Tuesday, November 19, 2013

'continues to be like a harbor always welcoming'

CARSON
....At least half of your mind is always thinking, I’ll be leaving; this won’t last. It’s a good Buddhist attitude. It prepares you for life as a Buddhist. If I were a Buddhist, this would be a great help. As it is, I’m just sad.

INTERVIEWER
You would be well on the road to enlightenment if you were a Buddhist.

CARSON
Instead, I’ve avoided enlightenment resolutely.

INTERVIEWER
I’d like to talk a little bit about your discovery of ancient Greece. You first started studying Greek in high school?

CARSON
Yes. Grade thirteen.

INTERVIEWER
Was it immediately apparent that it was changing your life?

CARSON
Yes, immediately. Mrs. Cowan started to teach me Greek—she was our Latin teacher in high school, in Port Hope—but she also knew Greek, so she offered to teach me because she found out I was interested in it, so we did it on our lunch hour.

INTERVIEWER
There wasn’t a Greek class?

CARSON
No. No one was interested except me. We read Sappho together, and it was simply revolutionary. I don’t know every language in the world—maybe if I knew Sanskrit and Chinese I would think differently—but there’s something about Greek that seems to go deeper into words than any modern language. So that when you’re reading it, you’re down in the roots of where words work, whereas in English we’re at the top of the tree, in the branches, bouncing around. It was stunning to me, a revelation. And it continues to be stunning, continues to be like a harbor always welcoming. Strange, but welcoming.

INTERVIEWER
That must be really nice, to have that place to go to.

CARSON
It is. I’m sure it’s part of what mental health I have. A large part. It’s a home. It’s a home in my mind. And then to be able to make my living at it is a great benevolence of the universe.

INTERVIEWER
A lot of people say the ancient Greeks are really our contemporaries. Spiritually, I mean.

CARSON
I don’t feel much direct relevance of ancient things to modern things. It was the temper of the times, especially in the seventies and eighties when I was getting my degree and teaching, to claim that the project of being a classicist was to find relevance to antiquity and invent courses that convinced students that you could learn everything you needed to know about modern life from studying the ancient Greeks. Well, this is bizarre, to say the least. What’s entrancing about the Greeks is that you get little glimpses, little latches of similarity, embedded in unbelievable otherness, in this huge landscape of strange convictions about the world and reactions to life that make no sense at all.

INTERVIEWER
So there’s this dense otherness that you just want to find out about. Whether it’s relevant is besides the point.

CARSON
One thing I do understand about the Greeks is that they, too, understood this and valued it. That is what the god Dionysus is as a principle—the principle of being up against something so other that it bounces you out of yourself to a place where, nonetheless, you are still in yourself; there’s a connection to yourself as another. It’s what they call "ecstasy." The Greeks invented this concept, but they also embody it for us, which may just be just our utilitarian approach to them. But who can say. We are always going to be looking at the Greeks and figuring out who they are in relation to what we are. We can’t get out and be in a third place and judge both of us.

INTERVIEWER
From a nice objective place?

CARSON
There is no objective place, just like there is no third gender; you’ve got to be in one place or the other.

- Anne Carson's Paris Review interview