David Baker has received fellowships and prizes from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Ohio Arts Council, Poetry Society of America, Society of Midland Authors, and the Pushcart Foundation.
I first heard this lecture at Breadloaf in 2004. When I was putting together Bliss 6, I wanted to republish this essay because I loved it so much. It was originally published in The Gettysburg Review, Summer 2003, Vol 16.1. Gettysburgreview.com. Right now, it is NOT available on their website. This is a Bliss Archive Essay, from Bliss 6, 2007.
IF: On Transit, Transcendence, and Trope
IF I were doing Derrida, as one theorist friend describes her work, I would have begun in the midst of thought, amid the continuing and continued sinew of syntax, as though always already we find ourselves not in the middle of a Dante’s dark woods but rather within the tangle of discourse, in the midst of language’s historical progress. Here there is no hope of a starting point. But, perhaps, that is a reconfiguration of hope.
I do think beginnings are dead. “No art form,” writes George Steiner in Grammars of Creation, “comes out of nothing. Always, it comes after.” The post-structural theorists have clarified (or further baffled) this condition for us, arguing convincingly that any origin, any trace of any originary phenomenon or concept, has been visited and many times written over. Origins are lost. And the beginning is always already underway. It is in fact postscript. Modernism, Steiner says, might be defined as an exasperation with the cruel fact of posteriority.
What then is the place of hope? Steiner again: “It is the status of hope today which is problematic. On any but the trivial, momentary level, hope is a transcendental inference. It is underwritten by theological-metaphysical presumptions, in the strict sense of this word which connotes a possibly unjustified investment, a purchase, as the bank would say, of ‘futures.’” Yet I want to assert that the falsity, the fictive and ecstatic processes of literature, as opposed to the procedures of testimony, provides exactly this— the premises of hope—though hope is nearly synonymous with death.
What I am doing is taking arguable positions on some large matters. And I don’t intend that my notions are merely the sport of theoretical suppositions. How we perceive of language and hope, how we conceive of time, trope, the components of narrative—these fundamental problems determine the structures of our imaginations and of our writings: how our work “begins,” how it associates, how it operates, and toward what ends and to what end it does or doesn’t lead.
In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. Several stories begin this way. I don’t believe in God. I do not, that is, believe in the gods of human religion, the cognitive makers of all, who out of nothing made something and in whose images we abide. I do not believe in the god or gods of virtually every bloodthirsty church on the planet. Yet I do believe that something came out of nothing, or almost nothing. I do not know how. It is a mystery, and I do believe in mystery and in its utter, generative fascination for us humans. God was a mystery to St. Augustine, the ultimate, awful “what if.” God was that than which nothing greater can be conceived. I find myself drawn to that figure, if not to that faith. I believe in our need for belief.
The demise of God coincided in the mid-19th century with the rise and demise of the Romantic. Fundamental to Romantic cosmology and art is the idea of transport and transcendence. Fundamental to the American imagination is Romanticism, for our government itself was founded on the Romantic precepts of insurgence and renewal. Samuel Willard’s 1694 election sermon, “The Character of a Good Ruler,” anticipates by nearly a century the most astonishing paradox upon which the Declaration of Independence resides. Willard’s assertion that “A People are not made for Rulers, but Rulers for a People,” invites the subsequent framers of the Declaration to determine that
When a long train of abuses and usurpations evinces a design to reduce the people under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security. Such has been the patient sufferance of these colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to expunge their former system of government.
The paradox is the imperative, inscribed within the system, for an overthrow of this or any other system at the point where it fails to act in the best interests of the people. But such a paradox is consistent with the logic of Romanticism. Expunging tyranny is the doubled desire to improve the future by remembering the past, especially if the past originates in the immaculate society of Eden.
