When things break down, then sometimes we have to remind ourselves that there are things in the first instance. This is a movement of consolation, of turning toward the sombre fact that in this world: things are purported to exist. Assuaged by the very fact of being, even the most perilous state of ruin reaps the reward of matter. When the world falls into emptiness, then only I outlive that emptiness, and I do this by maintaining my position in the world, of occupying the space-world.
Yet things of this world often evade their own being, precluding the very desire to assign a name to their identity. Things break down. And what transpires when they do? The Nothing? The Void? A Calling? Does empty space colonise atoms that are left too long in the lurking shadows? And when I sleep, does the vacuum of being surround me on all sides, only receding into the distance when I’m awoken from a dream that gives me a physical start? My atomic structure recomposes itself, pushes the void further into the darkness, and draws a limit on the boundless horizon of a world, in which the gods are no longer present.
This is the Metakosmia, the space between worlds, the draft unleashed when two things are prised apart. What dwells in this liminal sphere? How does this realm prevent itself from falling apart? The Epicureans thought that access to the Metakosmia was only possible via dreams. There, the immateriality of the spirit realm escaped the paradox of being neither visible nor invisible, neither thing nor no-thing. It is a world, into which dreams assume a level of felt reality, as Tennyson’s poem Lucretius exemplifies:
The Gods, who haunt
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of mow
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm!
The lucid interspace of world and world,
Where never creeps a cloud, or moves a wind,
Nor ever falls the least white star of mow
Nor ever lowest roll of thunder moans,
Nor sound of human sorrow mounts to mar
Their sacred everlasting calm!
Calm is that absence of pain, the space between worlds, the interspace in which being is both denied and affirmed. The “harsh frost” of the winter’s day reveals itself as nothing more than a reverberation of a spirit that dwells far from the limits of this Earth. Far from Earth, and also far from the phenomenon of touch. On the incompatibility of the Earth and the Metakosmia, Lucretius has the following to say: “For the flimsy nature of the gods, far removed from our senses, is scarcely visible even to the perception of the mind. Since it eludes the touch and pressure of our hands, it can have no contact with anything that is tangible to us. For what cannot be touched cannot touch.” (Chapter III, 146 my italics).
3 comments:
Thanks for bringing Metakosmia to my attention. Rather like Plato's chora, then, sensed only 'as if in a dream.' I love these relations between facticity and dreaminess, the reality that only gets grasped through a sense of its unreality that feels virtual, hypothetical.
Last week I wrote about these in the context of the impulse to define, which Cioran says is born of despair. So I want to enter . . .
the place where sorrow and definition perfectly meet, purely intersect. This place would be at once an absolutely sorrowful definition and an absolutely definitional sorrow, the site of a definition of sorrow so sorrowful that it provides the one who understands it with a sorrow defining their very being, a sorrow, in other words, that coincides with one’s understanding of its definition so purely as to constitute self-understanding. In light of the what/that distinction, this definition can only be fulfilled by a sorrow that is simultaneously a kind of empty or contentless or undetermined sorrow, a sorrow over a pure that, and a sorrow over an absolute what, a something so unmistakably unfortunate, so plenitudinously negative, that it cannot be countermanded from any outside or external perspective, by no god or emperor. Only thus will we arrive at the intersection of a most sorrowful definition and a most definitional sorrow, the definition of a sorrow our sorrow for which gives us the sorrow it defines as our own being, in short, a sorrow as inconceivable as it is inconsolable, a sorrow of being.
All best,
Nicola
p.s. will email you full text of lecture from last week
well written post.Thanks for sharing..
regards
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Indeed. A "reality that only gets grasped through a sense of its unreality that feels virtual, hypothetical." There is also something traumatic about this notion of a world accessible only through indirection, as though it was lurking within the body but forever evading the visual glance. Parasitic but also inaccessible.
Cioran says the impulse to define is born of despair? Yes, in my Merleau-Pontyean outlook, that sounds to me like a form of pre-reflective sorrow, necessarily (sub)liminal as it would evade and be effaced by volitional willing. Undetermined sorrow, too. I somehow feel that Levinas's "night of the il ya" has a significant role to play in bringing to light the idea of a "purely intersect" place. Again, a nameless thing caught through a reflected glance, but at the same time, entirely formed from the core of being.
Dylan.
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