Literature and Change

This is a response to an article by Tadhg Muller on the island website

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Sometime last century, when I was still a wee bairn, I had ideas about art. Looking back I can laugh at my naive ideas of becoming an author, an artist. Now I can see my career as little more than a spectacular abortion. I could alone bewail my outcast fate, or I could face up to my numerous personal failings, to a heroic lack of discipline, an almost pathological contempt for the editing process, the various bad choices I made. Or I could look back over a life of brutal violence, of drink and drugs, of death and suicide of work and family and love. Sometimes I look back, and I want to cry, sometimes I have to laugh. And then I think, “but above everything don't write unless you have to; if you need money make boots and we will respect you as a competent cobbler; if you write for money your work will show it.”

One of the greatest pleasure that comes with growing older is surveying the history of our lives. The joy of I told you so, the sorrow of I told you so...

Now. Cold wet winter night. Raw and wild. My heart is sad and sore.

Sometimes I stand in front of the bookshelf in the bookstore, and I sigh a sigh of relief at having dodged a bullet. A vast accumulation of books to be judged by covers, a wall of images and colours that captivate and scientifically seduce the eye, and thus the mind. Standing in the stink of the temple marketplace, amid this babble of books, I think of Plato's begging priests and soothsayers who go to rich men's doors and make them believe that they by means of sacrifices and incantations have accumulated a treasure of power from the gods that can expiate and cure with pleasurable festivals any misdeed of a man or his ancestors. And I listen as white-noise muttering gains intensity. Listening to, breathing in, becoming this cacophony of privileged voices and I tilt slightly my head, and half closing my eyes the words appear, certain words form themselves and a song bursts forth. An echo of the Iron Lady herself -- There is NO alternative. And in my reverie I overturn tables. And in my profanity I leave and drag myself through the negro streets looking for an angry fix. Cheap thrills! 48 pills!

This is a large part of the reason why I use poetry as my medium. Partly because I like the ephemeral nature of poetry, better than the novel, poetry allows one to easily diarise our daily struggles for sanity and clarity and my daily readings. Having a family and working, poetry allows me the freedom to create, without the full time effort novels or larger pieces demand. Poetry better than the novel allows one to make rapid changes of tone, mood and subject. And poetry better than non-fiction history allows one the freedom to see things as they could be, for the true is a gaol of what has actually happened. Poetry allows the flights of imagination required for political action. Poetry allows for the building of utopias. And most importantly, poetry, being the most despised and ridiculed of all literature these days keeps me at arms length of any thought of earning a living through art.

"I never mentioned a man but with the view
"Of selling my own works.
"The tip's a good one, as for literature
"It gives no man a sinecure.”

“And no one knows, at sight a masterpiece.
“And give up verse, my boy,
“There's nothing in it.”

So what is to be done? So much!

Not so much a manifesto or a prescription, rather a suggestion. Utopia. No more let us write of dystopia -- we live this daily. Our age demands utopias. Use as a model the sexually free, politically free, Zeus mocking and theoi humiliating cloud city of Pisthetaerus. Or the classless society of De Sade's Tomoe. This island kingdom, was not only sexually free, but promiscuity was mandated. In this imaginary land the king (who was more a figurehead than a ruler) would not allow himself to eat off gold plates while the children the makers eat black bread washed down with bitter tears. Or even the science fiction of Gene Roddenberry, author of the first interracial kiss on American television profaning a time beyond money and property where all needs are met as easily as plucking fruit from swollen trees.

Maybe some practical examples. In the gallery built by Hobart's very own Bruce Wayne, MONA, there is a certain poo machine which is loved and hated in equal measure. The Cloaca. It leaves me cold to be honest, I stand at look and understand, in my own erroneous manner. And I think, how great would this work of art be, if from one end it was fed babies (for it is when we are children that we are our most authentic) and out the other end it pooped chains. For is this not the fate of our children? To be digested and transformed into consumers of shit, to be everywhere enchained shitty gold bond citizens excreted by a reactionary kultur process that puts short term profit above all else.

Last year I went to see a play called Murder. This was a play about, unsurprisingly, murder using the music of Nick Cave. And I sat in the audience and I thought, why not a play called Poverty with maybe the music of (among others) the Gang of Four. This imaginary play could make people think and talk about poverty and the role it plays in our society, and how Capital needs poverty to survive.

How different would have been the arc of the life of Emma Bovary if she had read, really read, Justine (Good Behaviour Well Chastised). Careful reading would allow her to see the brutally honest morality of de Sade. A morality that would have allowed her to understand her betters as they are. Blood sucking vampyres who prey upon the souls of the weak and vulnerable. Who see war and famine as money making ventures. She would have learned to hate her oppressors, rather than idolising them and trying to worm her way into their society. For it is no coincidence that the greatest villains, the greatest murders and thieves are the wealthy and powerful in the novel. For this is as true of our age as it was in the time of the Sun King. Or as The Philosopher wrote “The fact is that the greatest crimes are caused by excess and not by necessity. Men do not become tyrants in order that they may not suffer cold.” As the ideals of the ruling class are the ideals of the age, so we see much written and spoken to convince us that our real enemy is not the wealthy but rather those poorer and more unfortunate than ourselves.

I do not know, I may be right, I may be wrong. I do know, however, that I am write for myself.

You Burn Me

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The tea-rose, tea-gown, etc.
Supplants the mousseline of Cos,
The pianola "replaces"
Sappho's barbitos.
Ezra Pound - Hugh Selwyn Mauberly

Fragment 38:
You burn me.

What are we to make of such a fragment? A fragment with so little information. We know very little about Sappho. We do not even write her name in her dialect. Psappha would be more correct. Even her name is mediated by years of eroding and mutating tradition. All that we accurately know about her life could easily fit into a single tweet.

She was born on the island of Lesbos, but was she a lesbian? Or was she, as the Victorians affirmed, a teacher, the head mistress of a finsishing school? We do not know. A priest in a cult of Adonis? A sacred prostitute at the temple of Aphrodite? How much does it matter? So much of what we think we know is just guesswork based on scattered ashes of the body of her works.

She seems to have been born as early as 630BC, and may have died in 570BC. One of the entries in a Byzantine encyclopaedia, the Suda, dates her to the 42nd Olympiad (612-608BC). Even this simple date is ambiguous,  tantalizing. Was she born in 612 or is this date her floruit, her time of flourishing?

Even straight forward and to our minds basic facts are open to argument. Did she marry and have children? An entry in the Suda suggests she married the wealthy Kerkylas from Andros, but this may be bawdy Attic punning propaganda, as the name could be taken to mean the she married 'Dick Allcock from the island of Man'. Possibly this came from one of the many Athenian comedies which used Sappho as a figure of ridicule. As the political climate in Athens became less tolerant of the noisy, boisterous democracy of the rowers, of the assembly, and the theatre; and as those who had been lampooned turned more and more to the law courts for compensation, the Middle Comedy period arose. In this style of comedy stock characters were used as cover for political critique, until the characters took on a life of their own, and became an end in themselves controlling the poets more than being controlled. Apparently Sappho was one of these characters, sexually promiscuous and often portrayed as a lesbian, and so fiction and biography became intertwined. 

As an aside it is interesting to note that Athens, the cradle of democracy for the modern West, was one of the more sexist communities in Ancient Greece. Women could not own property, and if the husband died the wife was often married off to her uncle. She was described as being 'of the land'. Marry the widow to get the farm. In our modern contract of falsehood Sparta represents a militarised Socialism similar to the collective of the Borg or the unfeeling Cybermen of Doctor Who. In reality compared to Athens Spartan women were accorded greater freedoms. This may have been because of the practical problems caused by the men spending most of their time in the regimental mess. In Laconia the young women exercised naked, as only Spartan women could give birth to Spartan warriors.

In the barbarous eastern frontier, where Sappho was from, women had various rights. This goes a long way to explaining the misunderstandings between Troy and the Achaeans, which led to the long cruel war. In the mind of Paris if Helen wanted to leave her husband she was free to do so, and was also free to take her dowry with her when she left. In the mind of Menalaus Alexander had violated an oath, had committed sacrilege

It is probably too much to assert that this middle comedy characterisation of Sappho as promiscuous and a lesbian was the deciding factor in Pope Gregory ordering the burning of her books. We do not know what was in the nine lost books. But we can assume that the lies generated about Sappho some two centuries after her death and the legend of insatiable sexual hunger that was created around her tempered the views of the Pope. In 1072 the Papacy ordered her books burnt. These perfect songs had survived some 1500 years of natural and man made disasters, the numerous wars and upheavals of the lived history of the Mediterranean. Did not Plato suggest that the comedies of Aristophanes played no vain part in bringing into being the mood of hostility towards Socrates? And that these distortions of the thoughts of Socrates acted upon the minds of the Athenian jurymen. In the Republic Plato suggests banning comics such as Aristophanes. The ones who earn their dinner ridiculing actual persons. For as we know only too well from our daily going about our business that the spreading of falsehood and rumour in the public culture takes on a life of it's own and that these lies confront us as an alien force. If, as is said in the old proverb, ‘a lie will go round the world while truth is pulling its boots on’ how many times will the lie circle our networked globe? Will it race round the world even to the extent that, like Superman flying so fast and so often around the world, time stops and then moves backwards. And so the electron fast lie is able to rewrite history, our shared artificial narrative.

