Sappho's Raft: Le rideau de la Mytilenienne

"What I had in mind was Le Radeau de la Meduse ("The Raft of the Medusa") and what that painting by Gericault encodes for Art History--a passionate yet scientific obsession with the human body focused against pathetic, modern circumstances in total belief the heroic were still possible.

Sappho has always felt to me like such an upheaval, the ache of indifference, the ecstasy of embroilment. While she provides a raft upon these boiling waves her raft is but a rideau, a curtain, which when raised to the rafters lets in the vision of shipwreck,

And Mytilene, and island in a sea, home to all bright manner of things under Sappho's sun, is, I pretend, the cartoon painted upon that rideau hiding from me, at times, the scene about to be discovered. In a word, survival, coming through the late fin de siècle upheld, in tact, by that steely delicacy which cradles the singular human heart so nimbly, that vulnerability." -Thomas Meyer