Ethics and Pirates

There an exhilaration which is consistently and quietly murdered by mere satisfaction. One can be satisfied that one has enough money; one can be satisfied that one's career is going swimmingly; one can be satisfied that one's spouse is inoffensive--even pleasant. But this is not enough and the soul knows it, and so finds this sort of satisfaction scandalous. Adding insult to scandal is the realization that one has not only accepted, but is now accepting, this spiritually apalling arrangement. One breaks for a moment and knows that some awful deal is being made--a deal by oneself for ones self. And yet one stays and stays and stays... as in a merger-like marriage... because it is stable, it shuffles, is safe.

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Yet every soul has a breaking point. And it may be that a soul can only take so much safety. With respect to social safety this is certainly true. For this sudden commission ('YOU CAN NO LONGER BE HERE! YOU CAN NO LONGER BE THIS!') often appears as a gag reflex, where what is gagged on is respectability.

"Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and start slitting throats".

This, of course, is not quite right; at its best the call is not a call away from ethics, but a call to it--(a call to which I must shout out 'Here I am!' immediately or all is lost). But there seems something right in the thought here expressed. Of course, it affirms our opening point--that, however paradoxical it sounds--it is normal to be suddenly and overwhelmingly repulsed by normalcy. But then, a repulsion of normalcy does not obviously produce an admiration of piracy--much less a temptation to it. So why piracy? Slitting throats is obviously not what calls to most of us in the pirate's vocation. What does? A decent answer would seem to be this: it is the privilege of the pirate to be in a position to criticize us--to suggest just how sleepy and slow both respect and regularity have made us. The young muscular buccaneer, his body slathered in tatoos raging against the very possibility of assimilation, incarnates an unequivocal renunciation of respectability; and the sheer audacity of this renunciation plays upon private suspicions that our satisfactions and respectable routines have made us lesser, made us soft--have not so much dignified as degraded us. We have become civilized, and in consequence lost the razor-edge senses of the sea-going savage. So the value of this element of savagery sensed by otherwise ethical persons need have nothing to do with throat-slitting. Rather, what the temptation towards piracy reveals to the ethical is how they are perpetually betrayed by the very stability of ethics. Lulled by it. For a fine thing, isn't it, to be a non-pirate--to be ethical?--to be on dry land, where down is always down, up is up! None of that dreadful rocking and rolling! We even pride ourselves on living lives on ground that stays sensibly flat. On such a footing, how respectable we are--accountants who trundle off to offices, smiling thinly past narrow glasses, nodding to all on the way ("Greetings, sir." "Fine weather we're having", "Tomorrow at luncheon--of course"). Now, though, see our citizen against his criminal counterpart. To begin, what a different creature must thrive who rides the sea, where the very base of one's world may leap up and throw you at any moment; where an untimely wind or a careless word means death; where clashes are not the work of lawyers; and where one whole-heartedly hails or hates, and refuses to mix the two. Yes, today, perhaps, our accountant has had his luncheon; perhaps he has even gotten the contract which has worried him for weeks. Ah--but meanwhile-- what a different soul is produced by leaping to the deck of an enemy ship in the face of a blunderbuss blast--or taking port, daring a town and its constable by your swagger, rolling and roaring drunk in a street whose name you can't pronounce and will never see again, shutters snapping shut as you pass! Snapping shutters! What fun! The sound of respectability in full retreat! Back! all of you! to your clean, well-lit places--to the ever-narrowing quarantine of the careful! A toast, brothers! And another! Is this not outrageous and grand? And so is it not the sinner, here, who enjoys the larger soul? From thoughts like these we get our worry: being lulled into respectability for so long, we have lost the ability--or rather, the agility--to be free-wheeling, devil-may-care, aggressively, unselfconsciously--and even savagely ethical. Our ethic grows larger while our souls grow smaller. And so the familiar picture of the ethical, neatly seated, all in one corner, hands folded, behaving themselves, while the others have all the fun--while the pirates really live.

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What is happening to me? I'm doing all the right things...

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Rightness, then, taken as regularity, appears to strike the sensitive ethical soul both as somehow caught up with ethics, and yet also a kind of enemy. And this is why the ethical admire some feature most often possessed by the enemies of ethics. Discord may not, strictly speaking, be ethical, but by God it keeps me awake--and, given the ethical urgency of life, it may seem unhealthy--even unethical-- to continue to sleepily shuffle through it. So ethics seeks stability, then comes to be unsatisfied with it, and on seemingly reasonable grounds. In this way the uninhibited criminal calls to us by his very uninhibitedness--his committedness to risk-- and we see him receiving as the enviable wages of his sin a resulting alertness which we suspect we cannot match. This alertness, (which we elsewhere called the ethics of insomnia), is thus usually found in turmoil, not safety--in places where disorder, not Order, have the upper hand. So the paradox: that stability engendered by ethic evinces a kind of sleepiness which undermines the attractiveness of the ethical. The ethical seems less alert than its opposite. Thus this alertness, though decidedly shady in its associations, becomes, even to the ethical, a value of its own. And it is this value which attracts the ethical to the limits of the ethical-- draws the ethical to the very edge of ethics--and of everything else. It then becomes natural to seek out the edges of things, where one is startled into wakefulness by the prospect of being slashed by them--perhaps literally. Lermontov's Pechorin, an amoral character almost entirely animated by this separate value--the value of wakefulness--muses in just this way after rejecting the love of two women of quality in favor of a lonely life and endless war in the Caucuses:

"I often scan the past and ask...why had I not wanted to tread that path...where quiet joys and peace of mind awaited me? No. I would not have gotten used to such an existence! I am like a sailor born and bred on the deck of a pirate brig. His soul is used to storms and battles, and, when cast out on the shore, he feels bored and oppressed, no matter how the shady groves lure him! no matter the peaceful sun!... "

How does the ethical soul achieve the wakefulness of Pechorin? No obvious answer here, but that does seem the right question. How might it be answered? It seems the ethicist must figure out, and incorporate, what the pirate gets right--must distill out the alertness engendered by the pirate's roguery without the awful chopping, hacking, and ruthless theft executed by those who seem most alert. So how, one wonders, does one do this 'distilling'? How does one 'go rogue', ethically speaking? For if the above is at all correct, it is ethically essential for keeping a certain sort of soul from drifting away from ethics--a drift resulting not from a straightforward appeal by evil, but in order to avoid something genuinely bad--in order to avoid the ethical evil of sheer boredom, which soon becomes a boredom with ethics, ultimately inspired by this honorable fear of sleep. Shall we appeal to social support? This seems counterproductive, since clashes, not comity, keep the soul awake. Conformity appears to such a person as a sort of chloroform; social support begats smugness, complacency--and renouncing this, we said, is just what the pirate gets right. So the social dominance of ethics works against any vivid commitment to it, by making it ubiquitous. Ubiquitous and thus risk free--and for the soul sick of safety, the absence of risk is great danger. So is the problem that ethics is dominant? Is winning? Is that what makes it secure, and so unsatisfying? Perhaps this is the beginning of an answer: Ethics should be the underdog. Ethics triumphant, perhaps, is a mistake--and so, therefore, are those stories which present it as all-conquering on a Throne. Ethics must dissassociate from Power-- needs the aesthetic of an insurgency. Ethics, above all, cannot be safe.