Was Sappho a lesbian, or was she married? Again the poems seem to point to both of these possibilities. Of course one can be married and have children and at the same time be a lesbian. They are not mutually
exclusive. Indeed we all have different modes of existing at different times of our lives. As it seems fairly certain that she was an aristocrat, it could be that she entered into an arranged marriage. Nobles have had arranged marriages for as long as they have wanted power.

One poem refers to Cleis, her 'kala pais', but does this mean beautiful daughter, or beautiful slave? The Greeks used the word pais to mean child. In the same way that rednecks in southern states of America would call black men boy, pais can also mean slave. This idea of the slave as childlike can be seen in French which still uses Garcon to mean boy, servant or even waiter. Obviously the language of domination. Most commentators seem to agree that it was her daughter, and I am not in a position to argue, but after almost 3000 years of time, writing as she did in an obscure dialect, how can we be sure what we know.

We can be pretty sure that she had to flee Lesbos and spent some time in Sicily, then a Greek colony. We know this as Cicero tells us a statue was erected in her honour in Syracuse. She may have been exiled for political activity, or the activity of her family. We do know she came back to Lesbos.

The one thing that we do know, and the only thing I feel we can truly focus on, is the fact that she was greatly admired as a poet. We know that she invented new forms of metre, notably the aptly named Sapphic stanza. Three lines of eleven syllables, with a fourth line of only five syllables. The Greeks, like the Latins based a line of poetry on alternating vowel sounds; not as in English poetry on stresses. In the following model:
- is a short vowel sound,
u is a long vowel,
x means the author could use either long of short.
The line would look like this:

- x -  x  - u u -  u - -  

An example in English by Alan Ginsberg

    Red cheeked boyfriends tenderly kiss me sweet mouthed
    under Boulder coverlets winter springtime
    hug me naked laughing & telling girl friends
        gossip til autumn


We also know that her poems were meant to be sung, accompanied by the lyre. The barbitos that Pound mentioned in our opening quote. Plato, among others, spoke of her as the tenth muse. Many poets including the Roman Ovid and Catullus greatly admired her work, even if they had muddle headed views about the woman herself. In another confusion of history we do not know if Sappho invented the plectrum, what we would call the pick for playing the lyre or if she invented the pectis, another type of stringed instrument. Both, neither? The truth does not really matter. For these legends show the esteem the ancients felt for her as a lyric poet. If alive today would Sappho be an example of what we would call a singer songwriter?

How much can we deduce of her character from the poems that have come down to us? I do not think we can place too much value on the remaining  fragments in giving us a clear answer. Often the poet will write a work from a specific point of view, will try on different voices and personas, which may or may not agree with the inner-held views and feelings of the maker. This is even more true in any analysis of Sappho, as we have many fragments but only a few completed poems. I do not think we can view her poetry as confessional in the same way that we can with the works of Sylvia Plath. As we can be no more that transitory confused visitors into her world, obscured as it is, as we are, by the fog and shadows of the past. We can only admire her work. We must refrain from using as a reinforcing mortar our bias and feelings in an attempt to support and add form to the crumbling walls of her often very sparse words.

The Middle Comedy Athenian playwrights, Victor Frankenstein like tried to reanimate Sappho, but with no understanding of electricity it seems they were left with the frail expedient of rubbing amber over her dried bones. Our modern artists attempt to energise Sappho. As so little is known, Sappho is one of those compelling figures of history who seem to work like a magnet on the razor sharp minds of our poets. Over the generations she has been stripped of her actuality. The dry brittle turning into dust bones of Sappho have been dug up and fashioned into a type of skeleton for both ancient and modern critics to try to reanimate. Attempts have been made by these thinkers of thoughts to bring her back to life in their own zombie image. Cutting and pasting great slabs of fleshy meat lies and transplanting the bloody vital organs of ideological contradiction; emotional, political and psycho-sexual.

