Econon, Ils Fvagvance

AulIov|s) Anne Cavson

Souvce TIe TIveepenn Beviev, No. 69 |Spving, 1997), pp. 14-16
FuIIisIed I Threepenny Review
SlaIIe UBL http://www.jstor.org/stable/4384608
Accessed 20/09/2010 1159
Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at
http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless
you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you
may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use.
Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at
http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=tpr.
Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed
page of such transmission.
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of
content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms
of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.
Threepenny Review is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Threepenny
Review.
http://www.jstor.org
ARTISTS FORVM
places emphasis on thematic exhibitions and related programs
that provide a forum for the discussion of ideas that surround and
inform an artist's work. ARTISTS FORVM presents work in the con-
text of conceptual concerns investigated by the artist in the studio,
and works closely with artists to develop a variety of programs
related to the exhibitions. The programs-artist talks, critical lec-
tures, panel discussions, workshops and demonstrations, poetry
readings, music performances, and other events offered in the
form of subscription series-provide an opportunity to have more
direct contact with the artist and the ideas.
BRIGtHTON PRESS
THE ART OF THE BOOK
January 14 to April 26
An exhibition of limited edition books by artists and
writers including Sandra Alcosser/Michele Burgess,
Robert Cremean, C. G. Hanzlicek/Oldrich Prochazka,
Mary Julia Klimenko/Manuel Neri, DeLoss McGraw/
W. D. Snodgrass, Faith Ringgold, Harry Sternberg,
Emilio Westphalen/Fernando de Szyszlo, Nancy Willard
and others
ARTISTS FORVM 1997
SUBSCRIPTION SERIES
Readings and conversations with artists, writers, curators
and collectors who have worked with Brighton Press.
Programs begin at 7 pm, with a reception at 6:30 pm
Thursday, February 20
FROM THE ARTIST'S POINT OF VIEW:
Robert Cremean in conversation with Michele Burgess
and Bill Kelly
Tuesday, March 11
POETS OF BRIGHTON PRESS:
Sandra Alcosser, C. G. Hanzlicek and Nancy Willard
Thursday, March 20
THE ARTIST AND THE POET-A DIALOGUE
IN BOOK FORM: Mary Julia Klimenko and Manuel Neri
Thursday, April 1 7
COLLECTING ARTIST'S BOOKS:
Joseph Goldyne and Robert F. Johnson
$100 Subscription Series of four events
$30 Individual events
WORKSHOPS IN THE BOOK ARTS
One-day workshops led by Michele- Burgess and Bill Kelly,
Co-Directors of Brighton Press, San Diego. Workshops focus
on individual projects and are limited to 20 participants.
Workshops take place at ARTISTS FORVM from 9 am to 4:30 pm
Saturday, February 22 / Sunday, February 23
BOOKMAKING: FROM CONCEPT TO PRODUCTION
Satu rday, March 8 / Su nday, March 9
BOOKS IN PROGRESS
Saturday, April 19 / Sunday, April 20
THE BOOK AS METAPHOR
$200 Series of three one-day workshops
$ 75 Individual workshops
ARTISTS FORVM
251 Post Street, Suite 425 San Francisco, CA 94108
Telephone (415) 981-6347
Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1 1 am. to 5 p.m.
BOOKS
Economy, Its Fragrance
Anne Carson
Editor's Note: This was originally a panel talk delivered at the most recent
annual conference of the Association of Scholars and Literary Critics, held in
Boston last August. The assigned topic for the panel was "The Poetry/Prose
Distinction."
AS I AM someone who cannot
define or effectively describe the
distinction between poetry and prose, I
will speak instead about its fragrance.
For I do believe I can smell the distinc-
tion. Let's begin with a text from the
Gospel of John:
Then Jesus six,days before the Passover
came to Bethany where Lazarus was which
had been dead, whom he raised from the
dead.
There they made him a supper; and
Martha served: but Lazarus was one of
them that sat at the table with him.
