On Relational Presence (Part two)

The Illusive Real

Adolescence often brutally arrives with a creeping, though distant awareness of mortal fate, of the real. This is a time of burgeoning desires to individuate, fuelled by fantasies of liberation from the shackles of parental projections, rules, and regulations. An important driver of the teenage rebellion is an increasing awareness of the fallibility of one’s caregivers, and their depressing capacity to disappoint. After all, cherished memories of care can soon become tarnished through disagreements, misunderstandings, abandonment, and, in the worst cases, neglect and abuse. All such experiences become the blueprint for the way we relate to care as we move through our lives, and the way in which we give and receive love. 

When we fall in love for the first time, nothing else in the world exists; it is a state of becoming which is experienced as infinite, though this affective experience of eternity is quite different from that of the childhood experiences of love that were adumbrated in the first article in this series; this new manifestation is infused with a libidinised, intoxicating, abandon to which we can only surrender. Uncertainty and a sense of precarity are important ingredients in propelling this particular form of desire into affective consciousness. When reality inevitably rears its ugly head, like a nagging gargoyle, we are reminded that we should have heeded the danger signs as a warning, and seen beyond their libidinal aspects and the promised immediacy of gratification. This is a harsh reminder of love’s evanescence, presenting us with an emotional truth: if love cannot survive its initial fires of first passion, then only ashes will remain; there is no phoenix rising. Thus, we must accept love’s loss, no matter how much our hearts yearn for its resurrection.  This form of love unconsciously wishes for the return of our earliest experiences of relational presence, but its inherent excitement is driven by a deeper knowledge that this is illusory.

W.B. Yeats depicts the painful fragility of romantic love in his poem ‘Ephemera’ : the ‘child’ of short-lived passion is worn out, and can no longer be roused. Indeed, when love dies in a romantic relationship we are often heartbroken, and in the midst of our grief, we feel that the child of our earliest experiences of relational presence has fallen asleep forever; we have become dis-illusioned; all that now remains is a heart-rending nostalgia, a haunting specter of what once was, or could have been, if only. In the aftermath of this experience of loss, one may feel that it was one’s own desire which was the problem, and if only one had not felt this desire that this love could have lived on. This is a cruel illusion, and can easily become a source of harsh self-criticism, and when one cannot find healing in an-other, then one may resort to substitutes or pseudo-loving.

It can be easy to write-off falling in love for the first time as an illusory phenomenon, though it is important to note that this ‘illusion’ is created by very real experiences. In this respect the most beautiful works of art are illusions. For William Blake, lost love represents the loss of innocence; in his poem ‘The Garden of Love’ flowers are cruelly replaced by tombstones. Although it is the beauty of nature for which the poet yearns, it is also that which, in the end, cruelly strangles the former joys of his youth. We may consider this to be an allegory for the way in which one can feel that there is something wrong with one’s own ‘nature’ when one experiences rejection, and if only one could have been born differently, with a different ‘nature’ then the love could have survived. When one suffers the pain of rejection, it is very difficult to see beyond such rigid and cruel distortions of reality.

Gérard de Nerval employs similar imagery of flowers and tombs to depict the agony of lost love in his ‘El Desdichado’ (The Disinherited). The poet pleads for the restored unity of the rose and the vine-leaf, longing for a near-symbiotic union, perhaps the return of the lost and wished for relational presence of infancy. This is particularly significant framed within the context of Nerval’s early life as he tragically lost his mother when he was just two years old.

In Oscar Wilde’s poem ‘From Spring Days to Winter’, lost love is represented by the dove, whose golden wings are now broken, perhaps depicting a loss of contact not only with the beloved, but also with a sacred and enchanted dreamworld. In Wilde’s poem, and for the Romantic poets before him, there is an apparent parallel between the loss of Romantic love and a bygone transcendent ‘Jerusalem’; an Atlantean mythopoeic haven for which the poet yearns, an illusive real which becomes the basis of Romantic desire. 

Returning to Nerval’s stirring line in ‘El Desdichado’ - ‘Et la treille où le Pampre à la rose s’allie’ - beyond the individual relationship to the symbols of the rose and the vine-leaf, for the Romantics more broadly, it is art which becomes the treille upon which the rose (love) and the vine-leaf (the enchanted world) can alchemically unite. Indeed, Nerval’s individual longing is one that cuts across the Romantic experience; an inner search for a lost, transcendent, unifying eternal which is also driven by the paradoxical awareness of mortality and threat of strangulation by the binding forces represented by the horrors of Blake’s Urizen: modernity. 

The spirit of Romanticism was becoming overcome by realism, like a candle being carried into a room fitted with electric light (Holmes, p.262).

