Logic at the Edges

"Words do have edges. So do you." Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson

Continuing her thoughts into Sappho's poem, fragment 31, author Anne Carson writes, "When I desire you, a part of me is gone. Your lack is my lack..." In this classical view, then, Eros is expropriation. Robbed of vital senses, limbs even, the lovers are left with essentially less. This attitude is grounded in the oldest of western mythology, it lies well within the classical Greek world; lovers are losers, or so they reckon. "But this reckoning proves a quick and artful shift. " Reaching, striving for someone, something that is outside the immediate self provokes a lover to observe that they have limits, they have "edges." From this vantage point, one might call it "consciousness," he sees in himself a hole. His desire then is for something that previously he "never knew he lacked; it is defined by a distance, a shift towards a necessary part of himself..." It is not a new acquisition, but something that "was always, always, properly his."

But the apparent geometry of the relationship "is a trick," Carson writes. And his next move is likely to collapse the trigonomic dimensions into a circle; all desire is longing for that which properly belongs to the one who desires, but has been taken away or lost..." Socrates writes, "so if you two are loving friends of one another, then you quite naturally belong to one another." Carson protests this reckoning, "it is profoundly unjust... to recognize a kindred soul and to claim possession as if the blurring in love with distinction between self and other is acceptable."

Yet desire, it seems, does indeed change the lover. It brings a newness, an expanded sense of possibility; a view of a newly formed self, enlarged. As with the Greek poets, the new self, the 'sweet-bitter' of eros brings the experiences of both utility and painfulness. Why? The ancients would say that pain arises at the edges which have been adulterated; bitter verging suddenly on the sweet. "Eros' ambivalence unfolds directly from this power to mix up the self. A lover helplessly admits that it feels both good and bad to be mixed up. And once mixed, asks the question, 'who am I?' Change gives him a glimpse of himself that he never knew before. This gives rise to a powerful insight into the importance of what Carson calls, Eros the Bitter-sweet, or love that alters the edges, and therefore the sense of the previously known self.

Eros Is a Verb

"It was Sappho who first called eros "bittersweet."  --Eros Bittersweet by Anne Carson

While hard to translate when applied to ancient gods, for the woman poet, Sappho who wrote the surviving poem Sweetbitter, the Greek word glukupikron translated into English might be thought of as bittersweet. Meaning a sort of sweetness when applied to eros and then a disappointment, or "first sweet and then bitterness in sequence," writes Carson. She says, "Many a lover's experience would validate such a chronology, especially in poetry..." In Sappho's poem, she does not seem to be recording the history of a love affair as much as she seems to be speaking of its geometry.

Desire is from without; it "creeps up upon its object irresistibly."  Recording in her poem, not the love but the instant of desire, Sappho sees the desire as "neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer." And often poets write of the resulting crazed feeling of the one who most ardently pursues the beauty of another. "Foreign to her will, it [desire] forces itself... Eros is an enemy. Its bitterness must be the taste of  enmity. That would be hate." The convergence of both love and hate in the same pole constitutes a paradox. It is somewhat cliche to say that hate begins where love leaves off. And yet hate is not the opposite of love.

"There is something pure and indubitable about the notion that eros is lack." In Sappho's fragment 31 she writes of this. Here the poetess creates a stage, mise en scene where the writer herself seems to step mysteriously into the situation, between the lover and the beloved, forming what is a triangle. An obvious answer is that this poem is really about jealousy. Many have thought this about it, while others have thought not. The word 'jealousy' comes from the Greek zelos, meaning zeal or fervent pursuit. "It [jealousy] is a hot and corrosive spiritual emotion, arising in fear, fed upon resentment." The jealous lover fears that another is preferred over them, and that their primary place in the beloved heart is under threat by another. "This," writes Carson is "an emotion of placement and displacement."  Thus the jealous lover covets a placement in the beloved affections, and is filled with anxiety that another will take it instead.

In Italy during the Renaissance period a dance became popular called Jealousy in which pairs of dancers separated during parts of the dance to join with others; at several stages in the dance, one of the dancers must stand alone while others move on. They then rejoin the others. "Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves, for it is the instability of the emotional situation which preys upon a jealous lover's mind." In Sappho's poem, she does not covet the man's place, nor fear for her own. And she directs no resentment at him. She is simply "amazed at his intrepidness." Yet it is the beloved beauty that so deeply affects Sappho as one in the triangle. And while jealousy may be implicit in this poem, it does not explain the geometry of the piece.

Finally jealousy, it becomes evident, is not the point: "the normal world of erotic responses is beside the point." It is, says Carson, "about the lover's mind in the act of constructing desire for itself." No claim beyond that does the poet make. Sappho perceives desire as a three point function, a triangle. She argues that it's a radical, necessary construction of desire. "For where eros is lack, its activation calls upon a three part structure--lover, beloved, and that which comes between them. Desire moves, and eros is a verb.