Eros, Attention, Acceptance: A Writer’s Arsenal

Then, again, one day, the one who was once young will learn that somewhere at the other end of this very earth the older one has died. At first she will want to write in order to know. But time hurries on—the letter is frozen in time. Desire remains desire.  

– Marina Tsvetaeva, “Letter to an Amazon” (translated by Sonja Franeta)

It is November. Darkness bites off chunks of daylight earlier. I am re-reading Letters: Summer 1926, a collection of letters exchanged between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetaeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke. In November 1922, Tsvetaeva wrote to Pasternak: “A letter is like an otherworldly communication, less perfect than a dream but subject to the same rules.”¹

In August 1926, as Rilke’s leukemia worsened, Tsvetaeva sent him a letter proposing what could be read as an erotic encounter: “You are what I’m going to dream about tonight, what will dream me tonight. […] A stranger, I, in someone else’s dream. I never await you; I always awake you.” She imagines her own role as a sort of poetic fantasy, adding: “Everything that never sleeps, would like to sleep its fill in your arms.” 

Tsvetaeva is telling Rilke what to dream. Her writing combines the adrenaline of the dare with the high-stakes of emotional recklessness. Not only does she thrive on risk, but she also demands that the reader meet her there, pushing the boundaries of politeness, reveling in her unboundedness, watching her usurp the masculine-coded role of courtship initiator or emotional aggressor. It is her pleasure. 

To read Tsvetaeva’s letters or prose is to feel shoved up against a wall with her hand on your chest, the scent of her breath scouring your nostrils. The sensual aggression of her address eroticizes the Other, rejecting all social conventions and boundaries between herself and the interlocutor. This is true whether she is writing to Pasternak or Rilke or Sophia Parnock, across genders, across genres of poetry, criticism, correspondence, and essay.  A table is overturned every time Tsvetaeva’s pen touches the page. A glass breaks. Someone’s feelings are hurt. Someone’s ego leaves splatter marks on the parquet. 

This penchant for erotic upset came to mind while reading philosopher Gillian Rose’s Paradiso, which was left unfinished due to Rose’s death from ovarian cancer. A philosopher needs only three things, Rose says: “Eros, attention, acceptance.” Eros, to Rose, means “infinite intellectual eros: endless curiosity about everything.” Attention is “the ability to pay attention: to be rapt by what is in front of you without seizing it yourself.” Acceptance draws on intellectual humility and uncertainty, which Rose calls “acceptance of pathlessness (aporia): that there may be no solutions to questions, only the clarification of their statement.”

The same three things are also necessary for the poet, the critic, and the essayist. Part of what it means to think is to consider the ideas of others, to take a deep interest in their experiences. Often, we write from what is held in-common: a wick, a spark, a shared darkness, a contiguous reverence—the erotics of intellectual inquiry.

Poets leverage erotic curiosity through metaphor, laying the unlike in bed together. Metaphors have the power to alter the way one perceives a word. An altered perception alters the relationship between words. “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers,” because Emily Dickinson left us with an image tied to birds. There is nothing essentially hopeful about birds, in and of themselves, but poetry hitches birds, feathers, and winged things to hope, which then leads to interpretation, or even to some hope-carrying avian thing perched unexpectedly in the third stanza of one’s own poem. 

Since metaphors’ power relies on context, and on connotations built across time, we cannot know whether we are creating or being created by the metaphors of others. This is how metaphor seduces—by distracting us from the implausibility of the marvel being presented. One sees its uncanny juxtapositions, like the plate metaphor William Gass concocted in the essays from On Being Blue, “like that unpocketed peppermint which has, from fingering, become unwrapped, we always plate our sexual subjects first. It is the original reason we read … the only reason why we write.”

Like eros, attention exists in relation to ravishment. “To be rapt by what is front of you,” as Rose says, one must be able to look closely without destroying the subject, without coercing the seen thing to do one’s bidding. One must persuade, and risk being persuaded. Close attention assumes a willingness to be seduced. 

The poet’s attention can rouse us with sonics, images, or rhythm, as W. B. Yeats does when he begins “A Drunken Man’s Praise of Sobriety” with an injunction, and then pivots to seduction by turning the end-rhyme into a sort of dance beat:

Come swish around, my pretty punk,
And keep me dancing still
That I may stay a sober man
Although I drink my fill.

