Pascal’s Abyss

Pascal had his abyss that moved along with him.
(Baudelaire, “The Abyss”).

Shortly after he was nearly thrown into the Seine in his coach, Pascal became fixated with the idea that he saw an abyss on his left hand. The incident had scarred his bodily awareness of space, such that the geometrical proportions of a room took on a renewed significance, now endowed with a “great hole leading who knows where; I see only the infinite through all windows” (Baudelaire). How is space moved from the materiality of its geometrical proportions, delineated through reason and abstraction, to space as an expression of “the eternal silence” felt through the contours of the body?

In Léon Spilliaert’s drawing, “Vertigo” (reproduced above), this collision of geometry and anxiety produces a supra-real landscape. Contours become punctuated with massive voids, angles lose their solidity, while the exposure leading from above to below becomes a plight of terror. The face of the human in the drawing is darkened, an amorphous hole where the eyes should be peers out from beneath the hood. There is motion in the person’s movement, the scarf caught in the breeze. In this scene of movement and deformed geometry, Spilliaert depicts tremendous hesitation in her movement. Indeed, more than hesitation, the figure is frozen between steps, with her body orientated toward the top, from where her “spirit, haunted by vertigo, envies non-being in its insentience” (Baudelaire). Baudelaire’s characterisation of Pascal’s abyss establishes a dilemma that the figure in Spilliaert’s drawing viscerally confronts: to commit to descent, would risk exposure to the precipice separating one place from another. Whereas, remaining stationary eschews one phobia for another, claustrophobia: the pathology of having no place to escape to.

How will phenomenology contend with Pascal’s abyss? How, that is, will phenomenology contend with the abyssal experience that is no longer reducible to the objective components of space? Of course, phenomenology has already accounted for the experience of space, which is less reliant on points, grids, and measurements, and more concerned with the affective relation we have with the intimacy of the “home.” Phenomenology’s orientation toward being “at home” in the world thus attests to a relationality bridging experience and world into a unitary phenomenon. That this relationality tends to privilege “felicitous” instances of dwelling does not, however, preclude the relation being redirected toward the experience of abyss. For what is at stake in this relation, is the animism of space, the very birth of place’s genius loci. More of which next time.