Anne Carson Quotes

Most / of those he interviewed for the science project had to admit they did not hear the cries of the roses / being burned alive in the noonday sun. Like horses, Geryon would say helpfully, / like horses in war. No, they shook their heads./ Why is grass called blades? he asked them. Isn't it because of the clicking? / They stared at him. You should be / interviewing roses not people, said the science teacher. Geryon liked this idea. / The last page of his project / was a photograph of his mother's rosebush under the kitchen window. / Four od the roses were on fire. / They stood up straight and pure on the stalk, gripping the dark like prophets / and howling colossal intimacies / from the back of their fused throats.

I emphasize the distinction between brackets and no brackets because it will affect your reading experience, if you will allow it. Brackets are exciting. Even though you are approaching Sappho in translation, that is no reason you should miss the drama of trying to read a papyrus torn in half or riddled with holes or smaller than a postage stamp
brackets imply a free space of imaginal adventure.

Maybe I could have been good as a drawer if I had done it as much as I did writing, but it's more scary to draw. It's more revealing. You can't disguise yourself in drawing.

My religion makes no sense
and does not help me
therefore I pursue it.

This was when Geryon liked to plan his autobiography; in that blurred state, between awake and asleep. When too many intake values are open in the soul, like the terrestrial crust of the earth.

Love does not
make me gentle or kind.

There is something about the way that Greek poets, say Aeschylus, use metaphor that really attracts me. I don't think I can imitate it, but there's a density to it that I think I'm always trying to push towards in English.

There are different gradations of personhood in different poems. Some of them seem far away from me and some up close, and the up-close ones generally don't say what I want them to say. And that's true of the persona in the poem who's lamenting this as a fact of a certain stage of life. But it's also true of me as me.

A cold ship

moves out of harbor somewhere way inside the wife
and slides off toward the flat gray horizon,

not a bird not a breath in sight.

Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary.

CHORUS
Many are the shapes of things divine.
Many are the unexpected acts of gods.
What we imagined did not come to pass --
God found a way
to be surprising.
That's how this went.

In myth, women's boundaries are pliant, porous, mutable. Her power to control them is inadequate, her concern for them unreliable. Deformation attends her. She swells, she shrinks, she leaks, she is penetrated, she suffers metamorphoses. The women of mythology regularly lose their form in monstrosity.

And now time is rushing towards them
where they stand side by side with arms touching, immortality on their faces, night at their back.

Hegel on sacrifice. The animal dies. The man becomes alert.

To be a prophet, Knox emphasizes, requires living in and looking at the present, at what is really going on around you.

A refugee population is hungry for language and aware that anything can happen.

how is a Greek chorus like a lawyer
they're both in the business of searching for a precedent
finding an analogy
locating a prior example
so as to be able to say
this terrible thing we're witnessing now is
not unique you know it happened before
or something much like it
we're not at a loss how to think about this
we're not without guidance
there is a pattern
we can find an historically parallel case
and file it away under
ANTIGONE BURIED ALIVE FRIDAY AFTERNOON
COMPARE CASE HISTORIES 7, 17 AND 49
now I could dig up those case histories
tell you about Danaos and Lykourgos and the sons of Phineus
people locked up in a room or a cave or their own dark mind
it wouldn't help you
it doesn't help me
it's Friday afternoon
there goes Antigone to be buried alive

He stood against the wind and let it peel him
clean

Under the seams runs the pain.

How does distance look? is a simple direct question. It extends from a spaceless within to the edge of what can be loved.

Why does tragedy exist? Because you are full of rage. Why are you full of rage? Because you are full of grief.

Eros is an issue of boundaries. He exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between 'I love you' and 'I love you too,' the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can.

Simply do something else and return to it later to find the problem wasn't a problem at all. Ruptures almost always lead to a stronger project.

Meanwhile music pounded / across hearts opening every valve to the desperate drama of being / a self in a song.

Time isn't made of anything. It is an abstraction. Just a meaning that we impose upon motion.

God's pity! How long will it feel like burning?

Three days
(so I hear)
she is without food,
keeps her body
pure of bread, longs to
run herself aground
in a sad secret death.

Is it a god inside you, girl?

[Short Talk on the Sensation of Airplane Takeoff] Well you know I wonder, it could be love running toward my life with its arms up yelling let's buy it what a bargain!

But when justice is done the world drops away.

Components of today include a shape asleep on the floor an erased white world the tumblers vibrating in the closet and he brought the wrong book. Alive in a room as usual.

