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  I checked in to my hotel, then strolled up the town’s sloped, cobblestoned main thoroughfare, the Rue Saint-Etienne. Halfway up, facing on to the Place du Grand Puits, was the house where Bataille had lived, first in 1943 during the Occupation, then again for several years from 1945. Across the little square from the house was a bar. The French, like the Italians, use the word ‘bar’ liberally: in Sicily, a bar is where you go to eat ice cream or drink an espresso; in France it might be where you have dinner. But this really was a bar, because groups of tourists sat outside it drinking wine and beer. Some of them glanced up at me as I observed Bataille’s house and read the blue plaque on the wall. Already I knew I was the only person in town who had come here for Bataille. These were pilgrims – not literary pilgrims or even pervert pilgrims, but the real kind (there were golden shells in the ground every few metres, indicating that this was part of the Camino de Santiago walk, with simple accommodation nearby). Or else they were just tourists, holidaymakers, content to have a few glasses of wine in a beautiful old hill town, watching the sun set over the lush Yonne valley. They didn’t want to know about this wanker Georges Bataille, and who could blame them?

  The town’s stonework and wooden shutters were bright now in the evening sun, as the peal of the basilica’s bells mingled with the relaxed patter of tourists. It was the idyllic French joli village – so joli, in fact, that UNESCO had declared the town and its basilica a World Heritage Site. There was even a Mary Magdalene angle, involving relics of hers that may or may not have been housed here (a rival village claimed it was they and not the Vézelayans who possessed the true relics). Attractive, smiling young nuns in pale-blue robes strode among the town’s narrow lanes and arches, as did fresh-faced priests with hooded robes. Clearly, Vézelay was a devout place, and thus an incongruous one for Georges Bataille to have lived, yet he liked it enough to have wanted his remains to be brought back and buried here. Asking after him in the former house of the pacifist and spiritual writer Romain Rolland (which is now home to an impressive art collection – Picasso, Miró, Kandinsky et al.), I felt a twinge of embarrassment: I imagined I was lowering the tone of the place – touristic yet devotional – by bringing up this notorious deviant and blasphemer. Then again, Bataille’s was an intensely spiritual, even religious, sort of atheism. The anguish that compelled him to plumb the depths of horror, decay and filth was indivisible from the intellectual upheavals Western civilisation had been going through since the collapse of the foundations of the Christian faith, weighed down under post-Enlightenment scientific knowledge – what Nietzsche had famously shorthanded as the death of God.

  Bataille’s filthy blasphemies emerged from a hinterland of loss and belief. In his adolescence, after a terrible childhood that had culminated in the traumatic abandoning of his incontinent, syphilitic father to a certain death at the hands of the invading Germans during the First World War, Bataille converted to Catholicism. Until his mid-twenties he was intensely pious, embracing his faith with the same zeal he would bring to bear on everything in his life. He even wrote a short and reverent book on Notre-Dame de Chartres Cathedral. For all the terror and evil of his writings, Bataille is, from one perspective, and like Nietzsche before him (himself the son of a pastor), one of Christianity’s great anti-devotees. His eventual assault on the faith bore all the virulence of the former zealot who redirects his religious fervour into the most furious irreligiosity. The common, conventional forms of belief – like that of the pilgrims flocking to Vézelay and its basilica – were too lukewarm for Bataille’s spirit; but so were the conventional forms of atheism. He had to take both where few others were willing to follow. An atheism of his kind – committed to preserving a sense of the sacred by the most appalling means – could not arise in one who had never been a believer. Even after he had renounced all faith he did not want us to mistake his intentions, the nature of his passion. ‘WE ARE FEROCIOUSLY RELIGIOUS,’ he declaimed in The Sacred Conspiracy (Bataille was given to shouty capitalisations when he got especially worked up). Even his fanatical hatred of bourgeois civilisation, with its denial of the ecstatic qualities of being, was an expression of his radical religiosity:

  A world that cannot be loved to the point of death – in the same way that a man loves a woman – represents only self-interest and the obligation to work. If it is compared to worlds gone by, it is hideous, and appears as the most failed of all. In past worlds, it was possible to lose oneself in ecstasy, which is impossible in our world of educated vulgarity.