As we have no real basis for raising Sappho from the dead, it is my feeling that we should let the poems stand, as best we can, on their own and admire their diamond sharp neatness.

Maybe she was 'looking small and dark, and exactly like a nightingale with misshapen wings enfolding a tiny body' as a scholiast to Lucian said, or maybe she was violet-haired and honey smiling, as a contemporary said.

Did she threw herself into the sea from the cliff of Leukates for love of Phaon of Mytilene, as some attest? Did she die at home in her bed, surrounded by loved ones and family?

So little actual knowledge so much ink spilled.

Sadly the ravages of time, the hostility of those who opposed paganism, the hostility of generations of misogynists, have left us only torn faint smouldering embers dug from out long buried garbage heaps. These embers are still bright, and are still able to burn under the skin of the reader after over 2500 years.

I have translated, in no particular order, some bits and pieces below. I have not even tried to reproduce the metre of her work, as the gap between modern English and the obscure inflected Aeolian tonal dialect is too great for us to safely jump over.

Fragment 16 - Is this a critique of Homer's hymn to violence?

Some they say the prancing cavalry
Others an army with banners
Still others the ships under sail
Are the most beautiful
Upon this black dismal earth.

But I say it is the loved one...

Fragment 31 - Something is happening here. This piece is full of sexual tension and energy. Is she lusting after the man or the woman? Is she behind the bushes spying on young lovers and bringing herself to orgasm. It seems that way to me. As green as grass could also mean as fresh as grass. Which makes me wonder; could Sappho be thought of as an Ancient Madonna?
Like a virgin? This fragment falls apart at the end, and we are not sure if the last line is meant for this poem.

He appears to me, this man,
As lucky as the gods. The one
Sitting cheek to cheek close to you.
You sweetly speak, he answers, obeys.

And your laughter excites desire.
In my breast my heart quivers.
The merest glance on you
And my voice fails.
My words break into pieces.
Fire burns under my delicate skin.
My eyes blind, a roaring fills my ears.

And sweat pours down, a trembling
Takes hold of me, as green as grass
I am. And a little death appears to me. 

But all can be dared.

Fragment 36, - in love in life, in all things this should be our motto.

I yearn after, I strive for...

Fragment 38 - simple, opens the door to the room of many questions.

optais ammi.
You burn me.

Fragment 47 - universal and timeless, who of us has not felt this?

As the winds shakes and bends the mountain oaks,
So love has disturbed my purpose...

Fragment 52 - simple, clear, almost Zen like. Also a fine example of the very literal style of the Ancient Greeks noted by Robert Browning.

The moon is setting
The Pleiades as well.
In the middle of the night
The hours pass.
Alone I sleep.

Fragment 54 - no context here, have no idea what she meant, but it
sounds nice. I think it could be Adonis again.

Down out of heaven he came,
All dressed in purple.

Fragment 82 - the Kleis fragment mentioned above

I have a lovely daughter
Formed like golden flowers.
Beloved Kleis.
Not the wealth of Lydia
Nor lovely...


Fragment 138 - A lovely image, note that Sappho uses the masculine
form of my love, filos, as opposed to feminine file.

Stand before me love, face to face
Let your beauty pour into my eyes

Fragment 140 - Adonis, the beloved of Aphrodite was a complex
character in Greek mythology. When the spring rains come and the snow
melts the rivers of Lebanon run red (with the rusty red earth) and the
ancients used to say that this was the blood of the dieing Adonis. The
cult of Adonis seems to have been secret women's business, and during
his yearly festival women would plant seeds in a small thin bowl of
dirt, the plants would grown quickly, and as quickly they would die
off. Adonis is one of the models of Frazer's ideal of the dieing
God. I tried to capture the alliteration of this verse. Kuthera being
another name for Aphrodite.

He is dieing, O Kuthera,
Your darling Adonis
What is to be done?
Beat your breasts daughters,
Rend your dresses.


If I was to reanimate Sappho I would imagine her running her own symposium. Vast drinking and dinner parties with gorgeous young things as sharp as they were beautiful lounging languid on pillows stuffed with rose flowers, and hurling copper eyed ladles across the room, trying to make the most satisfying clatter as the ladle hit the wine jug. A delicate wine splatter following. The room would be abuzz with conversation and bon mots and perfumes and flirtations and the sound of the lyre would announce a new song from the Divine hostess Psappha of Mytilene.

