That which is known as the self-creator is truly the Taste
[rasa]. Attaining this Taste, one becomes blissful. Who indeed could
live, who breathe, if this bliss did not pervade space?
– Taittiriya Upanishad
Nascent pleasure hurts our chest so much that we
prefer to feel the pain we are used to rather than the unaccustomed pleasure.
– Clarice Lispector, Too Much of
Life
Sweetness
conquers sweetness as one nail drives out another.
– Bernard of Clairvaux, Sermons
on the Song of Songs
The coming sweetness
is eternal sweetness, ancient and new. This is the sweetness, one tasted
before beginning, after end, and via the steps in between. The sweetness is
eternal or beyond time in the same way that time is, inevitably and impossibly
now, radically present to and overflowing with itself. The coming sweetness is
the sweetness of life, and more . . . “Because pleasure is not to be trifled
with. It is us.”[1]
The question of a sweetness to come
arises in connection with three essential and interrelated issues. First, the
question concerns the nature of reality and the issue of whether it is, as per
the idea of the divine as “true and highest sweetness,”[2] fundamentally delightful and
realizable now as such—an idea of pleasure’s radical absolute plenitude that stands
in opposition both to the more prevalent belief that pleasure depends upon satisfaction
of needs/desires and to the modern concept of the world. Contrary to millennia
of intuition and testimony that “the whole universe is full of infinite bliss,”[3] the materially conceived cosmos
of scientistic modernity has no space for any such supreme and omnipresent sweetness
because it is by definition a domain denuded of the immanent-transcendent reality
of life whose affective truth is “revealed to itself in an embrace that
precedes all things . . . in a state of absolute self-enjoyment that has no
other name than Life.”[4] As Kirill Chepurin
explains, via Schelling’s concept of bliss as the ecstatic state of “immediate
and absolute oneness that is ontologically prior to the divisions and
alienations of the world,” modernity is essentially marked by an “antagonistic
entanglement” with bliss: “At its most radical, bliss is positioned . . . against
the world and against any attempts to justify the world’s negativity as somehow
good or necessary . . . At the same time, bliss constitutes something like the
repressed underside of modernity, on which modernity feeds even while
foreclosing it, and the promise of which modernity requires in order to justify
the evils of the present for the sake of a supposedly better, fulfilled
future.”[5] And so the question
arises, given life’s inherent hunger for enjoyment and longing for happiness—inseparable
from its intrinsic suffering of itself—and
given that “we desire . . . not merely spiritual felicity, not merely vision,
but delight, corporeal felicity,”[6] what order of sweetness,
what forms of essential savor, will flow from the ruins of material progress’s
failure to unleash happiness upon the Earth? What is the coming body of sweetness?—given
that you “no longer bury your head in the sand of heavenly things, but bear it
freely instead, an earthly head that creates a meaning for the earth!”[7] Why not relinquish the privative,
possessive, and “completely rotten [pourrie] idea [of pleasure],” its narrow
predication upon desire as lack and reduction to satisfaction, and return it to
the nature of everything?[8] Is not everyone suffering
enough from not doing so? As Raoul Vaneigem says, “Everyone is so bored with
the pleasures of survival—pleasures of a world upside-down—that we have to open
up and free life’s pleasures, that they may spill out everywhere . . .
Revolution no longer lies in refusing to acquiesce and survive but in taking a
delight in oneself that everyone conspires to prohibit.”[9] Superseding the ever
foreclosed happiness of tomorrows, the omnipresent promise of the coming
sweetness concerns the atemporal future or advent of something always
here, of that which never is not.[10]
Second, the question concerns the
nature of enjoyment and the issue of its limitlessness, both in the sense of
the unfading imperative to enjoy and in the sense of the open-endedness of its
objects or occasions, there being no limit to what ‘gives’ pleasure. To
consider the sweetness to come is to recall the forever coming or arriving
quality of pleasure and how it is desired above and beyond any determinable thing.
As Leopardi observes of beings like us who “would not exist” without feeling
this desire: “such a nature carries infinity materially within it, for every
single pleasure is circumscribed, but not pleasure itself, whose extent is
indeterminate, and the soul, which loves pleasure substantially,
embraces the whole imaginable extent of this feeling, without being able even
to conceive of its extent, because it is not possible to form a clear idea of
something desired without limit.”[11] However fading, pleasure
remains imperishable, like a shadow of its own infinity. Just as anagogy is essentially
delectable, an unforgettable ‘foretaste of paradise’ defined by John Cassian as
“the enduring and heavenly sweetness [dulcedinem] of the
spiritual sense,”[12] so does delight bear an
anagogic core, something indefinable and inexhaustible, no less beyond—“he who
kisses the joy as it flies / Lives in eternity’s sun rise”[13]—than within: “in the
depths of the dark rottenness there shines clear and captivating the Great
Emerald. The Great Pleasure.”[14] This profound link
between sweetness and arrival is also seen in Michel Henry’s articulation of the
“sweetness [douceur] of being” as the “silent advent [venue]”
of life’s ongoing coming into itself in feeling, in the powerful helplessness
of an affectivity so essential that it is sweetness: “Sweetness is what
senses itself, experiences itself and, given to itself, finds its rest in the
feeling of self. Sweetness is feeling.”[15] Proportionally, malaise
expresses the suppression or refusal of this limitless auto-arrival, a state
when “the endless iteration of self-growth of Life in its eternal coming into
oneself . . . is no longer satisfied or answered.”[16] To ask after the coming
sweetness is thus to ponder the endless inner and outer depth of enjoyment as
that which one cannot not seek, to wonder why bliss neither vanishes nor is
found, or is ever found in its slipping beyond itself, seized in being still to
arrive, as per Eriugena’s articulation of the paradoxical process of life’s
pursuit: “since that which it seeks and toward which it tends, whether it moves
in the right or the wrong direction, is infinite and not to be comprehended by
any creature, it necessarily follows that its quest is unending and that
therefore it moves forever. And yet although its search is unending, by some
miraculous means it finds what it is seeking for: and again it does not find
it, for it cannot be found.”[17] To question the sweetness
to come means to ask for it, to query its advent, not simply as an as-yet
untasted sweetness, but as sweetness’s own qualitative coming, felt in the emergent
mystery of its elusive source.
Third, the question concerns the
nature of sweetness per se and the issue of its specific determination and/or
indefinability. What is it that makes sweetness a perennial designation
of the desirable quality of truth or vital sign of its inseparability from pleasure?
“But why this desire and hunger for pleasure? Because pleasure is the height of
the truthfulness of a being.”[18] How is the quintessential
savor of all that is felt and found to be of intrinsic worth—e.g. love, joy,
happiness, beauty, goodness, life—sweet? Is it possible to place one’s finger
on this taste, to touch as it were the point between the bear and the honey, without
it being severed in the tautology that sweetness is sweet or to be grasped only
in itself, without the sense of sweetness being swallowed by its own absoluteness?
