Paradise: On-Earthly Dilemmas

You're on earth. There's no cure for that.

—Samuel Beckett, Endgame

for Johanna Winant

I. On-earthly delights

The painting now known as The Garden of Earthly Delights (1490 - 1510) is a harbinger of the turn to earthly paradise. Its central panel depicts an equivocal pleasure garden where inventive forms of lust and violence crowd the picture plane. Eden on one side and Hell on the other complete the triptych. When the panels close, it is the third day of creation. Critics of Hieronymous Bosch's work have understood the painting's earthly navel as a dystopian portrait of divine judgement; rebellion against a ruthlessly ordered world that its inhabitants cannot experience as "good;" a relic of an old fashion for the outré; a phantasmagoric inverse of the workaday games and labors in Bruegel's genre paintings; a counterfactual paradise that can exist nowhere but in paint; and an accidental prophecy of a world in which all possibility of coordination, communication, and hopeful collective projects has been lost.1

From the perspective of the plague years of the twenty-first century, one might add that the triptych's central panel has become an image of a form of life whose primary condition is atomized experience: uncertainty about the world-as-is, uncertainty about the effects and meanings of human actions. The Garden teems with detail—swine, birds, ambivalent configurations of body and body, fountains like the reproductive organs of flowers, comic obscenities, torque of an eros suspended between pleasure and pain. Does it thrill?—is it funny?—does it hurt—?—do I like it because it makes me laugh and it hurts? It can be very wonderful to be unsure whether earth is the right place for love. Still, the eye cannot rest. Berries big as boulders and exoskeletal gondolas one could wear like a Comme des Garçons frock from the late 1990s, the play of scale is through the looking glass. Elongated, tense, intent on the immediately sensuous, ornate in their nakedness, the worldlings seem oblivious to the scenes of Heaven and Hell that flank them.

Do they think they are in paradise? Do they know they are on earth? So many of the painted revelers are caught in the act of reaching or grasping or resisting the reach or the grasp. If you asked them what they knew—they seem to know something—perhaps they would say this:

—there is so much world—but not for us.

II. On-earthly dilemmas

The first difficulty is a book I may never finish, a critique, from below, of three different aesthetic traditions of the other worlds in this one: Paradise, Arcadia, and the Golden Age.2 It was a poetics of paradise I was after, an account of its imperfect alignment with other deeply flawed dreams of a world ameliorated—and with the given world. It would have been a critique in the old and immanent sense: an attempt to understand the world from within world, to trace the conditions that give rise to particular visions of difference and to know their workings, their potentials and limits, their brutalities and their mercies, to become intimate with what they have to say about the world that imagined them in the first place: realism by way of irrealism. It was to be called On Earthly Delights.

I notice I am writing in the past tense. And I know why: I have begun to lose paradise, to lose my faculty for writing or thinking about it well. This is a matter of material conditions and some others merely desperately personal. Apart from these, the most intellectually interesting reasons for this loss are all about interpretive impasse.

Still, what does not resist my interpretation? But there are degrees and colors of difficulty. To insist otherwise would be to deny the plurality of the world's contents. So much of having a mental life seems to me to consist of the acknowledgement that the conditions of life lack transparency and, moreover, that it is difficult to think.

Paradise, as a theoretical object—and especially paradise for materialists—is a special case of on-earthly dilemma. If one lives in the real world even a little of the time, paradise can look like pure abstraction or a gaudy congeries of rotted desires.3 It bears out the old Nietzschean saw about how only that which has no history can be defined. How to theorize an implausible, imperfect, mythic, persistent, imaginative picture of the world-as-it-is-not?4 Paradise performs an interpretive difficulty that takes the form of the problem are things this way because they had to be? Sometimes, the point where knowledge breaks down is just where the pressure of reality is most intense, at the dim place where the necessary facts of life are hardest to tell from the contingent ones. That, I think, is how many of us end up in the florid laboratory of earthly paradise—at wit's end with the given world. 5

III. Another world and this one

Are things this way because they had to be? Is the world really like this? And could it have been—could it still be—otherwise?  What is it like, this world, when you can't tell the difference between the things that can be changed and the things that can't? 6 Or else, what is it like when the results of your discernment prove intolerable?

