Eros the Bittersweet

love and hate converge within erotic desire.

To catch a top still spinning makes her happy for a moment in her belief “that the understanding of any detail, that of a spinning top for instance, was sufficient for the understanding of all things.”

To be running breathlessly, but not yet arrived, is itself delightful, a suspended moment of living hope.

When I desire you a part of me is gone: your lack is my lack. I would not be in want of you unless you had partaken of me, the lover reasons.

Eros seemed to Sappho at once an experience of pleasure and pain. Here is contradiction and perhaps paradox. To perceive this eros can split the mind in two.

’Έρος δηὖτέ μ’ ὀ λυσιμέλης δόνɛι,

γλνκύπικρον ἀμάχανον ὄρπɛτον

Eros once again limb-loosener whirls me sweetbitter, impossible to fight off, creature stealing up

Eros moves or creeps upon its victim from somewhere outside her: orpeton. No battle avails to fight off that advance: amachanon. Desire, then, is neither inhabitant nor ally of the desirer.

(I hate and I love. Why? you might ask. I don’t know. But I feel it happening and I hurt.)

Eros is expropriation. she robs the body of limbs, substance, integrity and leaves the lover, essentially, less.

The shape of love and hate is perceptible, then, in a variety of sensational crises. Each crisis calls for decision and action, but decision is impossible and action a paradox when eros stirs the senses. Everyday life can become difficult; the poets speak of the consequences for behavior and judgment:

οὐκ οἶδ ὄττι θέω· δίχα μοι τὰ νοήμματα

(I don’t know what I should do: two states of mind in me. …)

On Sappho’s tongue, as we have seen, it is a moment bitter and sweet. This ambivalent taste is developed, in later poets, into “bitter honey”, “sweet wound”, and “Eros of sweet tears”.

Love does not happen without loss of vital self. The lover is the loser. Or so she reckons.

Later poets mix the sensations of hot and cold with the metaphor from taste to concoct “sweet fire”, lovers “burned by honey”, erotic missiles “tempered in honey”. Ibykos frames eros in a paradox of wet and dry, for the black thunderstorm of desire drives against her not rain but “parching madnesses”. These tropes may have some basis in ancient theories of physiology and psychology, which associate action that is pleasurable, desirable or good with sensations of heat, liquidity, melting, and action that is unpleasant or hateful with cold, freezing, rigidification.

The Eros of Euripides wields a bow that is “double” in its effect, for it can bring on a lovely life or complete collapse.

As in the Greek poets, its pain arises at that edge where the self is adulterated and bitter verges alarmingly on sweet. Eros’ ambivalence unfolds directly from this power to ‘mix up’ the self. The lover helplessly admits that it feels both good and bad to be mixed up, but is then driven back upon the question ‘Once I have been mixed up in this way, who am I?’ Desire changes the lover. “How curiously”: she feels the change happen but has no ready categories to assess it. The change gives her a glimpse of a self she never knew before.

The Greek word eros denotes ‘want,’ ‘lack,’ ‘desire for that which is missing.’ The lover wants what she does not have. It is by definition impossible for her to have what she wants if, as soon as it is had, it is no longer wanting.

Hunger is the analog chosen by Simone Weil for this conundrum:

All our desires are contradictory, like the desire for food. I want the person I love to love me. If she is, however, totally devoted to me she does not exist any longer and I cease to love him. And as long as she is not totally devoted to me she does not love me enough. Hunger and repletion.

The lover is the loser. Or so she reckons.
But her reckoning involves a quick and artful shift. Reaching for an object that proves to be outside and beyond herself, the lover is provoked to notice that self and its limits. From a new vantage point, which we might call self-consciousness, she looks back and sees a hole. Where does that hole come from? It comes from the lover’s classificatory process. Desire for an object that she never knew she lacked is defined, by a shift of distance, as desire for a necessary part of herself. Not a new acquisition but something that was always, properly, his. Two lacks become one.

For Simone de Beauvoir the game is torture:

“The knight departing for new adventures offends her lady yet she has nothing but contempt for her if she remains at her feet. This is the torture of impossible love …” (1953, 619). Jacques Lacan puts the matter somewhat more enigmatically when she says “Desire … evokes lack of being under the three figures of the nothing that constitutes the basis of the demand for love, of the hate that even denies the other’s being, and of the unspeakable element in that which is ignored in its request”

All human desire is poised on an axis of paradox, absence and presence its poles, love and hate its motive energies.

ἀλλ’ ἄκαν μὲν γλῶσσα †ἔαγɛ λέπτον δ’ αὔτικα χρῷ πῦρ ὐπαδɛδρόμηκɛν, ὀππάτɛσσι δ’ οὐδ’ ἔν ὄρημμ’, ἐπιρρόμ- βɛισι δ’ ἄκουαι,

†έκαδɛ μ’ ἴδρως ψῦχρος κακχέɛται† τρόμος δὲ παῖσαν ἄγρɛι, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας ἔμμι, τɛθνάκην δ’ ὀλίγω ’πιδɛύης φαίνομ᾿ †αι

He seems to me equal to gods that man who opposite you sits and listens close to your sweet speaking

and lovely laughing—oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, a moment, then no speaking is left in me

The word ‘jealousy’ comes from Greek zēlos meaning ‘zeal’ or ‘fervent pursuit.’ It is a hot and corrosive spiritual motion arising in fear and fed on resentment. The jealous lover fears that her beloved prefers someone else, and resents any relationship between the beloved and another. This is an emotion concerned with placement and displacement. The jealous lover covets a particular place in the beloved’s affection and is full of anxiety that another will take it. [...] For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved and that which comes between them.

if you looked upon my beloved and were not broken by desire, you are totally god or totally stone

When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps. And something becomes visible, on the triangular path where volts are moving, that would not be visible without the three-part structure. The difference between what is and what could be is visible. The ideal is projected on a screen of the actual, in a kind of stereoscopy. The man sits like a god, the poet almost dies: two poles of response within the same desiring mind.

The ruse of inserting a rival between lover and beloved is immediately effective, as Sappho’s poem shows, but there are more ways than one to triangulate desire. Not all look triangular in action, yet they share a common concern: to represent eros as deferred, defied, obstructed, hungry, organized around a radiant absence—to represent eros as lack.

Mere space has power. L’amour d’loonh (‘love from a distance’) is what the canny troubadours called courtly love.

the moment of ideal desire on which vase-painters as well as poets are inclined to focus is not the moment of the coup de foudre, not the moment when the beloved’s arms open to the lover, not the moment when the two unite in happiness. What is pictured is the moment when the beloved turns and runs.

“Eros is often sweeter when she is being difficult” says a Hellenistic poet (Anth. Pal. 12.153).

Aidōs (‘shamefastness’) is a sort of voltage of decorum discharged between two people approaching one another for the crisis of human contact, an instinctive and mutual sensitivity to the boundary between them.

οἶον τὸ γλυκύμαλον ἐρɛύθɛται ἄκρῳ ἐπ’ ὔσδῳ,
ἄκρον ἐπ’ ἀκροτάτῳ, λɛλάθοντο δὲ μαλοδρόπηɛς,
οὐ μὰν ἐκλɛλάθοντ’, ἀλλ’ οὐκ ἐδύναντ’ ἐπίκɛσθαι

As a sweet apple turns red on a high branch,
high on the highest branch and the applepickers forgot—
well, no they didn’t forget—were not able to reach

Sappho begins with a sweet apple and ends in infinite hunger. From her inchoate little poem we learn several things about eros. The reach of desire is defined in action: beautiful (in its object), foiled (in its attempt), endless (in time).

When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in her nostalgia for wholeness. her thoughts turn toward questions of personal identity: she must recover and reincorporate what is gone if she is to be a complete person.

When she inhales Eros, there appears within her a sudden vision of a different self, perhaps a better self, compounded of her own being and that of her beloved. Touched to life by erotic accident, this enlargement of self is a complex and unnerving occurrence.

