created 2025-03-30, & modified, =this.modified
rel: Wrong Norma by Anne Carson Consuming Romantic Utopia - Eva Illouz Praxilla
Why I’m Reading
Following Wrong Norma by Anne Carson, felt like reading more Anne Carson.
Absence of romantic love.
Kafka - The Top
Kafka’s “The Top” is a story about a philosopher who spends his spare time around children so he can grab their tops in spin. To catch a top still spinning makes him happy for a moment in his belief “that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things.”
Bittersweet
We take for granted, the sweetness of erotic desire; its pleasurability smiles out at us. But the bittersweet is less obvious.
Sappho: ”Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up”
Phaon
In Greek mythology, Phaon was a mythical boatman of Mytilene in Lesbos. He was old and ugly when Aphrodite came to his boat. She put on the guise of a crone. Phaon ferried her over to Asia Minor and accepted no payment for doing so. In return, she gave him a box of ointment. When he rubbed it on himself, he became young and beautiful. Many were captivated by his beauty.
According to Athenian Theater, Sappho fell in love with him. He lay with her but soon grew to resent her and devalue her. Sappho was so distraught with his rejection that she threw herself into the sea under the superstition that she would be either cured of her love, or drowned. She was drowned. Aelian says that Phaon was killed by a man whom he was cuckolding.
He is also mentioned by Plautus in Miles Gloriosus as being one of only two men in the whole world, who “ever had the luck to be so passionately loved by a woman”
Gone
Greek word eros denotes “want, lack, or the 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, soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting.
All our desires are contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the person I love to love me. If he is, however, totally devoted to me he does not exist any longer and I cease to love him. And as long as he is not totally devoted to me he does not love me enough. Hunger and repletion.
Who ever desires what it not gone? No one.
Ruse
Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry (inscription over the door of Plato’s academy)
Sappho
He seems to me equal to gods that man who is opposite of 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.
Lover, beloved and that which comes between them - the geometry of desire.
Tactics
Aidōs dwells upon the eyelids of sensitive people as does hybris upon the insensitive. A wise man would know this.
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. The proverbial residence of aidōs upon sensitive eyelids is a way of saying that aidōs exploits the power of the glance by withholding it, and also that one must watch one’s feet to avoid the misstep called hybris.
I want to say something to you, but aidos prevents me.…
The Reach
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
The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time).
Sensibility
…undeniable evidence remains, in the preserved fragments of their verses, of a sensibility acutely tuned to the vulnerability of the physical body and of the emotions or spirit within it. Such a sensibility is not given voice in the poetry we have from before this period. Perhaps this is due to an accident of technology. Lyric poetry and the sensibility typical of it begin for us with Archilochos because his poems came to be written down, we do not know how or why, sometime in the seventh or sixth century B.C. Perhaps there were many Archilochoses before him composing oral lyrics about the depradations of Eros. Nonetheless, the fact that Archilochos and his lyric successors derive from a written tradition marks in itself a decisive difference between them and whatever was before, not just because it gives us their texts but because it cues us to certain radically new conditions of life and mind within which they were operating. Oral cultures and literate cultures do not think, perceive or fall in love in the same way.
Oral cultures and literate cultures do not think, perceive or fall in love in the same way.
Thought
Again, I think I can only fall in love with someone who reads.
At the same time, a more private revolution is set in process by the phenomenon of alphabetization. As the audiotactile world of the oral culture is transformed into a world of words on paper where vision is the principal conveyor of information, a reorientation of perceptual abilities begins to take place within the individual.
The Oral one: Self-control is minimally stressed in an oral milieu where most of the data important for survival and understanding are channelled into the individual through the open conduits of his senses, particularly his sense of sound, in a continuous interaction linking him with the world outside him. Complete openness to the environment is a condition of optimum awareness and alertness for such a person, and a continual fluent interchange of sensual impressions and responses between the environment and himself is the proper condition of his physical and mental life. To close his senses off from the outside world would be counterproductive to life and to thought.
The Reading/Writing one: As an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of his senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, so as to train energy and thought upon the written words. He resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him.
