She pressed against the hand that was holding her up, the tension thickened the wail in her throat. Her eyes swung to rights and then she seemed to grow easy. She saw me from her stare, then, at that moment, 1 knew she was drifting home from the 'impossible' and in her nether depths 1 could discern a dizzying fixity. The milky outpouring travelling through her, the jet spitting from the root, flooding her with joy, came spurting out again in her very tears: burning tears streamed from her wide-open eyes. Love was dead in those eyes, they contained a daybreak aureate chill, a transparence wherein 1 read death's Madame Edwarda 235 letters. And everything swam drowned in that dreaming stare: a long member, stubby fingers prying open fragile flesh, my anguish, and the recollection of scum-flecked lips - there was nothing which didn't contribute to that blind dying into extinction. Edwarda's pleasure - fountain of boiling water, heartbursting furious tideflow - went on and on, weirdly, unendingly; that stream of luxury, its strident inflexion, glorified her being unceasingly, made her nakedness unceasingly more naked, her lewdness ever more intimate. Her body, her face swept in ecstasy were abandoned to the unspeakable coursing and ebbing, in her sweetness there hovered a crooked smile: she saw me to the bottom of my dryness, from the bottom of my desolation I sensed her joy's torrent run free. My anguish resisted the pleasure I ought to have sought. Edwarda's pain-wrung pleasure filled me with an exhausting impression of bearing witness to a miracle. My own distress and fever seemed small things to me. But that was what I felt, those are the only great things in me which gave answer to the rapture of her whom in the deeps of an icy silence I called ' my heart' . Some last shudders took slow hold of her, then her sweatbathed frame relaxed - and there in the darkness sprawled the driver, felled by his spasm. I still held Edwarda up, my hand still behind her head, the stave slipped out, I helped her lie down, wiped her wet body. Her eyes dead, she offered no resistance. I had switched off the light, she was half asleep, like a drowsy child. The same sleepiness must have borne down upon the three of us, Edwarda, the driver and me. (Continue? I meant to. But I don't care now. I've lost interest. I put down what oppresses me at the moment of writing: Would it all be absurd? Or might it make some kind of sense? I've made myself sick wondering about it. I awake in the morning - just the way millions do, millions of boys and girls, infants and old men, their slumbers dissipated for ever . . . These millions, those slumbers have no meaning. A hidden meaning? Hidden, yes, 'obviously'! But if nothing has any meaning, there's no point in my doing anything. I'll beg off. I'll use any deceitful means to get out of it, in the end I'll have to let go and sell myself to meaninglessness, nonsense: that is man's killer, the one who tortures and kills, not a glimmer of hope left. But if there is a meaning? Today I don't know what it is. Tomorrow? Tomorrow, who can tell? Am I going then to find out what it is? No, I can't conceive of any 'meaning' other than 'my' anguish, and as for that, I know all about it. And for the time being: nonsense. Monsieur Nonsense is writing and understands that he is mad. It's atrocious. But his madness, this meaninglessness - how ' serious' it has become all of a sudden! - might that indeed be 'meaningful'? (No, Hegel has nothing to do with a maniac girl's 'apotheosis'.) My life only has a meaning insofar as I lack one: on, but let me be mad! Make something of all this he who is able to, understand it he 236 Eroticism who is dying, and there the living self is, knowing not why, its teeth chattering in the lashing wind: the immensity, the night engulfs it and, all on purpose, that living self is there just in order . . . 'not to know'. But as for GOD? What have you got to say, Monsieur Rhetorician? And you, Monsieur Godfearer? - GOD, if He knew, would be a swine.4 0 Thou my Lord (in my distress I call out unto my heart), 0 deliver me, make them blind! The story

• how shall I go on with it?) But I am done. From out of the slumber which for so short a space kept us in the taxi, I awoke, the first to open his eyes . . . The rest is irony, long, weary waiting for death . . .

particularly in his later years, Georges Bataille was a very heavy user of Paris brothels. What he is envisioning is of course a gift economy, because under industrial capitalism everything is in excess, including prostitution.

SJG

en.wikipedia.org

Beatles - Ticket to Ride (Live at Wembley Stadium 1965) youtube.com musicnotes.com

I tend to hear this as 4 triplets per measure. This does not mean though that they are always all sounded. And it shouldn't be written as 3 quarter notes per measure. Rather the 4 triplets are always being fiddled with, and this is what makes it interesting.

"The Accursed Share" discussed youtube.com

SJG

About Bataille and his works. mitpress.mit.edu

A most important thinker

There are others who do a better job of connecting Christianity with worship of money, not just now, but from the very beginning, and then connecting Augustine and Original Sin with how Capitalism came into being.

SJG

Shit, why don't you write a novel with all this, sjg? LOL

" Theory of Religion brings to philosophy what Bataille's earlier book, The Accursed Share, brought to anthropology and history; namely, an analysis based on notions of excess and expenditure. Bataille brilliantly defines religion as so many different attempts to respond to the universe's relentless generosity. Framed within his original theory of generalized economics and based on his masterly reading of archaic religious activity, Theory of Religion constitutes, along with The Accursed Share, the most important articulation of Bataille's work. "

books.google.com

The origins of Religion, Money, and Prostitution are always going to be the same. And I think also the same goes for Human Sacrifice.

mikewc.blogspot.com

111 pages totuusradio.fi

nytimes.com

en.wikipedia.org

en.wikipedia.org

christianhubert.com

amazon.com

235bowery.s3.amazonaws.com

a good book abebooks.com

talks about Bataille's Accursed Share and Bachelor Machines books.google.com

Random Order: Robert Rauschenberg and the Neo-Avant-Garde – February 23, 2007 by Branden W. Joseph amazon.com

First 25 pages of Anti-Oedipus tau.ac.il

The Bachelor Machine, 2003 amazon.com

SJG

Gnosis - Secrets of the Kabbalah youtube.com

Ancient Knowledge youtube.com

This will explain it all,

csul.iii.com

Excess, expenditure, origins of money, and of paying hookers for sex. Should be required reading for TUSCL members. Founder, what do you way about that?

SJG

Jimmy Smith, Paris 1969 youtube.com