Comparison
makes you less interesting
to yourself doesn't it.
Your magic contracts your
body putting forth no frill
under another's gaze.

Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

I'm a strange new kind of inbetween thing aren't I
not at home with the dead nor with the living

Winter noon is on the rise. Weak suns yet alive
are as virtue to suns of that other day.
For the poor town dreams
of surrender, mother
never untender,
mother gallant
and gay.

Your voice I know. It had me terrified. When I hear it in dreams, from time to time all my life, it sounds like a taunt - but dreams distort sound, for they send it over many waters. During these hard days, I, a pilgrim, am giving my consideration to this. I trudge along the bottom of the river and the questioning goes on in me. What are we made of but hunger and rage? His heels rise and fall in front of me. How surprised I am to be entangled in the knowledge of some other animal.

I do think that something of the effect I have on people is to put everything on an edge where they're both infatuated with a kind of charmingness happening in the person or in the writing, and also flatly terrified by a revelation or acceptance of revelation that's almost happening, never quite totally happening.

Who knows what will happen if I'm alone with my grief.

I started to learn Greek when I was in high school, the last year of high school, by accident, because my teacher knew Greek and she offered to teach me on the lunch hour, so we did it in an informal way, and then I did it at university, and that was the main thing of my life.

What's here doesn't please you,
what's far off you crave.
Anne Carson, from Grief Lessons: Four Plays by Euripides

Caught between the tongue and the taste.

I don't want to be a person.
I want to be unbearable.

He / thought of women. / What is it like to be a woman / listening in the dark? Black mantle of silence / stretches between them like geothermal pressure. / Ascent of the rapist up the stairs seems as slow as / lava. She listens / to the blank space where / his consciousness is, moving towards her. Lava can / move as slow as / nine hours per inch. [ ... ] She wonders if / he is listening too. The cruel thing is, she falls asleep / listening.

Ray please I never lied to her. When need arose I may have used words that lied.

Time as hunger.
Time passing and gazing.
Time as perseverance.
Mountain time.
Time as paper folded to look like a mountain.
Time compared to the wild fantastic silence of stars.

A gust of night pushed its way in the door
and everyone inside wavered once like stalks in a field then resumed their talk.

CHORUS: Helen! wild mad Helen
you murdered so many beneath Troy.
Now you've crowned yourself one final perfect time,
a crown of blood that will not wash away.
Strife walks with you everywhere you go.
KLYTAIMESTRA: Oh, stop whining.
And why get angry at Helen?
As if she singlehandedly destroyed those multitudes of men.
As if she all alone made this wound in us

He had a respect for facts maybe this was one.

In later years this
is the one memory he
wishes would go away and
not come back. And the
reason he cannot bear her
dying is not the loss of her
(which is the future) but
that dying puts the two of
them (now) into this
nakedness together that is
unforgiveable. They do not
forgive it. He turns away.
This roaring air in his
arms. She is released.

What difference would such power make to
someone in love? What would the lover ask of time if he were in control?

When you are falling in love it is always already too late: dēute, as the poets say.

There is a theory that watching unbearable stories about other people lost in grief and rage is good for you - may cleanse you of your darkness. Do you want to go down to the pits of yourself all alone? Not much. What if an actor could do it for you? Isn't that why they are called actors? They act for you. You sacrifice them to action. And this sacrifice is a mode of deepest intimacy of you with your own life. Within it you watch [yourself] act out the present or possible organization of your nature. You can be aware of your own awareness of this nature as you never are at the moment of experience. The actor, by reiterating you, sacrifices a moment of his own life in order to give you a story of yours.

Consider incompleteness as a verb.

I am not a person who feels easy talking about blood or desire. I rarely used the word woman myself. But such things are the natural facts of what we are, I suppose we have to follow out these signs in the endless struggle against forgetting. The truth is, I lived out my adolescence mainly in default of my father's favor. But I perceived that I could trouble him less if I had no gender.

I used to think when I was younger and writing that each idea had a certain shape and when I started to study Greek and I found the word morphe it was for me just the right word for that, unlike the word shape in English which falls a bit short morphe in greek means the sort of plastic contours that an idea has inside your all your senses when you grasp it the first moment and it always seemed to me that a work should play out that same contour in its form. So I can't start writing something down til I get a sense of that, that morphe. And then it unfolds, I wouldn't say naturally, but it unfolds gropingly by keeping only to the contours of that form whatever it is.