Time and the progress of modernity are inimical to the Romantic, a lover who stubbornly and naively ‘holds a candle for’ one who has since long since moved on. Yet this pertinacious grip is the nucleus of the Romantic spirit, and its childlike naiveté is the creative fire at the heart of the illusive real. However, looking once again at Nerval’s ‘El Desdichado’, one can clearly see how this candle also casts a haunting shadow upon the Romantic’s dreams. Where Nerval pleads ‘Rends-moi le Pausilippe et la mer d’Italie’, there is a demanding, almost entitled nature to his wish for the past’s healing reprise, and as the poet’s demand appears to go unheeded, then I can only imagine this is felt to be a rejection of his love at an ontological level, a rejection of his true self. Importantly, it is out of the feelings of rejection of the true self inherent to lost love that resentment and bitterness are often born, and it is this resentment which lies dormant in Romanticism. This resentment becomes more explicit in the Gothic and Decadent movements where these tenebrous affective aspects are now brought into sharp relief, continuing to forge a link between the developmental difficulties of adolescence, and the cultural creep of modernity and its concomitant loss of wonder and mystery. 

As respective examples of the Gothic and Decadent movements, both Dracula and Dorian Grey - in their own unique ways - limn a romanticised, Luciferian rebellion against emotional vulnerability; each have supernatural gifts, though both characters are incapable of real human love or tenderness. Where the disinherited romantic idealises the loss of love and experiences of rejection, the gothic and decadent counterpart romanticises the shadowy aspects of the rejection; the fact that he is incapable of love becomes a source of fascination.

In part, it is this particular emotional deficit which drives Dorian’s and Dracula’s destructive actions, and with whom anyone whose love has been rejected can, at the deeper levels of the self, identify. Experiences of rejection can of course cause destructive responses and result in exploitative and hurtful relationships to oneself and others. Indeed, the adolescent identification with characters such as Dracula and Dorian Gray often begins with an experience of loss or rejection of one’s love. This loss is libidinised by a resentment towards an almighty, depriving other who is deemed to have shattered the precious illusion of eternal love and/or worldly enchantment. This resentment may relate to the earliest experiences of rejection: from one’s caregivers, in friendship, romantic relationships, or any combination thereof. This rejection relates to the adolescent’s closeness to the most isolated part of the self (the true self) which is sadly often experienced in the outside world as an outsider, or outcast.

Adolescents form aggregates rather than groups, and by looking alike they emphasize the essential loneliness of each individual (Winnicott, 1963, p.190)

For the Gothic and Decadent spirit, it is the bitter resentment of the rejected outsider which takes centre stage; the lamented dead flowers and tombstones of the Romantics become the Decadent and Gothic raison d’être, an embrace of decaying, terrifying beauty (Dorian Gray), or a dreadful fascination with tombstones, death and the night (Dracula). Although it may appear that the supernatural powers which these anti-heroes possess provide compensation for feelings of resentment and suffering, on a deeper level they are experienced as punishments for a repressed Romantic longing, a mocking retribution for the hubristic rejection of the real of mortality and modernity: Dracula possesses superhuman powers, yet he is also condemned to depend on the blood of mortals for his survival - he is still very much tethered to a parasitic, illusive real that is divested of all creativity and love. Like Faust, Dorian Gray enjoys the promise of eternal gratification, but it is his enjoyment of the illusion which leads to his fall, rather than the illusion itself. 

Both Dracula and Dorian Gray are doomed outsiders and cannot exist within the prosaic confines of society, and once again, herein lies their appeal. Yet surely, beyond their apparent lack of conscience, it is ultimately an absence of the capacity for love which is their undoing. It is this missing link which perhaps leads both characters to foolishly transgress the illusive and become moths to the flame of the real. This transgression is a defensive maneuver formed of the universal need of the infant self to know what is going to happen in order to feel secure in relationship. Indeed, to enjoy the illusive aspects of the real (mystery, wonder, negative capability), we need these early foundations of security and predictability, though not everyone of course is fortunate enough to benefit from such solid emotional foundations, to have been gifted a mythical ‘trellis’ on which the ‘rose’ of mystery and ‘vine-leaf’ may climb. Knowledge and realisation of this lack may cause great resentment, envy, grief, anger, and sadness; yet the mourning of what one has lost is the beginning of a path towards the mysteries of real illusions.

Holmes, R. (1985). Footsteps. New York: Harper Perennial.

Winnicott, D. W. (1963). Communicating and not communicating leading to a study of certain opposites. In The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment. New York: International Universities Press, 1965, pp. 179–192.