Yet once lucidity has truly come, this image of freedom begins, little by little, to lose its persuasiveness.
After lucidity has come, one does not always wish to grow more lucid.
In everyday speech, lucidity seems always to carry a luminosity with it, a quality worth pursuing, as though it led by nature toward maturity, reason, and freedom——like Comrade Pavel Korchagin, 1 radiant with the dazzling glow of idealism. Yet in the reality we inhabit, lucidity is often accompanied by a certain heaviness. It takes away a settled composure that had, until then, still been possible, and renders return to an earlier state impossible. The world still looks whole——the streets, lights, language, and order, all remain in their places; what has shifted is only the distance between the subject and all these things. And yet precisely this is already profound enough. Once one’s position has moved, it becomes very difficult to live again in the rooms of earlier days.
Many important experiences bear this quality. They give no answer; they only rob one of a certain former ignorance. Once one has seen, the life that follows cannot but carry the trace of the one who has seen. One may remain silent, may detour, may force oneself to repeat the older formulations, and yet within, one knows: the cloth that had covered the eyes has already fallen. The wholeness, the credulity, the immersion of the past will all appear distant from that moment on. What we call growing up is sometimes nothing more than the loss of the capacity to sustain innocence any longer.
Love often takes place in just such a region.
People are in the habit of depicting it as an activity of the will——as though one decides to commit, another decides to confirm, and yet another decides to withdraw. But love that truly touches the depths of the subject does not submit to this manner of operation. It is a black swan swimming slowly out of the night’s waters——no one had truly been prepared to see it, and no one had even believed that it could exist. A capacity that had lain latent somewhere within oneself suddenly takes on shape in the course of being with another: it turns out that oneself can feel in that way, of drawing near in that way, of receiving the whole world again between another person’s gaze and breath. Only at such a moment does one glimpse, (for the first time), a still-unnamed body of water deep within oneself, from which a black swan rises silently to the surface. Karl Marx once said that love is the objectification of the essential powers of the human being.
Perhaps it is for this very reason that love is not only an emotional 2 movement directed toward an object; it is, at the same time, as a light that abruptly illuminates the night, allowing the subject to see, for the first time, but those powers within that had also been sleeping, that he had not yet even recognized as his own.
Perhaps this is also why, somewhere beneath awareness, I have kept naming certain photographs La Cygne Noir. What is truly shattering about the black swan is never only its rarity, but the fact that once it appears, all the calm knowledge one had held concerning the world immediately loses its force.
People had long believed that swans must be white, until the moment those dark feathers beat across the field of vision and an entire apparatus of seemingly stable understanding broke apart in an instant.
The discovery of love is just like this. What it stirs is not the ordinary fluctuations of emotion, but the deeper strata of the subject. One has not learned another truth; one has only suddenly seen oneself. One sees that he can love in that mode, that such an openness was not an illusion, that the softness, the willingness to carry and to endure, have truly already taken place within oneself. Once such seeing has arrived, it cannot be withdrawn. Whoever has once seen who he might be will afterward find it very difficult to return to the self that had not yet seen. Change here takes on something close to the weight of fate: the old subject is not slowly repaired; at the instant the black swan skims over the water, it has already lost the ground of its continued existence.
And suffering quietly grows from this.
People are accustomed to attribute the suffering of love to loss, to departure, to some rupture that has already taken place, as though everything must wait for an ending to fall before its true weight can appear. Yet the deeper suffering already exists before that ending. It hides elsewhere——in those experiences that have clearly, authentically existed, yet find no place in which to come to rest.
Two people have truly drawn near; the roads walked together, the silences paused in together, certain moments each knew without needing to speak——all are real; and the changes within the subject are also real, the capacity that was summoned forth, the softness and the willingness to bear that suddenly appeared——all have left their traces in time. But here lies the strangeness: everything has already taken place, and yet there is no position capable of containing it. It hangs there, neither dispersed nor completed, like a strand of light at dusk that has not yet faded, still resting on the windowpane, though it no longer belongs to day ——statues of Épochè. The experience has been left behind; its meaning, however, finds no place to 3 settle.
