A lot of surrealist writing is basically: “Reality is boring, let’s escape into the dream-world where the mind can fly.” Astral Leak does the opposite. It says: “You don’t get to fly. You get to slip.”
In a “dreamy” surreal scene, things float and transform like magic. Here, everything transforms like matter: by melting, sticking, hardening, spilling, cracking, pooling. Even the big moments happen because someone drops something, slips, hits stone, bleeds, or gets covered in a chemical soup.
A big part of this book’s horror (and ultimately, it’s power) is how it keeps taking something that should mean one thing and forcing it to become something else.
In normal symbolism, washing is purification. Here, washing is where things get ruined in a ritualistic way. The first profanation, the “Pink Sacrament”, is literally born when blood and suds churn together into that creamy pink mixture, and the narration leans into how seductively wrong it looks. It becomes dirty, then useful, then biological.
So the sacred moment isn’t “clean becomes clean again.”
It’s: clean and filthy smashed together creating something that can’t be undone. That “pink” is the point of no return. Purity doesn’t get restored. It gets infected, and then treated like a relic.
In plenty of stories, “the third eye” means spiritual awakening. Here, an “eye” gets manufactured through violence and matter: soap pressed into a head wound, pulled out transformed, and called an eye.
So instead of: vision → insight → higher meaning,
you get: wound → insertion → new organ → wrong kind of meaning.
It’s enlightenment. Just not the kind you’re used to.
The finale isn’t just “filth and gravity forever.” When the storm turns everything into blinding whiteness—soap/steam/snow all becoming visually identical, the story does something different and colder than “downward into dirt.”
It says: difference itself can be erased. That’s annihilation-by-blankness. Like the universe takes all this sticky, bodily specificity… and then wipes the board clean with a white cloth.
The brutal philosophy behind it is that everything is reduced to matter, then matter is reduced to undifferentiated noise. It’s refusing the comforting fantasy that we’re minds piloting bodies. You are a body before mind—a leaky one. And meaning happens when bodies and materials collide, especially when the collision is taboo, humiliating, or irreversible. Preferably all three at once.
Informe—A short history of 1920s Surrealism and the schism
The book draws its philosophical DNA from the 1920s schism within Surrealism, specifically the “Dissident” movement led by Georges Bataille. While mainstream Surrealists like André Breton sought to transcend reality through the “Marvelous” and the stars, Bataille’s movement looked downward, into the mud, the rot, and the violent resistance of matter.
The core of this movement is Bataille’s Base Materialism, or the “Anti-Dream” as I like to think of it. It rejects the idea that humans are beings of light or spirit. Instead, it posits that we are biological machines defined by friction, viscosity, and decomposition.
A central pillar of the movement is the concept of the Informe—the destruction of categories. Base Materialism seeks to collapse the boundaries between “human,” “object,” and “trash.”
De-categorization: In Astral Leak, a person is reduced to a “wet cushion” or a “hard surface”; a piece of soap is transformed into an “eye.”
The Goal: To strip away the “dignity” of form until only the raw, resistant matter remains.
For Bataille, the “Sacred” is not found in purity, but in the collision of Purity and Filth. This is the mechanism of Profanation: the act of taking a clean symbol (like the white soap) and infecting it with the “Dirty” (blood in this case, the leaky resin in Astral Leak’s creatures, urine or other fluids).
The ultimate symbol of this movement is the Pineal Eye, a concept Bataille linked to the “Solar Anus.” It represents a third eye at the crown of the head that looks directly at the blinding sun until it bursts. It replaces the “soul” with the “gland,” insisting that enlightenment is not a spiritual vision, but a violent, physical puncture.
In practice, this is the act of turning a wound into an orifice. Readers of the Astral Leak will recognize this in Varek, but even here the profanation is worse:
A mouth-eye that is perpetually open in a silent scream.
Bataille, I’m sure, would approve.
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