Excerpts from Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson
To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
"And hate begins where love leaves off..."
In the absence of eyes, all Aphrodite is vacant, gone.
I hate and I love. Why? you might ask. I don't know. But I feel it happening and I hurt.
The moment when the soul parts on itself in desire is conceived as a dilemma of body and senses.
... sweet fire.... burned by honey.
Desire is not simple. Desire melts the limbs. Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded.
The shape of love and hate is perceptible, then, in a variety of sensational crises. Each crises calls for a decision and action, but decision is impossible and action a paradox when eros stirs the senses. Everyday life can become difficult; the poets speaks of the consequences for behavior and judgement:
I don't know what I should do: two states of mind in me...
The Eros of Euripides wields a bow that is "double" in its effect, for it can bring on a lovely life or a complete collapse.
... a negative image from which positive pictures can be created.
The lover wants what he does not have. It is by definition impossible for him to have what he wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting.
Desire can only be for what is lacking, not at hand, not present, not in one's possession nor in one's being.
All our desires are contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the person I love to love me. If he is, however, totally devoted to me he does not exist any longer and I cease to love him. And as long as he is not totally devoted to me he does not love me enough. Hunger and repletion.
Sarte sees in erotic relations a system of infinite reflections, a deceiving mirror-game that carries within itself its own frustration. For Simone de Beauvoir the game is torture. "The knight departing for new adventures offends his lady yet she has nothing but contempt for him if he remains at her feet. This torture of impossible love."
All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.
Who ever desires what is not gone? No one.
It is not a poem about the three of them as individuals, but about the geometrical figure formed by their perception of one another, and the gaps in that perception. It is an image of the distances between them.
Jealousy... is a hot and corrosive spiritual motion arising in fear and fed on resentment.
This is an emotion concerned with placement and displacement. The jealous lover covets a particular place in the beloved's affection and is full of anxiety that another will take it.
Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves, for it is the instability of the emotional situation that preys upon a jealous lover's mind.
It would be an unnatural heart or supernatural heart that failed to be moved by desire for such an object.
.... it takes place entirely within her own mind.
Where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components - lover, beloved, and that which comes between them... the third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros.
... a mutual sensitivity to the boundary between them.
Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between I love you and I love you too, the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.
The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of himself, of other people, of things in general.
Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.
When I desire you, a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness. His thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: he must recover and reincorporate what is gone if he is to be a complete person.
All desire is for a part of oneself gone missing.
Desire for an object that he never knew he lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, as desire for a necessary part of himself.
He takes up the question whether the desire to love or befriend something is ever separable from lack of it.
It is profoundly unjust of Sokrates to slip from one meaning of oikeios to another, as if it were the same thing to recognize in someone else a kindred soul and to claim that soul as your own possession, as if it were perfectly acceptable in love to blur the distinction between yourself and the one you love.
When he inhales Eros, there appears within him a sudden vision of a different self, perhaps a better self, compounded of his own being and that of his beloved. Touched to life by erotic accident, this enlargement of self is a complex and unnerving occurence.
There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love. They seem truer than other perceptions, and more truly your own, won from reality at a personal cost.
All at once, a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus... then edge asserts itself... you are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend.... I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody - with whom? With Bernard? Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?
The lover helplessly admits that it feels both good and bad to be mixed up, but is then driven back upon the question, "once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?" Desire changes the lover... the change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before.
The love which has its course barred, and fails to reach its fulfilment acquires a particularly strong hold over the human heart. The sparks of a vital desire burst into flame at the very moment when the desire is blocked in its path. It is the obstruction which makes the wholly personal feelings conscious... the frustrated lover seeks the cause in his own personality.
... the importance of bittersweet love in our lives...
Reading and writing change people and change societies. It is not always easy to see how nor to trace out the subtle map of cause and effect that links such changes to their context.
... a sensibility acutely tuned to the vulnerability of the physical body and of the emotions or spirit within it.
Oral cultures and literate cultures do not think, perceive or fall in love in the same way.
An individual who lives in an oral culture uses his senses differently than one who lives in a literate culture, and with that different sensual deployment comes a different way of conceiving his own relations with his environment, a different conception of his body and a different conception of his self.
Reading and writing require focusing the mental attention upon a text by means of the visual sense... he resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him... in making the effort he becomes aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action.
Literate training encourages a heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one's self.
When an individual appreciates that he alone is responsible for the content and coherence of his person, an influx like eros becomes a concrete personal threat.
Written words, on the other hand, do not present such an all-persuasive sensual phenomenon. Literacy desensorializes words and reader. A reader must disconnect himself from the influx of sense impressions transmitted by nose, ear, tongue, and skin if he is to concentrate upon his reading. A written text... separates the reader (or writer) from his environment... written words project their user into isolation.
