Emil Cioran - crazy hair, crazy guy!
I.
From out of the blue comes a book in the post: a copy of E. M. Cioran's On the Heights of Despair (1934), kindly sent to me by my friend and sometimes collaborator, the Dublin-based poet Simon Solomon ...
Originally published in his native Romania, this was Cioran's first book in which many of the themes and obsessions of his mature work are already foreshadowed. It might best be described as a series of existential meditations on death, suffering and life's absurdity, in which a young writer openly borrows some of Nietzsche's more theatrical poses and mystical clown's tricks.
Unfortunately, however, Cioran isn't ever going to be my cup of tea. Even his translator, Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, concedes that he's a specialized taste - "too sharp and bitter for many palates and, paradoxically, too lyrical and funny for some others" - though I'm not entirely sure this explains my own aversion.
After all, I'm perfectly happy with rancorous, darkly comic authors. So perhaps, then, it is the unrestrained lyricism; the fact that there's simply too much blood, sincerity, and fire within the pages for my tastes. If only Cioran had curbed his enthusiasm - and his rhetorical flourishes - I may have found this book easier to read and enjoy.
Of course, I've no doubt that the self-professed barbarian and passionate young fascist who authored On the Heights of Despair would brand my unlyrical (and perhaps at times even anti-lyrical) call for the exercising of caution cowardly - a sign of my own sclerosis and hollow intellectualism.
II.
The vital importance of lyricism to Cioran in the above work is clear from the opening section, in which he roots it in what he terms inner fluidity or spiritual effervescence - the chaotic, unconscious turmoil of the deepest self. Lyricism is thus an outward expression of profound interiority:
"One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality."
"One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality."
I don't know what that sentence means and it's not one I could ever imagine writing; not even in the throes of death or some other decisively critical experience, "when the turmoil of [my] inner being reaches paroxysm". In fact, such language and such thinking is antithetical to my substantial centre of subjectivity.
Thus, I'll just have to remain a stranger to myself and to reality; a loveless being, trapped in an impersonal bubble of objectivity and "living contentedly at the periphery of things", never knowing the lyrical virtues of suffering and sickness, but vegetating in scandalous insensitivity and sanity.
For according to Cioran, just as there's no authentic lyricism without illness, nor is there absolute lyricism "without a grain of interior madness". Indeed, the value of the lyrical mode resides precisely in its delirious and savage quality; it knows nothing of aesthetics or cultural refinement and is utterly barbarian in its expression.
Sounding more like Bataille than Bataille, Cioran concludes his vision of excess with the following:
"Absolute lyricism is beyond poetry and sentimentalism, and closer to a metaphysics of destiny. In general, it tends to put everything on the plane of death. All important things bear the sign of death."
"Absolute lyricism is beyond poetry and sentimentalism, and closer to a metaphysics of destiny. In general, it tends to put everything on the plane of death. All important things bear the sign of death."
As a thanatologist, I agree with this last statement. Only consciousness of death and of the fact that all being is a being toward death, isn't something that I find particularly troubling. In other words, whilst I might share Cioran's nihilism, I don't experience his intense anguish and black drunkenness.
I prefer a practice of joy before death, not a practice of misery (no matter how lyrical) ...
See: E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair, trans. Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston, (The University of Chicago Press, 1992).
I suspect the idea of anybody being 'perfectly happy' about anyone or anything would be the kind of verbal double whammy that might have had Cioran reaching for a revolver! As Stephen himself points out, the continuous trauma of thought and the chaos of creation are the inalienable hallmarks of his early passionate post-Nietzscheanism. There is joy here, but it is a kind of ecstatic despair, the paradoxical melancholy of the height that Nietzsche knew, not a bout of autumnal blues. One perhaps finds its closest analogue in the spiritual poetry of Emily Dickinson.
ReplyDeleteDoubtless absurdly, the sentence in Cioran's early work concerning intensity, integrity and daemonic singularity that apparently confounds the blogger (and which presumably mainly marks their stylistic differentation, rather than necessarily any episteological dysjunction - there is perhaps no modern writer whose 'revolt into style' was so relentlessly marked) made me think of the theme tune to the 1980s US inter-racial sitcom 'Diff’rent Strokes' ('Now the world don't move to the beat of just one drum / What might be right for you, may not be right for some’). As Macbeth's Weird Sisters incanted, a fateful/fatal life is bound to its peculiar percussion ('A drum, a drum! Macbeth doth come').
However, one citation from Cioran’s 1949 work 'A Short History of Decay' ought to be enough to scotch any misconceptions surrounding this author’s supposed sincerity, let alone his (transpersonal) lyricism. Like Nietzsche, he understood the importance of keeping his enemies closer than any friends he might have had (Beckett was possibly one, it seems, in Paris), and, like Nietzsche, he is ultimately a kind of refined and lapidary ironist, not an enthusiast - desolate, so to speak, rather than passionate. Might he not have resonated, depspite himself, with the late Leonard Cohen's memorable remark that when your life is burning well, your poetry is just the ash?
'It is enough for me to hear someone talk sincerely about ideals, about the future, about philosophy, to hear him say "we" with a certain inflection of assurance, to hear him invoke "others" and regard himself as their interpreter - for me to consider him my enemy.'