by Adrian Hart
For joy, though woe be deep, is deeper than woe.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra
Part Four, The Intoxicated Song
When we were filled with joy it belonged to none: It was simply there.
Joy knows, and Longing has accepted.
Maria Rainer Rilke, The Sonnets to Orpheus, II, 8
He who binds himself to joy
Does the winged life destroy;
But he who kisses the Joy as it flies
Lives in Eternity’s sunrise
...For all joy wants eternity.
William Blake, Gnomic Verses, Several Questions Answered
Joy. Like our newly-found freedom, seeming to promise everything and nothing at once, almost a burden we hardly know what to do with. Too much for me to handle. As such a distraction, an embarrassment, a Pollyanna in a room filled with world-weary depressives, an Other opposed to my 'wisdom'. Unhappiness, yes. Longing, desire, disappointment, loss or absence: the handy, constant themes of poetry and fiction. I am familiar with unhappiness. It inhabits me, I seem to know it as it seems to know my deepest self. I think about unhappiness yet barely give joy a passing thought as it is only in passing, it would seem, that it be known at all. But could it be that joy knows me more deeply and completely than unhappiness and also inhabits me in some forgotten region of my soul? Often, in an instant, my sorrows or petty preoccupations are canceled in the light of certain precious and rare moments for which the past would seem, in retrospect, merely a preparation or rehearsal for them and to which all our wrong turnings and sorrows had been merely conspiring in their own time, behind our backs, to lead us. From my new perspective it would almost seem that the very order of things had been reversed and the past altered by the present. In a childlike Eureka moment of personal recognition the disparate events of the past seem to gather themselves around an already plotted resolution and the world, drowning in its 'ocean of shame', seems at last redeemed and transfigured, Edenic once again in a shining clarity and goodness. All hope may have been lost and yet in this instant it seems I want for nothing: a great sun burns every grey vestige of doubt and melancholy to cinders, I have the world at my feet and I am filled (stupidly so, it will be said by those wiser than me) with an infallible, limitless optimism and joy. Joy, did I say? Yes, I decide, voicing it to myself like an ancient invocation, that’s the only word, however indefinable, banal, well-worn and yet scandalous, for this sense of things. It is as though I had forgotten joy, forgotten what joy was and had awoken to it at last after a long sleep, after a long stupor, as though, like Socrates, it had reminded me, taught me what I already knew. And it is not, it must be said, any kind of joy, trivial, humbled and secluded, but all-enveloping, a rending of the veil, an apocalyptic revelation of the Big Picture, the 'Unified Field Theory' bridging the gap between the individual and the universal, the earth and the heavens. Joy: the essential element - illusory or not - the personal utopia with which no map of the world would be complete, with which any philosophical synthesis or world view must nevertheless accommodate itself and to which it must even subordinate itself if it to shed any light and not crumple into meaninglessness.
Joy knows.
But what is it that joy ‘knows’ that melancholy and mere pleasure do not? If I were to allow this fleeting joy, this deep, deep joy of Nietzsche’s that is ‘deeper than woe’, to speak on its own terms and in its own time, what might it tell me, what questions might it compel me to ask? What is it I see when I see through its eyes, through the clarifying lens it places before me, what does it bring into focus that I would not otherwise have seen?
Others may argue, as I may well argue against myself, that this lens distorts the world, that my viewpoint displays a callousness towards the urgent claims of unhappiness and deprivation, that I am blindly naïve, willfully unknowing, that they, more serious, more worldly, more experienced, more politically astute, possess a knowledge to which I am barred access, that this joy is, indeed, banal, of no interest and that the assumptions implicit in it have no relationship with truth, with the way things are. And yet from my perspective it is rather its extreme clarity and lack of distortion that characterizes this joy, and it is their standpoint that is naïve and banal. By what absolute measure, I want to counter, do they discredit and disown its claims? I, rather, would like to measure the value of everything, of every political or practical enterprise, of every claim to reality or truth, by the authority of this single, momentary foretaste of utopia rather than by any Platonic ‘eternal ideas and truths’. From now on, I decide, my utopia will be my own standard par excellence around which which all meaning and value must constellate. Even now as I look at the written word ‘joy’ itself, contemplating it like a Muslim reader for whom the written word is a holy object in its right, I decide it shall be the key term in my personal dictionary or mythology of scared signs and events, a parcel of associations ready to be unpacked and able to generate an infinity of themes and ideas for investigation, and a more intractable, profound object of investigation, I would venture to claim, than unhappiness. After all, Beethoven even composed an ode to joy!
