In Plato’s Symposium, the poet Aristophanes proposes his theory on the origin of love. Man, he explains, was not always divided into two sexes. In the beginning we had four legs, four arms, and two sets of eyes, and we rolled about on the surface of the earth perfectly happy. Knowing nothing of suffering, we soon grew restless and over-confident. It wasn’t long before we made an attack on the gods themselves. In response, Zeus cut us in two “as you might divide an egg with a hair” and we were left two halves of one perfect being, constantly in search of our other half.

Since then love has been our obsession. Why do we fall in love? Why does love bring so much pain? What can we do to prevent love from destroying us? Unfortunately, as Anne Carson outlines in her philosphical essay, Eros the Bittersweet, we will never understand it. It is something beyond us—something just within our fingertips but always taking that one extra step to elude us. In the end we begin to realize that this is perhaps for the best—that it is maybe more fortunate than we realize. In terms of desire, the wanter and the wanted never come together. “To catch beauty,” Carson explains in the preface:

would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

Eros is a stunning book. Carson delves through literatures both ancient and modern, both literary and philosophical, to underscore what she believes to be the primary characteristic of desire: its contradictory impossibility. The lyric poet Sappho, she explains, summed it up in one word: γλυκόπικρος, or “sweetbitter”—an experience of simultaneous pleasure and pain. From there, Carson leaves no facet of love left unexamined, unpacking ancient theories of desire with crisp and cutting translations, an overwhelming knowledge of classical literature, and an insatiable thirst to define what love means to us. The result is an endlessly fascinating treatise that feels very much like the act of falling in love itself.

“The word eros,” Carson states, “denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what he does not have.” Who can dispute this? Going back to Aristophanes’ origin of love, she says of the lover, “The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness.” Again—we are searching for that other half. When we find what we seek, all curiosity—all desire—ceases, and there’s nothing left for us to do. The act of love in the ancient world was an act of pursuit. “Desire moves,” Carson says. “Love ‘puts the heart in my chest on wings.’” In this sense, we understand that something within us changes when we fall in love. We go through a transformation, and this is why love is so irrefutably important.

Carson broadens the sense of desire beyond sexuality: “A mood of knowledge is emitted by the spark that leaps in the lover’s soul. He feels on the verge of grasping something not grasped before.” And so desire—the pursuit of something adored—extends to the process of coming to know, or reaching out for knowledge. Knowledge is desirable. Our attitude toward love is that if we could only have our beloved—if we could only come to control him or her—we would be at peace. The same is true with knowledge: we are always on the cusp of understanding but we never quite understand. Before desire—and before knowledge—the self is whole, complete, and safe from external force. The self is invulnerable. When struck by desire, by the god Eros—the “limb-loosener,” of “sweet tears” and “bitter honey”—our self is suddenly changed, and as Carson reminds us, “Change of self is loss of self.” The metaphors for falling in love “are metaphors of war, disease, and bodily dissolution.” With exquisite clarity Carson shows us just how brutal desire can be and before long we sympathize with these ancient poets, wanting nothing more than to shut ourselves up from love forever and live on invulnerable and apathetic. We are wary of change and wary of love.

Of course it cannot be that simple. In an extended examination of Plato’s Phaedrus, Carson reveals Sokrates’ position on the matter of love—a truly radical stance at the time. Love brings madness—that goes without saying—but Sokrates believed that “erotic mania is a valuable thing in private life. It puts wings on your soul.” And what are wings but transformative elements—elements of motion? Without the placement of our soul on wings, how are we to move? Again: “Desire moves.” Things like falling in love and coming to know are maddening but necessary, are painful but key to our survival as human beings. This favored description of the poets and philosophers is central to our understanding of the importance of love, finding themselves “describing Eros in images of wings and metaphors of flying, for desire is a movement that carries yearning hearts from over here to over there, launching the mind on a story.” Love is a triangulation of now, then, and the space between—of lover, beloved, and the distance between them—of student, knowledge, and the potential journey of coming to know. Even if we never truly understand love, Carson helps us understand its necessity. Without it we would go nowhere.

Like the majority of MacArthur fellows, Anne Carson went largely unnoticed until she received a half million dollars. Unlike the majority of MacArthur fellows, readers are starting to recognize her name. Along with Derek Walcott, Charles Simic, John Ashbery, and Adrienne Rich, Carson enjoys inclusion in a small group of MacArthur poets who are likely to yield more than 100,000 results in your run-of-the-mill search engine. Certainly there’s something special about Anne Carson. In reading her signature collections of poetry, essays, shot lists, and dialogues, we know we’ve stumbled onto someone unique—a true genius worthy of any so called “genius grant.” Her 2000 volume, Men in the Off Hours, reminds us of the many reasons we love Anne Carson, and why, as author Michael Ondaatje reminds us, she is “the most exciting poet writing in English today.” Three of them come to mind.

