Plainwater

我之前读的作品里大部分是非虚构作品，短篇小说多过长篇小说，几乎没有读什么诗集。可能是因为应试教育，我对诗歌的印象比较负面，归咎于晦涩的语言和难以解读的主题。古诗姑且有韵律，句式也比较工整；现代诗就像抽象画，很难品读，除了《你是人间四月天》《致橡树》《雨巷》这种脍炙人口的。

开始读卡森是因为作品B对我的震撼，作者在尾注里提到了这个诗人。发现她在中文世界少有人讨论，抱着一种奇货可居的心态去看她的介绍，在YouTube上听她读诗。白发苍苍的她用冷静的——极度冷静的——语调来读她那些诗歌。诗歌按照常理应该是激情澎湃、感情充沛的，但是她的文字本身就已经完成了，语言自身是作品，而阅读只是点明句读。那是一种平静的体验。

先选择读Plainwater的原因是对“水”这个主题的熟悉。流体力学充斥着我过去几年的学习生活，看到海面与波浪，我却总是在想他们带着怎样的动量远道而来，怎样在沙砾上尖叫着破碎。后来在化学方向，也是看的水体里的一些污染物。总之我的人生是和水脱不了干系。

但是第一章就让我差点打了退堂鼓。确实是未曾接触过的形式和格式。跟上作品B里的妙语连珠已经让我一根筋的大脑转许多弯，而卡森更加需要前置的知识。
在我已经合上这本书打算读其他书的时候，豆瓣评论引用的这句话让我重新打开了Plainwater：

水是种你握不住的东西。就像男人。我试过。父亲、兄弟、爱人、挚友、饿鬼和上帝，一个接一个都从我的双手溜走了。

Anthropology of Water 水的人类学

在西班牙的朝圣之路是与名为Cid的男人一起。关于朝圣的疑问，关于赎罪与向往。

Are there two ways of knowing the world—a submissive and a devouring way? They end up roughly the same place.

What is the conversation of lovers? Compared with ordinary talk, it is as bread to stones.

When is a pilgrim like a letter of the alphabet? When he cries out.

How is a pilgrim like a blacksmith? He bends iron. Love bends him.

关于爱人，与来自中国的人类学家（“我”称作“Emperor”），引用了许多的中国谚语和经典。从印第安纳看堪萨斯到科罗拉多再一路向西到加州。我不知道爱慕是一种怎样的眼光，是不断复述那些他引用的诗句，还是满载星辉在帐中相拥而眠。

At midnight, fireworks in the plaza. No photographs—you know what fireworks are like. Tawdry, staggering, irresistible, like human love.

I took no maps, I cannot read maps—why press a seal on running water?

Enlightenment is not a place, no use rushing to get there.

Wind does not stop by day here, does not stop by night, it keeps belling, boasting, wrestling, rinsing, disheveling, bonfiring, boistering down—the black morning tea blows out of the cups.

a man has locks all over his body. But women are numb or liars or never stop thinking, you can not make me stop thinking.

Natural language is as brittle as pearl and the principle of noncontradiction too basic to be demonstrated, Aristotle avows, it can only be refuted. A single counterexample will do. Up, Daruma.

然后是关于兄长，他如何欺负“我”，如何划船，如何远走欧洲，找“我”借钱，朝着中国前进却不知道最后有没有到达。

贯穿全文的是父亲，他的存在似乎如影随形，但是他痴呆发狂的样子却已经习以为常。

Anthropology is a science of mutual surprise

人类学的研究方式是一整套生活方式，以水的譬喻呈现。这是一种奇妙的阅读体验。我需要去寻找答案。文学的功用不是达到智慧——它不可能达到——只能接近它。尽管当下的时代能写出人话已经难能可贵，真正的文学不仅仅是表面的玩弄语言功夫，更是背后的沉思，是想法的结晶。

读完这部分之后又回去读前面的部分。第一部分的弥涅墨斯对我来说有点费解，第三部分的Canicula di Anna说实话没特别读明白，第二部分的Short Talks和第四部分的The Life of Towns倒是挺有意思的。

我不算一个好的文学读者，总是焦躁地匆匆驶向终点。但是的确对于《荒原》都读不完的我来说这是一种前所未有的新奇体验。

Eros the Bittersweet: An Essay

这部作品是她的PhD defense。其主题的鲜明和内容的生动让这部作品成为不可多得的古典学著作。

核心正如标题所说：爱欲之苦涩与甜蜜。当我们谈论爱欲（Eros）的时候，其中甜蜜与苦涩这对几乎相反的概念不可分割地如影随形。

love and hate converge within erotic desire

Eros as a sweetness made out of absence and pain

本书从古希腊女诗人萨福（Sappho）的诗歌入手，漫游苏格拉底、柏拉图、荷马等古希腊哲人和诗人的世界为我们寻找矛盾的答案。

下面这句话在前半部出现，并且贯穿全书——爱欲是一个动词，其授受对象的空间划分（边界）以及动态时间性分析成是全书要点。

For in this dance the people do not move. Desire moves. Eros is a verb.

Sappho

The Reach

The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time).

Jealousy

The word ‘jealousy’ comes from Greek zēlos meaning ‘zeal’ or ‘fervent pursuit.’ It is a hot and corrosive spiritual motion arising in fear and fed on resentment.

Eyelids

Eyelids are important. From the eyelids may issue an erotic emotion that sets the interval between two people vibrating
“Aidōs dwells upon the eyelids of sensitive people
as does hybris upon the insensitive. A wise man
would know this.”

科学给予人原理和聪明，人文给予人启迪与智慧。社会学的分析中，总是摆脱不了结构主义，一定要进行一些自上而下的归类，虽然是生活中的点滴，但是科学毕竟需要除去那些私人的感情和温度。人文让人重新感受的流淌的情绪。爱欲的分析需要本体论，也需要一种感受。

Edge

接下来的大主题是“边界（edge）”。在阐释具体的边界问题之前，先看Eros的轨迹和方向。

Trajectory

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 real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

从Eros的轨迹可以看出其中的单向性（也是某种程度上的不可逆转性）揭示了一个几乎是匪夷所思的关键事实：

When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me.

这句话以另外一种形式出现在作品B里的时候，我的震撼与经典无以复加。作品B的作者又追加了自己的诠释，角色M对角色J是这么说的（略译）：

当你离开的时候，我的一部分随你而去。我不求你归还，只希望你珍藏在心底不要遗弃。

我的欲望是我自己亲手推开的大门，向着你走去的每一步都曾经是我的血肉，现在我要亲手交出去，交给你，然后我会变成另外一个自己，而你漠不关心甚至把我遗忘也没关系。那些疤痕或许哪天会成为我的墓志铭。

Logic at the Edge

Edge的一个例子是双关语（pun），可以是一种形式上的比喻（暗喻）导致的触类旁通。

Within a pun you see the possibility of grasping a better truth, a truer meaning, than is available from the separate senses of either word. But the glimpse of that enhanced meaning, which flashes past in a pun, is a painful thing. For it is inseparable from your conviction of its impossibility. Words do have edges. So do you.

Losing the Edge

Eros带来的后果即是边界的模糊，以至于消融（melting）。

Change of self is loss of self to these poets. Their metaphors for the experience are metaphors of war, disease and bodily dissolution

事实上，“消融”指代“边界的消失”是一个非常典型的暗喻（甚至是明喻），因为消融是属于冰（下文会提到这个重要喻体）的事情，而边界存在于所有气体以外的状态。

一件事物的消失本来应该是残酷的，在Eros的语境下却徒增幸福。这是一种矛盾，这让人反思这件事究竟是幸运与否。

Is melting a good thing? That remains am bivalent.

