Sappho’s Text

We encounter Sappho’s poetry, Sappho’s text, in fragments.

We encounter Sappho’s text as it dispersed into other texts, as it survived through quotation.

We rediscover Sappho’s text on disintegrating papyrus.

Whether in quotation or hand written on papyrus, Sappho’s text survives as plain text.

Sappho’s text is the strategy of remaining alive through bodies of others, through the speech of others. It is the strategy of persistence by dispersal, of survival by sociality.

Sappho’s text reminds us that nothing we say or do is meaningful unless it somehow finds itself, in however changeling or fragmentary form, in the bodies, speech, and thoughts of others.

Sappho’s text is the most fundamental form of publication, from one body to another, from one text to another. Speaking intimately to one other is this most fundamental form of publication.

Queer text is personal: mouth to ear, mouth to body, body to speech. What is personal in this way is lawless.

Were Sappho’s words seeds? Were Sappho’s words parasites?

A queer text is a disorienting text.

A queer text is a deliberate transubstantiation of the abject into the beloved.

What, then, is publishing’s abject? Plain text is the abject of publishing.

Plain text, publishing without any fixed outward form, against any norm or genre of publication, is queer text.

Queer is play, and queer publishing must be playful publishing.  

Sappho as an icon survives because the idea of her is useful, it makes things happen inside us. Sappho may or may not have been queer as we imagine it now, but we now put Sappho to queer uses.

Sappho’s text is erotic text.

What might an erotic publishing look like? Intimacy, exchange of fluids, interpenetration, repetition and rhythm, looking and touching, desire and release.

Plain text is text as text.

Plain text is text stripped of everything but language. It is a linear arrangement of characters, a pure sequence of words without styling.

We encounter text in an embodied state, in the form of books, grave markers, emails, billboards, street signs, postcards, lists, TV crawls, speeches, recited poems, but underlying all embodied forms of language is plain text.

Plain text is a code within the code of language.

Text is promiscuous, plain text even more so.

Text joins joyfully with text to generate text.

Plain text moves fluidly from writing to speech to printing to digital encoding and back again, lossless. It retains its self-nature as it changes forms.

Plain text is human-readable and therefore archival.

Plain text, reproducible and transmissible in infinite modes, is difficult to suppress or control.

Plain text is resistant text.

Plain text is urgent.

Urgent text is a text of love. It wants most keenly.

Urgent text is text that must find a voice and find an ear.

Urgent text is always in the present.

Urgent text emerges spontaneously, it is emergency.