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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BOOKS

ARTISTS FORVM

Economy, Its Fragrance

places emphasis on thematic exhibitions and related programs

Anne Carson

that provide a forum for the discussion of ideas that surround and
inform an artist's work. ARTISTS FORVM presents work in the con-

text of conceptual concerns investigated by the artist in the studio,

and works closely with artists to develop a variety of programs

related to the exhibitions. The programs-artist talks, critical lectures, panel discussions, workshops and demonstrations, poetry

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."

readings, music performances, and other events offered in the

form of subscription series-provide an opportunity to have more
direct contact with the artist and the ideas.

BRIGtHTON PRESS

Bethany's gesture is economically interesting in itself, but the place where they
cross-the moment when Judas cries

AS I AM someone who 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 distinction. Let's begin with a text from the
Gospel of John:

THE ART OF THE BOOK

January 14 to April 26

An exhibition of limited edition books by artists and

writers including Sandra Alcosser/Michele Burgess,

Robert Cremean, C. G. Hanzlicek/Oldrich Prochazka,

Mary Julia Klimenko/Manuel Neri, DeLoss McGraw/

W. D. Snodgrass, Faith Ringgold, Harry Sternberg,

Emilio Westphalen/Fernando de Szyszlo, Nancy Willard

and others

Then Jesus six,days before the Passover

came to Bethany where Lazarus was which
had been dead, whom he raised from the
dead.

There they made him a supper; and

Martha served: but Lazarus was one of
them that sat at the table with him.

Then took Mary a pound of ointment of

spikenard (very costly) and anointed the feet

of Jesus and wiped his feet with her hair:

and the house was filled with the odour of

ARTISTS FORVM 1997

the ointment.

SUBSCRIPTION SERIES
Readings and conversations with artists, writers, curators

and collectors who have worked with Brighton Press.

Programs begin at 7 pm, with a reception at 6:30 pm
Thursday, February 20
FROM THE ARTIST'S POINT OF VIEW:

Robert Cremean in conversation with Michele Burgess

and Bill Kelly

Tuesday, March 11
POETS OF BRIGHTON PRESS:

Sandra Alcosser, C. G. Hanzlicek and Nancy Willard

Thursday, March 20
THE ARTIST AND THE POET-A DIALOGUE

Then saith one of the disciples, Judas

Iscariot, Simon's son, which should betray
Why was not this ointment sold for three
hundred pence and given to the poor?
This he said, not that he cared for the
poor but because he was a thief and had the
bag, and bare what was put therein.
Then said Jesus, Let her alone: against the
day of my burying hath she kept this.
For the poor always ye have with you,
but me ye have not always.
(John 12. 1-8)

too correct. But economically interest-

Joseph Goldyne and Robert F. Johnson

ing, or at least vexing. Christ's rebuke

WORKSHOPS IN THE BOOK ARTS

One-day workshops led by Michele- Burgess and Bill Kelly,

costs to a minimum is not a sufficient

nor even a necessary condition for right

action. Spending wisely may be irrele-

on individual projects and are limited to 20 participants.

vant to virtue. Indeed, Christ sets Mary

Saturday, February 22 / Sunday, February 23

BOOKMAKING: FROM CONCEPT TO PRODUCTION

Satu rday, March 8 / Su nday, March 9

BOOKS IN PROGRESS

Saturday, April 19 / Sunday, April 20

THE BOOK AS METAPHOR

$200 Series of three one-day workshops

$ 75 Individual workshops

ARTISTS FORVM
251 Post Street, Suite 425 San Francisco, CA 94108
Telephone (415) 981-6347
Tuesdays through Saturdays, 1 1 am. to 5 p.m.

14

points to the possibility that keeping

Co-Directors of Brighton Press, San Diego. Workshops focus

Workshops take place at ARTISTS FORVM from 9 am to 4:30 pm

THE

of Bethany's virtue against a background of continuing and unresolvable

poverty in order (perhaps) to highlight
its difference from this continuum.
Mary of Bethany's wild and momentary use of ointment succeeds as a differential 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 ";the bag" 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 represents the whole tedious rulebook of
mortal conditions, causality, credit rating, 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

THREEPENNY

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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-

Let's see how John the Evangelist

$30 Individual events

COLLECTING ARTIST'S BOOKS:

because this thrift seems essential to

poetry. Economic measures allow poetry to practice what I take to be its principal 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

flowing its own measures and filling the

house with an odour of ointment.

"The poor always ye have with you,"

says Christ to Judas Iscariot, rebuking

$100 Subscription Series of four events

Thursday, April 1 7

Economy. Not because poetry is the

only form of verbal expression that
manages its resources thriftily but

believe it was Marilyn Monroe who

him,

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

IN BOOK FORM: Mary Julia Klimenko and Manuel Neri

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

goes about it. He is not of course writing poetry but his story has the struc-

ture of a poetic event and may be analogically 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 referencesboth 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 matter of commodity-value than time-sav-

ing but Marx reminds us in Capital

that when commodities present themselves 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 talking about mortal time immanent in all
of us, which flows over Christ's feet
and washes up against an interesting

question. ";Let her 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 trying 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

REVIEW

frugality; on the other hand his next

sentence ("the poor always ye have
with you") gestures towards a deeper

economic background. But of course

this gesture too will be dismantled. No
matter how much frugality is 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 wasted on a God. The
question remains, Is life wasted on a
mortal? Let us look at some poetic
answers to this fairly fundamental economic question.
First example: epigram from a classical Greek gravestone (ascribed to the
fifth-century BC poet Simonides of
Keos) which says:
Someone rejoices now that I Theodoros am
dead. Another over him

will rejoice. To Death we are all debts owed.

