In the manner of the medieval Christian mystical texts that form its central archive, Niklaus Largier’s remarkable book, Figures of Possibility: Aesthetic Experience, Mysticism, and the Play of the Senses (2022), is not content simply to advance an argument, but rather performs and invites his reader into a particular (and particularly generative) mode of reading that reorients the very relation between the religious and the aesthetic by way of careful attention to the “mystical.” Against a hermeneutic orientation to the sensus mysticus that would stabilize the play of forms by way of an allegorical or hidden meaning, Largier locates the mystical in the practices by which literary and aesthetic forms arouse and transform sensation, affect, and thought. In doing so, he produces an account of contemplation—a state of deep absorption in the concrete, embodied figures of sensation and affect—that feels both novel and ancient. Contemplation is not a technique by which a subject transcends the mundane realm of experience into pure intellection, but a practice of being drawn deeper into what is before one’s eyes and under one’s nose.
In calling attention to Largier shows his affinity with theories that locate affective experience “prior to” or “before” (or even “beneath”) cognitive thought (E.g. Largier foregrounds our sensory inhabitation of the figure as coming “before” we move to the territory of discourse and concept, “before we fall for the temptations” of speculation, to the possibilities contained within the figure “before it ‘is’ or ‘means’ anything”) (Largier, 44-45). Perception, memory, and thought occur “long before” understanding (Largier, 31). Figures turn into things “only when we remove ourselves” from their effects, textures, places, relations.
But one of the many delights and surprises of Largier’s book is the way in which he simultaneously interrupts the temporality of cognition, common to both medieval and modern epistemologies. Resisting the temptation to which theories of affect have sometimes fallen, to romanticize the prelapsarian state of affective and sensory innocence before the fall into conceptualization, Largier attends to contemplative practices that open the discursive mind to be interrupted by figuration, drawn through the hermeneutic posture and taken up into the figures. The book opens with one such scene of absorption. To readers of medieval contemplative literature, this too, traces a familiar itinerary in which illumination of the intellect gives way to a more immediate taste and touch of divine presence. In Largier’s contemporary scene, a spectator at a modern dance rehearsal is progressively absorbed in the movement of figures in a kind of dream space and time. A kind of ecstasy, to be sure, but here the spectator does not stand outside the body but is seduced into a deeper inhabitation of it in “a play that takes shape both outside and in our souls, fully material and fully spiritual” (Largier, 25). This modern incarnation foreshadows and echoes the thirteenth-century mystic Hadewijch of Antwerp’s vision at matins, which Largier treats later in the book. Hadewijch is sitting at the singing of matins when she is suddenly drawn out of her fearful mind and deeper into the outward form and taste of the Eucharist that is at the same time the shuddering bodily embrace of Christ. In these moments, the “after” of conceptual reification becomes the first moment in a deepening absorption in affect, sensation, and thought, in a way that resists a simplistic dichotomy of intellect and affect. (And not incidentally, Largier’s tracing of the movement of the mystical in Hadewijch’s vision gives no harbor to the hoary dichotomy of “speculative” and “affective” traditions of mysticism.)
I would like to take Largier’s invitation into a practice of reading as playing across the surfaces of a text, to follow Eric Auerbach’s figural networks that structure an antihermeneutic mode of reading. Near the opening of the book, Largier lingers on “a moment of contemplative attention” at a frozen pond in Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1972 film Solaris (Largier, 26). The images of the ice and bare branches, in their very concreteness, “give shape to our attention, free it from its involvement with itself, and turn it into the encounter that emanates from the things that are seen” (Largier, 27). In Largier’s viewing, these images are “meaningless,” but they are not mute: they call forth other images, even the Pauline image of seeing “in a mirror darkly” (1 Corinthians 13:12). The movement of thought is not frozen in the experience of the senses. Surface calls unto surface—figures play in relation to one another without the ligature of meaning.