我不能再熟悉的流体力学也从物理角度给出了诠释，那是一种柔软和粘稠的状态。作品B里面出现了非常多的“a puddle of jelly”的比喻，这种非牛顿流体则更是一种模糊的状态。这种他我不分的模糊在宏观上是一种边界的消失。

The viscous is a state halfway between solid and liquid. It is like a cross-section in a process of change. It is unstable but it does not flow. It is soft, yielding, and compressible. Its stickiness is a trap, it clings like a leech; it attacks the boundary between myself and it.

An individual who lives in an oral culture uses his senses differently than one who lives in a literate culture, and with that different sensual deployment comes a different way of conceiving his own relations with his environment, a different conception of his body and a different conception of his self.

Archilochos at the Edge

诗人的语言大大改变的我们的生活。他们最早把口头语言用书面的的方式写下，因为感官的刺激程度不同，所以Eros带给人们的影响也陡然增加，以至于磨灭了“边界”。维基百科里说，古希腊诗人Archilochos是最早完全以自己的感受写下诗歌的诗人，而不是寄托于神话。他的感受所用的器官是“肺”。不同于今天只是用于呼吸的肺脏，古希腊人所说的“phrenes”是呼吸、感受、思考和情感的器官。

The phrenes of the lover are as far as it goes. I have translated this word ‘lungs’ and referred to it as ‘the organ of breath.’ What is breath? For the ancient Greeks, breath is consciousness, breath is perception, breath is emotion.

Phrenes are organs of mind.

语言起源于感受，但是在发展的过程中与感官逐渐分离。这种“分离”是痛苦的源泉。

Literacy desensorializes words and reader. A reader must disconnect himself from the influx of sense impressions transmitted by nose, ear, tongue and skin if he is to concentrate upon his reading. A written text separates words from one another, separates words from the environment, separates words from the reader (or writer) and separates the reader (or writer) from his environment. Separation is painful. The evidence of epigraphy shows how long it takes people to systematize word-division in writing, indicating the novelty and difficulty of this concept. As separable, controllable units of meaning, each with its own visible boundary, each with its own fixed and independent use, written words project their user into isolation.

所以，当纸上写下爱的话语，书面与内心相距万里，黑纸白字上是一种象征主义，无法描摹所有真实。有古诗道“纸上得来终觉浅”，或许也是相似的道理。

When I contemplate the physical spaces that articulate the letters ‘I love you’ in a written text, I may be led to think about other spaces, for example the space that lies between ‘you’ in the text and you in my life. Both of these kinds of space come into being by an act of symbolization. Both require the mind to reach out from what is present and actual to something else, something glimpsed in the imagination
To write the words I love you’ requires a further, analogous replacement, one that is much more painful in its implication.

所以又一次撕裂我的心：

Your absence from the syntax of my life is not a fact to be changed by written words. And it is the single fact that makes a difference to the lover, the fact that you and I are not one.

因为话语是话语，书信是书信，而你是你。我如何想象你近在眼前，我的语言如何情真意切，现实是你远在天边，我看不见。我们不是那样的关系，我的文字生动却无力。

What Does the Lover Want from Love?

既然如此苦痛，情人究竟是为何而爱？铸铁神Hephaistos说情人的终极是合而为一。

It is not the number ‘one,’ as we have seen in example after example, to which the lover’s mind inclines when he is given a chance to express his desire.

但Stendhal和Aristophanes的诠释道：爱不是一种占有（possess）而是一种是启迪（delight）。

That which is known, attained, possessed, cannot be an object of desire. “In love possession is nothing, only delight matters,”

是一种朝着完美前进的脚步（亚里士多德的所谓movement）。当然所谓“完美”有想象的元素，连接真实的自我和“完美”的自我的，就是欲望（desire），也是爱欲（eros）。

Across this space a spark of eros moves in the lover’s mind to activate delight. Delight is a movement of the soul, in Aristotle’s definition. No difference: no movement. No Eros.

For his delight is in reaching; to reach for something perfect would be perfect delight.

Symbolon

Symbolon是希腊语里的symbol。产生bittersweet这种两面性的原因是一种暗喻式的交错。暗喻的本体和喻体性状不同，但是一旦站在特定的视角（例如文中举的画的例子），两条线惊人地相交。人在二分法中找寻每一个自己的Symbolon（又是象征主义），从而形成Eros。

对于暗喻来说，最重要的是想象力。想象力可以连接两个不同的领域，从而使分立的领域重新连接到一起。可以说，没有想象力的世界没有趣味。

Imagination is the core of desire. It acts at the core of metaphor. It is essential to the activity of reading and writing.

My Pages Makes Love

小说家Loungus是典型的利用这种两面性来吸引读者的例子。

Think how it feels. As you read the novel your mind shifts from the level of characters, episodes and clues to the level of ideas, solutions, exegesis. The activity is delightful, but also one of pain. Each shift is accompanied by a sharp sense that something is being lost, or has already been lost. Exegesis mars and disrupts pure absorption in the narrative. The narrative insists on distracting your attention from exegesis. Yet your mind is unwilling to let go of either level of activity, and remains arrested at a point of stereoscopy between the two. They compose one meaning.

这种两面性绝类Eros。在转移视线中阵痛又获得启迪。这是一种三角测定（Triangulation）——叙事、角色和注释（我理解这里的clues和exegesis是隐藏在表面文字下的线索）。在三个主体中的切换和徘徊和其中的折损（类似摩擦阻力？）造就了我们的痛苦。

In fact, neither reader nor writer nor lover achieves such consummation. The words we read and the words we write never say exactly what we mean. The people we love are never just as we desire them.
What is erotic about reading (or writing) is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge.

Ice-pleasure

“冰”是一种全新体验的象征。任何创新都有变得陈腐的一天，冰的存在就意味着迟早会融化（除非生活在南北极）。于是冰成为时间的度量，成为欲望的刻度。

Now, as you peer down through concentric circles of time, you see at the heart of the poem a piece of ice, melting. The startling likeness of ice drops into your perception with a shock like what the children must feel in their hands.

冰的时间单向性是存在与矛盾之中的。冰是另一个两面性的象征。冰带来的愉悦（Ice-pleasure）是短暂的，就像所有新鲜事物一样，一旦时间流逝便愈发陈旧。新鲜感永远是短暂的，这矛盾存在于新鲜感的定义之中，就像不会融化的冰，是自相矛盾的。

here ice-pleasure is a novelty…an original and unexpected form of torture

Ice, as physical substance, cannot be said to be delightful because it melts; but if “melting” is itself a metaphor for the aesthetic consideration of novelty, a paradox begins to come into focus. Novelties, by definition, are short-lived. If ice-pleasure consists, to some degree, in novelty, then ice must melt in order to be desirable.

而Pindar将冰和欲望联系：

to melt is in some degree desirable

Sophokles借用冰的譬喻替我们解释了欲望和时间的关系：

to save the ice, you must freeze desire. You cannot want that, and yet you do. It is quite new every time.

个中原因可以从量子力学窥见：海森堡测不准定理已经告诉了我们我们不可能同时测定粒子的位置和速度。同理，时间和欲望也不能被同时知晓。

There are different kinds of knowledge, Heisenberg has demonstrated, that cannot be held simulaneously in the mind (for example, the position of a particle and its velocity).”
“A while before Heisenberg, Sophokles appears to have recognized that you can only go so far into thinking about time, or about desire. There comes a point where dilemmas arise, staircases reverse: Eros.

