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Deborah J. Brasket

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Deborah J. Brasket

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

28 Friday Feb 2014

Posted by deborahbrasket in Creative Nonfiction, Literary Criticism, Poetry, Spirituality

≈ 6 Comments

Tags

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

457px-Blake,_William_(English,_1757–1827),_'Satan_Watching_the_Caresses_of_Adam_and_Eve'_(Illustration_to_'Paradise_Lost'),_1808,_pen;_watercolor_on_paper

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.

485px-Paradise_Lost_12For 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.

Paradise_Lost_16For 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.”

Paradise_Lost_14Redemption 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.

Bernini statue Ecstasy Santa_teresa_di_bernini_04Lacan 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.

Oxherding_pictures,_No__10

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”

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“Some Tragic Falling Off” into Difference and Desire

19 Sunday Jan 2014

Posted by deborahbrasket in Creative Nonfiction, Culture, Human Consciousness, Poetry

≈ 18 Comments

Tags

desire, Duality, human nature, Jacques Lacan, loss, meaning of life, Milton, Philosophy, Psychology, Wordsworth

800px-John_William_Waterhouse_-_Echo_and_Narcissus_-_Google_Art_ProjectI’ve been thinking a lot about desire and loss lately and remembering a paper I wrote exploring this topic. It began with a quotation from Robert Hass’s poem “Meditation at Lagunitas” which I posted here last week. The poem begins this way:

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light.

All the old thinking and new thinking is not only about loss, but also about desire, about returning to that “first world of undivided light.” About regaining what was lost.

The quotation above is followed by this one:

“We are all inescapable dualists—for Lacanian, not Cartesian, reasons.” – Charles Alteri

It strikes me that these are the great themes that are explored over and over again in all great poetry, literature, art, religion, science, psychology, philosophy—is it not? Groping for “something more,” something just out of reach. Feeling a sense of loss, of incompleteness, and seeking what will make us whole.

My paper starts off this way:

If duality arises from difference, difference from separation, and separation is accompanied by a sense of loss and desire, then it could be said that duality, difference, and desire presuppose “some tragic falling off” from an original–mythical or otherwise–world of undivided wholeness.

Milton’s Paradise Lost, Wordsworth’s Prelude, and Jacques Lacan’s lectures on psychoanalysis all repeat at various levels this elemental theme of difference, loss and desire. What Milton treats at a cosmic and theological level, Wordsworth treats at a temporal and personal level, and Lacan treats linguistically and psychologically. In each, however, language is instrumental not only in the initiation of difference, but in the formulation of a desire which may turn it back toward a redemptive reunion.

The paper was written for academics, but the ideas explored are relevant for all of us, for writers in particular, and for anyone grasping at the meaning of life, or seeking a sense of wholeness.

I’ll be exploring this topic in the next few posts, and I hope you will join me. It’s a huge topic, with so many implications. I’d love to hear your ideas and insights.

Here are links to the rest of the series:

Part II – Our Quest for Wholeness

Part III – A Poet’s “Sense Sublime”

Part IV – “Thou Art That”

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