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This thought, in tension with ethical triumphalism of every stripe, is scattered in various places--perhaps most prominently in the American Western, where the ideal ethical character is always rough, savage, marginal, alienated, and the Law is always best defended by some form of outlaw, as if ethics itself recognizes it needs a bit of lawlessness in its defense. The Nameless Drifter in the town more often than not must be lured and cajoled into saving it as if it were important to play up the fact that his loyalties are by no means certain--that his very ethicality is a close-run thing. In its own strange way, Christianity certainly started here--Jesus, up and through Good Friday, is presented as the God Who Fought the Law and Lost, and famously closed out His career as Criminal. His early followers began nobly enough, as wild, hunted conspirators, communicating by signs in the sand and whispered signals, taking to the catacombs to chant in flickering light the unfathomable Mystery that men should love one another. Yet now, few seem to be giving thought to the great slander Christ's church brings upon itself by selling itself as something strong and civilizing, something respectable, triumphant, tame.

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Chesterton, to his credit, was one Christian who understood that the true orthodoxy is not portrayed--or at least, had best not be portrayed--as some safely frozen Form--as stability--but as a spirit of constant alteration, improvisation, velocity. Thus his famous description of an orthodoxy which could still exhilarate: "In my vision, the heavenly chariot flies thundering through the ages, the dull heresies sprawling and prostrate, the wild Truth reeling but erect."

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If we need one, let us make this our point: that ethics--Faith--best stays erect precisely by being wild and reeling; its stability in the soul depends, not on its careful, but rather, its careening quality. Ethics is not the balance one has on land--that is the land's balance, not ours; rather, ethics is stability, not as status secured, but as tenuous and moment-by-moment achievement. Yet if this is so--if ethics is this skill of balance--it is best learned not in stability but in instability--not on land but on a ship. The urge to freeze everything in ethical poses--in rules, in routines, in institutions--even to force ethics itself to freeze and pose--is what takes from us our ethical sea legs and savage spirit, whose sensed departure is precisely what tempts us to 'spit in our hands and raise the black flag' to get them back. So no stable ethic for us! It is not up to us to keep it safe. Like the ark of old, a chest full of inestimable treasures, ethics tilts and wobbles in its way; but we only undermine it--and evince a lack of faith-- when we seek to steady it with our own well-meaning hands.

Silence and Romance

" ‘Fools!’ said I, ‘you cannot know

Silence like a cancer grows’..."

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Or so says Mr. Simon, in his and partner Art Garfunkel’s hauntingly beautiful ‘Sounds of Silence’. But the analogy between silence and cancer he deploys here has one simple problem: Cancer is obviously and always bad for us; silence isn’t. Indeed, sometimes silence seems positively good for us—so much so that what is lost in such sloppy indictments of silence is what we might call its nutritive qualities--particularly to malnourished modern minds which know so little of it. Carl Sandburg, in his wonderful biography, tells us of Lincoln that 'silence was immense in the building of the man'. In his early days as a surveyor and woodcutter, Lincoln grew up strong in the quiet, 'like the corn in an Illinois field'. And it is out in the fields, where nothing but breezes rustle the leaves, in which a soul as great, natural, and inscrutable as Lincoln's could wind its way out of the earth. If one wonders why such souls do not grow any more, it may have something to do with the absence of silence as soil.

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But this silence upon which (perhaps even by which) Lincoln was raised (that Lincoln who went on to re-unite a country now synonymous with freedom of speech) is a silence whose reputation is more or less captured by Mr. Simon above. But how can both be right? How can the same silence raise a Lincoln, and 'like a cancer grow'? Of course, motivation for the defamation of silence is not hard to come by. Silence is repulsive to many for its associations with solitude, and solitude—real solitude— is feared. Whether this fear of solitude is healthy is a separate question. The present point is that the connection between the two--between silence and solitude-- is unclear. It may be that words and language are thought to be our means of com-municating, as though human relations were not merely related to language but rooted in it. Haven't we been told that 'language is what makes us human' often enough? And don’t we use words to ‘break the silence’ and by breaking the silence end our solitude? Don’t we, on this basis, suppose this breaking to be a good thing? But if experience is any guide, this, again, is an overly sloppy characterization of silence. It overlooks the kinds of human connectedness which seem somehow based on quietness; it does not give sufficient weight to the phenomenological fact that it is not in conversation but in a special kind of silence in which we feel most human; it forgets that ideal intimacy which thrives in the absence of words.

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2. This is not some grand or mystical point. We know directly that no amount of speech can save us from solitude. We have all been with persons by whom words were disbursed in a kind of desperation, with conversation a constant attempt to connect--to lasso oneself to the other and vice versa, to forcefully prevent the two from flying apart. Words are flung out from such speakers the way a spider, having slipped from a ledge, might sling thread after thread at some receding anchor point as he falls. And they are relentless (“ever reeling them/ever tirelessly speeding them). With such word-deployers, talk is a tension--a suspension bridge between persons which gives its users no peace or sure footing, and shakes and rattles at the slightest wind. Each participant stands at the far end of this shuddering contraption and is understandably reluctant to commit to it their full weight; it seems to flimsy a thing to enable one to move towards the other. Yet are we not to connect by speaking to each other? But then, with respect to talking to each other as a means of connecting, what has gone wrong?

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Words here, we might say, are working too hard. Those who put them to such use do so under false, or at least exaggerated, expectations. If words are used to connect people in any intimacy beyond trade/economy, too much is being expected of them. To see the connection words always fail to make, consider the opposite case: a few of the lucky have, if only for a few moments, known a silence in which everything was sure--a kind of social certainty between persons which is not constituted by materiel as suspect as words. This sociality does away with suspense entirely. At such remarkable moments, one can acknowledge with words the connection; but one never supposes that the connection could be supported, much less constituted, by either knowledge or words. In this silence, one does not talk to understand the other; rather, talk enjoys the backdrop of a prior understanding. Before the questions, answers, compliments, and, eventually, accusations, there is a background welcome--an a priori confidence one has been admitted to which one is confident will never be withdrawn. Not that Language has no role; but its use cannot establish the conditions by which it can enjoy this background understanding. Its role is limited. It contributes to this form of interpersonal/Personal intimacy--this faith two persons find in each other-- the way our religious tradition claims Reason is said to contribute to Faith. Reason can not ground Faith; instead, Reason is ‘Faith, seeking understanding’. Faith, an interpersonal understanding, is silent, though about this silence reason can certainly speak. But Reason adds nothing to Faith's substantive silence.

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So, in a face-to-face, one seeks, through speech, a better understanding about the other; but who connects on the basis of 'about'? Whose intimacy is bolstered by, much less built upon, a sharing of information, however personal? Whose faith? What has information to do with intimacy? One can know everything about someone without 'knowing what they are about' in the relevant sense. And someone who only knew about persons, not ‘what they’re all about’ would not know persons at all. Such a connection between persons based solely on knowing about persons, is, in fact, a description not of a perfect sociality, but of the perfect sociopath.

