Daughter of Babylon, Doomed to Destruction
dēute, as the poets say. ('come here'; 'follow')
“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. What is this mode of perception, so different from ordinary perception that it is well described as madness? How is it that when you fall in love you feel as if suddenly you are seeing the world as it really is? A mood of knowledge floats out over your life. You seem to know what is real and what is not. Something is lifting you toward an understanding so complete and clear it makes you jubilant. This mood is no delusion, in Sokrates’ belief. It is a glance down into time, at realities you once knew, as staggeringly beautiful as the glance of your beloved (249e-50c).”
– Anne Carson, Eros the Bittersweet.
You asked me once why I was so insatiable, and I hardly knew how to reply. I remember it was summer, and the fruits were bleeding. I never seem to remember the important things, much less what we were speaking of beforehand; although, knowing myself, perhaps it was about the shepherds in Moldavia. You said it in such a manner that has since hindered me from swallowing raspberries. The juice doesn’t stain my lips; it lacks the viscerality that so pleases me. Now I turn away from such sickly sweetness.
In spite of my pretentiousness, my self-proclaimed splendour, my naked power, I have always been tangential. I am a footnote, a forgotten annotation, lost to the archives. But you know who I am. You go out with lanterns searching for me.
I leave you little notes, scribbled in blue ink, hidden in your wallet. ‘Prodigal man condemns himself to tortures of his own creation.’ I play catalyst to spare you, I say, but we both know I mean myself. My sternum aches, sensing what pain the future hides from us. I analyse, I prophecise, and cite God’s will.
You dream of time and space. I get epistemological. We make comparisons between performance and translation. In transforming someone’s words, I say, you risk destroying them. I cite inexact equations and surreal paradoxes. You say you love how clinical I can get. I think of the Greek word ‘deute’. I turn the pillow and say how I wish I was an alchemist.
And then you’ll speak of faith and love eternal, of a single, overpowering urge– will that flow so easily from your heart? I balk at how you move in tandem with your emotion, so fluid and freely. Then, I am a little girl again, watching the ballet. It makes me weep. I can feel how to pirouette with my phantasmic limbs. Enough, I say, it will.
I scratch at the very ropes I tie myself into each morning as I wake, and secure the knots of every night before I sleep. I thought I liked them tight, but I can barely inhale. How did I never notice these welts before?
It is in doing this that I begin to wonder. Perhaps I am insatiable because I am trying to fill the gaps between my veins. Perhaps I’m trying to pull together whatever remains of myself from when you left like I asked you to. Perhaps I’m just vain; the intellectual, Karamazovian type, starved for knowledge that brings divinely induced mania. Consume gloriously, or not at all.
I look back to that summer and what once takes seconds to appear now takes a minute or two. I wonder if I ever haunt you, or if you will ever let me do so. Perhaps in the future, the persistence of this memory will be obsolete. Your head on my shoulder, your soft sigh. “You’ll ruin me.” My question to you now is, did I? Do you feel destroyed?
Come and find me in the ashes,
Pythia.
When scholars study a thing, they strive to kill it first, if it's alive. *
You say I killed you–haunt me, then! Be with me always–take any form– drive me mad! **
Come back. Even as a shadow, even as a dream. ***