Spectroscopy / Continua
Dérives on Letters: Part 5
If it is true that nobody ever reads the same book—meaning that a single book is a lens that the reader looks through to read their own life, as Proust puts it somewhere—then it is also true, though in a more advanced, unassailable way, that nobody ever experiences the same transition between one book and another. The end of a book emits its own special glow based on the way one reads it, the surroundings, the time of day and year in which it is read; the parallax between the immobile text and the mutable feelings of the reader also determines what shade is to arise after the final word has been passed over. But if the end of a book glows like a sun that has been distorted into a bending half-sphere of color by the subtler atmospheric qualities of the reader (a sunset combining with the weather to produce a special palette of light), then the beginning of another book is like a new day rising over a fresh landscape, though seen, as it were, with the same eyes that only a moment ago surveyed the decaying aura of what could only have been an end.
In this way, the glowing dusk and the bright dawn of two different books bleed into one another on the same canvas—the mind—in a strange demonstration of what might be thought of as a spectroscopy of the spirit—a beautiful pseudoscience retaining something of Scriabin’s synaesthetic clavier à lumières, which he used to compose his Prometheus: The Poem of Fire, so that each transition, each horizon of affective color between one’s reading, is like a connective chord in our own poem of fire that we are always silently composing and leaving off work on, somewhere between the eye which reads and the page which is read, to be found neither on the surfaces of writing nor really in the depths of the reader.
And why should we find it strange that the word depth is almost always metaphorical in these contexts, while surface is used in a way that is entirely literal and much more easily believed (imagined pictorially)? Why should the use of the word surface strike us as purely descriptive, whereas the use, in the same context, of the word depth leaves us feeling as though we were taking liberties with an image? This continuum of depth–surface suggests that the surface of a written page is somehow just as metaphorical, just as figurative, as the depths of a soul.
Or, could it be that, when faced with certain pairs of terms, one of the two must remain fictional—a posited quantity—in order for either of them to mean anything? Imagine this, applied to something like Kant’s antinomy: the bad-infinity–movement between two contradictory terms disappears and the two superimpose into one living image. Think of free will, for example, in the third antinomy, getting backgrounded into the level of a posited fiction so that the other term, pure determinism, can play itself out at the level of reality (reminiscent of Schelling and his primordial Grund); alternatively, pure determinism gets backgrounded so that a free will can move about at the level of reality (seemingly a more common philosophical position). The problem would be whether such a supposed movement between the posited fictionality and the (also posited?) reality-status of two terms still nevertheless results in a kind of second-order bad-infinity within which our perspective gets caught (like a disembodied vision placed between two parallel mirrors).
Imagine the two terms we began with: depth–surface (or soul–text). What if the soul stopped taking up the fictional position of the continuum and became posited as literally real (as some people claim to already believe)? We would have nothing new, but would maybe see the human body, or some other thing, differently. I am reminded of the following lines from the Philosophical Investigations:
24. If the picture of thoughts in the head can force itself upon us, then why not much more that of thoughts in the mind or soul?
Here, the fictionally posited term seems to be the “in the head” of thought. And,
25. The human body is the best picture of the human soul.1
Is it therefore easiest for the soul to be posited as the fictional term, because we have an easy metaphorical image for it (the body), so that something like “text” (to continue our analogy) gets relegated to a surface (reality) term behind which we cannot imagine positing something analogous to a soul?
In this case, what would happen to the way we see writing or printed books? How would our ideas about the reproduction of writing via printing and distribution change if a soul was believed to be in them? Would we start writing only in the form of illuminated palimpsests, passed down over time and shared? What would be the social and economic run-on effects of such a belief? Or would writing become too sacer/profane to be regularly practiced at all?
422. What do I believe in when I believe that man has a soul? What do I believe in when I believe that this substance contains two carbon rings? In both cases, there is a picture in the foreground, but the sense lies far in the background; that is, the application of the picture is not easy to survey.2
EXTRACT
In We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin, the narrator finds himself in a catastrophic predicament. He has contracted an incurable sickness: he has developed a soul. The scissor-lipped doctor explains the malady to him:
Alright. So you have a plane, a surface—this mirror, for instance. You and I appear on the surface—right here—squinting our eyes from the sun, and notice: the blue spark flashing in that tube and now, the shadow of a passing aero. These things are just on the surface, just momentarily. Now imagine: some kind of heat has softened this impermeable surface, and nothing simply glides over it anymore—everything permeates, penetrating into that mirror world, which we peered into as curious children. Believe me, children are not as dumb as you think. The surface has been transformed into a volume, a body, a world, and all of his is inside the mirror—inside you—the sun, and the spark from the aero propeller, your trembling lips, and somebody else’s. You see: the cold mirror reflects, casting everything out, while this one soaks everything in, absorbing all traces forever. What had once been a barely noticeable wrinkle on somebody’s face is now inside you for the rest of your life. You heard a drop fall in silence—and now you can still hear it . . .3
Is this how it is? I think it is rather that the world is the heated mirror and that our subjectivity is the light that heats it. The drop that falls in silence is us. The subject drips with its warm light onto the mirror of the world.
Both of the above lines from “Philosophy of Psychology — a Fragment (previously known as ‘Part II’),” Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations. Blackwell. 2009.
Ibid. 134e.
Yevgeny Zamyatin, We. 1920. HarperCollins. 104-105.