Prepositions of a Martyr

In prayer, where and what is language? A prayer is a need—a friend, so to speak, made from language as such a woman was built from a side of that man. One reads the report, at least. A prayer invokes origin, and origin, if it stays, sustains an asylum, a covering for the bareness of time. It relieves the mind of labors one’s imagination cannot or will not fulfill and perhaps was not made to finish. One might say a prayer gives life to the imagination while the imagination is still being born. In other words, a prayer gives the imagination time for love, space to come between language and itself. A breath in place where breath is said to be, a clasping of hands: a prayer is prolepsis—a supplication by and in defiance to the contingent, it is the invention of care and the denial of knowledge. And yet, a form of and an appeal to knowledge, a prayer grows from the elisions in faith. A prayer is a kind of sleep, the kindness of not being here, or a kindness to the fact. It is a nursery for love in its apostrophe and yet a renunciation of absence: a beck, cry, trial; a prerogative, weapon, name; a wellhead, admission, way. It is a test, a chore, a joke, a raison d’etre, an aperture in one’s record of freedom, a veneer for the faith in it, words around which one wounds oneself to live and words one wounds around oneself to rest. A prayer is a scene of abandonment exempt from all prepositions in the physical and metaphysical world. That is, it exacts an immunity from words that govern the relations between words, and yet, as words of prayer they are only able to be known by observing the laws themselves. A prayer is a definition for faith in the act of desire. A prayer is a rest of the will in which desire has repair. A prayer is the natural selection of a covenant speciating into myth, but also a recovery from and towards the experiences we esteem as natural. It is the desire for a prelapsarian language it can never be, never truer till Babel, never more ordinary until it became itself. A prayer is a want, and an incision of forgiveness, a desire formed for the beatific ending to desire itself, on behalf of desires less well-spoken. A prayer seeks a failure for memory, and by failure, a revision, a bond to memory’s art. A prayer is being’s recourse to language, a dialogic medicine in the gestures of one tongue keeping obedience. A prayer is not one’s own words in that it may not come from oneself, as experience limits the status of origin, but the words of prayer are the subject’s words when he prays. A prayer is where Barthe’s grain of the voice—“the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the limb as it performs,” is the words of the voice’s desire while one utters words through mass desire (“The Grain of the Voice,” Barthes, 188). The form of one’s will to pray alters the words of prayer, just as the words for one’s desire draw the will towards them into prayer. The words of prayer signify preexisting forms of desire: perhaps words anticipate their alterations as desire appears to wait for ours. A prayer is then an erotic communion of word, scribe, and apparatus. By this definition the role of divine prayer in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 108 mirrors the poetics of friendship in Philip’s proof. Sonnet 108 begins by speculating “what’s new to speak,” answers in the tone of common knowledge that there is “nothing,” then relocates the necessity to “[saying] o’er the very same” (Sonnet 108, Shakespeare, Line 3, 5, 6). “I must each day say o’er the very same, / Counting no old thing old, thou mine, I thine…” (Sonnet 108, Shakespeare, Line 6). Why must I? It is certainly for “my love,” and “thy dear merit,” to keep “the eternal love in love’s fresh case” present and alive, to recover love from the ancient by the recitations of an older phrase (Sonnet 108, Shakespeare, Line 4, 9). But these miracles and reasons are also the effect of the compulsion itself.

