"Here lives the ultimate wound: not exclusion but indifference, not anger but a shrug, the absence even of remembrance: 'Someone who does not miss me,' writes Baudrillard in The Perfect Crime: 'this is the radical otherness.'" |
Paul Klee, Separation in the Evening (1922)
1. Rising to the general
Few admit it (it's a truth devoid of poetry), but the mere fact of falling in love is not very interesting. Circumstances vary, of course: but the moment before the shipwreck—the fleeting instant when you get to face something entirely different—is pretty much the same for anyone. The same goes for breaking up: we all tell stories about our loves, we share our feelings in order to know that we are not alone in being happy or suffering; and yet what does that accomplish? Each love is similar as is each abandonment, but no amount of facts can prepare us; and we will always think that our pain and pleasure are nobler, deeper, better: we recount our experiences, but deep down we tell each other that no one can ever understand this.
So instead we could try the Proustian way: "rise to the general," as he put it in the Guermantes. A morphology of the shipwreck: the main features of the roll that leads to a beautiful, or terrible, catastrophe. Would this help to understand or suffer less? No. And still.
2. A thankless job
When a new love enters your life you immediately forget levity, irony, even indolence. You always have to be present and awake, ready to interpret, understand any possible sign from the other; it's like living in a Middle-Age treatise, where everything hides meaning. Stones, gestures, sounds, falling objects, phone calls, coincidences—everything is a metaphor for something else.
You become superstitious and obscurantist: If I open this book now and read this sentence, she will call me. And if you actually read that sentence, you become terrified of it: and there is no point in telling you that this is irrational (because you are already in an irrational realm). If on the contrary you do not read it, that does not appease you: something else will come forward to destroy your rationality.
Hidden meanings everywhere: this is the fate of the lover, for he or she "stands in the brazier of meaning" (Barthes). The whole order is so different that naturally causes a kind of sweet discomfort. The solidity of the whole net of relations ceases to exist, precisely because the whole world is destroyed as it was before. Your ship has hit the cliff.
3. Absolutism
The shocking nature of any love, in its initial stage, lies in its absolutism—a kind of totalitarian vocation. Cathy describes her feeling for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights right this way: "If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."
We should read this statement stripping it of any romantic connotation: we should focus on its ontological value. In fact, in The Unavowable Community Blanchot sees in the community of lovers something that "has for its essential end the destruction of society." Love as desertion, and so it must be.
Western liberal democracies are founded on the individual: the rule of law is precisely one where the freedom of the individual, not the couple, is sovereign. Love in itself (love that doesn't forcibly lead to a family, love as mere love) is just a laceration of the community fabric. That is why no right to love is provided for in constitutions. Its absoluteness, its selfishness (a passionate kiss on the street is a distasteful gesture, it hurts, it tears the everyday like a shout or a fight), make it unmanageable for associated forms of living.
4. Some elements of love logic
Love is monist. Since its primordial treatment—the myth of the androgynous told by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium—the idea that "true love is only one" because there is only one lost half, seems pretty inevitable. Luckily life teaches us that nothing is unrepeatable, but after the shipwreck you are not very inclined to learn lessons.
Kinds are handy to identify one's personal taste, and yet the sum of all your favorite kinds will surely not appease you. The idea of the One therefore arises from a mathematics of rarity. Seven billion people seem suddenly very few, in front of an enduring love: the convergence of so many qualities, so many desires and needs is a thought that annihilates. So the loved one will be asymptotically close to one and one only, progressing until true delirium: he or she is not replaceable because he or she depletes the entire category. (There is no kind of people you love and you will love; there exists, each time, only her or him).
5. Fall
Paul Klee, Separation in the evening. At first glance, the canvas seems to be divided into three parts, and the color tones distributed proportionally: down, for about one-sixth of the picture, lies the red: then the pale yellow: and finally the blue. But the whole area is divided into strips of color that fades into the next, from the day's orange to the night's indigo, and in the middle two arrows—a shorter pointing up and the other down, meeting.
But what is striking is just the way the light falls off gradually from the ground and disappears in the darkness above: the adverb itself becomes part of the physical, gradually, by degrees, following clear levels, one by one, distinct phases of color, two arrows. All is linked.
