History of "my" sacred, recounted in chapters which could include: real life (waking state, dream, and half-sleep), language, art (religious pomp, performances -- bullfighting -- music, painting, and poetry).
Or rather, a rosary of dichotomies:
dream and waking
art and life
"crucial" experiences and everyday life
mythical language and common language, etc...
For each of these pairs, it would be a matter of showing how the second, profane term distinguishes itself from the first, sacred term.
Impression of the absolute given by certain words, which seem to have no alternatives. For example, "voracious," which evokes the idea of a famished being, tortured by the desire to devour. These types of words make it easy to believe that an actual Kabbalah exists, a preestablished harmony between ideas and the combinations of sounds that express them.
When I write an essay, I am completely "dissociated". If I write a poem I have -- at least momentarily -- the illusion of "totality". The only question is whether this dissociation, such as it is, is worth less or more than the illusion of totality.
The idea of the "gift" according to my mother: my brother Pierre's "gifts" for music. Opposition of "gifted" and "industrious." In short, I was raised with a certain contempt for "industrious."
Necessary injustice of the sacred: no possibility of justice or measure in trance. Necessary arbritrariness of the sacred: in the sacred, the fortuitous (or "gratuitious" or "free" or "arbritrary") and the necessary find unity. The sacred is what I love (something I love so much that I could abide anything in order to protect it); when I say "it," I am speaking not of the sacred object -- which I could be led to destroy or allow to be destroyed -- I am speaking of the bond itself that alone constitutes the sacred, of which the object is merely a support, like a kind of churinga.
More simply, the sacred exists not in people or things, but in the relationship I keep with certain things or certain people.
Hence, the sacred remains fluid, is never substantialized.
To "communicate" would mean to establish an actual relation.
Establishing a relation solely between things (as the surrealist technique of the image wishes to do) is a purely mechanical practice, enhanced by subterfuge and trickery. It is crucial that there be an actual (authentic) relation between me and the relation itself, and then, through this second relation, one between myself and the reader or listener. Metaphor -- or the cataclysm between distinct elements - can only represent the real cataclysm that must intervene between the poet and his reader. With a handful of very great poets (Villon, Racine), the human cataclysm is produced without even a need for the imagistic one.
from "Notes on the Sacred in Everyday Life"
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