“Thou Art That” – Part IV, “Some Tragic Falling Off”

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"Thou art that", human development, literary criticism, Milton, Paradise Lost, poetry

Milton’s great theme in Paradise Lost is the fall and redemption of humanity. This too can be seen as “some tragic falling off into difference and desire,” which has been the theme of my last two posts in this series.

Milton treats on a cosmic and theological level what Wordsworth treats on a temporal and personal level, and what Lacan treats linguistically and psychologically, and, in the end, mystically.

Each speaks of the loss of a “perfect” state of being–a Paradise (the Garden of Eden), or Unconscious Bliss (Child-like Joy & Innocence), or Undivided Wholeness (Pre-Lingual Identity, before I and Other became Two).

And each speaks of an incessant desire to regain what was lost.

For Milton in Paradise Lost the development of humanity is seen as a succession of “falls.” Satan falls from Heaven into Hell. Eve falls into temptation and Adam joins her there. They both fall from grace into disgrace, from innocence into guilt and shame. Then they fall from Paradise, the Garden of Eden, into a life of suffering and toil on earth.

Yet the Fall actually begins before there ever was a Heaven and a Hell, or an Adam and Eve. The Fall is actually a succession of “falls” into ever-increasing difference, loss, and desire. It begins when God, with a Word, divides creation from chaos, splits the Void in two, separates light from darkness, the waters from the earth, the higher from lower, the birds from the beasts, and so on.

We might think of the Big Bang as the first fall or split, when that undivided density of black matter exploded into an expanding universe. Perhaps every act of creation, including the first division of a human egg cell, or when the fist microorganism divided itself from the primordial soup, can be seen as “some tragic falling off” from a first world of undivided wholeness into an ever-increasing world of differentiation and identity.

But all this division is not really the point. It’s an important part of the point–and essential to it–but not the point itself.

For Milton, the point is redemption, or paradise regained—reunion with God. After his fall, Adam desires to return to that original state of grace and innocence and unity. The Archangel Michael tells him this is impossible. The knowledge of the Fall—of sin, difference, and death–will always lie between Adam and his former unknowing bliss.

And yet, paradoxically, Michael tells him, it is Adam’s knowledge of the Fall which will elevate his redemption above the original state. M. H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism calls this “The Paradox of the Fortunate Division.”

He writes: “Not only was [Adam’s] fall the essential condition of the Incarnation . . . but also of the eventual recovery by the elect of a paradise which will be a great improvement upon the paradise which Adam lost.”

Michael takes Adam up into a high hill and reveals to him all the good that will come out of evil when redemption takes place: “The earth shall be paradise, far happier place than this Eden, and far happier days.”

Adam replies: “O goodness infinite, goodness immense! That all this good of evil shall produce, and evil turn to good.”

Redemption begins with the first downward step into a differentiation out of which a desire for redemption promises, not reunion, not a return to what was, but something more. Something which far surpasses it.

Through poetry, his desire to recollect what he had lost as a child, he gains a “sense sublime” that surpasses what had been lost.

Lacan speaks of a similar journey in the development of the psyche. He shows how the quest for reunion with the unconscious bliss we knew as infants is ever-present and woven into the fabric of the psychic existence. It is not a conscious choice as with Milton’s Adam, or Wordsworth’s poet. It is experienced as an unquenchable desire for “something more” that haunts all our days.

Lacan locates this “something more,” which is beyond representation, in “feminine jouissance.” He refers to the Bernini statue of St. Teresa, in which he claims, “she is coming, no doubt about it,” and adds:

“Might not this Jouissance which one experiences and knows nothing of, be that which puts one on the path of ex-istence? And why not interpret the face of the Other, as the God Face?”

Lacan tells us: “Psychoanalysis may accompany the patient to that ecstatic limit of the ‘Thou art that,’ in which is revealed the cypher of his mortal destiny, but it is not in our mere power as practitioners to bring him to that point where the real journey begins.”

“Thou art that” is a central motif in Hindu mysticism. It is what the Christian mystic or Zen Buddhist might call the non-ego, becoming conscious of the unconscious, or unconscious of consciousness.

Throughout his 1964 seminars, Lacan alludes to God as “a ground or field,” or some “vast unconscious principle” that lay “outside of the dialectic of scientific certainty and metaphysical doubt”.

But that “face” or “ground” of God which we desire lies beyond language, beyond representation. It is that “ecstatic limit” toward which psychoanalysis can only aspire, but beyond which it cannot trespass. Psychoanalysis, language, poetry, can lead one to the threshold of this “ground,” but it cannot pass through it.

What’s interesting, and comforting, to me, is that we can’t obtain redemption or the poetic mind, let alone “Thou art that,” by going back to what we were in our original state of innocence and bliss.

Zen Oxherding picture No. 10 Returning Home

But by moving through our messy lives, experiencing the difference, loss, desire that cannot be avoided, and then reaching beyond that, to “something more,” we may find something that surpasses what we had originally sought.

And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
– T.S. Elliot

Other posts in this series:

Part I – “Some Tragic Falling Off” into Difference and Desire

Part II – Our Quest for Wholeness

Part III – A Poet’s “Sense Sublime”

A Poet’s “Sense Sublime” – Part III, “Some Tragic Falling Off”

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human development, Jacques Lacan, Language, literary criticism, Philosophy, poetry, sense sublime, The philosophic mind, Wordsworth, writing process

Language is that which gives rise to difference, to the desire for difference, and, at the same time, the desire to dissolve those differences.

