Eros the Bittersweet - Anne Carson
Status: #stone
Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty 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 once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up
We take for granted, as did Sappho, the sweetness of erotic desire; its pleasurability smiles out at us. But the bitterness is less obvious. There might be several reasons why what is sweet should also be bitter.
One moment staggers under pressure of eros; one mental state splits.
The pleasant aspect is named first, we may presume, because it is less surprising. Emphasis is thrown upon the problematic other side of the phenomenon, whose attributes advance in a hail of soft consonants (line 2). Eros moves or creeps upon its victim from somewhere outside her: orpeton. No battle avails to fight off that advance: amachanon. Desire, then, is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer. Foreign to her will, it forces itself irresistibly upon her from without. Eros is an enemy. Its bitterness must be the taste of enmity.
Because of his longing for something gone across the sea a phantom seems to rule the rooms, and the grace of statues shaped in beauty comes to be an object of hate for the man. In the absences of eyes all Aphrodite is vacant, gone.
The moment when the soul parts on itself in desire is conceived as a dilemma of body and senses. On Sappho’s tongue, as we have seen, it is a moment bitter and sweet. This ambivalent taste is developed, in later poets, into “bitter honey” (Anth. Pal. 12.81), “sweet wound” (Anth. Pal. 12.126), and “Eros of sweet tears” (Anth. Pal. 12.167).
Ibykos frames eros in a paradox of wet and dry, for the black thunderstorm of desire drives against him not rain but “parching madnesses”
Oh comrade, the limb-loosener crushes me: desire.
Each crisis calls for decision and action, but decision is impossible and action a paradox when eros stirs the senses.
Whether apprehended as a dilemma of sensation, action or value, eros prints as the same contradictory fact: love and hate converge within erotic desire.
The Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ 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.
Four of his dialogues explore what it means to say that desire can only be for what is lacking, not at hand, not present, not in one’s possession nor in one’s being: eros entails endeia.
“Desire … evokes lack of being under the three figures of the nothing that constitutes the basis of the demand for love, of the hate that even denies the other’s being, and of the unspeakable element in that which is ignored in its request”
Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it.
The word ‘jealousy’ comes from Greek zēlos meaning ‘zeal’ or ‘fervent pursuit.’ It is a hot and corrosive spiritual motion arising in fear and fed on resentment. The jealous lover fears that his beloved prefers someone else, and resents any relationship between the beloved and another. 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. Here is an image of the shifting pattern that is jealousy, from more modern times. During the first half of the fifteenth century a type of slow pacing dance called the bassa danza became popular in Italy. These dances were semidramatic and transparently expressive of psychological relationships. “In the dance called Jealousy three men and three women permute partners and each man goes through a stage of standing by himself apart from the others” (Baxandall 1972, 78). 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.
“If you looked upon my beloved and were not broken by desire, you are totally god or totally stone”
For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved and that which comes between them. They 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, on the triangular path where volts are moving, that would not be visible without the three-part structure. The difference between what is and what could be is visible. The ideal is projected on a screen of the actual, in a kind of stereoscopy. The man sits like a god, the poet almost dies: two poles of response within the same desiring mind. Triangulation makes both present at once by a shift of distance, replacing erotic action with a ruse of heart and language. For in this dance the people do not move. Desire moves. Eros is a verb.
Mere space has power. L’amour d’loonh (‘love from a distance’) is what the canny troubadours called courtly love.
Lovers who do not wish to run may stand and throw: an apple is the traditional missile in declarations of love (e.g., Ar. Nub. 997). The lover’s ball, or sphaira, is another conventional mechanism of seduction, so often tossed as a love challenge (e.g., Anakreon 358 PMG; Anth. Pal. 5.214, 6.280) that it came to emblematize the god himself, as Eros Ballplayer, in later verse (Ap. Rhod. 3.132-41). The glance of the eye can be an equally potent projectile. The poets call upon a vocabulary of innuendo that ranges from the “slantwise stare” of a flirting Thracian filly (Anakreon 417 PMG) to Astymeloisa’s glance “more melting than sleep or death” (Alkman 3.61-62 PMG) and the limb-dissolving gaze of Eros himself “down from underneath blue eyelids” (Ibykos 287 PMG).
Aidōs (‘shamefastness’) is a sort of voltage of decorum discharged between two people approaching one another for the crisis of human contact, an instinctive and mutual sensitivity to the boundary between them.