These questions about the fixed and the mutable may become most pressing in a form of life where the logic of the world is devastating to the degree it is perceived as logical and equally devastating to the degree it is perceived as chaotic. This crisis of knowledge is often the texture of on-the-ground experience here on earth: our social totality is organized by abstractions whose consequences inscribe themselves in the body, in our modes of being and being among others, in the "collective dream-houses" we have built (to borrow a phrase) and the ones we haven't. Call this mystification an effect of the way things are (you could also call it an effect of capitalism, among other things). If it is difficult to paint a coherent picture of paradise in all the smog, perhaps it is because a dreamworld in which your powers and your limits were self-evident is as obscure as the way we live now.

"Theodicy," the old name for the defense of a divinely ordered world against the problem of evil, has lost its nimbus. And many philosophical attempts to rationalize things-as-they-are smack of their own odd and unconvincing theologies. It is difficult to live in the world-as-is. And it is a tyranny to be asked to love it, though love is, mercifully, another question, even for the most simpleminded of fatalists. "There is another world and it is this one." That old materialist truism, uncertain of origin, is the most elegant description of a contingent fact I know.7

As to the question of an origin point, with you, paradise, there are always too many contingent facts. I could have started anywhere. The impulse was to start everywhere. I could not, after all, say "in the beginning..." with a straight face.

IV. Paradise, a poetic

After much slow and laborious thinking, involving many props, ventriloquisms, smoke and mirrors, I came to think of paradise as a poetic.8 Although this dreamworld had to be approached dialectically, "dialectics" seemed insufficient (and not a little pompous). "Poetic," then, from the Greek poiesis, for acts of making. It also left too much out. But it described the constructive qualities of a world-to-the-side and how it might offer a critique of the world from within. There was still the problem of how to think about the cruelty and violence of paradise. There was still the problem of its resistance to instrumentality, to a program for a viable form of life.  But the violently implausible had begun to seem to me like the punchline of any poetics.

So I imagined paradise as a poetic composed of two parts, one more or less material, one immaterial: The first was an imaginary (in the precise sense, as a repertoire of images). The second was a record of demands on the world with a peculiar grammar: they cannot be fulfilled by things-as-they-are because what they want is always more than the world-as-is can grant. 9

File under "imaginary" all the usual things: walled gardens and pictures of walled gardens, descriptions of sensuous pleasure, easy abundance, serpents, apples, the naked and unashamed, lambs cozied up to lions, trees that blossom and bear fruit all at once, parables of creation, language, unalienated labor, lost origins, first societies, prelapsarian sex, boundaries and dividing lines, language before language, failed tests, arts of losing, judgement and theodicy, myths of dominion, maps and territories, visions of forms of life that could have been or might be, first wonder, first knowledge, first disobedience, first violence, first desire, the entry of history or contingency or human agency into the world (the wind of Progress that bears Benjamin's agonized Angel of History away from the strata of catastrophe it longs to right is blowing—where else[?]—from paradise), and the telos of history, whether in the Kingdom of God, a world order of liberal nation-states, or fully automated luxury gay space communism.

A total folio of all the allegories of paradise would contain the sum of its imaginary and weigh what the earth does. File under "record of demands," this one in special: the drama of trying—and failing—to discriminate between necessity and contingency. There are others. But having played myself already, staring at the Garden of Earthly Delights 'til my eyes burn, I will try and stick to facts.   

V. Paradise, the facts of the matter

Perhaps there is no one who queries facts with such obstinate folly as the one who once believed they had—or could have—some kind of working equipment for distinguishing among the necessary facts of life (ungainsayable), the effectively necessary facts (ungainsayable now but perhaps not if the past had been other than it was), and the facts that are still contingent and mutable (sometimes by time or chance, sometimes by collective acts of will, sometimes even by individual ones). What happens when these orders of facts become confused, when your standards of judgement or your world view, if you have one, fail you?10 It may be at this moment of cognitive exhaustion—for which I would give our souls for a name—that you start to reach for alternatives to the world you know, the less plausible and the more robust and contradictory their traditions of representation the better, after a fashion.

There is no fact that does not come to us wreathed in thought or feeling or sensation. But the thoughts and feelings and sensations are of different orders, depending on the fact: gravity is, for purposes of ordinary perception, of the necessary facts (impossible to quarrel with, though its effects may be different on earth or the moon or the edge of a black hole), climate change or capitalism of the effectively necessary (indisputable conditions of contemporary existence, though they need not have been, had history taken other turns), and the easiest, significant example of the order of contingent facts might be our own emotions about how we understand the world "as is" and their effects ("The mind is its own place, and in itself / Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.").11 12 All three kinds of facts may be registered as forms of coercion from which you seek relief or else obscurity on which you need to get some purchase. In grasping for relief or purchase, you may seek out forms of alterity—paradise is one—that are already available in the given world.

