ANNE CARSON

I'd like to share an excerpt from Anne Carson's "Wildly Constant" part of her beautiful collection Float.

... The library contains not books
but glaciers.
The glaciers are upright.

Silent.
As perfectly ordered as books would be.
But they are melted.

What would it be like
to live in a library
of melted books?

With sentences streaming over the floor
and all the punctuation
settled to the bottom as residue.

It would be confusion.
Unforgivable.
An adventure.

Roni Horn once told me
that one of the Antarctic explorers said
To be having an adventure

is a sign of incompetence.
When I'm feeling
at my most incompetent

as I do in Stykkishólmur
many a dark morning
walking into the wind

I try to conjure in mind
something that is the opposite of incompetence.
For example the egg.

This perfect form.
Perfect content.
Perfect food.

In your dreams
said a more recent Arctic explorer (Anna Freud)
you can have your eggs cooked as perfectly as you want

but you cannot eat them.
Sometimes at night
when I can't sleep

because of the wind
I go and stand
in the library of glaciers.

I stand in another world.
Not in the past not the future.
Not paradise not reality not

a dream.
An other competence.
Wild and constant.

And who knows why it exists.
I stand amid glaciers.
Listen to the wind outside

falling toward me from the outer edges of night and space.
I have no theory
of why we are here

or what any of us is a sign of.
But a room of melted glaciers
reverberating with the nightwind of Stykkishólmur

is a good place to ponder it.
Each glacier is lit from underneath
as memory is.

Proust says memory is of two kinds.
There is a daily struggle to recall
where we put our reading glasses

And there is a deeper gust of longing
that comes up from the bottom
of the heart

involuntarily.
At sudden times.
For surprise reasons.

Here is an excerpt from a letter Proust wrote
in 1913:
We think we no longer love our dead

but that is because we do not remember them'
suddenly
we catch sight of an old glove

and burst into tears.
Before leaving the library
I turn off the lights.

The glaciers go dark.
Then I return to Greta's house.
Wake up my husband.

Ask him to make us some eggs.