In Now Then

承上，因为语言蕴含的暗喻，语言本身就是在用较为直观的描述空间位移的方式来描述相对更加抽象时间。语言就是用这样的方式诠释了时间的内核——流逝。

“时光飞逝”为时间插上了“翅膀”，而这翅膀是后文的一个讨论主题。

We habitually describe time in metaphors of passage. Time passes. Time is a stream that flows past, a track that unwinds, a road down which we walk. All our events and actions and utterances are part of the passage of time. Language, especially, is embedded in this moving process and the words we speak are gone when the time is gone—“on wings” as Homer says.

爱欲想要抓住时间，变瞬间为永恒，就像想要永远不会融化的冰一样。在这一点上，写作的三方（作者、读者、角色）达成了共识，于是无论何时重读，那块冰又不可思议地延续，即便已然在结局里融化。

An act of reading and writing, on the other hand, is an experience of temporal arrest and manipulation. As writer or reader you stand on the edge of transience, and hear from the shadows the sound of an ambiguous cough. The word ‘transient’ stares back at you from the page, poignant as a piece of melting ice. And it does not pass away. Temporally, the word stands to you in a somewhat perverse relation, permanent and transient at once as it is. Mastery of this relation is part of the study of letters. It gives the reader or writer a taste of what it would be like to control time.

If Eros is something written on a page, you can close the book and be shut of him. Or go back and reread the words again and again. A piece of ice melts forever there. What is written in letters “stays immovable and remains the same”

Damage to the Living

前文提到了一种事实改写成文字时产生的折损，其实这种折损无处不在，柏拉图提到其中两种：

Plato is concerned with two sorts of damage. One is the damage done by lovers in the name of desire. The other is the damage done by writing and reading in the name of communication. Why does he set these two sorts of damage beside one another? Plato appears to believe that they act on the soul in analogous ways and violate reality by the same kind of misapprehension.

为什么爱的的终结无论如何都是一种痛苦？之前读的The End of Love从社会学的角度提供了一种思路，这里提供了另外一种：因为时间状态的转换，因为充斥欲望的当下变成不可挽回的曾经。Time cannot rewind.

Logos in its spoken form is a living, changing, unique process of thought. It happens once and is irrecoverable. The logos written down by a writer who knows his craft will approximate this living organism in the necessary ordering and interrelation of its parts
The nonlover sidesteps painful transitions between ‘now’ and ‘then’ by stationing himself permanently at the end of desire. He sacrifices the intense and transient pleasure of the lover’s ‘now’ in return for an extended ‘then’ of consistent emotion and predictable behavior

Cicadas

蝉是另外一种短暂的欲望的象征：

They are stranded in a living death of pleasure.

Organisms struck by desire, however, tend to misprize this commitment

Gardening

园艺（Gardening）是一个类似冰和蝉的比喻。花园里是转瞬即逝的欲望，和外面的世界无关。

Sokrates adduces these gardens of Adonis as an analogy for the written word, seductive and ephemeral as it is, a simulation of living discourse

在欲望的花园里，寻欢作乐之需要饱满的果实和招摇的枝叶，那些根茎太过迟钝，那些未来太过沉重，所以不去思考，不去想就看不到。所以苏格拉底说：无根无果方予爱欲。

This lover prefers to play his erotic games with a partner who has neither roots nor future.

Beginning

Something Serious is Missing

说了这么多象征短暂的比喻，可是我们似乎忽略了一个问题——为什么即使痛苦人们仍然飞蛾扑火一般拥抱爱欲、渴望爱情？

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.
We love such suspended time for the sake of its difference from ordinary time and real life. We love the activities that are placed within suspended time, like festivals and reading, for their essential unseriousness.

我们需要回到爱欲的起点，回到那个瞬间——我们身陷爱河的瞬间。

Consistently throughout the Greek lyric corpus, as well as in the poetry of tragedy and comedy, eros is an experience that assaults the lover from without and proceeds to take control of his body, his mind and the quality of his life. Eros comes out of nowhere, on wings, to invest the lover, to deprive his body of vital organs and material substance, to enfeeble his mind and distort its thinking, to replace normal conditions of health and sanity with disease and madness. The poets represent eros as an invasion, an illness, an insanity, a wild animal, a natural disaster. His action is to melt, break down, bite into, burn, devour, wear away, whirl around, sting, pierce, wound, poison, suffocate, drag off or grind the lover to a powder. Eros employs nets, arrows, fire, hammers, hurricanes, fevers, boxing gloves or bits and bridles in making his assault. No one can fight Eros off

诗人用来形容爱情开始的词汇都是那么猝不及防突如其然。于是我们惊人地发现，我们竟然找不到那个瞬间，因为这是一种自发的无法控制的行为，人只能深陷其中而不自知。当你察觉到爱情，已经太迟了，人不由自主地进入“欲望的当下”，而情感的火山随时爆发。

When you are falling in love it is always already too late

It is a deadly stinginess by which the nonlover eludes desire. He measures his emotions out like a miser counting gold. There is no risk entailed in his transaction with eros because he does not invest in the single moment that is open to risk, the moment when desire begins, ‘now.’ ‘Now’ is the moment when change erupts.

于是爱欲里的人又陷入短暂的永恒：

Then Ends and Now Begins

这一切的爱欲，是上天的礼物，是恩赐还是天谴则各自分明。

All that this moment brings, both good and evil, bitter and sweet, comes gratuitously and unpredictably—a gift of the gods, as the poets say. From that moment on, the story is largely up to you, but the beginning is not.
When you fall in love you feel all sorts of sensations inside you, painful and pleasant at once: it is your wings sprouting (251-52). It is the beginning of what you mean to be

What a Difference a Wing Makes

前文提到的时间的“翅膀”，这是我们最后要诠释的东西。

The wings sprout when you fall in love

翅膀是和神交流的交通工具，希腊人把爱欲变作翅膀，乘之飞去，与神明共舞。也是因为这样，我们在“当下”获得了短暂的永恒。

Falling in love gives you access to an infinite good. But it is also very clear that, when Eros impinges on you in his true form, something is lost, something hard to measure
By adding pt- to Eros, the gods create Pteros, which is a play upon the Greek word pteron meaning ‘wing.’
Pteros, then, represents a net gain on the semantic level.
If you reach into the Phaedrus to get hold of Eros, you will be eluded, necessarily. He never looks at you from the place from which you see him. Something moves in the space between. That is the most erotic thing about Eros.