“A religion in our love” is an invention (Friendship’s Mystery, Philip, 5). It presses for a finality in the relocation from one love to another that has already occurred. The act of faith “in our love” furnishes the reserve of new speech. The proof accepts a way of language for the “first conceit of love” which hallows the fair name of the beloved: discovery seizes language into repetition (Sonnet 108, Shakespeare, Line 13-14). It does not diminish the hallowing or the fairness of the name; rather, it resuscitates the love in the words as the third quintet of Friendship’s Mystery describes a finality in the divine excess of friendship: “our hearts are doubled by the loss, / here mixture is addition grown; / we both diffuse, and both engross (FM, Philip, Line 11-15). The quintet suggests the “sacrifice” of “each heart which thus kindly dies” in the name of friendship, doubles the plurality of their union in friendship (FM, Philip, Line 29, 30). Prayer is the “mixture” of a common phrase with an uncommon voice creating divine repetition, an “addition grown” (FM, Philip, Line 11, 12). Friendship diffuses as “we whose minds are so much one,” and engrosses as we are “never, yet ever are alone,” spreading outward and inward, doubling in body and soul, turning the finality of space or time against their finalities (FM, Philip, Line 14, 15). The act of proof appropriates the act of prayer despite each act’s inversion of belief in the other’s kind—“by wonder and by prodigy,” by the natural openings in the mind forming the “election” to intellect’s vision, and the openings that part from nature into marvel; the proof comes by the passive infinity of exceptions and the activity which “grows deathless” in the exemplary (FM, Philip, Line 3, 8, 30). Proof requires witness—“Come, my Lucasia, since we see,”—as a religion creates its martyrs: the rhyme of sight’s infinitive retains itself in “prodigy,” “agree,” “liberty,” “destroys, “free,” “joys,” “captivity,” “free,” at the end of lines, and “we,” “griefs,” “to be,” “each,” preserved within the lines; later, in the accompanying poem, at the advent of “I am not thine but thee,” the essence of “thee” revises the world’s vision of the lover, followed in “felicity,” a joy of true eloquence, then “believed” and “deceived,”; “see,” as if becoming its past tense, is nearly discovered in “innocent” and “ornament” before their un(?)aspirated endings too (FM, Philip, Line 1, 3, 6, 7, 8, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 23, 29, TMEL, Philip, Line 2, 4, 6, 8, 18, 20, 23). Philip writes:

For though we were designed t’ agree,

That fate no liberty destroys,

But our election is as free

As angels, who with greedy choice

Are yet determined to their joys.

(FM, Philip, Line 6-10)

The lines argue for our free will to joy despite how there is no freedom which may reverse the buildings of fate. Within a concession to fate lies the power of friendship, which subordinates the shape of fate to the precise nature of their union. Freedom’s ability as “our election” to reverse the buildings of fate share their genesis with angels. However, the self-revision of a divine decree is not only a measuring up against the “miracles men’s faith do move” (FM, Philip, 2). Philips equates their “election” to the freedom of angels within the tradition that closes Lovelace’s To Althea, from Prison: “If I have freedom in my Love, / and in my soul am free, / Angels alone that soar above, / enjoy such Liberty” (FM, Philip, Line 4, To Althea, from Prison, Lovelace, Line 29-32). Lovelace’s poem is composed by four octets of time. The first begins in the presence of love “with unconfined wings,” the divine visitation of the lover, their physical communion in which he is “fettered to her eye,” succeeding all heavenly liberties above (Lovelace, Line 1, 6). The first octet may be a repurposing of memory, the proof of the last octet’s postulate, or the foundation for its eternal proof in the mind as a second coming of knowledge. The liberty of the fishes knows nothing of the liberty of wine or the habits of drink by the liberal thirst of grief; the liberty of the most ferocious winds knows nothing of the liberty of his song in praise of the King (Lovelace, Line 9-16, 17-24). It is not merely the fish or the wind that lacks the knowledges of liberty he holds, but these knowledges of liberty are hollowed in themselves as “know” is cleaned out by its equal in sound: “no”; in the sound that repeats and negates itself is the echo of knowledge reserved for the passions of the body, the revelries of sense. The tunnel in sound, a hollowing of knowledge, is where prayer, despite its resemblance to erosion, also fills the absences of liberty—the shape of hollowness and its cure (Lovelace, Line 8, 16, 24). The volta in the poem comes in the final octet where the mind is introduced as “innocent”: even if he is imprisoned, by the work of this preposition “in”—of which his body is the first subject, writing from inside the preposition itself—his love is where his freedom remains, his state of freedom survives where he has his soul (Lovelace, Line 27, 29, 30). The late entrance of “mind” enacts the identities of prayer: the content of repetition alludes to the liberties of the physical world, each repetition endowed with its own time—”when,” “when,” “when”—and yet, such repetitions of time belong in the mind if they are to be wound in the time of a singular making (Lovelace, Line 1, 9, 17). The preposition “of,” in the “first conceit of love,” venerates the labors of antiquity in that, as a kind of eye sinking into language, employed by time— “as a watch by art is wound to motion,”— it is an instrument of order for the knowledge of origin (Sonnet 108, Shakespeare, Line 13, TMEL, Philip, Line 9-10). The instances of time in Lovelace’s first three octets are wound by the repetition of “when”— by the art of faith; they are followed by Philip’s negation of having ever lived “until this time,” until she could truthfully say she was not merely Lucasia’s lover, but Lucasia herself, ending art’s work (TMEL, Philip, Line 1, 4). Philip inverts the role of the body, for all the time before “I am not thine, but thee,” she was a carcass who “breathed, and walked, and slept” (TMEL, Philip, Line 5).