Similarly, every act of love contains the possibility of sorrow and abandonment: it is ready to fall at any moment, it must be ready to fall and let the other free, since possession is the very contrary of love (Proust's lesson is final: you cannot own anyone). And then, you actually do fall.
6. A symmetrical revolution
When a love ends, reality is subverted again: another shipwreck. Perceptions change, everything becomes serious and dangerous, the colors are lurking in the background, and above all people seem utterly unfair as they just walk down the street and live their common life--they just live, you think, how do they dare?
You apply moral categories where there are none; you are again in a regime of terrible seriousness. But the polarity is inverted. After the contempt you felt for the world (as you believed to dominate it from the height of your feeling) the world takes revenge. Abandonment resembles to Giordano Bruno's revolution: the cosmos reveals itself as infinite, without points of reference, and in it you count for nothing; you're just a fragment launched into space. So once the sun revolved around you, now you're spinning like an idiot.
7. Nothing
In this roam your body endures as an embarrassing presence, the shadow of an era swept away by an ice age: a fossil that shows what it was, and nothing more. Literally, you "bring around" the body that belonged to the other. You are now strictly Cartesian; your mind casts bitter looks on it.
One of the more obvious cries in this situation is to think of being nothing—"Without you I'm nothing," just like Placebo's album. Oh, you wish you were! In fact without the other it's plainly and always you, and indeed at the maximum degree, with all your flaws amplified and your stinging desire and your ridiculous wounded ego. The gods of love do not give you annihilation (which would release you) but the perennial lament: everything that in normal times you would have dismissed as unbearable mass of nonsense. And now, as your exhausted friends would confirm, you are an unbearable mass of nonsense.
8. Another one
But there is still one last groove where the forsaken slumps: the lover who has fled falls in love again, and begins again with another. Dismay: was not love the realm of the one? Apparently not—and here is the coup de grace.
He or she is back in the world, you're still out of it: you belong to the past, in every sense (but the other one has the correct perception of it: a thing left behind; while you have the delusional perception of it: the desire that you become present again). Your existence for the one you've lost now may be pleasant, useless, or annoying, it doesn't matter—in any case it is lukewarm. And as we well know, what is lukewarm is inevitably spewed out.
Here lives the ultimate wound: not exclusion but indifference, not anger but a shrug, the absence even of remembrance: "Someone who does not miss me," writes Baudrillard in The Perfect Crime: "this is the radical otherness."
9. Remember to forget
After losing his beloved servant Lampe, who had worked for him for more than forty years, Immanuel Kant wrote a note and placed it on the desk, where he would see it every day: "Remember to forget Lampe."
Perhaps this anecdote is misunderstood: it appears that Lampe was fired because he had started drinking too much. Other report that Kant continued to call "Lampe" the new server, so it would testify only the philosopher's senile dementia.
It does not matter. Let's read it as it has been handed down: as an act of love that becomes a ritual—it is repeated like a morning prayer—without providing any purpose. It aims neither to absolution nor to salvation, it's simple desire to reiterate the sorrow.
More: it clarifies the contradiction between what you should (which is better, which is healthy) and what you secretly want: it nails it into a paradoxical sentence and thus leaves no escape, a note on your desk. Remember forever what is lost.
10. In place of this
In a dense article about probability theory, philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce wrote: "All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted would betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every great fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death."
At first glance, this seems a rather sad statement: let us rejoice because we live a limited time, otherwise we would be destined for much more misery. But I think it is possible to do greater justice to Peirce's idea by turning it inside out, and considering first of all its courageous disenchantment.
We can dream that nothing ever changes, in our love: longing for a state of comfortable eternity based on what we have built up; but, Peirce reminds us, entropy would still give us no escape. Yet, it is equally wrong to cultivate the idea that when it all goes wrong we are just condemned to suffer: that love happens once and forever, that probability is zeroed out by the idea of fate, that from shipwreck there is no chance of salvation. In place of this, we have life.