“Eros is often sweeter when he is being difficult” says a Hellenistic poet (Anth. Pal. 12.153).
Athenian nomos is poikilos in that it recommends an ambivalent code of behavior (lovers should chase beloveds yet beloveds should not be caught). But the nomos is also poikilos in that it applies to a phenomenon whose essence and loveliness is in its ambivalence. This erotic code is a social expression of the division within a lover’s heart. Double standards of behavior reflect double or contradictory pressures within erotic emotion itself.
A space must be maintained or desire ends.
It is a compound experience, both gluku and pikron: Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger. From her inchoate little poem we learn several things about eros. The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time).
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. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is. Like Sappho’s adjective glukupikron, the moment of desire is one that defies proper edge, being a compound of opposites forced together at pressure. 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: your lack is my lack. I would not be in want of you unless you had partaken of me, the lover reasons. “A hole is being gnawed in [my] vitals” says Sappho (LP, fr. 96.16-17). “You have snatched the lungs out of my chest” (West, IEG 191) and “pierced me right through the bones” (193) says Archilochos. “You have worn me down” (Alkman 1.77 PMG), “grated me away” (Ar., Eccl. 956), “devoured my flesh” (Ar., Ran. 66), “sucked my blood” (Theokritos 2.55), “mowed off my genitals” (?Archilochos, West, IEG 99.21), “stolen my reasoning mind” (Theognis 1271). Eros is expropriation. He robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity and leaves the lover, essentially, less.
Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. Or so he reckons.
Reaching for an object that proves to be outside and be yond himself, the lover is provoked to notice that self and its limits. From a new vantage point, which we might call self-consciousness, he looks back and sees a hole. Where does that hole come from? It comes from the lover’s classificatory process. 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. Not a new acquisition but something that was always, properly, his. Two lacks become one.
The exegesis measures out three angles: the lover himself, the beloved, the lover redefined as incomplete without the beloved. But this trigonometry is a trick. The lover’s next move is to collapse the triangle into a two-sided figure and treat the two sides as one circle.
all desire is longing for that which properly belongs to the desirer but has been lost or taken away somehow—no one says how
Desire and love and longing are directed at that which is akin to oneself [tou oikeiou], it seems. So if you two are loving friends [philoi] of one another then in some natural way you belong to one another
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.
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 now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.
Eros’ ambivalence unfolds directly from this power to ‘mix up’ the self. 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. “How curiously”: he feels the change happen but has no ready categories to assess it. The change gives him a glimpse of a self he never knew before.
Neville, for example, seems to come round to the same conclusion, as he ponders his love for Bernard, in The Waves: “To be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange”(
Nietzsche, on the other hand, is delighted: “One seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete; one is more complete.… It is not merely that it changes the feeling of values; the lover is worth more” (1967, 426).
In Greek lyric poetry, eros is an experience of melting. The god of desire himself is traditionally called “melter of limbs”
Literate training encourages a heightened awareness of personal physical boundaries and a sense of those boundaries as the vessel of one’s self. To control the boundaries is to possess oneself.
So in the lyric poets, love is something that assaults or invades the body of the lover to wrest control of it from him, a personal struggle of will and physique between the god and his victim. The poets record this struggle from within a consciousness—perhaps new in the world—of the body as a unity of limbs, senses and self, amazed at its own vulnerability.
Such a longing for love, rolling itself up under my heart, poured down much mist over my eyes, filching out of my chest the soft lungs
Desire and love and longing are directed at that which is akin to oneself [tou oikeiou], it seems. So if you two are loving friends [philoi] of one another then in some natural way you belong to one another [oikeioi esth’].
The breath of desire is Eros. Inescapable as the environment itself, with his wings he moves love in and out of all creatures at will. The individual’s total vulnerability to erotic influence is symbolized by those wings with their multisensual power to permeate and take control of a lover at any moment. Wings and breath transport Eros as wings and breath convey words:
The essential features that define this eros have already emerged in the course of our exploration of bittersweetness. Simultaneous pleasure and pain are its symptom. Lack is its animating, fundamental constituent. As syntax, it impressed us as something of a subterfuge: properly a noun, eros acts everywhere like a verb. Its action is to reach, and the reach of desire involves every lover in an activity of the imagination.
