Space reaches out from us and translates the world.
Rilke, “What Birds Plunge Through Is Not the Intimate Space”
We began our investigation of bittersweet Eros by countenancing a mistranslation of Sappho’s glukupikron. We assumed that Sappho puts gluku- first because Eros’ sweetness is obvious to everyone, his bitterness less so. We then turned our attention to the bitter side. These judgments were shallow, as we are now in a position to see. Eros’ sweetness is inseparable from his bitterness, and each participates, in a way not yet obvious at all, in our human will to knowledge. There would seem to be some resemblance between the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker. It has been an endeavour of philosophy from the time of Sokrates to understand the nature and uses of that resemblance. But not only philosophers are intrigued to do so. I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them. They are not like anything else, but they are like each other. How? Let us consider whether the ancient poets’ conception of glukupikrotēs, as we have come to understand it, has any light to shed on this matter.
“All men by their very nature reach out to know,” says Aristotle (Metaph. A 1.980a21). If this is so, it discloses something important about the activities of knowing and desiring. They have at their core the same delight, that of reaching, and entail the same pain, that of falling short or being deficient. This disclosure may be already implied in a certain usage of Homer, for epic diction has the same verb (mnaomai) for ‘to be mindful, to have in mind, to direct one’s attention to’ and ‘to woo, court, be a suitor.’ Stationed at the edge of itself, or of its present knowledge, the thinking mind launches a suit for understanding into the unknown. So too the wooer stands at the edge of his value as a person and asserts a claim across the boundaries of another. Both mind and wooer reach out from what is known and actual to something different, possibly better, desired. Something else. Think about what that feels like.
When we try to think about our own thinking, as when we try to feel our own desire, we find ourselves located at a blind point. It is like the point where the observer of Velazquez’ painting Las Meninas stands as he views the painting. This is a painting of Velazquez painting the king and queen of Spain. But the king and queen are not part of the picture. Or are they? There are many people, including Velazquez, in the painting but none seem to be the king and queen, and all are gazing steadily out at someone else beyond the picture frame. Who? As we meet the looks of these people we imagine at first that they are gazing at us. Then we notice some faces in a mirror at the back of the room. Whose are the faces? Our own? No. These are the king and queen of Spain. But now, just where are the king and queen located? They seem to be standing precisely where we are standing as we gaze into the painting at their reflection there. Then where are we? For that matter, who are we?
We are no one in particular and we are standing at a blind point. Michel Foucault has analyzed Velazquez’ painting and its blind point in his study of the archaeology of human knowledge, The Order of Things. Foucault calls the blind point “that essential hiding place into which our gaze disappears from ourselves at the moment of actual looking” (4). We cannot see that point, as we cannot think thought or desire desire, except by a subterfuge. In Las Meninas we see the subterfuge just coming into focus in a mirror at the back of the room. In Foucault’s terms this mirror provides “a metathesis of visibility” because around it the painting organizes a deliberate vacancy: “The lines that run through the depth of the picture are not complete; they all lack a segment of their trajectories. This gap is caused by the absence of the king—an absence that is an artifice on the part of the painter” (16).
Velazquez’ artifice triangulates our perception so that we all but see ourselves looking. That is, he has arranged his painting in such a way that a haunting fact gradually dawns on us as we observe it. Namely the fact that the vacancy recorded by the mirror is not that of King Philip IV and Queen Mariana. It is our own. Standing like understudies in the place where the king and queen would be, we recognize (vaguely disappointed) that the faces looming from the mirror are not our own and we all but see (if the angle did not keep jumping out of focus) that point where we disappear into ourselves in order to look. A point lying in the gap between ourselves and them. Attempts to focus on that point pull the mind into vertigo, while at the same time a particular acute delight is present. We long to see that point, although it tears us. Why?
There is no stillness at that point. Its components split and diverge each time we try to bring them into focus, as if interior continents were wrenching askew in the mind. It is not a point upon which we can gaze in such a way as to peacefully converge with the king and queen in one image there, one noun. That point is a verb. Each time we look at it, it acts. How?
Let us keep these questions in mind as we consider another point on the landscape of human thinking, a point which is also a verb—moreover a verb that triangulates, haunts, splits, wrenches and delights us each time it acts. Let us consider the point of verbal action called ‘metaphor.’
