c’s Reviews > Eros the Bittersweet > Status Update

'Eros is always a story in which lover, beloved and the difference between them interact.'

tbh i love how the spatial elements of eros are described in this essay – really makes you think about the geometric aspect of yearning / reaching

'Lysias is appalled by the paradox of desire and crosses it out: for him every erotic ‘now’ is the beginning of an end, and no more. He prefers a changeless, unending ‘then.’ But Sokrates looks at the paradoxical moment called ‘now’ and notices a curious movement taking place there. At the point where the soul begins itself, a blind point seems to open out. Into the blind point ‘then’ disappears.'

wowwww

'From that moment on, the story is largely up to you, but the beginning is not. In this realization lies the critical difference between Sokrates’ and Lysias’ erotic thinking. Sokrates has Phaedrus search Lysias’ logos for a beginning, in vain, to make a point. The beginning is not fictive. It cannot be placed in the control of a writer or reader.'

'Lysias does not create a stereoscopic image out of these two points in time, pulling your perceptions askew as Sophokles does in the poem about melting ice. Lysias’ ‘now’ and ‘then’ are not discontinuous or incompatible with one another, and their convergence is not paintful or paradoxical for the nonlover: desire is invested at neither point.'

'It rotates on an axis of ephemerality: contingent upon the day (ephēmeron) it will melt with the day. But days recur. It rotates on an axis of novelty: as lover you are pulled into vertigo “over and over again.” You cannot want that, and yet you do. It is quite new every time.'

wow

'As the vowels and consonants of an alphabet interact symbolically to make a certain written word, so writer and reader bring together two halves of one meaning, so lover and beloved are matched together like two sides of one knucklebone. An intimate collusion occurs. The meaning composed is private and true and makes permanent, perfect sense. Ideally speaking, at least, that is the case.'

'To create pleasure and pain at once is the novelist’s aim. We should
dwell on this point for a moment. It is of some importance that, as
readers, we are typically and repeatedly drawn into a conflicted
emotional response which approximates that of the lover’s soul
divided by desire. Readership itself affords the aesthetic distance and
obliquity necessary for this response.'

so true

"Let us superimpose on the question ‘What does the lover want from love’ the questions ‘What does the reader want from reading? What is the
writer’s desire?’ Novels are the answer."

this too is orv...

'Only a god’s word has no beginning or end. Only a god’s desire can reach without lack. Only the paradoxical god of desire, exception to all these rules, is neverendingly filled with lack itself.'

'Something paradoxical arrests the lover. Arrest occurs at a point of inconcinnity between the actual and the possible, a blind point where the reality of what we are disappears into the possibility of what we could be if we were other than we are. But we are not.'