Then took Mary a pound of ointment of
spikenard (very costly) and anointed the feet
of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair:
and the house was filled with the odour of
the ointment.
Then saith one of the disciples, Judas
Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray
him,
Why was not this ointment sold for three
hundred pence and given to the poor?
This he said, not that he cared for the
poor but because he was a thief and had the
bag, and bare what was put therein.
Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the
day of my burying hath she kept this.
For the poor always ye have with you,
but me ye have not always.
(John 12. 1-8)
"The poor always ye have with you,"
says Christ to Judas Iscariot, rebuking
Judas who has rebuked Mary of
Bethany for her extravagance with
some ointment. What does Christ mean
by saying, "The poor always ye have
with you"? Sociologically, a sad, flat,
and heartless statement. Politically all
too correct. But economically interest-
ing, or at least vexing. Christ's rebuke
points to the possibility that keeping
costs to a minimum is not a sufficient
nor even a necessary condition for right
action. Spending wisely may be irrele-
vant to virtue. Indeed, Christ sets Mary
of Bethany's virtue against a back-
ground of continuing and unresolvable
poverty in order (perhaps) to highlight
its difference from this continuum.
Mary of Bethany's wild and momen-
tary use of ointment succeeds as a dif-
ferential gesture because it breaks with
all those ordinary rules of procedure so
neatly summed up in John's phrase
";LJudas] was a thief and had the bag."
On a literal level ";the bag" that Judas
has refers simply to his charter as
accountant for the twelve apostles.
Judas manages their purse. But on a
deeper level Judas' bag surely repre-
sents the whole tedious rulebook of
mortal conditions, causality, credit rat-
ing, and cost analysis by which we (like
Judas) ordinarily live our lives and use
our ointment, thieves that we are.
Neither Judas' bag nor Mary of
Bethany's gesture is economically inter-
esting in itself, but the place where they
cross-the moment when Judas cries
out and ointment overflows-this
moment is interesting. This moment
emits fragrance. ". . . For the house was
filled with the odour of the ointment."
If I were marketing the poetry/prose
distinction as a perfume, I would call it
Economy. Not because poetry is the
only form of verbal expression that
manages its resources thriftily but
because this thrift seems essential to
poetry. Economic measures allow poet-
ry to practice what I take to be its prin-
cipal subversion. That is, insofar as it is
economic, poetry relies on a gesture
which it simultaneously dismantles. Let
us dwell for a moment on this gesture
and on its controlling principle. I
believe it was Marilyn Monroe who
once said, "I read poetry to save time."
There is a curious human preoccupa-
tion with saving time (or making time
pay, as it is alternately put) that I sus-
pect does somehow really underlie the
pleasure we take in poetic economy.
But I am less interested (today) in the
psychology of economic pleasure than
in the question of how poetry solicits
this pleasure-subversively, by over-
flowing its own measures and filling the
house with an odour of ointment.
Let's see how John the Evangelist
goes about it. He is not of course writ-
ing poetry but his story has the struc-
ture of a poetic event and may be ana-
logically useful. He frames the story in
two references to death-Lazarus' at
the beginning and Christ's at the end.
Notice the content of these references-
both are stories of resurrection.
In between the two immortal mortals
John places Mary of Bethany spilling a
lot of ointment, as if to say, Why both-
er saving time if you're going to live
forever? Now you may think Mary of
Bethany's extravagance is more a mat-
ter of commodity-value than time-sav-
ing but Marx reminds us in Capital
that when commodities present them-
selves to us for evaluation and
exchange, what we are really measur-
ing in them is time. Marx is talking
about labor-time immanent in any
commodity. John the Evangelist is talk-
ing about mortal time immanent in all
of us, which flows over Christ's feet
and washes up against an interesting
question. ";Let her alone. Against the
day of my burying hath she kept this,"7
says Christ as if to congratulate Mary
of Bethany for a frugal household
action whose rationale is apparent only
to himself. He implies she was just try-
ing to save time. I find it hard to get the
tone of Christ's remark here. He is nlot
exactly making mock of such ordinary
14
THE THREEPENNY
REVIEW
frugality; on the other hand his next
sentence ("the poor always ye have
with you") gestures towards a deeper
economic background. But of course
this gesture too will be dismantled. No
matter how much frugality is spent on
his burial Christ will overflow the
Death that seeks to contain him, after
less than a weekend in the tomb. The
fact is, Death is wasted on a God. The
question remains, Is life wasted on a
mortal? Let us look at some poetic
answers to this fairly fundamental eco-
nomic question.