“To give names to nameless things by transference [metaphora] from things kindred or similar in appearance” is how Aristotle describes the function of metaphor (Rh. 3.2.1405a34). In current theory, this process of thought may best be regarded as an interaction between the subject and the predicate of the metaphorical sentence. Metaphorical sense is produced by the whole sentence and works through what one critic calls a “semantic impertinence” (Cohen 1966), that is, a violation of the code of pertinence or relevance that rules the ascription of predicates in ordinary use in the language. The violation allows a new pertinence or congruence to emerge, which is the metaphorical meaning, from the collapse of the ordinary or literal meaning. How does the new pertinence emerge? There is in the mind a change or shift of distance, which Aristotle calls an epiphora (Poet. 21.1457b7), bringing two heterogeneous things close to reveal their kinship. The innovation of metaphor occurs in this shift of distance from far to near, and it is effected by imagination. A virtuoso act of imagination brings the two things together, sees their incongruence, then sees also a new congruence, meanwhile continuing to recognize the previous incongruence through the new congruence. Both the ordinary, literal sense and a novel sense are present at once in the words of a metaphor; both the ordinary, descriptive reference and a novel reference are held in tension by the metaphor’s way of looking at the world.
Thus, tension of an acute and unresolvable kind informs this mental action. It demands of the mind a “stereoscopic vision” (as Stanford 1936 puts it) or a “split reference” (in Jakobsen’s terms), that is, an ability to hold in equipoise two perspectives at once. Paul Ricoeur calls this condition of mental tension a state of war wherein the mind has not yet reached conceptual peace but is caught between distance and proximity, between sameness and difference. Such warfare marks the landscape of all human thought, according to Ricoeur:
We may speak with Gadamer of the fundamental metaphoricity of thought to the extent that the figure of speech that we call ‘metaphor’ allows us a glance at the general procedure by which we produce concepts. This is because in the metaphoric process the movement toward genus is arrested by the resistance of the difference and, as it were, intercepted by the figure of rhetoric. (Ricoeur 1978, 149)
An act of arrest and interception that splits the mind and puts it in a state of war within itself is the act called ‘metaphor.’ Let us compare with this act our experience of Las Meninas. At the core of the act called ‘metaphor’ our minds reach toward an identification: “to give names to nameless things” as Aristotle says. Velazquez’ artifice, in its turn, provokes us to try to give a name to that object at which all the eyes looking out of the painting are looking. For a moment we imagine they are all looking at us. Then we see the faces in the mirror. Our movement toward naming those faces is arrested by the difference between the two species (ourselves, the king and queen) who are candidates for that genus. The arrest occurs with a wrench that splits our vision, divides our judgment and is not resolved no matter how often we return to it for, each time we look, our moment of delighted self-recognition is intercepted by two dimly royal faces in the glass. Aristotle pinpoints such a moment of interception in metaphorical thinking, when the mind seems to say to itself: “Well how true! I was quite wrong after all!” He calls it a paradoxical element (ti paradoxon) and judges it one of the essential pleasures of metaphor (Rh. 3.2.1412a6).
Eros also has “something paradoxical” at the core of his power, at that point where bitter intercepts sweet. There is a shift of distance that brings up close what is absent and different. “Absences of eyes in the statues” present Helen to Menelaos as he stands in his empty hall, at the blind point between love and hate (Aesch. Ag. 414-19). “They love him and they hate him and they long to possess him” says Aristophanes of the love affair between the Greek dēmos and its favorite Alkibiades (Ran. 1425). “I’m in love, I’m not in love! I’m insane, I’m not insane!” cries out Anakreon (413 PMG). Something paradoxical arrests the lover. Arrest occurs at a point of inconcinnity between the actual and the possible, a blind point where the reality of what we are disappears into the possibility of what we could be if we were other than we are. But we are not. We are not the king and queen of Spain. We are not lovers who can both feel and attain their desires. We are not poets who need no metaphor or symbol to carry our meaning across.
The English word ‘symbol’ is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover. In the words of Aristophanes (in Plato’s Symposium):
ἕκαστος οὖν ἡμῶν ἐστιν ἀνθρώπου σύμβολον, ἅτε τετμημένος ὥσπερ αἱ ψῆτται, ἐξ ἑνὸς δύο· ζητεῖ δὴ ἀεὶ τὸ αὑτοῦ ἕκαστος σύμβολον.
Each one of us is but the symbolon of a human being—sliced in half like a flatfish, two instead of one—and each pursues a neverending search for the symbolon of himself. (191d)
Every hunting, hungering lover is half of a knucklebone, wooer of a meaning that is inseparable from its absence. The moment when we understand these things—when we see what we are projected on a screen of what we could be—is invariably a moment of wrench and arrest. We love that moment, and we hate it. We have to keep going back to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact with the possible. But this also entails watching it disappear. Only a god’s word has no beginning or end. Only a god’s desire can reach without lack. Only the paradoxical god of desire, exception to all these rules, is neverendingly filled with lack itself.
“Sappho drew this conception together and called Eros glukupikron.”8
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8 So says Maximus of Tyre, a Sophist and itinerant lecturer of the second century A.D. (18.9; Sappho LP, fr. 172).