Princeton University Press

Chapter Title: Something Serious Is Missing

Book Title: Eros the Bittersweet

Book Subtitle: An Essay
Book Author(s): Anne Carson
Published by: Princeton University Press. (1986)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zv117.32

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the Bittersweet

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 Something Serious

Is Missing

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.
Plato is perfectly aware of that pain. He re-creates it
over and over again in his dialectic, and its experience is
intrinsic to the kind of understanding he wishes to com-
municate. In the Phaedrus we have observed this re-cre-
ation especially on the analogic level. Plato's analogies
are not flat diagrams in which one image (for example,
gardens) is superimposed on another (the written word)
in exact correspondence. An analogy is constructed in
three-dimensional space. Its images float one upon the
other without convergence: there is something in be-
tween, something paradoxical: Eros.
Eros is the unspoken ground of all that happens be-
tween Adonis and Aphrodite in myth, which is reenacted
in the ritual of gardens. Eros is the ground where logos
takes root between two people who are having a conver-
sation, which may be reenacted on the written page. Rit-

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 Something Serious Is Missing

uals and reenactments take place outside the real time of

people's lives, in a suspended moment of control. We
love such suspended time for the sake of its difference
from ordinary time and real life. We love the activities
that are placed within suspended time, like festivals and
reading, for their essential unseriousness. This love wor-
ries Plato. A person seduced by it may think to replace
real time with the kind of time appropriate only in rituals
or in books. That would be a serious, damaging mistake,
in Plato's view. For, as there is no exact correspondence
between rootless plants and a dying Adonis, so there is
only a symbolic correspondence between written words
and real logos. The person who mistakes symbol for real-
ity is left with a dead garden, or with a love affair such as
Lysias prescribes for the nonlover. Something is missing
from such a love affair, as life is missing from the garden,
something essential: Eros.

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