"To tell is a function of self. This situation is a big problem for a writer. It is more than a contradiction, it is a paradox."
—page 172, from "Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God," as found in Decreation by Anne Carson
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The father gave me a gift he may not understand. No, he does. He gave me the gift of women and God. He gave me a word, words, mirrors perhaps of the Word.
He understands because he himself is husband and father—to a wife and daughter and enigmatic sons.
He gave me the gift of Anne Carson, who in turn gave her gift of Sappho, Marguerite Porete, and Simone Weil. They, in turn, gave their gift, threefold yet one.
He stared into my searching eyes, seeking with his own, and found a piece of "sought-ness."
He saw my own wife and daughter and fleeting, whispered, fragmentary sons, the latter now lost to this world, forever.
I received a gift that I may not understand.
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Decreation, like the rest of Anne Carson's work, stops one's heart and starts it anew. So this is what intellectual, imaginative essay and poetry and prose can do...
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"From early on Hölderlin had a theory of himself."
—page 184, from "Variations on the Right to Remain Silent" by Anne Carson as found in A Public Space #7
"Let's begin with Simone Weil, who was a practical person and arranged for her own disappearance on several levels."
—page 173, from "Decreation: How Women Like Sappho, Marguerite Porete and Simone Weil Tell God," as found in Decreation by Anne Carson
What does it mean to know one's self? What does it mean for others to know one's self?
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"Here is contradiction and perhaps paradox."
—page 3, from "Bittersweet," as found in Eros the Bittersweet by Anne Carson
Carson posits, as do the three women that she is profiling, that to know God one must decreate one's self. One must get out of the way in order to make one's self what it was truly meant to be. The three women are talking about different gods—Sappho, Aphrodite; Marguerite Porete, the Christian God; Simone Weil, a loosely defined God—and yet they are not.
I like the mysticism of all three women and that of Carson herself. All speak to my own heart, which stumbles along through its strangely well-defined and undefined mystical tendencies. Contradiction and perhaps paradox.
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Here on this Good Friday, I am meditating on kenosis, self-emptying, in a context that is the foundation, the pinnacle, of the theology of the Cross. It is anti-glory, anti-triumphal, as it should be. It is hidden and mysterious. It is weak and shadowed.
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And here, in the midst of kenosis made manifest, I have found it spelled out for me by a compatriot soul, who has found it spelled out for her by compatriot souls (and all provided by a perhaps unknowing compatriot soul).