Epilogue

What Is This Dialogue About? & Mythoplokos (fiction writer)

没有欲望的世界没有趣味可言，没有好奇心和想象力，人类死气沉沉。我们没有启迪也没有爱欲，浑沌和黑暗笼罩。

A city without desire is, in sum, a city of no imagination. Here people think only what they already know. Fiction is simply falsification. Delight is beside the point

这趟关于爱欲的苦甜旅程也终于到了终点。品读卡森的作品绝非易事，才学疏浅也不能保证所有的理解和解读正确，更多是我自己阅读的一些所思所想；品读卡森又是一种无比开心的事情，她所带给我的更多的心灵的撼动，是撕裂又愈合的伤口，有时候让我忘记了我在读的是一部古典学作品。诚然古典学的角度有强烈的浪漫主义思想，但是我不觉得那不切实际（许多过度浪漫的作品会让我觉得脑干缺失），反而她的知识面之广（她甚至了解海森堡——我想我的工科同学中了解的人并不多）、思路之清晰、语言之生动难以匹敌。她的语言是一把钥匙，打开了许多我藏在心底未曾解码不愿再提直到成瘀的困惑与秘密。

费拉德尔菲亚时隔三百二十多天在一个夜晚下了一场小雪，薄薄的一层覆盖在车盖、草丛和房顶。次日白昼晴空万里，阳光甚至久违地刺眼，看不清对面信号灯的颜色，看不到人的眼眸里是怎样不堪回首的过去。那些不会再来的每一个当下，那些离我而去的心绪，也悄然随之融化，蒸发，然后消失不见。但是又怎样呢，在爱意消逝的每一个早晨，冬天还在继续。

231102：

今天刷到一条微博：

第一次意识到你的女同的时刻：

热评：

突然对她有股难过情绪涌上来

本来喜欢应该是欣喜、欢乐的，但是在萨福语境下是蜂蜜和蜂蛰。

Speech: The Idea of A University

在继续下一部卡森著作的阅读之前，让我们先读一些轻松的。例如这篇她在1998年在McGill University发表的演讲。要注意的是，题目是别人拟定的，而内容是她自己发挥的。

卡森自己作为古典学学者，面对古典学岌岌可危的当下，重新为我们点明大学的意义。她说：

That’s the way it goes with philology: the closer you look at a word the more distantly it looks back at you.

许多人抱怨在大学学不到东西，与实际应用脱轨，Terry Eagleton写了一篇The Slow Death of the University。事实上，这也是我曾经思考过的问题。在我所在的学科，这样的抱怨更加频繁——比起选课更加自由的新兴工科，作为已经诞生逾百年的传统工科，强制修习的数学与物理科目在实际的工程与运用中其实用处有限，有时候我们也会羡慕别人选课的多样性。我想这对于古典学也是相似的处境，毕竟生活中使用拉丁语和应用量子力学一样稀罕而费解。

我记得本科的热力学教授告诉我们：“你们将来不一定会成为一个工程师，但是取得这个学位，意味着你们需要经受‘工程学的训练’。”，就像PhD耗费五年研究的东西也并不一定是终身的志向，那是一种的“学术的训练”。是通过这样的“无用”缔造“有用”，这种技能和本领，这种分辨和通晓，形成了我们所说的“博雅”，这与洪堡理念不谋而合。正如John Henry Newman所说：

In Newman’s view, the knowledge that results from a real university education has no use. It is useless. Or what he calls “liberal.”

这样的知识，除了言传身教，也需要我们广泛的阅读和摄取。

Liberal, from Latin liber, means “free.” … the Latin noun liber meaning “book”

于是大学成为一个发现问题并且解决问题的地方。那些问号不宜久留。

The Idea of the University, is an oxymoron. Ideas do not arise in places like universities. And if they do arise there they cannot long survive.

… As a figure of thought, an oxymoron serves two functions. It causes contradiction in the mind and discomfort to the senses.

卡森说，这种冲突是必要的。

…our task is to maintain this strife as stubbornly as possible - not to collapse it, not to blur it, not to pretend it isn’t there, not to decorate it with alibis like creative restructuring. But to acknowledge it as strife and keep it where it is - in the space between us and them, the space between the way things are and the way they could be, that space with brackets around it containing not quite a bottle, not quite smoke - that space which some ancient Greeks called daimonic.

卡森的结语是：

If you really want to stope human beings from seeking after God, it’s no use telling them there is no heaven. No use telling them there is no hell. Just tell them there is no difference.

见不到问题与冲突的麻木或许才是真正的不见天日。

我想要补充的是当下经常被视作“无用”的人文学科在当下的意义。如果说理工科解决的是“能不能”的问题，人文学科就是面对的“应不应该”的问题。人文学科是为了打破技术迷信。理工科改造世界，人文学科改造人。人文的视角是跳出社会规定好的一系列步骤，有所反思，让我们摆脱被社会单一化、扁平化甚至是工具化的命运，让你真正成为一个完整的属于自己的人。

在学工程优化课程的最后一讲里，Alexander Mitsos教授告诉我们：

Optimization cannot tell you what you want. You need to formulate according to what you want and then solve it exactly.

这也是数学本身不能为我们解决的。

Book Chapter: Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt and Desire

这是卡森为Before Sexuality写的一个章节，这本书的副标题是The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World，讲述的是在古希腊世界里的爱欲体验。卡森着重讲述的是女性在古希腊语境中作为一种污秽与肮脏c的地位。这个章节里可以看到卡森严肃学术的一面，是她一贯冷静沉着的风格。

卡森首先从几个角度分析了为什么女性被视作污染物。首先，她点名接触是危机，文明正是建立边界的过程，而女性的存在是一种让边界瓦解的危险。

她接下来论述了女人的几个特点——潮湿、熟成。干燥是一种属于男性的冷静的特质，而潮湿是没有思考能力的。正如《红楼梦》所说“女人是水做的骨肉”，女人是不定形的。“男人决定了形状，女人填充其中。”在古希腊语境里，人们把诞生后代的性称为工作，而为了爱欲和欢愉的成为玩乐。当少女熟成，则需要通过结婚的仪式来抹去污秽。

Speech: Economy, It’s Fragrance

这是卡森以“诗歌和散文的区分”为主题的一篇演讲。她的论点是：诗歌是一种“经济”：

If I were marketing the poetry/prose distinction as a perfume, I would call lit Economy. Not because poetry is the only form of verbal expression that manages its resources thriftily but because the thrift seems essential to the poetry.

她讨论的问题是：

how poetry solicits this pleasure - subversively, by overflowing its own measures and filling the house with an odor of ointment.

首先她说明了时间是一种恩赐的财富，但是对于人们来说这是有限的。然后她借用了Sappho等人的诗歌体现出了诗歌的“经济”——为了呈现出精准的音节和丰富的蕴含而精打细算。如果诗歌是永恒一般的存在，那根本不需要这样的推敲，但是也就不存在诗歌独特的Fragrance了。

诗歌是沙画还是雪雕，取决于它们与时间的关系。沙画需要不断重复，是一种挥霍；而雪雕融化在手里，需要谨慎的经济考虑。卡森说：

Poetry is an act of memory that crosses between sand art and snow art, transforming what is innumerable an headed for oblivion into a timeless notation.

The Albertine Workout

说来惭愧，本科四年间从来没有从图书馆借过一本书。办了全市大学通用的图书证，也没有派上用武之地。出于方便携带和笔记整理的考虑，其实平时大部分书还是倾向于电子版，实在找不到的才会去买实体书，更别说跑一趟图书馆，还要还回去，想想也是够麻烦的。但是诗歌除外，因为诗歌的排版和欣赏方式，很多时候从屏幕上会削减许多。刚上大学的时候喜欢读松浦光太郎，瘦瘦的一本书但是感觉很踏实。

话说回来，于是就在图书馆找卡森的时候发现了这本并没有很多人提及的2014年的作品。本书讨论的中心是Albertine，是普鲁斯特《追忆似水年华》里的一个重要的角色。惭愧的是我对《追忆似水年华》久仰大名但是并未卒读，所知道的只有第一卷的标题“在斯旺家那边”，还有赫赫有名的玛德莲小蛋糕。

Albertine是Albert的女性版，在法国叫Albert的人到处都是，但是Albertine十分罕见。Albertine和第一人称主角Marcel有着特殊的亲密的关系，被他自己称作heavy slavery（在Append 32里有更详细的解说）。

25.
By falling asleep she becomes a plant, he says.
26.
Plants do not actually sleep. Nor do they lie or even bluff. They
do, however, expose their genitalia.

