Princeton University Press
Chapter Title: Midas
Book Title: Eros the Bittersweet
Book Subtitle: An Essay
Book Author(s): Anne Carson
Published by: Princeton University Press. (1986)
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt7zv117.29
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the Bittersweet
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Midas
Sokrates drives home his point about Lysias' bad writing
with an analogy from the grave. "It is very like the in
scription on the tomb of Midas the Phrygian," he says of
Lysias' discourse, and proceeds to cite the inscription:
Χαλκή παρθένος ειμί, Μίδα δ' εττϊ στήματι κεΐμαι.
οφρ' άν ϋδωρ τε νά-η και δένδρεα μακρά τεθήλτ),
αντον ττ)δε μένουσα πολυκλαντου επί τύμβου,
άγγελέω τταριονσι Μίδας ότι ττ)δε τέθαττται.
Bronze maiden am I and on Midas' mound I lie.
As long as water flows and tall trees bloom,
Right here fixed fast on the tearful tomb,
I shall announce to all who pass near: Midas is dead
and buried here!
The analogy is an artful one on several levels, for the in
scription epitomizes in its form as well as in its content
all that Sokrates says we should mistrust about the writ
ten word, and also aims specific satire at Lysias. The in
scription is an epitaph: advertisement of death and a
challenge to time. It promises to assert a single unchange
able fact in one unchanging form into eternity: Midas is
dead. Its voice is that of a girl, youthful forever and
proud to defy the world of time and change and living
phenomena passing before her. With Midas, she holds
aloof: he in death, she in letters.
Furthermore, Sokrates confides, this epitaph is distinc
tive in one feature of its composition. Every line is inde
pendent of every other, in sense and in meter, so that the
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Midas
poem yields much the same meaning in whatever order it
is read:
ότι δ ' ονδεν διαφέρει αντον πρώτον ή νστατόν τι
λέγεσθαι, εννοείς που, ώς εγωμαι.
I suppose you notice (Sokrates says to Phaedrus)
that it makes no difference which line is read first or
which read last. (264e)
With this detail the inscription becomes specifically de
risive of Lysias. It is fairly obvious how a poem whose
lines are interchangeable may be compared with a speech
that starts where it should end and follows no cogent or
der throughout its exposition. But let us train our atten
tion, through this textual comparison, at the analogy in
real life toward which it points. The Midas inscription
has some salient details in common with the theory of
love that Lysias expounds in his speech.
Like Lysias' nonlover, the words of the inscription
stand aloof from time and declare their difference from
the world of ephemeral beings. The nonlover bases his
claim to moral superiority over the lover on this differ
ence. He achieves his difference by sidestepping the mo
ment which is 'now' for the man in love, that is, the mo
ment of desire when the lover loses self-control. The
nonlover, like the words on Midas' tomb, projects him
self into the future. Standing outside the time of desire,
he can stand also outside its emotions and regard all mo
ments of the love affair as equal and interchangeable.
Neither Lysias' erotic theory nor his speech acknowl
edges any necessary ordering of its parts in time. So, too,
the words on Midas' tomb transcend the temporal order,
in their form as in their content. Changeless themselves,
they promise to the reader, as Lysias does to his beloved
boy, unchanging consistency in the face of transforming
time.
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Midas
Now consider Midas himself. As a mythological sym
bol Midas deserves our passing consideration, for the
statement made by his tomb repeats the central, disfig
uring mistake of his life. It is a mistake from which the
lover may have something to learn.
He is a paradoxical case, in the ancient view. Midas is
used by Aristotle, for instance, to betoken the absurdity
of want in the midst of wealth:
καίτοι άτοπον τοιούτον είναι πλοϋτον ου ευπόρων
λιμω άπολεϊται, καθάπερ και τον Μίδαι» εκείνον μυ-
θολογονο-ι δια την άπληστίαν της ενχής πάντων
αντω γιγνομένων των παρατιθεμένων χρυσών.
It is an absurd thing [atopon] for wealth to be of
such a kind that a man who is rich with it dies of
starvation, like the mythological Midas: by reason
of the insatiability of his prayer, everything set be
fore him became gold. (Pol. 1.3.1257b)
Midas is an image of someone stranded in his own desire,
longing to touch and not to touch at the same time, like
the children in Sophokles' poem with their hands full of
ice. Perfect desire is perfect impasse. What does the de-
sirer want from desire? Candidly, he wants to keep on
desiring.
Midas' golden touch would be a powerful symbol of
perfect, self-extinguishing, self-perpetuating desire. As
such, Midas might call to mind the type of bad lover
whom Sokrates and Lysias denounce in their speeches,
for Midas' touch has a devastating effect on the things he
loves. They turn to gold. They stop in time. So, too, the
bad lover contrives to fix the living organism of his pai-
dika at a moment of gold, that is at the akme of his
youthful bloom, so that he may be perfectly enjoyable for
as long as possible. The Midas touch stops time for the
lover too, permitting him to freeze his own emotional life
at the high point of desire.
Plato does not make explicit any connection between
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MuJiis
Midas and the lover who wants to stop time; nonethe-
less, Midas may be selected for mention here partly in or-
der to evoke the Midas touch as an image of desire. It is
an important image because it helps to focus the central
point at issue between Sokrates' and Lysias' theories of
eros. Both theories agree that desire pulls the desirer into
paradoxical relations with time. Both theories observe
that the conventional erastes responds to this problem
with certain tactics, attempting to block the natural cur-
rents of physical and personal development that are
moving his beloved through life. These tactics are dam-
aging, Sokrates and Lysias concur; they do not concur at
all on what tactics are preferable. Lysias recommends,
through the fiction of his nonlover, that the best thing to
do is simply stand aside from time. 'Now' is the moment
that presents a problem, so imagine yourself at 'then' and
avoid the problem. Sokrates refers to this tactic as
"swimming backwards against the current" (264a) and
likens it to the jeu d'esprit on Midas' tomb. But his ob-
jections are more than rhetorical, and he goes on to judge
the Lysian attitude a crime against eros (242e). In the rest
of the dialogue we come to see what this means: a Lysian
theory of love violates those natural currents of physical
and spiritual change that constitute our human situation
in time. What happens when you choose to abstract
yourself from participation in time? Plato gives us three
different images of the answer.
Midas himself is one image. On his tomb, as in his life,
Midas is surrounded by a world of changing phenomena
in which he may not participate. His problems in life be-
gin with insatiable greed and end in death by want, a par-
adox with significant cross-references for erotic desire.
But his life and its implications remain an implicit feature
of Plato's treatment, so perhaps we are not justified in
drawing them out. We must turn to another category of
creatures who appear in the dialogue, and who share Mi-
das' dilemma in its main outlines as well as in its attitude
to want.
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