1: Juxtapositions
As we learned from Carson’s more well-known work, her so-called novel in verse Autobiography of Red, Anne Carson is the all-powerful mistress of juxtapositions. Instead of a winged red monster from ancient Greece living as a gay adolescent in modern day Canada, we get—in Men in the Off Hours—Thucydides discussing the nature of war with Virginia Woolf, Antigone and Oedipus filming a made-for-TV movie, a modern look at the life of Tolstoy. In the series “TV Men: Lazarus,” the speaker—a documentary film maker—explains his thoroughly modern interest in filming a reality series of Lazarus coming back from the dead.

We are left wondering, Why Lazarus?
My theory is
God wants us to wonder this.
…
But if God’s gift is simply random, well
for one thing
it makes a
more interesting TV show.

We are left to consider this as the director goes on to explain his process of putting “tiny microphones all over the ground / to pick up / the magic / of the vermin in his ten fingers.” In all these juxtapositions, Carson reminds us of the importance of history, that history itself is not too distant. She informs us, in “The Glove of Time by Edward Hopper,” of the arbitrary nature of history: “For in what does time differ from eternity except we measure it?” Carson knows that history is not static, that history is open to interpretation just as our most cherished fictions.¹ Her fusing of the modern and the ancient is her own adroit way of revealing the inherent transience in each.

2: Style
A reader of Anne Carson will already know that there’s nothing quite like her style. One might interpret that she’s not a fan of commas, even when they’re technically required to be within the constraints of English grammar. Some might see this as a reason not to love Anne Carson, but for those of us with a sense of adventure she comes through as a fearlessly inventive stylist. In “TV Men: Tolstoy,” Lev’s wife writes of his diaries, “So much here is—may God forgive me— / unjust cruel untruthful dragged up invented.” In “Irony is Not Enough: Essay on My Life as Catherine Deneuve,” Catherine wonders of the ancient Greeks or her students (we never know): “These people seem bathed in goodness, yet here come the beautiful dangerous white rapids beating onto them.” Carson’s syntax is molded into a terrifying lyricism and in each verse we see the urgency at the heart of human beings. Her work is unabashedly beautiful and evocative. The entire emotional landscape of winter is set with a flag that “shreds itself in the icy wind.” Lines like “Wrist-thick on the plain a sapling bends” remind us of our own frailty. The act of writing is a surgery in which “incisions [make] a dull blue sound like silk.” In the morning, sycamore trees “are big, unbandaging themselves.” A reader of Carson understands the English language at its most ecstatic. A writer should be so in love with the words he or she uses that it tears one’s heart to pieces, just like any other love. Carson understands love. She understands language. She knows how to make them torment each other.

3: Insight
Our most cherished authors are those that evoke our most cherished emotions and help us understand who we are. There’s a lot of dialogue in the literary world about the nature of reading—what we get from it, why we do it, what it says about us. Assuming we read to better know ourselves, naturally we look to those authors who understand humanity itself. Men in the Off Hours is Carson at her most empathetic, exploring our best and our worst. In “Freud (1st draft),” we are shown a young Sigmund who, faced with repeated rejections from the girls of Trieste, writes to a friend: “Since / it is not permitted / to dissect human beings I have / in fact nothing to do with them.” In “Audubon,” the young artist portrays our destructive desire to understand: “On the bottom of each watercolor he put “drawn from nature” / which meant he shot the birds / and took them home to stuff and paint them.” After the publication of Autobiography of Red in 1998, The Nation critic Bruce Hainley called Carson “a philosopher of heartbreak.” She summons this reputation once more in “Irony is Not Enough” when Catherine laments her attraction to one of her students:

Girl mends the earpiece, drops her coat on the floor, sits beside it. Takes out her Greek book and begins to translate, as if it had been prearranged. Had it? Deneuve feels a force of life coming at her too strong to think what parts this has or why it should happen. The victim of an ironic situation is typically innocent. Gradually twilight soaks the room, now it is almost too dark to read. Girl is lifting her coat, poised in the doorway, gone. Thanks, floats back along the hall. Looking down Deneuve sees her feet are naked. Moi je comprends pas ça², she whispers to them.