For all its ruined cottages, dark souls, pale whales, and melancholy inspirations, Romanticism is ultimately a hopeful aesthetic. Its evolution is hopeful, a revolution of progress for politics, the body, and the soul. Its famous 19th-century adherents all believed in God though they called it the Over-Soul, or Nature, or Democracy. (This is clearly not the God of Abraham or Mohammed or George W. Bush). More than this, they believed in the Self. Whitman formulates a world where each self is vitally a hero, capable of seeing straight into the spiritual heart of things and drawing from that vision a new language capable of transforming not only oneself but the very government. In “Nature,” Emerson succinctly offers the single most important Romantic statement about the relationship of language to truth. “Words,” he says, “are signs of natural facts. Particular natural facts are symbols of particular spiritual facts. Nature is a symbol of the spirit.”
Think of the great Romantic paintings for an example. You’re standing on a cliff, looking out into the distance, which is hazy, elevated, green, ruined, extensive, breath-taking. People are tiny, if there are people. Rock cliffs, winding streams, massive trees. What we see there is God. Or inspiration. Or the shape of the primitive and progressive human imagination. What we see is the landscape of sublime transcendence, where we are urged to step off, to step out of the body, into the light. Nature is a symbol of the spirit. In the ferocious transformations of Dickinson, the divine decay of Wordsworth, the melancholy fatalism of Keats, the progressive encouragements of Whitman and Shelley, even the terrible nada of Poe and Melville, we find the same tenets held dear: the primacy of self-identity. A belief in, an imperative toward, improvement. A sense of intelligence based as much on awe or wonder (or fear, for that matter) as on reason or logic. Nature as a symbolic system: in fact, nature as a language.
So what do we do with the Romantic paradigm in a post-deific age or discourse? That has been the shared problematic of modernism and Marxism alike. It has been project of 20th century realism (of which modernism and Marxism are related flavors) to replace the divine with the practical, the rational, and the social. Romanticism’s opposite, realism has been suckled on the scientific, the technical, the phenomenological. Romanticism is a matter of the spirit. Realism is a matter of matter. Romanticism is a system of beliefs based on the invisible. Realism is a phenomenology based on proofs. Even if all things, all matter, can be reduced to the tiniest quanta of stuff, and even though that quark may essentially exist in no space or weigh nothing at all, still there is always stuff rather than no stuff. In the process, awe, wonder, and the autonomous self have become quackery or mere sentiment.
Much of the fuel of postmodernist discourse has been mined from its enthusiastic critique and dismissal of Romanticism. And not without important and good results. Leo Bersani’s excellent polemic, The Culture of Redemption, argues that the aesthetic morality of Romanticism does great damage to our cultural well-being. Remember that Romanticism is an ultimately redemptive or progressive philosophy. Bersani argues that “a crucial assumption in the culture of redemption is that art . . . repairs” and improves. He continues: “Yet I want to show that such apparently acceptable views of art’s beneficently reconstructive function in culture depend on a devaluation of historical experience. The catastrophes of history matter much less if they are somehow compensated for in art, and art itself gets reduced to a kind of superior patching function.” That is to say, if we see in art a means of improving or curing what ails us, then we too easily forgive or disregard what we really do to each other. For Bersani, the corrective virtue of works of art depends on a misreading of art as philosophy, where art attempts to redeem the catastrophe of history. He says, “Everything can be made up, can be made over again” (remember the imperative to revolution and repair in the Declaration, that most Romantic and democratic of documents?) “ . . . and the absolute singularity of human experience—the source of both its tragedy and its beauty—is thus dissipated in the trivializing nobility of a redemption through art.”
Thus, rather than redemptive, art must become a form of witness or testimony, an accurate account of historical truths. Let’s return to our sublime painting for example. Where a Romantic might see an expansive natural landscape with its fallen mansions and dense, pastoral-turning-into-spiritual light, Bersani or any other cultural realist might see the delusions of arrogant pride, superstition, and leisure-class comfort. A self proud of its ownership of an entire natural landscape, the overgrown Eden.