他们之间的关系非常暧昧。

38.
This pictorial multiplicity of Albertine evolves gradually into a plastic and moral multiplicity. Albertine is not a solid object. She is unknowable. When Marcel brings his face close to hers to kiss, she is ten different Albertines in succession.
39.
One night Albertine goes dancing with a girlfriend at the Casino.
40.
When questioned about this she lies.
41.
Albertine is not a natural liar.

Marcel对Albertine有严重的占有欲，于是隔绝了她和她的朋友的来往。虽然Marcel没有直说，但是她其实对Albertine的同性恋趋向不满。

52.
One only loves that which one does not entirely possess. says Marcel.

普遍认为Albertine的原型是普鲁斯特的车夫Albert（这种映射也被称作 transposition theory）。作品中Albertine因为脱缰的马车香消玉殒，生前Marcel本来给她买了帆船，无奈取消订单；现实里的Albert因为飞机失事而早逝，而普鲁斯特也曾经为他订购飞机——和帆船是同样的价格。

57.
Granted the transposition theory is a graceless, intrusive and saddening hermeneutic mechanism; in the case of Proust it is also irresistible. Here is one final spark to be struck from rubbing Alfred against Albertine, as it were. Let’s consider the stanza of poetry that Proust had inscribed on the fuselage of Alfred’s plane - the same verse that Marcel promises to engrave on the prow of Albertine’s yacht, from her favourite poem, he says. It is 4 verses of Mallarmé about a swan that finds itself frozen into the ice of a lake in winter. Swans are of course migratory birds. This one for some reason failed to fly off with its fellow swans when the time came. What a weird and lonely shadow to cast on these two love affairs, the fictional and the real; what a desperate analogy to offer of the lover’s final wintry paranoia of possession. As Hamlet says to Ophelia, accurately but ruthlessly, “You should not have believed me.”

这本书前半部分是正文，后半部分是附录。附录部分本以为只是一些注解，但是读来却趣味不少。比如说下面这段里丰富的形容词辞藻一下就抓住了我

appendix 15 (a) on adjectives
Adjectives are the handles of Being. Nouns name the world, adjectives let you get hold of the name and keep it from flying all over your mind like a pre-Socratic explanation of the cosmos. Air, for example, in Proust can be (adjectivally) gummy, flaked, squeezed, frayed, pressed or percolated in Book I; powdery, crumbling, embalmed, distilled, scattered, liquid or volatilized in Book 2; woven or brittle in Book 3; congealed in Book 4; melted, glazed, unctuous, elastic, fermenting, contracted, distended in Book 5; solidified in Book 6; and there seems to be no air at all in Book 7. I can see very little value in this kind of information, but making such lists is some of the best fun you’ll have once you enter the desert of after Proust.

再比如这里看到一向冷静的卡森居然也出现这种有些激动的场面，被普鲁斯特所说的”heavy slave”所困扰。

appendix 32 on slavery
Marcel’s use of the phrase”heavy slave” bothers me. A certain master/slave tonality in Marcel’s relationships with other people overall bothers me. What makes a slave heavy? Does she have a heavy skin, heavy step, heavy jokes, heavy childhood; does she come from a heavy nation or adhere to a heavy philosophy of life? Does she speak with a heavy accent? Does she have a heavy reason for doing everything you tell her? Does a heavy slave imply a light master? Let’s say you want to get rid of the slave, do you use a heavier weapon than you’d need for the master or will any light-to-medium implement do, say a runaway horse or an early winter? How about bluffing the slave into thinking she’s winning this game you play every day with the kimono and the trick questions, do you have the stamina for that, and will you miss it when it ends, and how do all these things bear upon the difference between metaphor and metonymy? Sorry this appendix got away on me.

居然也提到了metaphor和metonymy，然后又写了两个章节解释。

appendix 33(a) on the difference between metaphor and metonymy

Since this question has arisen, here’s the difference: in a group of children asked to respond to the work “hut,” some said a small cabin, some said it burned down

而这个例子也被巧妙地运用在了最后一个appendix，让人拍手叫绝、会心一笑。~~不知道cicada有没有私货。参考Eros the Bittersweet~~

appendix 59 on a bad photograph

… as the photographer fiddled with his lenses and the cicadas sang in the hawthorn hedge and a summer afternoon at the farthest edge of human love extended itself before them into apparently, eternity. Maybe they discussed a small cabin. Maybe it burned down.

最后，今天是这座城市久违的温暖天气（16度！），很难抗拒坐在午后阳光下读书的诱惑，毕竟上一次也是11月的事情了。朋友提到了这个公园，其实去年大概8月的时候有路过过，但是没有坐下，也算是隐秘的世外桃源了。回家的时候，说不上是夕阳时分，但是太阳也倾斜了大半。再一次想起了作品B里对于两个人在公园里一起读书的美好场面，而这北纬四十度的阳光被大家享有，这安静的时刻却被我独占。

Autobiography of Red

卡森最负盛名的诗歌之一——《红的自传》。没有从这一本开始的原因，一是我还是不太会欣赏诗歌，另外是对于神话人物的不熟悉。读完来看，虽然我不能说我完全领会到了所有的点，但是上述的两点却意外地不是阻碍。

诗歌的确是音韵的科学，咀嚼的时候觉得流畅优雅，虽然不如古代诗歌整齐但是却能慢慢品味到韵律，这对于我是一种狂喜。而对于Greyon这个人物，卡森的设定尤其现代化，于是不会有那么多的距离感，仿佛就是电梯里会预见到的邻居一样。他和Herakels之间暧昧又绝望的关系，正如神话里Herakels如何亲手杀死他。

Volcano是重要的隐喻，没有活人亲眼见过火山爆发，除非有翅膀。

或许有一天会重读的。

Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red is Way Funnier Than You Remember

Seeing Red - NYTimes

Economy the Unlost

230220

这部书讲述的是诗歌里的“经济”。所谓的“经济”不仅和钱与金融有关，按照马克思的定义，货物交换及其媒介也在其中。看到这个标题会想到卡森在Mcgill的演讲Economy the Fragrance，也有类似的譬喻。
卡森主要的论证素材来源于古希腊诗人Simonides of Keos，也引入了很多德语诗人Paul Celan的诗歌。把诗歌和经济两个看上去风马牛不相及的概念一起论述是很有趣的，卡森对于事物的透彻阐述也让本来应该痛苦的阅读体验（每个章节都有几十页，如果整章整章看会迷失）变得深刻。

Prologue: False Sail

The title False Sail originated from romance of Tristan and Iseult:

In Thomas’ poem, Tristan is wounded by a poisoned lance while attempting to rescue a young woman from six knights. Tristan sends his friend Kahedin to find Iseult of Ireland, the only person who can heal him. Tristan tells Kahedin to sail back with white sails if he is bringing Iseult and black sails if he is not (perhaps an echo of the Greek myth of Theseus). Iseult agrees to return to Tristan with Kahedin, but Tristan’s jealous wife, Iseult of the White Hands, lies to Tristan about the color of the sails. Tristan dies of grief, thinking Iseult has betrayed him, and Iseult dies over his corpse.

Carson claimed economy as essential human value. as a trope of intellectual, aesthetic and moral value. But what does it mean to save words, especially for poets? The key question throughout the book is introduced:

What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted

Simonides provided some hints.