By "already available," I mean that no one invents the idea of paradise whole-cloth.13 Unlike Utopia or the Republic, paradise can be traced to no single author; has no certain origin; did not begin as theology or theodicy, though its figures—particularly the walled garden—became entwined with these religious problems; has developed its own images, aesthetics, themes, devices, grammars, customs, desires, narratives, political implications, architectures, incoherencies, cruel optimisms, encrustations and witherings; ebbs and swells in history without a fraction of the predictability of the tide under the influence of the moon; a document of barbarism as well as civilization; dialectical in Marx's sense of that word—the ideal as "the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into the forms of thought . . . the rational kernel within the mystical shell."14 To look to paradise is to find an overwhelming store of received images and ideas, a welter of conflicting stories and quarrelsome family resemblances, some profoundly violent, a handful glowing with an equivocal promise of human flourishing, so that the Paradisian finds there, readymade, a parallel world with its own curious history, recombinant from the materials of this one.15

VI. Paradise for materialists

One story you could tell about the wind-up to the Enlightenment and its aftermath is of the defiance of the theological vision of, as one scholar writes, "the heavenly and earthly cities [as] contradictory extremes." The call was, rather, to use "God-given reason to create the 'heavenly' city here and now . . . an earthly paradise [where] material happiness was to be a basic component of its construction."16 With certain caveats about the lie of omission and the tangles of overdetermination, let the premise stand. It helps to account for how paradise's threats and promises of transformation come back to earth. Kant's critical philosophy, a bruised and ingenious run at reconciling Newtonian determinism with Christian free will, is just such an essay in reason's applications and limits. If only we could come by the facts we most need! (But we want things facts cannot give.) If only reason could orient this world and reorient us to it. There's redemption for you. Or do I mean tragedy, so often the end of instrumental reason? Tragedy is another name for progress.

The ruinous progress narratives of the Enlightenment deserve such withering critique in part because the material happiness they travesty is still desirable. This thwarted flourishing undergirds Walter Benjamin's understanding of redemption as a historical past "citable in all its moments" and Theodor Adorno's assertion that "the only philosophy which can be responsibly practised in the face of despair is the attempt to contemplate all things as they would present themselves from the standpoint of redemption."17 Benjamin, on the whole, is more optimistic about the extent to which broken, charred, and bloody things can be recuperated, "brushed against the grain," in part because we can't know the uses the future will have for them.18

For Adorno, damage is damage. He began his reflections on damaged life in the wrecked year of 1944, four years after Benjamin's suicide at Portbou, and finished them in 1949. Minima Moralia (1951) speaks of philosophy's charge to "displace and estrange the world, reveal it to be, with its rifts and crevices, as indigent and distorted as it will appear one day in the messianic light." But Adorno can only articulate this task in the conditional: the effort to regard all things as they would look from the vantage of redemption. That is, he concedes it's impossible, from within the world, to achieve the positivist's view from nowhere.

All knowledge, all images of a world redeemed have to be pressed from the only world we have. But they bear the print of those imperfect materials, the same "distortion and indigeneity [they] seek[] to escape." The defensible thinking is the kind that can acknowledge this bitter bind of necessity, yielding the impossible for the sake of the possible. Apart from this concession to unavoidable facts, Adorno writes in Minima Moralia's finale, the question of redemption's reality or unreality hardly matters. The gift this bleak vision gives is the preservation of the possibility of an immanent critique, without which this life would be truly unlivable. This is some of the delightful bitterness in Wallace Stevens's observation that the imperfect, so hot in us, is our paradise, "[l]ies in flawed words and stubborn sounds."19 If all images of paradise are invariably cracked and stained by the limits of our position in history, it is also true that they are eloquent as the apes of Kafka and Nabokov: Rotpeter, whose captivity results in the sour state of human intelligence (his torment consists, ever after, in having to prove his humanity) and the nameless creature in Lolita, imprisoned, paradisaically, in the Jardin des Plantes, who learns to draw by sketching the bars of its cage.

