My short story “Another Bride in Porto” was published in Minerva Rising Press’ The Keeping Room. I don’t want to say too much about the actual story, because I think such exegeses can kind of kill a thing, but I will say the epigraph I used comes from Anne Carson’s “Eros, the Bittersweet.”
Re-reading that work is like turning a crystal in my hand, with its illuminating flashes of seemingly disparate discussions of desire, identity, logic, and knowledge using modern and ancient texts, the whole while spiraling around Sappho’s word “glukupikron,” the source for our English word bittersweet.
The Greek word “glukupikron” translates more closely to “sweet bitter” than bittersweet, an important difference.
The full quote for the epigraph comes from her chapter, “Finding the Edge”:
"If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole. When I desire you a part of me is gone: my want of you partakes of me. So reasons the lover at the edge of eros. The presence of want awakens in him nostalgia for wholeness.
—Eros the Bittersweet. Princeton University Press.
By desiring someone or something else, we reckon with the possibility and awareness that we don’t feel complete in ourselves. Our reach toward some other makes us aware of a lack, a wanting, or a “hole” in ourselves.
In “Another Bride in Porto,” I also reference the fado music particular to Portugal. I first heard fado on the day Amalia Rodrigues died in 1999. A radio announcement of her death on WGBH-Boston included one of her tracks that struck me so deeply, I immediately drove to Tower Records in Cambridge and bought three CDs.
After that, I went to concerts by Misia and Mariza and made strange pilgrimages, often alone, to small cities for fado festivals just to listen to those sad songs. Like two other musical forms I love, Greek rembetiko and tango, the music grew out of suffering and circumstances that weren’t my own, and yet I found only there something deep, inexplicable, and necessary. Eventually, I moved on, but I do wonder what those mournful, bittersweet songs brought me at that particular time in my life. What “hole” was I seeking to fill and why did I find relief there?
Carson’s Eros, the Bittersweet,” ends on a near ecstatic tone. The final section, “Mythoplokos,” suggests desire can only be present with imagination, for we can only imagine what we don’t have or are not able to attain. In this section, Carson presents Sokrates as the ultimate lover. He loved arguments, definitions, thinking, the process of coming to know, all provoked by his claim of not knowing, a lack. Carson writes:
“It is a high-risk proposition, as Sokrates saw quite clearly, to reach for the difference between known and unknown. He thought the risk worthwhile, because he was in love with the wooing itself. And who is not?”
What loss, what misery, it seems, not to be propelled by the right conceived desire. So perhaps this wandering through words, through music, through love, through sadness, through a sense of internal lack––and through the erotic––is also a wandering toward wisdom.
My story is here in “The Keeping Room”: Another Bride in Porto.