"But the poet's task, Kafka says, is to lead the isolated human being into the infinite life, the contingent into the lawful. What streams out of Mimnermos's suns are the laws that attach us to all luminous things. Of which the first is time.
Although he scarcely uses the word, everything in his verse bristles with it. Time goes whorling through landscapes and human lives bent on its agenda, endlessly making an end of things. You have seen this vibration of time in van Gogh, moving inside color energy. It moves in circles (not lines) that expand with a kind of biological inevitability, like Mimnermos's recurrent metaphor of the youth of humans as a flowering plant or fruit. These plants grow as the light does, for their life is one long day 'knowing neither good nor evil (fr.10) until the sun slips over the rim and everything goes dark. He does not use the words for dark, but substitutes events: death, old age, poverty, blind eyes, empty rooms, vacated mind. It is as if the darkness invents these evils, which arrive for no reason except the light has gone. When you pass from sun to shadow in his poems, you can feel the difference run down the back of your skull like cold water. 'And immediately then to die is better than life.' (fr.2)."
Anne Carson, Plainwater
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