Carolyn Forche has written passionately to advocate the function of witness in art. Her essay “El Salvador: An Aide-Memoire” was a rallying point in the 1980s for a socially or political responsible art, an art of testimony. “All language, then, is political,” she writes, “vision is always ideologically charged, perceptions are shaped a priori by our assumptions and sensibility is formed by a consciousness at once social, historical, and aesthetic. There is no such thing as nonpolitical poetry . . . It is my feeling that the twentieth-century demands a poetry of witness.” Or as Terence Des Pres asserts in his Praises and Dispraises, art must serve the social purposes of resistance, testimony, mobilization, and action. Art must not, as Wallace Stevens says it must, “evade the pressure of reality.”
In what way does art truly make something, rather than nothing, happen? Can poetry truly shape the structure of society? Yet doesn’t that figure itself contradict Bersani’s claim that art as an improving or redemptive instrument is also a damaging instrument?
As much as I admire the social realist’s views here, as much as I am grateful for the effects on recent literature (especially on literatures by the historically oppressed and suppressed), I also continue to hold some doubts.
First) As critics urge us to reject Romanticism (and its sense of transport, of inspiration, and of awe) in favor of politically or culturally relevant “texts,” a literature designed as witness or testimony runs the danger of devolving the language of metaphor into the language of mere information. To the social realists, literary language is or should be a kind of transcript. But I contend that the project of political criticism just isn’t adequately equipped to describe the full experience of a work of art. As Octavio Paz has written in The Other Voice, “To read a poem in this way [to deconstruct its political significance only] is like studying botany by scrutinizing a Corot landscape.” Or as Herbert F. Tucker argues in his editor’s comment in a recent issue of New Literary History, “the often politically urgent critique of historical and cultural meanings has a way of approaching literature as if it were information, of regarding a text’s formal literariness as if it were a code to be broken and discarded in favor of the message it bears.” Anyone who teaches in an English department these days will appreciate that. How many of our colleagues are interested only in the thematic intents of a work of literature—its political content and its cultural utility? How many are capable of appreciating or merely teaching the myriad and magical operations of craft, of technique? A quasi-scientific objectivity has seemed to replace our sense of wonder, of invention, of fictive play. But, as Paul Kane has written, “since virtually all literary themes can be reduced to commonplaces, there is clearly something other than cognitive content that attracts us.”
Second) The poststructuralists have intended to deconstruct us out of the notion of distinct or discrete literary genres. Genres, so the argument goes, are sentimental and artificial distinctions, as false as a sense of self is to a person. A poem, a play, an advertisement for hemorrhoid medicine, a political speech are all equal, and are all equally named by the pan-generic word “text.” All texts are equivalent in the interrogating, clinical eyes of our poststructuralists. But in dismantling literary genres, the theorists have betrayed one of their own most important entities: the historical. For a genre is a historically significant form of meaning. Of course literary genres overlap, and evolve, and are fluid rather than static. But part of the meaning of a poem is its form. Part of the theme or subject of a novel is its narrative shape. And these things derive from the historical progression of literature.
Third) As they discard genres, the poststructuralists also do away with the notion of the self. The self is a sentimental fiction constructed as a primitive form of species-survival. The self is a tyranny and a tyrant. Bersani is pointed again on this issue: “the sacrosanct value of selfhood [is] the value that may account for human beings’ extraordinary willingness to kill in order to protect the seriousness of their statements. The self is a practical convenience; promoted to the status of an ethical ideal, it is a sanction for violence.” And it’s true: our sense of self or identity is the basis for our murderous insistence to maintain a distance—a sense of difference—from others who are strange to us. But is it the self that is racist, sexist, classist, and nationalist? Just as literary genres are historically rooted things, endowed with a meaning that is not only authorially bestowed but historically bestowed, so too is the human sense of a self. If we must be accurate and true to history, rather than to try to redeem or forgive our cultural transgressions as Bersani argues, isn’t it true that the self, the individual, is also a historical construct? History and the self are not opposite forces. Rather, a self is a form of meaning, just as a literary genre is a form of meaning. To discard the self is to betray one of our most fundamental means of understanding, connection, and sympathy.
