"[..] heat coiled" - Writing Fragments

In the year 4626, if Man is still alive (if eBooks can survive), they will find...

...What, exactly? Heck, even if my hard-copy paperbacks survive, I suspect that they won't be in mint condition (because, of course, they'll be incredibly well-read!).

Assuming my books make it at all, either in paperback or in an eReader format that hasn't evolved into something too incomprehensible, I can't imagine they will be complete. Short of an incredibly dedicated reader deciding they're going to translate all of my works through the principles of Nuclear Semiotics - "This is not a book of orgasm. Something by Anna Voss is here. It was hot to us. It is still hot to you now,"  perhaps? - then the most probable way my work will make it over 2,600 years into the future is in... well, fragments. 

Oh, I trust the British Library will do their best, and I'm grateful to the 1911 Copyright Act for establishing my right to legal deposit - but for practical conservation, 2,600 years is something close to forever. If my words last that long, I know it's most likely going to be as snippets of text surviving the gaps that open in the degradation of time. Lost words, decoupled from context and left to echo into the future in pieces. 

Statistically, those fragments are probably going to be things like "his heart was hammering," or  "she ground down, rolling her hips," or maybe even just "she realised with a thrill," drifting among corrupted data and the static of missing paragraphs, silently inviting the reader to imagine all the content that time has denied them.

And that's inevitable, I think. The language in which I'm writing erotica probably isn't going to last for the next twenty-six centuries (indeed, as I have complained before, Beowulf's Old English is pretty well impossible to relate to, and that's only eleven centuries out of date). 

After all, it's entirely possible to be literally the most famous poet of your age, your likeness rendered on everything from frescos to jars to actual coins... and still, less than a tenth of your material will last forever.

It's horribly humbling to realise you can be so genuinely (known) world famous that people rank you with the actual Muses, and one of the foremost philosophers of the entire Western canon bigs you up, and even personally writes in intertextual dialogue with you (can you imagine how big a deal you have to be for Plato to start saying you're a big deal??) - and still, most of your writing can be lost to History.

This seems particularly unfair if Herodotus hasn't even been born (let alone invented History) at the time you're writing, but it can happen horribly easily. You just need to be a genius in a genre that's not glam enough for industrial-scale transliteration, writing on fallible materials. Add to that working in a dialect that declined when some martial prat on a horse rode through, quite possibly weeping about the size of his domain - and never considering he'd just mass-selected his own poxy dialect for everyone's default settings - and the brilliance of your words may still survive, but only in fragments. 

(But also, while I'm not in that league, if anyone does want to put my likeness on currency, I am okay with it. My bucket list is nothing if not aspirational.) 

 

Pictured: Sappho. (Or, at least, a woman who could write, painted in the 1st Century).
Note the image omits whatever it was she's written.
via Wikipedia

 

Anyway, as an author, I think about Sappho quite a lot. 

Not on account of her (comparatively recent) iconic status, nor as a result of her (literally Ancient) iconic status, but just because almost all of her poetry we're left holding comes in gaps, with only fragments of her words. 

And god(s), some of them are beautiful fragments.  

I don't speak even modern Greek, let alone Aeolic, so I have to work with translations, but just look at this from Fragment 31, where (for context) she's describing awe because a woman just laughed, and there's a guy sitting next to her, and she thinks he must be like a god to be able to sit that close and listen to her laugh and somehow not completely lose his mind from watching and listening to her laughing and being that close to someone so incredible, whereas in contrast, for her:

"whenever I look at you just briefly,
then it isn't possible for me to speak anymore.
My tongue is broken."

And then she goes on - she tells us just looking at this woman makes it feel like her skin's on fire, and she can't see, the blood is pounding in her ears, she's broken out in a sweat, she's feeling such a rush of attraction that she's practically shaking... 

But consider - this poem is two and a half millennia old. It's written for a society incomprehensibly different from anything that anyone alive has ever experienced, written assuming we'll hear it - literally hear it, sung, accompanied by a lyre - in a social context that would feel impossibly alien if any of us were dropped into it.

She's telling us about something she felt more than a hundred generations before living memory. And yet almost everyone alive has had that precise experience at a party. 

And they say Shakespeare is 'timeless'. 

I spend far, far too much time thinking myself into that beautiful liminal headspace of adoring desperation, trying to capture for my characters what it feels like to want, more than anything, and to be utterly overawed by devotion. It's a thing that I am, frankly, extremely good at (read my books if you don't believe me!) - but I could never, I think, have come up with something quite that concise, that perfect to express the failure of the body under erotic tension. 

