Status Updates From After Sappho

There must be a verb in some language that means, to leave the lamps burning for someone who has not yet arrived.

(…) Vita stayed up late at night to achieve the necessary state for this alchemy. She too ground lustrous oyster shells with a powder of lapis lazuli and silver leaf. In the end Vita wrote for Virginia the story of seeing the world change colour forever, which is one way to say that you are in love.

“But it was Eleonora Duse, after all, who said that we might have our parts in a tragedy and not know it. Perhaps she had meant to warn us of this risk, in life, that we see only our own parts? Amid the rubble we could hardly tell the edges of our lives from anything else.”

Ancient Greek has a singular and a plural, as in other languages. But there is also the dual, which is used for two things that naturally occur together: twins, a pair of turtle doves, breasts, the two halves of a walnut in one shell. Do you see? Eleonora asked Isadora, looking up from the Greek grammar that lay open between them. Only for two things that embrace each other. As when you sleep in my arms, my sweet.

loving the through line of lesbians as readers, especially of the classics

“In fact the fixity of some things was the cover for others. For example, there was an extreme reticence in the nineteenth century when describing women together. The English dictionaries used shy Greek terms, or omitted the possibility entirely. Only the criminologists wanted to discuss it, and only in order to chronicle the interiors of insane asylums, brothels, and unnatural mothers.”

“A poet is someone who stands on the door sill and sees the room before her as a sea whose waves she might dive through. (…) A poet is someone who swims inexplicably away from the shore, only to arrive at an island of her own invention.”

reads like weird history-based fanfiction in the smallest fragments of thought

„Eva wyjechała do Aten,zanim zdążyła nas nauczyć wszystkich trybów greckich czasowników.Dopiero później odkryłyśmy np. że w dwóch trybach nie ma przyszłości.Jeden to imperatyw, używany do zadań, rozkazów.Drugi to tryb subiektywny,stosowany do wszystkiego, co nie jest wynikającym z rozumowania faktem.Być moze Elektra cierpiała w czasownikach których nikt nie rozumiał, ponieważ tryb, w jakim żyła, nie miał przyszłości”