Cutting

A recent diatribe

ὦ κοινὸν αὐτάδελφον Ἰσμήνης κάρα

Ō koinon autadelphon Ismēnēs kara’

‘O common my-own-sibling’s head of Ismēnē’

That approaches to what Antigone says to Ismene her sister in the first line of Antigone, the play, though the Greek is not translatable; ‘koinon’ having both a sharper political and familial connotation than ‘common’ and ‘autadelphon’ having no equivalent in rarity and jewelled ambiguity - ‘my very sibling’, ‘my own sibling’, ‘my sibling herself’. This language cleaves as it joins, it is skilled in making incisions. The whole speech is rapturous, though it is a cold rapture, of the dual form of verbs and nouns, how that doubleness, two sisters, two brothers, is made phantasmagorically into one, wrenched back into its undefeated unity, born of incest.

The opening of Sappho 1 is:

ποικιλόθρον’ ἀθανάτ’ Ἀφρόδιτα

poikilothron’ athanat’ Aphrodita

Deathless Aphrodite of the many-coloured throne.

Or possibly ποικίλοφροιν’, of the many-coloured mind, which would be elegant. This poetry is as a black jet out of Homer, not created but always discovered in the mind, a permanent source of - its own power - only needing to be awakened on rereading. Then this too is the shock of recognition, with the slip-slapping ποικιλόθρον’, it lulls against ἀθανάτ‘, a change of sense, of semantic modality (symbolist sensuousness and blunt abstraction) no less flamboyant than a change of vowels. One wants this recognition, in Sappho one can always go further, find that your supplication may be redoubled, find new ways desire and the performance or protestation of desire may come to be the same thing. She speaks of Aphrodita as if the world was new-made, but she speaks to her for something she has already asked many times, satisfaction of her desires.

There is not much like the cutting in the verse of Greek tragedy. I know Greek extremely badly, but I now understand it better than when I took lessons in it and sat exams - understand its potentiality now I have read the tragedians. Its particular flexibilities can be made to stand in line, its sense of limitless background become merely the foil to some vast personal project of the tragic character, some rage towards the close. That is one pole to which all Greek, must implicitly respond. To watch how easily they seem to do it is to me a marvellous shock, as if the language itself were asking why, out of all human possibilities, this character, this actor, had arrived at this one.

How to prevent the seduction of such a writing - that is certainly what it must come to. You could not fail to think, reading that first line or speech of Antigone’s, that everything to come unfolds out of it like flat-pack furniture, there is an eerie smoothness to it all. Yet it is not true, knowing the endless discontinuity of history, knowing that though people are betrayed by their own intentions, it is the most incidental aspects of those intentions that undo them, or what structures them and which they see no reason to make note of until they realise - ‘men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please’, these and similar clichés could be adduced. One has to just repeat that it is not true and hope that some alternative sense of what drama, and so (as Aristotle reminds us) action might be, will come out of this denial.

Maybe this is the serious problem. A confusion over drama is a confusion over action, and I am not confused enough over action. A tedious desire for the continuation of my mental existence has tended to destroy competing possibilities, to prevent the importance of decisions showing itself. And beyond that to remind myself how good I am at cutting and its less discriminate relatives, at crushing, at blasting. Certainly I can do it to other people and do occasionally. I know how to seem clever, aloof and thus to intimidate, without appearing to have done so too overtly, and I use this power without scruple. It keeps one at a nice distance. This is certainly no confession; it is a necessity. Everyone needs a way to indicate where they leave the conversation, where the grace one extends to others, except occasionally those closest to us, ends. The difficulty comes in turning them on oneself, these bullying tactics. Then I ransack my virtuosity and suggest politely that its continual leaping after textual and conceptual adventure is nothing more than the most insignificant game between mental nobodies, the wrestling of ghost-puppets; that nothing comes out substantive, weighed down with honours that are marks of the hard labour of getting it. I am pitiless towards my skill with words and thoughts, a correlate of my arrogance over it is not necessary to say, since it will be assumed anyway.

Cutting, I wish it were gone. This history of substance is enough to make one sound like a cultic Derridarian. Nevertheless it is horrible to think of all this drama of such insistent joints, this wretched non-splitting in splitting, one could wish for the sensual quiet of Sappho. If there were a drama which started from her that would be something; erase all the muck otherwise, begin with these songs. Otherwise the drama’s progression will spit me out.