As I read this passage, Largier’s invocation of Tarkovsky’s frozen pond immediately called forth another frozen pond, this one in the wilderness of Concord, Massachusetts and in the pages of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. As Thoreau was aware, Walden Pond, no less than the ancient Christian desert, or the medieval monastic cell, provided the spatial possibility of a practice of “defamiliarization and critique in gestures of detachment” (Largier, 64). As has often been noted, Thoreau’s retreat from the world was neither drastic nor total—he needed only to position himself just outside of town, just a step beyond his quotidian life, to renew his senses for seeing and feeling. Thoreau may have gone to Walden to jumpstart a stalled writing career, and with the wild ambition to write a new scripture, but the work that resulted surely would not have endured had it been simply a compendium of Transcendentalist aphorisms. What remains vital is the progressive absorption in the concrete forms of sensation that the book chronicles over the course of an (artificially compressed) annual cycle of seasons. The advance and retreat of winter at Walden Pond signals a rebirth that is as physical as it is spiritual. The frozen pond stands at the center of this rebirth, not as a metaphor for the profundity of his thought but as the figural axis that pivots from depth to surface.
In November the very top layer of the pond begins to freeze in the coves, and Thoreau puts aside the winter preparation of his cabin to gaze through the new ice: “The first ice is especially interesting and perfect, being hard, dark, and transparent, and affords the best opportunity that ever offers for examining the bottom where it is shallow” (Thoreau, 231). The beauty of the ice lies its transparency to what stands beneath it. At first, he sees his own face looking back at him, reflected in the convex lenses of small air bubbles trapped just beneath the ice, “thirty or forty of them to a square inch” (Thoreau, 232). The crystalline clarity of the new ice proves fleeting, however. When a warm spell turns the frozen surface cloudy gray, “the beauty of the ice was gone, and it was too late to study the bottom” (Thoreau, 233). In the months that follow, the ice develops in irregular strata, laying down the story of its uneven formation, and Thoreau carries on with his plan to chart the depths of the pond. He cuts holes through which to drop plumb lines, then observes the action of rainfall and subsequent freezing on those holes. As water freezes in rivulets around the holes, they become “beautifully mottled internally by dark figures” resembling spiderwebs, or rosettes (Thoreau, 275). Unlike the virgin ice of November, these dark figures provide neither transparency to what lies beneath nor an optical reflection of his own image. Yet these surfaces do, in their way, transform his self-perception: the pond reveals his own dark figures, “a double shadow of myself, one standing on the head of the other,” formed, presumably, by the play of light off the melting ice (Thoreau, 275).
Crucially, Largier claims that practices of contemplation “evoke and shape possibilities of sensation, affect, and knowledge…in a way that does not anchor itself in the stability of a subject that stands on its own” (Largier, 65). Rather, the practitioner “exceeds herself” through absorption in “the asymmetrical force of the figure.” Likewise, Thoreau becomes so absorbed in the opaque beauty of the ice that his own image retreats behind him as a shadow.
Of course, I am making recourse to allegory here, in a way that may risk rejecting Largier’s invitation to attend to the concreteness of aesthetic experience. But the contemplative practices Largier traces do not abandon cognition so much as they open new possibilities both within andbeyond it. For Thoreau, spiritual insight was not gained by passing through the world of forms, but by living more attentively in their midst.
As he documented in his own journals, Thoreau grew increasingly absorbed in what Largier calls the “concrete world of figures,” and in the later years of his life famously turned his attention to the experimental science of the natural world and away, somewhat, from philosophical abstraction (Largier, 247). Largier’s refiguration of contemplation allows us to see Thoreau’s movement away from metaphysical speculation as a movement deeper into the mystical. Thoreau himself may have gone to Walden to prospect for Transcendentalist symbols out of which to forge his scripture, and while Walden is a testament to his success in that project, it is also a chronicle of his seduction by the very surfaces he initially sought to penetrate.
Thoreau spends much of his winter undertaking a careful survey of Walden Pond, charting its depth by way of intersecting lines drawn through its diameters. The image calls forth another, constituting contemplation in its most ancient sense, in which Roman augurs charted the with a diagram of crossed lines in preparation to read the celestial signs. For the surveyor, contemplation lies not in deciphering the meaning of those signs but in painstakingly tracing the literal ground before her eyes and beneath her feet.
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