Ringing steel, or, resonance
Sep. 20th, 2013 01:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kaberett posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
poetree... the most beautiful thing/on the black earth, wrote Sappho, two and a half thousand years ago.
It was twelve and a half million years ago (this, you see, is why I'm a little inexact: what are a few years between friends?) that Lesbos (or Lesvos) was last volcanically active. And yet: and yet. The Aegean has its volcanoes today, that still bring forth fire and brimstone, but they're a long way south, this being the way of subduction zones and time.
The black earth: it suggests richness, perhaps; dampness. But to me, it also suggests volcanic ash, worried and weathered into fertility.
It is not, you understand, that I intend to provide a close geological reading of this fragment: I am given little else to go on, after all. But I wanted to suggest to you that Sappho's choices, here, said not only fertility, but also home.
What I'm really here to do is to give you a necessarily brief overview of what has grown in that soil, through the gulfs of time and silence between us.
(There is - are - also Michael Field, the pen name adopted by a lesbian couple who lived from around 1850 to the beginning of the First World War. The main bulk of their work, prior to 1906, had among its influences the traces of Sappho, as she was understood by Victorians.)
Borges wrote that every writer makes their own precursors: that a work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. I cannot, I'm afraid, tell you much about Sappho's precursors - but I can tell you who I see looking back at me from the shards of fragment 16.
Helen, of course, is a recurring figure, who is not of herself of Sappho; and nonetheless Sappho's Helen (who left - or abandoned - her fine husband and went sailing to Troy) is echoed, perhaps, in Derek Walcott's, who in Omeros walks the paths of a very different island, halfway around the world, displaced in time as well as space; who is symbol, reflection.
From the sixteenth century, I think of Arthur Gorges' Her Face - to be read horizontally or vertically, it makes little difference, or perhaps all the difference: and in the spaces between words, in the delicate balance between lines, I catch my breath and wonder what is unspoken, or rather what it is I cannot hear. I think of it was your lightness that drew me with her lovely step: of Meg Bateman's poem Lightness/Aotromachd, where we have absence and beauty, twined around one another, in two languages - but in this case, both are given us by the author herself.
With my minimal classic training I think, of course, of arma virumque cano: I sing of arms and of the man, of Aeneas, says Vergil - intones Vergil? - who reminds us of the beauty of weaponry, and of the place of the chant, in his very first line. I think of Ovid - the motion of light on her face is echoed in Amores I.V, of the bars of light as of woodland cast across the floor - across Ovid's Corinna - by the sun through the half-closed shutters; and in Corinna I see Anaktoria, beloved and compared to the famous women of her time and of her place.
I think of Ovid's Heroides, out of the unexpected, of the women writing to the heroic lovers who have, in some way, mistreated them. I wonder at the poet, who placed himself as Oenone - who was left by Paris for Sparta and for Helen - and who placed himself as, yes, Sappho, and who - a man! at the beginning of the common era! - gives himself voice to discuss abortion and loss and maltreatment.
And so: and so. In love and in home - in knowing where one stands - there is beauty. The motion of light on a face can be as dazzling as the play of the sun on armaments beyond counting. And Anaktoria, who - in some sense - followed Helen's path? We, now, looking back, walk in her (lovely) steps on fertile ground, in company with those between us and, perhaps, in love. And I wonder: who is it that walks hand-in-hand with you?
It was twelve and a half million years ago (this, you see, is why I'm a little inexact: what are a few years between friends?) that Lesbos (or Lesvos) was last volcanically active. And yet: and yet. The Aegean has its volcanoes today, that still bring forth fire and brimstone, but they're a long way south, this being the way of subduction zones and time.
The black earth: it suggests richness, perhaps; dampness. But to me, it also suggests volcanic ash, worried and weathered into fertility.
It is not, you understand, that I intend to provide a close geological reading of this fragment: I am given little else to go on, after all. But I wanted to suggest to you that Sappho's choices, here, said not only fertility, but also home.
What I'm really here to do is to give you a necessarily brief overview of what has grown in that soil, through the gulfs of time and silence between us.
(There is - are - also Michael Field, the pen name adopted by a lesbian couple who lived from around 1850 to the beginning of the First World War. The main bulk of their work, prior to 1906, had among its influences the traces of Sappho, as she was understood by Victorians.)
Borges wrote that every writer makes their own precursors: that a work modifies our conception of the past, as it will modify the future. I cannot, I'm afraid, tell you much about Sappho's precursors - but I can tell you who I see looking back at me from the shards of fragment 16.
Helen, of course, is a recurring figure, who is not of herself of Sappho; and nonetheless Sappho's Helen (who left - or abandoned - her fine husband and went sailing to Troy) is echoed, perhaps, in Derek Walcott's, who in Omeros walks the paths of a very different island, halfway around the world, displaced in time as well as space; who is symbol, reflection.
From the sixteenth century, I think of Arthur Gorges' Her Face - to be read horizontally or vertically, it makes little difference, or perhaps all the difference: and in the spaces between words, in the delicate balance between lines, I catch my breath and wonder what is unspoken, or rather what it is I cannot hear. I think of it was your lightness that drew me with her lovely step: of Meg Bateman's poem Lightness/Aotromachd, where we have absence and beauty, twined around one another, in two languages - but in this case, both are given us by the author herself.
With my minimal classic training I think, of course, of arma virumque cano: I sing of arms and of the man, of Aeneas, says Vergil - intones Vergil? - who reminds us of the beauty of weaponry, and of the place of the chant, in his very first line. I think of Ovid - the motion of light on her face is echoed in Amores I.V, of the bars of light as of woodland cast across the floor - across Ovid's Corinna - by the sun through the half-closed shutters; and in Corinna I see Anaktoria, beloved and compared to the famous women of her time and of her place.
I think of Ovid's Heroides, out of the unexpected, of the women writing to the heroic lovers who have, in some way, mistreated them. I wonder at the poet, who placed himself as Oenone - who was left by Paris for Sparta and for Helen - and who placed himself as, yes, Sappho, and who - a man! at the beginning of the common era! - gives himself voice to discuss abortion and loss and maltreatment.
And so: and so. In love and in home - in knowing where one stands - there is beauty. The motion of light on a face can be as dazzling as the play of the sun on armaments beyond counting. And Anaktoria, who - in some sense - followed Helen's path? We, now, looking back, walk in her (lovely) steps on fertile ground, in company with those between us and, perhaps, in love. And I wonder: who is it that walks hand-in-hand with you?