Kierkegaard also devotes some thought to this “sensuously idealizing power … [that] beautifies and develops the one desired so that he flushes in enhanced beauty by its reflection.”
That which is known, attained, possessed, cannot be an object of desire.
Across this space a spark of eros moves in the lover’s mind to activate delight. Delight is a movement (kinēsis) of the soul, in Aristotle’s definition (Rh. 1.1369b19). No difference: no movement. No Eros.
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. In the Greek poets it is a knowledge of self that begins to come into focus, a self not known before and now disclosed by the lack of it—by pain, by a hole, bitterly.
But then, Nietzsche calls the modern world an ass that says yes to everyhing. The Greek poets do not say yes. They allow that erotic experience is sweet to begin with: gluku. They acknowledge ideal possibilities opened out for selfhood by erotic experience; they do so, in general, by divinizing it in the person of the god Eros.
No, obviously the soul of each is longing for something else which it cannot put into normal words but keeps trying to express in oracles and riddles.
It is not the number ‘one,’ as we have seen in example after example, to which the lover’s mind inclines when he is given a chance to express his desire. Maneuvers of triangulation disclose him. For his delight is in reaching; to reach for something perfect would be perfect delight.
We have looked at similar tactics penetrating lovers’ logic and contracting upon a solitude unknown before. They are tactics of imagination, which sometimes turn upon enhancing the beloved, sometimes upon reconceiving the lover, but which are all aimed at defining one certain edge or difference: an edge between two images that cannot merge in a single focus because they do not derive from the same level of reality—one is actual, one is possible. To know both, keeping the difference visible, is the subterfuge called eros.
Space reaches out from us and translates the world.
Eros’ sweetness is inseparable from his bitterness, and each participates, in a way not yet obvious at all, in our human will to knowledge. There would seem to be some resemblance between the way Eros acts in the mind of a lover and the way knowing acts in the mind of a thinker.
I would like to grasp why it is that these two activities, falling in love and coming to know, make me feel genuinely alive. There is something like an electrification in them. They are not like anything else, but they are like each other.
“All men by their very nature reach out to know,” says Aristotle (Metaph. A 1.980a21). If this is so, it discloses something important about the activities of knowing and desiring. They have at their core the same delight, that of reaching, and entail the same pain, that of falling short or being deficient. This disclosure may be already implied in a certain usage of Homer, for epic diction has the same verb (mnaomai) for ‘to be mindful, to have in mind, to direct one’s attention to’ and ‘to woo, court, be a suitor.’ Stationed at the edge of itself, or of its present knowledge, the thinking mind launches a suit for understanding into the unknown. So too the wooer stands at the edge of his value as a person and asserts a claim across the boundaries of another. Both mind and wooer reach out from what is known and actual to something different, possibly better, desired. Something else. Think about what that feels like. (Las Meninas)
Eros also has “something paradoxical” at the core of his power, at that point where bitter intercepts sweet. There is a shift of distance that brings up close what is absent and different.
The English word ‘symbol’ is the Greek word symbolon which means, in the ancient world, one half of a knucklebone carried as a token of identity to someone who has the other half. Together the two halves compose one meaning. A metaphor is a species of symbol. So is a lover. In the words of Aristophanes (in Plato’s Symposium): ἕκαστος οὖν ἡμῶν ἐστιν ἀνθρώπου σύμβολον, ἅτε τετμημένος ὥσπερ αἱ ψῆτται, ἐξ ἑνὸς δύο· ζητεῖ δὴ ἀεὶ τὸ αὑτοῦ ἕκαστος σύμβολον. 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. (191d)
Every hunting, hungering lover is half of a knucklebone, wooer of a meaning that is inseparable from its absence. The moment when we understand these things—when we see what we are projected on a screen of what we could be—is invariably a moment of wrench and arrest. We love that moment, and we hate it. We have to keep going back to it, after all, if we wish to maintain contact with the possible. But this also entails watching it disappear. Only a god’s word has no beginning or end. Only a god’s desire can reach without lack. Only the paradoxical god of desire, exception to all these rules, is neverendingly filled with lack itself. “Sappho drew this conception together and called Eros glukupikron.”
Writing about desire, the archaic poets made triangles with their words. Or, to put it less sharply, they represent situations that ought to involve two factors (lover, beloved) in terms of three (lover, beloved and the space between them, however realized).
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.