Why must the economy of the false sail be contrafactual? Because it is an impossible idea conditioned by the negative event that already exists. …

While Celan dragged it to the extreme.

That is why the whole of Celan’s poem gathers us into a movement—toward you—that sails to the end. But you, by the time we reach you, are just folding yourself away into a place we cannot go: sleep. Blank spaces instead of words fill out the verses around you as if to suggest your gradual recession down and away from our grasp. What could your hands teach us if you had not vanished? To stand at this border with whiteness exhausts our power of listening and makes us aware of a crisis in you. We travel toward your crisis, we arrive, yet we cannot construe it—the terrible thing is, after all (and most economically!) we are the false sail for which you wait.

The following sentence is just beautiful so I just copy it down here.

White, black, red, telling, lying, lied about, forgotten, fatal, all in all the falsity of the false sail is a rich proposition

1 Alienation

For those familiar with Marx’s theory on political economics, alienation is the most important ideas behind, and would be mentioned below.

Gift

the gift economy is above all a debt economy, where the actors strive to maximize outgoings. The system can be described as one of “alternating disequilibrium” where the aim is never to have debts “paid off” but to preserve a situation of personal indebtedness.

Xenia

means hospitality or guest-friendship in Greek

Xenos

Greek meaning stranger

Grace and Hare

Commodity form is not a simple state of mind. It fragments and dehumanizes human being. It causes a person to assume a “double character” wherein his natural properties are disjunct from his economic value, his private from his public self.

Money has quantified the moral tension between them and liquidated their mutual responsibility.

Celan

Clean writing for the dying language by Celan

Marx suggests an alternate model: money is not like language but it is like translated language.

language, remained unlost, yes, in spite of everything.

Although I have just glimpsed your soul, we are strangers. Our alienation looks like two pools of water that lie side by side, as close as two eyes. Pools reflect the sky but are speechless: two mouthsfull of silence.

Yizkor

Yizkor seems to be a word that has deep historical attachment and a particular relationship to memory.

What is remembering? Remembering brings the absent into the present, connects what is lost to what is here. Remembering draws attention to lostness and is made possible by emotions of space that open backward into a void. Memory depends on void, as void depends on memory, to think it. Once void is thought, it can be cancelled. Once memory is thought, it can be commodified.

2 Visible Invisibles

Money can be both visible like real estate or invisibles back statement.
Simonides is the first one in western culture to theorize the nature and function of poetry.
Simonides also employed the color within his poems, as a strategy of iconology.
Plato regarded painting sophistry rather than philosophy, as a phantasms of real life.

“Gorgias tells us that reality, if it exists at all, is incommunicable and that the function of words is to create an autonomous reality serving the rhetorical needs of the moment.”
“He is painting a picture of things that brings visible and invisible together in the mind’s eye as one coherent fact. The coherence is a poetic conjuring, but the fact is not. Together they generate a surplus value that guarantees poetic vocation against epistemological stinginess. To make “paintings that talk” is to engage in a conversation that is more than words and beyond price.”

“When our grief deserts us, where does it go and who will we be without it? These are questions that remain in the empty place where ἀλάθεια (truth) and τὸ δοκεῖν (appearances) lie side by side, strangeness by strangeness, exerting on one another a terrible and sleepless pressure that only the poet attends.”

3 Epitah

悼文

The epigraphic contract: a poet is someone who saves and is saved by the dead.
A poet’s task is to carry the transaction forward, from those who can no longer speak to those who may yet read (and may yet die).

Death is a central shaping metaphor: the metaphor of exchange.

For a gravestone is a coin with more than two sides. Inscribed on its surface are words that transform its commodity into communication and project its usefulness across the time.

Surface

Practices of life and practices of language overlap on an epitaphic stone.

“We are all debts owed to death.”…The idea that human life is not a gift but a loan or a debt, which will have to be paid back, originated with Simonides.

The responsibility of the living to the dead is not simple. It is we who let them go, for we do not accompany them. It is we who hold them there - deny them their nothingness - by naming their names.

Motion

Tears do not figure in the public eptaphs. These poems are encomia, not laments.

Measure

4 Negation

否定
Simonides use more negative words (fond of double negative) than any other poets of his period, giving repeated experience of loss, absence or deprevvation.

What is negation? One is measured against the other and found to be discrepant (different); the discrepant datum is annihilated by a word meaning “No”. The interesting thing about a negative, then, is that it posits a fuller picture of reality than does a positive statement.

Excision

Celan described German as a language stuffed with falsity and gagged with “the ahses of burned-out meanings”.
His envy of the printmaker’s precision parallels Simonides’ concern for the physical facts of the stonecutting. Both etching and epihraphy are processes of excision, which seek to construct a moment of attentiuon by cutting away or biting away or eliding away what is irrevelant so as to leave a meaning exposed on the surface. Drastic negation is inherent in the physical act.

… so Celan alsos liked to take negation, even further than Simonides.

Poetry is an act of memory that carves its way between sand art and snow art, transforming what is innumerable and headed for oblivion into a timeless notation.

Same sentence also appeared in Economy, the fragrance.

Star

Here Carson went back to her questions: “What exactly is lost to us when words are wasted and where is the human store to which such goods are gathered in?” Her answer to the question is “nothing”. She claimed that

it would be true to say that “Nothing is lost “ if the essence of noting is to not exist

Celan refers to things that cannot be said by using the printed symbol called an asterisk (star mark, i.e. *).

Asterisk, that perfectly economical sign. A star in any language. A mark on the page that pulls its own sound in after itself and disppears. A meaning that refuses to waste a single word in order to write itself on the world. Time is present in this refusal. For stars, as you know, exist in their own time. De pending on your coordinates, you may be gazing at a star in the night whose actual fire ceased to exist millennia ago. Depending on your alphabet, you may be looking at a word in a poem that has already ended.

And again, introducing the second questions.

And still the question remians. Where is the human store to which such economies are gethered in?

Epilogue: All Candled Things

(When it comes to Celan) For a poet’s despair is not just personal; he despairs of the word and that implicates all our hopes.

we have seen him (Simonides) transform it into a poetic method of luminous and precise economy. We have not seen him despair. Simonides’ lack of despair is noteworthy. Do words hold good for him?

In searching for the answer to the doubts on Simonides, Carson turned to praise poem.

…Games are for winners. They stand alone. Community comprises all the rest of us, who do not win, but watch and recognize the victor’s separate struggle, finding a way to praise it. Praise peotry addresses itself to an individual who has chosen to test the limits of human possibility and momentarily succeeded. His flame is burning very bright. Looking at it we feel both love and hate. Hate because he has surpassed us, love because his light falls on our hopes, enlarging them.

“All things are beautiful into which ugly things are not mixed.”…you know the human condition is an irretrievably mixed one. All our ambitios ubmit to this flaw. Our beauties turn base on a dime. We are not four-square. Gods fail to love us. The All Blameless Man turns out tnot to exist.
So where can we go for news of truth? To words. The poet’s words remain. His words hold good. In words he knows how to clear away everything ugly, blameworthy, incommensurable oir mad and manifest what is worth praise. He can minister to the flame. Gods alone have the power to keep themselves burning. All candled things need a Simonides.

On the other hand, the economy of the unlost always involves gratuity. Whether you call it a waste of words or an act of grace depends on you. It is typical of Celan.

The book ends with a poem.

Is blindness a defect?
Not always.
Is stammering a waste of words?
Yes and No.