Anything but blind or naïve, I have, in fact, a redoubled kind of sight or insight, a self-knowledge unavailable to the merely disillusioned - available, rather, as the zen masters already know, only at one stage immediately beyond disillusionment. I am, to use the common expression, taken out of myself. Rescued from the abyss of the endlessly self-regarding single ‘I’, I am the same and yet someone else, someone new, everything is the same yet nothing can be the same again; the present, as much as the past, is also another country. An expanded, redoubled, polarized kind of ‘I’, my real ‘I’ supplants the arrogance of my assumed ‘I’, narcissistic, Cartesian and opaque in its self-sufficient totality, and for which every ‘other’, if it was not at its disposal, could only be an obstacle to it. Having renounced ‘the will-to-possess’ - knowing that it got me nowhere anyway - I am no longer blinded by fear, I cease in this new freedom to fear the otherness of others, realizing that it is precisely in their evasive and intractable mystery, rather than any perfect amenability to myself and any desires I may have for them, that they are the true founders of my well-being, and that to get what one thinks one wants is often, after all, only to touch death. Even when alone, reflecting on and conversing with my own thoughts and feelings, I have become as ‘other’, as strange and unknowable to myself as anyone facing me. Who else to refer to here than Nietzsche? ‘If we affirm one moment, we thus affirm not only ourselves but all existence. For nothing is self-sufficient, neither in ourselves nor in things; and if our soul has trembled with happiness and sounded like a harp string just once, all eternity was needed to produce this one event - and in this single moment of affirmation all eternity was called good, redeemed, justified, and affirmed.’1
Silent, childlike, yet all-seeing, all-knowing and somehow more in accord with how things truly are, with that natural order of things, that reality synonymous with perfection itself if only we could see it, promising, perhaps, more than life can hope to offer, more than any desire would have dreamt possible, it seems to know everything yet mock knowledge, to subject itself to no knowledge and limits but its own, it seems to know and understand everything yet know that there is nothing to know or understand.
But would it ever be possible to define, to express, to comprehend it, or would this already be its kiss-of-death, a project as doomed as the attempt to describe or name the great Unnameable? And would it, like the Unnameable, even need our words or philosophy? Only music, we are told by Kierkegaard in his essay on Mozart’s Don Giovanni 2, can express or enact joy.