Two appropriations of prayer are in tension with one another throughout Sonnet 108. They recall certain misdeeds of prepositions: it is a misdeed to communion that the conditions of sincerity require words to come from oneself; it is a misdeed to love that words are the standard against which sincerity is measured because of a common knowledge that evades the trust yielded to and forfeited by experience. Love overcomes an impulse for origin as its power asserts itself as an origin of everything. With great and measured irony, art is the origin of the perceptible motion of time, “a soul the motions kept,” before Orinda discovers a soul for the first time in Lucasia’s soul (TMEL, Philip, Line 12, 7). Lovelace’s knowledge of freedom depends on the trust of the love through the body’s liberty retained in the art of prayer; Philip simultaneously retains and turns the source onto itself. There is, perhaps, a prayer that is not art. And so, in Friendship’s Mystery, liberty is summoned without additions (FM, Philip, Line 4). It is the election into their society that is given the measure of likeness to the freedom in freedom. This freedom seems to evade the gestures within the liberties of poetry, in our love, rather than theirs, in prayer rather than prayer. In Lovelace’s final conditional, liberty breaks from its form as a knowledge into enjoyment, a pure knowledge, perhaps, that exceeds the forms of knowing required for memory, repetition, even prayer, or their structures. Yet Philip’s prayer from “a religion in our love” remains, since one’s “felicity” is a perfection of thought where knowledge does not merely speak of itself, but in a mode of address, the excess of friendship (Lovelace, 32, FM, Philip, Line 5, TMEL, Philip, Line 2). Enjoyment “diffuses” and “engrosses” the line of vision without losing the sound—(or, “religion”)—of sight’s infinitive in “liberty,” but it is in Philip’s recovery of “liberty” where the angel’s greediness retains an immunity (“are yet determined”) to Lovelace’s wounding of time through which he reaches his angels (FM, Philip, Line 13, 1, Lovelace, Line 32). Enjoyment is “yet determined,” as prayer is the life of its iterations and “yet ever are alone” (Lovelace, Line 32, FM, Philip, Line 10, 15). Thus, “we court our own captivity / than thrones more great and innocent” (FM, Philip, Line 16-17). The captivity of friendship retains the shape in which this freedom, without gesture, has presence, since, without form, love is “to be set free” (FM, Philip, Line 18). In the infinitive it parts from the present tense while returning the eye of all the times emanating from the present. A freedom that just occurred in a state of infinite being is neither a freedom in love held in an innocent mind, nor a freedom that defines the courting of captivity as divine. (One is passive and whole, the other is active and hopeful. The freedom that is neither one or the other is not yet primordial, nor facing the other side of origin eclipsed by the self-knowledge emerging from the origin, but as if to contain the feeling of the word, which is to be free from it.)

“Religion,” in Philip’s expression, is a gesture in the sense that words of prayer are a gesture of, towards, from, and in knowledge. To see words of prayer as words of prayer, one may see the words themselves as seeking a body of knowledge from their own, through which faith, in its primal utterance as “our love,” expresses possession in the concord of being. That concord endures in the state of language where each word exists alone, never in the company of itself even in the company of its utterances. Obtaining perfect solitude in the sound of itself, the word is surrendered from between the lips as sound comes into sound from the recitation of another body returning the word. Sameness is a fare of surrender: the solitude of the word completes itself as a breath held in the perspective of eternal love, but it is, for all time, alone. Prayer is a word’s confession of being alone animated by one voice. The limits of the voice’s desire may be the desire’s origin. The voice is innocent for desiring plurality (that is, to speak) but it is desirable for being alone (that is, able to be heard). Philip writes:

I did not live until this time,

Crowned my felicity,

When I could say without a crime,

I am not thine, but thee.