First example: epigram from a classi-
cal Greek gravestone (ascribed to the
fifth-century BC poet Simonides of
Keos) which says:
Someone rejoices now that I Theodoros am
dead. Another over him
will rejoice. To Death we are all debts owed.
This poem, like the interaction of Judas
and Mary of Bethany in the Gospel of
John, shows us a crossing of two eco-
nomic attitudes. For in the first verse
the dead man tells us his name is
Theodoros-a Greek compound word
which would mean "gift of God"-
while the last verse hands Theodoros
over to the collection agency of Death.
In between, the poem sets up a fine ten-
sion between the gift of life and the
debt to death, between grace and com-
merce, and raises in our minds the
question, What is the difference
between a gift and a debt-between
Theodoros living and Theodoros dead?
An infinite difference, we would like to
believe, and yet the poem shows us
these two points of reference-gift of
life, debt to death-connected by an
assembly line of corpses ticking
inevitably along toward the open cash-
box of The Great Collector. As if there
were no difference at all except in the
timing. Sociologically this is not a sur-
prise; social anthropologists from
Marcel Mauss to Jacques Derrida have
explored at length the conundrum that
in actual human practice there is no
such thing as a gift. Every gift is a debt,
the sociologists tell us, insofar as a gift
sets up the idea of a countergift: every
gift contains the obligation to repay.
And here is where we get entangled in
the project of saving time. For obliga-
tions take place in that curious interval
of time that we call in English "the
present," and so long as an obligation
is pending, the present can continue to
be a gift. But as Theodoros tells us in
his epigram, once the day of reckoning
arrives, the present is past and gift
becomes debt. Death in the end is not a
giving god, as the ancient Greeks
acknowledged when they named him
Ploutos, a name that means simply
"Wealth." Why is Death wealthy? It is
a cumulative condition. Since the begin-
ning of time he has ne-ver forgiven a
debt nor bestowed a grace. Even more
securely than Judas, Death has the bag.
So now that Death has Theodoros in
his bag we might assume the transac-
tion between them is finished. But that
would be incorrect. This man
Theodoros, who has lain more than
two thousand years in the tomb, is no
more finished than you and I are. You
and I can clearly perceive a residue of
Theodoros loose in this room like a
perfume. His debt may be paid but his
interest is still rising. The poem that
maintains his interest does so by a sub-
versive economic action. That is to say,
by thrifty management of its own mea-
sures-measures of rhythm, diction,
syntax, image, and allusion- the poem
secretes a residue, the poem generates a
profit, the poem yields surplus value:
lifting Theodoros past the termination
of his debt into an endless extra space
and time on the far side of restitution.
Bestowing on Theodoros a gift that for
once is not a debt. Dismantling the
axiom of exchange that says there is no
such thing as grace in economics.