“Who can separate a bear from honey after it has tasted the sweetness? How
great is the sweetness of truth that bestows the most delectable life beyond
every corporeal sweetness; for it is absolute sweetness, from which flows all
that is desired by every taste.”[19] The concept of sweetness,
“among the most mixed and the trickiest of concepts," [20] encompasses a complex semantic continuum of sensation, affect, and experience
that cuts across all domains of life and is shaped by “a fundamental
observation that what is ‘sweet’ is both pleasing and beneficial.”[21] How to understand the
flavor of this flow, the quality that fulfills and transcends each of its
instances? Or is there no such integral taste, only a mixture confected by a confusion
of tongues babbling in the labyrinth of the recently mapped mammalian sweet
receptor cell which “produces appetitive responses in humans and animals,
drives the ingestion of energy-rich food sources, and promotes a diet that
includes critical macronutrients” and in “humans . . . also evokes a sense of pleasure,
satisfaction, and comfort”?[22] Yet even at the sensory level,
“the ultimate definition of ‘sweet’ remains elusive,”[23] just as more generally
“the physical sensation of taste is . . . one of the most obscure and least
conceptualizable for the understanding” since it produces, as per the double
reference of taste to both the sense and the sensed, “a kind of
symbiosis between object and subject.”[24] Likewise in the worlds of
theory and praxis, “the cultural phenomenology of sweetness leads us into a
zone of undecidability between literal and figurative meaning.”[25] To contemplate the
sweetness to come is to imagine and invite a sweetness that remains, an
unfinishable taste that goes on after all definitions of it have been sampled,
even a sweetness to be born from the vanishing of everything, not unlike the
one dripping into the poet’s heart near the end of Paradiso: “for almost
all my vision has ceased, but still there trickles into my heart [mi
distilla] the sweetness born of it.”[26] To anticipate the coming sweetness
is at least to suspect that we still do not know and/or have forgotten what
sweetness is—refreshing one’s hunger for it. This suspicion is made more pressing
by the modern power of sugar, a paradigmatic disunity of the pleasing and the
beneficial whose hegemony has fed a “devaluation of the experience of
‘sweetness’”[27]
and virtual reduction to so-called ‘dead’ metaphor of its spiritual and
affective senses, which only begs the question of their vital relation in the
first place.[28]
Indeed, sweetness’s historical debasement from the sublime to the sugary is a critical
index of the emergence of “a culture which conceives of experience and
knowledge as two autonomous spheres,”[29] which grasps only philologically
that “sweetness is a term expressing knowledge as direct experience,”[30] and which therefore
leaves scant space for this timeless present taste (rasa, sapientia)
of that purely pleasurable truth which “cannot be an object of knowledge, its
perception being indivisible from its very existence.”[31] To court this taste is to
open ourselves to a new way of understanding sweetness, even as the indefinable
flavor of reality itself.
This
study aims to consider and detect the coming sweetness in light of the idea of
pleasure’s ultimate truth and radical immanence, its belonging to the infinite
beyond within, as figured in the old allegory of the musk deer who searches far
and wide “for the source of the sweet scent” that comes, beautifully unknown until
revealed by fatal climbing fall, from its own navel.[32] According to Vivekananda,
the fable illustrates the futility of seeking happiness in external things and
the inevitability of finding it within oneself: “An objective heaven or
millennium . . . has existence only in fancy—but a subjective one is already in
existence. The musk-deer, after vain search for the cause of the scent of the
musk, at last will have to find it in himself.”[33] At the same time, the
desperate conundrum of the musk-deer, naturally clueless about the origin of
what delights it, expresses sweetness as something one is bound to seek outside
of oneself, through the circuity of experience that can only get where it is
going by not knowing the way, via the exhaustion of search per se. Here the
mystery of sweetness, hopelessly entangled in the necessity of failing
to find it, is inseparable from the difficulty of locating what never was, is,
or will be lost, of sensing the tricky trace of something too present. It
is critical, then, not to interpretively confuse the futility of the
musk-deer’s search with the seeming impossibility of an ‘objective heaven’ or
world of happiness, absence with looking in the wrong place, given that such
confusion is exactly the unaware condition of its searching.
For a
happy world or universal sweet life is possible, in the form of the community
of creatures who know and live from the true source of sweetness.[34] The fact that the
“perennial spring of imperishable sweetness is within everyone” is what founds
the possibility of such a ‘heaven on earth’, to be realized precisely through experience
of the illusion of its impossibility, just as the musk-deer’s auto-discovery
involves a recapitulation that renders the maze of its search transparent—what
I was looking for was here all along![35] The becoming-possible of
a happy world emerges via the scent of the whole series of unfailing failures
to find sweetness’s source which as series, in the unity of the line of
experience itself, demonstrate delight’s immanence in the mode of a common,
negative denominator. So our human inability to secure delight and happiness in
dependency upon external goods is not bad but the best unending news, the
highest unfading sign that everyone is on the track of something far deeper.[36] The interminable difficulty
of locating the source of sweetness ‘out there’, the endless insufficiency of
external objects of pleasure, is precisely what opens the experiential space
for the manifestation of inner sweetness into shared worlds of happiness, just
as it is the possessive and extractivist pursuit of pleasure as something
derived from the world and for a putatively separate and needy subject
that spoils its taste: “All that lives strives for happiness; yet a thousand
and one pains and fears attend upon every pleasure which man seeks through the
ignorance of exclusiveness.”[37] In the fable, the fall which
reveals the musk-deer to itself as the ground of sweetness signifies the
bottoming out of such a subject whose impoverished mode of pleasure-seeking
both frustrates and necessitates its contact with “the ocean of unfading bliss
within,” since the sweetness whose savor spurs it ever onward never ceases flowing
from itself, in tandem with the perpetual motion of its own desire.[38] The accomplishment of
this falling or returning to the true imperishable ground of pleasure is the
precondition for an earthly or objective heaven—an empty dream only from the limited
perspective of self-ignorant and isolated subjects who demand satisfaction exclusively
in the possessive, illusory form of externality: “those who find their joy
outside themselves easily fall into emptiness and are spilled out upon the
things that are seen and the things of time, and in their starved minds lick
shadows.”[39]
For shadows too are sweet—to a tongue whose soul is unknowingly sampling the
inner spring of itself with each lick.