VII. De Aerd waer haer een Paradijs

Perhaps the meaning of the world does not lie in the world. But, regardless of whether there's any action off-stage, the significant question becomes, at certain tender points in time, how meaning can be of and for the world, an effect of social relations and their potential human arrangements. On the exterior of Spinoza's house in Rijnsburg, there is a plaque engraved with two couplets from the Remonstrant poet Dirck Rafaelsz Camphuysen's May Morning. It was installed, so far as I can determine, no earlier than 1667, the year of Spinoza's death, four years after he had packed up his lens-grinder's equipment and lit out for Voorburg, and eleven after his ostracism, by writ of cherem, from the Jewish community in Amsterdam:20

Ach ! waren alle Menschen wijs,
En wilden daer by wel;
De Aerd waer haer een Paradijs,
Nu isse meest een Hel.

Freely translated:
Alas! If every man were wise
and all of them meant well,
the earth would be a paradise
but now it's mostly hell.

Spinoza, to whom knowledge of God was the highest calling and for whom God was equivalent to the natural laws of the universe, had some affinity with the Remonstrants. They were followers of Jacobus Arminius who disagreed with the unconditional election of Calvinist predestination. The Remonstrant version of this doctrine preferred, instead, conditional election: the theological premise that God knows in advance, who, by the exercise of their own free will, will choose faith and who won't. Calvinism's unconditional election, meanwhile, says the winnowing of the saved from the damned has nothing to do with the personal qualities of any given soul.

Camphuysen's poem winks at this debate over which conditions of the given world are foreordained and which might be shifted by human agency. It's that turn to the subjunctive mood: "If every man were wise...," then the mostly hellish world-as-is could be paradise. This world, rather than the next, is the stanza's sphere of action, and the state of the world-as-is, hellish or paradisiacal, is contingent on human wisdom and benignancy—or the lack of them. This plaque is among the material traces of a late seventeenth-century world in which theological debates about fate, free will, and Providence would be transposed to an earthier key, recast as philosophical problems of freedom, necessity, and history, though the religious versions of these questions would remain living concerns.21

Spinoza's late thought resonates with the Camphuysen quatrain that would eventually grace the house where he had stayed in Rijnsburg. For the philosopher, acquiring the wisdom that would transform this world from mostly hell to paradise was a question of knowing better the imperfection of natural and necessary laws he referred to by the name of God: Deus sive Natura, God, that is to say, Nature, in his famous coinage.22 His version of God is not behind the scenes of the world because it is indistinguishable from the world. The more you come to know God (that is to say, Nature), the more deterministic you understand existence to be and the freer you become, because more of your facts are necessary facts and you are insulated by knowledge of them against the buffeting of transitory passions and circumstance. For Spinoza, the exercise of reason amounts to happiness. And the process of reasoning is as close to theodicy as he comes. If his is not quite a theodicy without theology, it is an attempt, at least, to begin from the premise that, properly practiced, as the objects of philosophy, theology and theodicy would have to take as their object the immanent rather than the transcendent. And the task of sifting the facts of natural law from a life full of ephemeral states and apparent contingencies is what changes this world from hell to paradise. 

In the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), Spinoza imagines the best version of the state as the one that ensures the freedom of its citizens, a political arrangement that requires the separation of religion and politics—and the division of theology from philosophy. (He did not appear to have been particularly sanguine that his own reduction of theology to philosophy would have universal appeal.) The Tractatus attends closely to the text of the story of the exile from paradise in Genesis. Spinoza contends that Adam's error was not primarily disobedience but bad reasoning: he mistakes divine (natural) law for the kind that issues from princes. The philosopher speculates that instead of making a direct prohibition against eating the fruit, God revealed to Adam the punishment for the act but not "the necessary entailment of that punishment," so that Adam perceived this revelation not as an eternal and necessary truth but as a law" whose consequences were about "the will and absolute power of some ruler" rather than "the intrinsic nature of the deed." What Adam fails to understand, as Spinoza sees it, is that the will of God, who governs "solely from the necessity of his own nature and perfection,"23 is essential fact and the will of any given ruler historical and local. Redemption, here on earth, would mean learning to tell the difference between freedom and necessity. Paradise would be knowing you could.

VIII. Centuries pass

Centuries pass.

 [ . . . ]

[ . . . ]

[ . . . ]

IX. What was it like?

Centuries pass. It is decidedly post-45, decidedly postlapsarian, and now we are at the Alhambra with the poet Donna Stonecipher. Redemption as the sorting of facts is still on the table, though the terms are not quite so grand as freedom and necessity. In Model City (2015), paradise would be an answer sufficient to "Q: what was it like?" Model City is a phenomenology of planned cities and gardens. The book takes place in the space between the question and the large "A:" on its penultimate page. Though the final word appears to belong to the brief, locative legend on the last page: "Berlin and elsewhere 2010 - 2014," as if that were as good an answer as any.