To know desire, to know words, is for Archilochos a matter of perceiving the edge between one entity and another.
Breaks interrupt time and change its data... Breaks make a person think.
Think of the beauty of letters, and of how it feels to come to know them.
I am writing this book because that act astounds me. It is an act in which the mind reaches out from what is present and actual to something else. The fact that eros operates by means of an analogous act of imagination will soon be seen to be the most astounding thing about eros.
My astonishing victory over Menti did not give me a pleasure one-hundredth part as intense as the pain she gave me when she left me for M. de Rospiec.
Properly a noun, eros acts everywhere like a verb. Its action is to reach, and the the reach of desire involves every lover in an activity of the imagination.
The suffering of love does not arise out of any action... but only from the cogitation of the mind upon what it sees does that suffering issue.
What I have called crystallization is a mental process which draws from everything that happens new proofs of the perfection of the loved one.
... concocting in this way a love object out of thin air.
Anna Karenina's passion for Vronsky depends on a mental act.
All others are either known or knowable and cannot arouse her. Here we arrive at the nub of the matter, not for the first time. That which is known, attained, possessed, cannot be an object of desire.
Presumably, a positive picture could be made if the lover were ever to reincorporate his lack into a new and better self. Or could it? Is that positive picture what the lover wants from love?
O human beings, what is it you want of one another? Well, is this what you crave, to be joined in the closest possible union with one another, so as not to leave one another by night or day?... Consider whether this is what you desire, whether it would satisfy you to obtain this.
Was is the case that the round beings of his fantasy remained perfectly content rolling about the world in prelapsarian oneness? No. They got big ideas and started rolling toward Olympus to make an attempt on the gods. They began reaching for something else. So much for oneness.
... the tactics of incompleteness by which Sappho sustains desire and desirability...
I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive.
Both mind and wooer reach out from what is known and actual to something different, possible better, desired. Something else. Think about what that feels like.
Each one of us is but the symbolon of a human being - sliced in half like a flatfish, two instead of one, and each pursues a neverending search for the symbolon of himself.
Chariton refers to his work as "erotic sufferings": these are love stories in which it is generically required that love be painful.
In Sappho's poem the shift of view is momentary, a vertigo and sudden sense of being very close to the core where feelings form.
It permits the reader to stand in triangular relations to the characters in the story and reach into the text after the objects of their desire, sharing their longing but also detached from it, seeing their view of reality but also its mistakenness. It is almost like being in love.
Longing seized him to create a rival image in writing and he set to work on the novel.
All lovers believe they are inventing love.
There is a triangular circuit running from the writer to the reader to the characters in the story; when its circuit-points connect, the difficult pleasure of paradox can be felt like an electrification.
Written letters have the presence and authority of a third person, who is witness, judge, and conduit of erotic charges. Letters are the mechanism of erotic paradox, and once connective and separative.
Letters in this romance, as in Heliodoros' novel, bespeak their own power, a power to change reality erotically.
The words we read and the words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them... Eros is inbetween. Both the experience of desire and the experience of reading have something to each us about edges.
We speculated about writers' purposes (to seduce readers?) and we are finally led to suspect that what the reader wants from reading and what the lover wants from love are experiences of a very similar design. It is a necessarily triangular design, and it embodies a reach for the unknown.
As you perceive the edge of yourself at the moment of desire, as you perceive the edges of words from moment to moment in reading (or writing), you are stirred to reach beyond perceptible edges -- toward something else, something not yet grasped.
The edges of the space are the edges of the things you love, whose inconcinnities make your mind move.
A desire to bring the absent into presence, or to collapse far and near, is also a desire to foreclose then upon now.
... you can't put the melting mass down,
you can't keep holding it.
Desire is like that.
Pulling the lover to act and not to act,
again and again, pulling.
Here desire is a disease and an evil from the first line. Within the comparison desire turns out to be pleasurable, but its pleasure is that of holding ice in your hands.
Ice is cold and the longer you hold it, the colder your hands get. But this care reminds us of another. The longer you hold it, the more it melts. So would it not be more reasonable to put the ice down, sparing hands and ice?
Lovers are always waiting. They hate to wait, they love to wait.
Yet, simultaneously, the lover perceives more sharply than anyone else the difference between the now of his desire and all other moments called then that line up before and after it.
The lover's real desire, as we see in that handful of ice, is to elude the certainties of physics and float in the ambiguities of a space-time where absence is present and now can include then without ceasing to be now.
An act of reading and writing, on the other hand, is an experience of temporal arrest and manipulation... it gives the reader or writer a taste of what it would be like to control time.
What is written in letters stays immovable and remains the same.