Indeed
the musk-deer’s fate expresses how the fall or decay (from de ‘off’ + cadere
‘to fall’) of the search for pleasure’s source is itself the fulfillment of its
own essential immanence, the within-ness of the tasty self-substance one slips
or dives into even in the most ephemeral of delights. As seen in the Taittiriya
Upanishad’s explanation of the divine origin of sensual pleasure, this blindly
auto-affective process is marked (picture someone closing their eyes and
mmm-ing with delight) by a hidden turning away from the object of
enjoyment: “On obtaining an object of desire, the mind withdraws its attention
from the object, and, turning inwards before the rise of a desire for another
object, it enjoys the Bliss of the Inner Self (Pratyagatman). This is
what is usually called sensual pleasure. This truth is known only to the people
who are endued with discrimination.”[40] Enjoyment or savoring takes
place through a paradoxical sharing of self-taste. Pleasure is taken in the
partaking of self-pleasure, and preeminently so in light the heart’s
discernment of sweetness’s indivisibility. As Derrida writes, “love and
friendship are born in the experience of this unspeakable selftaste: an
unshareable experience and nevertheless shared.”[41] And Agamben, “The point
at which I perceive my existence as sweet, my sensation goes through a
con-senting which dislocates and deports my sensation toward the friend, toward
the other self.”[42]
As existence itself—e.g. the fact of your being you—is not properly perceived but
felt and intuited as a presence, as something touched in the darkness or
negativity of its being neither empirically nor rationally detectable,[43] so is love of another enjoyed
in the shade which expresses and proves its substantiality, in the
indirection of intimacy with taste’s individuated in-difference: “With great
delight I sat in his shadow, and his fruit was sweet to my taste” (Song of Songs
2:3). Sweetness manifests the indisputable flesh of life—always someone’s
(mine)—whose flavor is beyond affirmation or denial: “not good, not bad, but my
taste,” says Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, “of which I am no longer shameful nor
secretive.”[44]
Correlatively, the unity of love and truth finds expression in the sovereignty
of divine pleasure. As “Truth itself” tells Saint Teresa of Ávila, “Do you know
what it is to love Me truly? It is to know that everything which is not
pleasing to me is a lie.”[45]
Will
this sweetness ever end? While the animal’s fragrant body comes in the fable to
a final blissful halt—“This last moment of the deer’s life was its happiest,
and there was on its face inexpressible peace”—I find nothing to suggest that
the fall of the self-searching source of sweetness, one’s decay into the ground
of bliss, ever stops or reaches the limit of itself.[46] As Lispector writes near
the end of The Passion, subtly expressing this taste as simultaneously a
limitless place and a piercing point, “the less I know the more the sweetness
of the abyss is my destiny . . . I would never reach my root, but my root did
exist. I had timidly let myself be transfixed by a sweetness [doçura] .
. .”[47] Similarly for Schelling, the
eternally abundant reality of bliss belongs to the universal “abyss of repose” at
the heart of existence, the absolute now of ipseity or being oneself wherein temporality
and finitude are always already transcended.[48] Of such oceanic bliss the
Aristotelian truism of life’s natural sweetness, seemingly proven on evidence
of our will to live on despite severe suffering, provides an inverted
image: “there is perhaps some share of what is noble in life alone, as long as
it is not too overburdened with the hardships of life. In any case, it is clear
that most human beings are willing to endure much hardship in order to cling to
life, as if it had a sort of joy inherent in it and a natural sweetness.”[49] While the observation gives
misfortunate beings the appearance of possibly deluded castaways holding to the
raft of life as a best and/or only option, its uncertainty no less begs the
question of a profounder horizon where sweetness is more like the sea which surrounds
and clings to us, all creatures of the deep who are stuck willy-nilly with
a delight none can evade, shake loose, or ever traverse. From that perspective—of
a piece with the open wonder that one is—we cling to this life, the
worlds of these bodies, not as the sole graspable good, but as the avenue of
self-expansion into the sea. As Aquinas states, citing the derivations of delectatio
(delight) and laetitia (gladness) from dilatatio (extension,
dilation), the haptics of pleasure are affectively expansive and amplifying: “man’s
affection is expanded [dilatatur] by pleasure, as though it surrendered
itself to hold within itself the object of its pleasure . . . He that takes
pleasure in a thing holds it fast, by clinging to it with all his might: but he
opens [ampliat] his heart to it that he may enjoy it perfectly.”[50] Such sweetness is less a possessed
property of one’s precious little self than an all-consuming fact unto which temporary
beings are ever to return. As Chepurin, exploring with Melville’s Ishmael the
oceanic feeling of becoming “lost in the infinite series of the sea,” states: “To
call this only a feeling, though, fails to do justice to the ontological
unconditioned state of bliss as all-dissolution, for which all material being
really strives, and which exposes individuality and selfhood as secondary
impositions, revealing the one non-appropriable being that no particular self
can claim as its own.”[51] Now the Aristotelian as
if of life’s natural sweetness signals not the possibility of lack or
delusion but the presence of a surplus, such that we adhere to its inherent joy
through itself, not as something one could lose or let go of—for who possesses
what is forever everyone(’s)?—but as something still to be yet already found,
as per the weird Moëbius loop of life’s own will or movement, which Augustine
reminds us to follow: “Let us . . . so look as men who are going to find, and
so find as men who are going to go on looking.”[52]
Sweetness’s
limitlessness, in the sense of its being of the beginning, middle, and end of
things, is similarly found in Ibn Arabi’s teaching that a) the “cosmos is
identical with mercy, nothing else,” b) boredom is failure to “witness the
renewal of [the] bliss” of existence, which “in actual fact is renewed at each
instant,” and c) suffering “is named ‘chastisement’ [‘adhab]” because
“Inescapably, you will find that everything through which you suffer is sweet [‘adhib]
when mercy envelops you in the Fire.”[53] Bliss and mercy are twin circuits
of the endless sweetness of divine or infinite selfhood, the oneness of being whose
immanence makes selfishness, or whatever fights against this unbounded unity,
inherently miserable: “The source of eternal bliss is the Self in all. The
cause of perpetual misery is the selfishness of all . . . all suffering is [your]
labor of love to unveil [your] own infinite Self.”[54] The vector of sweetness
is like a hand timelessly extended, simply here to suddenly take hold of at any
time, such as the one Lispector, in the infinite likeness of all to all, offers
the reader of her Passion: “I am the one giving you my hand . . . Like
me, you will no longer fear adding yourself to the extreme energetic sweetness
of the God.”[55]
To open the endless scope of sweetness comes with moving away from the
standards of separative existence, which “derives its being and strength by
identifying itself with one opposite and contrasting itself with the other," [56] towards
the unforeseeable horizon where the beginning of Lucretius’s De rerum natura,
praising “alma Venus” as the “pleasure [voluptas] of men and gods,” is
addressed to everyone: “For you, the crafty earth contrives sweet flowers, /
For you, the oceans laugh." [57]Or if the
identity of ocean and drop is too much to swallow, the tide of this sweetness
at least capsizes life from being a flotsam-clasping castaway into an
unfettered drunken boat, as per the words of Rimbaud’s Le Bateau ivre:
“Plus douce qu’aux enfants la chair des pommes sures / L’eau verte pénétra ma
coque de sapin / Et des taches de vins bleus et des vomissures / Me lava,
dispersant gouvernail et grappin” [Sweeter than the flesh of hard apples is to
