Field Note
Anne Carson's Preface to Eros the Bittersweet draws upon Kafka's story "The Top" to craft a metaphor for the human's loving condition. The delight that the philosopher takes in trying to catch the spinning top becomes the pursuit of love and the meaning of Eros. One desires something which can only give pleasure in its pursuit. The catching of the top immediately leaves one nauseated.
Quotes
“as soon as the top began to spin and he was running breathlessly after it, the hope would turn to certainty but when he held the silly piece of wood in his hand he felt nauseated.”
The story is about the delight we take in metaphor.
What is Delight?
Beauty spins and the mind moves. To catch beauty would be to understand how that impertinent stability in vertigo is possible. But no, delight need not reach so far. To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.
That is to say, delight lies in the lack of understanding of beauty. The attempt to catch beauty is delightful in itself.
Delight in Metaphor
A meaning spins, remaining upright on an axis of normalcy aligned with the conventions of connotation and denotation, and yet: to spin is not normal, and to dissemble normal uprightness by means of this fantastic motion is impertinent. What is the relation of impertinence to the hope of understanding? To delight?
Why do we find metaphors delightful? Metaphors are not normal, they are fantastic motion which only remain upright in an axis of normalcy between connotation and denotation. Their disruption of the "normal uprightness" of straightforward, literal language, is in Carson's words, "impertinent." The delight does not lie in the comprehension but in its pursuit. "Delight need not reach so far." Therefore, the impertinence leads to the pursuit of understanding this impertinent act, which delights. In essence, impertinence sets an object of beauty in motion, and the delight comes from the hopeful, dynamic pursuit of that moving object, not from its static capture.
- Connotation: emotional or cultural associations that the word carries beyond its direct meaning.
- Denotation: literal, explicit meaning of a word.
The Suppression of Impertinence
Suppression of impertinence is not the lover’s aim. Nor can I believe this philosopher really runs after understanding. Rather, he has become a philosopher (that is, one whose profession is to delight in understanding) in order to furnish himself with pretexts for running after tops.
To understand, aka, the suppression of impertinence is not the lover's aim. The lover seeks to understand only to delight in the pursuit of understanding itself.