Glass Irony and God

230226

I borrowed this book from library and like the size and layout. Quite a handy for reading and carrying (like paperback much better than hard cover). Former reader left some pencil marks as a hint of rhymes for poets new-comer like me. I read it through at a cafe on a Sunday morning. When smoothing folded corners, I felt like touching a wrinkles on a sentimental face. But spring is coming. Though power snow fell yesterday.

I felt a bit lost when reading TV Men and searched for some reviews. The review written by is quite impressive. I has the same feeling about Eros, the Bittersweet with her. I never sobbed on a thesis, but I did on this one. *It means the world to me.

Much of Carson’s work might be described as fan-fiction of the classics (though I suppose that is also true of much of Western literature). Her “TV Men” poems imagine mythic heroes and canonical authors as the stars of their own tv shows.
For me, in fact, reading Carson made me never think of anything the same way again.

The Glass Essay

It is a story about post-broke-up woman. The man left her alone is called Law.

Even her mother said

“You aren’t getting over him.”

Emily Brontë is mentioned repeatedly in this work, as a mean a meditation of protagonist, such as her misspelling of whatcher. I should have known something about Emily and Heathcliff) to know this poem better. Nonetheless my heart still shilvered for the beautiful sentences.

Her breaking up with Law is described.

“Soul is the place
stretched like a surface of milestone grit between body and mind,
Where such necessity grinds itself out.”

Her Father with dementia is in hospital.

“Goodbye
Goodbye. Who are you?”

“Something had gone through me and out and I could not own it.”

The Truth About God

In this work, God is not like something solemn and speechless. More lively, watching, thinking, blaming, sighing and walking past the window of human-beings.

God’s Christ Theory

God’s List Of Liquids

TV Men

Carson’s favorite, living their lives in modern context. Hektor meaning to hold. He is Prince of Troy. And chapters of Socrates and Sappho.

“TV is inherently cynical. It speaks to the eye, but the mind has no eye.”

“TV is loud, yet we do not awake.”

Right my dad never awaken by TV, but me deep in dream.

The Fall of Rome: A Traveller’s Guide

Visiting Anna Xenia in ancient Rome, while Anna herself was stranger of Rome in history, therefore called Xenia.

Keyword: Stranger

“A stranger is a master of nothing.

Who in a nightmare
can help himself?”

“What is the holiness of empire?
It is to know collapse.

Everything can collapse.
House, bodies
and enemies

collapse
when their rhythm becomes
deranged.”

“A stranger is someone who comes on the wrong day.”

Recalling a mini novel:

Stranger, acquaintance, friend, lover, stranger.

We are strangers at the beginning as well as the end. One can tell nothing ever changed if no traces are found.

The Gender of Sound

An essay describing difference in utterance of both genders from a classic pov. A delightful thought on feminism.

“In general the women of classical literature are a species given to disorderly and uncontrolled outflow of sound to shrinking, wailing, sobbing, shrill lament, tond laughters, screams of pain or of pleasure and eruptions of raw emotion in general.”

“Nowadays, sex difference in language is a topic of diverse research and unresolved debate.”

It is true that when I was studying Japanese, man’s and woman’s languages are distinguished clearly in dictionary.

Decreation

很快翻完的一本集子，觉得比较有趣的是这些文章：

Every Exit Is An Entrance Sleep (A Praise of Sleep)
Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God

整体来说形式挺丰富耳目一新的，但是内容可能不对胃口吧。

还是摘抄一句话：

Sublimity is the echo of a great soul.

The Beauty of Husband

得奖作，我的感想和《红的自传》差不多。我还是喜欢Essay多过Poetry。

Red Doc>

《红的自传》的后续。可能因为作品B对这篇的引用很多，所以读起来几分熟悉，又因为前作奠定的那种忧伤气息，读起来更加忧郁。

其实挺早就找到了这本的pdf，因为排版还以为是乱码，后来在图书馆看了书之后才发现的确就是这样的。

标题的“>”挺有意思。

P14

Memory sucks it all backwards. Hands and no place for hands last morning later you realize that was our last.

Memory is exhausting.

P45

The road stops at a square red sign IMPASSIBLE. They don’t mean us says Sad backing up to go round the sign.

Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

if a man is ruined like a ditch don’t keep washing your hands in him

P77

“To feel anything deranges you. To be seen feeling anything strips you naked.”
“To be seen is penalty.”

Tearstained laughter a phrase G blushes to remember. Talking is like drowning etc

I mean the whole immediate Visible crushed onto the frontal cortex is nothing but white without any Remainder now you’ll say of course there’s no Remainder if a thing hasn’t happened yet! but the fact is most of what you people see most of what you people call the present world is just Remainder just a failure of Invisibility’s flames to disappear from that thin edge.

Love was a big bunch of grass that grows up in your min an makes you stupid.

Mentioning Albertine of Proust.

What is the different between poetry and prose you know the odd analogies prose is a house poetry a man in fames running quite fast through it

And the reason he cannot bear hear dying is not the loss of her (which is the future) but that dying pus the two of them (now) in to this nakedness together that is unforgivable.

Ida, Io, Sad, Army, Ice, 4NO, CMO

A Review

Norma Jeans Baker of Troy

A comparatively short one about war in Troy. History of War: Lessons are quite a fun series to read.

Sometimes I think language should cover its own eyes when it speaks.

“War creates two categories of persons: those who outlive it and those who don’t.
Both carry wounds.”

Desire is about vanishing. You dream of a bowl of cherries and next day receive a letter written in red juice. Or, a better example: you know I’m not a totally bona fide blonde — I always say blonde on the inside is what counts — so I get a bit of colour every 2 weeks from a certain Orlando in Brentwood and I used to wonder shouldn’t I dye the hair down there too, you know, make it match, but the thing is — talk about a bowl of cherries — most men like it dark. Most men like what slips away. A bit of strange. But I digress.
Dirt is something that has crossed a boundary it ought not to have crossed. Dirt confuses categories and mixes up form.

deception illusion trickery duplicity doubleness fraud bluff beguilement hankypanky dodge hoodwink artifice chicanery subterfuge ruse hoax shift stratagem swindle guile wile wiles The Wiles of Woman

In war, things go wrong. Blame Woman.

Men in the Off Hours

也是典型的卡森集子，有诗歌有散文，Glass, Irony and God里面也收录的TV Men这里也有，但是内容略有区别。目前来说，我还是更喜欢散文/论文作品，这部集子里的两篇关于error的文章 Essay on What I Think About Most 和 Essay on Error (2nd draft) 都很喜欢。里面提到了很多Metaphor概念。

“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?”

“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.”

“the chief aim of philology (the study of words and of the way words and languages develop)
is to reduce all textual delight
to an accident of history.”

“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.”

回过头来，第一篇文章联系了伍尔夫和撰写的《伯罗奔尼撒战争史》和修昔底德 (Thucydides)。

it is important to mark the beginning of war. Otherwise, and so easily, it will lose itself into the middle of time … “always the most mysterious of losses.”

下面这篇“采访”简短有力，整篇摘抄一下

ESSAY ON WHAT I THINK ABOUT MOST
“INTERVIEW WITH HARA TAMIKI (1950)

I: Death.
HT: Death made me grow up.
I: Love.
HT: Love made me endure.
I: Madness.
HT: Madness made me suffer.
I: Passion.
HT: Passion bewildered me.
I: Balance.
HT: Balance is my goddess.
I: Dreams.
HT: Dreams are everything now.
I: Gods.
HT: Gods cause me to be silent.
I: Bureaucrats.
HT: Bureaucrats make me melancholy.
I: Tears.
HT: Tears are my sisters.
I: Laughter.
HT: I wish I had a splendid laugh.
I: War.
HT: Ah war.
I: Humankind.
HT: Humankind is glass.
I: Why not take the shorter way home.
HT: There was no shorter way home.”