Grace is the first word of both verses
of this epigram. Chairei ... chairesei says
Simonides: "Someone rejoices... anoth-
er will rejoice" using a verb (chairein)
that means "to rejoice, have grace, take
pleasure, be gratified" and is formed
from the noun charis, whose most gen-
eral translation is "grace" but which
has two spheres of reference. Aes-
thetically, charis refers to the beauty,
'4~~~~~~44~~~~~ - ~ ~ i
charm, or pleasing surface of things like
human flesh, an earring, a sunrise, a
horse, a piece of language. Socio-
economically, charis means a favor,
benevolence, or gift. Both its aesthetic
and its socioeconomic meanings are
reciprocal, that is, charis can convey
both the charm of an earring and the
gratification felt by someone who
notices its charm; charis can convey
both favor in the sense of a benefaction
bestowed and favor in the sense of
compensation received-both gift and
countergift. It is a more-than-two-sided
word and evokes a world where things
do not stop easily at the borders of
themselves, they overflow.
I believe Simonides begins each verse
of his poem with the verb chairein
because overflow of grace is essential to
the epitaphic transaction of his subject.
After all, what Theodoros hopes to
achieve with these two lines of verse is
to buy himself a bit of time. Whenever
his epitaph is read he lives again,
beyond the term set by Death. We as
readers bestow this grace on him in the
gift of our attention. In return we get
the charis of the poem-that is, the
grace or charm that makes a poem a
poem, lifting it above the value of its
paraphraseable content and persuading
us to read or reread it however occa-
sionally for two thousand years. When
Theodoros confidently asserts,
"Someone rejoices... someone else will
rejoice..." he is putting his whole
time-saving faith in this transaction.
Grace is a coin with more than two
sides. In which we trust.
There is a poem of Sappho's that
explores this relationship of trust:
Dead you will lie and not ever memory of
you
will there be nor desire into the after
time. For you will have no share
in the roses of Pieria, but invisible also in
the house of Hades
you will go your way among the blotted
dead-having been breathed out.
(Sappho fr. 55 LP)
According to the ancient editors who
preserved this poem, it is directed at a
woman of considerable wealth who
was nonetheless amousikos-"unmusi-
cal"-that is, she chose not to waste
her time on song, dance, poetry, or the
pursuit of knowledge. Sappho responds
to her in kind with a poem that imitates
the relations of time and is constructed
around a time-saving device. Its effect is
to render some woman nameless to this
day. It is quite true, we feel neither
memory nor desire for her, we see an
empty house through which she passed
leaving no imprint. The poem foretells
this woman's afterlife and sets out for
her, in four verbs referring to the
future, a reliable prediction: When you
die you will be nobody. But placed
within these future references, like a
trap of the kind called a deadfall, is a
more surprising inference: You were
always nobody, you lived your life as if
you were already dead. The inference
arises from Sappho's third verse:
".. . invisible also in the house of Hades
you will go your way..." Sappho has
constructed her deadfall trap out of the
tiny Greek word kai, a conjunction
meaning "also." Sappho makes point-
edly economic use of this conjunction
by invoking a metrical license called
crasis that allows her to abbreviate the
word kai to a single kappa and join it
to the preposition en that follows: kai
en becomes kan. Two beats are reduced
to one.
Now crasis is of interest to us because
it is a time-saver. Defined as a metrical
license permitting the compression of
two open vowels into one long syllable
for time-saving purposes, crasis quick-
ens the connective action of the con-
junction kai and syncopates some
woman's posthumous nonentity upon
its counterpart in present life. By the
time we feel the retroactive force of this
conjunction, a nameless woman has
already floated forward to verse four
and to her darkening future, leaving
behind her-lodged in a single kappa-
the whole bad investment of her days
without roses. No fragrance at all fills
the house of this woman who insisted
on living her life as if it were mortal, as
if she were Judas holding his bag.
Sappho has composed a poem that
deliberately takes a tuck in itself in
order to comment on a certain question
of value. Her subject is a woman who
wasted eternity in order to save time.
Her method is a slightly mocking use of
poetic economy.
I want to look now at a poem in
which both economy and its mockery
are intensified to an almost intolerable
degree, a poem of Paul Celan.
NO MORE SAND ART, no Sand book, no
Masters.
Nothing on the dice. How many
Mutes?
Seven and ten.
