- Anne Carson / Eros the Bittersweet
Added 2025-03-22 10:41:52 +0000 UTC"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."