Stonecipher's geographies include Ebenezer Howard's Letchworth Garden City in England; the Socialist model city Eisenhüttenstadt (the former Stalinstadt in East Germany); Anniston, Alabama and Seaside, Florida in the United States; Portolago, an Italian rationalist model city on the Greek island of Leros; Le Corbusier's la ville radieuse; Tony Garnier's la cité industrielle; and utopian-dystopian Berlin. Among these sites, the Alhambra is something of an outlier, an elaborate palimpsest of a palace-fortress-cathedral-mosque-church, noted for its pleasure gardens, closely associated with the culture of Moorish Spain and concomitant fantasies of a Golden Age of tolerance. Stonecipher's other model cities fit neatly under the witty epigraph from Le Corbusier—"[w]e are waiting for a form of town planning that will give us freedom[]"—which recalls the long tradition of associating the topos of U-topia with the city.

But the Alhambra is more paradisian than utopian in its physical qualities: palatial rather than urban, the abode of the monarchs rather than the masses. And it's full of literal paradises, the walled, quadripartite gardens, called charbagh in Persian. This garden-form spread throughout the Islamic world and was taken up in Quranic descriptions of Jannah, the Garden of Eden, and also the afterworld of the righteous, whose highest level is called Firdaus or paradise.24 The Alhambra's metaphorical connotations are also distinct from utopian ones. Utopia's idealizations often put aesthetic form in service, outright, to political projects. In paradise, the relationship between aesthetics and politics can be slightly more mystifying. (Whether or not they know it, all paradises have an aesthetics and a politics, though these features of paradise are often incoherent.) I think of László Krasznahorkai's hypnotic sentences on the Alhambra, in which centuries go by in the space between the initial capital and the period and the fortress's murky origins become a metaphor—as the poet Ange Mlinko reads it—for the obscurity of art itself.25 What is the paradisiacal Alhambra doing among the model cities? 

In "Model City [18]," the speaker travels to the Alhambra and ends up spending most of her time in the on-site archive, experiencing the place through photographs and films about the Alhambra. She feels guilty about this but also it is very calming to live the place in mediation, "daydreaming over the black-and-white Persian gardens in a film, the Palace of the Nasrid in a brown ink drawing." What the speaker wants is for the calm of mediation to "delete [her] guilt" over avoiding first-hand experience of the actually-existing Alhambra outside the archive. Why can't she bear direct contact with the place? And what explains her guilt, her wish that she could "walk outside and find the entire Alhambra tinted sepia"?

The answer turns out to be that the "real" Alhambra, in living color, destroys any pretense of mediated calm "with its real greenery, so green, so real."26 A palimpsest of recreations and restorations, the Alhambra itself comes to no one unmediated, it's true. But it can be hard to know that in the sensuous overwhelm of its so-green, so-real gardens.27 Sorting facts in the archive, one has the illusion of the kind of detachment—the kind of control—in which it is possible to imagine you stand enough apart from the world to develop a reliable way of interpreting it. Ask: what is changeable, reparable? And: "what was it like?"

This archival longing expresses Adorno's conviction that the only way to philosophize responsibly in the face of despair (his personal synonym for the given world) would be to imagine how things would be, were they redeemable. In "Model City [18]," that conviction is twinned by the craving for a break—just for a little while—from Adorno's more stringent reminder: the deforming pressure of reality marks our pursuit for clarity about the ratio of contingency to necessity in our insufficient social arrangements. Even our best visions of the better are scarred by their origins in the world. Some kinds of art may smell of a world better than this one, but deny the bloom of putrefaction at your peril.

In Stonecipher's poem, the fantasy of paradise as a reliably legible world crashes up against the too-much-with-us of the Alhambra in real-time. Experiential surfeit confuses the ability to tell pleasure and promise from distortion. If only you could get a fix on that "so green, so real," "snatch a shard of glass with which to pierce the beautiful finite experience, pierce it to infinity[]"!28 The closest she can come to this shadow of the sublime, the flâneuse of Model City, is to cast these images in her chosen form, a simile. If one cannot say what something was or is, perhaps it's still possible to say what it's like.

Stonecipher's opening question sets a similitude to catch a verisimilitude: "what was it like?" Each poem begins anaphorically by way of response, always likening: "It was like..." "It was like..." "It was like..." The similes might unscroll forever without any end to the comparanda, as if to mark the difficulty of mapping one's coordinates in a world so gorgeously, relentlessly plural, where the catastrophes are piled so high, where it's hard to track the invisible circulations of capital or information (of which there is always too much, and never in the right places), where history has no arc and endings are arbitrary.