Fourth) The poststructuralists’ heavy reliance on formalism, science, and technology has led them logically to abandon notions of the self, of literary genres, of an art-work’s emotive or affective capability, and more. In fact and in paradox, literary poststructuralism seeks the death of literature. Stanley Fish has claimed the “death of the author” as a way of dismantling the notion of origins, of intent, of authority. In place of the author, though, the critic has lately supposed his or her own ascendancy. Deconstruction may be as much about the wielding of authority or power in universities as about language and history. There are English Departments, as we know, that teach precious little literature any more. There are literature classes that take great pride in never looking at a single literary “text.” Scientific formalism and poststructuralism have given birth to the dimness we now call Theory. I have colleagues who are experts in Theory. Theory is, in this use, unmodified. These colleagues are adept social engineers, no doubt, but speak of literature with disdain. Language is inherently unclear, without reliable meaning, ever-shifting, ever unreliable, they assert. Haven’t poets always known that? Language to the deconstructionists is a failed system of endless self-references. The incredible irony is that Theorists tend to treat Theory with a religious fervor, an unbending certainty in their correctness; and to speak otherwise is to commit the sins of ignorance, disenlightenment, and intellectual fascism. There is absolutely no negative capability—no doubt, no wonder, no suspended disbelief—in the character of Theory. And about Fish’s “death of the author” wish, here is Harold Bloom in a characteristically grouchy and acute assessment: “The death of the author is a trope, and a rather pernicious one; the life of the author is a quantifiable entity.”
So, what do we do with transcendence? Here is my riskiest admission. I do not believe in God; I do believe in transcendence. How, in God’s name, can that be? How, not taking God’s name at all, can that be? Here is George Steiner again: “The intuition—is it something deeper than even that?—the conjecture, so strangely resistant to falsification, that there is ‘otherness’ out of reach gives to our elemental existence its pulse of unfulfillment. We are the creatures of a great thirst. Bent on coming home to a place we have never known. The ‘irrationality’ of the transcendental intuition dignifies reason. The will to ascension is founded not on any ‘because it is there’ but on a ‘because it is not there.’”
So I want to examine some of the problems and potentialities of a latter-day transcendence. We know the basic trajectory of the transcendental. That it means to “go across” or “travel over.” It describes an intelligence, an acute perception, based on intuition rather than reason (or on intuition and reason conjoined, I think), and seems akin to religious rebirth or, as the poet says, out-of-the-body travel. But is transcendence only God-Hunger? More inclusive than this, it is a primal imaginative and experiential entity for all human beings and human societies. We want to be out of ourselves. This desire for transport is why all societies have drink, drugs, ritual dance that leads to dizziness. It is why children love to spin until they fall. It is why sex is remarkable. And poetry. As Emerson writes, “All men avail themselves of such means as they can” in their search for sublime vision.
Now I must I confess that, over the years, I have asserted my disbelief in language’s ability to represent a transcendental operation. The complete transcendental act must arrive at a condition where language ceases to exist (or where it has yet to come into being): language’s absence. I suggest the inherent frustration or grief of transcendence as language, since the transcending destination would be wholly irrelevant to words, apart from them. Transcendental literature points to, but can never arrive at, the transcendent. But in Of God Who Comes to Mind, Emmanuel Levinas counters my doubt this way: “The attempt to place in doubt the very significance of words such as ‘transcendence’ and ‘beyond’ bears witness to their semantic solidity, since . . . we recognize what we are contesting.” Harold Bloom makes a further, strong case: “A transcendence that cannot somehow be expressed is an incoherence; authentic transcendence can be communicated by mastery of language, since metaphor is transference, a carrying-across from one kind of experience to another.”