Dream Factory Manifesto

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How can we speak of a dream factory?

Socialism?

Capitalism?

Classless Society?

What are our dreams? A better life, a life of co-operation, of working together.

What is a factory? A place to work, where things are made. From Blombos Cave to the Apple plants in the Special Economic Zones of the People's Republic of China, we come together to make things. Man woman young old black white. Work is what unites us, the coming together to work. Work must become play.

Even deeper work ((think elastically) and the complex of changes (social and physiologically) and feedbacks involved) created us.

Does work create language? Have women always done the bulk of the work? Did women create language?

Factory from the Latin factor. a maker, a doer, performer, perpetrator, one who strikes the ball.

We need to turn away from the dystopian narrative. We need to create utopias - we can write of utopia and mock the plutocrats.

Thomas Moore brought the word Utopia into being. The idea is old, older than the name, think of the utopian farces of Aristophones. In Cloud Cuckoo Land, Pisthetaerus chases away the poet, the town planner, the inspector, the oracle peddler, the law mason.

Pisthetaerus becomes like a God.

Utopia; what is the meaning? It could be outopia - no place, or it could be eutopia, good place. Does it matter? Moore gives us only utopia, teasing us or misunderstanding? Culture arises equally from the fact of not remembering the quote correctly as it does the note perfect recital.

Tales and myths, or so I am told, are powerful emotional tools that pass culture and morality down the ages. Let us not pass down the morality of our parents, of the police man, or an edginess that actually dulls.

Reject bourgeois concepts of conflict in literature! Let us build to our own climaxes!

I am not naive, but I seek to become naive.

Johnny Rotten sang "There is no future", it was implied but not understood, unless you make it yourself.

He also sang, "Your future dream is a shopping scheme." Let us write, let us spew, let us draw, let us extrude, sing, scream, paint, cry, act, shout, perform, build our dreams. For ourselves.

No more tales of junkie lusers - realistic and gritty as they may be, they only reinforce the power of Kapital over us, they only reinforce our alienation.

Reject the cult of violence and death. we are, our children are fed a steady diet of death, let us say enuf. Choose (as George Michael quaintly said) Life. Real active live work, as opposed to the concentration of dead labour.

Work going back the generations - something done, deed, action - weorc, worc, werkan, werk, verk, warc, werah, werk, gawaurki, vareza, ergon, orgia, gorc, verziu, vargas, vragu, waurkjan, wyrcan, wrikan, wrecan, yrka - and PIE *werg-. Also an urge, THE HUMAN URGE.

Do not be wishy-washy.

If you want to be cynical, do it properly, give up all wealth and possessions, live in a wine cask, do not eat meat, and see the knife as your friendly doctor.

If you wish to be a skeptic, again do it properly, doubt all things, even your own thoughts and experiences. Walk with friends who will save you from the cliff.

To create to make to do to act to play to dream. To struggle to win.

Be realistic, the graffito spoke to me, demand the impossible. The Dream Factory. The space where we build our dreams. A place of work and struggle.

A lifetime of compulsion. A dream of play. Two or three days a week at most, maybe a week in every six. Child care at the work place, schools serving breakfast and lunch, helpful police men and women dressed in natty grey uniforms with pink piping, passing out condoms, and directions to lost tourists, lovely and unarmed.

Philosophy has only interpreted the world, the point is to change it. Is not art a mode of philosophy? Is not art a love of wisdom, a way of interacting with the world. The point of art is to change the world.

Dantesque Hades

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An amusing Dantesque view of Hades, from the reactionary and
maculate Aristophanes. This piece is from The Frogs. Here Herakles is
describing what he saw in Hades, the suffering of those who have
violated the law. The reference to Morsimus being a fellow poet and an 'insipid'
playwright that Aristophanes did not have much respect for,
describing him with a flurry of insults in another play (Peace, if I
remember correctly) as having arm pits that stank like a he-goat.

I think the moral here is do not beat your parents and treat fairly your
rentboys.

Then comes the Earth moist
With much filth everflowing.
In this sewer they lie down.

Anyone
Who abused guests,
Or those who were
Roused by tender boys
And filched the small
Coin payment,
Or those who beat their Mothers,
Or smashed their Father's jaw,
Or swore falsely the river Styx,
Or those who copied out
A speech by Morsimus.

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image from http://imoralist.blogspot.com.au/2009/03/self-censorship-from-warhol-to-kylix-to.htmlhttp://kylieeastley.blogspot.com.au/