![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(no subject)
Jul. 1st, 2008 03:25 amI had a love affair, short and surprising. It began when a man at a party said I have to see you again - he said this all of a sudden (I knew him vaguely) in a conversation with other people about other things, dark green room, and it surprised me and I walked out into the night and went home surprised and didn't see him again for a year and then it began. It ended when he said I had damaged his soul. Also surprising! Love and hate are side-by-side surprises, are they not. I mention this because it is a universal puzzle and also because Empedokles had a theory of it, which may give some comfort. Empedokles tells us that the forces of Love and Strife roll through the universe organizing all reality into the actions and sufferings we call our lives. Yes they tear us apart but otherwise nothing would ever happen. Yes we are to blame for it but way back at the start of being us, not now. Back when the deep trees were still shivering in long joy their human arms. And the tones of each soul had just been brushed on - like a sudden clearance of snow we felt we could exist without lack! But soon the relics begin to stir - and certainly this cheats and baffles reason, how there can be relics at the dawn of time - yet we all know, as one moves into love, it gradually becomes impossible to identify with the other's innocence. From somewhere, almost inside it, stains soak through. Who am I? His tears exasperate me. You are good at being cold he says and I say Alas and the famine is all around us.
One of the best moments in Carson, hidden in Answer Scars, an 'annotation' to various artwork titles provided by some idiot narcissist that Carson blithely segues into her own concerns, mostly at the time her identification with Holderlin.
First time I read the lovely bit about the impossibility of identifying with the other's innocence, I think I thought of the uninnocence as being a kind of scheming. It's like they're out to get you, and taking it like that makes you out to get them. Inflects differently for me now: the uninnocence is their habits, their history, the ways they're not like you (or too like the bad you, the outer). You can't afford to not read their history in them, since they're in so much of your life which you have to live. But identifying them with that history, limiting them to it is such a loss. Such a slight adjustment and it works perfectly well but the inventory you've taken is all that's left of them, and who needs inventory.
Love the gnosticism. So close to Poimandres, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, that early Frost poem about choosing life before birth--but she's getting it from the source. Holderlin did that too, hence her obsession with him: took things back to early Greece and etymology, not so accurately but it's the need more than the scholarship that frees the movement.
Another gratification, this Holderlin quote, from The Death of Empedokles, I think in her translation:
yes I know everything, the world is mine
and subject to me are all its powers....
What would the sky be and the ocean,
the islands and stars
if! what would they be these lifeless strings! without my giving them music and speech and soul?
Pure Shelley: "Hymn of Apollo" and "Mont Blanc" especially. Was she thinking of Shelley? The phrasing of the latter may also color her summary of Empedoklean Strife and Love.
A gift to know that these stranger friends think the same thoughts, ignorant of one another or not. The same stars, inside and out, of the dying astronomer's gesture.
One of the best moments in Carson, hidden in Answer Scars, an 'annotation' to various artwork titles provided by some idiot narcissist that Carson blithely segues into her own concerns, mostly at the time her identification with Holderlin.
First time I read the lovely bit about the impossibility of identifying with the other's innocence, I think I thought of the uninnocence as being a kind of scheming. It's like they're out to get you, and taking it like that makes you out to get them. Inflects differently for me now: the uninnocence is their habits, their history, the ways they're not like you (or too like the bad you, the outer). You can't afford to not read their history in them, since they're in so much of your life which you have to live. But identifying them with that history, limiting them to it is such a loss. Such a slight adjustment and it works perfectly well but the inventory you've taken is all that's left of them, and who needs inventory.
Love the gnosticism. So close to Poimandres, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, that early Frost poem about choosing life before birth--but she's getting it from the source. Holderlin did that too, hence her obsession with him: took things back to early Greece and etymology, not so accurately but it's the need more than the scholarship that frees the movement.
Another gratification, this Holderlin quote, from The Death of Empedokles, I think in her translation:
yes I know everything, the world is mine
and subject to me are all its powers....
What would the sky be and the ocean,
the islands and stars
if! what would they be these lifeless strings! without my giving them music and speech and soul?
Pure Shelley: "Hymn of Apollo" and "Mont Blanc" especially. Was she thinking of Shelley? The phrasing of the latter may also color her summary of Empedoklean Strife and Love.
A gift to know that these stranger friends think the same thoughts, ignorant of one another or not. The same stars, inside and out, of the dying astronomer's gesture.