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3. So we seek a pure sociality which Reason and words cannot establish, only acknowledge. Sincerity—an openness to another, which is not constrained to pass through the over-narrow aperture of words—is for this reason indigenous to silence. We know that, with respect to establishing this intimacy, there is nothing to say. One still seeks, through language, knowledge of others; but the knowledge about others only matters to us against the background of this 'sound of silence', so sweet to us that we are always straining at, or rather, past words to get at it; we are always listening for it. We seek it, but do not find it—particularly if we suppose, absurdly, that it is something words might contain. But how are we to seek this silence? How can we go about trying to hear silence? How might this Social Silence be listened for?

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4. Speaking broadly, we have both individual and collective examples of how not to listen. Both in individual experience as persons and as one among peers--both as our irreducibly separate selves and as members of Western culture—we have already gone quite far down the wrong road. But the cultural fear of silence, coupled with the individual’s quest for it, have to be taken together if either is to be understood. This is why the desperate chatter of two thirty-somethings in a diner, both panicked for connection, should be read against the larger cultural tradition in which their little (but infinitely important) drama is played out, and vice versa. For consider both cases at once—even consider both cases as one: is not the dissolution of desperate words into an understanding both silent and superior, the ultimate aim of each of us-- of all of us when we are one of the people at the table? Likewise, isn't the aim of philosophy (understood as epistemology) the end of philosophy? Isn’t the practice of raising questions about knowledge to know, and so settle them, and so justify being quiet about them? In both the personal and philosophical cases, isn't the idea to reach an understanding that we need no longer reach for?

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But both in both cases we seem to suppose that words are the way to reach this understanding. And this seems wrong. In the personal case, words inspired by a desperate attempt to connect are a de facto acknowledgment of the failure to do so. Nevertheless, in cars, cafes, kitchens, bedrooms, words are launched, fall, and shatter--small memorials to failed connections which litter our wasted evenings—like little white crosses--tombstones on hillsides. Words fail to connect us as we hope, because that is not what they are for. They died trying, because they were trying to do the impossible. Likewise, in its own looming way, the role of the word, already out of character in Western romance, is miserably mis-cast in Western philosophy. That knowledge should be our link to other minds! That we should talk our way to each other!

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5. It is open to us to reject this role for language in both cases. If we accept Silence of this special sort we have been describing, we get, as a result, the background ethical solution to every supposedly epistemic anxiety. For the deep uneasiness of Western culture at the prospect of absent knowledge must, for it to grip us as it does, be rooted in a powerful individual worry. And it is. For the Western urge to alleviate the terror of skepticism is, at root, driven by terror of solipsism. And, loosely but accurately speaking, the fear of the thirty-somethings at the restaurant is that fear which has given rise to the bulk of Western philosophy. Consider our couple: they are two people with a terror of solipsism. And this terror is at root, not the worry of being condemned to being deceived about reality—is not a concern about distorted vision; rather, it is a fear far deeper: the fear of being invisible. The terror that we do not know (in Western parlance, do not see) is the sublimated terror of being unseen. “No one sees!” the Cartesian might worry; but this worry has its roots in the heart, which worries “Dear God! I see no one, and no one sees me!” The fear of the unknown, and the fear of not knowing, are, at bottom, the single fear of every one of us that we will never be known. To understand the world... is this our quest? What for? Who for? No. Our quest as persons is to be understood, and to be understanding, with reference to each other, without reference to knowledge. And this is the 'knowledge' in which silence is at home. Silence is even evidence of having reached such an understanding.

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6. Of course, even the philosophies of the East, which did not care for the West's exultation of language (which freed them to make their own brilliant and novel mistakes) did not suppose that words were of no value. But the value of words and concepts was, as it were, a grudging concession, a temporary instrumentalist grant of reprieve; a work permit was issued them provided they take their natural place, subject to the requirements of the understanding that says nothing--provided speech was properly subject to silence. As the Zhuangzi has it:

"A fish trap is for catching fish; once you have the fish, you can forget about the trap. A rabbit-snare is for catching rabbits; once you've got the rabbits, you can forget about the snare. Words are for catching ideas; once you've caught the ideas, you can forget about the words. Now where can I find a person who has forgotten about words, so that I may have a word with him?"

Our account of the sociality of the right kind of Silence clearly rejects some implications from this citation. First, we may reject that words are a necessary condition for understanding each other wordlessly. It might be wiser to content (as Levinas does) that word-less understandings are the precondition for the narrower, non-personal understandings which words can contain. More important to expunge, however, is the idea that words are primarily and originally for gathering ideas rather than connecting to persons. If the first word ‘broke’ the Silence we are discussing, it shattered the peace of an original understanding, not created it. And perhaps this is another aspect of the quest for connection: the sense that we are re-establishing an original connection lost. Words cannot establish contact, perhaps— only re-establish it. At any rate, the more original the word, we should say that the more explicitly it will be found carrying out its function of acknowledging, recognizing, repairing this original intimacy. Surely 'hello' is the first word, and a word par excellence, not ‘green’ or 'fire' or 'cat'! For who would break the Silence merely to describe?!

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But, if we consider the quest of the West, which, at bottom, is a quest of Western individuals for interpersonal connection, we can say, of the couple incessantly talking over their over-priced dinners, that what they are seeking by their incessant talking is some one to whom they need not talk. They seek, not to break the silence, but repair it. They seek a silence which they both hear—the antithesis of solitude—to which they can together repair. This Silence, they hope, will never be broken. Two persons, understanding and understood. Nothing said established it; and now that it is established, there is nothing more to say... And this is to say that for all its appalling dryness and tiresome pretensions of inhuman rigor, Western philosophy is, in a very direct sense, a manifestation of these two frustrated daters; literally speaking, its air of objectivity and epistemic obsessions have fundamentally romantic roots.

There are approximately 6 billion people in the world. If one is lucky, out of that 6 billion there are three or four persons who believe in you unreservedly. When one is unlucky, one of the three or four departs...

RIP Beloved Nana 1922-2009

Personal Music

Certain forms of music seem less social than others.

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One form of music strives for a kind of mathematical beauty--seems to arise as an ode to L'esprit de Geometrie--is paid tribute to what Kant calls 'the sublime'. Presented with such work, we feel witness to the passing of something majestic, immense--something far beyond the human scale, awesome, austere, objective. The work rolls over us, dominates us. Our souls, in the presence of these tones and resonances, are made to realize their smallness, as if the Infinite had passed this way and shown only Its back. Head down, we greet the work in a respectful silence. The interaction between this kind of work and its hearer has a hierarchical structure. We are not its equal, and it does not address us as such. It approaches us with a mien unapologetically aristocratic. Enjoyment of the work, our susceptibility to it, takes the form of an elated subjection. Insofar as we dare to address the work, we bow to it, and feel taller for having bowed. And this element of subjection is not incidental to hearing the work--it is what it is to hear it--or, at least, is what it is to understand it. One cannot hear it at all (except as patterns of noise) unless one genuflects--approaches in an attitude of prayer. But all this makes the work asocial in this sense: we respond to it, but part of its excellence consists of its unresponsiveness to us. The size difference is too great for there to be an interaction. We and the work are never in dialogue. To enjoy this music is to admire its altitude and indifference to us. The aesthetic impulse here is the same which has always tempted humans to honor stars which burn too far away to warm, or to speak in a quiet reverence of the limitless and casually brutal sea.

