Phoenix design by Stephen Russ for the cover of Penguin's
unexpurgated edition of Lady Chatterley's Lover (1960)
According to D. H. Lawrence, unless the individual is willing to be dipped into oblivion and made nothing, then they will never really change. For like the phoenix, we renew our youth only when we are burnt down to hot and flocculent ash.
Interestingly, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran thinks along similar lines when it comes to the question of how best to achieve one's immortality - with the latter conceived in terms of immaterial purity (a synonym for nothingness).
In his astonishing first work - written whilst still only 22 years of age - Cioran speaks of the bath of fire which "purifies so radically that it does away with existence". Its scorching flames set one's very being ablaze, until, finally, one has become-ash.
In a moving final passage, he asks: "when the inner conflagration has scorched the ground of your being, when all is ashes, what else is there left to experience?" There is, he confesses, "both mad delight and infinite irony in the thought of my ashes scattered to the four winds, sown frenetically in space, an eternal reproach to the world".
Thus, unlike the vitalist Lawrence, the nihilist Cioran feels no need to imagine himself rising from the ashes like some mythical bird, with bright new feathers. For him, the passing into death isn't any kind of triumph, nor a preliminary to a new and better life.
Having said that, even Cioran allows himself to occasionally dream of a world that is transfigured by the bath of fire, rather than simply reduced to ruin:
Interestingly, the Romanian philosopher E. M. Cioran thinks along similar lines when it comes to the question of how best to achieve one's immortality - with the latter conceived in terms of immaterial purity (a synonym for nothingness).
In his astonishing first work - written whilst still only 22 years of age - Cioran speaks of the bath of fire which "purifies so radically that it does away with existence". Its scorching flames set one's very being ablaze, until, finally, one has become-ash.
In a moving final passage, he asks: "when the inner conflagration has scorched the ground of your being, when all is ashes, what else is there left to experience?" There is, he confesses, "both mad delight and infinite irony in the thought of my ashes scattered to the four winds, sown frenetically in space, an eternal reproach to the world".
Thus, unlike the vitalist Lawrence, the nihilist Cioran feels no need to imagine himself rising from the ashes like some mythical bird, with bright new feathers. For him, the passing into death isn't any kind of triumph, nor a preliminary to a new and better life.
Having said that, even Cioran allows himself to occasionally dream of a world that is transfigured by the bath of fire, rather than simply reduced to ruin:
"If I could [...] I would set a fire burning insidiously at the roots of life, not to destroy them but to give them a new and different sap, a new heat. [...] In this way life would adjust to higher temperatures and would cease to be an environment propitious to mediocrity. And maybe in this dream, death too would cease to be imminent in life."
Notes
D. H. Lawrence, 'Phoenix', in The Poems, ed. Christopher Pollnitz, (Cambridge University Press, 2013).
E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), see the sections entitled 'The Bath of Fire' and 'The World and I'.
This post is dedicated to my beautiful friend, the artist Heide Hatry, who knows more than most about becoming-ash.
Readers interested in a sister post to this one on DHL and EMC and the question of becoming-animal, should click here.
E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992), see the sections entitled 'The Bath of Fire' and 'The World and I'.
This post is dedicated to my beautiful friend, the artist Heide Hatry, who knows more than most about becoming-ash.
Readers interested in a sister post to this one on DHL and EMC and the question of becoming-animal, should click here.
Thanks for these provocative parallels. This is great research. I'd never heard of Cioran before your posts. All of this annihilation and being reborn is really interesting, but it feels like fanciful language to tart up the depressing reality of mortality. I've always preferred Philip Roth's blunt, beautiful and simple definition: Life is a short period of time when you're alive.
ReplyDeleteOne can almost say that Cioran 'vitalises nihilism'! To me, he's a supreme ironist of dispersed divinity.
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