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By Root 1098 0

presence of mystery and the absence of certainty—comes up with remarkable frequency. “Whatever inspiration is,” the Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska said in her 1996 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, “it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know.’”* One of her colleagues, the Canadian poet Anne Carson, put it even more plainly in a poem called “Essay on What I Think About Most.” (The opening lines are “Error. / And its emotions.”) “What we are engaged in when we do poetry,” Carson wrote, “is error.” I take her to mean by this three things. The first is that poetry is made of words, and, as we’ve seen, words have error built into them from the get-go. Every syllable is a stepping stone across the gap, an effort to explain something (train tracks, thunder, happiness) by recourse to something it is not (a word). The second is that writing, whether of poetry or anything else, involves a certain inevitable amount of getting it wrong—an awareness that truth is always on the lam, that the instant you think you’ve got it pinned down on the page, it shimmers, distorts, wiggles away. Last, but possibly most important, I take her to mean that poetry, like error, startles, unsettles, and defies; it urges us toward new theories about old things.

Making mistakes as one might make poems, rejecting certainty, deliberately exploring ambiguity and error: this is the optimistic model of wrongness on Ecstasy. It does not truck with (to borrow Carson’s words again) “fear, anxiety, shame, remorse / and all the other silly emotions associated with making mistakes.” I don’t agree that such emotions are silly, but I do agree that they are not a good place to set down our luggage and settle in. Artists entice us past them, into a world where error is not about fear and shame, but about disruption, reinvention, and pleasure. Art is an invitation to enjoy ourselves in the land of wrongness.

As that suggests, it is not just the makers of art but its beneficiaries—you and me—who get to experience an acute pleasure in error. Think for a moment about “suspension of disbelief,” the prerequisite for enjoying fictional narratives of all kinds. As readers, spectators, or listeners, we consent to believe, albeit temporarily, in something we know to be false. What we expect to receive in exchange is pleasure. And we do. But that pleasure often comes to us in forms that—fittingly, since they derive from error—we do not usually enjoy.

Take suspense. Under normal circumstances, we don’t relish the anxiety of not knowing, but when it comes to art, we are veritable suspense junkies. I don’t just mean that we gravitate toward works that are explicitly created and billed as thrillers, although we certainly love those, too. Virtually all fictional narratives contain some element of strategic withholding, hoodwinking, and revealing, and we simply can’t get enough of it. We love to be kept guessing—and, what’s more, we are happiest when all of our guesses prove wrong. That’s why some of the most satisfying fictional narratives (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Our Mutual Friend, Pride and Prejudice, and The Usual Suspects, to name a few) don’t merely resolve their suspense at the end, but do so in a way that comports with the facts yet still contrives to astonish us.†

So one perverse pleasure of art is the pleasure of being lost, in the sense of being confused or in the dark. (Traditionally, this confusion is temporary, and resolves into satisfying clarity at the conclusion. In modern art, with its more acute interest in error, the sense of being lost is often ongoing: see Gertrude Stein.) But a second pleasure is that of being lost in a different sense: of exploring uncharted territory, whether in the world or in the self. We say of a particularly engrossing work of art that we got lost in it—as if, through experiencing it, we had wandered into an unfamiliar world. And we also say (note the unusual reflexive form) that we lost ourselves in it, as if it had caused the confines of a familiar identity to go a little slack. This feeling of being utterly absorbed in something, from