Economy, Its Fragrance

Author(s): Anne Carson

Source: The Threepenny Review, No. 69 (Spring, 1997), pp. 14-16
Published by: Threepenny Review
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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 someonewho 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 beforethe Passover
came to BethanywhereLazaruswas which
had been dead, whom he raised from the
dead.
There they made him a supper; and
Martha served: but Lazarus was one of
themthatsat at the tablewith him.
Then took Marya pound of ointmentof
spikenard(verycostly)and anointedthe feet
of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair:
and the house was filledwith the odour of
the ointment.
Then saith one of the disciples, Judas
Iscariot,Simon'sson, which should betray
him,
Why was not this ointmentsold for three
hundredpenceandgivento the poor?
This he said, not that he cared for the
poor but becausehe was a thiefand had the
bag,and barewhatwas put therein.
ThensaidJesus,Letheralone:againstthe
dayof my buryinghathshe keptthis.
For the poor always ye have with you,
but me ye havenot always.
(John12. 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 ";thebag" 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. ";Lether 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
THE THREEPENNY REVIEW
frugality;on the other hand his next
sentence ("the poor always ye have
with you") gesturestowards a deeper
economic background.But of course
this gesturetoo will be dismantled.No
matterhow much frugalityis 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 wastedon a God. The
question remains, Is life wasted on a
mortal? Let us look at some poetic
answersto this fairlyfundamentaleco-
nomicquestion.
Firstexample:epigramfrom a classi-
cal Greek gravestone(ascribedto the
fifth-century BC poet Simonides of
Keos)whichsays:
Someonerejoicesnow thatI Theodorosam
dead.Anotheroverhim
will rejoice.To Deathwe areall debtsowed.
This poem, like the interactionof Judas
and Mary of Bethanyin the Gospelof
John, shows us a crossingof two eco-
nomic attitudes.For in the first verse
the dead man tells us his name is
Theodoros-a Greekcompoundword
which would mean "gift of God"-
while the last verse hands Theodoros
over to the collectionagencyof Death.
In between,the poem sets up a fine ten-
sion between the gift of life and the
debt to death,betweengraceand com-
merce, and raises in our minds the
question, What is the difference
between a gift and a debt-between
Theodoroslivingand Theodorosdead?
An infinitedifference,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
inevitablyalong towardthe open cash-
box of The GreatCollector.As if there
were no differenceat all except in the
timing.Sociologicallythis is not a sur-
prise; social anthropologists from
MarcelMauss to JacquesDerridahave
exploredat lengththe conundrumthat
in actual human practice there is no
suchthingas a gift. Everygift is a debt,
the sociologiststell us, insofaras a gift
sets up the idea of a countergift:every
gift contains the obligation to repay.
And here is wherewe get entangledin
the projectof saving time. For obliga-
tions take placein that curiousinterval
of time that we call in English "the
present,"and so long as an obligation
is pending,the presentcan continueto
be a gift. But as Theodorostells us in
his epigram,once the day of reckoning
arrives, the present is past and gift
becomesdebt.Deathin the end is not a
giving god, as the ancient Greeks
acknowledgedwhen they named him
Ploutos, a name that means simply
"Wealth."Why is Death wealthy?It is
a cumulativecondition.Sincethe begin-
ning of time he has ne-verforgiven a
debt nor bestoweda grace.Even more
securelythanJudas,Deathhas the bag.
So now that Death has Theodorosin
his bag we might assume the transac-
tion betweenthem is finished.But that
would be incorrect. This man
Theodoros, who has lain more than
two thousandyearsin the tomb, is no
more finishedthan you and I are. You
and I can clearlyperceivea residueof
Theodoros loose in this room like a
perfume.His debt may be paid but his
interest is still rising. The poem that
maintainshis interestdoes so by a sub-
SPRING 1997
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,
charm,or pleasingsurfaceof thingslike
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 earringand the
gratification felt by someone who
notices its charm; charis can convey
both favorin the senseof a benefaction
bestowed and favor in the sense of
compensationreceived-both gift and
countergift.It is a more-than-two-sided
word and evokesa world wherethings
do not stop easily at the borders of
themselves,theyoverflow.
I believeSimonidesbeginseach verse
of his poem with the verb chairein
becauseoverflowof graceis essentialto
the epitaphictransactionof his subject.
After all, what Theodoros hopes to
achievewith these two lines of verseis
to buy himselfa 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
paraphraseablecontent 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 memoryof
you
will there be nor desire into the after
time.Foryou will haveno share
- ~ ~ i
'4~~~~~~44~~~~~
in the roses of Pieria,but invisiblealso in
the houseof Hades
you will go your way among the blotted
dead-having beenbreathedout.
(Sapphofr. 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 retroactiveforce 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 MORESANDART,no Sandbook, no
Masters.
Nothing on the dice. How many
Mutes?
Sevenandten.
YourQuestion-your Answer.
YourSong,whatdoes it know?
Deepinsnow,
Eeepinow,
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 Sandfromthe Urns,in 1948.
The phrase at the end of the opening line
("no Masters") is, I think, a referenceto
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.
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 Complaintof a Classic

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
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.

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?
WateringCan
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 charactersand 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
(translatedfromthe Polishby the authorand RobertHass)

I I-

16 THE THREEPENNY REVIEW