Longus’ page makes love to the reader, first and obviously, by drawing him into the bittersweet emotion of lovers in the story.
All lovers believe they are inventing love: Daphnis and Chloe actually do invent love. They live in a pastoral wonderland, swell to desire with the buds of spring and, after many discouragements, marry one another on the last pages in a cave of Eros. They are, as one critic puts it, “emblematic innocents in emblematic predicaments undergoing an emblematic growth in erotic knowledge” (Heiserman 1977, 143). Here, for example, is what happens when Daphnis wins his father’s consent to marry Chloe and rushes out to tell her the news. The lovers find themselves in an orchard rich with fruit trees:
Letters are the mechanism of erotic paradox, at once connective and separative, painful and sweet. Letters construct the space of desire and kindle in it 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 (the actual and present erotic relation between Clitophon and the other woman) and what could be (the ideal love of Clitophon and Leucippe). Letters project the ideal on a screen of the actual. From within letters, Eros acts.
Letters make the absent present, and in an exclusive way, as if they were a private code from writer to reader.
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. The two symbola never perfectly match. Eros is in between.
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. The unknown must remain unknown or the novel ends. As all paradoxes are, in some way, paradoxes about paradox, so all eros is, to some degree, desire for desire.
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
The blind point of Eros is a paradox in time as well as in space. A desire to bring the absent into presence, or to collapse far and near, is also a desire to foreclose then upon now. As lover you reach forward to a point in time called ‘then’ when you will bite into the long-desired apple. Meanwhile you are aware that as soon as ‘then’ supervenes upon ‘now,’ the bittersweet moment, which is your desire, will be gone. You cannot want that, and yet you do.
This disease is an evil bound upon the day
Here’s a comparison—not bad, I think:
when ice gleams in the open air,
children grab.
Ice-crystal in the hands is
at first a pleasure quite novel.
But there comes a point—
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.
So, desire forms a ring around the small universe of its victims: the poet who strives to represent it, the children fascinated by its analog, the lover pinned in its compulsion. But that universe does not form the outer circle of the poem. You keep climbing, for the staircase continues to spiral. The desire at the beginning of the poem is desire as transience—it is an “ephemeral evil” (ephēmeron kakon), bound to the day that flickers over it. The desire at the end of the poem is desire as repetition—exerting its pull “over and over again” (pollakis). So time forms a ring around desire.
Endlessly I sustain the discourse of the beloved’s absence; actually a preposterous situation; the other is absent as referent, present as allocutory. This singular distortion generates a kind of insupportable present; I am wedged between two tenses, that of the reference and that of the allocution: you have gone (which I lament), you are here (since I am addressing you). Whereupon I know what the present, that difficult tense, is: a pure portion of anxiety.
The experience of eros is a study in the ambiguities of time. Lovers are always waiting. They hate to wait; they love to wait. Wedged between these two feelings, lovers come to think a great deal about time, and to understand it very well, in their perverse way.
Desire seems to the lover to demolish time in the instant when it happens, and to gather all other moments into itself in unimportance. Yet, simultaneously, the lover perceives more sharply than anyone else the difference between the ‘now’ of his desire and all the other moments called ‘then’ that line up before and after it.
Deute combines the particle dē with the adverb aute. The particle dē signifies vividly and dramatically that something is actually taking place at the moment (Denniston 1954, 203, 219, 250). The adverb aute means ‘again, once again, over again’ (LSJ). The particle dē marks a lively perception in the present moment: ‘Look at that now!’ The adverb aute peers past the present moment to a pattern of repeated actions stretching behind it: ‘Not for the first time!’ Dē places you in time and emphasizes that placement: now. Aute intercepts ‘now’ and binds it into a history of ‘thens’.
Eros—here it goes again! [dēute]—the limbloosener
whirls me, sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing
up
No one in love 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.
Sokrates conceives of wisdom as something alive, a “living breathing word” (ton logon zōnta kai empsychon, 276a), that happens between two people when they talk. Change is essential to it, not because wisdom changes but because people do, and must.
a Lysian theory of love violates those natural currents of physical and spiritual change that constitute our human situation in time.
Written texts make available the notion that one knows what one has merely read. For Plato this notion is a dangerous delusion; he believes the reach for knowledge to be a process that is necessarily lived out in space and time. Attempts to shortcut the process, or package it for convenient reuse, as in the form of a written treatise, are a denial of our commitment to time and cannot be taken seriously.
