"of all stars the most beautiful"

From Sappho fragment 24a, translated by Anne Carson in If Not, Winter (2002)

] you will remember
] for we in our youth
    did these things


yes many and beautiful things
]
]
   ]

Reading those lines, I couldn't help but think of Roberto Bolano and the herculean work of preservation and regeneration he accomplished in The Savage Detectives, reviving and remaking a long-lost culture of poetry and bohemianism and lust and vagabondage. The world he shows us is suffused with the ardors and energies of youth, yet--because within the novel we are hearing about the events later--tinged with the inevitability of loss.

Contra Sappho, I in my youth did not really do these things--I was always too staid and uncertain to even truly want to live a life of extravagance or emotional abandon--but I thrill to Bolano's reminder that yes, others did, with all their hearts, these many and beautiful things.

A distant duet

{Photos by rocketlass.}

Shhhhhhh! Be very, very quiet!

At this ridiculous hour we're slipping out of the house to go away on an overnight camping trip to a friend's family's ranch in the lovely hills of rural Missouri.

In looking ahead to what we'll probably to get up to there, I like to think of some lines of Sappho I read Friday, in Anne Carson's translation:

In this place you Kypris taking up
In gold cups delicately
nectar mingled with festivities:
       pour.

Whatever my desire, the reality is likely to be closer to how Hank Williams paints it:

Comb your hair and paint and powder
You act proud, and I'll act prouder
You sing loud, and I'll sing louder
Tonight we're setting the woods on fire.

Or if all goes well, we'll hew a reasonable path somewhere between the two, creating an unexpectedly harmonious duet between the singer from Lesbos and the singer from Alabama.