… with one impulse of the heart we only just grazed it—and sighing left the first fruits of our spirit there and came back to the sound of our human tongue where words have beginnings and endings.
Augustine, Confessions 9.10
When I desire you a part of me is gone: your lack is my lack. I would not be in want of you unless you had partaken of me, the lover reasons. “A hole is being gnawed in [my] vitals” says Sappho (LP, fr. 96.16-17). “You have snatched the lungs out of my chest” (West, IEG 191) and “pierced me right through the bones” (193) says Archilochos. “You have worn me down” (Alkman 1.77 PMG), “grated me away” (Ar., Eccl. 956), “devoured my flesh” (Ar., Ran. 66), “sucked my blood” (Theokritos 2.55), “mowed off my genitals” (?Archilochos, West, IEG 99.21), “stolen my reasoning mind” (Theognis 1271). Eros is expropriation. He robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity and leaves the lover, essentially, less. This attitude toward love is grounded for the Greeks in oldest mythical tradition: Hesiod describes in his Theogony how castration gave birth to the goddess Aphrodite, born from the foam around Ouranos’ severed genitals (189-200). Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. Or so he reckons.
But his reckoning involves a quick and artful shift. Reaching for an object that proves to be outside and be yond himself, the lover is provoked to notice that self and its limits. From a new vantage point, which we might call self-consciousness, he looks back and sees a hole. Where does that hole come from? It comes from the lover’s classificatory process. Desire for an object that he never knew he lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, as desire for a necessary part of himself. Not a new acquisition but something that was always, properly, his. Two lacks become one.
The shifty logic of the lover unfolds naturally from his ruses of desire. We have seen how lovers, like Sappho in fragment 31, recognize Eros as a sweetness made out of absence and pain. The recognition calls into play various tactics of triangulation, various ways of keeping the space of desire open and electric. To think about one’s own tactics is always a tricky business. The exegesis measures out three angles: the lover himself, the beloved, the lover redefined as incomplete without the beloved. But this trigonometry is a trick. The lover’s next move is to collapse the triangle into a two-sided figure and treat the two sides as one circle. ‘Seeing my hole, I know my whole’ he says to himself. His own reasoning process suspends him between the two terms of this pun.
It seems impossible to talk or reason about erotic lack without falling into this punning language. Consider, for example, Plato’s Lysis. In this dialogue Sokrates is attempting to define the Greek word philos, which means both ‘loving’ and ‘loved,’ both ‘friendly’ and ‘dear.’ He takes up the question whether the desire to love or befriend something is ever separable from lack of it. His interlocutors are led to acknowledge that all desire is longing for that which properly belongs to the desirer but has been lost or taken away somehow—no one says how (221e-22a). Puns flash as the reasoning quickens. This part of the discussion depends upon an adroit use of the Greek word oikeios, which means both ‘suitable, related, akin to myself’ and ‘belonging to me, properly mine.’ So Sokrates addresses the two boys who are his interlocutors and says:
… Τοῦ οἰκείου δή, ὡς ἔοικεν, ὅ τε ἔρως καὶ ἡ φιλία καὶ ἡ ἐπιθυμία τυγχάνει οὖσα, ὡς φαίνεται, ὧ Μενέξενέ τε καὶ Λύσι.—Συνεφάτην.—Ὑμεῖς ἄρα εἰ φίλοι ἐστὸν ἀλλήλοις, φύσει πη οἰκεῖοί ἐσθ᾽ ὑμῖν αὐτοῖς.
… Desire and love and longing are directed at that which is akin to oneself [tou oikeiou], it seems. So if you two are loving friends [philoi] of one another then in some natural way you belong to one another [oikeioi esth’]. (221e)
It is profoundly unjust of Sokrates to slip from one meaning of oikeios to another, as if it were the same thing to recognize in someone else a kindred soul and to claim that soul as your own possession, as if it were perfectly acceptable in love to blur the distinction between yourself and the one you love. All the lover’s reasoning and hopes of happiness are built upon this injustice, this claim, this blurred distinction. So his thought process is continually moving and searching through the borderland of language where puns occur. What is the lover searching for there?
A pun is a figure of language that depends on similarity of sound and disparity of meaning. It matches two sounds that fit perfectly together as aural shapes yet stand insistently, provocatively apart in sense. You perceive homophony and at the same time see the semantic space that separates the two words. Sameness is projected onto difference in a kind of stereoscopy. There is something irresistible in that. Puns appear in all literatures, are apparently as old as language and unfailingly fascinate us. Why? If we had the answer to this question we would know more clearly what the lover is searching for as he moves and reasons through the borderlands of his desire.