The static blooms of Adonis provide us with an answer to our question ‘What would the lover ask of time?’ As Plato formulates it, the answer brings us once again to the perception that lovers and readers have very similar desires. And the desire of each is something paradoxical. As lover you want ice to be ice and yet not melt in your hands. As reader you want knowledge to be knowledge and yet lie fixed on a written page. Such wants cannot help but pain you, at least in part, because they place you at a blind point from which you watch the object of your desire disappear into itself.
Lysias’ text offers to its readers something that no one who has been in love could fail to covet: self-control.
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: dēute, as the poets say. 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.
the intimacy of the nonlover is mixed with a mortal self-control [sōphrosynē thnētē] which disburses itself in mortal miserly measurings [thnēta te kai pheidōla oikonomousa] and engenders in the beloved soul that spirit of begrudgement commonly praised as virtue.…
that everything in existence has a beginning, with one exception: the beginning itself. Only the archē itself controls its own beginning. It is this very control that Lysias usurps when he takes his pen and crosses out the beginning of eros for his nonlover. But this act is fiction. 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.
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? How is it that when you fall in love you feel as if suddenly you are seeing the world as it really is? A mood of knowledge floats out over your life. You seem to know what is real and what is not. Something is lifting you toward an understanding so complete and clear it makes you jubilant. This mood is no delusion, in Sokrates’ belief. It is a glance down into time, at realities you once knew, as staggeringly beautiful as the glance of your beloved (249e-50c).
The point of time that Lysias deletes from his logos, the moment of mania when Eros enters the lover, is for Sokrates the single most important moment to confront and grasp. ‘Now’ is a gift of the gods and an access onto reality. 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 (253a).
Sokrates’ answer to the erotic dilemma of time, then, is the antithesis of Lysias’ answer. Lysias chooses to edit out ‘now’ and narrate entirely from the vantage point of ‘then.’ 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. Sokrates proposes instead to assimilate ‘now’ in such a way that it prolongs itself over the whole of life, and beyond. Sokrates would inscribe his novel within the instant of desire.
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.
Wings, in traditional poetry, are the mechanism by which Eros swoops upon the unsuspecting lover to wrest control of his person and personality. Wings are an instrument of damage and a symbol of irresistible power. When you fall in love, change sweeps through you on wings and you cannot help but lose your grip on that cherished entity, your self.
Wings are no foreign machinery of invasion in Plato’s conception. They have natural roots in each soul, a residue of its immortal beginnings. Our souls once lived on wings among the gods, he says, nourished as gods are by the infinite elation of looking at reality all the time. 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
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 mean to be.
For Sokrates, the moment when eros begins is a glimpse of the immortal ‘beginning’ that is a soul. The ‘now’ of desire is a shaft sunk into time and emerging onto timelessness, where the gods float, rejoicing in reality (247d-e). When you enter ‘now,’ you remember what it is like to be really alive, as gods are. There is something paradoxical in this ‘memory’ of a time that is timeless. The real difference between Sokrates’ and Lysias’ erotic theories resides in this paradox. Lysias is appalled by the paradox of desire and crosses it out: for him every erotic ‘now’ is the beginning of an end, and no more. He prefers a changeless, unending ‘then.’ But Sokrates looks at the paradoxical moment called ‘now’ and notices a curious movement taking place there. At the point where the soul begins itself, a blind point seems to open out. Into the blind point ‘then’ disappears.
When you fall in love you abandon the forms of ordinary life. The lover’s only care is to be with his beloved. All else slips into insignificance,
He never looks at you from the place from which you see him. Something moves in the space between. That is the most erotic thing about Eros.
A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination. Here people think only what they already know. Fiction is simply falsification. Delight is beside the point (a concept to be understood in historical terms). This city has an akinetic soul, a condition that Aristotle might explain in the following way.
“Eros makes every man a poet” says the ancient wisdom
Eros is always a story in which lover, beloved and the difference between them interact. The interaction is a fiction arranged by the mind of the lover. It carries an emotional charge both hateful and delicious and emits a light like knowledge. No one took a more clear-eyed view of
Eros is always a story in which lover, beloved and the difference between them interact. The interaction is a fiction arranged by the mind of the lover. It carries an emotional charge both hateful and delicious and emits a light like knowledge.