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Coda: The Sublime, Intermedially Speaking Years ago, I was hitching with a friend on a Buginese fishing boat from Sulawesi to the island of Lembata in eastern Indonesia. One late afternoon, when the sun was at its lowest, we had spotted a whale rising up from the waters within yards before us—so close and unexpected as to almost become unreal. Dolphins regularly accompanied our boat, and the sea stretched out with nothing in sight save some deserted islands scattered here and there. It was exactly one year before the great flood devastated eastern Flores, wiping away several islands in the Flores Sea. Now, however, the sea was flat, like a pond, in a dead stillness. Sleeping on deck, I awoke one morning perhaps half an hour before sunrise . The world was enveloped in a strange and sharp pink light that blurred the distinction between the unmoving waters and the sky. Except for the boat, nothing could be discerned, not even a little flying fish, not even a horizon. All was lost in that light, which made the sea and the sky appear as one continuum, a dome without beginning or end—immense and oppressive. It was a sight too excessive to be digested: limitlessness does not suit the glance of an eye. It needs ‘‘something’’ to anchor and form its view and it needs something to recognize. For one uncanny moment it seemed as if the world was lost and this pinkish nothingness had come in its place. So I closed my eyes, waiting for the sun to shape its familiar differences once more. There can be no doubt: even when it is only a semblance, the infinite is too much for us. Nothing, according to Charles Baudelaire, ‘‘cuts deeper . . . than the infinite,’’ even though it is a cutting that seems pleasurable and painful at the same time.1 The pleasure consists in a momentary loss of self, in losing one’s ‘‘gaze in the endlessness of the sky and the sea,’’ perhaps experiencing a sense of forgetfulness as one drowns oneself out in this empty space, or a sense of freedom in the wide and open expanse ahead. Yet on the other hand, this emptiness remains frustratingly excessive and inaccessible : ‘‘the depth of the sky confuses me. Its unending clarity exasperates me.   Coda: The Sublime, Intermedially Speaking The insensitivity of the sea, the immutability of the spectacle revolts me.’’2 If the infinite beckons, it also resists; the indefinite clarity of the sky and the sameness of the sea: the speaker cannot stand it, for all it does is bring home the impassable gap between that unchanging stillness and his ‘‘incurable existence .’’3 The infinite is longed for, but when it appears—though it can never appear in so many words—it cannot be endured. And so the speaker is trapped in a peculiar double bind: seeking to fuse with the vast expanse he is contemplating, this fusion can only be ‘‘there’’ when he is not ‘‘there’’—when his (sense of ) self is suspended, under erasure . If such moments prove ultimately untenable due to their extreme brevity, here the feel of the infinite proves untenable because it undermines itself from the inside out: it breaks precisely when it peaks. The spell of forgetfulness is broken by the very bliss it occasions: ‘‘the energy is so voluptuous that it creates a sense of discomfort, a positive suffering’’—the pleasure is too much, too intense.4 Instead of intensifying any sense of oblivious uni- fication, this pleasure intensifies the frustration of being cast out, of being ‘‘there’’ after all. It awakens, precisely, a painful consciousness of separation and of a powerlessness to sustain one’s own absent-minded extension in empty space. It is then, having caught but a glimpse of the infinite, that the speaker revolts and confesses: ‘‘The quest for the beautiful is a duel whereby the poet cries with horror before he is defeated.’’5 The experience of the infinite is a failed experience that collapses when a sense of intense pleasure is contradicted from within: just when this pleasure is at its highest it becomes a painful suffering. Pleasure here thus ‘‘occurs’’ in conjunction with pain, the former already bears the latter, just as the pain still includes the pleasure in being its intensification. As I have tried to show here, it is in this way—in a way that resists the deciding of pain into...

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