In Bloom’s reading of things, transcendence is the fundamental figure of literary language. It is not simply a way of talking about the divine. It is a way of talking about the transaction of metaphor. It is a transfer—of power or of a supremely powerless imagination—from one thing or state or discourse to another. A trope is transcendent. Here are some lines from our Patron Saint of Disbelieving Belief, Charles Wright, from “Lives of the Artists”:
Jaundicing down from their purity, the plum blossoms
Snowfall out of the two trees
And spread like a sheet of mayflies
soundlessly, thick underfoot—
I am the silence that is incomprehensible,
First snow stars drifting down from the sky,
late fall in the other world;
I am the utterance of my name.
Belief in transcendence,
belief in something beyond belief,
Is what the blossoms solidify
In their fall through the two worlds—
The imagine of the invisible, the slow dream of metaphor . . .
Metaphor, as we know, is the enemy of the real. Metaphor is thereby “dangerous” to Tomas in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being: “Metaphors are not to be trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.” Our poststructuralists often decry metaphor as frivolity, as fiction, as an ornament of privilege. Metaphor cannot accurately portray political truths. This is not a new issue. Why were the early American Puritans so terrified of poetry? Because its beauty could convince us to disregard God’s real world. Because poetic metaphor was an instance of authorial pride. Because its fictive nature presented a counterfeit world. That’s why the Puritans could take the lovely King James psalms and turn them into the Bay Psalm Book, a testament to utility, humility, and, well, the ugly:
The Lord to me a shepherd is,
Want therefore shall not I.
He in the folds of tender grass
Doth cause me down to lie:
To waters calm me gently leads,
Restore my soul doth he,
He doth in paths of righteousness
For his name’s sake lead me.
Yea though in valley of death’s shade
I walk, none ill I’ll fear:
Because thou are with me, they rod
And staff my comfort are.
For me a table thou hast spread,
In presence of my foes:
Thou dost anoint my head with oil,
My cup it overflows.
Goodness and mercy surely shall
All my days follow me:
And in the Lord’s house I shall dwell
So long as days shall be.
The first book published in America, in 1640, The Bay Psalm Book is a document to practical use, full of fear of the language of beauty and metaphor. This same fear drove another writer to make even more astonishing claims:
…we shall have to obliterate many obnoxious passages, beginning with the verses…. [For] if anyone at all is to have the privilege of lying, the rulers of the state should be the persons; and they, in their dealings either with enemies or with their own citizens, may be allowed to lie for the public good. But nobody else should meddle with anything of the kind.
That wasn’t one of our latter-day tyrants. That was Plato, who expelled poets from his utopian Republic. Poets and storytellers were the first people to be banished—before murderers and thieves—because poets couldn’t be trusted to tell the unmetaphorized or state-sanctioned truth.
The magic of literary language, the magic of metaphor, is its fluidity, its shifting or alternative nature. It does not so much intend to tie us to a singular truth, but rather it continually makes gestures of connection and transfiguration. It is a going-toward, uniting sign to signifier to signified, as they say.
So, I want to make three assertions about the status or possibility of transcendence in contemporary thinking. Some of these notions are embedded in the history of transcendental discourse, and some represent recent adjustments or evolved forms of the transcendent.
First) The transcendental is a means of instruction to us in the provisional and conditional, rather than merely in the actual or historically factual. Issuing his admiration for a fellow poet, Czeslaw Milosz in A Treatise on Poetry says, “His praise was as if in a world of as if.” The subjunctive is a means to articulate hope, a means to dream or aspire or suppose. Steiner writes that “it is only man, so far as we can conceive, who has the means of altering his world by resorting to ‘if’clauses. . . . It seems to me that this fantastic, formally incommensurable ‘grammatology’ of verb-futures, of subjunctives and optatives proved indispensable to the survival, to the evolution of the ‘language-animal’ confronted, as we were and are, by the scandal, by the incomprehensibility of individual death.” In an even more astonishing passage we see Derrida extolling the fictive conditional. Derrida’s Demeure is a visionary gloss on Maurice Blanchot’s The Instant of My Death. “It is here,” he says, referring to Blanchot’s account of his near murder by the Germans as World War II wound down, “that false testimony and literary fiction can in truth still testify, from the moment that the possibility of fiction has structured—but with a fracture—what is called real experience.”
