On Being Lyrical by Emil Cioran
On Being Lyrical by Emil Cioran
Why can't we stay closed up inside of ourselves? Why do we chase after expression and form, trying to deliver ourselves of our precious concern or "meanings," desperately attempting to organize what is after all a rebellious and chaotic process? Wouldn't it be more creative simply to surrender our inner fluidity without any intention of objectifying it, intimately and voluptuously soakin in our own inner turmoil and struggle? Then we would feel with much richer intensity the whole inner growth of spiritual experience. All kinds of insights would blend and flourish in a fertile effervescence. A sensation of actuality and spiritual content would be born, like the rise of a wave or a musical phrase. To be tormented by a sense of inner infinity, means to live so intensely that you feel you are about to die of life. Such a feeling is so rare and strange that we would live it out with shouts. I feel I could die of life, and I ask myself if it makes any sense to look for an explanation. When your entire spiritual past vibrates inside you with a supreme tension, when a sense of total presence resurrects buried experiences and you lose your normal rhythm, then, from the heights of life, you are caught by death without the fear which normally accompanies it. It is a feeling similar to that experienced by lovers on the heights of happiness, when they have a passing but intense intimation of death or when a premonition of betrayal haunts their budding love.
Only a few can endure such experiences to the end. There is always a serious danger in repressing something which requires objectification, in locking up explosive energy, because there comes a moment when one cannot restrain such overwhelming power. And then the fall is from too much plenitude. There are experiences and obsessions one cannot live with. Salvation lies in confessing them. The terrifying experience of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of your self. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness. This is why lyricism represents a dispersion of subjectivity; it is a certain quantity of an individual's spiritual effervescence which cannot be contained and needs constant expression. To be lyrical means you cannot stay closed up inside yourself. The need to externalize is the more intense, the more the lyricism is interiorized, profound, and concentrated. Why is the suffering or loving man lyrical? Because such states, although different in nature and orientation, spring up from the deepest and most intimate part of our being, from the substantial center of subjectivity, as from a radiation zone. One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality. What is unique and specific in us is then realized in a form so expressive that the individual rises onto a universal plane. The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reac hes the original source of life. True interiorization leads to a universality inaccessible to those who remain on the periphery. The vulgar interpretation of universality calls it a phenomenon of quantitative expansion rather than a qualitatively rich containment. Such an interpretation sees lyricism as a peripheral and inferior phenomenon, the product of spiritual inconsistency, failing to notice that the lyrical resources of subjectivity show remarkable freshness and depth.
There are people who become lyrical only at crucial moments in their life; some only in the throes of death, when their entire past suddenly appears before them and hits them with the force of a waterfall. Many become lyrical after some decisively critical experience, when the turmoil of their inner being reaches paroxysm. Thus people who are normally inclined toward objectivity and impersonality, strangers both to themselves and to reality, once they become prisoners of love, experience feelings which actualize all their personal resources. The fact that almost everybody writes poetry when in love proves that the resourcees of conceptual thinking are too poor to express their inner infinity; inner lyricism finds adequate objectification only through fluid, irrational material. The experience of suffering is a similar case. You never suspected what lay hidden in yourself and in the world, you were living contentedly at the periphery of things, when suddenly those feelings of suffering which are second only to death itself take hold of you and transport you into a region of infinite complexity, where your subjectivity tosses about in a maelstrom. To be lyrical from suffering means to achieve that inner purification in which wounds cease to be mere outer manifestations without deep complications and begin to participate in the essence of your being. The lyricism of suffering is a song of the blood, the flesh, and the nerves. True suffering begins in illness. Almost all illnesses have lyrical virtues. Only those who vegetate in a scandalous insensitivity remain impersonal when ill, and thus miss that deepening of the personality brought about by illness.
One does not become lyrical except after a total organic affliction. Accidental lyricism has its source in external factors; once they have disappeared, their inner correspondent also disappears. There is no authentic lyricism without a grain of interior madness. It is significant that the beginnings of all mental psychoses are marked by a lyrical phase during which all the usual barriers and limits disappear, giving way to an inner drunkenness of the most fertile, creative kind. This explains the poetic productivity characteristic of the first phases of psychoses. Consequently, madness could be seen as a sort of paroxysm of lyricism. For this reason, we should rather write in praise of lyricism than in praise of folly. The lyrical state is a state beyond forms and systems. A sudden fluidity melts all the elements of our inner life in one fell swoop, and creates a full and intense rhythm, an ideal convergence. Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.