Modern life has long seemed to take for granted a certain premise: whatever is painful signals dysfunction, a deviation in need of repair, adjustment, re-placement.
The object has not truly departed, the relation has not truly taken shape, and so the subject can only remain in a state suspended without resolution. He cannot deny that those traces exist, nor can he place them within some steady order. Such suffering is heavier than emptiness, because it carries the residual warmth of presence, carries the evidence of what truly took place, carries a light that refuses to go out.
It is precisely at this step that one instinctively reaches out, wishing to pull what has been suspended back to ground, to let drifting meaning settle, to find for it a name, a conclusion, a reality that can be offered to the world. One often mistakes this for the most natural direction in which love moves. But it is, in truth, a deeper anxiety. It is not the composure that comes from intimacy, but the restlessness that arises when facing the future.
One hopes that time will stop shaking; one hopes that what remains unformed will hurry and take shape; one hopes that the possibility originally left open will become belonging; one hopes that what flows will at last come to rest. What we call confirmation, commitment, the naming of a relation, all take on a more secret longing.
The suffering in love never comes only from what cannot be possessed. The deeper layer lies in the fact that the object always retains a portion that crosses beyond the subject’s arrangement.
On the surface, one appears to be asking only for the closeness of the present; what one truly wishes to keep, however, is that portion of the other which will, in the future, still belong to one’s own narrative. The hand reaches toward the relation, but what the heart seeks to grasp is certainty itself.
Yet the future is not, after all, something that can be held in the palm of the hand. It always carries the shadow of the not-yet-arrived, carries its open directions, carries a freedom that no one can close down in advance. If the subject wishes that the future of the other come to rest within his own will, that freedom will be threatened in silence. Love too will imperceptibly change form at this point. It begins to expect an unbroken response, to expect an enduring stay, to expect the other to exist in a manner that is predictable, dependable, placeable within one’s own order. Such a desire, at first glance, seems tender—— as if it only wished to dispel uncertainty so that the relation might settle into steadiness; yet a step deeper, what lies hidden within is another kind of bondage.
When a person entrusts the peace of his heart to the condition that the other’s future must submit to his own, he is at the same instant bound in return by that very wish. He begins to wait, to keep watch, to hear danger in every silence, to sense disorder in every slowing, to feel a secret fear before every change. On the surface, the subject seems to want to keep the other; yet the truer situation is that his own heart has long since been tied fast by the hand he extended.
The suffering in love never comes only from what cannot be possessed. The deeper layer lies in the fact that the object always retains a portion that crosses beyond the subject’s arrangement. It carries freedom, carries future, carries an openness that will never entirely submit to any will. Whoever truly sees this will feel within himself a tremor of great complexity: he still wishes to come near yet knows that true nearness cannot be purchased at the price of closing off the other’s freedom; he still hopes the relation may sink into quiet, yet also dimly understands that certain orders completed too early cause love itself to lose its breath.
Lucidity, at this point, makes love difficult. It strips away many illusions concerning possession and forces the subject to remain within a relation that cannot easily be completed——to continue to bear it, to continue to feel, to go on recognizing, within the incomplete, the authenticity of that experience.
On the question of the motherland, in just such a region, a secret resonance with love is to be found. They share the same structure; only the mode of objectification differs.
Facing the motherland, a person finds it equally difficult to remain naïve for long. Of course one loves her, and of course one has been shaped by her. A person’s language, his childhood, his sense of shame, his modes of judgment, the grain of his desire, even certain of his most hidden habits of feeling, have all already, in silence, been inscribed into the body by her history. But one glance deeper, and suffering follows close behind.
The motherland has never been an object from which one may arbitrarily select parts. She is not composed only of warmth, glory, nostalgia, and belonging; she carries equally the wound, the violence, the error, the absurdity, carries those contents that, once seen clearly, cannot but bring pain. If one is willing to embrace only a purified motherland——only a motherland without fissure, without shadow, without heavy history——then what one embraces is mostly only a picture within one’s own heart.