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Posted below is music of a very different sort--a social sort in which a certain responsiveness (between performers, performers and audience, or both) seems to be constitutive of what it is to hear it--not as noise, but as music. Whereas to be 'caught up' by some sublime chorale or classical piece seems possible in a solitary station, to be 'caught up' by social music involves grasping, being grasped by, its responsiveness. Much the way God the Father gave way to His gentler, far more social Son, who fished, snacked, chuckled, listened—here the passing by of Infinity gives way to something earthier—something not too infinite to be influenced by us--something not too vast to look us in the eye. In social music inheres an uncertainty, flexibility, vulnerability. Whereas the music described above suggests an eternal and unshake-able architecture ("somber music/walled against time"), social music is contingent, shifts moment by moment, takes its cues from its surroundings--from nods, foot-taps, faces--from us. Constitutive of enjoying this music is the sense that the music is not there to be honored, but altered, entered, joined. We might say it is honored to be altered. The imperative of involvement is in direct opposition to an overawed and spectatorial stance. Social music cannot merely be observed. In this sociality, other distinctions also lose their relevance. In social music there can be no distinction between what it is to hear music (as more than noise) and being caught up in the responsiveness between performers, as they respond to the contingencies of the particular performance, and the improvisations of each other. Nor can a sharp line be drawn between the performance and the work performed, as these too are in dialogue. And here is another rejection of a spectatorial relation to this music: this responsiveness means a performance is not a re-presenting of a work; a performance is not the same work re-presented. Rather, each time it is performed, seen, and heard, it is open to being seen differently, re-visioned, re-vised. Social music is thus not re-presentational, but rather, re-creational, and in the most literal sense.

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Jazz, a music whose 'structure' simply IS responsiveness, re-creation, play--is the ultimate social music. In consequence its improvisational ‘structure’ has all the contingency, potential for awkwardness, and uncertainty of any social engagement. No wonder it is not favored by lovers of pre-established order! Yet its play—its notion of perpetual creation—is never arbitrary— is never a creation ex nihilo. For in all its careenings, its apparently reckless, ‘play what you will’ ethos, it remains anchored by this singular social imperative—Play what you will—but acknowledge the one before you! The randomness of play tempered by inter-play. However, the responsiveness of jazz—its sociality—is often obscured by the intricacies of the language in which its performer-creators respond. Instead, here are two clearer, more visually accessible instances of social music, where the performance arises out of interpersonal address, and our enjoyment of the performance is inseparable from the interaction of the performers. One might say, with the appropriate caveats, that this is what Jazz looks like.

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Detached interplay is easy. One sings--then another--that is not sociality, but sequence. But when what one sings next depends on what was just sung... Here, the sociality is so sincere, and the music so beautiful, one wonders how far to push the idea that the latter is the condition for the former--that this openness to each other is, with respect to social music, the 'without which, not'. Louis Armstrong & Frank Sinatra Uploaded by ZeFire. - Watch more music videos, in HD! Frank Sinatra and Dinah Shore Uploaded by gucomatz. - Music videos, artist interviews, concerts and more. P.S. Dinah's face at :15--lovely!

Uncalled-for Exercises in Unencouraging Verse

I wrote--and then reversed--the lines, 'his immortal spirit'.

The cursor danced back quietly, and removed the words

whose seams had seethed with meaning

A soft key-touch before

But now by cursor silenced evermore,

As a man

Is subtlely removed from this earth

Alone

In a room

Without fanfare.

The cursor dances back across

Anonymous, calm-blinking sweep

The cursor dances back across

His immortal soul.

********* ********* *********

No gates rolled shut like the press of tides

No portcullis fell with as final a clang

As this carven latch on the edge of a wood.

Unanswered Unechoed

The silent trees stood 'round the click of the door

Of the small bungalow

Where Old Yensen is ready to die.

Intentional Insomnia

Late nights lend thoughts a grandeur they seem not to enjoy at any other hour--'seem' because this sense of the grand is not because the thoughts we think at night are grander, but rather, because at night we naturally think more grandly, whatever be the thought.

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The source of this post-midnight majesty of mind is worth considering--and seems to me to be this: an empowerment by isolation--an isolation that secures for the lone thinker, 'sailing through strange seas of thought/alone' an exemption from daylight economies. These economies are sensible places where thoughts are exchanged--and so wherein thought is a product, and thinking a process of domestication, a cautiousness, a commodity. By contrast: in the dark and absence of others, thought reverts to something soaring, severe, solitary, all but indifferent to the social, even hostile to it. The interpersonal etiquette of thought is shucked off at nightfall, the way an over-socialized savage shrugs off his colonizer's starched, restrictive clothing, paints his face, and slips into the river, eyes gleaming, knife in teeth. In the thickening dark, thought steps outside of the social; the dangerous evening breezes are caught in mental sails which, in daylight, were spread downward, like nets, for knowledge. But now in the cool they billow--and the late-night thinker has altitude--carrying thought above and beyond the reproachful circle of well-lit faces. Lifted beyond accusing lights, thought alights--and crouches, claws out, breath quick, back arched-- breathes wild, alone, endangered, exuberant. In this dark, thought is removed from the exchange economy, where thoughts are engineered with a mind for trading--and becomes a kind of irresponsible and imaginative careening.

Suppose this is the phenomenology, then. What drives it?

The answers I am inclined to accept are in the description above, the crux of which is this: it is only at night and alone (one must be willing to be alone--to face the absence of every face) that we can at last think FOR OURSELVES. All are asleep; our thoughts cast about only for us, report only to us, return only to us--and often not at all. The crucial matter, though, is that all thought we might express to another involves common ground, and so must be mediated; yet, by engaging in thinking which expressly declines future expression--by devising a thought we have no intention to express--we permit that thought to be im-mediate. A thought of this sort--an unmediated thought-- is what we would think, absent the urge, always already internalized, to alter the thought in order to share it with another thinker. Yet this is economy socializes thoughts which otherwise come at us wild, rude, and naked. This is to say the economy of thought concerns itself not so much with traditional representation as with re-presentation of the most literal sort-- the concern that a thought will have to be presented again to another. It is always plumping wild notions for (perhaps unwanted) positions as propositions properly behaved; the economy of thought takes the savage we spoke of and seeks to civilize him--seeks to make of him a civil servant. And again, this mediating, socializing, civilizing, is due to the thinker engaging in thought under the prospect of a future sociality.