The lavish totality of facts refuses to be packed into a file in an archive, a poetic form, a walled garden, a city plan, or the finite form of the book. The "it" of "what was it like?" might as well be the whole of the world "as is," a whole form of life, as much of it as you can know. "It" is not paradise regained, no Archimedean point from which to lift the globe from one place to another for a better look. Still, "it" is not nothing. "What was it like?" There are things to be said to that, even in the absence of a certain means for getting a coherent picture of facts, of rounding off the answer definitively.

Hegel had a vision of the triumph of art as the fixture of fugitive things, so that the substantial is "cheated of its power over the contingent and the fleeting."

the lustre of metal,
the shimmer of a bunch of grapes by candlelight,
a vanishing glimpse of the moon or the sun,
a smile,
the expression of a swiftly passing emotion,
ludicrous movements, postures, facial expressions . . .
changing nature in its fleeting expressions,
a burn,
a waterfall,
the foaming waves of the ocean,
still-life with casual flashes of glass,
cutlery . . .
a woman threading a needle by candlelight,
a halt of robbers in a casual foray,
the most momentary aspect of a look
which quickly changes again,
the laughing and jeering of a peasant . . . 29

He preferred a world in which the substantial could get one over on the fleeting, old Hegel. Phenomena like luster, shimmer, facial expression, foaming waves, and laughter decay too quickly for perception or study to have their fill. In art, meanwhile, at least 'til inherent vice comes into flower and the paint fades or the book is drowned, these passing things, records of "it," may be given their due. Read less generously, this triumph also sounds a lot like an aesthetics in which the dead have more power than the living and the living are compelled to like the triumphant substantial, simply because it has triumphed, because at last something is pinned in place and art stands midway between matter and spirit and all's right with the world. To be easy in this belief, you would have to give up all knowledge that things might have been otherwise. You would have be very sure of what it meant to face the facts. It might be a kind of relief.

It's harder now, the idea that art stands apart enough from the substantial to triumph over it. And Model City, so very much of the recent past (recent for now), is a dispatch from a world in which the aesthetic has bled into nearly every aspect of life along with anxieties about its waning powers. The longing to pierce the beautiful finite experience to infinity may be an expression of the desire to give the substantial its victory over the ephemeral, to provide a definite chronicle of "what it was like." But there's a lot of noise. And the craving to know "what it was like" and "what it is like" are always a little beyond what this world is able to yield—one of those necessary luxuries of unrequited labor, unrequited love, criticism (or, The Unrequited).

In Model City, poetry and fallible substance mingle too freely for the expectation of complete satisfaction to be a serious one. Instead of the fixative triumph of art, a speculative archaeology has to suffice: poetry tries to tell "what it was like" by recovering what we wanted it to be like—even if those desires were also tarnished by wrong life, even if they involved thwarted contingencies or necessities we couldn't discern for the lives of us, though we did our best with the materials closest to hand, though we did our worst.

One way to speak of paradise, at its most exquisitely accurate, is as a curious essay in failure, the kind that only becomes legible in retrospect. "What was it like?" is a question about paradise because paradise can figure a last resort: an attempt to learn how the real world is arranged—and why—when all other attempts to find your way about have failed. So you go there with your guilty longing to know those things that refuse to be subsumed into means and ends, no matter how many times you've tried to kill the urge, despite understanding that you're going to leave hungry. Sometimes paradise is the place you end up when you have nowhere else to go, when there is all this air and darkness.

"What was it like?" cannot be asked or answered in the present tense (what is it like?) simply because the conditions of visibility are so bad. So the answers are always "for the time being." Or else the answers are for the strangers of some other Jetztzeit, brimful, where life is differently wrong. There, perhaps, they have learned to distinguish through the haze a set of facts that adds up to a past adequate to the present. There, perhaps, they have set the baleful stars in some new constellations and made them as ridiculous as they are. It is for the strangers that "what was it like?" could be answered, honestly: "it was like paradise." Surely, in the garden of earthly delights, they would be in on the joke. It was like that. Some greens are so green (so real). It was like that. There are things the given world does not give.

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Rebecca Ariel Porte (@___OED___) is a member of the Core Faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. For a long time, she was at work on a book about Paradise, Arcadia, and the Golden Age. 

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References