"For Gérard de Nerval would not have suffered from life if life had not been put in symbols, had not been typified in symbols, cut up into astral homunculi in cooking pots, and if these symbols and allegories of beings, made desperate and repressed by the rituals of alchemy, had not moreover been put outside semen, outside that seed of tumors and semen which in real life leads to syphilis or plague, to suicide or madness. -- What is madness? A transplantation out of essence but into the abyss of the exterior interior. What is essence? A hole or a body? Essence is this hole of a body that the abyss of the circular mouth of the cooking pot has never truly made signify facing the impatiences of alchemy." (Trans. Clayton Eshleman, in Watchfiends and Rackscreams)
This description of essence just floors me. I understand this "hole of a body" as a simultaneous interior/exterior: a kind of undifferentiated plane (in the Deleuzean sense, obviously), but maybe something like a catenoid becoming a helicoid--a surface wrapping around itself to create a temporary interior; then dissolving it at will:
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| from http://www.math.hmc.edu/~gu/curves_and_surfaces/surfaces/catenoid.html |
I'm also curious about these astral homunculi. What a weird, terrifying, and kind of funny image. My son some times puts little toy dolls in his toy cooking pots. Symbols of being?
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