People who learn the art of letters come to believe in their own ability to render things clear and fixed for all time. It can be a dangerous belief. For it would be a remarkable power.
What difference would such a power make to someone in love? What would the lover ask of time if he were in control? These are questions relevant to our investigation of eros since, in general, we are trying to see what the passion of love has to teach us about reality. And love is an issue of control. What does it mean to control another human being? To control oneself? To lose control?
... he enumerates the ways in which a nonlover is preferable to a lover as erotic partner.
No one in loves really believes love will end. Lovers float in that "pure portion of anxiety," the present indicative of desire. They are astonished when they fall in love, they are equally astonished when they fall out of love.
Love based on the physical passion of the moment cannot but falter when that thrill is gone. The nonlove of the nonlover, in contrast, having no special commitment to pleasure in the present, can take a consistently atemporal attitude to this love object and to the love affair. Now and then are moments of equal value to the nonlover.
"When I spend time with you I shall not primarily be cultivating the pleasure of the moment but, really, the profit coming in the future, since I am not overthrown by desire but in full control of myself... These things are indiciations of a friendship that will last for a long time.
There is no time when desire is pain for the nonlover.
... he simply declines to enter the moment that is now for the man in love, the present moment of desire. Instead, he stations himself safely at an imaginary then and looks back upon desire from a vantage point of emotional disengagement.
The nonlover is unlikely ever to find himself staring down in desperation at a lump of melting ice. When this man picks up ice it is in full expectation that he will soon have a handful of cold water. He likes cold water fine. And he has no special affection for ice.
Such a lover... will stunt the growth of his beloved in every direction that leads the boy away from direct dependence.
One is the damage done by lovers in the name of desire. The other is the damage done by writing and reading in the name of communication.
It is not hard to see that a similar controlling attitude is available to the reader or writer, who sees in written texts the means to fix words permanently outside the stream of time.
He would be an extremely simple person who thought written words do anything more than remind someone who knows about the matter of which they are written.
Technicians of reading and writing see in letters a means to fix thoughts and wisdom once and for all in usable and reusable form.
Sokrates conceives of wisdom as something alive a living breathing word, that happens between two people when they talk. Change is essential to it, not because wisdom changes but because people do, and must.
Writing has this strange power, quite like painting in fact; for the creatures in paintings stand there like living beings, yet if you ask them anything they maintain a solemn silence. It is the same with written words... they keep giving the one same message eternally.
Logos in its spoken form is a living, changing, unique process of thought. It happens once and is irrecoverable. The logos written down by a writer who knows his craft will approximate this living organism in the necessary ordering and interrelation of its parts.
What does the desirer want from desire? Candidly, he wants to keep on desiring.
Now is the moment that presents a problem, so imagine yourself at then and avoid the problem.
Serious thoughts need different cultivation and time to grow; planted as seeds of living speech in the ground of an appropriate soul, they will take root, ripen, and bear fruit as knowledge in due season.
... serious thoughts and knowledge have their real life in philosophical conversation, not in the games of reading and writing.
... emotional calculus....
Lysias' text offers to its readers something that no one who has been in love could fail to covet: self-control. How do apparently external events enter and take control of one's psyche?
... eros is an experience that assualts the lover from without and proceeds to take control of his body, his mind and the quality of his life... eros comes out of nowhere to replace normal conditions of health and sanity with disease and madness.
Very few see him coming. He lights on you from where outside yourself and, as soon as he does, you are taken over, changed radically. You cannot resists the change or control it or come to terms with it. It is in general a change for the worse, at best a mixed blessing.
For indeed lovers themselves admit that they are sick not sane, and know they are not in their right minds, but they are not able to control themselves... harmfulness ensues.
As soon as eros enters his life, the lover is lost, for he goes mad. But where is the point of entry? When does desire begin? That is a very difficult moment to find, until it is too late. When you are falling in love it is always already too late... To be able to isolate the moment when love begins, and so block its entry or avoid it entirely, would put you in control of eros.
Nonlovers are people who remain 'masters of themselves'. Sokrates denies that such control is ever possible, or even desirable, for human beings. He speaks of it as an economy of death.
... the intimacy of the nonlover is mixed with a mortal self-control which disburses itself in mortal miserly measurings and engenders in the beloved soul that spirit of begrudgement commonly praised as virtue.
It is a deadly stinginess by which the nonlover eludes desire. He measures his emotions out like a miser counting gold. There is no risk entailed in his transaction with eros because he does not invest in the single moment that is open to risk, the moment when desire beings, now. Now is the moment when change erupts. The nonlover declines a change... He is secure in his narrative choices of life and love. He already knows how the novel will end, and he has firmly crossed out the beginning.
