Poetry: not as we know it.

"To One Who Loved Not Poetry"
Thou liest dead, and there will be no memory left behind
Of thee or thine in all the earth, for never didst thou bind
The roses of Pierian streams upon thy brow; thy doom
Is now to flit with unknown ghosts in cold and nameless gloom.

(Sappho, translated by Edwin Arnold, 1893)

I love poetry, but I've never been particularly good at writing or explicating about it. What draws me to it is the sharpness of its brevity and the peculiar disconnect it creates between the living world and itself. I've jumped back a few hundred centuries to the Greeks again-- the reason for this is simple, I don't want to write about Dante until I can do him full justice. The Inferno will come. But here is Sappho-- who is a literary vixen in her own right--and its a tough task to do her justice too.

This is a particularly relevant poem though, for it attempts to encapsulate the meaning of poetry to not just the human soul but also to human existence. But I don't think "poetry" here and in Sappho's mind is suggestive of simple verse. And this may be a very simple interpretation and a completely pointless post, but I want to talk about this idea of living poetry, and of binding roses from Pierian streams upon our brows. In other words, why do we read literary works that suggest something beyond the ordinary to us-- in the case of this blog, why does each one of these books call out to me, and so many of my friends, begging for a rereading but also asking from us to immortalize them in the lives that we lead?

Here's slightly different aspect of death: this is the fear that death will scratch the memory of a being from this earth, damning him to an eternal existence with the unknowns, or what I read to be as more like-mindeds. In a sense, the death of a figure who shuns a moderate version of Quixote's life is a figure who shuns the possibilities told to him by his ancestors. It's interesting that I have this thought because earlier I was playing around with the prologue of the Arabian Nights, where the crucial suggestion is that the past is indeed a place from which to gain knowledge and seek admonition. Here, the literary past in particular is a place through which to somehow evade death's darkest punishment: erasure.

If what we fear most about death or distance or disappearance from the lives of others is the erasure of our being's presence and the memories we sought to create in our lifetime, I wonder then, whether Sappho's solution is the antidote? When we intoxicate, decorate, and even consecrate ourselves, are we seeking to make an eternal memory? I guess what I'm struggling with here is how do we make a memory so powerful that even in our death, it continues to live on? Sappho had the Pierian stream, its intoxicating water and its lush roses to sate her desire with-- in this world, are our facebook pages, our blogs, our emails, our diaries, our academic essays a way of immortal preservation? Or is it our deeds, our immense love for others, our friendships, our relationships, our families that preserve us? Is it in the latter that we must seek Pierian roses or the former?

I wonder too, if what Sappho suggests is yet another concept of hell. Fire and brimstone over and over again, can it just be that hell is a place where all we encounter is sameness, where each person has committed the sin of being unexceptional, or of living a life in which a lack of imagination and an absence of empathy informed his ill-deeds? Heaven, by this standard, would be a place where those who learnt and taught the virtues of possbility and perseverance landed up. And in a sense, it's true I think-- Heaven is a place of eternal possibility, or at least that's what they told me when I was a kid. I remember planning to eat a couple of hundred burgers and lots and lots of apple-pie when I finally got there.