Sappho, 2022

In my pinhole photos, the ivy clad university looks dependable, and decent. It’s how I thought of such institutions once, before my partner filed - and won - a sexual misconduct case against a prominent professor.

During the year-long inquiry scores of other victims got in touch. They confided details of their own abuse at the hands of professors worldwide.

I heard their truths. It became clear that corrupt academics, and those influenced or broken by their actions, were not an unusual phenomenon, and that their joint influences reached deep into our everyday lives.

It’s not just handsy professors that are the problem. It’s the students who’ve learnt from them, who go on to become politicians, bankers, upper management, and the like. 

After due process the professor in question was found guilty and stripped of emeritus status. Then began the dismantling of their professional work. For how could anybody trust anything a warped mind produces? If such professors believe it ok to betray their students - with sexual assault, coercion, and blackmail being common issues - then we’d be foolish to trust them at all, right?

I believe so, yes.

This experience, and the knowledge it offered, altered much for me. For starters, in the creation of my art I try to be far more discerning. I used to be happy to feature in any shop window, and produce with selfish and unambitious intention. Now part of my creation process are questions like, what am I expecting others to pay attention to with my output, how am I guiding them to think about it, and whom am I dealing with in the media and gallery system?

During my partner’s case I learnt that this one university - thought by many to be North America’s finest - had 50 lawyers working full time on serious complaints about professors. Multiply the implications of this number by the number of universities in the world, and think rationally about the matter, and inevitably another question arises; if a large number of the professional people offering us information - now and in the past - are morally corrupt, and we’ve little chance of working out who they are, how do we believe anything we’re told?

Can we accept any historical or scientific theory, for example, once we understand it was quite possibly created by a power and sex motivated academic, or their repressed Victorian ancestors?

Of course not. But such thinking is unstable ground and from here we can descend into QAnon or any amount of other conspiracy theories that lead us straight into the arms of the patriarchy.

I decided to move forward with nuance and purpose. Many things are too big for me to address, and I leave them aside for now. When I can though I take it on, for my own interest, to indicate that I see the corruption game and call it out, and in an effort to change the world for the better.

One of the subjects I’ve begun with has been Sappho, because she seems an obvious example of history being corrupted by perverted academics, and because I’ve an interest in her art.

The main ‘facts’ we know about Sappho were recorded over a thousand years after her death. Of these, the most repeated is that she was a lesbian poet who wrote of her desire for women from an ego centred perspective.

I survey available information. It took a few days but here’s a summary.

1/ We know no reliable facts about Sappho. None. Everything we say is a guess.

2/ In ancient Greece the word ‘lesbian’ is said to have been slang for women who were great at fellatio. Calling someone a ‘lesbian’ was a patriarchal slur, a tactic to reduce the person to a sexual act. Sappho wasn’t a sensitive, great poet, her critics\rivals may have been smirking, just pretty good at blow jobs.

3/ The concept of humans being straight, gay, or anything else wasn’t even considered when Sappho was alive. Reproductive sex has always existed, but sexuality? People were keen to divide themselves according to class and nationality back then, yes, but sexual preferences beyond those that enforced social status? There’s no evidence for that. So we might ponder, if sexuality didn’t exist in her time, what other boundaries might also not have existed back then? The boundaries between self and nature?

You might say I find what I want to find. A valid comment, which you could attribute to most these days. And then we must ask, if most is just opinion, then where do we want the solid ground to be? What would we want our societies to believe? It gets interesting then, when we discuss personal intentions; even more so if we add the necessity of accepting responsibility for our words.

Perhaps the strongest reason to ignore talk of sexual desire in Sappho’s poems appears when I approached her work afresh and actually read her words.

I studied a copy of ‘If Not, Winter…’, Anne Carson’s translation of the poems of Sappho. Her translation offers only what Sappho actually wrote, there are no filler words at all. And where we have a line with 1 word and 5 illegible words, Anne only offers the 1 word we’re certain of.

Although scholars have many ways to describe Sappho’s style I’d suggest it's that of a sensitive person who loved life and was able to feel the effect of the evening flowers. She mentions nature just as much as she mentions individuality-based love. You could make a strong case for her being a nature poet as much as anything else.

I decide to do that. I take Sappho’s words and add to them, as academics have done before me. Only, I project a oneness with nature onto her work, and a knowledge of the wrongs mankind inflicts upon our world, rather than individual sexual desire. Centuries before her people had spoken about deforestation and climate change (read Gilgamesh), and shortly after her life Plato was speaking against the devastation caused by logging around the city of Athens, so it’s a fair guess that Sappho would've been aware of the destruction that the patriarchy creates.

My results might be historically inaccurate, but if you’re going to get it wrong it’s perhaps better to promote a love of nature whilst doing so, rather than white male academic sexual fantasies? Well, that’s my view, and choice, anyhow.

Sappho’s surviving words are in italics. All others are mine. I sat in nature to compose them, and was influenced by what was happening around me. A hawk hunting, birds calling, wind blowing. The line breaks are courtesy of Anne Carson. 

 

Fragment #4

Chipmunk’s trembling heart

Hawk blocks the sun absolutely

Soothing ‘Come come, I can

Offer completion.

No different than it would be for me

Were it your chance to shine in answer

To reincarnation’s call, I trust. You’d see your face

In mine, my temporary survival in your passing,

Your fate in mine’. And having been caressed

By lilac scented wings, now rest.

Fragment #18

To tell of home forget your

Tongue and brush, to meet your face in all and return

To tell tales is impossible. Instead create signposts.

And for a man

Greater still the challenge, than for woman or child

Fragment #24c

Under floorboards, in woodpiles,

Among their discarded wisdoms, we live

hiding our truths in

The opposite

Of Sapien genetic disorders

Daring

To hold fast

hoping peasants manage

To stop the Kings wars

Fragment #78

It wasn’t a winter to linger in

Wind flushed squares, no parties nor

Laughter, free song or stolen kisses, desire

Was dormant; but all at once

The evening flowers blossom

And with it desire

Once again, in all I took delight

Fragment #63

Dream of black birds, and when awake shout to sparrows

You come roaming and when sleep returns I promise to dream you, too!

Sweet god, terribly from pain you suffer, the priests say, so we’re able

To hold the strength separate from the understanding; your sacrifice makes war possible

But I expect not to share your gifts with any soul, I’ll ask

Nothing of the blessed ones, especially not that they receive invite to our cyclical traumas

For I would not be like this to the pure, they’re worth more than to be our

Toys, or characters in our myths, factories for our needs

But it may happen to me that I bow to you,

All of us are weak, except Circe

Fragment #60

You’re enamoured by his territory, his colour, having encountered

Him amongst marshy reeds you see he’s got strength, food and shelter that he wants

To share, or…trade. But stay. Lets accomplish the plan

The nest, the eggs, the brood. Ok, you tweet. Stay. Maybe, you tweet. Stay! I call out

I’ve got bright enough feathers! Return to the heart at once

Remember all that you wish to win

Use it as fuel to face loud lust, to fight yourself for me

Don’t be driven by the noise, don’t be by the wanton one persuaded

I could flit from branch to branch too! I could, but yes you know well

I won’t, I listen to the quiet one too much for that. Yet, I may… just look

At her feathers, her colours, such fertility. Our plan? Do remind me…

Fragment 29a

Deep song

Candles twinkle through glass, windless snowfall

Deep sound

The silence of the midday portal