The real motherland still drags along those portions which one is unwilling to acknowledge and yet cannot forget; they do not stand outside her; they are within her; they have become her shape and have become as well the weight one cannot go around when loving her.
To love the motherland becomes a bearing within lucidity. One cannot easily severe one’s connection with her, nor can one command her to rewrite herself. She is too vast, too long in time, and too deeply involved in the formation of the person. One knows very well that she does not always correspond to one’s ethical wishes and knows equally well that one cannot keep only the bright parts and delete everything else from memory. Yet it is precisely at such a moment that love shows its true weight.
It is no longer merely gentle belonging, no longer only a momentary excitement on festival days, no longer some abstract and safe identification. It is a sustained shouldering; a pain carried with lucidity. The object remains present yet always rises higher than one’s palm; one is wounded because of her, and it is precisely for this reason that the relation between oneself and her takes on that genuine density, as flesh and blood, not easily cut apart.
Why, however, is suffering always conceived as something that must be driven out?
Modern life has long seemed to take for granted a certain premise: whatever is painful signals dysfunction, a deviation in need of repair, adjustment, re-placement. People have therefore grown accustomed to believing that if only the arrangement were more rational, the training more mature, the inner management more effective, then those portions hard to bear would gradually recede and be replaced by some steadier order. This view is indeed convenient, and for that reason appears especially alluring. It makes life look like a procedure for continually eliminating friction, reducing risk, smoothing over cracks, as if evenness itself constituted the highest value. Yet experiences that truly touch the depths of a person nearly always carry a bitterness that cannot easily be removed. Without this layer, meaning grows thin, emotion loses weight, and many things that were originally able to pierce the soul deeply become, along with it, flat and weightless.
Texts such as those of Fyodor Dostoevsky, or Ninety-Three (1874), always carry a heaviness that refuses to 4 dissipate, and this is not only because they have written down suffering, but because they are never in a hurry to relieve the reader of it. They know how a person becomes clear within a fissure and know that certain truths will show their contours only within pain.
Always hidden within such writing is a reverence for existence, as though a human being were human not by brightness alone but shaped equally by that darkness which cannot be said. The measure of grieving without being wounded in the aesthetic 5 tradition of my motherland falls here. Grief cannot be allowed to vanish, because it lends life its echo, its layering, that lingering tone which refuses to fade; form equally cannot be allowed to collapse, because once emotion is permitted to flood without boundary, grief slides from depth into dissipation. Grief, thus, is preserved, gently held in, placed within the rhythm of aesthetic form. For this very reason, it endures.
The shadow of death does not ruin this beauty; on the contrary, it gives it weight.
The epiphyllum illustrates this structure most clearly. Now it blooms, its withering 6 arrives with it. One who watches the flower knows very well in his heart that this layer of brightness cannot stay for long. Yet precisely because of its brevity, the moment of blossoming appears more solemn, as though time itself were suddenly drawn taut, and all brilliance pressed, in an instant, toward its extreme. The shadow of death does not ruin this beauty; on the contrary, it gives it weight. That faint touch of sorrow is not a sentiment added later but arrives at the same moment as the beauty and co constitutes its meaning. Without this layer, brightness would of course remain, yet it would appear too light and would even lose its true power to dwell in the heart.
The suffering of love may be understood anew in the same light. It is not only an obstacle within a relation, nor merely a defect awaiting to be overcome. It preserves the density of love; it preserves the grain of an experience before it has been worn smooth. The subject suffers precisely because he has truly seen the freedom of the other, the openness of the future, the portion of the relation that cannot be completed in advance by any will, and that capacity within himself which, once it has shown itself, can never again be taken back. If everything could be settled with ease, love would on the contrary lose its depth. Only when the subject understands that the object cannot be entirely possessed, the future cannot be claimed in advance, and the relation cannot be fully placed by any paper certainty, does love to attain a higher degree of honesty. Such honesty is hard to bear, and yet precisely for this reason pulls the relation out of consumerist lightness and gives it back its weight.