(To My Excellent Lucasia, Philip, Line 1-4).

Her love received a name, Lucasia, a hallowed place where the nature of possession has the authority to be expressed. Of the two poems addressing this love in Orinda’s possession, Friendship’s Mystery is an invitation for collaboration. To My Excellent Lucasia, rightfully, has little concern for reciprocity: “our design” requires, perhaps, no requital, and the proclamation of “our soul” eliminates the need for dialogue in Friendship’s Mystery (TMEL, Philip, Line 23-24). At the end of Orinda’s words to Lucasia, “I am not thine but thee,” is a question the poem seems to have little regard for: “Are thee me?” (TMEL, Philip, Line 4). That question might be the place of language in the act of prayer.

Desire is an eternity of discernment. Eternity concerns a state of mind where discernment makes language shiver. The shiver measures expression. That is not to suggest the more shivering there is the more vigorous the imagination in love as the young man to whom Sonnet 108 is addressed desires from the poet. In the act of definition—whether the definition existed before the act—desire creates energy, violating the law of conservation in so far as it sustains not only the appearance, but the sensation—and a common experience—, of eclipsing mere conversion by self-creating or self-destroying in earnest. Thus, it is possible desire “knows well” the life of words but does not “well know” itself (Sonnet 129, Shakespeare, Line 13). As a guiding force for identity and the identities conceived in the narrative of its force, desire’s capacity becomes reproductive. It appears to have created an inconceivable energy (to be in possession of a thing which it is by rule the creator of, yet neither piercing nor hiding behind a concept of illusion). Interceding the transmission of the conceivable, it relieves the appetite first drafted by the natural limits of our existence. The natural limit is seeming and personal, like a thought subject to disposition; the appetite animates the likeness to surpass the limit, revising the nature of the limit’s environment which first created the appetite. The natural limit is not natural, but a name for the act of limiting. Naming is discernment within the indiscernible limits of human experience; desire is the surrogate for what naming expresses. The act of limiting is never synonymous to restraint or idealization, neither self-restraint in the case of self-knowledge, nor self-provocation in the case of self-belief. Restraint is only an aspect in the verbal biography occurring in the space between a limit, visible as an ideal, and the act of limiting, visible often as the personal expiration of an ideal. The act of limiting poses a danger in appearing as words, but words are vital for their indifference to ideals because the act of limiting conceives the form through which content is justified in experience. The act of limiting may be a response to “the fatigue of language” (“Adorable!”, Barthes, 20). But the cause of the fatigue of language may also be the fatigue of the soul in which language limits the soul as a form of knowledge, passing its fatigue over to the soul. The act of limiting might be a prerequisite to identification, and yet the soul has the capacity to be left unscathed, in-experienced, unfastened from speech, and released from knowledge, even in a duration of identities conceived by desire. To identify one’s love as one’s own presupposes a plurality of likenesses, separating one likeness from another within the humility of Eros. The act of limiting is not humble, but it is necessary for the labor of humility that makes prayer a prayer, that professes “I am not thine, but thee” (TMEL, Philip, Line 4). Prayer is a limit. In the act of itself—the act of limiting—it rescinds the limit it was. Prayer is a desire, which suggests that in desiring, one has limited oneself in the medium of desire even though desire seeks to repeal its origin through the progressive into the infinitive, a state of language immune to origin or where origin goes to be extinct. The separation of likeness is an omen of the appetite’s revision towards humility as an “extreme” (Sonnet 129, Shakespeare, Line 4, 10). (If one love is like itself it is essentially unlike another, but the separation of likenesses exists within an omnipresent likeness which is a sum of desire’s visibility. Prayer is an instance of the omnipresent. The ability for desire to be seen gives form to plurality and the instruments of plurality: a You and an I; a kinship within the epithet that exposes one love as distinct from other loves, a denomination in language to form Ours.)

