Anne Carson, The Woman That You Are

Eros Wants to Lick Your Brain

Since I first started reading Eros the Bittersweet a little before we read Sappho’s Come Close last April, it heavily inspired me while writing my review for it:

“Eros, with his comely wings, flies in and out of the edges of our vision and the realms of our consciousness. Our poor hearts can do nothing but beat to the rhythm of his wings. Even in the helplessness of desire, that limb-loosening, breath-quickening spell, there is an almost god-like power in knowing that this feeling has existed before we ever breathed its name.”

Amor and Psyche by Paul Thumann

Eros the Bittersweet is a reworked version of Carson’s PhD thesis. And what a thesis it was indeed! This review will mainly consist of me admiring Carson’s writing and not adding much in the way of value/intellectual analyses since I am always just in awe of her work.

In the chapter titled Ruse, Carson introduced to me the concept of the geometry of a poem. I had never ever considered that before. I feel as though I become a smarter person each time after I read an Anne Carson book.

Carson introduces this concept using Sappho’s Fragment 31 (one of my favorites of Sappho’s)

“​​The poem floats toward us on a stage set. But we have no program. The actors go in and out of focus anonymously. The action has no location. We don’t know why the girl is laughing nor what she feels about this man. He looms beyond the footlights, somewhat more than mortal in line 1 (isos tbeoisin), and dissolves at line 2 into a pronoum [ottis) so indefinite that scholars cannot agree on what it means. The poet who is staging the mise-en-scene steps mysteriously from the wings of a relative clause at line 5 (to) and takes over the action.

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. Thin lines of force coordinate the three of them. Along one line travels the girl’s voice and laughter to a man who listens closely. A second tangent connects the girl to the poet. Between the eye of the poet and the listening man crackles a third current. The figure is a triangle” (p. 13).

Through describing the triangular shape in Sappho’s Fragment 31, she reimagines the poem into another form, giving dimension to those ancient words.

I fear I have nothing else of value to add, but just wanted to share that if you want to change the way you think about desire, about love, about poetry, read Anne Carson.

“Imagination is the core of desire” (p. 77)

<3 D

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Eros Wants to Lick Your Brain

Notes on Eros the Bittersweet

To Sappho, Eros is both pleasure and pain. It is reaching toward something. Or someone. It reaches like a poem, often written about someone you lean against, but do not quite touch. A flame flickering, never quite burning out, never quite lighting the room enough to reveal what is surrounding you. In one sharp moment of “now,” both the bitterness and sweetness coexist. This is desire. To be consumed by Eros.

Desire melts you: “Boundaries of body, categories of thought, are confounded.” (p. 7). Eros is desire for what is missing. If you were to get it, it would no longer be missing, and so Eros would vanish. What a sweet paradox.

Isn’t this something all lovers know so well? The most bittersweet moment is right before you are sure. To not quite know. To chase something fleeting. Once you grasp it, the bittersweet Eros disappears, and perhaps something beautiful comes to replace it. But. As human beings, we tend to become hooked on what is almost within reach, but not quite. After fulfilling one dream, we are already searching for the next.

Have you not stood next to someone you adore and been so infatuated that no word could come out of your mouth? There is nothing to say. And yet it is known. The air feels electrified. There is a “shared shyness that radiates between lover and beloved.” (p. 21). Zeus split us all in two, and so we spend our lives looking for the missing part. Desire is the gap, the space between the two halves. And this is what I, like many writers, write about: the gap between lover and beloved. It is triangular. To desire someone outside yourself, as if they have already taken something from you, and you must take it back.

By loving another, we realize where we end. So is love about the self and the other merging? Or is it the other entering and changing you through desire? Haven’t you ever said: I was changed by it when describing a love affair, or a connection you once had? The self carries this change even after desire fades. You learn to love this new reflection of yourself. In their gaze, you were something you too could love.

To add a personal note, this constant reaching and yearning could be described as the theme of my life. Often I ask myself: how much is enough? Should I stop reaching and allow myself to rest? But I cannot.

Life is about the reaching. It is the reason you rise in the morning. To reach for a lover’s hand, or for the new idea that bloomed in your mind the night before. To move toward something that does not resemble death.

Desire compels us to reach toward some kind of resolution. And to do this, we use imagination. We must imagine the desired outcome, the fantasy. This is what makes us human animals: the ability to imagine.

Reading Carson feels like reading poetry. The images she creates, the intertextuality, the weaving together of thought and fragment; it all wraps you in a spell where she woos you, the reader. You nod, you say yes. You see yourself reflected in the text, at the edge of your own understanding. Like coming to know yourself. You must pause, put the book down, take one word at a time and feel it in your mouth, on your tongue. You come to understand the text as you come to understand yourself. Both are beautiful mysteries, limited only by physicality.

Perhaps life is most true when we love. We go a little mad. Nothing matters but to be in the presence of the one we long for. We may not even understand it. And yet suddenly the world is so beautiful. God-like. Carson recalls Plato’s idea of how we once had wings and lived among the gods: “Now we are exiled from that place and quality of life, yet we remember it from time to time, for example, when we look upon beauty and fall in love.” (p. 157).

Perhaps falling in love is, in truth, remembering. Re-membering. Bringing two back together again. When you are seen by love, you are seen by god. You are back at the beginning of time, when there was nothing to reach for; for all you needed was already yours.

<3 J

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