Graham St John > Quotes

“I regard this radical experience of rave as a manifestation of the religious ‘fête’,13 or ‘celebration’. The ‘festive’, a religious category different from that of ritual, is, for Georges Bataille specifically, a human fusion in which this accursed share is given expression. Fuelled by desire, an instinct, a call for destruction, exhilaration, dis-order, a motivation often understood as animalistic, the fête, in which the paradoxes of human and social life collide, is simultaneously harnessed and subordinated by a wisdom which enables the participants to come back from this confusional state with a feeling of replenishment, as if having received some kind of impetus from the ‘outside’ (Bataille 1989: 54).”
― Graham St. John, Rave Culture and Religion

“Our zealous prowler of the higher dimensions searched in vain for it in the art world. “Verrocchio never saw it. Michelangelo didn’t anticipate it. Yeats didn’t know. Blake hadn’t a clue. Melville wasn’t briefed.”59 There was no wrinkle of it, “not an atom of the presence of this thing,” in the carpets of Central Asia or in the visions of an Arcimboldo or a Fra Angelico or a Bosch.60 If art is “a probing of the unknown,” then why do painters, from Early Renaissance to Abstract Expressionists, give no hint? “We’ve had Beccafumi, Pollock, Piero della Francesca, but nobody got near this, not even the Surrealists.” And yet, as Charles Hayes was informed, “here’s this experience that leaves you absolutely quaking. It’s like an aesthetic orgasm, a Niagara of beauty, but alien beauty.”61 At other times, it had the qualities of an outrageous jest and the ambiguity of a pun. And yet while it possessed the “zany, impossible, improbable, hysterical revelation of the joke,”62 it was remote from any known amusement, and could not be pegged as any thing of the kind.”
― Graham St John, Strange Attractor: The Hallucinatory Life of Terence McKenna