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Yet I am now up, and no others are stirring. Dark and sleep separate me--provided all others are gone! For even one more thinker is a market; preparing a thought for two constitutes mass-marketing. Yet, now that all others sleep, I may think under this notion: the markets are closed! All others have closed their stands and gone home to soma, to sleep, to others--perhaps even love. But we have not done this. We are alone. And what we think ALONE need not be given to another. We cannot, under these conditions, give the thoughts we have; and therefore we have them differently--have different thoughts--thoughts less sociable, more primitive, and, perhaps, and in some sense, more pure. A thought under these conditions is for no one--not even for me (I expect nothing of it, hold it to no norms) and therefore need not be homogenized--can be wildly and unapologetically particular--need not be ACCEPTABLE to anyone, and a thought unworried about how it will trade is the only thought which, to that mind, is properly considered indigenous. For only such unapologetically sovereign products of mind need not be bowdlerized and/or bastardized. They do not pander to a demographic. How could they? They have none.

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Yet of what sort of value, one might ask, are such thoughts? But the answer has to do, not with the value of particular thoughts, packaged, and ready for shipping--that was economy. Granted, it seems this thinking--this anarchic meditation--this intellectual dreaming--seems to have SOME sort of value--an extra-economic value. Yet the paradox is clear. Such speculations are not intellectual investments with a strange return--they are, as it were, an investment in thoughts that, with regards to returning, are under no obligation. To speculate in this way is to fund an exploratory venture which seems to make the speculator suddenly rich--yet precisely because this thinking need not give its sole investor any traditional dividend. Yet the abstract return here, surely, is the freedom from being obligated to produce one. The value is not a commodity within the economy, but, perhaps, the outer wilds that make possible the tame. This value is intellectual liberty in the strongest most undisciplined sense-- cut free from the economy which demands that our thinking be productive, improve the bottom line, please the bosses, turn a profit, produce for common consumption.

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And this world of consumption is where we labor all day. Yet every 3 a.m. brings about the overthrow of the values of economy. At that hour the mind enters a temple emptied, just after the table of the moneychangers have been upset, and all others have vanished. With lights low, the night a great, high-ceilinged church, an open-air cathedral in which all other parishioners are always absent, one is simultaneously free from, and vulnerable to, every blasphemy, and we feel ourselves uninhibitedly thinking our thoughts as ours. Answerable to no one, accepting a thought outside of the productive, deep night frees us to think without the daylight obsession with answers. We are, with no accusing face awake to tell us to be sensible-- to put us in harness--to MAKE something of our selves--to make sense-- we are at last able to wildly and irresponsibly cast about with a positive intent to catch nothing, lunge for branches we'll surely miss, sail for islands that may be myth, launch quests for conclusions we cannot reach, and, wholly apart from any green-eye-shade measure of productivity which daylight and the presence of others requires, relish the pure joy of the leap, heedlessly flinging forward our thoughts ("ever unreeling them/ever tirelessly speeding them"), our selves ("And you/O my soul").

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There is, of course, a dark side to this kind of adventuring. It presents a special danger. Some minds, too long absent from others--those whose 3 a.m. lasts too long--somehow confuse slipping into the dark with letting the dark slip into them. They set out at night as we do, yet in such a way that they never find their way back to morning. Their thoughts, never formulated under the gaze of another face, become terrible, faceless. In severe cases, there is even a rage/resentment against the faces that constitute the morning of the mind. There then arises, so as to make the night last forever, a desire to close all eyes--the terrible dream, in the nightmare of Lear, which Cornwall represents.

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But that the night-minded face such threats is hardly a point against our practice; for an equally terrible darkness falls upon minds who seem to grow blind by being subjected to too much daylight, too much sun, too much sociality. They are NEVER alone in thought--never think, free of other faces-- always think for others--and so come to regard the natural state of all thought as engineered for others; their entire mentality never escapes economy, and so they literally never think for themselves. Such persons operate the means of production, but no longer own it. All their thoughts are encompassed by economy, therefore all their thoughts are engineered 'for the people'--are genericized even before they are had. Such persons do not, strictly speaking, ever have their own thoughts; there is no thought of theirs which stands as private property. All is in common, and so is common--terribly common. Thus the dangers cancel out: the night-thinker's mind may collapse inward; but this is no point against it, as the day-thinker's mind may collapse outward--have its boundaries always and everywhere violated by an incessant light and the relentlessly prying eyes of others. When day-thinkers collapse, they do not explode, they dissipate-- become hackneyed, unoriginal--and by not exempting themselves from economy, come to that market offering nothing which might fully be called their own. By contrast to the collapsed night-thinker, the collapsed day-thinker is less seen than sensed; we sense that we know what they will say before they say it--know that whatever they say, we will have heard it before--know that, whoever it is that they are speaking for, they have somehow, and at the deepest possible level, relinquished the very capacity to speak for themselves.

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So there are dangers on both sides--respective dangers of both a social and solipsistic savagery. Why prefer our way, then? Why prefer insomnia?

For just this reason: there is, in our nightly leaves from considerations of economy, a possibility of a new kind of value. It is our intense provincialism, possible only at night and alone, that makes us valuable to others come morning. We wake late--we walk out, and into faces--faces welcoming, warning, suspicious--but we have been away--and therefore can be of value to them. We are returning from elsewhere and so, here in daylight, face others with something to offer. We are less domestic labor than importers; and the novelty of our imports is only possible given the exile from economy already described.

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Might we push this further--might we say, in a bit of hopeful self-praise, that our alienation has interpersonal--that is, ethical--value? The thought would be this: suppose we had not accepted the utter isolation of night--had not accepted night in its fullness--had, when faced with its emptiness, declined it--or at least, declined its unique disciplines. What if, instead of being the savage we spoke of, who relates to--even relishes--the dark into which he slips, we had, like good civilized souls, warded it off with phones and family and friends which we clutch and wave against night, like the blinding torches one might wave at a bear, or a cross the character waves before an approaching vampire. Suppose, at nightfall, instead of letting all outer lights go out, we built blue ones--huddled before flickering screens, streaming the dreams of others--what would have been the result? Isn't it true that, had we warded off night rather than welcomed it--had we defended against its asociality rather then accepted it--we would have remained blind to what it shows us once our eyes adjust? As a result, would we not have destroyed the very indigenousness of thought it enables by thinking with and for everyone else? But now...everyone else... if we have not, in their absence, had thoughts which were made apart from them, and, as it were, without them in mind, what will we give them at a reunion? With what exotic and unprecedented gift might we present them, if we have not ranged far and wide? And yet: if dark is something into which we voluntarily, and with a thrill of fear (always fear!), slip--were our thoughts in the dark allowed to rage as a kind of noble savagery we were willing to risk--into which we might nightly immerse ourselves, into which we might nightly descend--if we had the discipline to sink into it--the discipline not to keep to the surface--the discipline not to swim--what extraordinaries might we now have to sell at the morning market?

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This, it would seem, gives us reason to hold that, at times, the Western equivalence between thought and light fails us--for given the previous paragraph, it follows that the tendency to stay near the light is not necessarily excellent--even in an economic sense. The dark, a wild sea, must swallow us sometimes--and we may ourselves be complicit in bringing about this swallowing. One cannot sink out of sight for others--that would still be a motive of economy; but once one does it with no thought of others, one may for this very reason come to have something for them.

