A Necessary Fiction

Notes on reading eros: the bittersweet by anne carson

He seems to me equal to gods that man

who opposite you

sits and listens close

to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing--oh it

puts the heart in my chest on wings

for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking 

is left in me

no: tongue breaks, and thin

fire is racing under skin

and in eyes no sight and drumming

fills ears

and cold sweat holds me and shaking

grips me all, greener than grass

I am and dead--or almost

I seem to me.

Sappho, fragment 31

"It is a poem about the lover's mind in the act of constructing desire for itself."

"There are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. 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. When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps. And something becomes visible. . . . The difference between what is and what could be is visible."

***

"A space must be maintained or desire ends."

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,

high on the highest branch and the applepickers

     forgot--

well, no they didn't forget--were not able to reach

. . .

Sappho, fragment 105a

"The poem is incomplete, perfectly."

". . . this poem acts out the experience of eros. . . . Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger. From her inchoate little poem we learn several thins about eros. The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time)."

***

"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."

***

"Words do have edges. So do you."

"There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love. The seem truer than other perceptions, and more truly your own, won from reality at personal cost. . . . All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus. A gust of godlikeness may pass through you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible and present. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you know see.Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual."

"Desire changes the lover. . . . The change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before."

***

"In writing, beauty prefers an edge."

***

"Let us superimpose on the question 'What does the lover want from love' the questions 'What does the reader want from reading? What is the writer's desire?' Novels are the answer."

***

"To create pleasure and pain at once is the novelist's aim."

"Novels institutionalize the ruse of eros. It becomes a narrative texture of sustained incongruence, emotional and cognitive. It permits the reader to stand in triangular relation 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."

***

"All lovers believe they are inventing love."

"The novelists who constructs this moment of emotional and cognitive interception is making love, and you are the object of his wooing."

***

"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, at once connective and separative, painful and sweet. Letters construct the space of desire and kindle in those contradictory emotions that keep the lover alert to his own impasse. Letters arrest and complicate an existing two-term situation by conjuring a third person who is not literally there, making suddenly visible the difference between what is. . . . and what could be. . . . From within letters, Eros acts."

***

"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 unplucked apple, the beloved just out of touch, the meaning not quite attained, are desirable objects of knowledge. It is the enterprise of eros to keep them so."

***

"Sokrates' central argument, as he goes on to reevaluate madness, 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 incursions 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, Sokrates says (244a-45). 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."

"When you fall in love you feel all sorts of sensations inside you, painful and pleasant at once: it is your wings sprouting (251-52). It is the beginning of what you are meant to be."

***

"In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible their difference. It is an erotic space. . . . When the mind reaches out to know, the space of desire opens and a necessary fiction transpires."