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Eros in Footnote

Matthew Kulisch

for Anne Carson

γλυκύπικρον (Lat. glukupikron)1
The Greek Anthology, Volume 12, pp. 1512
δόκητος (Lat. adokētos)3

Hesiod, “Theogony” ln. 188-1914
Plato, The Symposium (Aristophanes)5
Sappho, Fr31, Poetarum Lesbiorum Fragmenta6

William Blake, Notebooks7
Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta IV: Sophocles8
Heliodoros, Aethiopica9

Plato, The Symposium (Socrates)10
Πτέρωτα (Lat. Pteros, pt- does not scan)11
μυθοπλόκον (Lat. mythoplokon)12

Virginia Woolf, The Waves, On Neville and Bernard13

  1. “sweetbitter”
  2. If you looked upon my beloved and were not broken by desire, you are totally god or totally stone.
  3. “unthought of”

  4. As soon as he cut off the genitals with adamant,
    he threw them from land into the turbulent sea;
    they were carried over the sea a long time, and white foam arose from the immortal flesh; with a girl grew…
  5. Sliced in two like a flatfish, each of us is perpetually hunting for the matching half of himself…
  6. I am and dead—or / almost / I seem to me.

 
  1. Nature has no outline, but Imagination has.
  2. a lump of ice melting in /  warm hands
  3. absolute contrarieties were fitted together as one sound: joy interwoven with grief, tears mixed with laughter, total gloom turning into festive delight

  4. the greatest of good things comes to us through madness when it is conferred as a gift of the gods
  5. “but the immortals call him Pteros, because of his wing-growing necessity”
  6. “weaver of fictions”


 
  1. How curiously one is changed by the addition, even at a distance, of a friend. How useful an office one’s friends perform when they recall us. Yet how painful to be recalled, to be mitigated, to have one’s self adulterated, mixed up, become part of another.  As he approaches I become not myself but Neville mixed with somebody—with whom?—with Bernard?  Yes, it is Bernard, and it is to Bernard that I shall put the question, Who am I?


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