"But it feels that I might drown..." This is because you might; but this is true of anyone who, like the hopeful pearl diver, grabs his rock, holds it tight, and plummets to the bottom, where, amidst the colds, pressures, and inexplicable darks, stays down long enough, and maintains enough presence of mind--his mind-- to bring something beautiful up from those fiercely individual depths--up...up... to the easier, everyday trading which takes place upon a reassuring surface-- solid, sun-drenched, shared. He enhances the surface by breaking it.

Belief, Credence and Credit

It is fair to say that Western epistemologists have an unhealthy obsession with belief--'unhealthy' not because any obsession with belief is necessarily unhealthy, but because of a mischaracterization of the beliefs over which they obsess.

Prescribing cures for this obsession is hardly something to be handled in a blog post--even a post of unseemly, reader-repelling length (for examples of which, see below). But as the following post's demographic is already infinitesimally small, and the basic idea about how beliefs come to be mischaracterized is, in broad outline, a familiar story, here we go:

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Suppose one has a practice --say, a practice of assuring others. I say, for instance, "Oh don't worry--I assure you that is the best road", or "It can't be as terrible as all that" or "Don't worry so much--you'll do fine"...and so on. Now suppose we come, not merely to assure others, but to talk about the assurances we give. There would seem, at least grammatically, a new subject to discuss: we not only have a practice of assuring, but also 'assurances' and their various properties. The shift here, made in a hundred instances since the West took Plato and ran with him, is from VERB (and the adverbs that describe ways of assuring--e.g. 'poorly', 'quickly', etc.) to NOUN (and the adjectives which describe assurances--e.g. 'solid', 'credible', 'good', etc.). And having made the shift, I may now ask this previously un-tempting question: “I want to give good assurances: what makes an assurance a good one?”

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Note what has happened: the question is framed as a matter, not of assuring well, but of finding out ABOUT or ACCESSING assurances—specifically, whether they are good—and then, having FOUND a good assurance, giving it. The thought seems to be that “Giving a good assurance” insures I am “assuring well.” But note the detached language of ABOUT and FINDING, as if the world were strewn with assurances (some good, some bad) t0 be given or not given. Assuring well begins to appear as a form of DISCOVERY, not of SKILL. And we are now in a position to ask things like, “How can I be sure an assurance is a good one?” And in this way skepticism enters.

What has this to do with belief?

To show how this same story occurs with belief, it is important to get the original practice of believing correct. What sort of practice is it?

I am presently inclined to say this: that the original notion of ‘belief’ is not the name for an item in the world, but a mode of issuing assurances. “I believe…” is making an assurance, to others, or perhaps to oneself. Philosophers are right this far: that belief is a form of commitment. But what must be added (to avoid the disastrous verb-to-noun-ifying arc just sketched) is that belief’s original form is of a commitment to another person.

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You ask me: “Do you believe this rope will hold?” I hesitate. Why? Because my announcement that I do, in fact, believe the rope will hold is not merely an observation of some epistemic state I am in (“I report to you I have the belief ‘This rope will hold’); rather, I make a commitment to you; that rope’s holding is something of which I am willing to assure you, and therefore something upon which I am willing to risk my credibility (something I can hardly lose with objects!). I thereby lend credence—not merely to the idea that the rope will hold—but to you. I literally lend you credence—creed—belief; I issue it like credit, which I promise that you can spend. And when you tell me that you believe something—or even assert something in my presence—you are issuing credit to me, which I may in turn issue another…and so on, in the marvelous market of credit/credence which is the practice from which ‘beliefs’ spring.

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This is a large move to make in so small a space—but note at least three very fine consequences.

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(i) First, the entire, unfortunate, ‘Western’ arc we sketched with respect to assurances is short-circuited. The practice of believing is, at bottom, the practice of issuing credit, NOT the quest of a single subject knowing/getting things right. Beliefs arise in a credit economy—they are its currency. They first appear as nouns in the form of particular declarations of commitment which we make to other people. (This is why the present continuous ‘believing’ is rarely used—because to say “I believe” is to commit—and if we are still ‘believing’ we have not committed, and so have not placed our faith and credit so as to rest it upon some particular advisory/assurance. Similarly: we say, when pressed, “I promise” not “I am promising”—for if we are still promising, we have not yet issued a promise.)

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(ii) Second: if this is right, the very idea that all our beliefs are false is a very strange thought—on our picture, it is the worry that all assurances are vain. But how can this be, if we issue earnest assurances? Of course, we may issue assurances which turn out poorly; the rope, in some cases, may not hold. But the repair for this is not to enhance the credibility of a proposition, but to enhance our credibility with others. And this is not some epistemic circumstance beyond our control; it is something always and at every moment within our power to DO. We can always issue credit; we can always BE credible.

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Finally, and most importantly (iii) this permits a shift from treating of belief as a primarily epistemic, to a primarily ethical matter. The results of this are massive. A sample: (a) it means that wondering whether we can ever trust our beliefs is, at bottom, the question of whether we can trust each other, and whether we ourselves are trustworthy. The ontological question of whether there are any assurances is gone, replaced by the ethical challenge of whether we will assure others, and whether others will assure us (and perhaps, whether we will allow them to). (b) Crippling and unresolveable questions about our belief’s credibility give way to an active interest in enhancing our credibility, issued to others in the form of declarations of belief. The question of whether to give credence to our beliefs becomes the question of whether or not we will issue credit/credence to others, both in the form of accepting their commitments to us, and ensuring our credit is good when issuing creeds to them (“The rope will hold”, “It’s down the road on the right”, “Paris is in France”). (c) By ethicalizing the nature of believing in this way, we make the process of believing intrinsically intersubjective—not merely in a linguistic or collaborative sense, but in the sense that beliefs are issued/oriented to others. And this eliminates entirely a certain brand of skepticism which speaks of ‘my’ and ‘your’ beliefs, envisions beliefs which are ‘internal’ to me, and unaccessible to you, and imagines this to be a problem overcome by gathering MORE beliefs. But if the root use of ‘belief’ is as I have here supposed, the idea that we relate THROUGH belief is simply out of court. Rather, our epistemic relations are built upon the issuing of assurances to each other; our relation to ‘beliefs’ are rooted in our declared commitments to each other. And our concern for belief is, at the end of the day, a function of a form of interpersonal concern, deeper than the epistemic.

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This last point, were it to stand, would eliminate the concern that , without impregnable beliefs about why we should be concerned with our standing with each other, our ethical lives are ‘ungrounded’. For if this sketch of belief were in the ballpark, the very nature and origin of belief destroys this worry. Beliefs exist because we give credence to each other (as gifts exist because we give good things to others). In a world of credit, beliefs are our markers, a currency of interpersonal commitments. Thus to suppose one need believe something about the world in order to accept the original rootedness of interpersonal commitment has things backwards; one needs to make commitments to others in order to believe at all.

