"God differs from the unknown, in that a profound emotion, coming from the depths of childhood, is in us 'hound to the evocation of Him. The unknown on the contrary leaves one cold, does not elicit our love until it overturns everything within us like a violent wind. In the same way, the unsettling images and the middle terms to which poetic emotion has recourse touch us easily. If poetry introduces the strange, it does so by means of the familiar. The poetic is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known.

Divine or poetic apprehension is on the same level as the empty apparitions of the saints, in that we can, through it, still appropriate to ourselves that which exceeds us, and, without grasping it as our own possession, at least link it to us, to that which had touched us. In this way we do not die entirely: a thread-no doubt tenuous-but a thread links the apprehended to me (had destroyed the naive notion of him, God remains the being whose role the church has determined).

We are only totally laid bare by proceeding without trickery to the unknown. It is the measure of the unknown which lends to the experience of God-or of the poetic-their great authority. But the unknown demands in the end sovereignty without partition."

Georges Bataille. Inner Experience. 

for amplified violin + electronics, premiered by Modney at McClintock Coral and Recital Room, Northwestern University. April 10th, 7:30 pm.