Your Question-your Answer.
Your Song, what does it know?
Deepinsnow,
E eepinow,
Composed in 1964, a year when Paul
Celan was becoming more and more
disheartened by the resurgence of
anti-Semitism in Europe, this poem
seems to refer in its opening line ("No
more Sand art, no Sand book") to the
first book of poetry he published, which
was called Sand from the Urns, in 1948.
The phrase at the end of the opening line
("no Masters") is, I think, a reference to
a poem from this early collection that
became famous, the poem "Death-
fugue," which concerns the world of the
concentration camps and contains the
refrain " Death is a Master from
Germany." Both the book Sand from
the Urns and the poem "Deathfugue"
were repudiated by Celan himself, the
former because of the many misprints
that appeared in the text when it was
published, the latter because he came to
think it spoke too directly about things
which could not be said.
SPRING 1997 15
"Nothing on the dice," says the sec-
ond line of the poem. This may be
another allusion to Celan's own poetic
past, specifically to the French poet
Mallarme, whose long poem "A
Throw of the Dice" was much admired
and also translated by Celan during his
early years in Paris. But by 1964 Celan
was no longer imitating Mallarme and
aestheticism in general seemed irrele-
vant to his project. So the lines "No
more Sand art, no Sand book, no
Masters. Nothing on the dice..." repu-
diate a kind of art and a stage of him-
self which no longer suffice; a stage in
which he had sought to "poeticize"
reality (as he says) rather than simply
to "name" it.
I don't know who the seven and ten
mutes in the middle are. Critics have
raised many possibilities. The muteness
of the seventeen remains, another sort
of repudiation.
The poem ends "Deepinsnow."
Throughout Celan's work snow seems
to be a figure for the season and the
conditions of his mother's death (she
was executed in winter in a labor camp
in the Ukraine). In between the sand
and the snow comes a question (which
is also an answer): "Your Song, what
does it know?" I am inclined to take
this as a question addressed by the poet
to the poet. He is demanding an episte-
mology of himself. The whole poem is
his answer. It juxtaposes two kinds of
song, two ways of knowing. One creat-
ed by sand art, the other by snow art.
The difference between them-has to do,
at least in part, with their relationship
to time.
Sand, if you pick it up, will run
through your fingers, then lie on the
ground inert, possibly for centuries.
Snow, if you pick it up, will melt and
then vanish. Sand art works by repeti-
tion and so may represent the entire
vast, improvident, and infinitely replic-
able burned-out linguistic store of
poeticizing poetry which Celan wished
to repudiate. Snow art, on the other
hand, keeps a sense of its own econo-
my. Which Celan emphasizes by paring
the last word down gradually
("Deepinsnow, Eepinow, E-i-o") to
its merest constituent Vowels. He per-
mits us to see the name he is giving to
reality, then see it melt away into the
different whiteness of the page. But
suspended within this act of disap-
pearance is a terribly quiet pun. For
one cannot help but think, watching
"Deepinsnow" melt away, that if this
poem were translated into Hebrew, a
language in which vowels are not
printed, it would vanish even before
its appointed end. As did many a
Hebrew.
Finally, let us recall a very ancient
Hebrew exemplar of the sand of
Celan's poem, which may also tell us
something about the fragrance of econ-
omy in human transactions generally.
It is in the Book of Genesis (22.17) that
God makes Abraham a promise: "That
in blessing I will bless thee and in mul-
tiplying I will multiply thy seed as the
stars of the heaven and as the sand
which is upon the sea shore. And thy
seed shall possess the gate of his ene-
mies..." In his lifetime Celan saw the
seed of Abraham lose possession of the
gate of his enemies and exchange the
innumerability of sand for a specific
number which is usually put at six mil-
lion. By the odd mathematics of that
time the number six million came to be
equal to zero. Celan sets up a parallel
mathematics of reduction, but he has
replaced sand with snow and zero with
a letter of the alphabet. Here is a short
answer to his own epistemological
question: what a poet knows is how to
imitate the human zero with a poetic
0! Poetry is an act of memory that
crosses between sand art and snow art,
transforming what is innumerable and
headed for oblivion into a timeless
notation. Through memory the poem
exchanges grace for grace. But I won-
der if Celan is not making mock of this
poetic act even as he executes it, when
he turns the last verses of his poem into
an inside-out Hebrew lesson in
which-unusually-it is the consonants
that have to be supplied from memory.