Human beings were originally round organisms, each composed of two people joined together as one perfect sphere. These rolled about everywhere and were exceedingly happy. But the spherical creatures grew overambitious, thinking to roll right up to Olympus, so Zeus chopped each of them in two. As a result everyone must now go through life in search of the one and only other person who can round her out again. “Sliced in two like a flatfish,” says Aristophanes, “each of us is perpetually hunting for the matching half of herself”

Eros is an issue of boundaries. she exists because certain boundaries do. In the interval between reach and grasp, between glance and counterglance, between ‘I love you’ and ‘I love you too,’ the absent presence of desire comes alive. But the boundaries of time and glance and I love you are only aftershocks of the main, inevitable boundary that creates Eros: the boundary of flesh and self between you and me. And it is only, suddenly, at the moment when I would dissolve that boundary, I realize I never can .

Infants begin to see by noticing the edges of things. How do they know an edge is an edge? By passionately wanting it not to be. The experience of eros as lack alerts a person to the boundaries of herself, of other people, of things in general. It is the edge separating my tongue from the taste for which it longs that teaches me what an edge is. Like Sappho’s adjective glukupikron, the moment of desire is one that defies proper edge, being a compound of opposites forced together at pressure. Pleasure and pain at once register upon the lover, inasmuch as the desirability of the love object derives, in part, from its lack. To whom is it lacking? To the lover. If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover herself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole.

to be contracted by another person into a single being—how strange

There is something uniquely convincing about the perceptions that occur to you when you are in love. They seem truer than other perceptions, and more truly your own, won from reality at personal cost. Greatest certainty is felt about the beloved as necessary complement to you. Your powers of imagination connive at this vision, calling up possibilities from beyond the actual. All at once a self never known before, which now strikes you as the true one, is coming into focus. A gust of godlikeness may pass through you and for an instant a great many things look knowable, possible and present. Then the edge asserts itself. You are not a god. You are not that enlarged self. Indeed, you are not even a whole self, as you now see. Your new knowledge of possibilities is also a knowledge of what is lacking in the actual.

The self forms at the edge of desire, and a science of self arises in the effort to leave that self behind. But more than one response is possible to the acute awareness of self that ensues from the reach of desire. Neville conceives it as a “contraction” of the self upon itself and finds it merely strange. “How curiously one is changed,” she muses. she does not appear to hate the change, nor to relish it. Nietzsche, on the other hand, is delighted: “One seems to oneself transfigured, stronger, richer, more complete; one is more complete.… It is not merely that it changes the feeling of values; the lover is worth more” (1967, 426). It is not uncommon in love to experience this heightened sense of one’s own personality (‘I am more myself than ever before!’ the lover feels) and to rejoice in it, as Nietzsche does. The Greek lyric poets do not so rejoice.

There is at the beginning of life, in the Freudian view, no awareness of objects as distinct from one’s own body. The distinction between self and not-self is made by the decision to claim all that the ego likes as ‘mine’ and to reject all that the ego dislikes as ‘not mine.’ Divided, we learn where our selves end and the world begins. Self-taught, we love what we can make our own and hate what remains other.

In the view of Snell, the first formation in Greek society of a self-conscious and self-controlled human personality, aware of itself as an organic whole distinct from other personalities and from the world around it, can be traced to a moment of emotional ambivalence that splits the soul. Sappho’s adjective glukupikron signals that moment. It is a revolution in human self-awareness that Snell calls “the discovery of the mind.” Blocked eros is its trigger. Its consequence is the consolidation of a ‘self’:

"The love which has its course barred, and fails to reach its fulfilment acquires a particularly strong hold over the human heart. The sparks of a vital desire burst into flame at the very moment when the desire is blocked in its path. It is the obstruction which makes the wholly personal feelings conscious.… [the frustrated lover] seeks the cause in her own personality."

Snell’s is a sensational thesis and has provoked excitement, wide dissent and ongoing controversy. No resolution of the questions of history and historiography involved is available, but Snell’s insight about the importance of bittersweet love in our lives in a powerful one, appealing to the common experience of many lovers.