Let's do something cheerful
all your designs are about captivity, it depresses me.
Geryon watched the top of Herakles' head
and felt his limits returning. Nothing to say. He looked at this fact
in mild surprise. Once in childhood
his ice cream had been eaten by a dog. Just an empty con
in a small dramatic red fist.
Herakles stood up. No? Let's go then. On the way home they tried "Joy To The World"
but were too tired. It seemed a long drive.

I do think I have an ability to record sensual and emotional facts and factoids, to construct a convincing surface of what life feels like, both physical life and emotional life.

I am kind of a curmudgeonly person, so I don't gravitate to groups or traditions, which is probably just pretentious of me.

Monogamous.
I'm interested in monogamous.
I got married last May

and had my honeymoon is Stykkishólmur.
This year I returned to Stykkishólmur
to live with my husband

for three months in one small room.
This extreme monogamy
proved almost too much for us.

Rather than murder each other
we rented a second place
(Greta's house)

near the pool.
Now we are happily duogamous.

Everything depends on liking the people and trusting the people. You have to assume that whatever they do will be as good as you want the thing to be and just go ahead with that.

Banal sexism aside,
I find myself tempted

to read Wuthering Heights as one thick stacked act of revenge
for all that life withheld from Emily.
But the poetry shows traces of a deeper explanation.

As if anger could be a kind of vocation for some women.
It is a chilly thought.

When an ecstatic is asked the question, What is it that love dares the self to do? she will answer: Love dares the self to leave itself behind, to enter into poverty.

MEGARA
Wait for worse? You love the light so much?

AMPHITRYON
I do, I love its hopes.

My brother once showed me a piece of quartz that contained, he said, some trapped water older than all the seas in our world. He held it up to my ear. 'Listen,' he said, 'life and no escape.

Those nights lying alone are not discontinuous with this cold hectic dawn. It is who I am.

Fr. 2
All We as Leaves
He (following Homer) compares man's life with the leaves.
All we as leaves in the shock of it:
spring-
one dull gold bounce and you're there.
You see the sun? - I built that.
As a lad. The Fates lashing their tails in a corner.
But (let me think) wasn't it a hotel in Chicago where I had the first of those - my body walking out of the room
bent on some deadly errand
and me up on the ceiling just sort of fading out-
brainsex paintings I used to call them?
In the days when I (so to speak) painted.
Remember
that oddly wonderful chocolate we got in East
(as it was then) Berlin?

I will not stop singing
the Muses who set me dancing.

As Sokrates tells it, your story begins the moment Eros enters you. That incursion is the biggest risk of your life. How you handle it is an index of the quality, wisdom, and decorum of the things inside you. As you handle it you come into contact with what is inside you, in a sudden and startling way. You perceive what you are, what you lack, what you could be.

Nighthawks

I wanted to run away with you tonight
but you are a difficult woman
the rules of you -

Past and future circle round us
now we know more now less
in the institute of shadows.

On a street black as widows
with nothing to confess
our distances found us

the rules of you -
so difficult a woman
I wanted to run away with you tonight.

You are a person in love with the impossible

They were two superior eels
at the bottom of the tank and they recognized each other like italics.

What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.

You read a hundred
military manuals you won't
find the word kill they trick
you into killing.

Free marks are a gesture of rage. One of the oldest myths we have of this gesture is the story of Adam and Eve in the garden of paradise. Why did Eve put a free mark on that apple? To say she was seduced by the snake or longing for absolute knowledge or in search of immortality are posterior analytics. Isn't the simple fact of the matter that she was bored?

HE WAS FOURTEEN
it was years ago and Sad's
name wasn't Sad yet. First
comet. G had just
stumbled off a bus they
looked at one another and
that lasted until G was
almost twenty but he.
Well. Being a loyal soul
himself. Sad's need to
make friends everywhere.
Sex friends club friends
gym friends dope friends
shopping friends
breakdown friends a
common enough problem.
Sad didn't see a problem.
One day he looked around
and G was gone.

I: Dreams give us more than we ask
M: I'm not talking about dreams no one's dreams are of any use to anyone else
I: Why
M: They are merely experiments an experimental surface
I: But surely that involves at least let's say an organizing effort
M: Nothing takes place but the place
I: Are you serious
M: Just a telephone ringing in an empty house
I: Why not answer it

Desire is no light thing.

I don't know that we really think any thoughts; we think connections between thoughts. That's where the mind moves, that's what's new, and the thoughts themselves have probably been there in my head or lots of other people's heads for a long time.

