TH10. Ancient Azygy of the Pineal Sun-Blossom

Bataille described existence as ‘a durable orgasm’.1 Both Reich and Bataille saw in the orgasm the ultimate relapse into undifferentiated plasma, yet Bataille was far clearer as to where this led: death. For Bataille, existence itself is synonymous with ineluctable expenditure, a fact betrayed by orgasm, sleep, laughter, and death—reversions from upright rectitude to bestial relapse and wanton disbursement, these are all stations on the inevitable downward route to ‘zero’. And, given the postural significance of each of these actions, Bataille was inevitably drawn to Spinal Catastrophism.

Like Blumenberg, Bataille relates uprightness to the origins of mythology, and, like Freud and Ferenczi, he formats the ‘progressive erection [from] quadruped to Homo erectus’ as a deviation from coprophiliac anality. Bataille fixates upon half-upright monkeys, who, he delectates, expose their ‘anal projections’ like ‘excremental skulls’. Inasmuch as their knuckle-dragging existence is some kind of ugly ‘halfway house’ between horizontal and vertical modes of carriage, primates are cast as some kind of partway antithesis on the stepwise ascent to mankind’s upright ‘nobility’: a dialectical step between horizontal and vertical, the monkey is awkwardly diagonal.2 (Primate posture thus inhabits a kind of uncanny valley—from which Bataille derives much titillation.) Nonetheless, by way of necrotizing the Renaissance cliché of orthograde ‘dignity’, Bataille locates in man’s spinal realignment merely a more refined lasciviousness—a more violent voluptuousness. To wit, he pinpoints ‘Two Terrestrial Axes’: the ‘vertical’, which ‘prolongs the radius of the terrestrial sphere’ as axis of libertine escape, lorded by ocean tides and plants (which ‘flee’ the earth to sacrifice themselves ‘endlessly’ to the Sun’s downward onslaught); and the ‘horizontal’, domicile to beasts and ‘analogous to the turning of the earth’. ‘Only human beings’, Bataille notes, ‘tearing themselves away from peaceful animal horizontality’, have ‘succeeded in appropriating the vegetal erection’, surrendering themselves to exquisite upwards collapse towards outer space’s solar enormities and fluxions.

Kant had linked the terrestrial-spinal axis to self-orienting rationality, but for Bataille the excremental effluence of the simian anus is merely rerouted upward—‘blossoming with the most delirious richness of forms’—in the ostentatious bulbing of the sapient cranium, a most exotic and wanton flower. The surging gradient of expenditure migrates from digestive-horizontal slope to the more intensified zenith-realm of intelligences. And yet, as Bataille notes, this upward-thrusting ‘liberation of man’ is somewhat end-stopped or bottlenecked by the skull’s right angle. Like the swell of a kinked hose, the perpendicular brain-cap is a ballooning instability. Along with Reich and Ferenczi, Bataille notes that in laughter, coitus, and torment this blockage in the solar-spinal surge is relieved: we assume free-flowing continuity with celestial potlatch. He wrote that ‘human life is bestially concentrated in the mouth’:

Terror and atrocious suffering turn the mouth into the organ of rending screams. On this subject it is easy to observe that the overwhelmed individual throws back his head while frenetically stretching his neck in such a way that the mouth becomes, as much as possible, an extension of the spinal column, in other words, in the position it normally occupies in the constitution of animals.3

But whatever our posture (whether thrown back in spasmodic laughter or hunched over in studious repression), the ‘delirious richness’ of intelligence maintains its cloaked solar affinity. Effectively, it matters little whether we attempt to truncate the radiant wantonness of laughter and orgasm by holding our heads firmly forward in rational conversation: intelligence itself is, for Bataille, just another form of filthy expenditure. Bataille sees right-minded rationality, like the sun’s long-drawn-out thermonuclear orgasm, as a form of profligacy (albeit one disguised in the rectitude of a skull at right angles to its spine); he communicates this unstoppable solar affinity with the symbol of a ‘pineal eye’ erupting from the parietal suture at the skull’s ‘summit’.4

This parietal third eye is actually exhibited in fish, amphibians, and reptiles, where it is used for photoreception. In these creatures it remains nervously connected to the brain’s pineal gland. In the 1880s, scientists first described it as the distal extension of the epiphysis cerebri, erupting through a parietal foramen at the pinnacle of the skull. (One of the first proper neuroanatomical descriptions of it came from a study of the Petromyzon, the fish whose nervous system Freud was himself specialising in during this same period.)5 Such an unpaired eye, atop the skull, it has long been hypothesized, serves to connect the pronograde lizard, salamander, or frog with the blazing heat of the tropical sun directly above them.6 We mammals outwardly exhibit no such organ, though our closest extinct ancestors did; nonetheless, we retain an inward vestige of it in the shape of our pineal gland. This gland, importantly, is azygous—meaning that it doesn’t exist in a pair—just like the eye it was once connected to. (This curious anatomical oneness, of course, led Descartes to infuse it with the soul’s ipseity.) Such azygous singularity arises from the gland’s position as the anatomical inner remnant of the cyclopean proto-eye exhibited by protochordates (such as the lancelet or amphioxus, celebrated by Haeckel as the common ancestor of vertebrata).7 It thus represents bilaterality’s liminal threshold. The mammalian retention of a pineal gland is the somatic fossil-scar of ancestral cyclopia, and therefore of pre-bilateral existence (of ancient azygy, predating sagittal symmetry)—so that Bataille’s symbol once again captures Spinal Catastrophism’s phyletic-temporal recidivism. It should come as no shock, then, that the pineal gland is a producer of melatonin and thus remains functional in the modulation of circadian rhythms and seasonal cycles. In other words, it is an ancient inner clock—at the proximal core of the brain—oscillating in tune with the solar Zeitgeber. Cerebral revenants of a pre-spinal past, pineal glands are, moreover, uniquely prone to calcification.8 Known as ‘brain sand’ or corpora arenacea, such cortical mineralization demonstrates this ancient gland’s acute susceptibility to time sickness or heterotopic futurity.9 Our ancient pacemaker is prone to arrythmia. And the unfortunate upright ape with a blinded and calcified third eye truly is gazing into its own entropic future.10 Which, incidentally, is the same as the future prematurely glaring into it by way of a mineralising brain-core, a chronopathic infection vector.