LOVE AS METAPHORICS, METAPHOR AS AMOROUSNESS

In the first of the two climactic comparisons in “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” a love is being beaten:

	Our two souls therefore, which are one,
	Though I must go, endure not yet
	A breach, but an expansion,
	Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If the image of a beating isn't mourning, it's at least a suppressed cry of anguish, masochism muffled by the insensate condition of the gold. One could fancy that “breach” is kept from blasting the love by the “reach” and “each” it encloses like circuit breakers. Of course, the jouissance of a pounding, as well as the experience of a vanishing luster, is softened by the departure's association with the metal sacred to alchemy. (Of help, too, are the stabilizing hums in “expansion” and “thinness” and the bridging

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continuity over the invisible “breach” line between metrical units of both “airy” and “thinness,” two in a row, running.) Where does gold, so perfect, so ductile, go when it goes away from itself ? You can guess. You must make yourself as the golden stone, says the fifteenth-century Book of the Holy Triplicity, if you want to enter the pure heaven. In fact, or so notes the physicist David Deutsch in The Fabric of Reality, gold you can stick your hand through is no longer gold. When the atoms “are sufficiently far apart it becomes misleading to think of them as forming a continuous sheet.”^[11] The chemical “proof” of Donne's figure—the novelty of using science to validate metaphysics—is actually carried into realms of fantasy. The figure is gorgeously extravagant. Amorous. An act of faith.

Love spends metaphor like a spider's rappelling filament from its own same-as-other bowels. Again, “the literary experience,” as Kristeva puts it, “stands revealed as an essentially amorous experience, unstabilizing the same through its identification with the other.”^[12] Donne's speaker at once expands and thins himself as “subject” by projecting his experience in terms of, onto the image of, and effectively into the “substance” of another element, until the physical malleability of the gold upstages the infinite expansiveness of the soul of love. The figure creates a tertium quid that's constrained by neither of its two constituents but is, instead, a glowing, indefinite back-and-forth movement between them, a vibration. Its miracle is that it exists, dazzlingly, nowhere but in the movement of transference. This is what makes it amatory. Love and metaphor alike are motions. From same into same-and-other, along a golden and diffuse path called idealization. “Metaphor as damaging the Single meaning, as symptom of its toppling over into infinity, is…thevery discourse of love.”^[13] The stakes of metaphor, like those of love, lie in surpassing finitude without leaving a single atom of one's condition in this world, just as the beaten gold becomes invisible without ceasing to be a material thing.

Nothing so assures us that the speaker is in love as the inspired one-yet-two of the meaning of his simile, its final undecidability (as concrete image, as metaphysics). Simile and metaphor are ecstasies of destabilization. Being like is neither being nor nonbeing; it's being in play, stereoscopic ontology.