On the Heights of Despair [2]

~Emil Cioran 

Only a few can endure such experiences to the end. There is always a serious danger in repressing something which requires objectification, in locking up explosive energy, because there comes a moment when one cannot restrain such overwhelming power. And then the fall is from too much plenitude. There are experiences and obsessions one cannot live with. 

Emil Cioran
Roemeens-Franse filosoof

Salvation lies in confessing them. The terrifying experience of death, when preserved in consciousness, becomes ruinous. If you talk about death, you save part of your self. But at the same time, something of your real self dies, because objectified meanings lose the actuality they have in consciousness. This is why lyricism represents a dispersion of subjectivity; it is a certain quantity of an individual's spiritual effervescence which cannot be contained and needs constant expression. 

To be lyrical means you cannot stay closed up inside yourself. The need to externalize is the more intense, the more the lyricism is interiorized, profound, and concen- trated. Why is the suffering or loving man lyrical? Because such states, although different in nature and orientation, spring up from the deepest and most intimate part of our being, from the substantial center of subjectivity, as from a radiation zone. One becomes lyrical when one's life beats to an essential rhythm and the experience is so intense that it synthesizes the entire meaning of one's personality. 

What is unique and specific in us is then realized in a form so expressive that the individual rises onto a universal plane. The deepest subjective experiences are also the most universal, because through them one reaches the original source of life. True interiorization leads to a universality inaccessible to those who remain on the periphery. 

The vulgar interpretation of universality calls it a phenomenon of quantitative expansion rather than a qualitatively rich containment. Such an interpretation sees lyricism as a peripheral and inferior phenomenon, the product of spiritual inconsistency, failing to notice that the lyrical resources of subjectivity show remarkable freshness and depth.