We cannot really say that time ‘is’ except in virtue of its continual tendency not to be.
Augustine, Confessions 11.14.17
Time watches from the shadow
And coughs when you would kiss.
W. H. Auden, “One Evening”
The blind point of Eros is a paradox in time as well as in space. A desire to bring the absent into presence, or to collapse far and near, is also a desire to foreclose then upon now. As lover you reach forward to a point in time called ‘then’ when you will bite into the long-desired apple. Meanwhile you are aware that as soon as ‘then’ supervenes upon ‘now,’ the bittersweet moment, which is your desire, will be gone. You cannot want that, and yet you do. Let us see what this feels like.
Below is a fragment of a satyr play by Sophokles entitled The Lovers of Achilles. The fragment is a description of desire. It turns eros subtly, permitting different aspects of its perversity to come to light. At the center is a cold, original pleasure. Around the center move circles of time, different kinds of time, different dilemmas set by time. Notice that this poem is an analogy. Neither its pleasure nor its various kinds of time are to be identified with eros, but the way they intersect may feel like eros to you.
τὸ γὰρ νόσημα τοῦτ᾽ ἐφίμερον κακόν·
ἔχοιμ᾽ ἂν αὐτὸ μὴ κακῶς ἀπεικάσαι.
ὅταν πάγου φανέντος αἰϑρίου χεροῖν
κρύσταλλον ἁρπάσωσι παῖδες εὐπαγῆ,
τὰ πρῶτ᾽ ἔχουσιν ἡδονὰς ποταινίονς·
τέλος δ᾽ ὁ ϑυμὸς οὔϑ᾽ ὅπως ἀφῇ ϑέλει
οὔτ᾽ ἐν χεροῖν τὸ κτῆμα σύμφορον μένειν.
οὕτω δὲ τοὺς ἐρῶντας αὑτὸς ἵμερος
δρᾶν καὶ τὸ μὴ δρᾶν πολλάκις προίεται.
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.
(fr. 149 Radt)9
Much is left unsaid in this poem, as in any formulation of desire, yet you may feel you know exactly what is meant. No direct reference is made, for example, to desire as desirable. Here desire is a “disease” and an “evil” from the first line. Within the comparison (ll. 2-7) desire turns out to be pleasurable, but its pleasure is that of holding ice in your hands. An acutely painful pleasure, one would think, yet again no direct mention is made of the painfulness of ice. Here ice gives a novel kind of enjoyment. The absence of these predictable attributes of ice and of desire surprises you, like a missing step, but you climb on through the poem anyway. And suddenly you find yourself on a staircase rendered by Escher or Piranesi. It goes two places at once and you seem to be standing in both of them. How does that happen?
At first the poem looks like a simple ring composition, for the whole structure is a simile whose comparandum (desire, 11. 1 and 8) neatly encircles its comparatio (grabbing a handful of ice, 11. 2-7). So, desire forms a ring around the small universe of its victims: the poet who strives to represent it, the children fascinated by its analog, the lover pinned in its compulsion. But that universe does not form the outer circle of the poem. You keep climbing, for the staircase continues to spiral. The desire at the beginning of the poem is desire as transience—it is an “ephemeral evil” (ephēmeron kakon), bound to the day that flickers over it. The desire at the end of the poem is desire as repetition—exerting its pull “over and over again” (pollakis). So time forms a ring around desire. Now, as you peer down through concentric circles of time, you see at the heart of the poem a piece of ice, melting. The startling likeness of ice drops into your perception with a shock like what the children must feel in their hands. The poem places you for shock, at an interface between two kinds of time, each of which spirals with its own logic upward through the structure of the poem, and through the psychology of desire. They seem to fit one within the other, yet there is a point where the perspectives become incompatible.
The desire for ice is an affair of the moment, transparently. But not only physical time threatens it: here ice-pleasure is a novelty. A pleasure “quite novel” says the poet, using an adjective (potainious) that is applied by other poets to an innovative scheme (Bacchylides 16.51), an original and unexpected form of torture (Aesch. PV 102), a bizarre clattering sound not heard before (Aesch. Sept. 239). The adjective denotes something fresh and untried, perhaps newfangled. With this adjective Sophokles realigns your sensibility to ice and makes clear that he wishes to depict eros, not just as a difficulty, but as a paradox. Ice, as physical substance, cannot be said to be delightful because it melts; but if “melting” is itself a metaphor for the aesthetic consideration of novelty, a paradox begins to come into focus. Novelties, by definition, are short-lived. If ice-pleasure consists, to some degree, in novelty, then ice must melt in order to be desirable.
