{"id":167297,"date":"2024-04-17T10:30:38","date_gmt":"2024-04-17T14:30:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=167297"},"modified":"2024-08-21T11:55:34","modified_gmt":"2024-08-21T15:55:34","slug":"throwing-yourself-into-the-dark-a-conversation-with-anne-carson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2024\/04\/17\/throwing-yourself-into-the-dark-a-conversation-with-anne-carson\/","title":{"rendered":"Throwing Yourself Into the Dark: A Conversation with Anne Carson"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"

Anne Carson. Photograph by Peter Smith.<\/p><\/div>\n

Anne Carson and I met on Zoom last October, in the brick-red sitting room of her apartment in Reykjavik, the city where she and her husband, Robert Currie, have spent time each year since 2008. A theatrical set piece painted by Ragnar Kjartansson leaned against the wall. Out the window: the ocean and Iceland\u2019s barren expanse. \u201cAmerica seems so cluttered, vegetatively,\u201d Carson said. \u201cTrees everywhere, plants all over the place, flowers. Here it\u2019s just empty. There\u2019s lava, there\u2019s the sea. There\u2019s just lines. Empty space.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n

Empty space is one of Carson\u2019s creative playgrounds. \u201cLecture on the History of Skywriting\u201d\u2014the centerpiece of her latest collection,<\/em> Wrong Norma\u2014is narrated by the sky, or space itself personified. Formally, where other Sappho translators have filled the gaps between the ancient poet\u2019s fragments, Carson\u2019s\u00a0<\/em>If Not, Winter marks the negative space with brackets, emphasizing that lines and stanzas have been lost to history. Carson has often explored absence-as-presence:<\/em> Eros the Bittersweet argues that desire comes from lack, while<\/em> Nox, an elegy for her late brother, Michael, mourns the final absence of someone who had long been missing from her life.<\/em><\/p>\n

We were there to talk about<\/em> Wrong Norma, Carson\u2019s first original work in seven years, which she called \u201ca collection of disparate pieces, not a coherent thing with a through line or themes or a way you have to read it.\u201d But images, phrases, and ideas recur: bread, blood, pebbles, a fox, lawyers, a heart of darkness, John Cage, the word <\/em>wrong, and various flavors of wrongness, for example. \u201cI don\u2019t have much to say,\u201d Carson remarked. Yet, over a pair of hour-long conversations, we found plenty to talk about.<\/p>\n

<\/em><\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Tell me about the \u201cwrongness\u201d in the title of Wrong Norma<\/em>.<\/p>\n

ANNE CARSON<\/p>\n

When people ask me, \u201cHow are Canadians different from Americans?\u201d I say, \u201cCanadians have one characteristic: they\u2019re polite, but wrong.\u201d All the time, polite but wrong.<\/p>\n

\u201cWrong\u201d I put in the title because, well, because of the Canadian thing. And also, something you always feel in academic life is that you\u2019re wrong or on the verge of being wrong and you have to worry about that, because everything is so judgmental and hierarchical. Getting tenure depends on XYZ being \u201cnot wrong\u201d every time you speak. So it\u2019s kind of a mentality I was interested in disabling.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s something Simone Weil says in an essay she has about contradiction, because people find contradiction in philosophical texts so perplexing, and she specializes in contradiction. She says it\u2019s a useful mental event, because it loosens the mind. And once you can loosen, you can go on to think other things or wider things or the things underneath where you were. It\u2019s just suddenly a different landscape. And that loosening, I think, is what wrongness allows in.<\/p>\n

I could talk about wrongness tomorrow and say an entirely other thing. A person is a prism, you know, and concepts just flash from this to that from day to day.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

As I read Eros the Bittersweet, <\/em>I was thinking about the adage that friends and lovers \u201cspeak the same language.\u201d I don’t know if that’s true\u2014it seems more like everyone speaks their own individual language, and there’s this constant act of translation happening in relationships.<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

I don’t think anybody ever knows what another person means when they speak, frankly. It’s more than translation, it\u2019s just throwing yourself into the dark. Language is so very, very personal, private. Weird. I guess you could think of it as translation, that seems like a kind of euphemistic metaphor. It’s probably a lot more hopeless than that. But the effort of speaking as a human is the effort to get past that hopelessness with every sentence.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

That seems similar to the idea that the way that one language expresses an idea might never fully translate to another. What happens in that space you inhabit as a translator, between the original work and the translation?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

