Sappho, "And I said" (tr. Mary Barnard)

Hi all –

Happy Holidays! I am putting this together on Christmas in case you need some fresh, hot-off-the-presses content. I am enormously grateful to be with family, to help around the house a bit, and to sneak in some reading and writing. Not everyone gets such luxuries. I gave to the Prison Journalism Project earlier this year–I am a regular donor to the Inside Books Project–and if you're wondering how to share more cheer and love, I do recommend familiarizing yourself with the work both organizations do. I want to bring one article from the Prison Journalism Project to your attention, as some prisoners in the U.S. did see the images from CECOT, and they have words you want to hear. A sample:

When I saw the El Salvador photos, I was outraged. I knew everything was staged. I knew all those men would experience much worse things as soon as the cameras clicked off.

-- Cesar Hernandez, Texas

If someone asks you what's so bad about CECOT, the censored 60 Minutes segment is an excellent resource. Parker Molloy's The Present Age has that report: "Watch the 60 Minutes Segment CBS Didn't Want You to See." What needs to be known: 1) the U.S. government is responsible for due process violations, and due process is owed to all persons 2) the technical term for sending people away to be tortured is "extraordinary rendition," and it is absolutely a crime against humanity 3) CECOT, which can be called a concentration camp, sexually abuses and tortures those sent there.

Please do read and share "What We Saw in Those Images From the El Salvador Mega Prison." Most people have no idea what actually goes on in our criminal justice system. Some even believe authoritarianism can be prevented without opposing mass incarceration or militarized police units. It's going to take a real reckoning with what we've created to change things for the better.

Sappho, "And I said" (tr. Mary Barnard)

Blood, fire, and butchery. Sappho: "And I said / I shall burn..."

And I said
Sappho (tr. Mary Barnard)

And I said

I shall burn the
fat thigh-bones of
a white she-goat
on her altar

In the previous fragment we read, Sappho puzzled over love to the point of paralysis. What could she possibly give one who has everything? Someone no less than Aphrodite? Now, there's panicked, harried resolve, a cutting through a sea of emotional chaos. All the self-doubt accompanying being in love meets a spectacular sacrifice: "I shall burn the / fat thigh-bones of /a white she-goat / on her altar." Aphrodite, we imagine, has never had this intense a combination of tears and anger at her altar.

I am gathering notes on aphorisms from Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil for a project. I imagine Sappho's sacrifice of a goat messy in more than one way, as she wants a god to cure her inner turmoil. This makes for a fruitful dialogue with Nietzsche: "Whatever is done from love always occurs beyond good and evil" (§153). Yeah, I can believe lovesick wounded pride is beyond good and evil. If you believe the world torments you with signs of a beloved everywhere, that isn't good. If you're trying to read every possible portent, that's weird, somewhat pathetic and sweet, not necessarily evil. Love doesn't demand control, but it insists on having a chance.

This isn't irrelevant to interpreting Nietzsche. Often, his readers emphasize noble, aristocratic types who indulge cruelty in opposition to democratic pettiness, envy, and a vengefulness which tears down anything good. I believe that exaggerated, dangerous picture–it did and does inspire Nazis!–is a bit of a cartoon, better understood as a starting point for asking how morality and power relate. One could say the fundamental problem with the last man, the one who insists on sameness or else, a debased, violent equality, is that they're so paranoid they cannot possibly love. I see Sappho taking a risk chasing a perfection which drives her mad.

"Okay," you say. "Is Nietzsche, on your reading, just license for whatever romantics want?" Um, no? His concern is what brings us to freedom and ever higher excellence. But that depends on embracing a uniqueness which his own rantings do not always affirm. Roughly, he gives you a history of morality where power and how power is regarded create "good," and this is eventually inverted by the powerless, the formerly "evil." Morality as we know it depends on dishonesty about what was originally good. He has a clear preference for what he wants you to do with this story, but ultimately it is up to you to take the story and do more with it. He is open about only providing a prelude to the philosophy of the future. If you can see a higher human type defined by the pain of loving, you're pushing his thinking where it needs to go.

With this lyric, this smallest part of a part, I'm focused on the details of love. The quite literally burning passion. The "fat-thigh bones," a feast at other times, now given to the wind. A she-goat whose white hair makes the blood from the slaughter that much more visible. The deed of love is not just the ritual killing or the documenting of it. It is the poetizing. Nietzsche, again: "Love brings the high and concealed characteristics of the lover into the light–what is rare and exceptional in him: to that extent it easily deceives regarding his normality" (§163).

What we see of Sappho here I believe "high," "rare," and "exceptional." Her experience translated into a poem and the poem makes an imprint. You may object that there is nothing particularly notable about this. There are plenty of earworms in the Top 40 we will forget about in a matter of weeks. How do we distinguish the manufactures of a machine meant to make the sale no matter what from the lyrics which birthed love poetry itself? It helps that, at this moment, authenticity and history coincide. But I wouldn't neglect Nietzsche speaking of the "concealed characteristics of the lover" or deception regarding normality. Sappho poses as everyman. Her pride shines on that altar; it is brighter and louder than most. Still, many feel she is normal, just like them. No differences have been exposed. We all fall in love, no?