But might one dare to write a book, to create a work of art dedicated to joy? A ‘white painted on white’? A nothing imposed on nothing? The impossible ‘book to come’ brimming with the kind of ‘jubilatory discourse’ called for by Roland Barthes? The book of a self ‘rewritten’ by joy? An initiatory book, a ‘Book of the Dead’ with its Osiris narrating his own emergence towards open sunlight and the second life? Like music, it is only its effect on me, only its afterimage in my memory and the knowledge it seems to proffer that I can try to describe, and perhaps joy, like any emotion extreme enough to unsettle the smooth, domestic autonomy of the everyday self, is less an ephemeral event complete in its own passing than a ‘prescription’, a ‘pre-script’, a beginning, a fragment, the founding of a dialogue, of a question. When it envelops me I am unable to inhabit, to grasp, to retain any power over it. Unlivable in its immediacy as a fleeting emotion, as an emotion for its own sake, it is nothing for my purposes, its psychology of no interest. Only in my reflections following its passing, and in my reflections on the event, the person, the place or the idea that gave cause to it, and above all on its effect on me, may it be said to have its true life and meaning. ‘The only true paradise is the paradise we have lost. ‘3
Rather than allow this joy to pass me by in mid-flight I decide to listen to and sound the ‘depths’ of this deep, deep joy, despite the knowing irony of quotation marks official thinking uses like surgical clasps around a word like ‘joy’ to handle its fumbling discomfort or embarrassment with whatever seems both familiar and unfamiliar, with what seems almost amenable to and yet finally resists description or category. Even at the risk of falling into monomania, of trying to conduct a dialogue within the confines of a monologue (But is not joy itself a freewheeling, endless monologue, a celebratory game with itself?), I would like to allow it the mediation of a space, a stage to practise on me its own spirited, Socratic, ironic form of dialectics and analysis, its own Nietzschean ‘joyful science’4, its own joyful philosophy or joyful art. I want to allow joy its own kind of logic - the drama of its own ‘argument’ with unhappiness, its own ‘chain of reasoning’ - and to tell me what only joy can know and explain and unhappiness can only dream about from behind its protective walls. If joy’s heavenly ‘Utopia’ is dead, then long live Utopia and the ‘Heavenly,’ words re-minted, lent new life and new flight with the wings of these quotation marks, resurrected if only in the free space between these quotation marks, in the realm of these reflections. Joy’s innocent whiteness containing all the colours of the spectrum, its weightless ‘drop of nothingness lacking to the sea’5 might nevertheless be the reserve of a meaning deeper and broader than that accessible to the unhappiness we are often assured is the reserve of the deepest meanings and insights. Perhaps its argument advances a more exquisite, spirited, baroque kind of ‘logic’, a curvilinear, sinuous, gestural, ‘natural’ line of preference unafraid of continuously renewing and exhausting, divagating from and recoiling on itself, as if mocking the charmless rectitude of the linear and the super-rational, the conspiracy of the dour against giddy playfulness, the ordinary against the extraordinary.
I will assume for now that, having already had my time of doubt and prudent self-weighing, I have resolved my old complaints and arguments with the world and reached a kind of completion, a point in life where existence seems less problematical, when I am less easily satisfied with negative sensations of insufficiency or absence or hindrance - such as sorrow, dispossession or conflict, for example - to stimulate my will, to inspire me with ideas and images. Perhaps then I might then allow myself, this once, to grant joy in all its self-sufficient plenitude a free hearing and allow it to tell me its own side of the story. Rather than allow the jealous interdictions of unhappiness to impede its carefree flight, rather than make the superficial judgements which the necessity to make decisions and act on them often imposes on us, I might bestow on this joy the kind of attention I might otherwise grant only to a matter which seemed more ‘serious’, more weighty, more substantial, and grant it the dignity of a reply to its antithesis, the devil’s advocate of unhappiness.