Perhaps mockery is the only way to
refer to the losses implied in these con-
sonants, or to the grace that poetry
claims as its rate of exchange. And so
Celan dismantles the syllables of his
own proposition and releases a flow of
vowels into the room, filling the house
with fragrance. Not exactly the odor of
ointment, but still, something to be
kept against the day of burying. LI
Borderlines
A Castle from a Dream
The city was castle-like, compact, dense, multilayered, like the edifices of
Piranesi. Red brick predominated-it signified civilization-and on the
other side of the river wilderness began. He marched quickly; his compan-
ions, a he and a she, could hardly keep up. And suddenly he realized how
abstraction changes into reality: the spicy scents from stores, an enticing
vapor from passed-by kitchens, huge flitches of hams, taverns full of wine
drinkers, oh, to be thus restored to the senses, only that and nothing else.
Warmth
Every moment in that community of artists, writers, and scholars was a
densely woven fabric of conflicts, friendships, aggressive-defensive
alliances, and above all, of gossip about everybody's private life. So
absorbing was their submersion in the moment, that its peculiar nature
escaped their attention. Only the flow of time revealed it and then one
could wonder. One day, suddenly, faces perfectly familiar appeared with
their mark of passed years, wrinkled, bleak, with gray hair or a shining
baldness. This sad sight was accompanied by a shock of realization: of
course, intensity is maintained by the bodily presence and animal warmth
of those who are persons and organisms at the same time. When their
vital energy weakens, and, together with it, its radiation, the cold of the
approaching glacier already is felt. Its big wall advances irresistibly,
crushing little rabbits, froggies, teeny people and their games. Later on,
there is only the history of arts, letters, and sciences. Nothing in fact can
be more or less faithfully reproduced, and in vain doctoral dissertations
try to dig up details. A few names survive and a question doomed to
remain unanswered: where did all that go?
The Complaint of a Classic
The complaint of a classic, i.e. of a poet who instead of vanguard pur-
suits busied himself with polishing the language of his predecessors: "I
was perfectly aware of how little of the world is scooped up by the net of
my clauses and phrases." Like a monk, sentencing himself to ascesis, tor-
mented by erotic visions, I would take shelter in rhythm and the order of
syntaxis, afraid of my internal chaos.
Again
Again I was flying in my dream. As if my old body contained the poten-
tial of all movements prior to live beings, flying, swimming, crawling, run-
ning.
Watering Can
Of a green color, standing in a shed by rakes and spades, it comes alive
when it is filled with water from the pond, and an abundant shower pours
from its nozzle, in an act, we feel it, of charity towards plants. It is not cer-
tain, however, that the watering can would have such a place in our mem-
ory, were it not for our training in noticing things. For, after all, we have
been trained. Our painters do not often imitate the Dutch, who liked to
paint still lifes, and yet photography contributes to our paying attention to
detail and the cinema taught us that objects, once they appear on the
screen, would participate in actions of the characters and therefore should
be noticed. There are also museums where canvases glorify not only
human figures and landscapes, but also a multitude of objects. The water-
ing can has thus a good chance of occupying a sizable place in our imagi-
nation, and, who knows, perhaps precisely in this, in our clinging to dis-
tinctly delineated shapes, does our hope reside, of salvation from the tur-
bulent waters of nothingness and chaos.
-Czeslaw Milosz
(translated from the Polish by the author and Robert Hass)
I
I-
16 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW