schmelectra

1. I was a smart kid. Hell, i think i'm still pretty smart. I was flipping through The Last Days of Plato which includes Phaedro, The Apology, Crito and Euthyphro. Halfway through i pulled out an old bookmark... It was a page from a 'page a day' calendar. The date? september 1995. I was 14 when i was last reading that... Neat!

2.radio edit.

3. More on Anne Carson: The book that i am reading (Eros the Bittersweet for those of you who have forgotten) never ceases to amaze me. I pick it up at just the right time and it epitomizes everything i feel at that moment ab out love, etc. For example:
" '... When i spend time with you I shall not primarily be cultivating the pleasure of the moment, but really, the profit coming in the future, since i am not overthrown by desire but in full control of myself. ... These things are indications of a friendship that will last for a long time.'
Lysias sidesteps the whole dilemma of eros in one move. It is a move in time: he simply declines to enter the moment that is 'now' for the man in love, the present moment of desire. Instead, he stations himself safely at an imaginary 'then' and looks back upon desire from a vantage point of emotional disengagement. He is able to include in his appraisal of the erotic situation 'now', all the likelihoods and implications of the same erotic situation 'then'. Lysias does not create a stereoscopic image out of these two points in time, pulling your perceptions askew as Sophokles does in the poem about melting ice.* Lysias' 'now' and 'then' are not discontinuous or incompatible with one another, and their convergence is not painful or paradoxical for the nonlover: desire is invested at neither point. Eros traditionally puts the lover in the position of genuinely desiring both points at once. Lysias' erotic theory forestalls this problem. The nonlover is unlikely to ever find himself staring down in desperation at a lump of melting ice. When the man picks up ice it is in full expectation that he will soon have a handful of cold water. He likes cold water fine. And he has no special affection for ice."
" '... And the boy is most delightful to his lover just where he does the most damage to himself.' " - Sokrates
You see, the first is how i feel about . I am looking at the future of our friendship (or whatever it is we have going on). I am not focusing on the desire i have now but focusing on the end result. It works. And the second one is how i usually end up in relationships-- the one having the damage done to them. So this begins (hopefully) a new era of the way i conduct myself in matters of the heart.
4. i had another one, but i forgot...
5. oh well.




*
"This disease is an evil bound upon the day.
Here's a comparison--not bad, i think:
when ice gleams in the open air,
children grab.
Ice-crystal in the hands is
at first a pleasure quite novel.
But there comes a point--
you can't put the melting mass down,
you can't keep holding it.
Desire is like that.
Pulling the lover to act and not to act,
again and again, pulling.
-Sophokles