I think of it as a ditch, a ditch between two roads or countries. It\u2019s always been interesting for me, the state of mind that the translator arrives at, where they have two languages simultaneously on their brain-screen. And they’re saying something not quite equivalent and they both keep on floating there. Some writers\u2014Emily Dickinson would be the outstanding example\u2014make use of that ditch within their own language. So she’s not translating from another language. She’s translating herself. She writes certain lines and words and then crosses them out and puts another word in, or writes the third word on the side, or turns the paper over and makes another version of the whole thing. And it all exists together as the poem. It\u2019s just a really weird state of mind, to have all that floating, and have it be, <\/em>have it constitute the poem in its entirety\u2014in its untidy, unresolved entirety.<\/p>\n

In translation, this arises in a different way, because you have a text, and it has perhaps certain obvious errors in it. And then you have variant readings at the bottom of the page, which are ideas that different scholars have had over the years to make a better reading where it seems wrong. So you get, again, these possibilities floating in your mind, for the same thing, but different. And they\u2019re all kind of there together constituting the poem. I’ve never known what to do with that. It\u2019s a beautiful event to have the poem in Greek with various readings in English underneath it, and to have all that floating as possibilities for what the guy really said.<\/p>\n

I can\u2019t communicate the beauty of that most of the time on a page in a book, or in something called \u201ca translation of x.\u201d There’s no format for that. You can do it sort of on a computer with links and whatnot, side text. But basically nobody wants to be bothered with reading all those links, and it doesn’t feel the same. As a scholar, when you\u2019re looking at the page itself with the language and the variants, and it all floats in your mind, it’s just an extraordinary experience. Incommunicable, I think, in its finer aspects.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Interior from Wrong Norma<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

What about the act of creating something from scratch? Is that experience similarly spatial?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

I think about it as something that arrives in the mind, and then gets dealt with if it\u2019s interesting. It\u2019s more like a following of something, like a fox runs across your backyard and you decide to follow it and see if you can get to where the fox lives. It\u2019s just following a track.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

The fox is one of the mysteries of Wrong Norma<\/em>. Did he have a fixed meaning or feeling as you wrote about him, or would it change every day?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know where that fox came from. I was writing the liner notes for the LP of Ragnar Kjartansson\u2019s The Visitors<\/em>, and I was drawing at the same time. The fox appeared in the drawing, and he was such a great fox, I thought, \u201cI\u2019ve got to put that fox in somewhere,\u201d so I put it into the Visitors<\/em> piece. It was just an accidental fox that arrived by himself and then seemed to need to be dealt with.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How do you access your most creative headspace?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

Sometimes, what I end up writing about is just the way the light is. And there seems to be some kind of contract that’s already in place between me and the light to say\u2014in this notebook, which no one will ever read\u2014what the light is like today, to get exactly the right words. I don’t know what that contract is. But it seems to underlie all the other writing.<\/p>\n

After the light, we could talk about my mother or what I’m having for dinner or Proust\u2019s theory of translation. But the important thing is over. The light was the important thing. It remains a mystery to me why that’s the case, or where that contract came from.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In the piece \u201cSnow,\u201d you write about a premonition featuring the night clerk at the hotel where you stayed the week before your mother passed away. Is that something that happens to you often?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

Once it did. In Greek myth, the god Hermes is called the psychopomp, which means that when somebody is about to die, he goes to them and leads their soul to the underworld. So I kind of categorized the bellhop in the hotel as that guy. But when Currie and I were going to his father\u2019s funeral, we picked up a hitchhiker in the middle of Michigan, nowhere. God knows where he came from, because it\u2019s just empty landscape and then this guy, on the side of the road, in a really clean blue suit. He had a blue suit and a blue shirt. He was really starched-looking, and he got into the car and the car suddenly smelled like laundry, he was that clean<\/em>. We tried to talk to him, and he didn\u2019t want to talk. He was going to some public library on the side of the road three towns down, but he wouldn\u2019t describe who he was. And then we let him out of the car at the library and went on our way. That guy was a psychopomp, because we didn\u2019t know Currie\u2019s dad was dead yet. Or, he wasn\u2019t dead yet. He died the same day. We figured that guy was the sign that somebody\u2019s going to the other world. So it does happen. I wouldn\u2019t say often.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

For a long time, you and Currie co-taught a class on artistic collaboration at NYU called \u201cThe Egocircus.\u201d What sorts of exercises would you do with your students?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

\u201cBurn something, use the ash\u201d was one of the prompts. \u201cImprove a hotel\u201d was another. We sometimes gave them just three words like \u201csailing, butter, death.\u201d And then they would make things. It wasn’t that we disallowed writing entirely\u2014they always did come up with writing\u2014but we encouraged them to use other skills. They were always discovering things they could do that they didn’t know they could do.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you have any non-writing skills that are part of your writing process?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