An injunction demands a certain form of attention from the reader. When issued inside a repetition or a beat, the injunction pops out and speaks directly to the flesh. Yeats’s direct address grabs us by the collar, removes us from the sidelines and places the reader inside the poem. His attention is ours. 

Although injunctions are grounded in the presumption of authority, the poetic injunction differs from the proclamation in its flexibility—it can continue asserting its authority, or it can shift into persuasion, and beguile. Like the poet’s, the critic’s attention is creative—it highlights a particular aspect of the text. My decision to set apart a stanza hallows it, or grants it increased significance in this setting-apartness. The critic’s attention renders certain parts of the text sacred. Perhaps the writer’s desire to make sacred is the strongest argument against treating art as a Religion, an institution that administers set-apartness. Paradoxically, religious institutions desecrate the hallowed by monopolizing access to it.

Rose’s “acceptance of pathlessness” is what makes everything touchable, imaginable, open to consideration. Like the philosopher, the poet speaks in order to draw closer to the unspoken, the unspeakable, or the undecided. Strategies of closure, in poetry, double as techniques of disclosure. 

Poetry makes not finding possible. The self, like the style or voice, changes depending on the interlocutor.  The neo-necromantics may get caught necking in the minimalist's tool shed. The poem that begins as a rave may be stymied by the appearance of its sad raven. The writer may be seduced away from their point of origin. The artist wearing a fish on his head has not found his voice (or his self) as a fish; he is simply playing with his relationship to selfhood. The emphasis on finding and being oneself is increasingly commercial. Late capitalism confuses self-discovery with self-production. A self is not something one can or will be—a self is an uncanny combination of things across time. 

In the poem “New Year’s Eve,” which Tsvetaeva dedicated to Rilke, she writes: “I have long put life and death in quotation marks, / like fabrications known to be empty.”² And then, she leans on the asterisk as a punctuation mark that can carry death:

Life and death, I pronounce with a secret
smile—you will touch it with your own.
Life and death I pronounce with a footnote,
with an asterisk…

This textual pronouncement of the asterisk, that fallen-star shape, is followed by the ellipsis, which opens the ending to include the infinite. Tsvetaeva’s “asterisk” reminds us that the text does not include everything the writer could say, or even everything the writer wished to say. It introduces uncertainty and instability. It closes by dissing closure. 

Tsvetaeva refused to wear glasses to correct her nearsightedness—she kept the world blurry, maintaining a certain distance between perception and reality. To cling to an inability to read one’s room is to accept irresolution, or to court dreaminess and unlikeness. But it also invites not seeing the self clearly, and problematizes the possibility of seeing one’s reflection in a mirror. Are you yourself in your blurred reflection?

It still mystifies me that Tsvetaeva, an avid epistolarian whose letters formed a critical part of her writing corpus, died by suicide without leaving a note. The intense erotic connection she sought from writing reminds me of Georges Bataille’s “white heat.” I suspect she lit the white heat to arouse herself rather than the Other—to feel alive in creating a timeless relationship with this Other—to languor in the intimacies she imagined rather than depict the challenges of poetic encounters in Stalin’s Soviet Union. 

In January 1927, Tsvetaeva wrote to the recently-deceased Rilke: “Beloved, come to me often in my dreams—no, not that. Live in my dreams.” What audacity! The writer enervates eternity by seducing spirits. 

I think of Rose—eros, attention, acceptance—as the first freeze decimates the potted ferns on our front porch. The world creaks as it wakens. My dog, Radu, lays two bird bones at my feet. I realize that something has died. It is not a scrap of plastic. It is not a toy. It is freezing and I am delirious. Live in my dreams, I imagine Tsvetaeva whispering to the ghost. The unfathomable excitement is the most dangerous. I can recognize the bones but still do not know who It is. Or how the winged thing climbs inside so many of us.
 

¹Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Letters: Summer 1926. 

²Translation by John Henriksen, per Svetlana Boym, Death in Quotation Marks: Cultural Myths of the Modern Poet .