children / The green water penetrated my hull of fir / And washed me of spots
of blue wine / And vomit, scattering rudder and grappling-hook].[58]
As further
witnesses to the advent of such absolute persuasion, whereby what is
pursued out there (externally and instrumentally) is found in here
(internally and intrinsically), consider Michel Henry’s concept of the
self-submerging “intoxication [ivresse] of life” whereby sorrow converts
into joy.[59]
Or Richard of St. Victor’s account of the “inner sweetness,” at once “a taste
and an intoxication,” which “alienates the mind from itself” and similarly
moves animals to leap as when fish “play in the water . . . [and] go beyond the
bounds of their natural habitation . . . suspend[ing] themselves for a moment
in the void.”[60]
Or Abhinavagupta’s concept of wonder (camatkāra) as the sweet act of
tasting shared by all beings, sentient and insentient, “this awareness of
subjectivity in the very heart of matter” and “bliss of the world.”[61] Or the recurring presence
of sweetness in accounts of near death experience, e.g. “I could taste
sweetness inside me” (Mahmoud), “I felt a strange sweetness” (Wlodzimierz
Borkowski), “I understood then why one speaks of the odor of sanctity, of the
‘sweet smell’ of the Holy Spirit. This was it” (Carl Jung). [62] Or Nietzsche’s
affirmation, via tragedy, that “in the ground of things, and
despite all changing appearances, life is indestructibly mighty and pleasurable.”[63]
Or William Blake’s
definition of energy as “eternal delight.”[64] Et cetera. All point to
the unbounded fact of sweetness, not as a result of certain conditions, but as
the intrinsic quality of the unknown yet unfailing space of spontaneity or
movement of reality, a playful omnipresent place that everything for whatever
or no reason is suddenly springing and slipping into, resulting in the
original sense (from re-sultare, ‘to spring back/forth’), just as “love
is nothing if it is not spontaneous.”[65] From this perspective, temporality,
which is measured by thought and action, is something always late to the scene
of pleasure, tracing retrospectively its spontaneous arrival, a per these vernal
lines from Wordsworth: “The budding twigs spread out their fan / To catch the
breezy air / And I must think, do all I can, / That there was pleasure there.”[66]
What
is to come from letting the idea of pleasure decay into everyone’s leap-fall
unto the omphalic abyss-point of sweetness’s inner spring? What happens when
the whole concept of enjoyment is flipped on its head and held like a divining
rod for locating delight’s immanent source? Why not abandon the
alluring/frightful specter of a more satisfying/unpleasant world—all the dreams
of progress and decline that never stop abandoning us—in f(l)avor of whatever
world is to follow in the wake of savoring and sharing in an eternal taste?
Is it not time for people to drop their pretense and presumption of
satisfiability and slip into something more . . . everything?
In
entertaining these questions, I am not interested in programs, projects, or prognostications
regarding what shapes the coming sweetness will or should take. The plan is
rather to research and contemplate its traces in a few specific sites, like a
prospector whose findings, however faint, will reveal the simple fact of the
treasure itself, which really speaking is always already found and preeminently
not in need of production, transport, or purchase. More expressly, I
will explore how the experiential path into the coming sweetness, the material,
imaginative, and intellectual ‘ways’ to it, lies through the serial dialectics
of pleasure which, perpetually slipping in and out itself, persists in a vital state
of infinite decay towards its own eternity or meta-temporal now. Seriality is
the interface between time and eternity, individual and universal, one and
many: “The series is simultaneous unity and multiplicity, particular and
general: true poles of all perception, which cannot exist without one another.”[67] Likewise is pleasure per
se inseparable from seriality, as felt in delight’s proverbial ‘waves’, the
insistent do-it-again-ness of enjoyment of repetition and permutation, and in
the iterative play of likeness/unlikeness itself in thought, feeling, and
perception.[68]
If the coming sweetness is truly eternal, not another fading ‘coming
attraction’ but a sweetness forever here to stay, one that properly never comes
and never goes yet ceaselessly flows or manifests like a spring in endless
advent of itself, then it is to be located via the unstoppable continuity of
what perdures and creates itself in the midst of mutability or finitude, i.e.
in the anarchic, unbounded unity of life that is without—or is its own—principle,
for “Only that which is without a principle properly lives [Hoc enim proprie
vivit quod est sine principio].”[69] Seriality or
one-after-another-ness, sovereignly indifferent to the distinction between
regularity and randomness, order and chaos, inherently open to whatever comes, marks
the way of slipping into the coming sweetness because it is the way of life
itself. As Proudhon says, “That alone is durable, living, useful and beautiful,
which is serial; that alone is of natural and permanent institution, which has
its ordination in itself.”[70] And so this sweetness is
not something to be arrived at so much as surrendered to, less as an exterior
force which overpowers as an interior fact that emerges, in other words, with
the twist that one is no less on the side of what is surrendered to. As
Lispector writes in The Apple in the Dark, “A certain sweetness had
overtaken him, except that he was monitoring [vigiava] his own
submission and was somehow directing it.”[71] As if sweetness names the
desire of desire, the secret heart of wanting that wants you, awaiting within
this other side of delight’s horizon.
In
sum, fundamentally at stake in the question of the coming sweetness is the
spirit’s irrepressible call for freedom and the struggle to untether ourselves
from a) the chain of if-then structures consolidating the domain of false
values, all that is colored by the alienation of ends and means, which commonly
carries the stench of justification, and b) the reifying objectification or
reduction of entities to their quantifiable attributes and categories of
difference, all that denies their transcendent facticity and inherent infinity,
which commonly tastes of the bitterness of prejudice, bigotry, dogmatism, and
such. True values, by contrast, bear the stamp of sweetness, in the old sense
of the qualitative unity of the pleasing and the good.[72] They direct us to “the
intrinsic richness of being which knows no limitation” and refuse the impoverishment
of experience perpetuated by sacrificial illusions of destination, purpose, or
success: “All that life is and has, is at once deprived of intrinsic
significance if it comes to be regarded as merely instrumental to some far-off
event.”[73] As if we were all born on
some colonial spaceship and not HERE! The coming sweetness is something
incredibly close, a this that simply never ends: “Simply I am I. And you
are you. It is vast, and will endure. What I’m writing to you is a ‘this.’ It
won’t stop: it goes on [continua].”[74] It is the taste of life’s
return to itself, to the breath which blows ubi vult (John 3:8), the
resurrection of the living to the infinite depth of their own vision,
for “not until that glad hour when we are at last rid of our delusions about
the science of the experts, and are content simply to choose among pleasures,
can we face the unknown with a lucid passionate gaze.”[75] This gaze is not blind to
the lights of reason and authority but sees through them in due perspective as
reflections of what can only be seen through itself and touched without fear. As
Tommaso Campanella writes, this immediate order of understanding “is not
through syllogism, which is like an arrow with which we may reach a target from
afar without tasting it, nor merely through authority, which is like touching
with someone else’s hands, but through an inner touch in great sweetness [per
tactum intrinsecum in magna suavitate], which God hides from those who fear
him.”[76] Atop the mountain of
Purgatory, Virgil tells Dante, “lo tuo piacere omai prendi per duce” (Purgatorio
27.131) [now take your own pleasure as guide]. Incredible that one ever loses track
of it.