  Soon it would be twilight, and I wanted to find the cemetery where Bataille was buried before darkness fell. I tend to learn languages primarily from books, so that I often suspect my diction comes across as archaic and pompous. For instance, what I said to the little old lady I encountered on my way to the graveyard probably sounded to her something like: ‘Matron, I seek the tomb of a venerable scrivener. Kindly point me towards the necropolis.’ Point me she did, and I continued on up the paving-stoned slope, past the basilica. The cemetery was behind it, perched slightly beyond the town on the verge of the steep hill, so that it overlooked the valley splendidly. All in all, a nice place to be buried but, try as I might, I could not locate Bataille’s grave. I checked every headstone, then I tried the older, more overgrown cemetery on a lower level of the hillside. Then I went back and checked the first one again. Nothing. Had it been any other philosopher, I might have conceded defeat. But here was the final resting place of the man who, more than anyone in history, had been transfixed, awed, entirely obsessed by death. To fail to find the place where death and Georges Bataille finally got it together – where he attained the object of his desire – was not acceptable.

  I returned to my hotel and did a Google image search on my phone. A Czech photographer had come on a similar expedition a couple of years earlier, and she had taken a haunting shot of the grave. Once again the internet had proved that anything you might think about doing, someone else had not only done already but also documented online, with groovy filters. In the last of the day’s light I hurried back to the cemetery and, with the help of the photo, quickly located the grave: it was one of the first I could see after stepping through the gate. In this little country cemetery on a hill, surrounded by the graves of the pious deceased, Bataille’s headstone bore one of the more remarkable epitaphs I had seen:

  One day this living world will pullulate in my dead mouth.

  On this serene summer’s evening the phrase seemed beautiful – defiant in a manner that, for all Bataille’s nihilism, was not deathly but affirmative, joyful, rapturous. Bataille had always denied that he was a philosopher, but a label he had accepted, knowing full well its provocative weight in certain circles (Sartre’s, for instance), was that of mystic. In one of his most beautiful formulations, he evokes the mystic’s yearning:

  Without knowing it, he suffers from the mental darkness that keeps him from screaming that he himself is the girl who forgets his presence while shuddering in his arms.

  Nonetheless, as I closed the cemetery gates and left Bataille there with the living world pullulating in his dead mouth, the feeling persisted that I would not read much of him again. I continued to see beauty in waste; still believed, if not quite as often or as intensely, in useless acts, wreckage, lost causes, anything that went down in flames. But to hold Bataille’s body of work close any longer would bring not inspiration but disease. I was, in other words, sick to death of his sickly deathliness. Time to move on.

