eros, part two
[note 2.20]
[photo: early human couple, out for a stroll]
Last week we looked at Ann Carson’s Eros the Bittersweet.
Here’s a little more from that:
In any act of thinking, the mind must reach across this space between known and unknown, linking one to the other but also keeping visible the difference. It is an erotic space. . . . When the mind reaches out to know, the space of desire opens and a necessary fiction transpires.
Last week, as it creeped into the 90s, I biked up to the Museum of Natural History, where I met my friend, the writer and musician Jonathan Meiburg. He’s just back from several months in Antarctica—his phone is full of images of the strange, impossible creatures that live in the water below the ice, creatures that no one has seen until now. He told me about the land below the ice, which is full of mountains and rivers (sonar has mapped it out), as we wandered from room to room, past dinosaur skeletons and dioramas of our former selves. I tried to imagine all that was unknown to those depicted behind the glass—like today, almost everything was unknown.
A mind reaching across this space between known and unknown—along with defining eros, this seems as good a definition of bewilderment as I know. It echoes a quote by the artist Bruce Nauman I saw on the wall of the Tate a few years ago:
