The Meaning-full-ness of Fragments
A short “thought for the day” offered to the Cambridge Unitarian Church as part of the Sunday Service of Mindful Meditation
(Click on this link to hear a recorded version of the following piece)
—o0o—
We are clearly living in a time of significant social, political, religious, and cultural fragmentation. Many things we once relied upon are, quite literally, falling apart. Inevitably, this is disorientating and, at times, frightening. And whilst I cannot, single-handedly remove all your fears and concerns about this, I can at least remind you that fragmentation is not inherently negative. What matters most is our response: whether we let the fragments lie as rubble, or gather them into new patterns of meaning. The point is: fragmentation can be embraced and worked with creatively.
To illustrate this, consider an example that can be connected to Valentine’s Day. Although it began as a Christian feast day honouring a martyr named Valentine, it has evolved into a global celebration of love, and for me, one of the poets I most strongly associate with love is the Greek poet Sappho (c. 630 BCE – c. 570 BCE). In antiquity, she was regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets—Plato even called her the “Tenth Muse”—and I speak of her today because her work tells a fascinating story of fragmentation. First, let’s hear one of her love poems, Fragment 22, in two translations: the first is by Anne Carson, and the second is by Willis Barnstone.Fragment 22 (trans. Anne Carson)
]
]work
]face
]
]
if not, winter
]no pain
]
]I bid you sing
of Gongyla, Abanthis, taking up
your lyre as (now again) longing
floats around you,
you beauty. For her dress when you saw it
stirred you. And I rejoice.
In fact she herself once blamed me
Kyprogeneia
because I prayed
this word:
I want
Fragment 22 (trans. Willis Barnstone)
A deed
your lovely face
if not, winter
and no pain
I bid you, Abanthis,
take up the lyre
and sing of Gongyla as again desire
floats around you
the beautiful. When you saw her dress
it excited you. I’m happy.
The Kypros-born once
blamed me
for praying
this word:
I want
Very little is known of Sappho’s life, but her poetry was admired throughout antiquity. Alas, like so many ancient authors, nearly all her work has been lost. Of the five hundred poems she wrote, only one complete poem and about two thousand lines survive as intelligible fragments.
A few fragments survived in Greece, but in 1879, a wealth of material was discovered in the Egyptian oasis of Faiyum. In Egypt, Sappho’s poetry was written on papyri, which were also used to create the papier-mâché for wrapping mummies. When archaeologists unwrapped these mummies, they discovered that Sappho’s poetry had provided some of the raw material. As Willis Barnstone notes, by cutting the papyri into thin strips:
“The mummy makers of Egypt transformed much of Sappho into columns of words, syllables, or single letters, and so made her poems look, at least typographically, like Apollinaire’s or e. e. cummings’ shaped poems. The miserable state of many of the texts has produced surprising qualities. So many words and phrases are elliptically connected in a montage structure that chance destruction has delivered pieces of strophes that breathe experimental verse. Her time-scissored work is not quite language poetry, but a more joyful cousin of the eternal avant-garde, which is always and ever new. So Sappho is ancient and, for a hundred reasons, modern” (Sweetbitter Love by Sappho, trans. Willis Barnstone, Shambhala, 2006, p. xxix).
So, can the poems of a great poet still be considered great when they are so fragmented? I believe the answer is “Yes”. This is because fragmentation has helped her texts become for us “differently great”—great, that is, in a different register from the greatness found in their original form. While a complete great poem is obviously magnificent, a fragment of a great poem can be, let’s call it “magnetic”; it pulls in the reader to participate in the making of new meaning and new poems.
This aligns with the contemporary philosopher Iain Thomson’s view that:
“. . . what makes the great texts ‘great’ is not that they continually offer the same ‘eternal truths’... but, rather, that they remain deep enough—meaning-full enough—to continue to generate new readings, even revolutionary re-readings which radically reorient the sense of the work that previously guided us” (Figure/Ground Interview).
The renewed greatness of Sappho’s texts depends not on their original completeness, but on their present, magnetic, incomplete nature. Their “meaning-full-ness” is made possible by a creative, material reality in which everything is always-already in motion: dissolving into fragments, then building them up again into new forms.
Human love and life—in fact, all love and life—also moves this way. We can never completely know ourselves or others because we, too, are composed of shifting, contingent fragments of memory, constantly being woven and rewoven into new orientations. We are not so much ‘be-ings’ as ‘be-comings’.
The metaphysical point is simple: the process of life, “the Great Life of free and unobstructed creative evolution” [自由で無碍な創造的進化の大生命] (Imaoka Shin’ichirō in, “The Position of a Free-Religious Person”, 1951), relies on movement, which always necessitates fragmentation. Without it, change cannot occur. Where fragmentation and movement are absent, there is no life and—to recall Valentine’s Day—no real human love.
So, when everything around us is, or certainly feels like it is, fragmenting, remember that this process is necessary for new life to emerge from out of its old forms. It seems to me that one of our spiritual tasks in these times is, therefore, not to despair at the fragmentation, but as Jesus reminded his disciples while feeding the five thousand, lovingly to “Gather up the fragments left over, so that nothing is lost” (John 6:12).
Jesus’ teaching, and Sappho’s fragments, remind us that, from the pieces, we can always-already be creating new, sustaining, and sometimes better, ways of being and loving together.
—o0o—
POSTSCRIPT
“In conclusion, I would like to stress that, although perhaps not intended for classical scholars, Carson’s translations are generally reliable and most elegant. Compared to Mary Barnard’s celebrated, but overly poeticized and ‘reconstructive’, renderings, or David Campbell’s literal and accurate translations, Anne Carson’s “If Not, Winter” stands out as a major attempt at recapturing the polysemic state of Sappho’s fragments, as well as the echo of their original language. It is perhaps the most significant recent contribution to the long tradition of ‘translations’ (in the broadest sense) of Sappho in Europe and the United States.”
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