[from On the Heights of Despair, trans. by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, University of Chicago Press]
Why can't we stay closed up inside of ourselves? Why do we chase after expression and form, trying to deliver ourselves of our precious concern or "meanings," desperately attempting to organize what is after all a rebellious and chaotic process? Wouldn't it be more creative simply to surrender our inner fluidity without any intention of objectifying it, intimately and voluptuously soakin in our own inner turmoil and struggle? Then we would feel with much richer intensity the whole inner growth of spiritual experience. All kinds of insights would blend and flourish in a fertile effervescence. A sensation of actuality and spiritual content would be born, like the rise of a wave or a musical phrase. To be tormented by a sense of inner infinity, means to live so intensely that you feel you are about to die of life. Such a feeling is so rare and strange that we would live it out with shouts. I feel I could die of life, and I ask myself if it makes any sense to look for an explanation. When your entire spiritual past vibrates inside you with a supreme tension, when a sense of total presence resurrects buried experiences and you lose your normal rhythm, then, from the heights of life, you are caught by death without the fear which normally accompanies it. It is a feeling similar to that experienced by lovers on the heights of happiness, when they have a passing but intense intimation of death or when a premonition of betrayal haunts their budding love.
Only a few can endure such experiences to the end. There is always a serious danger in repressing something which requires objectification, in locking up explosive energy, because there comes a moment when one cannot restrain such overwhelming power. And then the fall is from too much plenitude. There are experiences and obsessions one cannot live with. Salvation lies in confessing them. The terrifying experience of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of your self. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness. This is why lyricism represents a dispersion of subjectivity; it is a certain quantity of an individual's spiritual effervescence which cannot be contained and needs constant expression. To be lyrical means you cannot stay closed up inside yourself. The need to externalize is the more intense, the more the lyricism is interiorized, profound, and concentrated. Why is the suffering or loving man lyrical? Because such states, although different in nature and orientation, spring up from the deepest and most intimate part of our being, from the substantial center of subjectivity, as from a radiation zone. One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality. What is unique and specific in us is then realized in a form so expressive that the individual rises onto a universal plane. The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reac hes the original source of life. True interiorization leads to a universality inaccessible to those who remain on the periphery. The vulgar interpretation of universality calls it a phenomenon of quantitative expansion rather than a qualitatively rich containment. Such an interpretation sees lyricism as a peripheral and inferior phenomenon, the product of spiritual inconsistency, failing to notice that the lyrical resources of subjectivity show remarkable freshness and depth.
There are people who become lyrical only at crucial moments in their life; some only in the throes of death, when their entire past suddenly appears before them and hits them with the force of a waterfall. Many become lyrical after some decisively critical experience, when the turmoil of their inner being reaches paroxysm. Thus people who are normally inclined toward objectivity and impersonality, strangers both to themselves and to reality, once they become prisoners of love, experience feelings which actualize all their personal resources. The fact that almost everybody writes poetry when in love proves that the resourcees of conceptual thinking are too poor to express their inner infinity; inner lyricism finds adequate objectification only through fluid, irrational material. The experience of suffering is a similar case. You never suspected what lay hidden in yourself and in the world, you were living contentedly at the periphery of things, when suddenly those feelings of suffering which are second only to death itself take hold of you and transport you into a region of infinite complexity, where your subjectivity tosses about in a maelstrom. To be lyrical from suffering means to achieve that inner purification in which wounds cease to be mere outer manifestations without deep complications and begin to participate in the essence of your being. The lyricism of suffering is a song of the blood, the flesh, and the nerves. True suffering begins in illness. Almost all illnesses have lyrical virtues. Only those who vegetate in a scandalous insensitivity remain impersonal when ill, and thus miss that deepening of the personality brought about by illness.
One does not become lyrical except after a total organic affliction. Accidental lyricism has its source in external factors; once they have disappeared, their inner correspondent also disappears. There is no authentic lyricism without a grain of interior madness. It is significant that the beginnings of all mental psychoses are marked by a lyrical phase during which all the usual barriers and limits disappear, giving way to an inner drunkenness of the most fertile, creative kind. This explains the poetic productivity characteristic of the first phases of psychoses. Consequently, madness could be seen as a sort of paroxysm of lyricism. For this reason, we should rather write in praise of lyricism than in praise of folly. The lyrical state is a state beyond forms and systems. A sudden fluidity melts all the elements of our inner life in one fell swoop, and creates a full and intense rhythm, an ideal convergence. Compared to the refined culture of sclerotic forms and frames, which mask everything, the lyrical mode is utterly barbarian in its expression. Its value resides precisely in its savage quality: it is only blood, sincerity, and fire.
[from On the Heights of Despair, trans. by Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, University of Chicago Press]
posted by Ismael Ricardo Archbold at 12/19/2005 10:41:00 AM
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