A fragmented thought flashes up from a discarded issue of The Paris Review, dazzling in its clarity, and at once I am taken in:

                        The only way to understand the sea is to drop a grid on it.

Never mind the apparatus of a grid as one that cannot be used without being in ‘poor taste’ (as though that’s what’s at stake these days). The ease of legibility afforded by an editor’s typesetting choice has already settled that question. The phrase pops out from an otherwise emptied space, defiantly scrutable.

Pushing back, naturally, I reject the claim as a Cartesian desire for certitude. Merleau-Ponty called this a desire motivated by fear and paranoia, jealously seeking to arrest movement solely in the interest of avoiding error. It is what led him to characterize Cartesian philosophy as “cruel” for its being less about love of truth than about fear of error. This is not the same as Sartre’s critique of Cartesian philosophy that emphasized “the desire to possess the other’s freedom and the consequent reduction of human relationships to sadomasochism” (K. Whitmoyer, 2016). Rather, Merleau-Ponty’s objection seems to have registered a change in the grand gesture of unshakeable faith that once permitted the beloved’s betrayal but has come to be bound up with apodictic certitude, such that the logistics of this betrayal in time and place could be subjected to contingency plans.

There are kinds of error, and the one involved thus far doesn’t exclude the safeguarding of sovereign authority as incontestable. Error in this sense lessens my authority and threatens my privilege. The point about ironic reversal remains relevant in observing the difference between truth and belief. For there to be belief there must be room for disbelief. Without it, belief becomes falsified. But I think the battle against positivism on this point has been fought in the open for so long that understanding has adjusted itself to the risk. In any case, the embarrassment of being found in contradiction, of being charged with hypocrisy seems to have lost its “umph” – its get up and go. One is no longer cautious to avoid the error of “conflation” among streams of thought, for instance. Superposition, complementarity, paradox, dual consciousness, double consciousness – all of these are permitted without fear of incoherence, not only because their use has long been relegated to the sandbox of ideas, but because what’s at stake in the valuation of certitude, even in the midst of misrule, is the maintenance of charge. Mental and emotional energy must continually find investment. Of the errors then, the worse seems to be in the incoherence that comes with meaninglessness, the increasingly meaningless charge the very word undergoes, pointing up a loss of cathectization, perhaps owing to term limits. Here I’m reminded of a persuasive argument by Anat Matar of the Department of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University that concludes Maurice Blanchot ultimately descended into incoherence in his selective denunciation of state sanctioned violence.

To return to the example of Merleau-Ponty in Whitmoyer, a relationship of identity is drawn between Descartes’ fear-stained philosophy and Proustian love. In Proust’s novel, the narrator Marcel’s fascination with Albertine is demonstrated to be at bottom about narcissistic jealousy and an inability to love. Marcel fears that at the end of the day Albertine is little more than “the daughter of merchants,” as she who, while awake, is frightfully mundane. It is only while she sleeps that he can love her fully, because only then “Her personality did not escape at every moment, as when we were talking, by the channels of her unacknowledged thoughts and of her gaze” (In Search of Lost Time, as cited in Whitmoyer, 2016).

But I think more can be inferred from the importation of Cartesian doubt into the discussion. “That I am not mad” may be applied to Marcel’s fear of losing an alibi in Albertine, and not only this. Beyond the question of madness, it has to do with the reassurance that comes with there being one who is witness to my madness, my cruelty, and does not abandon me.

Merleau-Ponty’s analysis, delivered as lecture notes in the mid-1950s, concludes an alternative to Marcel’s false desire of possession is in the recognition of the “beloved’s impossesseability” (Whitmoyer, 2016). Again, more may be said here, and evidently must be said. One cannot return to his own past. There is no ‘re-do.’ This obsessive desire to see one’s glory while at the height of his power reflected in the ruins of the present is shabby at best. It is a shabbiness that the full light of an impossessable love makes visible.

Allowing for all this, there is another kind of error having to do with the nachtraglich of the thing. Such a view suggests to “drop a grid” fulfills another cause. It distances from the too familiar, from sentimental attachment to that which takes what line it likes, to what is not entirely subject to the author’s choice, only to slip in the same ending. Maybe the grid restores an uncertainty otherwise compromised by tendentiousness. It would correct against an automated, conditioned preference for a well-worn groove as much as it would erect a guardrail against the wildness of the ignorant one who doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. On the other side of failed authority, the use of the grid seems an appropriate response to this nachtraglich (“after the event”). It might ask why an event has happened in such a way and no other, thus bringing into view that at some point there could have been a different outcome.