Language has eyes, and when vision is desiring, the work of language imposes might through image, but the image is not merely a mental representation. It touches the danger of the real because of its ability to live inside the mind. In this sense the cynicism for crafts of love resembles the failures of prayer in that environment whose limits remain indiscernible. The limits that are discernable in the environment, defining the dynamic of a society, a friendship, a voyeurism, exist in the real: the natural negative of fantasy from which all objects—the nests from without of the uncontrollable lives of fantasy from within—as for example, the handkerchief embroidered with “conceited characters” and the “thousand favours from a maund… of amber crystal and of beaded jet” from A Lover’s Complaint, or the escalation of poesies in The passionate Sheepheard to his love: from the flocks of sheep to “a thousand fragrant poesies,” from hand-made gowns of wool pulled “from our pretty Lambs,” to the imported “Corall clasps and Amber studs” (A Lover’s Complaint, Shakespeare, Line 16, 36-7, The passionate Sheepheard to his love, Marlowe, Line 6, 10, 13, 18). A globalization made visible by desire makes all commodities of affection lackluster in their equality. Each commodity retains its essence, however, through the act of definition, which cannot unmake the damage of human affection, but offers a space between the menace of the physical world and the materials sorted into kinds of prey. The resistance to differentiation in the aftermath of naming is a cynicism against the concealed force of prepositions in lines such as: “What’s in the brain that ink may character?” and “I’ve all the world in thee” or “a religion in our love” (Sonnet 108, Shakespeare, Line 1, TMEL, Philip, Line 20, FM, Philip, Line 5). “In” is not the absolute emphasis in any of these lines, but it is a foot each line pivots on. The craftsmanship of desire is visible as a violence beneath the words naming these finished wonders like new flesh and blood set free in a discontented stream of time. In commodifying love, they risk the same extinction that prayers do around a hearth absent of faith. Poetry and prayer, creation and recreation, petition and repetition undergo a likeness in eros.

The desires of language see themselves in the mystery of friendship when the language of possession becomes the language of being. Homoeroticism might insulate Philip’s structure of affection from the gendered tradition it inherits. In a body of poetry, like desiring like reserves an impersonation of form by the animating force of content while form and content remain one. Animation of form desires animation of content, and thus, desire’s revision is the desire of being. The appetite as disclosed so far has been only the interim desire. It is possible desire seeks more than what one has the ability to desire in being. The limit expression is recreated, then, by “I am not yours, but you.” It does not merely rephrase the friend as one’s second self, but a phrase desiring through desire in a world without end. It defeats what seems to be an eternal dependency on prepositions, recovering Philip’s use of “innocent” in her address, which retrieves its positions in her making (FM, Philip, Line 17, TMEL, Philip, Line 23).