[1] Clarice Lispector, “The Birth of
Pleasure (fragment),” in Too Much of Life: The Complete Crônicas, trans.
Margeret Jull Costa and Robin Patterson (New Directions, 2022), 187. Cf. “I’m
your favorite flavor, más dulce que la miеl” (Kali Uchis, “Aguardiente y
Limon,” Sin Miedo (del Amor y Otros Demonios) [EMI, 2020]).
[2] Augustine, Confessions,
trans. F. J. Sheed (Hackett, 2006), 9.1.1, translation modified. In this
passage, Augustine’s identification of the divine sweetness intersects with the
sweetness of freedom from ephemeral pleasures which the presence of God in
oneself supersedes: “How lovely [suave] I suddenly found it to be free
from the loveliness [suavitatibus] of those vanities, so that now it was
a joy to renounce what I had been so afraid to lose. For You cast them out of
me, O true and supreme Loveliness [suavitas], You cast them out of me
and took their place [intrabas] in me, You who are sweeter [dulcior]
than all pleasure, yet not to flesh and blood; brighter than all light, yet
deeper within than any secret” (ibid.). Mary Carruthers reads this as an
ecstatic expression in which the morally ambivalent concept of sweetness is
applied to the divine for persuasive effect: “Augustine, who was acutely aware
of the ambiguity of dulcedo/suavitas, even counseling against using
these words in translations of the Bible in favor of less morally troublesome
words like bonitas, nonetheless called in rapture to his God, ‘vera tu
et summa suavitas’ [Confessions 9.1]. For all its ambivalence, sweetness
seems to have been a necessary term, worth risking for the sake of some greater
expressive good” (The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages [Oxford
University Press, 2013], 94). This interpretation, however, seems to risk
dualizing the essence of sweetness against the drift of Augustine’s words,
which instead trace a scale of lower to higher sweetness, as well as overlook
the crucially Augustinian emphasis on God as the pure, immanent, and
inescapably sought-for source of all pleasure: “Thus the soul is guilty of
fornication when she turns from You and seeks from any other source what she
will nowhere find pure and without taint [liquida] unless she returns to
You. Thus even those who go from You and stand up against You are still
perversely imitating You. But by the mere fact of their imitation, they declare
that You are the creator of all that is, and that there is nowhere for them to
go where You are not” (Confessions, 2.7.14). On this model, sweetness
per se is more like a unitary liquid substance found everywhere, whether in
dirty evaporating drops or fresh ever-flowing abundance, all the more so if we
recall the platonic inseparability of imitation and participation, on which see
Jean-François Pradeau, L’imitation du principe: Plotin et la participation
(Vrin, 2003) and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, “Imitation, Expression,
Participation,” in Traditional Art and Symbolism, ed. Roger Lipsey
(Princeton, 1977), 276–85. So I prefer to think that it is precisely this
omnipresence that makes sweetness a necessary term, ambivalent only to
logically divisive reason, the concept-fact of an all-pervading and as if
superessential savor.
[3] Meher Baba, quoted in Bhau Kalchuri, Lord
Meher, 1072, https://www.lordmeher.org/. Meher Baba identifies the reality
of bliss with existence itself as a plenitude from which humans block
themselves off by means of a possessive and extractivist pursuit of pleasure perpetuated
through its own disappointment: “The whole universe is full of bliss. In fact,
nothing really exists except bliss. But ordinary mortals cannot achieve it and
they run after material happiness, trying to extract pleasure out of the world
by acquiring possessions. Man tries one pleasure after another, but all fade
away and he is never satisfied. When he is fed up with one, he tries another.
When that one proves distasteful, something else is tried, and so on. For ages
on end, mortal beings have tried in vain, birth after birth, to gain happiness
from the world” (ibid.).
[4] Michel Henry, I Am the Truth:
Toward a Philosophy of Christianity, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford, 2003),
50. As Henry explains, science’s blindness to the truth of life, akin to Agamben’s
definition of evil as “the reduction of the taking-place of things to a fact
like others, the forgetting of the transcendence inherent in the very
taking-place of things” (The Coming Community, trans. Michael Hardt
[University of Minnesota Press, 1993], 14), is not just a matter of the
ignorance wherethrough “biology never encounters life, knows nothing of it, and
has not the slightest idea of it” (ibid., 38), but a more active and
paradoxical self-negation: “On the one hand, science is a mode of life that
belongs to absolute subjectivity. On the other hand, each of the operations of
scientific subjectivity is carried out through the putting out of play of this
subjectivity, so that it can focus on the being that is there in front and that
is taken as the only ‘real’ and ‘true’ being. It sets aside and rejects into
nothingness everything that is not itself. It does not just misunderstand this
essence of life – it denies it. - it denies it . . . It thereby discredits
traditional forms that developed absolute life and explicitly aimed for such
development” (Michel Henry, Barbarism, Scott Davidson [Continuum, 2012],
63). Cf. “it is the character of the present time that all authority is founded
on what cannot be experienced . . . modern science has its origins in an
unprecedented mistrust of experience as it was traditionally understood”
(Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience,
trans. Liz Heron [Verso, 1993], 14–7).
[5] Kirill Chepurin, Bliss Against
the World: Schelling, Theodicy, and the Crisis of Modernity (Oxford, 2024),
6, 2.
[6] Miguel de Unamuno, The Tragic
Sense of Life, trans. Anthony Kerrigan (Princeton University Press, 1972),
255.
[7] Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke
Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge,
2006), 21.
[8] Gilles Deleuze, “Dualism, Monism
and Multiplicities (Desire-Pleasure-Jouissance) [Seminar of 26 March,
1973],” trans. Daniel W. Smith, Contretemps 2 (2001): 96.
[9] Raoul Vaneigem, The Book of
Pleasures (Pending Press, 1979), 2.
[10] Cf. “although bliss may appear
from within the unblissful world as either a lost paradisal past or a
longed-for blissful future, it is itself immanently atemporal (Chepurin, Bliss
Against the World, 6).
[11] Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone,
trans. Kathleen Baldwin et al. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013), 129.
[12] John Cassian, Conferences,
14.10, from Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Second Series, Vol. 11, eds.
Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Christian Literature Publishing Co., 1894),
revised and edited for New Advent by Kevin Knight,
http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3508.htm.
[13] William Blake, Complete Poetry
and Prose, ed. David V. Erdman (Doubleday, 1988), 470.