Heracles was strangely silent. What is he thinking? / Geryon wondered. / Geryon watched prehistoric rocks move past the car and thought about thoughts. / Even when they were lovers / he had never known what Herakles was thinking. Once in a while he would say, / Penny for your thoughts! / and it always turned out to be some odd thing like a bumper sticker or a dish / he'd eaten in a Chinese restaurant years ago. / What Geryon was thinking Herakles never asked. In the space between them / developed a dangerous cloud.

It is generally anger dreams that occupy my nights now.
This is not uncommon after loss of love -

blue and black and red blasting the crater open.
I am interested in anger.

I don't read reviews and I don't know what to do with opinions, so I just lose them. They take up space, they become a process of manufacturing a persona, which I want to avoid.

My mother forbad us to walk backwards. That is how the dead walk, she would say. Where did she get this idea? Perhaps from a bad translation. The dead, after all, do not walk backwards but they do walk behind us. They have no lungs and cannot call out but would love for us to turn around. They are victims of love, many of them.

Some conversations are not about what they're about.

Now every mortal has pain
and sweat is constant,
but if there is anything dearer than being alive,
it's dark to me.
We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing
(whatever it is) that glitters on the earth
we call it life. We know no other.
The underworld's a blank
and all the rest just fantasy.

I walk and walk with cold hands.
Back at the house it is filled with longing,
nothing to carry longing away.
I look back over my life.
I try to find analogies.
There are none.
I have longed for people before, I have loved people before.
Not like this.
It was not this.

To feel anything
deranges you. To be seen
feeling anything strips you
naked. In the grip of it
pleasure or pain doesn't
matter. You think what
will they do what new
power will they acquire if
they see me naked like
this. If they see you
feeling. You have no idea
what. It's not about them.
To be seen is the penalty.

Geryon was amazed at himself. He saw Herakles just about every day now.
The instant of nature
forming between them drained every drop from the walls of his life
leaving behind just ghosts
rustling like an old map. He had nothing to say to anyone. He felt loose and shiny.
He burned in the presence of his mother
I hardly know you anymore, she said leaning against the doorway of his room.
It had rained suddenly at suppertime,
now sunset was startling drops at the window. Stale peace of old bedtimes
filled the room. Love does not
make me gentle or kind, thought Geryon as he and his mother eyed each other
from opposite shores of the light

Gorge after gorge, turning, turning. Caverns of sunset, falling, falling away - just a single vast gold air breathed out by beings - they must have been marvelous beings, those gold-breathers. Down. Purple-and-green islands. Cleft and groined and gigantically pocked like something left behind after all the oceans vanished one huge night: the mountains. Their hills fold and fold again, fold away, down. Folded into the dens and rocks of the hills are ghost towns. Broken streets end in them, like a sound, nowhere. Shadow is inside. We walk (oh quietly) even so - breaking lines of force, someone's. Houses stand in their stones. Each house an empty socket. Some streaked with red inside. Words once went on in there - no. I don't believe that. Words never went on in there.

The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind.

No one will ever make necessity not happen.

You used to say. "Desire doubled is love and love doubled is madness."
Madness doubled is marriage
I added
when the caustic was cool, not intending to produce
a golden rule.

That night we made love "the real way" which we had not yet attempted
although married six months.
Big mystery. No one knew where to put their leg and to this day I'm not sure
we got it right.
He seemed happy. You're like Venice he said beautifully.
Early next day
I wrote a short talk ("On Defloration") which he stole and had published
in a small quarterly magazine.
Overall this was a characteristic interaction between us.
Or should I say ideal.
Neither of us had ever seen Venice.

It is for God to fix the time who knows no time,

Philosophers say man forms himself in dialogue.

Here we go mother on the shipless ocean.
Pity us, pity the ocean, here we go.

When is a pilgrim like a photograph? When the blend of acids and sentiment is just right.

Small, red, and upright he waited,
gripping his new bookbag tight
in one hand and touching a lucky penny inside his coat pocket with the other,
while the first snows of winter
floated down on his eyelashes and covered the branches around him and silenced
all trace of the world.

A thousand questions hit my eyes from the inside.

It takes practice to shave the skin off the light.

What sense is there in pain at all - however we contrive it for ourselves as we cast about for ways to bind up the wound between us and God?

We humans seem disastrously in love with this thing (whatever it is) that glitters on the earth
we call it life.