Drawing and painting. I\u2019ll put swimming in. Tidying up, I\u2019m a good tidier.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Interior from Wrong Norma<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

How does swimming figure into your writing?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

It keeps me from being morose and crabby. Sometimes I think in the pool. Usually it\u2019s a bad idea. The ideas you have in the pool are like the ideas you have in a dream, where you get this sentence that answers all questions you\u2019ve ever had about reality and you get up groggily and write it down, and in the morning, it looks like \u201clet\u2019s buy bananas\u201d or something completely irrelevant. Plus, I like water. Some people just need to be near water.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

You and Currie are fans of John Cage, who talks about eliminating the ego from art. I\u2019m still thinking about the John Cage epigraph that appears in your 2016 collection Float\u2014<\/em>\u201cEach something is a celebration of the nothing that supports it.\u201d<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

That pertains to writers because they tend to have an accumulated store of memories and choices, which they call their autobiography, and then they just recycle that endlessly as they’re writing. You\u2019ve just got to get out of that.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

In the writing world, particularly in and around M.F.A. programs, there\u2019s a lot of discussion around things like \u201ccharacter\u201d and \u201cperspective,\u201d the mechanics of narrative. Do you think about \u201ccraft\u201d in these terms?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

Never. I don\u2019t think about it. I think people should just quit that stuff. Just think about something and follow it down to where it gets true.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

I worry that\u2014in America at least\u2014the act of critical thinking is being devalued from a cultural perspective. Do you notice that as a thinker or teacher?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

That\u2019s part of the thing that made me start thinking about hesitation. The last few years I was teaching, I was teaching ancient Greek part of the time and writing part of the time. And the ancient Greek method when I was in school was to look at the ancient Greek text and locate the words that are unknown and look them up in a lexicon. And then find out what it means and write it down. Looking up things in a lexicon is a process that takes time. And it has an interval in it of something like reverie, something like suspended thought because it\u2019s not no thought<\/em> because you have a question about a word and you attain that as you go through the pages looking for the right definition, but you\u2019re not arrived yet at the thought. It\u2019s a different kind of time, and a different kind of mentality than you have anywhere else in the day. It\u2019s very valuable, because things happen in your thinking and in your feeling about the words in that interval. I call that a hesitation.<\/p>\n

Nowadays people have the whole text on their computer, they come to a word they don\u2019t know, they hit a button and instantly the word is supplied to them by whatever lexicon has been loaded into the computer. Usually the computer chooses the meaning of the word relevant to the passage and gives that, so you don\u2019t even get the history of the word and a chance to float around among its possible other senses.<\/p>\n

That interval being lost makes a whole difference to how you regard languages. It rests your brain on the way to thinking because you\u2019re not quite thinking yet. It\u2019s an absent presence in a way, but it\u2019s not the cloud of unknowing that mystics talk about when they say that God is nothing and you have to say nothing about God because saying something about God makes God particular and limited. It\u2019s not that\u2014it\u2019s on the way<\/em> to knowing, so it\u2019s suspended in a sort of trust. I regret the loss of that.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Interior from Wrong Norma<\/em>.<\/p><\/div>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you think that our experience of time has something to do with the way that we pay attention? Do you think that someone who reads a lot would experience time differently from someone looking at screens all day?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

\u00a0That seems to imply judgment. I\u2019m not sure. What I am sure of is that we seek out ways to make time stop. That only happens in moments of total attention, which is why we pursue them. I suppose that can happen when you watch a movie on Netflix. Or when you’re deep in the midst of composing your best poem. Either of them can provide a focus of attention that you can enter, disappear into. My only interest in dealing with time is to find ways to make it stop. Because when it doesn’t stop, you\u2019re in boredom.<\/p>\n

You’re watching it go by, and there\u2019s nothing happening in it enough to fill it. Enough to take you away from misery. I don\u2019t find much of a middle ground between boredom and whatever the other thing is \u2026 immortality, I guess. Forgetting time.<\/p>\n

To be out of time, to be in that other state, is completely fun. So fun that you forget worrying about time.<\/p>\n

INTERVIEWER<\/p>\n

Do you spend hours at a time in that state?<\/p>\n

CARSON<\/p>\n

Minutes maybe, if I\u2019m lucky.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Kate Dwyer is a writer based in Brooklyn. Her\u00a0work has appeared in the<\/em> New York Times and many other outlets.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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