[14] Clarice Lispector, A Breath of
Life, trans. Johnny Lorenz (New Directions, 2012), 155. On the anagogical
dimensions of joy, see Søren Kirkegaard, Without Authority, ed. and
trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton University Press, 1997), 44–5,
on which Leo Stan comments: “spiritual felicity dissolves the future and the
past as sources of sorrow, nostalgia, and worry, giving rise to an
undifferentiated oneness between the self and its transcendent ground . . . joy
shelters an eschatological dimension, inasmuch as by gaily existing in God at
this very moment and regardless of all possible tribulation, the individual is
offered an unexpected foretaste of paradise. Accordingly, attaining this inner
bliss and holding on to it with all one’s might is an unpostponable call, a
duty to be fulfilled this very day” (“The Lily in the Field and the Bird of the
Air: An Endless Liturgy in Kierkegaard’s Authorship,” in Kierkegaard and the
Bible. Tome II: The New Testament, eds. Lee C. Barrett and John Stewart
[Routledge, 2010], 61).
[15] Michel Henry, The Essence of
Manifestation, trans. Girard Etzkorn (Martinus Nijhoff, 1973), 476, 663. Seeing
that the coming of being to itself “corresponds to no battle, to no effort of
the absolute at grasping itself . . . [and] is oblivious to the splitting of
opposition and does not even presuppose it” (476), the sweetness of being
carries the sense of gentleness no less than that of pleasurable
sensation and savor. There is a natural spontaneous gentleness in the way one
is (with) oneself, giving to and giving into the ongoing advent of life or
existence and its activity. Similarly, Jean-Louis Chrétien discusses the divine
sweetness of gentleness both in terms of an unforgettable anticipatory flavor of
the eternal for which one must be (made) ready—“taste is an act of ours for
which we ourselves must prepare, and that also prepares us”—and in terms a
welcoming giving of time: “Gentleness lets be what (or whom) it finds itself
before, in order to take time for it. It does not take this time from others,
but from and of itself, and thereby gives it to others . . . This taste is not
a savor that we would keep for ourselves, for the oil of sweetness comes to
expand itself surely and silently, offering and sharing itself” (Ten
Meditations for Catching and Losing One’s Breath, trans. Steven DeLay
[Kalos, 2024], 80–2).
[16] Henry, Barbarism, 104.
[17] Eriugena, Periphyseon: The
Division of Nature, trans. I. P. Sheldon-Williams, revised by John J. O’
Meara (Dumbarton Oaks, 1987), 593.
[18] Lispector, A Breath of Life,
45.
[19] Nicholas of Cusa, On the Vision
of God, 24.108, in Selected Spiritual Writings, trans. H. Lawrence
Bond (Paulist Press, 1997), 284.
[20] Carruthers, “Sweet Jesus,” 10.
[21] Carruthers, Experience of
Beauty, 89.
[22] Zhang Juen et al., “The structure
of human sweetness,” Cell 188 (2025): 4141. Notice how this statement
tacitly denies for no reason the pleasure of sweetness to non-human animals,
perpetuating via a concept of human exceptionalism a false separation between
taste and experience.
[23] Darra Goldstein, Introduction to The
Oxford Companion to Sugar and Sweets, ed. Darra Goldstein (Oxford
University Press, 2015), xvii.
[24] “La sensation physique du goût est
en effet pour l’entendement une des plus obscures, des moins conceptualisables
qui soient. La vue et l’ouïe créent une certaine distance entre l'objet perçu
et le sujet, le toucher maintient une certaine extériorité. Dans le goût, au
contraire, se produit une espèce de symbiose entre l’objet et le sujet, comme
le manifeste le terme même de goût, qui, dans l'usage spontané, désigne à la
fois et le sens qui perçoit et la qualité de l’objet perçu” (Pierre Adnès, “Goût
Spirituel,” in Dictionnaire de spiritualité ascétique et mystique: doctrine
et histoire, Tome VI [Beauchesne, 1967], 642).
[25] R. James Goldstein, “‘Dolcezza’:
Dante and the Cultural Phenomenology of Sweetness,” Dante Studies 132
(2014): 114.
[26] Dante Alighieri, The Divine
Comedy: Paradiso, trans. Robert M. Durling (Oxford University Press, 2011),
33.61–3.
[27] Joseph Imorde, “Carlo Dolci and
the Aesthetics of Sweetness,” Getty Research Journal 6 (2014): 9. Imorde
argues that “the metaphor of God’s sweetness was eviscerated by the constantly
growing production and consumption of sugar” (9). Yet to phrase it this way
appears to miss how this evisceration is also precisely a translation of the sublime
or divine sweetness into metaphor, which is ironic given that the knowledge of
direct experience precisely is not metaphorical, but as Mary Carruthers states
“a fully phenomenal knowing” whose proper quality is sweetness: “Sweetness is
the experiential property of knowing” (“Sweet Jesus,” in Mindful Spirit in
Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk, ed. Bonnie
Wheeler [Routledge, 2006], 13, 11). A perfect example of the presumption that
non-gustatory sweetness is metaphorical, a logical transference of
taste-sensation to another domain, is provided in an empirical study of the
connections between sweetness and consonance in music: Jason Stoessel, Kristal
Spreadborough, and Inés Antón-Méndez, “The Metaphor of Sweetness in Medieval
and Modern Music Listening,” Music Perception 39 [2021]: 63–82). I
assume that this presumption is a consequence of the contemporary predominance
of the gustatory meaning in the concept of sweetness, rather than a reflection
of belief that medieval and modern people commonly experience and articulate
the sweetness of music in comparison to the taste of honey.
[28] This relation is crystallized, for
example, in the tradition of monastic sweets which “represent desire earthly
and divine [and] . . . . embody a delight in the spirit expressed through
delicious bliss mixed, baked, served, and tasted” (Cristina Mazzoni, The
Women in God’s Kitchen: Cooking, Eating, and Spiritual Writing [Continuum,
2005], 76).
[29] Agamben, Infancy and History,
20.
[30] Carruthers, “Sweet
Jesus,” 13.
[31] Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, The
Dance of Shiva: Fourteen Indian Essays (Munshiram Manoharial, 1982), 35.
[32] “Once, while roaming about and
frolicking among hills and dales, the Kasturi-mriga was suddenly aware
of an exquisitely beautiful scent, the like of which it had never known. The
scent stirred the inner depths of its soul so profoundly that it determined to
find its source. So keen was its longing that notwithstanding the severity of cold
or the intensity of scorching heat, by day as well as by night, it carried on
its desperate search for the source of the sweet scent. It knew no fear or
hesitation but undaunted went on its elusive search until, at last, happening
to lose its foothold on a cliff, it had a precipitous fall resulting in a fatal
injury. While breathing its last the deer found that the scent which had
ravished its heart and inspired all these efforts came from its own navel. This
last moment of the deer’s life was its happiest, and there was on its face
inexpressible peace” (Meher Baba, Discourses, 6th ed., 3 vols [San
Francisco: Sufism Reoriented, 1973], II.193). On the origins of the fable, which
is found in Kabir, see K. Karttunen, “The Musk Deer and its Musk in Classical
Indian Literature,” Kervan: International Journal of African and Asiatic
Studies 29 (2025): 347–55.