Hopper : Confession 关于时间

“Yet I say boldly that I know that if nothing passed away, time past were not
And if nothing were coming, time future were not
And if nothing were, time present were not”

“Morning swings in a moonsplashed hole.
Time
zones
jam together
at
the
pole.”

Latin rhetoricians translate the Greek word eironia as dissimulatio which means “mask.” After all why study the past? Because you may wish to repeat it. And in time (Sappho notes) one’s mask becomes one’s face.

希腊语的“肺”和“心”这个在之前读过的其他书也有提到。

Ancient Greek phrenes. Usually rendered as “heart” in modern translations because we don’t understand very much about how love works. To breathe is to love.

关于距离，回到她最爱的萨福。

“Sappho is one of those people of whom the more you see the less you know. But it might well have been for Sappho, as representative of the whole mysterious, polluted species of ancient womanhood, that Dorothy Parker composed her famous epitaph:
If you can read this, you’ve come too close.”

卡森补完计划，还剩下Nay Rather，整个费城的任何图书馆都没有，所以亚马逊下单了但是还要两周才能到，在那之前floating、nox、H of H Playbook去图书馆预约看一下

Antigonick是我最不擅长的剧本形式，搁置一下

读诗的意义在于：

Reading a good poem doesn’t give you something to talk about. It silences you. Reading a great poem pushes further. It prepares you for the silence that perplexes us all: death.

Nay Rather

The previous paragraph is about silence. Coincidently, the whole Nay Rather is talking about silence, or how to translate silence.

Variations on the Right to Remain Silent (also collected in Float)

Each something is a celebration of
the nothing that supports it.

-John Cage

There are two types of silence - physical (e.g. Sappho) and metaphorical. The definition and some examples for latter one provided in following text.

But now what if, within this silence, you discover a deeper one - a word that does not intend to be translatable. A word that stops itself.

Homer let the word only to gods fall silence.

Here are four letters of the alphabet (molu), you can pronounce them but you cannot define, possess, or make use of them. You cannot search for this plant by the roadside or google it and find out where to buy some. The plant is sacred, the knowledge belongs to gods, the word stops itself.

Joan the Arc （圣女贞德）
All Joan’s guidance, military and moral, came from a source she called ‘voices’

The light comes in the name of the voice is a sentence that stops itself. Its components are simple yet it stays foreign, we cannot own it.

Francis Bacon (not for his essay but his painting) - for something beneath, inside the surface - violence

Bacon has another term for this stopping: he calls it ‘destroying clarity with clarity’s Not just in his use of colour but in the whole strategy of his compositions, he wants to make us see something we don’t yet have eyes for, to hear something that was never sounded. He goes inside clarity to a place of deeper refreshment, where clarity is the same and yet differs from itself, which may be analogous to the place inside a word where it falls silent in its own presence.
Bacon says we live through screens. What are these screens? They are part of our normal way of looking at the world, or rather our normal way of seeing the world without looking at it, for Bacon’s claim is that a real seer who looked at the world would notice it to be fairly violent - not violent as narrative surface but somehow violently composed underneath the surface, having violence as its essence. No one has ever seen a black hole yet scientists feel confident they can locate its essence in the gravitational collapse of a star - this massive violence, this something which is also, spectacularly, nothing.

Purple to make purple

But the purplefish had another name in ancient Greek, namely K&\yn (kalkhe), and from this word was derived a verb and a metaphor and a problem for translators.
The verb kalyaíveIv (kalkhainein), ‘to make purple‘, came to signify profound and troubled emotion: to grow dark with disquiet, to seethe with worries, to harbour dark thoughts, to brood in the deep of one’s mind.

Hölderlinq

What fascinates me is to see his catastrophe, at whatever level of consciousness he chose it, as a method extracted from translation, a method organized by the rage
against cliché. After all what else is one’s own language but a gigantic cacophonous cliché. Nothing has not been said before. The templates are set.

Cliché means ‘to make a stereotype from a relief printing surface’ in French, she said.

Till now, the title “Nay Rather” has not appeared yet, but Carson mentioned it in her translation of Ibykos in six wonderful ways with “Nay Rather” in every poem. “Nay Rather” itself, I regarded as a transition, which is kind of sudden silence.

2023-03-26_10-37-54

Here is an interview to her, I would say, I rather rare one.

Nox

Latin Multas = many, much. Multa nox means late in the night, perhaps too late

1.0. I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy. There is nothing more to be expended on that, we think, he’s dead. Love cannot alter it. Words cannot add to it. No matter how I try to evoke the starry lad he was, it remains plain, odd history. So I began to think about history.

Interesting finding that, two spaces between each sentence.

Latin per = through

1.1 History and elegy are akin. The word “history” comes from an ancient Greek verv meaning “to ask”.

Hekataios

Latin gentes = race nation (feminine)

Latin et = and

1.2 Autopsy is a term historians use of the “eyewitnessing “ of data or events by the historian himself … “To be nothing - is that not, after all, the most satisfactory fact in the whole world?” asks a dog in a novel I read once (Virginia Woolf Flush 87). I wonder what the smell of nothing is. Mell of autopsy.

1.3 Herodotos is an historian who trains you as you read. It is a process of asking , searching, collecting, doubting, striving, testing, blaming and above all standing amazed at the strange things humans do.

Note that the word “mute” is regarded by linguists as an onomatopoeic formation referring not to silence but to a certain fundamental opacity of human being, which likes to show the truth by allowing it to be seen hiding.

followed by an instance in cigarette-smoke-soaked Copenhagen

Latin aequora = surface, plain

Latin vectus = to carry, to convey

Latin advenio = to come, to arrive

Notice that photocopy cannot see the stroke at the top and bottom of page. The ‘WHO’ and ‘YOU’, can be read from previous page. I believe that they are not on the same page (I checked).

2.2 He wrote only one letter, to my mother, that winter the girl died.

Latin has = this

Latin miseras = sad, poor

Latin frater= brother

Latin postremo = after everything else

4.2 She never hot an address for him. Indeed during the last seven years of her life he wrote to her not a single word. Eventually she began to say he was dead. How do you know? I said and she said When I pray for him nothing comes back.

I fall, you fall, I have fallen, a neutral verb, whence casual and casually.

It is for God to fi the tie who knows no time.

Always comforting to assume there is a secret behind what torments you.

Repent means “the pain again.”

6.1 … his death came wandering slowly towards me across the sea.

something inbetween, something so deeply swaying.

7.1 I guess it never ends. I brother never ends. I prowl him. He does not end.

prowling the history of a person, no use expecting a flood of light. Human words have no main switch. But all those little kidnaps in the dark. And then luminous, big, shivering, discandled, unrepentant, barking web of them that hangs in your mind when you turn back to the page you were trying to translate.

Why do we blush before death?

If you are writing an elegy begin with the blush.

I am curious about the season of coldness you hav ethere.

The days [become] small, the night long

Yesterday you cannot change.

Toda you might alter.

Tomorrow does not give any promise.

230828: a good review of Nox

Float

I gave up scanning every single page. Just took photos of some essay that I may be interested in

Don’t like boundary -Maintenance

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