We do not yet have an answer. Nonetheless we should pay attention to the punning character of the lover’s logic: its structure and its irresistibility have something important to tell us about desire, and about the lover’s search. We have seen how Sokrates makes use of punning language to slip from one sense of oikeios (‘kindred’) to another sense (‘mine’) when in the Lysis he is discussing eros as lack. Sokrates makes no attempt to conceal his wordplay here; indeed, he draws attention to it with an uncommon grammatical usage. He deliberately mixes up reciprocal and reflexive pronouns when he addresses the two philoi, Lysis and Menexenos. That is, when he says to them “… you belong to one another” (221e6) he uses a word for ‘one another’ that more commonly means ‘yourselves’ (hautois). Sokrates is playing, through words, upon the desires of the young lovers before him. Mix-up of self and other is much more easily achieved in language than in life, but somewhat the same effrontery is involved. Like eros, puns flout the edges of things. Their power to allure and alarm derives from this. Within a pun you see the possibility of grasping a better truth, a truer meaning, than is available from the separate senses of either word. But the glimpse of that enhanced meaning, which flashes past in a pun, is a painful thing. For it is inseparable from your conviction of its impossibility. Words do have edges. So do you.
The punning logic of the lover is an important piece of cogitation. The lover’s puns show the outline of what he learns, in a flash, from the experience of eros—a vivid lesson about his own being. When he inhales Eros, there appears within him a sudden vision of a different self, perhaps a better self, compounded of his own being and that of his beloved. Touched to life by erotic accident, this enlargement of self is a complex and unnerving occurrence. All too easily it becomes ridiculous, as we see for example when Aristophanes takes the typical lover’s fantasy to its logical, circular conclusion in his myth of round people. But at the same time a sensation of serious truth accompanies the lover’s vision of himself. There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love. They seem truer than other perceptions, and more truly your own, won from reality at personal cost. Greatest certainty is felt about the beloved as necessary complement to you. Your powers of imagination connive at this vision, calling up possibilities from beyond the actual. All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus. A gust of godlikeness may pass through you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible and present. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
We might look, for purposes of comparison, at how this insight takes shape within the mind of a modern lover. In her novel The Waves, Virginia Woolf describes a young man named Neville watching his beloved Bernard approach him from across a garden:
Something now leaves me; something goes from me to meet that figure who is coming, and assures me that I know him before I see who it is. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another. As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody—with whom?—with Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I? (83)
Neville is less alarmed by the hole in him than are the Greek lyric poets when they record the depradations of eros. And, unlike Sokrates, Neville does not resort to puns to account for his mixed-up condition. He simply watches it happen and measures off its three angles: desire moves out from Neville himself, ricochets off Bernard, and bends back to Neville—but not the same Neville. “I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody.” The piece of himself that goes out to Bernard makes Bernard immediately familiar “even before I see who it is.” As Sokrates would say, it makes Bernard oikeios. Even so, Neville goes on to appraise the experience as an ambivalent one, both “useful” and “painful.” As in the Greek poets, its pain arises at that edge where the self is adulterated and bitter verges alarmingly on sweet. Eros’ ambivalence unfolds directly from this power to ‘mix up’ the self. The lover helplessly admits that it feels both good and bad to be mixed up, but is then driven back upon the question ‘Once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?’ Desire changes the lover. “How curiously”: he feels the change happen but has no ready categories to assess it. The change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before.
Some such glimpse may be the mechanism that originally shapes a notion of ‘self’ in each of us, according to some analyses. Freudian theory traces this notion to a fundamental decision of love and hate, somewhat like the ambivalent condition of the lover, that splits our souls and forms our personality. There is at the beginning of life, in the Freudian view, no awareness of objects as distinct from one’s own body. The distinction between self and not-self is made by the decision to claim all that the ego likes as ‘mine’ and to reject all that the ego dislikes as ‘not mine.’ Divided, we learn where our selves end and the world begins. Self-taught, we love what we can make our own and hate what remains other.
Historians of the Greek psyche, notably Bruno Snell, have adapted Freud’s ontogenetic picture to account for the rise of individualism in Greek society during the archaic and early classical periods. In the view of Snell, the first formation in Greek society of a self-conscious and self-controlled human personality, aware of itself as an organic whole distinct from other personalities and from the world around it, can be traced to a moment of emotional ambivalence that splits the soul. Sappho’s adjective glukupikron signals that moment. It is a revolution in human self-awareness that Snell calls “the discovery of the mind.” Blocked eros is its trigger. Its consequence is the consolidation of a ‘self’:
The love which has its course barred, and fails to reach its fulfilment acquires a particularly strong hold over the human heart. The sparks of a vital desire burst into flame at the very moment when the desire is blocked in its path. It is the obstruction which makes the wholly personal feelings conscious.… [the frustrated lover] seeks the cause in his own personality. (1953, 53)
Snell’s is a sensational thesis and has provoked excitement, wide dissent and ongoing controversy. No resolution of the questions of history and historiography involved is available, but Snell’s insight about the importance of bittersweet love in our lives in a powerful one, appealing to the common experience of many lovers. Neville, for example, seems to come round to the same conclusion, as he ponders his love for Bernard, in The Waves: “To be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange”(80).