  That Friday evening, back in Paris, I walked to a bar in the eleventh arrondissement and watched the rain hammering down on the street outside. I ordered a bottle of red wine and stayed there until I had finished Michel Surya’s definitive Georges Bataille: An Intellectual Biography, which I had been reading all week. It was after one o’clock as I walked home along the Rue de Belleville, deserted now with the rain still falling hard. I was drenched but I didn’t care. Two black guys approached me. I tried to walk between them and found that one of them had clasped
my wrist, firmly. I looked at him; our eyes met. I pulled my arm away but he held me tight. Then his friend was holding up a large, serrated knife that shone in the streetlight. He too looked me in the eye. I had sent the proofs of my new book off to my publishers that afternoon and now, with all the wine inside me, I reflected that I’d achieved and enjoyed a few things in life, and worse could happen than to die here, picturesquely, on a Paris street in the rainy night, to a gleaming knife. And then this passivity became active desire: a sudden, bright wish to die. Unexpectedly the guy let go of my arm. I walked off. They turned and cursed at me. I cursed back. I considered going after them and roaring in their faces, kicking and punching wildly. I lost my way in the rain, enthralled by visions of beating a man to his death – any man or any woman – not to cause pain but for the release of it, pummelling a face with my fists till it caved in, stomping a skull against the rained-on concrete. I was still raging when I got home – a euphoric, self-fuelling rage that craved eruption. That night I dreamed my own death. I knew that I was dying – the process was quick – but as I died I became suffused with joy because I knew that this death – of my self, my individuality, this bungled figment that called itself Rob and staggered through its world – was of no consequence, a mere transformation, the end of an illusion of separateness. A veil had been lifted and there was no boundary between me and all else: to have lived once was to live forever, merged with all that is in an infinite churning, where individuality is no more substantial than the patterns thrown up on the foam of the sea. I slept a good nine or ten hours and when I awoke it was a sunny late morning. I lay there feeling light, cheerful. A conversation in Spanish drifted up from the courtyard outside my open window. I remembered the dream, the brilliance of it. The ping of an incoming email sounded from my phone. Soon it was back – the anxiety, the plans, the craving to distinguish, preserve and disseminate myself. But the cheerfulness remained, the levity, and with it a lingering thought, or hope, or faith, which faded into the background ambience as the day progressed, that the dream had been the reality and that this lonely, curious existence was the dream.

  Your photos made me laugh. It’s hard to tell where they were taken, whether it’s night or day, what planet we’re on. The camera seems to be on ketamine. I’ve been walking and cycling all week, exploring unfamiliar quarters of the city. I sit by the river and watch people or read. The days are bright and crisp. In the evenings I call over to Eddie and he shows me his paintings, and we get drunk on red wine. I’m enchanted by his daughter Callisto, but also by his ex-wife. I tell him this: he laughs and refills our glasses. On Saturday night I ended up alone in a bar in the eleventh as students teemed around me. It was cheery there. Drunk, I worked and reworked a single paragraph in my notebook, till the page was a mess of crossed-out words and arrows and asterisks. It was a passage that had been coalescing in my thoughts for months: it felt time to get it down.

  This morning I cycled to the quays in the nineteenth, where I lived when I first moved to Paris. The area beneath Jaurès Métro station has become a refugee camp. There are dozens of tents, children running about, men standing in clusters talking. It was one reality superimposed on another, as if the chaos had spilled out of the screen and now it’s right there in front of you, invading the dream of Paris.

  And here I am in a cafe by the canal, hunched behind my laptop. The couple across from me are arguing acidly, unaware that I speak English. She is blonde and slender, he is fat and dominant. Perhaps they have scorching sex, who knows. Nor do I know (since you ask) what purpose you will serve in my life – or would serve if we were to continue this correspondence till death do us part, rather than only for the time it takes to get these books written. In the meantime, you too are ‘a diary that writes back’. Isn’t that enough? It would be good if I could be you for a day – in your body, your mind – and you could be me, and then we might get somewhere. Meanwhile, a wave from across the gulf. Send more photos.

  Tent

  Nesrin was a Kurdish artist who claimed to have slept with two of the 9/11 hijackers, simultaneously, during a trip to America when she was seventeen, weeks before the men perished in a ball of fire above Manhattan. It was almost certainly a lie, but Nesrin used it as the basis for a video work, Love Collision, which was shown at underground galleries and club nights in Berlin. The work comprised a hardcore porn film in which Nesrin has sex with two men, intercut with footage of cities at night and hedonistic dance parties. The three performers have verses from the Koran inscribed on their bodies – a clear nod to Theo van Gogh’s film Submission.

  I knew all this because my friend Fran told me about Nesrin when he heard I was visiting Kassel to cover the documenta festival for an art magazine. Nesrin was living in the city, and Fran thought it worth putting us in touch even though she was, he wrote in an email, ‘definitely evil, but in an original way’. Under no circumstances should I go to bed with her if the possibility arose, he insisted. It would not – ‘repeat, not’ – end well. I replied that there was more than enough scorched earth in my past already. ‘Ah yes,’ he wrote back. ‘Scorched Earth Rob, lives his life like a retreating Nazi.’

