A brief interpretation of visibility and invisibility, separateness and simultaneity

(Image: “Fish Magic”, Paul Klee. 1925.)

This little post riffs on a theme from my article you can’t play here, forthcoming with MARCH in April (link coming soon). In a traipse across physical and metaphysical forms of play, the article refers to a no-place, a space that becomes apparent through the dynamic of neither-nor, revealing by way of negative space. The idea responds in part to Adorno’s exploration of play in Aesthetic Theory, including the aversion toward the childish in the evolution of modern art, which he refers to as a straining toward maturity: “Art brings to light what is infantile in the ideal of being grown up. Immaturity via maturity is the prototype of play.” Arrival via the non.

This dynamic which dances on the edges of the experience and expression of play — that of grasping richness via negation — is also provoked in another paradoxically fragile and fierce state by metaphysical poet John Donne in “Negative Love“:

“If that be simply perfectest
Which can by no way be exprest
But Negatives, my love is so.
To All, which all love, I say no.”

The finitely knowable is made cheap, banal and perverse, irretrievably open to exploitation and ransom. Play, as love in Donne’s poem, in its most beautiful forms, doesn’t know it is play, doesn’t assert itself in its own name, and doesn’t present a catalogue of traits or prescriptive actions that are satisfied by execution and acknowledgement. It is content in itself without need of performance or proof, elusive in its revealing by way of not-that, irrepressibly made external because of its internal integrity—and, through that same elusive quality that cannot be so simply distilled, completely whole.

Donne returns to this principle of a visible love, through a subject’s concern for how their love looks to others, in “A Lecture Upon the Shadow”, where he writes:

“That love hath not attain’d the highest degree,
Which is still diligent lest others see.”

A constant tension between visibility and invisibility, performance and eclipse, certainty and validation. In a person’s diligent concealment that is rooted in shame, and in a performative exaggeration rooted in uncertainty, love, like play, loses its essence. In attending exclusively to its own awareness without integrating ambiguity, it is already lost to that limited notion of itself.

In Tertium Organum, Russian esotericist Piotr Ouspenskii wrote: “Temples of love and the mystical celebration of love’s mysteries exist in reality no longer: there is the “everyday manner of life” and psychological labyrinths from which those who rise a little above the ordinary level can only desire to run away.” Over a hundred years after the book’s publication, this brief passage only resonates more violently, in the increasing exclusion and estrangement in contemporary society of states of ecstasy and the sublime, whether internally or externally expressed.

Curiously, this separation is also reflected in the opposing morphology in English and Russian within expressions of states or conditions of love—an opposition that can’t be entirely reconciled between the two languages and, thus, states of being. Specifically, the descriptors for “being in love” vs. влюблённый. The most direct translation for the term “влюблённый” would be something like “enamoured”, but though it exists it’s not a commonly used term. The infrequency of the term’s use compared to the condition “to be in love” is more reflective of its place in collective psychodynamics than just the existence of the term “enamoured”.

The English “enamoured” doesn’t entirely capture the implication of the Russian condition “влюблённый”, given that it’s an adjective applied to the person, rather than simultaneously a condition affecting the person / noun and the transformed identity of the person / noun in that moment. In English, love is, by norm, a state that is separate from the self to be entered into, whereas in Russian, love is the inherent state of the transformed person in that moment, which overcomes them without an implied separation of the state and self.

More on another day.

. . .

To end this riff, in another return to Nick Drake, friend of sailors on the seas of via-not (on the waves of which, in others’ words, the “speechless unite in a silent accord“), at a time when everything around has “lost that magic many many years ago”:

“I was born to sail away
Into a land of forever
Not to be tied to an old stone grave
In your land of never.”