As stated in the list of MacArthur fellows, Anne Carson is a poet. Consulting the dictionary, we find a startling definition of poet: “a person possessing special powers of imagination or expression.” In this sense Anne Carson is a true poet, yet her reach goes beyond poetry. A frequenter of book stores will almost always find her work huddled away in the poetry section—if said frequenter can find it at all—yet Anne Carson uses her experience and her talent to explore other mediums and break down the barriers of form. In a 2000 article in The New York Times, journalist Melanie Rehak notes that, “Her work as both a poet and scholar is based largely on making emotionally plausible connections between subjects, writers—even entire epochs—that seem as if they couldn’t possibly inform one another.” With her aforementioned juxtapositions and her experimentation with various genres, this couldn’t be more accurate. Carson reminds us what it means to go on living as a part of our rich history, but more importantly she reminds us of the real pleasure in reading—its thrills and its unadulterated rapture. As is true with all of her collections, Men in the Off Hours is not to be missed.

***
1: For more information on the transience of ancient history, see Hannah E. V. Čulík’s article, “History and Fiction.”
2: “I don’t understand it.” (Fr)

The more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates.

When confronted with aphoristic pearls like these from the middle of the 20th century it’s hard to keep going. We may ask ourselves in a fit of despondency, What happened to the literary world? In T. S. Eliot’s time wasn’t literature an entirely different enterprise? Weren’t books and their authors greater than anything we could now conceive in the modern world?

The brilliant, albeit slightly creepy, T. S. Eliot

In my disappointment with the modern world my first impulse is to agree. Of course the answer is that education has failed. Of course we deal with “the distractions of the Internet… the vanishing seriousness of university literature departments… and the allure of the pervasive entertainments of popular culture.” One of the most popular writers today is Stephanie Meyer. Of course our reaction is to say that modern literature is in decline. Where have our heroes gone? Again, as a reader of mostly dead authors, it’s hard to believe anything else.

You may have heard someone say over a stiff drink, Can’t it be like the good old days? Those days were different, weren’t they? Of course they were different. Today we have modern technology, increased awareness of cultural differences, countless readers all over the world following the latest news on their favorite authors. On second thought perhaps things haven’t changed. Advances in technology aside, T. S. Eliot’s literary world and the literary world as we see it today have much in common. Readers today follow their favorite authors on Twitter. In the 1930’s they followed them in newspapers. In a bookstore today all one initially sees is the light reading—the crime novels, the courtroom dramas, romance and beach reading, memoir after memoir. It’s easy to believe that our world is hopeless and depressing and lost to drivel but in truth today’s readers aren’t so different. The average American in the mid 20th century did not read Eliot just as they did not read Joyce or Faulkner or Woolf. Instead they read their crime novels, their courtroom dramas, their romance and beach reading, memoirs of their favorite celebrities. In fact the only possible change is that in today’s world the most erudite and “literary” works are perhaps read by more readers than ever before. The ivory tower in today’s world has become more accessible.

Epstein concludes his article on a rather somber note:

If the literary culture that T. S. Eliot, at his best, represented is over and done, a thing of the past never to be recovered, the loss is of a seriousness beyond reckoning.

Again, when I read this my first instinct is to mourn, to become morose and weep for the greatness that we’ve lost. Instead I grin. With household names like Cormac McCarthy, Gabriel García Márquez, Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison; with incredibly perceptive critics along the lines of Martin Amis and Harold Bloom; with lesser known writers like Anne Carson and Eula Biss performing thrilling literary experiments, we have nothing short of a wonderfully diverse and enriching literary world. Epstein’s article only shows his unproductive and twisted nostalgia. And what do we know of nostalgia? In One Hundred Years of Solitude García Márquez reminds us of its true nature: “Sometimes, over a watercolor of Venice, nostalgia would transform the smell of mud and putrefying shellfish of the canals into the warm aroma of flowers.” In today’s world, a lover of the literary arts has a chance at greatness even if he or she couldn’t afford to go to Harvard or Oxford. In fact it’s what most of us are banking on. Things are only going to become more exciting from here.

It wasn’t that long ago that I mentioned one of the many quagmires of novel writing—or at least one of my personal predicaments. As one might expect of a writer, I very much love to read. As one might expect of an amateur novelist, my favorite literary form is the novel. I love novels to the extent that I fantasize about the apocalypse just so I have time to read them. Luckily for me I wear contacts so there’s no danger of my glasses breaking when they fall on a rock. I’ve been known to worship novels. I suppose it goes without saying, my reason for writing one.

This is the quagmire: when you (meaning me) are writing a novel, your focus is shifted. It’s more difficult to take it in as a complete work of art. Instead you get hung up on certain sentences, a character’s mannerisms, the overarching structure. In time the novel has your thinking so warped that you have to put it down. Not to mention the way novels haunt your own prose style. What happens when you read too much Faulkner? Your sentences try to crawl outside of themselves. You’re tempted to use the word crepuscular.