  Nesrin was an obscure artist in more senses than one. I read a few descriptions online of works she’d exhibited, but no search result divulged what I really wanted to know: what she looked like. I could find no photographs bar a couple of shadowy, indistinct portraits that suggested a slight, dark-haired woman dressed in black. I emailed her and explained that I was a friend of Fran’s. I mentioned the dates of my stay in Kassel and said it’d be cool to meet up if she had time. Two days later, Nesrin wrote back that she would rather not meet, but asked if I would be willing to participate in an ongoing artistic production relating to ‘art tourists’ in Kassel. I wouldn’t have to do much, she explained, just follow occasional instructions that she would send by email or text; for the rest of the time I could go about my visit as normal. Curiosity outweighed wariness; I agreed to take part.

  Surrounded by forests and hills in the centre of Germany, Kassel was bombed to rubble during the Second World War. Documenta, the festival that was inaugurated there in 1955 by Arnold Bode, was meant to put Germany back in dialogue with the continent it had done so much to decimate, and showcase the kind of art that the National Socialists had suppressed as ‘degenerate’. I arrived on the train via Frankfurt on a Friday afternoon that was sinking under rain. The city didn’t look like much as I made my way from the station. I was renting a bedsit near the university, on the side of town inhabited by students and immigrants, its grey residential blocks serviced by hookah bars and kebab joints.

  After picking up the key from a cheery young Muslim woman, I bought an umbrella and took a tram towards the city centre. The crowds milling and queuing around Friedrichsplatz, the main square repurposed as a multifunctional documenta headquarters, suggested that Europe’s art festivals, or this art festival at least – which turned Kassel into an exhibition space for a hundred days every five years – were in fine fettle as commercial prospects. Despite being here to write about documenta, I was hardly an expert. I subscribed to a couple of art magazines, attended shows in whatever city I was in, but I had absolved myself of ever really keeping up with the scene. In lieu of extensive knowledge, I hoped that my combination of curiosity and scepticism would amount to a serviceable investigative method.

  I took shelter in the press centre, equipping myself with maps and flyers from the information desk, where young women in black T-shirts issued directions and press passes. The first-floor cafe served as a convening point for grouped visitors, dripping puddles as they hunched over soggy maps like generals planning an invasion. I ordered a flat white and sat by the floor-to-ceiling windows, looking over the blurred geometry of Friedrichsplatz. The museums surrounding the square trailed long queues under canopies of brolly and parka, which I hoped my press pass would allow me to skip. My socks were wet. I sneezed with considerable violence. Now that I was here, the prospect of gleaning
an aesthetically meaningful experience from documenta seemed dispiritingly effortful, especially under such waterlogged conditions.

  Unless I was going to make up my article on the festival, I had to get out there, and so, resigning myself to squelching around in wet socks for the evening, I left the press centre and commenced my explorations right there on Friedrichsplatz. Planted on the grass-covered square in front of the Fridericianum museum stood the newly erected Parthenon of Books. This was the current documenta’s spectacular centrepiece, the one you saw on websites and news articles, which rendered only partly redundant the experience of standing in the downpour to gape at it. The Parthenon was a full-scale replica of the real thing on the Acropolis in Athens, built not of Grecian stone but of books – specifically, books that had at some time and place been banned. These outlaw texts were wrapped in plastic, lining the columns and pediment, supported by a scaffolding of steel girders. I hovered near a walking tour (more accurately, a huddled and shivering tour) and freeloaded the key info, learning that this Parthenon of Books was in fact a reprise of the original work that the artist, Marta Minujín, had installed in Buenos Aires in the 1980s. Ascending the steps and passing between broad pillars, I clocked an assortment of Rushdies, Burroughses, Lawrences, Nins and Joyces, along with some less-expected outliers.