IN THE BRILLIANCE OF THE SUN

"Around us and in our hearts, the immense intoxication of the old European sun swaying between wine-coloured clouds... That sun struck our faces with its great torch of incandescent purple, then flared out, vomiting itself to infinity. Whirlwinds of aggressive dust; a blinding mixture of sulphur, potash, and silicates through the windows of the Ideal!... Fusion of a new solar orb that soon we shall see shine forth!"
–F.T. Marinetti, Let's Murder the Moonlight, 1909

"I want to have my throat slashed while violating the girl to whom I will have been able to say: you are the night."
–Georges Bataille, The Solar Anus, 1927

If one thing infuriated the Surrealists more than Salvador Dali's obsession with shit, it was his fascination with Hitler – in particular, the Führer's "milky white buttocks". But if Hitler was indeed a moonchild, the product of venom and venality, his analogue Benito Mussolini gavotted beneath the same Roman sun that once gilded the cheeks of Caligula as he crucified the Christian scum, the black sun worshipped by the boychild Heliogabalus in subterranean chambers of blood.

The Marquis de Sade, insuperable in the annals of sodomy, produced by a juxtaposition of excrement and roses the means to deify the naked beast that howls mournfully in the void of violence; whereas Blaise Cendrars, a founder of modernism, was yet haunted by primordial visions of crabs shaped like an ossified anus. Marinetti, leader of an order of assassins with directives to flay the night, proclaimed War as the art of the future, Europe as a canvas daubed with human death, a paroxysm of screaming vesuvial skulls.

Visionaries of the sun. A pentagram of black fire whose points extend from Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty to Bataille's acephalic rites, from Crowley's Cefalu to de Sade's Selligny and back to the divine carnage of Caligula's Rome. Pornography, black magic, lycanthropy.

God, how the corpse's blood is sad in the depth of sound: a vortex of manias sutured to the ancient eye, proclamations of murder and insanity, human sacrifice, deicide, dreams. Bones in the labyrinth that glisten with obscene clamour, even unto dust. An anal hex that rots unrequited, in paralyzing morbidity, glutted with blood and shit, a monument to the terminal velocity of the mind.

In the brilliance of the sun, new anatomies erupt from abattoirs and prisons, from mechanisms of atrocity, from backstreet latrines, and from mouths deliriously scarred by flowers.

In the brilliance of the sun, the scorpion cures the scorpion.

"The sun, situated at the bottom of the sky like a cadaver at the bottom of a pit, answers this inhuman cry with the spectral attraction of decomposition. Immense nature breaks its chains and collapses into the limitless void. A severed penis, soft and bloody, is substituted for the habitual order of things. In its folds, where painful jaws still bite, pus, spittle, and larvae accumulate, deposited by enormous flies: faecal like the eye painted at the bottom of a vase, this Sun, now borrowing its brilliance from death, has buried existence in the stench of the night."
–Georges Bataille, The Pineal Eye, 1929