So what does a lover of books do? Writing a novel is a long process. I’m currently working through my second draft and while I’m moving at an alarming pace I realize there is still a long stretch of writing before me. Writing the initial draft took three months. With all that novel left to write and rewrite you can’t simply tell yourself that you’ll read again when it’s over. You have to compromise.

I am reading poetry. I am reading essays. I am reading philosophy and criticism. Unless it’s a singular cohesive text I don’t even bother reading the whole book. I’ve read portions of books from Philip Larkin, Yusef Komunyakaa, James Wright, T. S. Eliot, and Jorge Luis Borges. I’ve read essays both comical and awe-inspiring from Martin Amis and David Foster Wallace. I’m in the middle of one of the most fascinating philosophical literary texts I’ve ever read: Anne Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet. What is interesting, I’ve noticed, is that I’m not reading in the same way that I’ve always read. Again, novel writing has warped my sensibilities. When I read Anne Carson I’m looking for something. I’m searching. There is something she’s trying to tell me and I’m going to use it in my work. I read as a novelist these days, gathering information. I can tell that Eros the Bittersweet is going to be a strong influence on my next novel, which at the moment is only a title and a document full of notes. Reading has become research, and as horrifying as that sounds it’s more exhilarating than anything because I’m loving every moment of it.

That is how the reader in me is surviving. Yesterday I took a holiday and spent the day at home. Toward the middle of the afternoon I spread a blanket on the grass in my back yard and in what may have been a writer’s fantasy I listened to the birds and read about the triangular structure of love. I even managed to incorporate a bowl of cherries, as though the symbolic representation of happiness wasn’t yet complete. Even though reading can be a toxic enterprise you can’t put reading on hold. It keeps you grounded in the rest of the world. For a while I was wholly absorbed in my novel and I let nothing else in. You start to feel anxious. Even though you think you’re putting all your creative energy into a novel there is a piece left unused: that creativity that occurs when you encounter something inspirational—a logical conundrum or a scientific fact or a little piece of history. You have to keep feeding your creativity with books. You have to read, even if you can’t read your drug of choice.

After rather careless deliberation, the discussion question’s for May’s book, Autobiography of Red, have been drafted. Feel free to answer them or come up with your own.

Visit the thread for more details, and see the questions below.

• “A man moves through time. It means nothing except that, like a harpoon, once thrown he will arrive” (81). What do you make of this statement, particularly when examined against its place in the work (Geryon on a plane, traveling toward Buenos Aires)? What does it suggest about Geryon’s life and situation?
• Geryon is red. Everything about him is red and the color is intrinsic to his character. The only other character with even a hint of assigned color is the “Yellowbeard” character, featured on pages 85-97. Is this significant?
• Geryon has a reoccurring thought process: after observing an event that pleases someone, he concludes “____ makes ____ happy. This occurs at least three times in the novel, on pages 23, 97, and 107. It is a trait that has followed him from childhood. Does Carson’s inclusion of it in these three separate instances suggest any sort of importance or insight into Geryon’s character?
• At the closing of the interview at the end of the book, there is the enigmatic “So glad you didn’t ask about the little red dog.” As mentioned in the essay on Stesichoros at the very beginning, the original Greek text contains references to Geryon owning a little red dog that Herakles kills with his club. Did Carson omit this part of the story or did she work it in in another way?
• In the original text by Stesichoros, Herakles comes and kills Geryon to get his red cattle. In Carson’s telling, we can come to understand that Herakles doesn’t literally kill Geryon, but breaks his heart. What does Herakles get out of this (as there are obviously no cows…), if anything?

Hello, kittens. I’m announcing this eleven days in advance to give you fair warning.

For May I have chosen the lovely and delightful Autobiography of Red by Anne Carson: a novel in verse.

From the back of the book:
Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red monster, reveals the volcanic terrain of his fragile, tormented soul in an autobiography he begins at the age of five. As he grows older, Geryon escapes his abusive brother and affectionate but ineffectual mother, finding solace behind the lens of his camera and in the arms of a young man named Herakles, a cavalier drifter who leaves him at the peak of infatuation. When Herakles reappears years later, Geryon confronts again the pain of his desire and embarks on a journey that will unleash his creative imagination to its fullest extent. By turns whimsical and haunting, erudite and accessible, richly layered and deceptively simple, Autobiography of Red is a profoundly moving portrait of an artist coming to terms with the fantastic accident of who he is.

I’m expecting participation from Courtney on this, as she has already read it, and although I know Hannah is remarkably busy, I’m hoping she might find the time, prone to the classics as she is.

Seriously, folks, this book instantly became a favorite when I finished it. I highly suggest you participate in this month’s selection.