Joe Wenderothexcerpt from Withstanding Seizure
Sappho Seizure Translated from the Greek by Willis Barnstone To me he seems like a god as he sits facing you and hears you near as you speak softly and laugh in a sweet echo that jolts the heart in my ribs. For now as I look at you my voice is empty and can say nothing as my tongue cracks and slender fire is quick under my skin. My eyes are dead to light, my ears pound, and sweat pours over me. I convulse, greener than grass, and feel my mind slip as I go close to death, yet, being poor, must suffer everything.It is not easy to stand with a world as convulsive as this one. It is difficult. This world, in truth, is a sea--it heaves and bursts and pulls itself apart. And we are not above this world except in pretend. It is not easy to stand here, as here--and yet it is perhaps just as difficult not to stand here. That is, even if our whole goal is to stand apart from the convulsive world, even as we seek with all our might to establish our "selves" upon another firmer ground, the sea comes over us. Of course there are "success" stories--there are those who seem to stand, for a time, upon another firmer ground. While it is true that this other firmer ground is manifest materially (and so is always dependent upon the maintenance of discreet financial and social systems), this other firmer ground is always first and foremost an imaginary ground, and for it to be maintained, one must keep in place a specific kind of imaginary practice. This practice might be described as a safeguarding of the self against knowledge. The development of such a practice seems inevitable and hardly monstrous, so long as it remains humble enough to confess its consistent failure. That is, the instinct to allow for truth, to connect with the world as it truly stands, convulsing, is as inevitable, or as pressing, as the instinct to maintain a firm ground. For me, the struggle to reconcile and accommodate these seemingly contradictory instincts is the fundamental human struggle; it is the struggle to evolve the imagining of a firm ground that is neither rigid nor naive--a firm ground that is not set against, and that can withstand, the convulsions that make it live and die, appear and disappear.
Poetic speech is unique in its power to manifest such a ground--a ground which, while it is in some sense firm, nevertheless understands its stability as but a necessary delusion. In poetic speech, the firmness of imaginary ground is a firmness already subtly possessed of the convulsion(s) of the real (the unimaginable); the horizon that poetic speech conjures up nurtures that borderÑthat inherently compromised space wherein it is impossible to see exactly where oblivion begins and order ends and vice-versa. Indeed, if poetic speech is to be reckoned as powerful, it is because of this possession: because it has found a way of capturing (resonating with) the force of the impending unimaginable, such that the imaginary ground--the speaker herself--is implied as a corresponding power, at least to the extent that she is able to withstand, even capture, the convulsion that informs and sustains the limits of her ownmost project. The poet is powerful, in short, because she lives in the shadow of that horizon, that border, and knows it will cross over her just as she crosses over it.
Sappho's poem Seizure makes us think more carefully about the way in which the poet's experience is convulsive. To "convulse" is to show evidence of inward disruption; it is to be penetrated by something that one cannot abide but at the same time cannot reject. When one convulses, one's unity is shaken and made awkwardly apparent . . . but it is not dissolved; one remains in some sense together, as one body/person, even as that body/person trembles with the secret disruption that has caused it to lose its expectable power, the power to remain upon its way. There is a phrase I have seen in Homer that is generally translated as "loosens his limbs." It is used to describe death in battle; when a warrior is speared, for instance, it is said that he has had his limbs loosed. The phrase speaks to the moment of losing one's power, one's grasp; the warrior is still conscious in this moment, but his power, his hold on his fate, has been disrupted. I thought it was curious, then, when I saw the phrase in Sappho, in the first stanza of the poem To Atthis:
Love--bittersweet, irrepressible--Here, the convulsion caused by "love" is compared with the moment wherein a warrior is felled by a mortal blow. What are we to make of this comparison? Is this simply a weak analogy, a sentimental exaggeration? Clearly, the blow that love delivers is not the blow that war delivers. What is to stop us from leaping to the conclusion that this is a weak analogy? For Sappho, the focus is not the blow itself, but the convulsion--the seizure, the trembling--that the blow causes. Love's "weapon" is never specified--the analogy never extends in that direction but instead focuses entirely upon the resulting state of the blow. Her "love" has caused her to be filled up with something that she cannot abide yet cannot reject, and here is where the analogy transcends its seeming sentimentality. Rather than being a trite exaggeration of emotional pain, the analogy is a subtly executed glimpse of the physical/mental convulsion that is at once the foundation and the destiny (the end and the beginning) of imagination. This glimpse implies that we continually, "irrepressibly," suffer blows to our grasp of where we are and so continually lose control of our way through the world. Just as a felled warrior, in his final moment, looks out across a chasm at the scene he has suddenly been divorced from, so, too, a lover gazes, struck by the voice or the face of the one she loves and cannot possess, reeling in the chasm that holds the two apart.
loosens my limbs and I tremble.
Joe Wenderoth is the author of Disfortune (1995), It Is If I Speak (2000), and Letters to Wendy's (2001). He teaches at Southwest State University in Marshall, Minnesota. This essay appears in My Business Is Circumference, edited by Stephen Berg (Paul Dry Books, 2001).