Of course, I will have to admit to myself that I have been tempted to disavow any joyful moment as marginal, a trivial disruption, a mere interlude within unhappiness, or else, at the other extreme, to be avoided, an embarrassing affront to one’s self-possession or sense of ‘propriety’ and therefore an evocation of madness, chaos, egoistic inflation, hubris, holding out the promise of something which would seem impossible, forever beyond reach. It might have seemed, on the face of it, a diminution, an infantilization of the self to me and to everyone else equally infected with modernity’s suspicion and indeed abhorrence any joyful moment as anything more than an opiate, as a temporary restorative from the demands of production or shifting product or keeping time. Like everyone else on some forgotten day long ago I was myself spurned by joy in a clumsy attempt to possess it - like King Anfortas, emblem of the modern self-alienation, intellectually and emotionally at odds with himself, the spiritually tortured figure at the centre of the incomplete Parsifal legend, I was ‘wounded’ by my own failure to grasp the import of this Grail, to answer the question poised by it, dazzled, enraptured by the miracle of that plenitude endlessly flowing from a cup of pure emptiness, of nothingness. Or perhaps again, like Parsifal, in his adolescent self-absorption, equally wounded, equally dazzled, I took this joy for granted and having received this new affluence, this precious, priceless gift, this ultimate ‘commodity’ on a platter from nowhere, merely used its influx of power as a pretext to take a holiday from practical affairs, or wander off into vacant musings, allowing it to recede into memory as though nothing of great import had occurred, reassuring myself that it was enough, anyway, to live for the moment, that to name a joy was to exterminate it, that joy was already above words and above understanding and that, anyway, we were already suffering too many explanations forced upon us. And what right, I would ask, unconsciously assimilating the ethics of today’s hardworking ‘consumer’ of commodities, did I have to this joy when I had done nothing for it, not worked and paid for it like any other commodity? I would dismiss, in a crudely ‘scientific ‘way, any joy that came my way as the mere symptom or effect of a random cause, as , for example, the simple relief from some physical or emotional discomfort, or else the euphoria following some narrow escape from some misfortune or potentially fatal event - or again as mere fantasy, wish-fulfilment, an empty play of forms to distract us from the dead ends and unresolved contradictions impeding our search for the ‘real and the true’.
But if I were to examine my experience further I would have to say that when it visits me it strikes me as the very undermining of fate or expectation, the confounding and mockery of cause and effect. It alters my past, reversing, as it were, these laws and conferring on the present the effect of having been ‘retrospectively predestined’, the effect shaping its own cause, revealing the past as having followed an entirely different and more ingenious course from the arbitrary one I had imagined. And rather than escape from myself, rather than take leave of my senses in some anonymous and impersonal ecstasy, I return to myself - not in some disillusioned homecoming or retreat to the past, to the sameness of the past - but in a meeting with my own ‘destiny’, my ‘future’, which is none other than to be restored at last to the paradise garden I had thought was lost to forever. Only now does it seem that I have never been severed from that garden, that I was ‘destined’ for it from the beginning, that ‘it had to be’, and it seems that I never had to search for it in the first place, that its magic was before me all along . If, in my less than joyful moods, I like to believe that everything is predestined for the tragic, that everything is going to hell in a handcart, perhaps then I am merely like the ancient Greeks who invented tragedy for themselves, not because of any melancholic or destructive predisposition, but rather as a shaded respite from the world’s heavy sweetness, from their own surfeit of health and well-being, and I perhaps forget that this tragedy was a pretence, a construction as much as anything else.
For example, as I awake one morning I am surprised by a new sense of plenitude, of complete adequacy to myself, and rather than compelled at the first onset of consciousness to retreat once again to my room and ponder the wreckage of my own life, I am full of Messianic impatience to embrace the world’s crowded flux, its diverse clutter, its intense abundance. At once the sense of ‘sophisticated’ cosmopolitan spleen, of melancholy vacillating between timid complaisance and reckless defiance that I had habitually cultivated, gives way to a Nietzschean fearlessness towards the future and a sense that I have, at last, a future to speak of. Melancholy veers, modulates towards joy and, in the ironic, doubled-edged way of emotion, seems to give rise to it, a brilliant white sun emerging from the darkness, its light graciously fusing heaven and earth, a C Major chord shattering the D Minor tonality of my old life. I well know that a moment such as this is endlessly precedented in literature, in art and music, merely one more repetition, one more reinstatement of the same joyful event in the lives of countless individuals through history, yet nevertheless it is also the first and only joy, unprecedented, unique, addressing me, like love itself, by my own name. Transformed in an instant from a mere observer of circumstance, from the ‘all-too-human’, I am infinitely more than the arbitrary and battered entity I once took myself for, more than the passively determined outcome of my own origin, my own genes and my own history with all its mounting evidence against me.
