November 9, 2023 On Nature Teetering Canaries By Judith Schalansky Illustration by Na Kim. Translated by Imogen Taylor One stifling hot night in early August, I dreamed, as I always do when I have a fever, the old, familiar dream: the earth opens up before my feet, a gaping pit appears, and into this pit I fall, then clamber straight back out, as eager as a cartoon character, only to fall into the next pit that suddenly yawns before me. An endless obstacle course engineered by some higher power, an experiment going nowhere, the opposite of a story. This dream has followed me since childhood and is probably as old as the realization that I will, one day, end up in a pit forever. As a piece of drama, it is extremely simple, and yet it’s an effective dream and no more unoriginal than that of my friend Sibylle, who told me over breakfast a few days later that she has regular nightmares of being swept away by a vast, tsunami-like wave. I was reminded that of all the arts I would like to master, lucid dreaming is at the top of the list: you sleep and dream, fully aware that you are asleep and dreaming, but the real skill lies in being able to intervene in the events of your dream and steer the plot in your favor. As a lucid dreamer, I could, with no trouble at all, see to it that the steam train hurtling toward me was brought to a halt by, say, a lady-chimp passenger with the presence of mind to interrupt her grooming and pull the emergency brake. I could arrange for my missing child, lost in the fairground throng, to reappear, bright and chirpy, on the broad shoulders of a gently smiling nurse. I could even have a burned jungle returned in dizzying time-lapse to its former chlorophyll-drenched glory and commandeered by a raucous and triumphant menagerie. I could rewrite my nightmares with every narrative device available to me, draining them of the horror that resonates deep into waking life. All the signs, all experience, all probability notwithstanding, I could make everything end happily. I could transform leaden impotence into mercurial superpower with daring and ingenuity, unafraid of even the most implausible twist. Read More
December 8, 2020 Arts & Culture What We Know of Sappho By Judith Schalansky Fragment of parchment preserving parts of several poems by Sappho. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. As Nebuchadnezzar II is plundering Jerusalem, Solon ruling Athens, Phoenician seafarers circumnavigating the African continent for the first time, and Anaximander postulating that an indefinite primal matter is the origin of all things and that the soul is air-like in nature, Sappho writes: He seems to me equal to the gods that man whoever he is who opposite you sits and listens close ….to your sweet speaking and lovely laughing—oh it puts the heart in my chest on wings for when I look at you, even a moment, no speaking ….is left in me no: tongue breaks and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming ….fills ears and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead—or almost ….I seem to me. But all is to be dared, because even a person of poverty … Buddha and Confucius are not yet born, the idea of democracy and the word philosophy not yet conceived, but Eros—Aphrodite’s servant—already rules with an unyielding hand: as a god, one of the oldest and most powerful, but also as an illness with unclear symptoms that assails you out of the blue, a force of nature that descends on you, a storm that whips up the sea and uproots even oak trees, a wild, uncontrollable beast that suddenly pounces on you, unleashes unbridled pleasure, and causes unspeakable agonies—bittersweet, consuming passion. There are not many surviving literary works older than the songs of Sappho: the down-to-earth Epic of Gilgamesh, the first ethereal hymns of the Rigveda, the inexhaustible epic poems of Homer and the many-stranded myths of Hesiod, in which it is written that the Muses know everything. “They know all that has been, is, and will be.” Their father is Zeus, their mother Mnemosyne, a titaness, the goddess of memory. Read More