In A Valediction: Forbidden Mourning, John Donne prohibits the expression of grief between the inescapable parting of two lovers. The first two stanzas create a parallel for two kinds of an ending. Men “whisper” consent in the mandating of their souls’ departures from this life (Donne, Line 2). The status of their lives remains indiscernible to their friends, staging a communal failure of discernment. Speech is the medium for failure: “some of their sad friends do say / The breath goes now, and some say, No” (Donne, Line 4). The timing of one’s breath resists narration by another eye’s receptivity. The goings of the virtuous men are posed as faint, gentle, obliging to the body, for the gift of ascribing moral good to one’s life may occur in the quality of how death begins. Their passing is also one more act of self-restraint underlining their virtue: “to go” is a will to mildness rewarded by “away” (Donne, Line 2, 1). The volume of expression between saying and whispering must be perfectly reduced to silence (Donne, Line 6). Donne urges his lover to come into a resemblance with him, to perform, as to have already attained, a state of incomprehensibility, like the deprivation of knowledge represented by a virtuous body becoming a corpse: “So let us melt, and make no noise” (Donne, Line 5). The amalgam of silences fortified by the deliberate work of lovers is the force posed as equal and opposite to the imminent force of their separation: “a breach, but an expansion, / like gold to airy thinnes beat” (Donne, Line 34-35). Donne identifies the aspiring environment of this absent sound as the imperceptible motion of the soul evading the physical influences of knowledge, and yet the space of silence has a metallic vulnerability. Telling love profanes joy: telling “our love” to figures of the common displaces joy outside the temple, making the knowledge of life or death visible for those still at a distance from the threshold (Donne, Line 8). It is a charge of transmutation from the holy into the secular, and a redefinition of the secular as a forming of knowledge that has abandoned its prescribed place in time. By prematurely becoming itself, this knowledge disrupts the continuum of disclosure on earth as in heaven. Misinterpretation is then a sign for timeliness; the obscurity of love to those outside and inside love compels its exceptionality. Donne’s love in residence on earth creates two souls as a mere condition—“if they be two”— in the being of one (Donne, Line 21). His metaphysics are still bound to the preposition. The motions of the earth are analogous to the virtuous men on their deathbeds and the lovers’ grief at the site of valediction (Donne, Line 9). Reckoned near a mode of divination, the earth’s “moving” is familiar in its “harms and fears,” but the trembling of the spheres defines another fear whose species of distance, “though greater far, is innocent” (Donne, Line 9, 12). The state of innocence is based on the effects of motion, the spaciousness of “trepidation,” the metallic silence, rather than the character of the spheres (Donne, Line 11-12). The bodies of fate are innocent not only despite distance but because they are of a finer, more potent farness. The effect should make the lover’s mourning needless because their love is “so much refined that our selves know not what it is” (Donne, Line 17, 18). Innocence is the prescience of a lover’s desire to revise the experience of grief and control the shape of love. Thus, the consequences of bodily separation are dispensable by a pre-ordained triumph of soul. The interpreters of absence are askance in the form of sublunar lovers. They “cannot admit absence” because either their love, or the soul of their love which is “sense”—the faculty of the sublunar lovers’ perception, the mode of their identities dulled to the repute of earth— displaces the rudiments of their earthly being, and what offers the love or the soul of love to perception. When love is indiscernible to the senses— “care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss”—a kind of prayer ripens, “and makes me end where I begun” (Donne, Line 36). The dual condition of their oneness effaces any preceding methods of integration. His lover is “the fixed foot” of “stiff twin compasses” (Donne, Line 26-27). The ideal that should immunize them still suffers from the motions of embodiment, in the sheltered form of a compass: the movement of one foot creates the “show” of movement in the other (Donne, Line 28). But it is also the condition of being fixed and stiff, the “firmness” in silence, that “makes my circle just, and makes me end where I begun” (Donne, Line 35-36). (Say more of this?)

Thomas Wyatt’s Who list his wealth and ease retain magnifies a limitation in Donne’s Forbidden Mourning. A body confined in a tower is vulnerable to gravity: “the fall is grievous from aloft” (Wyatt, Line 9). The perfect relation of Donne’s conceit is contingent on the stability of the environment in which the just circle is drawn (Donne, Line 35). The abiding perils of the body that “The Bell Tower showed me such sight,” interrupt the spiritual form that would liberate two lovers from their grief of severance (Wyatt, Line 16). Philip provides a settlement as she first reversed the use and escape from Lovelace’s physical world: she draws out Donne’s minor casting of immortality as the absolute condition of the soul, but the physical world is not effaced by a metaphysical ideal. Rather, from within her earthly jurisdiction, she omits the ordinary expressions of corporal love for the fact of a body and the un-fact of the body. “I am not thine, but thee” relieves love of prepositions, but “I’ve all the world in thee” draws the prayer back: “in” holds the beginning of a ritual which “innocent” requires. “In” is the prayer in a world without prepositions, in the name of being in the name: I am you: (I have all the world) in (you). Such is the re-wounding of “innocent” in Philip’s poems. Lovelace’s “innocent” requires an absence of knowledge created by the repetition of invoking different knowledges of liberty which self-excavates into a state of innocence where freedom is “in” love. Donne’s “innocent” relieves the spheres of their influence as it fixes them in their power, a pure, innocent power, a love immune to knowledge that should give them a freedom to silence, an escape from the grief of bodily separation. Two forms of innocence arise from two forms of imprisonment and separation. Philips declines the innocent spheres of Donne as she writes over the liberty of Lovelace. To court one’s captivity is greater than a deferral to divine will for the immortality of the soul is the other face of self-knowledge, rather than the other face of self-belief. It is a growth of negations that arises from bodily sacrifice. The language of being must have the necessary innocence of bodies: its agreement to the limits of freedom are revised in their design by the knowledge of “election,” that is—desire, the eternity from where a body of discernment has a place in words:

Then let our flames still light and shine,

And no false fear control,

As innocent as our design,

Immortal as our soul.

(To My Excellent Lucasia, Philip, Line 17-24).

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