Via Negativa

The man must not drink of the running streams, the living waters, who is not prepared to have all nature reborn in him,–to suckle monsters. The snake in my stomach lifts his head to my mouth at the sound of running water.

The Blog of Henry David Thoreau

There is so little left that hasn’t been said . . .

Ah, but this is most untrue! What do you mean by said? Nothing, but nothing, can be repeated identically. . . .

[T]here is so little that has been said, such huge empty spaces where understandings and communications have never even been started. . . .

– The Coffee Sutras
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“Does it matter who says it?”

“No, so long as it is said right. The saying has its own existence: people knew this long before they tried to prove it with marks on clay and papyrus leaf and tortoise shell.”

“Yes, assuming it is uttered in full awareness. A true saying is unique and unrepeatable, however the words might choose to repeat themselves.”

“But given such ideal circumstances, again it shouldn’t matter who says something, because anyone can say anything – you never know. In other words, if the autonomy of the saying derives mainly from its originality, that fact takes precedence over the happenstance of its occurrence.”

“But it does matter, because in fact the saying lives only in the moment, indivisible from the vibration of the vocal chord, the exhalation of breath, the movement of hand and torso. This body, this breath. It’s sheer fantasy to locate its originality elsewhere.”

“Both these positions are in error. The saying lives in its situational and linguistic contexts, as one element in a communally created, autopoietic system of signs and signifiers.”

“But that’s a lot of fashionable-sounding nonsense. The empirical world does not and will never conform to theories, which seek nothing less than to overthrow the horizon, that unattainable or unknowable dimension in light of which all original sayings – and thus language itself – take wing.”

“Then at the heart of language we shouldn’t expect to find some ‘deep structure,’ but incommensurability: pure sound. Holy silence.”

“What about the saying? Are the words I say the same as the words you hear?”

“Perhaps we should think of words as analogous to germs – not just the bad ones, but the ones we need to fight those others off, or to digest food. They use us, we use them. They bind us together in many ways both wonderful and terrible. They cannot exist apart from us, and we would do poorly without their help.”

“What about this saying, this conversation?”

“Who cares! I am only interested in you. Whoever you are.”

“Then we must begin to assume responsibility for the words that come out of our mouths. You must care – one slip, one terrible sentence can destroy a relationship. Every true thing we say to each other is formed in light of that knowledge.”

“Then we have yet to exchange a single honest word.”

“We have been licentious. There was never a true assent, only lack of refusal. No?”

“No. I mean, yes. Well, maybe . . . ”

Only one time in my life have I ever let my guard completely down. It was, of course, for love.

“My guard” – please forgive the cliche. I mean, you know, that imaginary wall – “security barrier” if you like – that protects, indeed defines our autonomy as free and sovereign individuals. Or, in a less Kantian sense: the door that we prefer to keep firmly shut in order to avoid being overwhelmed and destroyed by Whatever.

What the imagination can build, I said to myself, the imagination can remove. Without telling my lover what I was doing I began, figuratively speaking, to strip. Looking full into her face, one by one I took off every mask, every cloak, every pretence – and I have many. I was enough of a would-be Buddhist to realize that there was no true face or essential self “underneath,” but I was determined to show it to her anyway.

It helps to know that she was a mind reader, one of two I’ve dated. (Both were women who had been abused as children; mind reading was pretty clearly a survival tool.) We were sitting in the back of a funicular car at the time. When we got to the bottom of the mountain some ten minutes later, I broke the spell. She said quietly, “That felt like a thousand years.” Which might have been sheer glibness (another defense mechanism of hers), but I think she meant it.

She was leaving Japan in two days, and I would be staying on in the Far East for another six months. Our relationship had never been more than another life experience for her – a circumstance for which I never blamed her, because she had been honest about it from the start. I, however, had fallen deeply in love for the first time in my life. The sex had never been that good, for reasons I wouldn’t fully understand until years later, when additional experience and the achievement of some measure of distance permitted a more dispassionate judgement. Removing my guard, letting her completely inside, was the only thing I could think of that might have a chance of making her as attached to me as I was to her.

In part, it was simply an effort at communication, true communication. You’ve heard, I’m sure, that “show, don’t tell!” is the poet’s dictum. I wanted to show her what actual love was like, and the only way to do that was by showing what it could do.

Even aside from romantic love, the fact is that we cannot communicate in any real sense without communion, without opening ourselves up – imitating Christ or Isaac or some other poor rooster, all potential wound on the altar of the soul. The exchange of information is either completely peripheral to true communication, or else our concept of information must be radically expanded to include such embodiments as breath and heart.

