The Latin poet Lucretius dedicates practically an entire book of his poem to the discussion of simulacra. A simulacrum is like an appearance; for Lucretius, an Epicurean, ‘all things have what we call simulacra: a kind of slight membrane that comes away from the surfaces of their bodies and whirls here and there through the air’. With these words, which I am pleased to translate according to my whims, begins, in Book IV of De Rerum Natura, the explanation of what simulacra are. An explanation which, in some ways, has never been surpassed. This fantastical and essentially magical physics of slight membranes may make us laugh, even if, more or less, until the eighteenth century, science gave credence to things with not much more basis in fact; still, the discourse we find in Lucretius on the effects of simulacra on human behavior gives us highly exact information about the influence of fantastical mirages on the passions. Proceeding intuitively, feeling his way along, Lucretius discerns, no less clearly than the moralists and psychoanalysts, the action of the springs of our conduct. Everything – in Lucretius or in psychoanalysis – may be summed up in terms of desire, in the broadest sense of the word: if we desire simulacra, it is because they are external, and the impulse toward simulacra is of a piece with that impulse which, in puberty, drives us toward fusion with all that appears different from ourselves and for that reason calls to us and attracts us.
There is a poetic truth deeper than scientific or material truth, and it is to this that Lucretius aspires. What he says about simulacra moves us, even when we know it to be based on hypotheses science has declared false; it moves us by its admirable acuity of observation and the delicacy of its expression. What simulacrum is clearer than the erotic dreams of adolescence? ‘Adolescents, pervaded with the fecund fluid of youth, once the generating seed has ripened in their bodies, are drawn toward those simulacra a beautiful face and seductive colours offer to them,’ we read. Yes – and Lucretius’s way of saying this is crude and tender equal parts, and that is no easy thing – these simulacra push us to possess them, because ‘passion turns toward the object that has inflicted the wound of love. Because the law dictates that the wounded man shall lie down by the wounded woman: blood flows in the direction of the person who has wounded…’ And so ‘this is Venus for us, this is the reality we call love; this is the spring that spatters sweetly and drop by drop works its way into our hearts and will later freeze us with sorrow. Because, if the beloved is absent, we always keep an image of it near us…’
Yet, Lucretius rushes to add, simulacra of this kind are to be avoided, we must slake our amorous thirst with whomever we come across, rather than concentrating on an individual who may well make us suffer. In this way, he pays tribute to his inner Epicurean: but what comes first – the description, in dreams or waking, of the mirages of love and desire, of the languor, the fury, the longing they inspire – is likely something else: the tribute the poet Lucretius pays to the passions of Lucretius the man. The philosopher tells himself, and tells us, not to let the simulacra carry us away; the poet, the man, knows and feels obscurely, just as we all do, that at times some simulacra are stronger than any philosophy, and that the entirety of our lives may perhaps be conceived as a measureless simulacrum: wounding, intermittently sweet.
19 January 1980