The operations of metaphor, of trope, in other words, by their very conditionality, can be made to clarify or structure, as Derrida says, “real experience” in a way that testimony can only copy.
Second) The operation of metaphor, the transcendental nature of literary language, is essentially an ecstatic gesture. “Human speech declares its origins in transcendent dialogue,” says Steiner. “We speak because we were called upon to answer; language is, in the root sense, a vocation.” This impulse enacts our hopeful desire to connect with an “other”—whether that is god, a lover, or a companion self. And this is one of my central, if ironic, notions. The desire for transcendence is both a desire to be outside ourselves, out of our bodies, out of our minds, and a desire to be most fully ourselves, most fully with or inside ourselves. The desire for transport is a bodily desire. We must transcend being, Steiner writes, “in order to ‘be with.’”
But how can that be?
Willis Barnstone in The Poetics of Ecstasy asserts not one but five varieties of ecstatic transport. Rage and anger. Madness. Felicity and enthusiasm. Secular love or physical union. And of course mystic or deific union. In each case the poet, the person, is driven to stand outside the self (that is the meaning of ek-stasis) by an extremity of passion. We go from one place to another place, in our minds or hearts, without moving. But passion, the impulse of transcendence, is a product of biology. The body is passion’s natural habitat. None other than Walt Whitman, in his great document of transcendental irony, “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry,” admits and praises this paradox:
What is it then between us?
What is the count of the scores or hundreds of years between us?
Whatever it is, it avails not—distance avails not, and place avails not,
I too lived, Brooklyn of ample hills was mine,
I too walk’d the streets of Manhattan island, and bathed in the waters
around it,
I too felt the curious abrupt questionings stir within me,
In the day among the crowds of people sometimes they came upon me,
In my walks home late at night or as I lay in my bed they came upon me,
I too had been struck from the float forever held in solution,
I too had receiv’d identity by my body,
That I was I knew was of my body, and what I should be I knew I
should be of my body.
Who is more ecstatic and hopeful than Whitman? Who more fully articulates the potentiality of perfection, sounding his bodiless and timeless “barbaric yawp . . . over the rooftops of world”? Yet who is more fully identified by the body than Whitman? Who is more fully at home in himself? The body is, as he writes, “his nighest name.” And the physical contact of bodies, for Whitman, provides not only sensual but spiritual, indeed metaphysical, connection. But this is my point: at the moment of these transcendences, which are real, we are not out of ourselves but are more deeply in ourselves, are ourselves, than at any other time. The unreal transcendent may be our realest moment.
Third) I realize the previous statement is ironic. But this is central: I think the necessary companion-trope of transcendence is irony. I have always been fascinated with this problem. In about tenth grade, at just the point when I was casting off the vestiges of my parents’ Protestant church, I was stricken with one of those great adolescent crushes on a writer. It was Thomas Merton. The more I read the more I disbelieved in God, though I believed in Merton and Merton’s God. I know now I loved Merton not because of his faith in God but because of his faith in language. It seemed the ultimate irony—irony of nearly classical stature—for a Trappist monk, subsumed in so much compulsory silence, to be so full of language, even poetry.
So, can we see transcendent ecstasy as a form of sublime (or not so sublime) irony? Is even religious discourse now most possible when vividly ironized? Anne Carson says in “The Truth about God”: “My religion makes no sense / and does not help me / therefore I pursue it.” And Geoffrey Hill, in “To William Corbett,” epitomizes the paradox and problem of religious belief: “I say it is not faithless / to stand without faith, keeping open / vigil at the site.” Jorie Graham’s “Prayer” is also on point, correlating the desire for sublime transit with ironic awareness. Faith’s fate is transformation, she says, but an “impure” one:
This is the force of faith. Nobody gets
what they want. Never again are you the same. The longing
is to be pure. What you get is to be changed.
