#Economy of the Unlost

[malaisequotes]

“What is remembering? Remembering brings the absent into the present, connects what is lost to what is here. Remembering draws attention to lostness and is made possible by emotions of space that open backward into a void.”

Economy of the Unlost by Anne Carson

[elektramouthed]

 Why are neologisms disturbing? If we cannot construe them at all, we call them mad. If we can construe them, they raise troubling questions about our own linguistic mastery. We say “coinages” because they disrupt the economic equilibrium of words and things that we had prided ourselves on maintaining. A new compound word in Celan, for example, evokes something that now suddenly seems real, although it didn’t exist before and is attainable through this word alone. It comes to us free, like a piece of new air. And (like praise) it has to prepare for itself an ear to hear it, just slightly before it arrives—has to invent its own necessity.

Anne Carson, from Economy of the Unlost

[soulmaking]

Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost

[nickged]

Praise poetry addresses itself to an individual who has chosen to test the limits of human possibility and momentarily succeeded. (Anne Carson, “Economy of the Unlost”)

[aschenblumen]

Cuando alinea el «secreto de la Creación» con el «secreto del Discurso», Buber hace una afirmación teórica acerca del Espíritu que Celan y Simónides prefieren representar bajo la forma de conversación. La afirmación es doble. Porque, por un lado, el espíritu no viene de otra parte, ya está presente, de forma invisible, entre los elementos del discurso empleados aquí. Al mismo tiempo, el espíritu no se eleva por voluntad propia, se trata de un arrebato que surge detrás del velo por un esfuerzo del lenguaje entre Yo y Tú. El esfuerzo, tal como lo representan Simónides y Celan, tiene mucho que ver con el acto poético: alcanza precisamente el extremo de la charlatanería común [el habla cotidiana, de acuerdo a la voz Gerschwärtz], donde la metáfora espera y el nombrar [facultad de la lengua divina, según Benjamin, por cuanto significa la universalización plena de lo espiritual] acaece.

Anne Carson, «Visibles invisibles» en Economía de lo que no se pierde. Traducción de Jeannette L. Clariond.

[processes]

Money is something visible and invisible at the same time. A "real abstraction," in Marx's terms. You can hold a coin in your hand and yet not touch its value. That which makes this thing "money" is not what you see.

When the ancient Greeks talk of money, adjectives for "visible" and "invisible" occur inconsistently. Money can be found categorized as "invisible" when contrasted with real estate, for example; as "visible" when it means a bank deposit that is part of an inheritance. Modern scholars have been unsuccessful in efforts to abstract a stable definition for these terms from ancient usage.

In the view of the anthropologist Louis Gernet, the confusion represents a "flawed category" created by the Greeks when they tried to fit the many nuances of moneyed situations into a binary terminology. "The problem is, thought moves in many directions."

Money also moves in many directions. Simonides, we know, had occasion to observe these movements and to meditate on their relation to the phenomena of perception.

He lived at an interface between two economic systems. His texts and testimonia make clear that he gave thought to the concepts of visible and invisible, was aware of a turmoil in their categorization and had an interest (conditioned perhaps by economic experience) in their valuing.

This interest shows up especially in his statements about what poetry is and how it works. He seems to believe that the visible and invisible worlds lie side by side--

Economy of the Unlost, Anne Carson

[snoozingbear]

anne carson, economy of the unlost (reading simonides of keos with paul celan), 1999

[othellho]

Anne Carson from Economy of the Unlost, viii

[kitchen-light]

Homer said we ride into the future facing the past. Maybe the simplest prophecy is that we have made it this far. (“Trust the hours. Haven’t they / carried you everywhere, up to now?” writes Galway Kinnell.) In Economy of the Unlost, Anne Carson’s meditation on two other lyric poets, Paul Celan and Simonides of Keos, she puts it this way: “a poet is someone who traffics in survival.”

Anna Badkhen, from her essay “How to Read the Air”, published in The Paris Review, November 3, 2020

[mykristeva]

No genre of verse is more profoundly concerned with seeing what is not there, and not seeing what is, than that of the epitaph.

— Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost

[agardenofdaydreams]

Poetry is an act of memory that carves its way between sand art and snow art, transforming what is innumerable and headed for oblivion into a timeless notation. Excising all that is not grace.

Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost

[malaisequotes]

“Memory depends on void, as void depends on memory, to think it. Once void is thought, it can be cancelled. Once memory is thought, it can be commodified.”

Economy of the Unlost by Anne Carson

[elektramouthed]

 A negative is a verbal event. There are, philosophers assure us, no negatives in nature, where every situation is positively what it is. The negative is a peculiarly linguistic resource whose power resides with the user of words. But verbalization in itself is not sufficient to generate the negative. Negation depends upon an act of the imagining mind. Negation depends upon an act of the imagining mind. In order to say “The smoke of Tegea burning did not rise up into the clear air,” I bring together in my mind two pieces of data, one of which is present and actual (Tegea itself perceptible before me), the other of which is absent and fictitious (Tegea as it would be if it were burning). I put these two data together and say, “This is not that.” Negation requires this collusion of the present and the absent on the screen of the imagination. The one is measured against the other and found to be discrepant; the discrepant datum is annihilated by a word meaning “No.” The interesting thing about a negative, then, is that it posits a fuller picture of reality than does a positive statement. So a person who speaks negatively can be said to command and display a more complete view of things than one who makes positive assertions.

Anne Carson, from Economy of the Unlost

[iocheaira]

and why is the paperback of economy of the unlost THIRTY DOLLARS

[splendidemendax]

also to judge by this introduction my next read is going to be anne carson's economy of the unlost (which reads paul celan with simonides)

anyway now i'm reading against forgetting: twentieth-century poetry of witness, edited by carolyn forché. it is a cinderblock of a book (816 pages) filled with poetry by people who suffered a variety of atrocieties. certainly this will improve my mood 👍

[smakkabagms]

What is remembering? Remembering brings the absent into the present, connects what is lost to what is here. Remembering draws attention to lostness and is made possible by emotions of space that open backward into a void. Memory depends on void, as void depends on memory, to think it. Once void is thought, it can be cancelled. Once memory is thought, it can be commodified.

Anne Carson, Economy of the Unlost