In reality the beginning is the one moment that you, as an unwitting target of winged Eros, cannot control. All that this moment brings, both good and evil, bitter and sweet, comes gratuitously and unpredictably -- a gift of the gods, as the poets say. From that moment on, the story is largely up to you, but the beginning is not.
We should note that the Greek verb 'to read' is anagignoskein, a compound of the verb 'to know' and the prefix ana, meaning 'again.' If you are reading, you are not at the beginning.
As sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be. What is this mode of perception, so different from ordinary perception that it is well described as madness?
To address yourself to the moment when Eros glances into your life and to grasp what is happening in your soul at that moment is to begin to understand how to live. Eros' mode of takeover is an education: it can teach you the real nature of what is inside you. Once you glimpse that, you can begin to become it. Sokrates says it is a glimpse of a god.
In Sokrates' view, to cross out 'now' is, in the first place, impossible, a writer's impertinence. Even if it were possible, it would mean losing a moment of unique and indispensable value.
The facts are that eros changes you so drastically you seem to become a different person.
It assumes, as was standard in the popular moral thinking of the day, self-control as the rule of an enlightened life. Sokrates... vindicates mania.
Change of self is loss of self.
But the fact is, the greatest of good things come to us through madness when it is conferred as a gift of the gods.
Sokrates' central argument... is that you keep your mind to yourself at the cost of closing out the gods. Truly good and indeed divine things are alive and active outside you and should be let in to work their changes. Such incursion formally instruct and enrich our lives in society; no prophet or healer or poet could practice his art if he did not lose his mind. Madness is the instrument of such intelligence. More to the point, erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul.
Where thtey see loss and damage, Sokrates insists on profit and growth. Where they see ice melting, he says wings grow. Where they brace themselves against takeover, he unfolds himself for flight.
When you fall in love you feel all sorts of sensations inside you, painful and pleasant at once: it is your wings sprouting. It is the beginning of what you mean to be.
... several images of changelessness... the images are not encouraging: at best you will escape your own notice having died.
... when Eros impinges on you in his true form, something is lost, something hard to measure.
Falling in love, it seems, dislocates your view of what is significant.
... Eros deforms our lives. Meter, essentially, is an attempt to control words in time. We impose such control in the interests of beauty. But when Eros flashes into your life he brings his own standard of beauty and simply cancels out 'all those proprieties and decorums whose beauty you once cherished.'
A reader, like a bad lover, may feel he can zoom into his text at any point and pluck the fruit of its wisdom. A writer, like Lysias, may feel he can rearrange the limbs of the fiction on which he dotes with no regard for its life as an organism in time.
These are writers who share a strategy; they purpose to re-create in you a certain action of the mind and heart -- the action of reaching out toward a meaning not yet known. It is a reach that never quite arrives, bittersweet.
Imagine a city where there is no desire... their life looks flat... the art of storytelling is widely neglected.
A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination... delight is beside the point.
Whenever any creature is moved to reach out for what it desires, that movement begins in an act of imagination.
Phantasia stirs minds to movement by its power of representation; in other words, imagination prepares desire by representing the desired object as desirable to the mind of the desirer. Phantasia tells the mind a story. The story must make one thing clear, namely, the difference between what is present/actual/known and what is not, the difference between the desirer and the desired.
He loved to ask question. He loved to hear answers, construct arguments, test definitions, uncover riddles and watch them unfold out of one another in a structure opening down through the logos like a spiralling road or a vertigo. He loved, that is, the process of coming to know.
On the one hand, the reasoning mind must perceive and bring together certain scattered particulars, in order to make clear by definition the thing it wishes to explain. This is the activity of collection. On the other hand, it is necessary to divide things up by classes, where the natural joins are: this activity is division.
That is to say, we think by projecting sameness upon difference, by drawing things together in a relation or idea while at the same time maintaining the distinctions between them. A thinking mind is not swallowed up by what it comes to know. It reaches out to grasp something related it itself and to its present knowledge but also separate from itself and from its present knowledge.
To reach across it is tricky.
When the mind reaches out to know, the space of desire opens and a necessary fiction transpires.
He describes collection and division as the activity that empowers him to speak and think. And he alleges that he is in love with this activity.
In this one small thing at least it seems I am wiser -- that I do not think I know what I do not know.
A power to see the difference between what is known and what is unknown constitutes Sokrates' wisdom and motivated his searching life. The activity of reaching out for that difference is one with which he admits he is in love.
To reach for something else than the facts will carry you beyond this city and perhaps, as for Sokrates, beyond this world. It is a high-risk proposition, as Sokrates saw quite clearly, to reach for the difference between known and unknown. He thought the risk worthwhile, because he was in love with the wooing itself. And who is not?
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