And yet this shift of spirit imposes its own obligations and questions along with the possibilities its new influx of power contains. It is not possible to merely savour the present when the past and the future both make their claims on it. The present is not without a backward regard for time lost, for time wasted. Rather than hold out the simple promise of a clean severance from the past and everything I would rather dismiss from memory, it is also a call to recover losses, to redeem the past and retrieve the promise it left off, to return to the real life I knew I had yet to fully live. What am I to do with this joy, what should I make of it? How am I to contain and harness it? At last I am ready... but for what?
And what, I should now ask myself, exactly is this new ‘I’, this new self, this most abstract and yet concrete of selves? This joy of mine seems more than a mood, the fool’s paradise of a delusion or ‘insanity’ which any psychiatrist would be only too happy to rid me of, and it seems too devoid of sentiment, too absolute, too ‘metallic’ in its certainty and emphatic claims on me for such a dismissal. Rather than any obscuration or blindness it has the imprint of sanity, of a lucidity or perception and is not, like most Eureka moments, merely an enthusiastic ‘vision’ or faith in an all-encompassing, fixed totality or system blindly impervious to anything outside it. On the contrary, this Eureka is the very fissuring within the totality of the self-assured ‘I’. And yet it is because of this division, this new plurality, this new dimension within the very solitude of my own self, that I am opened to my self’s otherness and the possibility of mediation and reciprocal exchange with it and, ironically, with the ‘global’ otherness of the world beyond, a relation unavailable to an undivided ‘island’ self defending its own isolation. Celebrating rather than opposing the mystery of this otherness, from this point of view the world is no longer alien, there is no such thing as chaos or absurdity,there are no loose ends or disparities. If the world appears alien and chaotic to the isolated self, to the dulled vision of unhappiness, only to me does everything seem clear, full of promise, right and just , the world brimming over with more order and meaning than I know what to do with. If not already a full presence open to immediate understanding, everything yet seems ready to amount to something, every detail the embellished articulation of some indefinable, open-ended future or Utopia that resolves everything indefinitely, infinitely, radiantly, yet without obliging it to cohere to a glib finality, everything converges on the ‘experience of the impossible’6, a transcendence of what was thought merely possible, of what, given time, was merely able to ‘actualize what was already possible’6. Joy allows me a new insight into the ironic reciprocity between things, between the sensual charm of the world’s impeccable, inscrutable surfaces and the language of the spirit, of ideas. Rather than a banal economy of means, a puritanical dream of levelled, monochromatic sameness, my ‘impossible’ utopia or heaven revels in dualities, its’ ‘logic’ a quantum logic of double meanings and states of being endlessly feeding off and making play with contradiction and paradox. Already able to defend myself against every joke the world would play on me at my expense, I am no longer the fool of irony, of my own viewpoint’s ironic implications , but rather, it may be almost said, the spirit of irony itself, of the ambivalent, duplicitous irony lying in wait at the heart of any ‘pure’ idea, of anything, of nature itself. In this utopia everything singular likes to undermine and mock the singularity of its own essence by siding with and speaking for its own opposite, everything is also something else, a quantum particle also a quantum wave, a self also another, presence also absence, repose is in collusion with movement, substance with nothingness, truth with the lie.
From this summit I can laugh at the crudely defensive logic with which I had once erected staid walls of an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ to ward off whatever should threaten this placid, vulnerable happiness which yet still lacked for what it excluded, for the open, limitless spaces, for the seductive, chance intrusion of some sublime or beautiful Otherness it had forced me to renounce for its sake.
Many, it would seem, resist the transforming, initiatory potential of time and prefer to remain infantilized rather than allow time to work its alchemy on them, hysterics ( the Old German hustera, the womb) afraid of leaving the first, biological womb to enter the second womb of time and undergo its ritual for the Big Chance of a second birth and the new sight of consciousness. Everything must be drawn to the surface of consciousness if I am not to remain like one who has never taken the necessary pains to come into himself and get himself ‘thrice-born’, like Dionysus. There are in any life, it may be said, only two seminal plots, two narratives: either the successful passage from the first birth to the metaphorical death and rebirth - or else the refusal or failure of this passage, and my own birth and the course of life following it would seem meaningless, dreamlike, without plot without symmetry or shape, if it were not for this vital second birth when I seem come into myself and, as distinct from everything universally innate, everything already given to me, become the one that I was always intended to be, the creator of myself. The narrative told of me by others may have everything to do with them but is no concern of mine. Let them represent me however they like. For me time is not yet over and done with, it has more to tell me, more gifts, more surprises to unwrap.