It is precisely because it is true that it cannot be avoided.
As the writing about suffering reaches this point, what truly shows itself is no longer suffering itself, but something behind suffering more silent, and more difficult to avoid. After all this has been undergone, the subject has not stepped back. The possibility of stepping back seems to have been quietly closed at the very moment lucidity arrived. One may still hesitate, may still sway during long nights, may still imagine whether one could believe as lightly as before, commit as lightly, hand everything over once more to a simpler narrative; yet the change that has truly taken place within will not be annulled by these hesitations. One cannot decide whether he has been changed, cannot command the object to respond according to one’s wish, cannot make the future fold up into a calm, certain, controllable path.
So it is with love; so, it is with the motherland.
Every object that truly matters carries a portion that rises above the subject, carries its own freedom, and carries a future that refuses to be written down in advance. Once the subject sees this, it becomes very difficult to settle back into the ignorance of earlier days
The question of freedom, too, can only be understood anew upon this soil. It is no longer the light Sartrean word of choice, no longer the notion that one may at any moment withdraw, change 7 course, or begin again. Such an image is of course stirring, because it gives the subject a nearly omnipotent illusion, as if the will, provided it were firm enough, could always make the world yield, could always have the situation rearranged, could always turn fate a little by the force of subjective power. Yet once lucidity has truly come, this image of freedom begins, little by little, to lose its persuasiveness.
What is preserved here is not an omnipotence of action, but an honesty of existence.
The subject gradually realizes that he does not possess power of such breadth. Experience that has taken place cannot be recalled; capacities that have already shown themselves cannot be put back to sleep; truths that have already been seen do not disappear merely because one refuses to acknowledge them. The object retains its portion that cannot be controlled; the future still opens onto multiple possibilities; and the subject himself is no longer that subject who could have chosen freely before anything had taken place. In other words, if freedom still exists, it can no longer be understood as arbitrary manipulation of one’s situation; it can exist only within a more difficult position.
That position is extraordinarily narrow, and yet remarkably firm. It confers on the subject little outward power, but it preserves an inner thing that cannot be surrendered. The subject cannot govern the object, cannot command the future, cannot abolish suffering, cannot render the complex once again pure; yet he can still refuse to capitulate to illusion, can still refuse to hand back to the darkness what he has already seen, can still refuse, knowing full well that nothing can be completed, to use some false ending to rewrite the meaning of what has already taken place.
The measure of grieving without being wounded in the aesthetic 5 tradition of my motherland falls here.
This appears small, and yet it constitutes the final ground on which one may stand after lucidity has come. It keeps the subject from sinking entirely into self-deception, from re-embracing broken narratives in exchange for a moment’s ease, from once again mistaking love for possession, or the motherland for a purified picture to soothe oneself with. What is preserved here is not an omnipotence of action, but an honesty of existence.
And so, freedom, in the end, comes to rest within lucidity. It does not carry much glory; it rarely grants the feeling of triumph. It does not even bring lightness; more often it arrives accompanied by a bitter aftertaste, by the weariness of being forced to keep the eyes open. And yet precisely because of this, it appears real.
A person who has truly seen can only live on, afterward, bearing that seeing. Wounded, hesitant, swaying again within the heart—none of this is enough to make him become his former self. The object always rises above the subject; suffering is never entirely wiped out; certain relations never truly reach completion. Yet the subject at least knows that he can no longer settle down in blindness.
Lucidity takes away the convenience of sinking, takes away the ease with which one could mistake, forget, or avoid; and in return it preserves for the subject one final refusal. It is a force extremely faint yet irreplaceable: unable to determine the world, one still refuses to renounce the acknowledgment of its true structure.
Lucidity takes away the convenience of sinking ….in return it preserves for the subject one final refusal….unable to determine the world, one still refuses to renounce the acknowledgment of its true structure.