Alphabetic Edge
rel:Adjacent characters Aesthetics
The Greek Alphabet revolutionized the human ability to set down thoughts.
The components of every single linguistic noise are two
- a sound
- the starting and stopping of the sound
What must be stressed is that the act which created the alphabet is an idea, an act of intellect which, so far as signs for the independent consonants are concerned, is also an act of abstraction from anything an ear can hear or a voice say. For the pure consonant (t, d, k or whatever) is unpronounceable without adding to it some suggestion of vocalic breath. The Phoenician sign stood for a consonant plus any vowel, the vowel being supplied from context by a reader. The Greek sign, and this for the first time in the history of writing, stands for an abstraction, the isolated consonant.
We read too much, write too poorly and remember too little about the delightful discomfort of learning these skills for the first time.
Pythagoras is said to have felt a similar aesthetic pressure:
He took pains over the beauty of letters, forming each stroke with a geometrical rhythm of angles and curves and straight lines.
Boustrophēdon
Through the sixth century B.C. they used for their inscriptions the continuous to-and-fro style of writing known as boustrophēdon, so named because it turns at the end of each line and comes back along the furrow as the ox turns with the plow.
Writing this way was made easier for the Greek writer by the fact that, of the twenty-six shapes available to him, twelve were symmetrical, six required very little change in reversal and only eight looked markedly different backwards.
Juncus rigidus
Juncus rigidus is a species of rush known by the common name sea rush. It is native to much of Africa and parts of western Asia. It is found inland and by the sea in sandy saline habitats. In Ancient Egypt, Juncus rigidus was used to make pens for writing on papyrus. The rush has also been used for weaving mats and the fibre can be used in paper manufacture.
With this soft brush the Egyptian writer painted rather than wrote his letters, producing a thick and often uneven band of ink that left forked trails wherever it was lifted.
Thought
Another connection between text/computer/writing/weaving/fabric as computation
Greek reed pens defined outlines and edges, a tool for paying attention to each start and stop.
Being a phonetic system, the Greek alphabet is concerned to symbolize not objects in the real world but the very process in which sounds act to construct speech. Phonetic script imitates the activity of discourse itself. The Greek alphabet revolutionized this imitative function through introduction of its consonant, which is a theoretic element, an abstraction. The consonant functions by means of an act of imagination in the mind of the user. I am writing this book because that act astounds me. It is an act in which the mind reaches out from what is present and actual to something else.
What Does a Lover Want from Love?
Emma Bovary’s love letters to Rodolphe
But as she wrote she saw in her mind’s eye another man, a phantom composed of her most passionate memories, her most enjoyable books, and her strongest desires; at last he became so real and so tangible that she was thrilled and amazed, and yet he was so hidden under the abundance of his virtues that she was unable to imagine him clearly.
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.
Symbolon
In the Greek 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 a symbol.
σύμβολον symbolon, from a verb meaning ‘put together’, ‘compare’, alluding to the Classical practice of breaking a piece of ceramic in two and giving one half to the person who would receive a future message, and one half to the person who would send it: when the two fit perfectly together, the receiver could be sure that the messenger bearing it did indeed also carry a genuine message from the intended person.
Thought
I do not feel at all halved. I would like someone to spend time with more closely, but this is because it is something I want, not need.
I don’t say this as someone who would push out someone who I loved, and loved me.
What a Difference a Wing Makes
When you fall in love you abandon the forms of ordinary life.
It is an old idea in Greek that the gods have their own language. Modern philologists are of the opinion that we have here a vestige of the difference between Greek and pre-Greek populations of the mainland. The ancients took a bolder view. “Clearly the gods call things by the names which are naturally right”
Mythoplokos
Imagine a city where there is no desire. Supposing for the moment that the inhabitants of the city continue to eat, drink and procreate in some mechanical way; still, their life looks flat. They do not theorize or spin tops or speak figuratively. Few think to shun pain; none give gifts. They bury their dead and forget where.
A city with no desire is a city of no imagination.
For Sappho, the desirability of desire seems to be bound up with the fictional process that she calls “the weaving of myth.”