And yet is it true that I am merely indulging in a vain escapade? How, after all, can I feel and think this way in the face of the world as it is? Am I, indeed, merely insensible, without compassion? The media brandish the bad news, there are the ‘great and burning issues of the day’ to consider, flags to wave, causes to address, and any display of this joy must seem offensive to anyone who wants, who suffers. Perhaps those people for whom life can amount to no more than a confusing distraction or imposition are right: life, finally, is a degradation demanding the ceaseless vigilance of an order to set it at rights with itself. Joy cannot last, it will consume itself, and when the effects of its drug wear off what I had thought was mine today will slip out of my hands. Is it then time that I ‘came to terms with reality and face the facts’, that ‘I took my head out of the clouds’? Yet I am more down-to-earth, more clear-headed, more objective than I ever was when I did not know this joy. Face to face with the reality of my new self, ‘enlightened’ as I am by this influx of emotion, I have awoken from that mean-spirited ‘reason’ which was only another kind of sleep pretending it was awake, awoken from that solipsistic, mad form of reasoning which dreamt of possessing the Other and fusing with it. I know that truth, knowledge, Eros and love lie precisely in the otherness and mystery of the other, in what can’t be possessed. Celebrating rather than resenting this otherness and passing of things, freed thus from anxiety towards the tenuousness of my attachments, I am paradoxically more self-sufficient, less arrogant and filled, rather, with a new generosity, an infinite compassion towards that suffering which also yearns for its opposite, for well-being, for joy. And yes, I want to say in relation to joy’s impermanence, joy festively consumes and exhausts itself like everything else, but only for the redoubled joy of endlessly begetting itself again. Like radiant, ebullient music it wants its own endless passing and transformation. It is only by withholding itself, by eluding my desire to possess it, that everything gives itself over to me.
It seems, rather, that this ‘naïveté’ is only the arch irony of a wisdom and experience which has already regained the purity and clarity of childhood, a smiling wisdom, the wisdom of Sophia, the goddess of wisdom and knowledge beyond wisdom and knowledge, who waits for us at the cul-de-sac of every exhausted search for meaning. The wisdom of the Mona Lisa who is yet ‘older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times, and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas...’7 Not so ingenuous as they imagine, this joy is more knowing, coherent and profound than the heavy resentment of those who, in the name of the profound, take refuge in seriousness only because they are too shallow to see that ‘life is too serious to be taken seriously.’8 What, anyway, do those anaemic souls know, I ask myself , with their longing for a lost paradise, their retreat to origins, unable as they are to withstand the onslaught of the present and its eternal becoming? Both the yearning, otherworldly Medievalism and the worldly rationalism that would abandon the transitory and particular as illusory and side for the eternal, for the realms of ‘the pure spirit’, seem sterile and redundant in my present state. What need do I have now to spurn the world for the consolation of that cloudy heaven of floating abstractions when, secretly, impossibly - and improperly, from the point of view of those who would ‘cure’ me in the name of a dubious, worldly pragmatism or propriety - I have already ‘died and gone to heaven’ and now comprehend the whole in all its parts, when I am already, like God, the very substance of the stars and heavens? Joy, rather, wants to lead me down from its summits to selflessly re-enchant the world, to ‘re-illusion’ it with the kind of magic accessible to childhood and first romance, to reveal the world as neither so obstructive, insensible nor chaotic as I had once come to believe in my disillusionment. If all is as intangible and provisional as an image, a dream, a spectacle of dancing atoms, then so be it. Who would have it any other way other than as theatre? This sacred theatre of joy is where things have the chance to happen, where everything subordinates itself to being seen, to be revealed, to being named, the place where the real finds its destiny as spectacle, as appearance. And my own destiny has been none other than to bare witness to the world’s display of forms, their coming and dying away, without demanding anything more from them. It is enough for me that I can simply touch the world with my eyes. The mystery is not in any hidden depths but in the visibility of things clinging inscrutably to their own limits, limits which delineate and foreground that infinity which would otherwise be nothing without them. In childhood everything was surface, everything was what it was and had to be. Later on surfaces seemed to mean something more and as such I wanted to look behind, beyond them, but it is only now when I have, as it were, forsworn surfaces for the sake of an infinite, unconditional ‘going forth’, that surfaces are surfaces again and I can celebrate their scintillating effects.