The Avoidance of Love

i. There are no lengths to which we may not go in order to avoid being revealed...especially to those we love and are loved by. –Stanley Cavell

ii. We hid because we were...naked...and ashamed -Genesis

iii. I’ll do anything for love...but I won’t do that -Meatloaf

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Love is said to be hard to find; but one wonders how many of those wishing to find love are willing to be found by it. At this moment millions plot their capture by love, and millions plot their escape from its clutches. Moreover, because these contrary impulses to find and to flee love appear as a fault line within single souls, this tragi-comedy is possible: the love-seeker and love-avoider can be one and the same person. With respect to love, then, we are each in danger of this double-mindedness—in danger of unwittingly living two lives; we may weave paeans to love in articulate thought’s open daylight, then retreat each evening to unravel the day's work by candlelight in some inner room, out of sight of all suitors. Yet this polarity is most often unknowingly practiced, so we do not recognize our existence as unravelers. We may in public profess fondness for love while conspiring against it in some deep and destructive privacy. We consciously identify with the quest for love, yet are reluctant to acknowledge that rogue element of our selves which relentlessly labors to avoid it. Left unchecked, this cross-purposed quest for love quickly degenerates to farce. Each day the sun rises. We cross ourselves and cast a net for love; the sun sets; we have caught nothing. And love escapes our nets each and every day precisely because of the holes we have torn in its bottom the previous night.

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Our dual reaction to love suggests that love has two aspects. And the sheer disparity in our reaction to these aspects suggests that, while there is something about love which is wonderful (the aspect which gets all the press, and to which we will give no more here) there is also something formidable, even fearsome about it. It is welcome—and also unwelcome. It is deeply attractive; but it is also, as Dante has it, a ‘lord of terrible aspect’. But what is so ‘terrible’ about love? This is not, of course, to be answered tritely—with some aphorism about how ‘love hurts’. For what we are interested in here is a fear, not of love going bad, but of a good love—not of some pseudo- or failed love, but of the genuine article. What is interesting is the fear of a healthy love, and the nature of this unhealthiest fear.

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i. Cavell’s analysis of love-avoidance has two components. The first involves noting that love has an imperative aspect. This is disguised by talk of love as something we have; but love involves a very special sort of possession. My love is ‘mine’, not in the sense of something I have; rather, the possessive is in place only to note that this love is demanding something uniquely from me. We can 'have' love, but only in the sense we have responsibilities. We ‘keep’ our love, but in the sense that we keep covenants. Love is owned in the sense that the officer owns his battlefield commission; it calls him out before he can call it his; it is ‘for him’, but only because he accepts it as what he is for; and for him to accept it as his cannot be done without deferring to its constitutive demand—without already honoring its authority. So while being loved involves elation, to accept it is to be subjected to an obligation. To decline or avoid a commission, and to avoid or decline to be loved, thus involves a rejection of some sort of call or claim upon us.

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So love demands something of us. But what does it demand? In his morally beautiful reading of King Lear, Cavell offers an account of the imperative of love. Love seeks to cherish you, respect you, do you honor; it seeks to give you recognition—to recognize you. This is what love would do for you. But love cannot do this for you without thereby asking something from you; this means that in order to be loved one must “Stand forth and be recognized!”—and this, Cavell argues, is a step which, to some degree, we are often unwilling to take. Love revels in you and seeks to do you honor; yet love’s recognition/honors are such that they must be bestowed face to face; and this means that to receive love’s recognition is to run the risk of being recognized. Love thus demands exposure (hence its association with light)—insists that the one to whom love is given “allow himself to be recognized, revealed to [the] other.” Love says, “Come forth and be loved!” Yet however much longing for love there may be, there remains a deep desire to avoid being forthcoming—a desire to avoid the ‘coming forth’. We wish for It, considered as gift or present without strings; but that we present ourselves is unconditional love's one condition. Love comes to us this dual imperative containing a promise of both honor and exile—honor in being paid that indescribable compliment of being recognized— exile from the cold, cool comfort of my own internality; love seeks to shine upon me, and so cheerfully annihilates that pleasant shade of inner anonymity to which I retreat and in which I feel secure.

This theme of exposure explains the selection of Lear. Cavell pursues this distinctly human art of avoiding this exile/exposure—the art of avoiding love— in his reading Lear because Lear is a play long noted for its obsession with vision, blindness, (recall the horrendous blinding of Gloucester) and deep concern with not being seen. In particular, Lear’s dominating motive, Cavell insists, is ‘to avoid being recognized”. Cordelia’s genuine love therefore threatens him in a way Regan and Gonheril’s false love does not—“puts a claim on him he cannot face”; thus threatened by the demands of real love, he proceeds to demean and threaten the one who really loves him. Refusing to recognize her love for fear he will be recognized, he even has recourse to madness, wherein he refuses to recognize himself. Other characters likewise exhibit a drive to ‘isolation and the avoidance of eyes,” under theat of ‘the shame of exposure, the threat of self-revelation.”

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ii. So love brings with it the threat of being, not merely looked at, but seen. But why is being seen such a threat? Why might one fear the recognition love demands?

Cavell’s answer is shame— which, as he notes, is "the specific discomfort produced by the sense of being looked at; the avoidance of the sight of others is the reflex it produces”. Shame seeks, above all, not to be seen. “Under shame, what must be covered up is not your deed but yourself.” Yet as just noted, to be presented with love, one must be present to receive it; to be fully loved one must be fully present—a frightening thought if we find our selves un-presentable! To be found by love is a fine thing, then: until one realizes that to be found by love is to be found out. To be seen seems benign: unless one fears being seen through—in which case the eyes of those who love you pose a direct threat. Shame in this way interprets an offer of love as a singularly intolerable intrusion—and intrusions are natural to avoid.

This avoidance is not merely reactive; a well-trained avoider/unraveler, it is pre-emptive, taking the form of avoiding not only the love of others, but an avoidance of loving others oneself. For to love another incites the dangers of reciprocation. By contrast, the refuser of love reserves the right to remain hidden. “A failure to recognize others is a failure to let others recognize you” and ‘recognizing a person depends upon allowing oneself to be recognized by him...”. This, Cavell argues, is why Lear first recognizes the now eye-less Gloucester: because he “can be recognized by him without being seen...”

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iii. So it is ‘the threat of self-revelation’ that is at the root of love-avoidance, and the notion of shame which drives the desire to avoid. There are, one presumes, as many shames as there are persons. But there also seems to be a common structure to the shame threatened by love--or rather, there seems to be a form of shame which is, as it were, instigated by love itself.

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This shame which is 'instigated' by love must be kept separate from other kinds of shame--kinds which vary in content, but are most manifest with those who are closest to us. The normal case seems to be this: an insecure beloved feels the lover knows too much. The lover’s demand, implicit in his love, is, necessarily, that he be a witness to our inadequacies; we are ashamed of these inadequacies. And this shame and awkward feeling, produced by the thought of having our embarrassments publicized, we then interpret as some inadequacy of the love or the lover in question. We thusly make the faults which love reveals into the fault the lover, or of the love itself. The irony is that it is constitutive of love, this ‘inadequacy’ we would avoid. Yet we madly try to wriggle clear of it, regardless. They love us. They have found us out! This makes us uncomfortable. Out with their eyes! Of course, we do not do as Cornwall did. But we do diminish the lover’s sight of us by increasing our distance. When they come walking, we absent ourselves mentally, emotionally—they cannot see what is not there! To love’s ‘Come forth’ we send forth to parley only some portion of ourselves, and hold the rest in reserve. And in parley we stand further away so as to diminish their vision of us, complain we feel distant, then look for love elsewhere--always elsewhere.