[33] Swami Vivekananda, Complete
Works: Volume VI (Advaita Ashrama, 1991), 379. For Vivekananda, the
delusion of the possibility of an objective heaven is related to the fallacy
that “evil is a fixed quantity,” diminishable by the increase of good, whereas
their relative nature means that the “progress of the world means more
enjoyment and more misery too” (379–80). Accepting this, one is left two
options, either accept the world as it is as “bear the pangs and pains in the
hope of a crumb of happiness now and then” or “give up the search for pleasure,
knowing it to be pain in another form, and seek for truth,” the unitary
reality underlying the opposites—with the promising twist that “the same truth
is bliss” (380), at once “my real Self and the reality of everything else”
(380). That one, with all the inherent contradictoriness of a real human being,
cannot practically but choose both only underscores the actual inseparability
of truth and pleasure, the fact that we need our pleasure to be true, of the
nature of reality, as much as we want truth to be pleasurable.
[34] Cf. “Divine love will not only
introduce imperishable sweetness and infinite bliss into personal life, but it
will also make possible an era of New Humanity” (Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.25).
[35] Meher Baba, Life at its Best
(Sufism Reoriented, 1957), 39.
[36] Cf. “The condition of the world,
the strife and uncertainty that is everywhere, the general dissatisfaction with
and rebellion against any and every situation shows that the ideal of material
perfection is an empty dream and proves the existence of an eternal Reality
beyond materiality” (Meher Baba, The Everything and the Nothing [Meher
House Publications, 1963], 55).
[37] Meher Baba, Life at its Best,
39–40.
[38] Meher Baba, Life at its Best,
40.
[39] Augustine, Confessions,
9.4.10.
[40] The Taittirîya Upanishad, with
the commentaries of Sankarâchâya, Suresvarâchârya, and Sâyana (Vidyâranya),
trans. A. Mahadeva Sastri (G. T. A. Printing Works, 1903), 589.
[41] Jacques Derrida, “Justices,” Critical
Inquiry 31 (2006): 699.
[42] Giorgio Agamben, “The Friend,” in What
is an Apparatus? and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella
(Stanford University Press, 2009), 35.
[43] As Stephen Priest explains,
“although some things that exist can be detected rationally or empirically,
their existence is not empirically or rationally detectable. Although
spatiotemporal processes, and numbers of things, can be detected empirically, space,
time, and numbers cannot. Nor can they be discovered just by
thinking. Although present things can be perceived, their presence
cannot. Although the human being you take yourself to be can be sensed, the
fact of its being you (rather than no one or someone else) cannot.
Nevertheless, all these phenomena, or realities, are intuited or are present”
(“The Unconditioned Soul,” in After Physicalism, ed. Benedikt Paul Göcke
[University of Notre Dame Press, 2012], 299).
[44] Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 156,
on which Virgil W. Brower comments: “Any love devoid of the element of mein
Geshmack [my taste] is . . . hostile to all flesh and, therefore, to life .
. . A love of the flesh must include my taste. This is a new . . . veritate
pabulo [food of truth] for my truth is my taste—meiner Wahrheit
ist mein Geschmack—and is so beyond good and evil. Mein Geschmack
with no secrecy is one to be shared (“The Taste to Come: The Lick of
Faith and the Other-Mouths of Messianism,” Postscripts 3 [2007]:
255).
[45] Teresa of Ávila, The Life of
Teresa of Ávila, trans. J. M. Cohen (Penguin, 1957), 306.
[46] Meher Baba, Discourses,
II.193.
[47] Clarice Lispector, The Passion
According to G. H., trans. Idra Novey (New Directions, 2012), 187–8.
[48] As quoted in Chepurin, Bliss
Against the World, 7. He explains: “In this blissful now, the particular
coincides with the universal immediately, without the negativity of synthesis
but also without foreclosing the being of the particular . . . To intuit this
bliss is to see the it is what it is at the heart of everything, an A =
A, in which each finite being’s particularity is dissolved in absolute identity
or what one might call the pure ‘=’ . . . Absolute identity is absolutely
indifferent, and absolutely without relation to any difference or specificity,
to any specific position of identity. It is the whatever identity, or whatever
manifestation or revelation of absolute identity. Finite things may come into
being and perish, but the ‘=’ persists, eternally or atemporally, in each and
every one of them” (ibid., 124–5).
[49] Aristotle, Politics, trans.
C. D. C. Reeve (Hackett, 1998), 1278b30.
[50] Thomas Aquinas, Summa
Theologica, 5 vols., trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Christina
Classics, 1981), I-II, q33, a1.
[51] Chepurin, Bliss Against the
World, 142.
[52] Augustine, The Trinity,
trans. Edmund Hill (New York: New City Press, 1991), 271.
[53] Ibn ‘Arabi, al-Futuhat
al-makkiyya, 4 vols. (Cairo,1911), II.437.24, II.653.25, and II.207.11,
quoted in William C. Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi: Heir to the Prophets
(Oneworld, 2005), 130; William C. Chittick, The Sufi Path of Knowledge: Ibn
‘Arabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (State University of New York Press,
1989), 106; and Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi, 139, respectively. “Chepurin
highlights water and fire as twin dimensions of bliss for Schelling: “Water and
fire, Schelling notes, are equally consuming (verzehrende) principles, ‘hostile
to selfhood’ . . . Divine being is absolutely one; therefore, the bliss of
gravity (watery bliss) and the bliss of light (fiery bliss) constitute a mere
relative distinction, which disappears in God, whose absolute agency is
absolute indolence” (Bliss Against the World, 143).
[54] Meher Baba, Life at its Best,
52–3).
[55] Lispector, Passion, 179.
[56] Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.23.
[57] Lucretius, The Nature of Things,
trans. A. E. Stallings (Penguin, 2009), I.9. Cf. Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s
pantheological interpretation of Lucretian nature as “an immanent,
ateleological, delightful abundance” Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), 78.
[58] Arthur Rimbaud, Complete Works,
Selected Letters, trans. Wallace Fowlie (University of Chicago Press,
2005), 130–1.
[59] “Et quand . . . souffrance atteint
son point limite dans le désespoir, alors, selon Kierkegaard, ‘dans son rapport
à lui-même, en voulant être luimême, le moi plonge à travers sa propre
transparence dans la puissance qui l’a posé’ et l’ivresse de la vie nous
submerge. Heureux ceux qui souffrent. Au Fond de sa Nuit, notre chair est Dieu”
(Michel Henry, Phénoménologie de la vie, I: De la phénoménologie
[Presses Universitaires de France, 2003], 76) [And when . . . suffering reaches
its limit point in despair, then, according to Kierkegaard, ‘in its relation to
itself, in wanting to be itself, the self plunges through its own transparency
into the power that has posed it’ and the drunkenness of life submerges us.
Happy are those who suffer. In the depths of its Night, our flesh is God.]
