Extracts, Eros the Bittersweet
The Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting. This is more than wordplay.
Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alice. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.
When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of Eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to a complete person.
When I desire you a part of me is gone: your lack is my lack. I would not be in want of you unless you had partaken of me, the lover reasons. Eros is expropriation. He robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity and leaves the lover, essentially, less. Love does not happen without the loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. Or so he reckons.
But his reckoning involves a quick and artful shift. Reaching for an object that prove to be outside and beyond himself, the lover is provoked to notice that self and its limits. From a new vantage point, which we might call self-consciousness, he looks back and sees a hole. Where does that hole come from? It comes from the lover’s classificatory process. Desire for an object that he never knew he lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, as a desire for a necessary part of himself. Not a new acquisition but something that was always, properly, his. Two lacks become one. The shifty logic of the lover unfolds naturally from his ruses of desire.
On the surface of it, the lover wants the beloved. This, of course, is not really the case. if we look carefully at a lover in the midst of desire, for example Sappho in her fragment 31, we see how severe an experience for her is confrontation with the lover even at a distance. Union would be annihilating. What the lover needs is to be able to face the beloved and yet not be destroyed.
The blind point of Eros is a paradox in time as well as in space. A desire to bring the absent into the presence, or to collapse far and near, is also a desire to foreclose then upon now. As lover you reach forward to a point in time called ‘then’ when you will bite into the long-desired apple. Meanwhile you are aware that as soon as 'then’ supervenes upon 'now’, the bittersweet moment, which is your desire, will be gone. You cannot want that, and yet you do.
The experience of Eros is a study in the ambiguities of time. Lovers are always waiting. They hate to wait; they love to wait. wedged between these two feelings, lovers come to think a great deal about time, and to understand it very well, in their perverse way.
Desire seems to the lover to demolish time in the instant when it happens, and to gather all other moments into itself in unimportance. Yet, simultaneously, the lover perceives more sharply than anyone else the difference between the ‘now’ of his desire and all the other moments called ‘then’ that line up before or after it. One of those moments called ‘then’ contains his beloved. That moment pulls at his attention, vertiginously, by love and hate at once. The lover’s real desire, is to elude the certainties of physics and float in the ambiguities of a space-time where absent is present and ‘now’ can include ‘then’ without ceasing to be ‘now’. From his special vantage point, “wedged between two tenses” as Barthes says, the lover looks at ‘now’ and ‘then’ with a calculating eye and a sinking heart. How he would love to control time! But instead, time controls him.
No one in love really believes that love will end. Lovers float in that “pure portion of anxiety”, he present indicative of desire. They are astonished when they fall in love; they are equally astonished when they fall out of love.
The relation of desire to time is the fulcrum of Lysias’ argument. As soon as the lover’s desire flags, Lysias predicts, the lover will lose interest in his beloved and exit, with pain and embarrassment all round. He will repudiate the relationship, regret his investment in it and move on to new infatuations. Love based on the physical passion of the moment cannot but falter when the thrill is gone. The nonlove of the nonlover, in contrast, having no special commitment to pleasure in the present, can take a consistently atemporal attitude to his love object and to the love affair. ‘Now’ and ‘then’ are moments of equal value to the nonlover.
The consistency of his own outlook permits the nonlover to accommodate change in the beloved, Lysias goes on to argue. The nonlover will not be appalled when his boy’s physical appearance changes with age nor will he endeavor to prevent the boy from changing in other ways, for example, by acquiring new friends, new ideas or assets. He will not desert the relationship wen passion cools nor begrudge the beloved any of the benefits of friendship, even after the boy’s beauty has passed its peak.
There is no time when desire is pain for the nonlover. ‘Now’ and ‘then’ are for him interchangeable: his love affair is a series of events in time that can be entered at any point or rearranged in any order without damage to the whole.
Cicadas can be read as an image of the fundamental erotic dilemma. They are creatures pulled into confrontation with time by their own desire. They offer a new solution to the lover’s paradox of ‘now’ and ‘then’. Te cicadas simply enter the ‘now’ of their desire and stay there. Abstracted from the process of life, oblivious to time, they sustain the present indicative of pleasure from the instant they are born until, as Sokrates says, “they escape their own notice, having died”. Cicadas have no life apart from their own desire and when it ends, so do they.
Here is an alternative to the tactics of Lysias’ nonlover. The nonlover sidesteps painful transitions between ‘now’ and ‘then’ by stationing himself permanently at the end of desire. He sacrifices the intense and transient pleasure of the lover’s ‘now’ in return for an extended ‘then’ of consistent emotion and predictable behavior. Cicadas choose the opposite sacrifice, investing their whole lives in the momentous delight of ‘now’. Passing time and its transitions do not affect them. They are stranded in the living death of pleasure.
Beginnings are crucial. Socrates emphasizes in the most dignified language that everything in existence has a beginning, with one exception: the beginning itself. Only the arche itself controls its own beginning.
In reality, the beginning is the one moment that you, as an unwitting target of winged Eros, cannot control. All that this moment brings, both good and evil, bitter and sweet, comes gratuitously and unpredictably – a gift of the gods, as the poets say. From that moment on, the story is largely up to you, but the beginning is not.
As Socrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be. What is this mode of perception, so different from ordinary perception hat is well described as madness? How is it that when you fall in love you feel as if suddenly you are seeing the world as it really is? Mood of knowledge floats out over your life. You seem to know what is real and what is not. Something is lifting you toward an understanding so complete and clear it makes you jubilant. This mood is no delusion, in Socrates’ belief. It is a glance down into time, at realities you once knew, as staggeringly beautiful as the glance of your beloved.
The point of time that Lysias deletes from his logos, the moment of mania when Eros enters the lover, is for Socrates the single most important moment to confront and grasp. ‘Now’ is a gift of the gods and an access onto reality. To address yourself to the moment when Eros glances into your life and to grasp what is happening in your soul at that moment is to begin to understand how to live. Eros’ mode of takeover is an education: it can teach you the real nature of what is inside you. Once you glimpse that, you can begin to become it.
