Sweetbitter, Bittersweet & Velazquez’s Las Meninas

'A dizzying retinal riddle of a painting, Las Meninas plays tug of war with our mind. […] Suddenly, we see Las Meninas for what it is – not just a snapshot of a moment in time, but a soulful meditation on the evanescence of the material world and the inevitable evaporation of self.’

In her superb essay ‘Eros the bittersweet’, Anne Carson discusses Sappho’s use of the word ‘sweetbitter’, and the curious (mis) translation of this term into ‘bittersweet’.  Supporting her discussion of eros as a ‘lack’ which results in the disintegration of the boundaries of the self, she references Velazquez’s mind-blowing painting, Las Meninas. It’s a painting I adore for many reasons. The figures inside it seem to dance holographically against a flurry of shadows, fleeting, half-present and lacustrine yet the textural richness of the scene makes it so real and full of substance. Figuratively speaking, it has the realness of earth or soil and yet somehow appears watery, but even this description fails to capture how it makes me feel when I look at it. Unsurprisingly, Las Meninas, is one of the most ‘written about’ pieces of art in the world and still it twists like a sea-snake away from anyone’s attempt to fix its meaning. Funnily enough, desire (at least as an intellectual subject) is also something that has been meditated upon since the classical times of Sappho – perhaps because it, like Las Meninas, is so mind-boggling.

Not only does Las Meninas demand the viewer consider the nature of reality itself but the artist peering out from behind the canvas within the frame of the painting places the viewer in the position of the King & the Queen who appear as marginal figures in a mirror at the back of the room. The viewer is and isn’t the King of Spain, is and isn’t present in the scene, is and isn’t the subject to which all attention is directed towards. Magically, the boundaries between art and reality, dissolve, as do the boundaries of the viewer’s own identity as they are drawn into the world of 17th century Spain. Though I could likely write an entire essay on the painting itself, what I am particularly fascinated by is how its dizzyingly paradoxical logic brings me to the murky ground of my own relationship to desire.

Desire itself is undeniably a dizzying riddle both as a feeling and as an intellectual subject. Like a tide of thin fire running through veins, it subsumes and dissolves the self and the desired object, whilst demanding the desiring subject partake in a drama of illusion. My first question for you, my dear reader: is desire a psychological sensation or a bodily sensation or both? I cannot decide but it certainly has a strong relationship to the imagination. From what I’ve experienced and seen, the wilder the desire, the wilder the imagination becomes in its capacity to create the desired object into being. Or is it the other way round? That people with wild imaginations experience desire more strongly? Both options pose a significant problem – if it’s the desirer projecting the desired one into being, then is the desirer just in love with a fabrication of their own mind? What does that then mean for the self? I think it means that desire says more about the desirer than it does about the love-object – that actually we desire the ‘other’ to escape from the ‘self’ and in doing so, we lose the self in the process of desiring whilst paradoxically showing a lot about who we are and how our brains work. It's compelling to see how this can be mapped onto the experience viewers have when looking as Las Meninas. Velazques renders the painting's viewer the art-object of the artist's gaze peering out from within the painting but then the reverse process occurs simultaneously; the viewer is in fact also the subject that gazes upon the art object. There's a gnarly double-experience in which art and human, object and subject, mutually dissolve one another whilst also creating one another. This, like desire, presents a paradox of destruction/creation, bitterness/sweetness, loss/gain.

There's this passage from my favourite writer, Jeanette Winterson, which reverberates in my head whenever I discuss this subject:

“What is desire? Desire is a restaurant. Desire is watching you eat. Desire is pouring wine for you. Desire is looking at the menu and wondering what it would be like to kiss you. Desire is the surprise of your skin. Look - in between us now are the props of ordinary life - glasses, knives, cloths, Time has been here before. History has had you - and me too. My hand has brushed against yours for centuries. The props change, but not this. Not this single naked wanting you.”

Notice her language of theatrics and remember what I said about desire as being a drama of illusion played out in the theatre of the mind and the body. Desire is a fantastical (and therefore unreal) drama that makes ordinary things beautiful and yet somehow it is so intrinsic, so real, so bodily. Winterson's beautiful description of desire as 'this single naked wanting you' is not ‘of the mind’ but something more prehistoric, felt in the body and maybe processed in the mind. In other words, its paradoxical nature is very ‘Las Meninas’…

I am a writer and therefore have a wild imagination that enjoys making things beautiful for the sake of making life ‘artful’ – it is a wonderful thing that makes me experience the world in absolute colour and with absolute force. But it also makes me prone to self-destruction, particularly in the context of desire, because it dissolves the boundaries between what is real and what is not. The result of this is often heartbreak – because who the person actually is or what the situation actually is turns out to be far less beautiful that what my mind *can* make it into. Certainly, there have been cases where I’ve imagined the person I’ve desired to be something they probably aren’t, probably because I love them. Of course they are beautiful because people are wonderful but when you desire someone, you can often find yourself thinking that everything they do is beautiful, and that beauty can become so thick and so opaque that it masks the un-beautiful, the hurtful and the cruel. When I’m then faced with the aforementioned ‘nastiness’, it is never in small gulps but in a waterboarded torrent, which means my reaction to a relationship falling apart is extreme. This is unfair on the loved one because the nastiness is normal - we all have faults - I have plenty. Yet it's true that I feel the loss of a relationship, not only as a loss of the person but of everything I created around that person. It’s like setting fire to a manuscript you’d spent so long writing and watching it crumble in front of you. It’s a writer’s worst nightmare. If creation is so strongly part of my identity, and I created the desired object to begin with, then losing the desired ‘other’ is also losing the self. This creates a feeling of devastation and hurt beyond measure because it feels like a betrayal of the ‘self’ and we all know betrayal is biblically awful to experience.

My therapist has, on numerous occasions, asked me to stop intellectualising my emotions and to confront them instead. Writing, in its capacity to make sense of emotion, seems like a happy medium between emotional processing and intellectualising. She asks me things like: why do you think you create people in this way and what are the consequences of that? Why is it that you place such emphasis on the ‘other’ – is it because you don’t understand yourself or because you don’t like yourself? Ya know, the fun questions that tend to hit like a high-speed train and physically bruise the chest. After the meltdown of one partciluar relationship, I wanted to study it and understand why I was so hurt by it because I was shocked by my own reaction to it falling apart. The reaction was nothing short of explosive - the experience of pain and anger was extreme - but I just couldn’t understand why. Now I think I do – because I had woven it into existence beyond what it was, played it out like a full-blown episodic of Hamlet and when the curtains came down, I was left on the stage alone in the silence with a script burnt to a pile of ashes. This is because desire so often does lead to a certain loss of self and that's often why we feel heartbreak so vividly - yes we desperately miss the person, but we also mourn what we lost of ourselves along the way.

I think the reason Sappho had described the experience of desire as sweetbitter, not bittersweet is because the experience of desiring someone so often follows the ordered logic of extreme pleasure (sweet) followed by extreme pain (bitter). In either case the conflation of two opposites in one word achieves what Velazquez achieves in ‘Las Meninas’ – namely that ‘bittersweet’ or ‘sweetbitter’ paradoxically holds together pain and pleasure in the same frame. Desire therefore demands us to step into a world of experience in which absolute beauty and absolute terror are felt simultaneously – which is perhaps why it is so impossible to write about, because it doesn’t actually make logical sense and therefore eludes language, which is the only way we can make sense of the world. It is true then – that when it comes to desire, we are both the King & no one, staring at ourselves for what we are but also staring at the ‘other’, in control and utterly powerless as we partake in the painting of its fantasy whilst standing somehow in the force of its reality.