Few admit it (it's a truth devoid of poetry), but the mere fact of falling in love is not very interesting. Circumstances vary, of course: but the moment before the shipwreck—the fleeting instant when you get to face something entirely different—is pretty much the same for anyone. The same goes for breaking up: we all tell stories about our loves, we share our feelings in order to know that we are not alone in being happy or suffering; and yet what does that accomplish? Each love is similar as is each abandonment, but no amount of facts can prepare us; and we will always think that our pain and pleasure are nobler, deeper, better: we recount our experiences, but deep down we tell each other that no one can ever understand this.
So instead we could try the Proustian way: "rise to the general," as he put it in the Guermantes. A morphology of the shipwreck: the main features of the roll that leads to a beautiful, or terrible, catastrophe. Would this help to understand or suffer less? No. And still.
2. A thankless job
When a new love enters your life you immediately forget levity, irony, even indolence. You always have to be present and awake, ready to interpret, understand any possible sign from the other; it's like living in a Middle-Age treatise, where everything hides meaning. Stones, gestures, sounds, falling objects, phone calls, coincidences—everything is a metaphor for something else.
You become superstitious and obscurantist: If I open this book now and read this sentence, she will call me. And if you actually read that sentence, you become terrified of it: and there is no point in telling you that this is irrational (because you are already in an irrational realm). If on the contrary you do not read it, that does not appease you: something else will come forward to destroy your rationality.
Hidden meanings everywhere: this is the fate of the lover, for he or she "stands in the brazier of meaning" (Barthes). The whole order is so different that naturally causes a kind of sweet discomfort. The solidity of the whole net of relations ceases to exist, precisely because the whole world is destroyed as it was before. Your ship has hit the cliff.
3. Absolutism
The shocking nature of any love, in its initial stage, lies in its absolutism—a kind of totalitarian vocation. Cathy describes her feeling for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights right this way: "If all else perished, and he remained, I should still continue to be; and if all else remained, and he were annihilated, the universe would turn to a mighty stranger."
We should read this statement stripping it of any romantic connotation: we should focus on its ontological value. In fact, in The Unavowable Community Blanchot sees in the community of lovers something that "has for its essential end the destruction of society." Love as desertion, and so it must be.
Western liberal democracies are founded on the individual: the rule of law is precisely one where the freedom of the individual, not the couple, is sovereign. Love in itself (love that doesn't forcibly lead to a family, love as mere love) is just a laceration of the community fabric. That is why no right to love is provided for in constitutions. Its absoluteness, its selfishness (a passionate kiss on the street is a distasteful gesture, it hurts, it tears the everyday like a shout or a fight), make it unmanageable for associated forms of living.
4. Some elements of love logic
Love is monist. Since its primordial treatment—the myth of the androgynous told by Aristophanes in Plato's Symposium—the idea that "true love is only one" because there is only one lost half, seems pretty inevitable. Luckily life teaches us that nothing is unrepeatable, but after the shipwreck you are not very inclined to learn lessons.
Kinds are handy to identify one's personal taste, and yet the sum of all your favorite kinds will surely not appease you. The idea of the One therefore arises from a mathematics of rarity. Seven billion people seem suddenly very few, in front of an enduring love: the convergence of so many qualities, so many desires and needs is a thought that annihilates. So the loved one will be asymptotically close to one and one only, progressing until true delirium: he or she is not replaceable because he or she depletes the entire category. (There is no kind of people you love and you will love; there exists, each time, only her or him).
5. Fall
Paul Klee, Separation in the evening. At first glance, the canvas seems to be divided into three parts, and the color tones distributed proportionally: down, for about one-sixth of the picture, lies the red: then the pale yellow: and finally the blue. But the whole area is divided into strips of color that fades into the next, from the day's orange to the night's indigo, and in the middle two arrows—a shorter pointing up and the other down, meeting.
But what is striking is just the way the light falls off gradually from the ground and disappears in the darkness above: the adverb itself becomes part of the physical, gradually, by degrees, following clear levels, one by one, distinct phases of color, two arrows. All is linked.
Similarly, every act of love contains the possibility of sorrow and abandonment: it is ready to fall at any moment, it must be ready to fall and let the other free, since possession is the very contrary of love (Proust's lesson is final: you cannot own anyone). And then, you actually do fall.