I breathe the rarefied Alpine air of this spirit, I am at home with, even intimate with the immensity of the beyond, I experience the Hindu Samadhi (the divine within) but for all that I do not exclude the charm of the local, the particular. I want to celebrate once again small, immaculate things, sinuous arabesques, the bright clarity of the East. I can admire beauty’s counter-force to the powers of the brutal, to the banal, to everything which would diminish the charm each day’s mystery. I can laugh again, but this laughter is not a satanic, hopeless onslaught obliterating every detail of the world for the sake of a pure vision of clean, flawless monotony, for oblivion and sleep, but that very primal ripple of laughter, that celestial, primordial Nitrous Oxide which negated the void in an explosive instant and brought all the forms in the universe into being. If I was once afraid of beauty’s cruel indifference to my misfortunes and wayward moods, now this beauty - this heightened, transparent beauty - remains loyal to me and confides its secrets to me. Having already ennobled me with a power equal to itself and to the things it illuminates, equal to the objects and spaces which would otherwise have merely subjugated me, and equal to that perfection with which I have already been conjoined by my very cognisance of it, beauty, once so intractably remote, now seems to approach of its own accord, to concur , to resound with something in me, to loose its heaviness, to take on a lightness and transparency and once more dance and fly.
I remember, in a moment of doubt, how Kierkegaard wrote that not to despair of the world is a sin, an arrogance, a hubris, a tempter of fate. Yet, according to the ‘theology’ or ‘philosophy’ of my heightened state, any despairing of the world, any hating of existence, any negating of the senses in an attempt to elude the invasive volatility of a world which sometimes, it would seem, has no place for us, would seem an evasion, a cowardice. The safer, easier, less noble way would be to choose not to be rather than to be, to take the path of least resistance and retire to a place at one remove from the world which, of course, would nevertheless merely continue on its merry way without us. But what has despair’s mute unknowingness ever taught me, what is its fruitless, insipid wisdom compared to the bright, benevolent fruitfulness of this joy? And I remember again that Kierkegaard says in the same space that to despair is also a sin,9 so perhaps this joy demonstrates the ‘negative theology’ of this positive, affirmative despair of holding to the past, to objects, to others - as a strategy for releasing oneself from the eternal round of birth and death. Joy’s theology is not so black and white, does not demand an ‘either/or’ choice.
For now, in accord with the laws that this joy reveals to me, and despite both the ideologues of relativism and the absolute, it seems that I have no other option amongst the infinite multiplicity of choices available to me (such as, for instance, to side either with the aesthetic or the spirit) but to side with Kierkegaard and ‘choose only myself’, to ‘choose myself absolutely’, as he put it, and to choose this joy which is not something outside me but none other than my very self, my ‘true’ self. My only response is to throw everything in with a ‘faith’ in this pure, dangerous and impossible idea, and yet the only idea that was worth anything. I am to appoint myself as my own ‘chosen one’ and elect myself to be rather than not to be, to be here rather than elsewhere. As a creature of creation I have no other choice but to be the creator, the artist of myself, to be a ‘going forth’, a ‘passion’, a ‘becoming’ as opposed to an already ‘become.’ Guilt for the past, regrets, sorrow for what was lost? It is too late, anyway, to undo this joy when I have already been undone by it. Now there is no going back to my safe haven, to the land of the unhappy consciousness. I must dare risk, sacrifice everything, I tell myself. It’s now or never. Judgment day. Better, as they say, to leave the dead to the dead. Why augment the world’s suffering with my own, why disturb the sleep of the dead? They can carry on well enough without me. This joy is a predisposition latent in the natural order of things, the dice is already loaded in its favour.