The Japanese understand this. They have a strong cultural preference for non-verbal communication, and tend to feel that if close family members or lovers depend too much on speech, it’s a sign that their relationships are weak. But as Butuki said recently about his attempts to negotiate with Japanese businessmen, the entire language works through innuendo. Definitive statements are rude. A typical sentence concludes with a diminuendo of self-deprecating qualifications: “you-know-isn’t-it-perhaps-I-wonder-but,” accompanied by the baring of teeth in a subordinate’s grin or the slightly more restrained and tolerant smile of the superior.

Wordless or otherwise, communication on the level I attempted that day cannot help becoming a form of sorcery, a manifestation of power. This was not, as the cliche has it, “naked power,” but power incidental to a demonstration of psychic nakedness. Had our relationship been more balanced, perhaps it wouldn’t have seemed like such a big thing. I imagine that anyone reading this who has been married for a long time will be feeling a mixture of amusement and pity that I never got beyond all the sturm und drang . . .

It almost worked. After her return to the states, she stayed faithful for what she later told me was a record for her – four months. As for me, I descended into squalor and drunkenness, changing so completely that by the time my parents flew into Osaka three months later, my own mother walked by me three times in the airport terminal without recognizing me.

I have hated Japan ever since.

So Czeslaw Milosz finally kicked off (thanks to Siona for the link). He was 93! I find it encouraging that someone so fundamentally dour could live so long. It challenges our idiotic pseudo-Christian cultural predilection to look askance at anyone who dares to utter a discouraging word.

In the last year he lived in the United States, Milosz kept a journal subsequently published as The Year of the Hunter (translated by Madeline Levine, FSG, 1994). On March 30, 1988, Milosz contrasted his worldview with that of the hugely influential Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz:

Do you really like Gombrowicz’s novels and plays? Now, be honest! No. I don’t envy him his having written them; I would not wish to be their author. Do they disturb me? Yes. Because if people really exist only for other people, if the cocoon we have spun vanished in a cosmos about which we can say nothing, not even whether it exists (at most, that it exists in our minds), if this is so, then perhaps we really do live in hell. My anxiety derives from my thinking of Gombrowicz as a modern writer, so that I have to consider myself old-fashioned. A polite little boy who believes in a dear little God, who tries to avoid sin, encounters an uncivilized rapscallion who sticks out his tongue and thumbs his nose at the authorities of two millennia. In the final analysis, what I can oppose to Gombrowicz comes straight from the strorehouse of ancient concepts:

“The world exists, not just in my mind.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because it is observed by God.”

. . . I have a tremendous need to go outside of myself, beyond my persona; the more I am aware of my aging organism, the stronger is this need, this desire to be somehow a part of God’s thoughts when he observes the world, a need for perfect objectivity, for a sphere that endures independently of people’s fleeting interconnections. I have tested this; my poetry is like that, it moves outward, it travels beyond me. The ideal: to be able to say that, although things are not good with me, the world endures and moves along its path, and in this world, despite all its ghastliness, there is another side, a true side, a lining visible to the eyes of Divinity. In other words, my quarrel with Gombrowicz really revolves around his “argument about the existence of the world”; that is, his stubborn denial of assertions that something other than our perceptions exists. That is one of his attacks on objective truth. The other is the way that people entangle themselves in a single interconnected body; hence, the truth is always their truth, God is their God.

Milosz’s view was essentially tragic. Later in the same entry, describing a Palm Sunday mass, he muses on his feeling of identification with millions of other believers over the centuries, and his intuition that a figure like Christ is necessary because “every individual is alone with his threshold of pain, of dereliction, and I in my egotism am unable to enter into my fellow man.”

A day later (April 1), Milosz references the Japanese philosopher Keiji Nishitani, whose critique of Sartre and Nietzsche for their “subjectivization of atheism” also seemed to fit Gombrowicz.

What remains is to reflect on the virtually inescapable conclusions of extraordinary intellects like Gombrowicz (because, after all, Sartre and Gombrowicz arrive at the same conclusion independently of each other), and to consider also the probability that the post-Christian West opens to the philosophy of the East where the subject-object problem is crossed out.

Farewell, old prophet.
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For appreciations of Milosz as a poet, see the cassandra pages, the vernacular body and languagehat. And be sure to check out Siona’s recollection of a classroom visit by Milosz linked to above.

Back on January 26, I quoted from Milosz’s appreciation of a poem by Izumi Shikibu, also in A Year of the Hunter.