Heraklitos. (When words don't for).I was thinking about contradiction when September 11 came. Awake all night, struggling with contradiction, because I had to do a lecture on it the next day and lecturing is not easy for me. A lecture is not a conversation, you don't get to ask the other people in the room what they think until the end, you have to expose yourself first. I was sifting possible openings. Begin with Heraklitos, who likened reality to a "backsprung bow," that is, a system of oppositions bristling bristling see hackles. against itself unchangeably. Or start from Hegel and the doctrine of essences. For Hegel everything that has an essence is in a condition of "self-negation" -- that's how it's possible for us to distinguish between a thing and itself. Only God, said Hegel, has no essence. God is absolutely God all the way through. Or maybe talk about the gnostics with their crazed mythologies of cosmic contradiction working itself out through good and evil and cold perfect sex. "I am the Mother and am the Father and I copulate cop·u·late v. To engage in coitus or sexual intercourse. with myself," says the gn ostic deity Protennoia in a treatise of that name. Other gnostic theories replace this copulation copulation /cop·u·la·tion/ (kop?u-la´shun) sexual union; the transfer of the sperm from male to female; usually applied to the mating process in nonhuman animals. cop·u·la·tion n. 1. with a single hot masculine error: "The world came about through a mistake, for he who created it wanted to create it imperishable im·per·ish·a·ble adj. Not perishable: imperishable food; imperishable hopes. im·per and immortal: he fell short." I was contemplating that sentence when I turned on the radio and heard the sound of the first World Trade tower falling. I put my lecture away. Contradiction is not only a mode of reasoning. Sometimes it comes in and fills the room. Bringing deathliness and death and the filth of death. There is nothing you can do with the filth of death but contradict it. Here is the text I used in the end: Lily Events (1) A man and woman looking for Looking for In the context of general equities, this describing a buy interest in which a dealer is asked to offer stock, often involving a capital commitment. Antithesis of in touch with. lilies. (2) All the people going down to look for lilies. (3) Mud taken up looking for lilies. (4) Washing the lilies in the water to remove the mud. (5) Washing themselves off after the mud has got on them. (6) Lilies in a basket. (7) Walking from the lily place "to go look for a dry place to sit down." ("Lily Events," anonymous poem from Arnhem Land, Australia, in Poems for the Millennium, eds. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris [University of California Press "UC Press" redirects here, but this is also an abbreviation for University of Chicago Press University of California Press, also known as UC Press, is a publishing house associated with the University of California that engages in academic publishing. , 1995]) Anne Carson is a classicist clas·si·cist n. 1. One versed in the classics; a classical scholar. 2. An adherent of classicism. 3. An advocate of the study of ancient Greek and Latin. Noun 1. and poet. Her most recent book is The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Alfred A. Knopf, 2001). |
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