SACRUM

SACRUM Spirit is a bone. —G. W. F. Hegel I. Sitting He sits down on a chair before his desk; immediately there is discomfort. It is an invitation, a provocation. The discomfort begins as a dull pain at the base of the spine, around the coccyx. It radiates outward, as if from the anus into the buttocks: a fundamental ember, a basic burning. The doctors tell him the discomfort derives from his sacrum. The years of sitting at his desk, writing, have displaced the bone, the pivot of the human body. An ectopic shift over time. He has given up on the doctors, on physical therapy, on meditation and medication—everything that was to ease the discomfort. The treatments have all proven useless. Discomfort remains sovereign. Not to fight the discomfort, but to let it enter the body more deeply. Learning to submit to the discomfort, to identify with it: this, paradoxically, is the path to personal sovereignty. Loss of self through (identification with) the sacrum. A somatic transvaluation. II. Holy Bone Hieratic, “pertaining to sacred things,” from L. hieraticus, from Gk. hieratikos “pertaining to a priest or his office, priestly,” from hierateia “priesthood,” from hiereus “priest,” from hieros “sacred, holy, hallowed; superhuman, mighty; divine”; also “strong.” Gk. Hieros osteon, “holy bone,” “strong bone.” Sacrum, “bone at the base of the spine,” from L.L. os sacrum “sacred bone,” from L. os “bone” + sacrum, neuter of sacer “sacred.” So called because this bone is the part of animals often offered in sacrifices. Translation of Gk. hieron osteon. Sacral. In anatomy, from Mod.L. sacralis, from sacrum, the bone. In anthropology, from L. sacrum, “sacred thing, rite.” Vertebra, from L. vertebra “joint or articulation of the body, joint of the spine,” perhaps from vertere “to turn” Etymology, so often of dubious value, here reveals essential connections: sacrum—turning— sacrifice—sacred. The sacrum is the sacred pivot, the holy bone. He has an ache in his holy bone. Comfort—the comfort that ensures self-stability—is sacrificed at the altar of the desk, where instead of kneeling, he sits, and instead of praying, he reads, he writes. III. Mythical Anthropology The medical-industrial complex, including the psychiatric industries and their ruthless neutralization of the most radical aspects of psychoanalysis, has played its role (alongside so many other regimes) in the translation of the prolific violence of human passions into the production of legible symptoms, the reduction of affective-somatic vicissitudes to manageable “conditions.” The mythic meaning of the passionate body—its sufferings, its discomforts, its ecstasies—is suppressed, repressed. And yet, this enforced alienation from the mythic foundations of passionate life is not decisive. It is true that underwordly currents and unconscious imperatives that have found their most egregious expressions in religion—ritual orgies, mystical ecstasies, bloody sacrifices, and other refusals of comfort—are stifled within today’s bureaucratic systems. But Freud was right in suggesting that repressions only set the stage, prepare the altar, for the return of those repressed elements, frequently in monstrous guises. And thus the surrealists’ exhortations, long since thought to have grown toothless and quaint, find renewed urgency in the context of the ever more intense bureaucratization of everyday life, the disciplining, organization, and comforting (the making-complacent) of human bodies and human thought. “Methodical knowledge” shall give way, if only sporadically, to the free reign of bodily passions and unconscious phantasms, introducing “a lawless intellectual series into the world of legitimate thought.” For the human being “can no longer recognize himself in the degrading chains of logic, but he recognizes himself, instead—not only with rage but in an ecstatic torment—in the virulence of his own phantasms.”i Mythical thought, activated by the forces of the unconscious, is not structured according to chains of logic, but expresses itself through associative links, wild metonymies, constant turns— like vertebrae dis/articulating a monstrous form. IV. Inverted Skull Many traditional societies have regarded the fused sacral vertebrae as a “support, and a focal center in the human body.”ii The sacrum is a pillar or pivot, an omphalos at the body’s core. But its form suggests something further. The sacrum is also a skull. According to what Bataille called the conditions of mythological representation, the location of the sacrum, this “lower” skull at the base of the body, establishes associations with the anus, and thus excretion and transformation. The “inverted” skull is connected via a “serpentine conduit” to the skull that crowns the upright human body, the skull from which speech issues. The articulated vertebral column connects these two ends of articulation—the skull that speaks and the skull that excretes. The “pelvic skull” of the sacrum is also a “bony sacred portal” opening onto the “transformative power” of the Otherworld (or Underworld)—that is, the unconscious and death. The Otherworld is the locus of transubstantiation in, with, and through mythical thought: a death and a resurrection, a generative decay, a transformation, a dislocation. This association is upheld in Mayan languages, where “words usually relate the sacrum to notions of ‘god’ and ‘sacred,’ while the coccyx is related to ‘fire.’” In Tzotzil Maya, for instance, chak signifies at once “rump, bottom, lower end” as well as “red,” and therefore fire, heat, blood, the sun. An excremental skull, a monstrous skull ablaze at the end of articulation: the sacrum flares, is enflamed: ossiferous affiliate of the solar anus. V. Solar Anus Has no one noted that the skull so often held to replace the genitals in André Masson’s famous rendering of the Acéphale resembles, with regard to both form and location, nothing so much as a blazing sacrum, the point of the coccyx coinciding with the anal aperture which also forms an oral orifice for this base and basic skull? A monstrous god, a headless anti-icon announcing the freedom “to resemble everything that is not [oneself] in the universe,” the Acéphale embodies, emblematizes, the power of the sacrum: a solar anus, a rotten sun darkly radiating. The headless god thus has at its core the pelvic skull, the excretory skull of the Otherworld. The Acéphale heralds the return of what has been repressed, even as it advances a sovereign renunciation of comfort, a refusal of boredom in a “rapturous escape from the self.” Partaking of an “inner existence of flames,” the sacrum burns, producing a discomfort at once physical and psychical.iii To escape oneself is to accede to a sovereignty that refuses comfort, to affirm the burning sacrifice in which the “I” is the offering. Sitting on the holy bone, the serpent bites. Gradually but ineluctably, discomfort spreads like poison, like a toxin: a disintegration of the integral self, a slow and negative ecstasy. Writing, the solar anus radiates. VI. Writing (Discomfort Zone) To write is to relinquish comfort, and to produce discomfort. To sit in a chair before a desk, body bent, turned toward the Otherworld, hour upon hour, time after time, is discomfort, is descent. Expounding his life-affirming myth, Nietzsche expressed this thought through his Zarathustra: “Here do I sit and wait, old broken tables around me and also new half tables. When cometh mine hour?—The hour of my descent, of my down-going?” Zarathustra, who pronounced laughter holy, and Nietzsche, who wrote this laughter and lost his mind: both at their desks, bent and aiming at descent. As a certain French philosopher noted, “Nietzsche was certain that the writer would never be upright; that writing is first and always something over which one bends.”iv One bends, compromising the upright human stature. (The headlessness of the up-standing Acéphale is another version of this strike against erect posture.) One sits and writes, pressuring the sacred bone, appearing to labor—but risking ecstasy. VII. Work / Ecstasy In writing—the writing that risks ecstasy—one loses one’s head in a play of thought, in a culmination and thus an exceeding of attention that mimics and parodies the postures that bureaucratic regimes solder into the human body. Writing expulsed from the sacrum is a turning away from the world of use and rational servitude, the world in which one is kept, quite precisely, in place. Writing returns the repressed. It is free to resemble what it pleases, in a game of continual articulation and disarticulation. Sacral writing is the duplicitous double of work, the serpentine other to writing issuing from that upper skull which holds together the head of articulate reason. The sacrum agitates, it burns with sovereign discomfort, opening onto a sphere from which labor is banished. In this realm, work is indistinguishable from play: a parody of industry, a work beyond use, a discomfort without goal or end: the sacred. To paraphrase Simone Weil, it is not the path that causes discomfort; discomfort is the path. To quote Nietzsche, “Maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child—at play.” “To read,” de Certeau has asserted, “is to be elsewhere, where they are not, in another world.”v And to write is to be ecstatic, to descend, to return again to the Otherworld, which is never a metaphysical beyond: sacrifice without salvation: “the putting to death of the author by his work.”vi To write is not to transcend time through work, but to experience time. Sacral pain is time entering the body, bringing the self out of itself, elsewhere. VIII. Ectopia He will enter the room again, pull the chair from the desk, and sit down, again. He will submit to the prolonged discomfort of writing—again. And in doing so, time will enter him. No transcendence, no salvation. He will be out of place: elsewhere to elsewhere, ecstasy to ecstasy. i Georges Bataille, “The Pineal Eye.” Quotations concerning the sacred status of the sacrum are drawn from Brian Stross, “The Mesoamerican Sacrum Bone: Doorway to the Otherworld.” Stross does not, however, explicitly associate the Otherworld with the unconscious. iii Bataille, “The Sacred Conspiracy.” iv Jacques Derrida, “Force and Signification.” v Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life. vi Bataille, Inner Experience. ii