There are many kinds of irony. I do not mean here an irony of voice—the irony of sarcasm: to say one thing and imply another. In fact, I have grown downright grim about the mouth, as Melville says, with so much contemporary poetry that is merely ironic, smart, sarcastic, fast-talking, even erudite, but without a soul or the soul’s music. By irony here I mean a classical or situational irony, or as Bloom puts it, a “clash of incommensurate forces.”
Here are some of the fundamental ironies of transcendental discourse.
A) Though it seems to desire an erasure of self, the transcendental—like the operations of metaphor—depends on a self as an origin and a locus. T. S. Eliot is on point: “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” Transcendence is the conjoining of the body and the bodiless.
B) As the transcendent depends on the body, so does it depend on time. Whitman said previously that “time avails not,” then adjusted that notion by embracing the time-bound body. A poetic transcendence, a sublime or visionary truth, according to Milosz, is “time lifted above time by time.” Even death, according to Levinas, is “understood as the patience of time.”
That is, transcendence requires a death. That is its irony—and the irony is doubled, as transcendence then restores us to ourselves. Transcendence requires, if only for an instant, a release from our identities and our familiar gestures into a space where we may reconsider our identities and gestures. Derrida describes an “unspoken trauma, a feeling of lightness or beatitude” in the encounter at the instant “of death with death.” He continues, “Perhaps it is the encounter of death, which is only ever an imminence, only ever an instance, only ever a suspension, an anticipation, the encounter of death as anticipation with death itself, with a death that has already arrived according to the inescapable.” The clearer formulation here is Blanchot’s: “Dead—immortal. Perhaps ecstasy.”
D) Our belatedness, the posteriority that Steiner asserts, does not invalidate or negate our relationship with the sublime. While irony now is a necessary figure in transcendental or sublime discourse, that discourse is still viable. “The longing for the sublime thus has not died,” writes Glenn W. Most; but “for us, there cannot be a sublime that is not free from loss, from regret, from a melancholy sense of ineluctable afterness.”
I believe we put ourselves in the presence of poetic or figural language in order to experience or to represent our own and our species’ transcendental possibilities. Literary language, the language of trope and representation, is itself a form of ecstatic or transcendental exchange. As we turn into something else, we turn into ourselves. And as we share the experience of literature, we turn into each other. We share the body. We are all more or less one entity, one life form, as connected to the tree, the stream of water, the humus and rich chemical soil, as to our lovers and children. And we know something resides there in the magic of metaphor. Here is Charles Wright again, in “Lives of the Saints”:
Remember, face the facts, Miss Stein said.
And so I’ve tried,
Pretending there’s nothing there but description, hoping emotion
shows;
That that’s why description’s there:
The subject was never smoke,
there’s always been a fire.
Here’s another leap: the passionate transport of our imaginations, the fictive play that is literature, is a fundamental expression not only of individual identity but also of political and social connection and responsiveness.
If I had been doing Derrida here, I would not so much conclude as gesture toward the next or another. I think that is a worthy gesture, though, as the transcendent, like language itself, is always pointing onward. It is an arrow, like an arrow of time, the arrow of imagination. At the end of her great poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death,” Emily Dickinson sees that eternity is not a destination but a means of transit: “Since then—tis centuries—and yet / Feels shorter than the Day / I first surmised the Horses’ Heads / [she says, ever more slowly] Were toward Eternity—.” That “toward”—directional but never-arriving—means everything. Trope, like transcendence, is where we go when we stay still. It is where we go in sex, in song, in madness, out of our selves, which is one of the fundamental characteristics of having a sense of the sense or a self at all. It is where we go when we imagine. It is the ecstatic journey of the instant that flashes with IF.