We saw that in Part II of this series with Lacan’s explanation of the infant’s development in the “Mirror Stage,” and its “quest for wholeness.” Our psychic journey from the womb to maturity is a kind of “becoming” where our quest to return to the undivided bliss of infancy leads us through a world of difference, loss, and desire, to a point of ecstatic expectancy of “something more.”

This “process of becoming” and the desire for “something more” is the turf of poets as well as psychoanalysts. And no poet writes more upon this subject or with such longing, perhaps, than William Wordsworth, who explores our journey from unknowing childhood innocence to the development of the philosophic, or poetic, mind.

This journey from unconscious bliss to the conscious sublime can be traced in “Tintern Abbey,” “The Ode to Immortality,” and “The Prelude.”

In “Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth recalls his childhood experience of undifferentiated bliss when Nature “was all in all.” He describes the “aching joys” and “dizzy raptures” as:

An appetite, a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied

Yet as he grows into a man, his journey into language and difference has given him “abundant recompense.” He has “learned to look on nature, not as in the hour of thoughtless youth,” but from within the thoughtfulness of the mature philosophic mind.

By recollecting the original experience of undifferentiated wholeness from within a state of differentiation, he has felt:

A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And tolls through all things.

Here we see a clear distinction between the thoughtlessness of the original experience and the thoughtfulness of the second recollected experience. The memory of the undifferentiated wholeness recollected from within a state of differentiation (words, language, thought, and poetry) transcends the original state. It reaches a state of sublimity which far surpasses the original state.

Yet this sublimity, this joy, is mixed with the “still, sad music of humanity”—a futile desire for the unmixed bliss which can be “recollected” but may never be regained.

Wordsworth continues exploring this problem in his “Ode to Immortality.” He states that although “our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting” of our original home in God, yet we come from that state of wholeness “trailing clouds of glory,” memories of that bliss.

The “prison-house” which closes upon the growing child, dividing him from God (wholeness, undifferentiated bliss), cannot squelch his memory of, nor quench his thirst for, that which once was.

Yet it is not for this, for what was lost, that Wordsworth raises his “song of thanks and praise”:

But for those obstinate questionings
Of sense and outward things,
Fallings from us, vanishings:
Blank misgivings . . . .

In other words, he gives thanks for those futile and fleeting things, the desire that accompanies loss, the desire to recollect and recreate. In this he finds “strength in what remains behind.” This is the desire which does not disdain difference and loss, “human suffering” and ”death” but looks through them toward “faith” and the “philosophic mind,” rather than past them toward any final fulfillment.

This is the insatiable desire with finds in the “meanest flower / thoughts too deep for tears.” It is desire expressed as poetry. It is the desire of which Wallace Stevens later writes in “Of Modern Poetry,” desire which:

Like an insatiable actor, slowly and
With mediation, speak words that in the ear,
In the delicatest ear of the mind, repeat,
Exactly, that which it wants to hear . . . (italics mine)

It is desire speaking poetry and poetry speaking desire. Perhaps it is not so strange that Wordsworth, the poet for whom “the mind of man” was the main “haunt” and “region” of his “song” should be the first to write “the poem of the mind in the act of finding what will suffice” (Stevens)

For Wordsworth, the fleeting bliss hat he fails to sustain as a child in experience, he re-experiences at a more elevated level as a man and poet in the act of recollection—in the imagination.

He explains in “The Prelude” how this new bliss, or sense of sublimity, in which he “recognizes grandeur in the beatings of the heart,” does not shy away from difference, from “pain and fear”, but is founded in “such discipline.”

This sublimity is not a return to unity, an end of desire, but desire which recreates itself as poetry. It is a sense of intense identification with nature which does not erase difference, but thrives on it.

The central problem he explores in all his poetry is:

How does one get back to a sense of unity and undifferentiated bliss in spite of the fact that difference, pain and loss, remain?

The answer he provides is:

One does not return to what was, but moves through what is, on the way to something else, something higher (poetry, the imagination, the sense sublime).

One doesn’t get there in spite of difference, but because of it. The desire which feeds upon difference never quite reaches its destination because there is always, already, that something more, beyond representation, to hope for.

Wordsworth tells us in “Tintern Abbey”:

Our destiny, our nature, and our home
Is with infinitude, and only there:
With hope it is, hope that can never die,
Effort, and expectation, and desire,
and something evermore about to be.

For Wordsworth, as well as Lacan, desire attenuated into a state of ecstatic expectancy is “a sense sublime.”

It is a state of intense identification with the Other—not as it was or is, but as it becomes within the act of interpenetration, or re-interpretation within the act of creation.

What Wordsworth experiences is a becoming—a transitory and fleeting thing which, nonetheless, becomes the essence of his poetry. This “something evermore about to be” is sublime expectation.

It is Emily Dickenson writing: “Not what the stars have done, but what they are to do, is what detains the sky.”

It is Wallace Stevens’ “black water breaking into reality.”

This elemental theme of difference, loss, desire, and “something more” to come, is also explored in Milton’s great work on the fall and redemption of humanity, “Paradise Lost.”

I’ll explore more of that in my next post in this series. If you missed the first two posts in this series, you can read them here:

“Some Tragic Falling Off” Into Difference and Desire

Our Quest for Wholeness – Part II, “Some Tragic Falling Off”