In this sense, freedom is less a capacity to escape necessity than a fate of keeping the eyes open within necessity. Fate here is not poetic ornament but almost the most sober fact: one cannot, in the end, decide whether one will be changed; cannot decide whether those truly important objects are willing to submit to one’s arrangement; cannot decide whether time will halt its steps for the sake of one’s wishes. What can be grasped is pitifully little, and the reason the subject has not entirely lost himself is precisely that, within this pitifully small space, there is a dignity that has not yet been taken from him. He can refuse to let fantasy substitute for the real, refuse to let control disguise his own dependence, refuse to let some ending turn back around and declare that everything in the past had only been a misunderstanding; he can acknowledge the incompletable, acknowledge the love that brings pain, acknowledge the history that cannot be purified, and acknowledge that the future always retains the openness that belongs to future itself. Such acknowledgment does not, of course, bring immediate consolation; it may even render suffering clearer, sharper, since every covering has been stripped away; yet precisely at this point the subject at last stands firm again, as if his feet had once more touched some cold, solid ground.
The freedom that the subject may hold onto, in the end, may be no more than this. It is not abundant, and it is not tender. It often wearies, causes pain, gives rise to a longing for those earlier, un-reflected calms.
After lucidity, a person loses many kinds of ease. The convenience of blind commitment gradually recedes; the sense of safety that mistook possession for love slowly fades; the possibility of imagining the motherland as an object without fissure or shadow likewise disappears. Even the ability to understand suffering simply as some error, some accidental deviation, some malfunction awaiting repair, is lost along with it. And yet at the same time, the subject gains something rarer: he finally knows what it is that he is bearing, and finally knows why he has, in truth, never truly turned and walked away.
There is little in this of heroic exaltation, little strength one might display; it is only that certain seeings, once they have occurred, cannot but be kept faith with; and certain lucidities, once they have arrived, bring freedom with them—not as a reward, but as a burden that cannot be evaded, as a fate that must be carried if one is to go on living.
Seen thus, what we call freedom has never been only the capacity to open new roads; it is equally the capacity to refuse return to darkness; not only the luxury of choice, but also the insistence, within the absence of choice, upon not abandoning lucidity. The freedom that the subject may hold onto, in the end, may be no more than this. It is not abundant, and it is not tender. It often wearies, causes pain, gives rise to a longing for those earlier, un-reflected calms. And yet it is the truest thing we possess. It is precisely because it is true that it cannot be avoided.
Notes
1 Pavel Korchagin (Павел Корчагин) is the protagonist of Nikolai Ostrovsky’s novel How the Steel Was Tempered (Как закалялась сталь, 1936),
2 From Karl Marx’s “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844” (“Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844”),
3 This suspended state, held open rather than resolved, is precisely what phenomenology names épochē, the suspension or “bracketing” introduced by Edmund Husserl (Ideen I, 1913), by which the natural attitude’s implicit judgments about the reality of the world are held in abeyance so that the structure of experience itself may come into view.
4 Quatrevingt-treize, 1874, Victor Hugo’s last novel, set against the Vendée uprising during the French Revolution; a work in which political terror, moral ambiguity, and personal sacrifice are given their full, unresolved weight.
5 “Grieving without being wounded” (哀而不伤) is a phrase from the Analects of Confucius, describing an ideal of aesthetic and ethical restraint in which sorrow is acknowledged without being allowed to overflow into destructive excess. It has shaped Chinese poetics for millennia and names a discipline of form at the threshold of feeling.
6 The epiphyllum (昙花), a night-blooming cereus that opens for only a few hours before withering; a long standing image in Chinese poetic and Buddhist traditions for the fleeting and precious, and for the inseparability of beauty from impermanence.
7 A reference to the Sartrean conception of radical freedom developed in L’Être et le néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), in which the subject is condemned at every moment to choose——a view which the present essay inflects, and partly contests, in favor of a freedom rooted in lucidity rather than in pure choice.
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