Robert Greer Cohn

    In Edgar Allen Poe's Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, the fascinating climax is a whirling, dizzying descent of a ship into a maelstrom, like water going down a drain. At the nadir, luckily, a reversal occurs, and the protagonist rises through deliverance.
    Malraux's Clappique (in Man's Fate) analogously, in front of a spinning roulette wheel where he has "gone for broke," experiences a thrill from losing. Afterward, he goes to a bordello to renew the feeling in another way: "let's go commit suicide with this one (girl)." One senses the connection of "whirl-whorl-vortex-whore." On a cosmic scale: spiralling worlds (nebulae)-whorls.
    Plato's chora—womb—is the head-spinning site of a metaphysical whirl (French tourniquet; "tail chasing") like Aristotle's "infinite regress" of philosophical propositions. All probing thought frighteningly encounters this inner adventure, which can finally illuminate: notable examples include Pascal's gouffre; Kierkegaard's "The Absolute Paradox" (from Philosophical Trivia); Mallarmé's Igitur, "A la nue...", A Throw of the Dice; Wyndham Lewis's vorticism; the preface to Camus's The Rebel.
    Camus's text is helpful: he convulsively shakes off the constriction of "the absurd" on which he had staked so much earlier, through a new descent into the whirl of paradox chasing its tail, in a threateningly infinite regress, which passes through a series of meta-paradoxes—paradox squared, cubed, etc. At a certain point, like Poe's Pym, he providentially reverses the downward spiral and sees his youthful "absurd" as "smug" and arbitrary. In his book, where he belatedly repudiates Nietzsche, he is on his way, a prodigal son, to a rebirth of faith in the sacred, which he proclaims in a series of interviews. A very old story indeed, repeated throughout Western culture. Some, like Bohr and Derrida and modern academia, got hopelessly hung up on the absurd—Einstein was better graced: he believed (including the "luminous Nazarene") in his lifetime obsession and constant, light. That is the key image in Camus's final masterpiece, The Fall.
    Now, the universal phenomenon of dimensionality, including the eternal cross, is implicit in the whirl of polarities involved in paradox-plumbing. Each kaleidoscopically succeeding paradox-pair—positive-negative, light-dark, joy-sorrow—organically traverses, like a new branch of a tree, a preceding one. Each is eventually involved in a total looping-back to the origin: as in Kierkegaard's "repetition" and "Instant"; Proust's total recall in privileged moments of involuntary memory; or the spinning succession of remembered rooms in pre-sleep; Bergson's equivalent in the panicky "moment of truth" while drowning.
    So we have, in flashes, all those familiar "pivotings" of experience, beginning with the sacred Grace descending, like T. S. Eliot's "hidden waterfall" ("at the source of the longest river," Little Gidding), and turning into the "longest river" of Eden-bound life. Grace becomes graciousness; terrible, too-beautiful sacred awe turns into mercy. So a birthing mother naturally, miraculously, turns from self, smiling, to the newborn. Good men, sons, follow suit: Abraham was a prime example on his psychic cross pivoting from saintly ordeal to on-going life and "seed." Sexual love is transverse, in that way, to total Eros, as the rivery flow of time is to space, electric current to magnetism (Maxwell).
    Such too is the turn of tears into flowing laughter, as at an Irish wake. "God has a sense of humor," a kindly Catholic priest told me: how right he was! "I know I love someone when they make me laugh" (Auden). Children, dogs win our hearts that way. One may easily prefer a Rabelais or an Erasmus to a murderously merciless synagogue-burning Luther. Priggish and Jew-hating T. S. Eliot melted before Groucho Marx. Alas, the hung-up or stuck-up humorless will, like the poor, always be with us: there is no word for "compromise" in Arabic. Mercy, humor, courtly love, Katherine Hepburns, feminine life-flow, and gentle mama's-boy men, are not much in evidence in that region.
    Ironically, keeping our own nimbleness, we could use a little stiffening, pivoting in the opposite direction.