(And yes, OK - a core theme of my works means that a lot of my dominant characters would have very little patience for someone whose tongue is "broken" - even if they're responsible for the muscle cramps and quivering that broke it, so it's not a line I'd normally get the chance to deploy - but it is beautiful writing.) 

And then at the other end of the scale (? Maybe? It's really hard to tell where a fragment sits on a scale,) there's things like 

 

"Hither again, oh Muses, leaving your gold [..]

 

Gold what? Gold what? How do we make the Muses come hither?? People with writer's block want to know!

I don't know if they were written to be like that - and I am not a classicist so I absolutely wouldn't dare presume! - but certainly I am left reading fragments like that with a faint sense of frustration. I don't have anything but the muses leaving gold... something or other, so I can't fill in 'palaces' or 'temples' or 'apples' or whatever the line used to say and be certain: all I have is doubt. The line begs me for interpretation because it has become unfinished. 

Of course, I do a good line in being impassive when begged by someone something unfinished, but the fragments snag at my mind in a different way. The trouble with poetry that's become fragmented is that you end up holding the gaps. And that's frustrating as hell: people like their stories to have an ending, even if (thank goodness) many people understand that stories should not necessarily end with relief. 

Okay, if fragments of my work ever do make it to the 47th Century, it will probably read like a jumble of stories about people who were obsessed with finding the most comfortable and satisfying places to sit without any of the, as it were, juicy context... 

But I have also realised that there are some scenes I write - the scenes of maximum overwhelm, as it were - in which I am writing fragmentary sentences here and now, not to taunt the future with possibilities but to capture a character's overload in the present. I didn't set out to do so, but I've done it anyway, almost instinctively, because fragments are a fantastic way to capture confusion. 

Such as this line, which I wrote in Edge Close without ever consciously trying to fragment my register:

 "His face was wet. His lips were numb. His heart was hammering with joy and pride and pleasure. 

She was still panting softly, eyes closed. One hand resting on her belly. The other sliding free of his hair to press against her own breast."

 

If even half of that gets read in 4626, a reader will, I think, still understand that something has happened, something that left two people changed. They won't have the broader context of who George and Ellen are, or why this matters, or how Ellen found the courage to take the lead - but they won't need to. (They'll be missing out, obviously - but the fragment itself would stand, would still carry meaning. If I'm lucky, it might even still make someone ache). 

I didn't even realise that I had, essentially, shifted register into fragmented lyric poetics when I wrote that line, but I did recently spot the shift happen while revising the draft for Her Ascendant Intern - which should still be coming out this month - I think because the broader context of the book had primed something in my hindbrain to look for fragments in this register. 

I was going back through, doing all the usual things - catching rogue formatting errors, adding more heat, missing the last few typos and so on. It was a fairly workaday editing / procrastination session. 

And then I read this:

"She frowned, and stood up, intending to get herself a glass of water. Her knees shook; rising, she felt weak, and for a moment she remembered [..]"

 

And something in there felt familiar - not because I wrote it, but because I caught the echo of fire beneath the skin and a tongue that's suddenly broken. 

And thinking about it, that makes sense - sometimes, when you're grounding interiority in the body, there are times when you have to accept that language will fail and understanding will be forced to surrender to sensation.

The other thing I've discovered, having seen what I'd done with Intern, and then gone looking in my other works, is that I've been writing those moments of deep, crumbling interiority like that for something close to forever. It's not just Edge Close; even in On Chestnut Tree Lane, which (as I've said before, is a book that now drives me slightly wild just because I am confident I could now do its premise and its women far more justice), there are little lines like "Scott whimpered. His chest rose and fell in stuttering gasps."

And what I think that tells me is that yes - desire and passion and psychology are all important. They're all critical to what I do. 

But sometimes, the body understands before the mind does. The mind works within the context of interior monologue, writing paragraphs of its own psychology; the body works in pure fragments - beats and impulses and desires that operate without context, without words, without any reference to the broader narratives taking place around you. 

Back in January I blogged about how important it is to me to write female desire without assuming it has to be witnessed to be real - and I conceded that - at least for Ellen in Edge Close, it's important she witness her own desire returning. But I think in some ways, writing Her Ascendant Intern has helped me articulate an additional layer of discovery to that theory. I think, sometimes, even if the woman knows something's arousing, she needn't be conscious of why. Because even if the context of the arousal might not be available to her, the truth of it remains, even as a fragment. 

And perhaps, on balance, that's a notion Sappho might tolerate. 

If any fragments of this post could ever echo back that far.