It might well be pragmatic and ‘realistic’ of me to pass it over in silence, but again, what, realistically, will I do with this mass of energy and spirit which remains? Only by allowing joy to speak, to reveal itself, to make itself visible, might it be able to thwart modernity’s conspiracy of silence against it. Doesn’t this joy demand the precision of articulation, however impossible? ‘Say me, write me, name me’ it says. ‘Lend me the substance of adequate expression and so affect a happy vengeance on the chaos which would otherwise obliterate all remembrance of me. Take revenge even on me, on joy, on life, as you would take revenge on any emotion that would dominate and crush you.’ It would seem to follow that I owe it to myself to attempt to disclose, to admit this ‘secret’ of mine to myself and others, that I am ethically obliged to speak of it rather than guard it to myself like King Midas with his gold and petrify myself in a golden silence. Failing to lend it words, no matter how inadequate, would be to risk the true kind of madness - as opposed to this madness held in check - of being defeated by joy, unable to reflect on it at one remove and articulate it. Again, only in my reflections on it may it survive and come into its own, intensified and prolonged by these reflections countering its power with their own.‘ The sublime is what resists domination.’10 (Theodor Adorno) And indeed, isn’t it the light of untroubled clarity itself, doesn’t this joy seem to imply there is nothing which cannot be said? And if I am to concede that this event is more than a narcotic or diverting agitation, surely I am bound to try and extract a more lasting benefit from it. Its first glow remains in the memory as a permanent remnant, a precious souvenir from a holiday in utopia, and, like Prometheus, I would rescue it from this utopian dream, from its distant place in the house of the gods, and return it to earth, replete with its new kind of knowledge, with everything lived and loved, rescued from banality, crystallized as word and image.
©Copyright 2008
Adrian Hart
1. Friedrich Nietzsche
The Will to Power (Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale translators) New York: Random House, 1967. (pages 532-533)
2. Soren Kierkegaard
Either/Or
The Immediate Erotic Stages or The Musical Erotic (Alastair Hannay translator)
Penguin Books, 1992. (Pages 60-135)
3. Marcel Proust
Remembrance of Things Past
4. With reference to Friedrich Nietzsche’s Die Frohliche Wissenshaft
Translated as La Gaya Scienza or The Gay Science or The Joyous Wisdom
Translated, with commentary by Walter Kauffmann
(New York: Vintage 1974)
5. Stéphane Mallarmé Igitur (V)
Stéphane Mallarmé Selected Poetry and Prose
Translated by Mary Ann Caws
(New York: New Directions, 2001)
6. Jacques Derrida Paper Machine
As If It Were Possible, “Within Such Limits”
Pages 81, 89, 91
Translated by Rachel Bowlby
(Stanford California: Stanford University Press, 2005)
7. Walter Pater The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry
Page 89
(Oxford: Oxford University Press,1998)
8. Oscar Wilde The Critic as Artist,
The Soul of Man under Socialism & Selected Critical Prose
(London: Penguin, 2001)
9. Soren Kierkegaard Either/Or : A Fragment of Life. The Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of Personality
Page 316
Translated by Alastair Hannay
(London: Penguin, 1992)
10. Theodor W. Adorno Aesthetic Theory
Towards a Theory of the Artwork
Page 260
Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedman, Editors
Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor
(London: Continuum, 1997)
Adrian Hart
Auckland
New Zealand
Email: ahart@zeroland.co.nz
