Anne Carson Poem

ESSAY ON WHAT I THINK ABOUT MOST by Anne Carson (from Men In The Off Hours)

Error.

And its emotions.

On the brink of error is a condition of fear.

In the midst of error is a state of folly and defeat.

Realizing you’ve made an error brings shame and remorse.

Or does it?

Let’s look into this.

Lots of people including Aristotle think error

An interesting and valuable mental event.

In his discussion of metaphor in the Rhetoric

Aristotle says there are 3 kinds of words.

Strange, ordinary and metaphorical.

“Strange words simply puzzle us;

ordinary words convey what we know already;

it is from metaphor that we can get hold of something new and fresh:

(Rhetoric, 1410b10-13)

In what does the freshness of metaphor consist?

Aristotle says that metaphor causes the mind to experience itself

In the act of making a mistake.

He pictures the mind moving along a plane surface

Of ordinary language

When suddenly

That surface breaks or complicates.

Unexpectedness emerges.

At first it looks odd, contradictory or wrong.

Then it makes sense.

And at this moment, according to Aristotle,

The mind turns to itself and says:

“How true, and yet I mistook it!”

From the true mistakes of metaphor a lesson can be learned.

Not only that things are other than they seem,

And so we mistake them, but that such mistakenness is valuable.

Hold onto it, Aristotle says,

There is much to be seen and felt here.

Metaphors teach the mind

To enjoy error

And to learn

From the juxtaposition of what is and what is not the case.

There is a Chinese proverb that says,
Brush cannot write two characters with the same stroke.

And yet

that is exactly what a good mistake does.

Here is an example.

It is a fragment of ancient Greek lyric

that contains an error of arithmetic.

The poet does not seem to know

That 2+2=4.

Alkman fragment 20:

[?] made three seasons, summer

and winter and autumn third

and fourth spring when

there is blooming but to eat enough

is not.

Alkman lived in Sparta in the 7^th century B.C.

Now Sparta was a poor country

and it is unlikely

that Alkman led a wealthy or well-fed life there.

This fact forms the background of his remarks

Which end in hunger.

Hunger always feels

Like a mistake.

Alkman makes us experience this mistake

With him

By an effective use of computational error.

For a poor Spartan poet with nothing

left in his cupboard

at the end of winter-

along comes spring

like an afterthought of natural economy,

fourth in a series of three,

unbalancing his arithmetic

and enjambing his verse.

Alkman’s poem breaks off midway through an iambic metron

with no explanation

of where spring came from

or why numbers don’t help us

control reality better.

There are three things I like about Alkman’s poem.

First that it is small,

light

and more than perfectly economical.

Second that is seems to suggest colors like pale green

without ever naming them.

Third that it manages to put into play

some major metaphysical questions

(like Who made the world)

without overt analysis.

You notice the verb “made” in the first verse

has no subject: [?]

It is very unusual in Greek

for a verb to have no subject, in fact

it is a grammatical mistake.

Strict philologists will tell you

that this mistake is just an accident of transmission,

that the poem as we have it

is surely a fragment broken off

some longer text

and that Alkman almost certainly did

name the agent of creation

in the verses preceding what we have here.

Well that may be so.

But as you know the chief aim of philology

is to reduce all textual delight

to an accident of history.

And I am uneasy with any claim to know exactly

what a poet means to say.

So let’s leave the question mark there

at the beginning of the poem

and admire Alkman’s courage

in confronting what it brackets.

The fourth thing I like about Alkman’s poem

is the impression it gives

of blurting out the truth in spite of itself.

Many a poet aspires

to this tone of inadvertent lucidity

but few realize it so simply as Alkman.

Of course his simplicity is a fake.

Alkman is not simple at all,

he is a master contriver-

or what Aristotle would call an “imitator”

of reality.

Imitation (mimesis in Greek)

is Aristotle’s collective term for the true mistakes of poetry.

What I like about this term

is the ease with which it accepts

that what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error,

the willful creation of error,

the deliberate break and complication of mistakes

out of which may arise

unexpectedness.

So a poet like Alkman

sidesteps fear, anxiety, shame, remorse

and all the other silly emotions associated with making mistakes

in order to engage

the fact of the matter.

The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection.

Alkman breaks the rules of arithmetic

and jeopardizes grammar

and messes up the metrical form of his verse

in order to draw us into this fact.

At the end of the poem the fact remains

and Alkman is probably no less hungry.

Yes something has changed in the quotient of our expectations.

For in mistaking them,

Alkman has perfected something.

Indeed he has

more than perfected something.

Using a single brushstroke.

Zecharia Sitchin Passes Away - UFO Evolution

Zecharia Sitchin Passes Away - UFO Evolution

Once there was a girl

Who got lost somewhere between the graded graduations. Cutting things up; a thousand fractions kept filing themselves away in her brain. Then a storm came. Some things were lost, others she saved, held on to tightly showing everyone she came across. Still, sometimes when the wind blows, she'll find some waiting, blown up against her door all soaking and mushed.
She peels them off and lays them out in the sun.

Greetings

I react back, but a tad bit slow, for you see my thoughts tend to fall down some kind of hole.