[60] Richard of St. Victor, Richard of St. Victor: The Book of the
Patriarchs, the Mystical Ark, Book Three of the Trinity, trans. Grover Zinn
(Paulist Press, 1979), 91, 334.
[61] Loriliai Biernacki, The Matter
of Wonder: Abhinavagupta’s Panentheism and the New Materialism (Oxford
University Press, 2023), 56, 183n63. Biernacki explains: “Wonder entails acting
in the world. And this happens through a bodily hermeneutic, wrapping
subjectivity in the imagery of tasting, the delight of the senses. This,
indeed, makes a lot of psychological sense. To savor something, to reflect,
brings us precisely back to the embodied ‘I.’ What happens phenomenologically
in this reading of wonder is that we taste the reality of our embodiment,
consciously and in a particular time and space. The wonder we feel from the
rich web of the Milky Way on a clear night or from the tapestry of sunset
colors over the mountains is not really about transcending the body so much as
it is about being present in the body. Present enough that is, to allow our
senses to tap into the secret subjectivity we share with the materiality we
encounter, the matter of stars and wavelengths of light is refracted across
rocks and oxygen and clouds” (54).
[62] “Mahmoud NDE,” Near Death
Experience Research Foundation, https://search.nderf.org/experience/7189;
Wlodzimierz Borkowski, quoted in Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The
Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, in The Omnibus
Homo Sacer (Stanford University Press, 2017), 873; Carl G. Jung, Memories,
Dreams, Reflections, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (Vintage Books,
1963), 295.
[63] Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth
of Tragedy and Other Writings, trans. Ronald Speirs (Cambridge, 1999), 39.
[64] “Energy is eternal delight”
(William Blake, Complete Poetry & Prose, ed. David V. Erdman
(Doubleday, 1988), 34. Catherine Keller contrasts the spontaneous vitality of
energy as eternal delight to the draining movements excitement and indulgence:
“The energy of eternal delight is the alternative to a hedonistic indulgence in
bursts of pleasure. Pepsi peppiness and consumer glee are draining, not
energizing, the planet. The manic excitations produce depressive effects in a
vicious circle that, if undiagnosed, blocks the circulation of our spontaneous
interactivity. For our souls live indissociably from these bodies that are
folds of the living planet. Its life would be the pulse of its energy . . . So
this energy, far from a homogenous linear flow, signifies the creative throb of
life itself, beyond the distinction of human and nonhuman” (“The Energy We Are:
A Meditation in Seven Pulsations,” in Cosmology, Ecology, and the Energy of
God, eds. Donna Bowman and Clayton Crockett [Fordham, 2012], 15).
[65] Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.137.
[66] William Wordsworth, “Lines written
in early spring,” in Lyrical Ballads (1798), ed. W. J. B. Owen (Oxford,
1969), 66.
[67] Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, On the
Creation of Order in Humanity, trans. Shawn P. Wilbur,
https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/new-proudhon-library, III.vii.339,
translation modified. See also, Nicola Masciandaro, The Seriality of the One
(Anthem, 2025).
[68] Chesterton links
the desire for recurrence with the tireless delight of the eternal: “It is
possible that God says every morning, ‘Do it again’ to the sun; and every
evening, ‘Do it again’ to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that
makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but
has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite
of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than
we” (Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1927].
108–9). Wordsworth identifies “the pleasure which the mind derives from the
perception of similitude in dissimilitude” as paradigmatic: “This principle is
the great spring of the activity of our minds, and their chief feeder. From
this principle the direction of the sexual appetite, and all the passions
connected with it, take their origin: it is the life of our ordinary
conversation; and upon the accuracy with which similitude in dissimilitude, and
dissimilitude in similitude are perceived, depend our taste and our moral
feelings” (William Wordsworth, “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads [1800],”
in William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads 1798,
2nd ed., ed. W. J. B. Owen [Oxford University Press, 1969], 173).
[69] Meister Eckhart, quoted in Michael
A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying (University of Chicago Press,
1994), 286.
[71] Clarice Lispector, The Apple in
the Dark, trans. Benjamin Moser (New Directions, 2023), 10. To this we may
compare Meister Eckhart’s description of the instantaneous overflowing of God
in the individual: “He has to act, to overflow into you, just as when the air
is clear and pure the sun has to burst forth and cannot refrain . . . You need
not seek Him here or there, He is no further than the door of your heart; there
He stands patiently awaiting whoever is ready to open up and let Him in. No
need to call to Him from afar: He can hardly wait for you to open up. He longs
for you a thousand times more than you long for Him: the opening and the
entering are a single act” (Meister Eckhart, Complete Mystical Works,
trans. Maurice O’C Walshe [Crossroad, 1987], 58).
[72] Cf. “And let each day be a loss to
us on which we did not dance once! And let each truth be false to us which was
not greeted by one laugh!” (Nietzsche, Zarathustra, 169).
[73] Meher Baba, Discourses,
I.113, 167.
[74] Clarice Lispector, Água Viva,
trans. Stefan Tobler (New Directions, 2012), 88.
[75] Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of
the Free Spirit, trans. Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson (Zone, 1998), 12.
[76] “. . . non per syllogismum, qui
est quasi sagitta qua scopum attingimus a longe absque gustu, neque modo per
authoritatem, quod est tangere quasi per manum alienam, sed per tactum
intrinsecum in magna suavitate, quam abscondit Deus timentibus se [in quella
grande dolcezza che Dio cela a chi lo teme” (Tommaso Campanella, New
Metaphysics, quoted in Eugenio Garin, Storia della filosofia italiana,
3 vols. [Einaudi, 1966], 2.813). Bertrando Spaventa glosses this sweetness as
liberty and this touch as that of feeling, self-awareness, and certainty: “‘. .
. sed per tactum intrinsecum in magna suavitate.” Cioè in
magna libertate . . . Cos’è
questo tactus? In generale nient’altro che il sentire,
la coscienza di sè, la presenza dello spirito a sè medesimo, l’Io,
il pensare, la certezza” (La filosofia italiana nelle sue relazioni con la
filosofia Europa [Laterza, 1908], 95). Giorgio Agamben cites this sweet
touch to exemplify taste (in the stronger sense of discernment, judgment,
discrimination etc.) as “knowledge that enjoys and pleasure that knows (Taste,
trans. Cooper Francis [Seagull, 2024], 15–6). Discussing the connections between
Campanella’s “naturalistic attitude” and early modern concepts of taste or gusto,
Klien observes that Campanella’s “confident acceptance of a subjective and
incommunicable value is akin to the old idea of natural magic” (Robert Klein, Essays
on the Renaissance and Modern Art, trans. Madeline Jay and Leon Wieseltier [Viking
Press, 1979], 167). Lispector’s drama of tasting and contacting reality in the Passion
similarly crosses the threshold of fear and postponement: “The horror is that
we know that we see God in life itself […] And if I postpone the face of
reality until after my death—it’s out of guile . . . just as I only have the
courage to really dream when I sleep” (Lispector, Passion, 154).
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