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But there is an odder explanation of love-avoidance—an explanation which involves that shame which seems prompted by love itself. At first, this motive of avoidance appears more innocent than the others but is not. For it arises in an arrogance far worse than mere insecurity.

It begins with the fact that love always appears as a sort of excess—as something we could not possibly merit—as something always arbitrary—something undeserved. So far, so good. Trouble begins, however, when this is attached in the wrong way to a strong sense of justice—the mad idea that we ought only get and/or accept what we deserve. The often-admirable sense that "I don't deserve this" is heightened in those with a good sense of accepting no more than one deserves.

Yet into the moment that love meets justice enters this disastrous thought: that one would be ashamed to accept a love for which one is not yet worthy. At first glance, this looks like a humility. But is it? For it is as though one were to say to oneself: “Ah. I do not now deserve the love on offer. Until I earn your love, I will not have it! This love you freely give me will not be mine until you MUST give it because it is OWED me.” In this way a fine concern for equity morphs into an emotional and ethical absurdity. A love which is owed? which might be earned? Here is no humility, but rather, a preposterous conceit. For it supposes that one could deserve love—might, instead of accepting it, earn it like a wage—could, by one’s sheer worthiness, be the cause of it—could extract it from others as a sort of tax, rightly and justly collected as a kind of tribute to our own outstandingness. I could (in a very different sense than the usual and more healthy one) MAKE love—or rather, make it MINE, not by accepting its one demand to show myself, but by demanding love show itself in encore to my own excellence. This awful notion of earning love seeks to turn the tables on love’s demandingness—supposes that love not only issues demands, but must respond to demands we might issue. It seeks to take from love its command ‘Come forth!’, and invert it, forcing love to show itself in honor of itself. It twists the basic rightness of love—its serendipity, unreasonable generosity, seemingly pointless abundance—into an issue of rights. "What RIGHT have I to your love?" the poet asks—knowing that, insofar as the love is real, the answer the lover gives is always a smiling "None—and yet I give it." Love has no interest in this economic equality of rights or calculations of worthiness. Love, rather, is an embarrassment of riches; but it is not humility to decline to accept love until one is seen as worthy of it, and so is no longer embarrassed; this is a special form of love-avoidance, masked as virtue, is inspired by the most deep-seated pride.

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Of course, we have been speaking in over-stark terms here—i.e. EITHER love OR love-avoidance; but at the end of the day, most are willing to compromise, not seeing that a love diluted is nothing less than a love denied. In this spirit of compromise—in this compromised spirit—we often avoid the absolute ‘Here I am!’ of love, settling for some safer, cheaper facsimile. Generally speaking, doing such deals looks smart. Sensible. Love is domesticated; its demands become housebroken; we become comfortable; safe. But the price for this mere contentment is hard to see, is invisible, and so is rarely faced. For as we pad about, having sanded smooth all of life and love’s threatening edges—as we, in an appalling composure, play down the sheer audacity of love’s intolerable demand—as we shuffle through an easy and inoffensive life warmed by wealth, chloroformed by comfort— a Cordelia stands strong, wide-armed, open-hearted--and stands...and stands... out in the cold with her love and its fearsome demands. Her arms are open for us, but remain empty, because we cut a deal, compromised—lost faith. And in this way Love seems to escape some of the truest lovers. The world’s Cordelias paradoxically fail to find love precisely because of the genuine-ness and concentrated nature of the love they offer. Their offer of a free, full love demands too much. By contrast, Goneril and Regan’s offer is rarely rejected. It is accepted by Lear precisely because “they are not offering true love”, and this offer of a tamer substitute is exactly what he wants...” Cordelia (“Love, and be silent!”) offers herself and her love, and, in doing so, demands more than Lear is ready to give. Cordelia—Love—thereby puts a claim upon us we often flinch from, and do not face. We are offered love, in all its terror of exposure, and we blink, scratch, look down at our shoes—a instant’s hesitation which produces an infinite, irreparable (though generally unseen) harm. We might say that those who ask where love is might better ask, 'when'—the love they seek is forever lost in these instants of heart-hesitation—in these instants of losing heart.

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Perhaps we are not this love-avoider (surely not!); but at least we know them. Here is the woman who flees love’s possibility for a sensible merger—who hides from love in marriage—who exchanges the wild exhilaration of being called out by love in favor of life with a nice man who calls each day before dinner. And here is the man who, despite all his swagger, spends his time adventuring, but who balks at the Great Adventure and its terrible potential for that most powerful shame, generated only by the gaze of a loving woman who recognizes him--the prospect of which leaves him nauseous with a dread whose intensity hails of gunfire and grisly death cannot equal.

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At times in the face of avoidance the lover persists. In such cases, things tend to end badly, as the avoider counters by persisting in his avoidance. Granted, adamant avoidance often goes no further than that bitter undercurrent—that inexplicable simmering resentment—a petty aggression for all persons who love, or have loved, and so KNOW us. We are exposed to them, and seem to bear them a special, if minor and manage-able malice—are relieved in their absence—wish them gone as petty criminals wish the absence of cameras. Other reactions are more extreme. Avoidance is expressed as aggression. The presence of love brings the terror of exposure. The terror of exposure then leads to more provincial terrors. The more the lover persists in loving, the more the love-avoider resents him—digs in against him as though against an attacker (“Do thy worst, blind cupid; I’ll not love...!”) I avoid. I reject. Yet the lover keeps offering love! The bastard! The persistent lover keeps reminding me of my unworthiness, aggravating my fear of shame. And he insists. And in his insistent love is love's imperative. How I hate him! An inarticulate anger is then aimed at the source of this threat of exposure—and so often at the very persons by whom we are most loved.

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This analysis of love-avoidance would seem to give us a window into the unbearableness of Christ. “Christ was killed by us,” muses Cavell, “because his news was unendurable.” And what was the ‘undendurable-ness’ of His news, if not His talk of a Love infinite, unconditional, inescapable? And to the love-avoider, keeper of secrets, hider of failures, what is this announcement, if not the unending prospect of an infinite, unconditional, and inescapable shame?

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Yet, every now and then, love is not avoided, but accepted. The madness of hiding oneself—perhaps even the competing terror of passing through life anonymously—as one whom no one knows—may break the spell. And, though there is something embarrassing about love, embarrassment may be prevented from turning to shame by being laughed at—or, perhaps, laughed out. We spoke of love-making earlier: when all is well, this too strikes lovers as a wild kind of excess, which, when both have given themselves over to it/each other, often ends in laughter of the highest and healthiest kind—of two persons who, somehow levitated by the exultation of the other in them, suddenly find they can afford to take themselves lightly (something the person who hides in his shame never does—shame is too heavy for that). And this is wonderful—this sense of lightness of self afforded by love, wherein our brooding self-concern is simply laughed away, as though, in the light of love, this self-concern itself becomes embarrassing. At such moments, the madness of love-avoidance itself becomes something about which we are embarrassed. It is, as Cavell has it, as though "shame becomes ashamed of itself"—and stops.