Philobiblon

… takes me to Greece, and Sappho.

She was one of the many women of the past about whom I knew disgracefully little, but a bit of academic remaindering should help to sort that out. A lot in Reading Sappho: Contemporary Approaches (ed. E. Greene, 1996, Uni of California Press) is too technical for my non-knowledge of Greek, or my interest in the finer points of poetry, but some chapters are brilliant, for example “Sappho and Helen,” by P. duBois (p. 79-88)

It concentrates on one fragment, as reconstructed:

Some say a host of horsemen, others of infantry,
and others of ships, is the most beautiful thing
on the dark earth: but I say, it is what you love.

Full easy it is to make this understood of one and all;
for she that far surpassed all mortals in beauty,
Helen, her most noble husband

Deserted, and went sailing to Troy, with never a
though for her daughter and dear parents. The …
(Cyprian goddess) led her from the path …
… Which now has put me in mind of Anaktoria far away;

Her lovely way of walking, and the bright radiance
of her changing face, would I rather see than
your Lydian chariots and infantry full-armed.

It is a beautiful piece of poetry. Some expert comments:
“The poem works on the tension between desire, love, presence, and absence, and on the threat of war outside, the drama of pursuit of love. In each of the three parts of the lyrics Sappho refers to the world of war, the world of men and heroes …” (P. 82)

“Much of the energy of the poem comes from the force of her personal preference, her ability to make Anaktoria walk before us, but Anaktoria’s presence is straining to break out of a structure which gives her existence wider meaning…. Helen is an element of the old epic vocabulary, yet she means something new here.

“Sappho subverts the transitional interpretation of her journey to Troy. And in doing so she speaks of desire in new terms, circling down on a definition of the abstract force. Eros is a term insufficiently abstract; Eros is a god, Aphrodite a personification. Sappho moves towards the abstract by employing the substitutability of things, people, shops. She achieves a representation of desire by the accumulation of details, examples, personal testimony.” (p. 83)

Sappho is writing at a time of transition from myth to rationality, DuBois says. In nearby Lydia money was being invented at the same time, which Aristotle saw as allowing abstract thought, through the creation of abstract values. So Sappho is ranking by value.

In oral literatures women are usually described as objects, things to be exchanged – e.g The Iliad starts with the return of Chryseis and the seizure of Briseis – or as fixed markers that men move past, e.g. Odysseus leaving Kalypso’s island.

“Sappho, however, acts, as did Helen, in loving Anaktoria, in following her in her poem, in attempting to think beyond the terms of the epic vocabulary. Her action is possible because the world of oral culture, of a certain type of exchange, a type of marriage characteristic of such societies, is no longer dominant. … The institutions of the democratic cities have not yet evolved. The lyric age, the age of the tyrants, is a period of confusion, turbulence, and conflict; it is from this moment, this break, that Sappho speaks.”( p. 87)

No 64 Surprising and Distressing Things
While one is cleaning a decorative comb, something catches in the teeth and the comb breaks.
A carriage overturns. One would have imagined that such a solid, bulky object would remain forever on its wheels. It all seems like a dream – astonishing and senseless.
A child or a grownup blurts out something that is bound to make people uncomfortable.
All night long one has been waiting for a man who one thought was sure to arrive. At dawn, just when one has forgotten about him for a minute and dozed off, a crow caws loudly. One wakes with a start and sees that it is daytime – most astonishing.
One of the bowmen in an archery contests stands trembling for a long time before shooting: when finally he does release his arrow, it goes in the wrong direction. (p. 117-8)

No 134 Letters are Commonplace
Letters are commonplace enough, yet what splendid things they are! When someone is in a distant province and one is worried about him, and then a letter suddenly arrives, one feels as though one were seeing him face to face. Again, it is a great comfort to have expressed one’s feelings in a letter even though one knows it cannot yet have arrived. If letters did not exist, what dark depressions would come over one! When one has been worrying about something and wants to tell a certain person about it, what a relief it is to put it all down in a letter! Still greater is one’s joy when a reply arrives. At that moment a letter really seems like an elixir of life. (p. 207.)

OK. In the interests of copyright better stop now. I’d recommend buying the book; you won’t regret it!

An interesting idea from the Guardian; you can get the name and address of a (presumably undecided or swingable) voter in a key constituency and write them to give your view. Here.

Who knows, it might even make a difference. My prediction is that the election will be undecided 48 hours after the vote has finished and it will all end up in the courts again. Partly, this will be because it is so close, but also because I suspect that the idea of “Her Majesty’s loyal opposition” (which is a pretty odd concept in historical terms) — a preparedness to accept you will lose power and gain it again in due course — has broken down in the US, at least among Republicans.

You might ask about her life; little is known except what the Pillow Book reveals, and it is by no means a conventional diary. Her father was a poet and a scholar, and she may have been briefly married to a court official and had a son. The introduction says: “There is a tradition that she died in lonely poverty; but this is probably an invention of moralists.”

A few more of her words:

Item 74: Things That Lose by Being Painted
Pinks, cherry blossoms, yellow roses. Men or women who are praised in romances as being beautiful.

Item 75: Things That Gain by Being Painted
Pines, Autumn fields. Mountain villages and paths. Cranes and deer. A very cold winter scene; an unspeakably hot summer scene. (p. 138.)

Item 174. The Way in Which Carpenters Eat
The way in which carpenters eat is really odd. When they had finished the main building and were working on the eastern wing, some carpenters squatted in a row to have their meal; I say on the veranda and watched them. The moment the food was brought, they fell on the soup bowls and gulped down the contents. They they pushed the bowls aside and finished off all the vegetables. I wondered whether they were going to leave their rice; a moment later their wasn’t a grain left in the bowls. They all behaved in exactly the same way, so I suppose this must be the custom of carpenters. I should not call it a very charming one.” (p. 255.)

More here and here.

I’ve been thinking about the process of blogging and its predecessors, which took me back to one of my favourite books of all time, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, by a lady-in-waiting to the Japanese empress in the last decade of the 10th century AD. It’s a journal, a commonplace book, a collection of poetry and in some ways a conduct book. Sei was, no doubt typically of her time, a terrible snob, but delightfully free from repressive morality.

Her conduct advice still seems pretty good:
“A good lover will behave as elegantly at dawn as at any other time. He drags himself out of bed, with a look of dismay on his face. The lady urges him on: ‘Come, my friend, it’s getting light. You don’t want anyone to find you here.’ He gives a deep sigh, as if to say that the night has not been nearly long enough and that it is agony to leave. Once up, he does not instantly pull on his trousers. Instead he comes close to the lady and whispers whatever was left unsaid during the night. Even when he is dressed, he still lingers, vaguely pretending to be fastening his sash.
Presently he raises the lattice, and the two lovers stand together by the side door while he tells her how he dreads the coming day, which will keep them apart; then he slips away. The lady watches him go, and this moment of parting will remain among her most charming memories.
Indeed, one’s attachment to a man depends largely on the elegance of his leave-taking. When he jumps out of bed, scurries about the room, tightly fastens his trouser-sash, rolls up the sleeves of his Court cloak, over-robe or hunting costume, stuffs his belongings into the breast of his robe and then briskly secures the outer sash – one really begins to hate him.”

(Trans. I Morris, Penguin, London, 1967, p. 49-50

… is the “big” title of Marilyn French’s latest, a big three-volume set, from the sound of the Guardian review.

The reviewer’s not sold, but it still sounds like a great idea.