This poem, like the interaction of Judas

and Mary of Bethany in the Gospel of
John, shows us a crossing of two economic attitudes. For in the first verse
the dead man tells us his name is
Theodoros-a Greek compound word

versive economic action. That is to say,

by thrifty management of its own measures-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

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

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... another will rejoice" using a verb (chairein)

"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

that means "to rejoice, have grace, take

explores this relationship of trust:

pleasure, be gratified" and is formed

from the noun charis, whose most general translation is "grace" but which
has two spheres of reference. Aesthetically, charis refers to the beauty,

paraphraseable content and persuading

us to read or reread it however occasionally for two thousand years. When
Theodoros confidently asserts,

Dead you will lie and not ever memory of

you

will there be nor desire into the after

time. For you will have no share

over to the collection agency of Death.

In between, the poem sets up a fine tension between the gift of life and the
debt to death, between grace and com-

"Wealth." Why is Death wealthy? It is

a cumulative condition. Since the begin-

ning of time he has ne-ver forgiven a

debt nor bestowed a grace. Even more
securely than Judas, Death has the bag.
So now that Death has Theodoros in
his bag we might assume the transaction between them is finished. But that
would be incorrect. This man
Theodoros, who has lain more than
two thousand years in the tomb, is no
more finished than you and I are. You
and I can clearly perceive a residue of
Theodoros loose in this room like a
perfume. His debt may be paid but his
interest is still rising. The poem that
maintains his interest does so by a sub-

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 pointedly 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.

which would mean "gift of God"while the last verse hands Theodoros

merce, and raises in our minds the

question, What is the difference
between a gift and a debt-between
Theodoros living and Theodoros dead?
An infinite difference, 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
inevitably along toward the open cashbox of The Great Collector. As if there
were no difference at all except in the
timing. Sociologically this is not a surprise; social anthropologists from
Marcel Mauss to Jacques Derrida have
explored at length the conundrum that
in actual human practice there is no
such thing as a gift. Every gift is a debt,
the sociologists tell us, insofar as a gift
sets up the idea of a countergift: every
gift contains the obligation to repay.
And here is where we get entangled in
the project of saving time. For obligations take place in that curious interval
of time that we call in English "the
present," and so long as an obligation
is pending, the present can continue to
be a gift. But as Theodoros tells us in
his epigram, once the day of reckoning
arrives, the present is past and gift
becomes debt. Death in the end is not a
giving god, as the ancient Greeks
acknowledged when they named him
Ploutos, a name that means simply

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

'4~~~~~~44~~~~~ - ~ ~ i

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 quickens the connective action of the conjunction kai and syncopates some
woman's posthumous nonentity upon
its counterpart in present life. By the
time we feel the retroactive force 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 kappathe 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 MORE SAND ART, no Sand book, no

Masters.

Nothing on the dice. How many

Mutes?
Seven and ten.

Your Question-your Answer.

Your Song, what does it know?
Deepinsnow,

E eepinow,

charm, or pleasing surface of things like

human flesh, an earring, a sunrise, a
horse, a piece of language. Socioeconomically, 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 earring and the
gratification felt by someone who
notices its charm; charis can convey
both favor in the sense of a benefaction
bestowed and favor in the sense of
compensation received-both gift and
countergift. It is a more-than-two-sided
word and evokes a world where things
do not stop easily at the borders of
themselves, they overflow.
I believe Simonides begins each verse
of his poem with the verb chairein
because overflow of grace is essential to
the epitaphic transaction of his subject.
After all, what Theodoros hopes to
achieve with these two lines of verse is
to buy himself a bit of time. Whenever

SPRING

in the roses of Pieria, but invisible also in

Composed in 1964, a year when Paul

the house of Hades

you will go your way among the blotted

dead-having been breathed out.

(Sappho fr. 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

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 Sand from the Urns, in 1948.
The phrase at the end of the opening line
("no Masters") is, I think, a reference to
a poem from this early collection that
became famous, the poem "Deathfugue," 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.

1997

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15

"Nothing on the dice," says the second 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 irrelevant to his project. So the lines "No
more Sand art, no Sand book, no
Masters. Nothing on the dice..." repudiate a kind of art and a stage of himself 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 epistemology 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 repetition and so may represent the entire
vast, improvident, and infinitely replicable burned-out linguistic store of
poeticizing poetry which Celan wished
to repudiate. Snow art, on the other
hand, keeps a sense of its own economy. Which Celan emphasizes by paring
the last word down gradually
("Deepinsnow, Eepinow, E-i-o") to
its merest constituent Vowels. He permits 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 disappearance 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 economy 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 multiplying 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 enemies..." 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 million. 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 wonder 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 consonants, 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 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 companions, 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

The Complaint of a Classic

The complaint of a classic, i.e. of a poet who instead of vanguard pursuits 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, tormented by erotic visions, I would take shelter in rhythm and the order of
syntaxis, afraid of my internal chaos.

drinkers, oh, to be thus restored to the senses, only that and nothing else.

Again
Again I was flying in my dream. As if my old body contained the potential of all movements prior to live beings, flying, swimming, crawling, run-

Warmth

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?

Watering Can
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 certain, however, that the watering can would have such a place in our memory, 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 characters and 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 imagination, and, who knows, perhaps precisely in this, in our clinging to distinctly delineated shapes, does our hope reside, of salvation from the turbulent waters of nothingness and chaos.

-Czeslaw Milosz
(translated from the Polish by the author and Robert Hass)

16

THE

I-

THREEPENNY

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REVIEW