So as you watch the ice melt, your solicitude for it is distracted by a different kind of care. The ice may lose favor even before it changes state. Its “pleasure” may cease to be “quite novel” and so cease to be pleasure. Suddenly here the laws of physics, which govern events like melting ice, are intersected by certain vaguer psychological laws governing our human enslavement to novelty in moods and styles. Novelty is an affair of the mind and emotions; melting is a physical fact. Each is measured out on a scale that we call temporal, although two different kinds of time are involved. Where does the dilemma of a novelty intercept that of a piece of ice? What should a lover want from time? If you run backwards down the staircase of a day, can you make novelty grow? Or freeze desire?
Let us be subtle about how Sophokles contrives to draw us into these questions. The simile of ice is a delicate and insidious mechanism. It sets up a condition of suspense at the center of the poem that pulls our minds and emotions, as well as our senses, into conflict. We hang upon the physical fate of the melting ice; it is, in a way, the protagonist of the simile and we are watching it perish. At the same time, we care for the hands of the children. Ice is cold and the longer you hold it, the colder your hands get. But this care reminds us of another. The longer you hold it, the more it melts. So would it not be more reasonable to put the ice down, sparing hands and ice? But holding onto ice delights children, for that is a novelty. At this point in our reasoning, time coughs from the shadow, as Auden says. Time is the condition of delightfulness and of perishing both. Time brings the nature of ice into fatal conjuncture with human nature, so that at a critical moment the crystal glamor of ice and the human susceptibility to novelty intersect. One kind of time (that of aesthetic events) intersects another (the time of physical events) and dislocates it.
Our suspense has a sensual side as well. Sophokles’ image of time is a piece of ice melting. It is an image selected not only for its dramatic and melodramatic potential but for its history. As readers of Greek lyric poetry we recognize here a familiar erotic topos, for the poets frequently imagine desire to be a sensation of heat and an action of melting. Eros is traditionally “the melter of limbs” (lusimelēs). One vivid example from many of this conventional imagery is a fragment from Pindar:
ἀλλ᾽ ἐγώ τᾶς ἕκατι κηρὸς ὣς δαχϑεὶς ἕλα̨
ἱρᾶν μελισσᾶν τάκομαι, εὖτ᾽ ἂν ἴδω
παίδων νεόγυιον ἐς ἥβαν·
… but I am like wax of sacred bees
like wax as the heat bites in:
I melt whenever I look at the fresh limbs of boys.
(Snell-Maehler, fr. 123.10-12)
Conventionally, as we see from Pindar, to melt is in some degree desirable, its context one of delicious heat. Sophokles subverts the image. As we watch his melting ice, all our conventional responses to the melting experience of desire are dislocated. As a conventional lover, you relish the sensation of melting, in your bittersweet way. As an observer of ice, your feelings about melting are different, more complex. You can almost bring those feelings into focus against the screen of the conventional image, but not quite. Eros is in between. Eros’ connection with the conventional image of melting, and at the same time with this novel image of it, pulls your mind into vertigo.
Sophokles pulls you, in vertigo, back to the problem of time. His simile unfolds as a paradox of sensations: the uneasy image of hot ice almost comes into focus. The simile involves you in a conflicted response: to save the ice, you must freeze desire. You cannot want that, and yet you do.
Sophokles pulls you, in time, back to the problem of the blind point. Time encircles desire in this poem and the melting ice is an image of the way desire rotates within time. It rotates on an axis of ephemerality: contingent upon the day (ephēmeron) it will melt with the day. But days recur. It rotates on an axis of novelty: as lover you are pulled into vertigo “over and over again.” You cannot want that, and yet you do. It is quite new every time.
There are different kinds of knowledge, Heisenberg has demonstrated, that cannot be held simulaneously in the mind (for example, the position of a particle and its velocity). The likeness of desire to ice in Sophokles’ poem pulls you into such knowledge, a pull that splits your mental vision, much as the lover is split by the paradox of desire. Your moment of stereoscopy on the staircase, as you try to understand this poem, is no bad imitation of that erotic division. A while before Heisenberg, Sophokles appears to have recognized that you can only go so far into thinking about time, or about desire. There comes a point where dilemmas arise, staircases reverse: Eros.
___________
9 Not inadvertently, the first line of the translation departs from Radt’s emended text (ephimeron) in favor of the MS reading (ephēmeron). Since Arsenius, the codices’ ephēmeron (“bound upon the day”) has been changed to ephimeron (“lovely, desirable”) on alleged grounds of sense: Why would Sophokles begin his description of desire by binding it into time? I believe, and hope to show, that it makes compelling sense. Ephēmeron is the evil with which we must begin.