Fragmentation and Creation

    The famed Humanist scholar Petrarch was known to have written many letters to his long-dead inspirations, the wandering spirits of those virtuous pagans whose work he deemed preservable in some capacity. He would temporally displace himself for moments in time to compose these documents, unstuck from his Christianized origins in medieval Italy and forgetting the worries of his time - the women who may or may not have been alive for him to obsess over in his Canzoniere - in exchange for eternal longing for something that is not any longer. The existence of these letters does nothing for Petrarch but cause him more sorrow; he worries he has offended Cicero in subsequent documents, putting on a pantomime of one-sided exchange. This, then, emphasizes distance in a society which could not bear to be close to the dead or worship ancestors, instead thinking souls would rise as skeletons at Judgment Day and putting as much space - the entire sky - between themselves and Heaven as possible. Paradise is a boring place in medievality and thereafter anyway, where flawlessness characterizes all, where everyone has monocultural virtue and is only allowed in if their behavior was divinely right. I, of course, am no expert on this matter, and this vision of Heaven is an opinion of mine, but Petrarch's lament of death, distance, and unattainability became a genre unto itself in subsequent centuries of literary development, did it not? Thus, Heaven must be torture, and God must be a nightmare for the man who writes to those who never knew the name of Christ. Responsible for rediscovering a manuscript of Cicero which would have otherwise likely deteriorated, Petrarch bears the burden of knowing the dead more intimately than many in his time, and this is what makes him fail to recognize that Cicero lives on through him. He ruins himself and widens spacetime through his successes, failures, and mere acknowledgments that the past existed and he now has to deal with it. The unattainable gives him purpose, but he doesn't pick up the scraps - he leaves them on the ground and takes photographs. The shards matter this much despite the errors in transmission; the true Cicero, after all, was lost the moment his first original manuscript was hand-copied and disseminated. Where is rhetorically vicious, truly stalwart Cicero? He is in shreds.
    The idea of 'lost media' has gained far more credence in the mainstream of online culture than any articulation of what Petrarch unknowingly experienced, the 'altered media' of Ciceronian texts. From there, a duality emerges between 'lost' and 'found,' searches for unknown songs intensify to the point that they become far more difficult to find as they are reposted over and over, edited and remixed, chopped and screwed. The 'lost' is that which we are forbidden access by the passage of time, ideally only for the time being. As time goes on, we naturally lose more and more in the same way we approach death, and we're about to see so much lost in subsequent decades as many misconceptualize digital media as lasting forever, when in reality its fragility matches or exceeds the papyri of early Biblical manuscripts, its Nag Hammadi-esque preservation in a temperature-controlled environment without human interference basically impossible. There is no application of the documentary hypothesis and/or source criticism to 'found' media, no attempts to identify an author outside the immediate canonical creator. We do not treat Everyone Knows That the same way as Deuteronomy, yet both have reached legendary status (albeit in different degrees). No blanks have been filled in; if the 'found' copy is missing a scrap, it's fine, but if a brief lacuna or interpolation exists in every manuscript of Vergil, scholars will wonder about its purpose for many decades, essentially indefinitely unless, somehow, something is found. We forget in this day of reposting, hypotheticals, and YouTube-video-essay-summary-as-analysis that these internal logics exist and are important to survey. In creating these understandings, we creatively construe; we find places for the placeless, and there is value there.
    Fragmentation is something I have intended to write about at a greater length for some time now, as I have discussed it many times in relation to textual transmission and Julia Holter's "Aviary," among other things, but I think the best place to begin is with Sappho. Of Sappho we have pieces we have had to assemble from wine bottles, refuse in Egypt's dead of nowhere, commentaries, hearsay, and everything else, all without the word of God to tell us anything of her existence. Of subsequent queer women we mostly have rumors; in fact, queer women were once created by rumors in the process of transcribing history, lesbianism bestowed upon unfavorable figures, nonetheless adding to legendarity in the twentieth century and onward, funnily enough. Of the women who were said to be in Boston marriages we know their strong emotions for one another, but redactions have omitted the precise places we would rather have filled in. Finally, of the women of the lesbian canon, we have so much that some argue against their queerness after they've left their deathbeds and gone up, down, or horizontally to wherever they may end up, precisely because they believe God is in the gaps. Like how Cicero survives in fragments, these women face difficulties being incorporated into latter-day Cities of Women (after de Pizan), for we suppose that they are erased by these superimpositions. Their survival in fragments, however, truly speaks to an eternal idea of love, as eternal and unwavering as the haunt of death looming over us all (but especially Petrarch). We find these fragments and, in filling in the gaps and reconstructing, we create something distant yet new, something unique to the context in which we restructure. The infinity of our world and these recursions creates many different Sapphos, many ideas of the woman from whom all femme queerness radiates into the future, refracted through our visions of form and our experiences of function. Sappho is gone, but we can become closer to her in subjective ways by making things from her text, refusing to solely speculate on her responses to our present-day or whatever came after; she would never be applicable to our time, and she would never truly understand anything which extended beyond her lifetime but the underlying idea of love threading her back to us. Our fragmentations outline disparate ideas into one structure, archaisms made fresh in their translation into modern tongues or even their direct inclusion with a multi-paragraph footnote explaining the gamut of possibility surrounding such obscure lexical items. This universe, inherently productive, and this mode of communication we indulge in, language, are inherently productive and can find creation even in the wake of destruction, life originating from things that die, all emerging from a spontaneous happening in a void we cannot even imagine until we are already gone. I say that our recursively fragmented world, while neither flawless nor the best of all possible, is the most fulfilling we will ever know, and the artifacts of perception and ideation impact our lives in positive ways, even when ends approach everything but the unknowable, overarching divinity.


REFERENCES
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/47859/47859-h/47859-h.htm - Petrarch's letters to the ancient dead
http://gnosis.org/naghamm/nhl.html - Nag Hammadi library's complete contents
https://juliaholter.bandcamp.com/album/aviary - Julia Holter's "Aviary"