6. A symmetrical revolution
When a love ends, reality is subverted again: another shipwreck. Perceptions change, everything becomes serious and dangerous, the colors are lurking in the background, and above all people seem utterly unfair as they just walk down the street and live their common life--they just live, you think, how do they dare?
You apply moral categories where there are none; you are again in a regime of terrible seriousness. But the polarity is inverted. After the contempt you felt for the world (as you believed to dominate it from the height of your feeling) the world takes revenge. Abandonment resembles to Giordano Bruno's revolution: the cosmos reveals itself as infinite, without points of reference, and in it you count for nothing; you're just a fragment launched into space. So once the sun revolved around you, now you're spinning like an idiot.
7. Nothing
In this roam your body endures as an embarrassing presence, the shadow of an era swept away by an ice age: a fossil that shows what it was, and nothing more. Literally, you "bring around" the body that belonged to the other. You are now strictly Cartesian; your mind casts bitter looks on it.
One of the more obvious cries in this situation is to think of being nothing—"Without you I'm nothing," just like Placebo's album. Oh, you wish you were! In fact without the other it's plainly and always you, and indeed at the maximum degree, with all your flaws amplified and your stinging desire and your ridiculous wounded ego. The gods of love do not give you annihilation (which would release you) but the perennial lament: everything that in normal times you would have dismissed as unbearable mass of nonsense. And now, as your exhausted friends would confirm, you are an unbearable mass of nonsense.
8. Another one
But there is still one last groove where the forsaken slumps: the lover who has fled falls in love again, and begins again with another. Dismay: was not love the realm of the one? Apparently not—and here is the coup de grace.
He or she is back in the world, you're still out of it: you belong to the past, in every sense (but the other one has the correct perception of it: a thing left behind; while you have the delusional perception of it: the desire that you become present again). Your existence for the one you've lost now may be pleasant, useless, or annoying, it doesn't matter—in any case it is lukewarm. And as we well know, what is lukewarm is inevitably spewed out.
Here lives the ultimate wound: not exclusion but indifference, not anger but a shrug, the absence even of remembrance: "Someone who does not miss me," writes Baudrillard in The Perfect Crime: "this is the radical otherness."
9. Remember to forget
After losing his beloved servant Lampe, who had worked for him for more than forty years, Immanuel Kant wrote a note and placed it on the desk, where he would see it every day: "Remember to forget Lampe."
Perhaps this anecdote is misunderstood: it appears that Lampe was fired because he had started drinking too much. Other report that Kant continued to call "Lampe" the new server, so it would testify only the philosopher's senile dementia.
It does not matter. Let's read it as it has been handed down: as an act of love that becomes a ritual—it is repeated like a morning prayer—without providing any purpose. It aims neither to absolution nor to salvation, it's simple desire to reiterate the sorrow.
More: it clarifies the contradiction between what you should (which is better, which is healthy) and what you secretly want: it nails it into a paradoxical sentence and thus leaves no escape, a note on your desk. Remember forever what is lost.
10. In place of this
In a dense article about probability theory, philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce wrote: "All human affairs rest upon probabilities, and the same thing is true everywhere. If man were immortal he could be perfectly sure of seeing the day when everything in which he had trusted would betray his trust, and, in short, of coming eventually to hopeless misery. He would break down, at last, as every great fortune, as every dynasty, as every civilization does. In place of this we have death."
At first glance, this seems a rather sad statement: let us rejoice because we live a limited time, otherwise we would be destined for much more misery. But I think it is possible to do greater justice to Peirce's idea by turning it inside out, and considering first of all its courageous disenchantment.
We can dream that nothing ever changes, in our love: longing for a state of comfortable eternity based on what we have built up; but, Peirce reminds us, entropy would still give us no escape. Yet, it is equally wrong to cultivate the idea that when it all goes wrong we are just condemned to suffer: that love happens once and forever, that probability is zeroed out by the idea of fate, that from shipwreck there is no chance of salvation. In place of this, we have life.
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Giorgio Fontana (1981) is an Italian award-winning writer. He has published nine books translated in eight languages and has contributed to several magazines such as The Massachusetts Review, The European Review of Books, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, Politico, Asymptote. His last book is an extensive essay on Franz Kafka.
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