Epistemology

Prefatory note: Epistemology is the study of how we know what we know (what we know is NOT to be confused with scholarship).  Episiotomy is a surgical intervention for pregnant women in which a doctor cuts the flesh between the vaginal sphincter and the anus to keep it from tearing during birth.  I always confuse these two words: the knowing and the mutilation.  I wonder if that means anything?

Some people, mostly scholars, are now saying that Lao Tzu (popularly understood to be the founder of Taoism) is mythical and the work attributed to him, the Tao Te Ching, apocryphal.

Some people, mostly most people, are still saying that Georges Bataille (author of Story of the Eye and Blue of Noon) was one very sick puppy.  Though some scholars are willing to admit that his work has more merit than originally granted.

Most people are willing to agree that both the mythical mystic and the actual deviant were archivists or librarians.  Some people are born sociopaths, some people are born librarians, and librarians spend their lives recording, preserving, organizing, cataloging and sometimes indexing anything they can get their hands on.  They have even been known to cross-reference!  Librarians stand on a shifting, devious landscape between all that has been endeavored by the human intellect and all that is unknown.  It is no wonder then that people of this persuasion would turn to philosophy, be rendered cryptic and have an abiding interest in transformation.

If one accepts that the Tao Te Ching was written, and most people do, then it requires no great leap to assume that the person who recorded it and made copies was of the librarian persuasion.  It is therefore no surprise that an archivist, faced with the ephemeral quality of a spoken tradition, would write something down and organize it.  Whether the archivist in question was the mythical Lao Tzu who took off into the desert or another archivist with the same name is probably not of very great importance. 

What is of importance is that it was preserved and we have it today to read.  And read it we do because it gives us the feeling of being in an E. H. Shepherd painting, drifting happily down a river in a dream where anything can happen and everything does all at once but not in a hectic way.  Just reading it, even in translation, slows down the brain, empties the head and leaves a feeling of alert euphoria behind.

On the other hand, reading Bataille is viscerally wrenching, emotionally devastating and has the long lasting effect of making one wonder, years later, what it really would feel like to sit on an eyeball fresh from its skull.

Conclusion: What do knowing and mutilation have in common?  They are both transformative.