Let no one enter here who is ignorant of geometry.
(inscription over the door of Plato’s Academy)
There is something pure and indubitable about the notion that eros is lack. Moreover, it is a notion that, once adopted, has a powerful effect on one’s habits and representations of love. We can see this most clearly in an example: consider Sappho’s fragment 31, which is one of the best-known love poems in our tradition.
φαίνεταί μοι κῆνος ἴσος θέοισιν
ἔμμεν᾽ ὤνηρ, ὄττις ἐνάντιός τοι
ἰσδάνει καὶ πλάσιον ἆδυ φωνεί-
σας ὐπακούει
καὶ γελαίσας ἰμέροεν, τό μ᾽ ἦ μὰν
καρδίαν ἐν στήθεσιν ἐπτόαισεν,
ὠς γὰρ ἔς σ᾽ ἴδω ϐρόχε’ ὤς με φώναι-
σ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἔν ἔτ᾽ εἴκει,
ἀλλ᾽ ἄκαν μὲν γλῶσσα †ἔαγε λέπτον
δ᾽ αὔτικα χρῷ πῦρ ὐπαδεδρόμηκεν,
ὀππάτεσσι δ᾽ οὐδ᾽ ἒν ὄρημμ᾽, ἐπιρρόμ-
βεισι δ᾽ ἄκουαι,
†έκαδε μ᾽ ἴδρως ψῦχρος κακχέεται† τρόμος δὲ
παῖσαν ἄγρει, χλωροτέρα δὲ ποίας
εμμι, τεθνάκην δ᾽ ὀλίγω ’πιδεύης
φαίνομ᾽ †αι
He seems to me equal to gods that man
who opposite you
to your sweet speaking
and lovely laughing—oh it
puts the heart in my chest on wings
for when I look at you, a moment, then 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.
(LP, fr. 31)
The poem floats toward us on a stage set. But we have no program. The actors go in and out of focus anonymously. The action has no location. We don’t know why the girl is laughing nor what she feels about this man. He looms beyond the footlights, somewhat more than mortal in line 1 (isos theoisin), and dissolves at line 2 into a pronoum (ottis) so indefinite that scholars cannot agree on what it means. The poet who is staging the mise-enscène steps mysteriously from the wings of a relative clause at line 5 (to) and takes over the action.
It is not a poem about the three of them as individuals, but about the geometrical figure formed by their perception of one another, and the gaps in that perception. It is an image of the distances between them. Thin lines of force coordinate the three of them. Along one line travels the girl’s voice and laughter to a man who listens closely. A second tangent connects the girl to the poet. Between the eye of the poet and the listening man crackles a third current. The figure is a triangle. Why?
An obvious answer is to say that this is a poem about jealousy. Numbers of critics have done so. Yet, just as many readers deny that there is any hint of jealousy here.2 How is such blanket disagreement possible? Are we all operating with the same idea of what jealousy is?
The word ‘jealousy’ comes from Greek zēlos meaning ‘zeal’ or ‘fervent pursuit.’ It is a hot and corrosive spiritual motion arising in fear and fed on resentment. The jealous lover fears that his beloved prefers someone else, and resents any relationship between the beloved and another. This is an emotion concerned with placement and displacement. The jealous lover covets a particular place in the beloved’s affection and is full of anxiety that another will take it. Here is an image of the shifting pattern that is jealousy, from more modern times. During the first half of the fifteenth century a type of slow pacing dance called the bassa danza became popular in Italy. These dances were semidramatic and transparently expressive of psychological relationships. “In the dance called Jealousy three men and three women permute partners and each man goes through a stage of standing by himself apart from the others” (Baxandall 1972, 78). Jealousy is a dance in which everyone moves, for it is the instability of the emotional situation that preys upon a jealous lover’s mind.
No such permutations jeopardize Sappho in fragment 31. Indeed, her case is the reverse. Were she to change places with the man who listens closely, it seems likely she would be entirely destroyed. She does not covet the man’s place nor fear usurpation of her own. She directs no resentment at him. She is simply amazed at his intrepidity. This man’s role in the poetic structure reflects that of jealousy within Sappho’s feelings. Neither is named. It is the beloved’s beauty that affects Sappho; the man’s presence is somehow necessary to delineation of that emotional event—it remains to be seen how. “Lovers all show such symptoms as these,” says Longinus, the ancient critic to whom we owe preservation of Sappho’s text (De Sublimitate 10.2). Jealousy may be implicit in the symptoms of love whenever they occur, but jealousy does not explain the geometry of this poem.
Another popular theory about fragment 31 is the rhetorical theory, which explains the man who listens closely as a poetic necessity (see note 2). That is, he is not to be thought of as a real person but as a poetic hypothesis, designed to show by contrast how deeply Sappho is affected in the presence of her beloved. As such he is a cliché of erotic poetry, for it is a common rhetorical maneuver to praise one’s beloved by saying “He must be made of stone who could resist you.” Pindar, for example, in a well-known fragment (Snell-Maehler, fr. 123) contrasts his own response to a beautiful boy (“I melt like wax as the heat bites into it”) with that of an impassible observer (“whose black heart was forged of adamant or iron in a cold flame”). The rhetorical point may be reinforced by adding a comparison with divine impassivity, as in the Hellenistic epigram that says “If you looked upon my beloved and were not broken by desire, you are totally god or totally stone” (Anth. Pal. 12.151).3 With this contrastive technique, the lover praises his beloved, and incidentally begs sympathy for his own suit, by aligning himself with normal human response: it would be an unnatural heart or supernatural heart that failed to be moved by desire for such an object. Is this what Sappho is doing in fragment 31?
No. In the first place, the register of normality is missing from Sappho’s poem. Her record of erotic emotion is singular. We may recognize her symptoms from personal memory but it is impossible to believe she is representing herself as an ordinary lover. Moreover, praise of the beloved does not stand out as the principal purpose of this poem. The girl’s voice and laughter are a significant provocation but she disappears at line 5 and Sappho’s own body and mind are the unmistakable subject of all that follows. Praise and normal erotic responses are things that occur in the real world: this poem does not. Sappho tells us twice, emphatically, the real location of her poem: “He seems to me.… I seem to me.” This is a disquisition on seeming and it takes place entirely within her own mind.4
Jealousy is beside the point; the normal world of erotic responses is beside the point; praise is beside the point. It is a poem about the lover’s mind in the act of constructing desire for itself. Sappho’s subject is eros as it appears to her; she makes no claim beyond that. A single consciousness represents itself; one mental state is exposed to view.
We see clearly what shape desire has there: a three-point circuit is visible within Sappho’s mind. The man who listens closely is no sentimental cliché or rhetorical device. He is a cognitive and intentional necessity. Sappho perceives desire by identifying it as a three-part structure. We may, in the traditional terminology of erotic theorizing, refer to this structure as a love triangle and we may be tempted, with post-Romantic asperity, to dismiss it as a ruse. But the ruse of the triangle is not a trivial mental maneuver. We see in it the radical constitution of desire. For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components—lover, beloved and that which comes between them. They are three points of transformation on a circuit of possible relationship, electrified by desire so that they touch not touching. Conjoined they are held apart. The third component plays a paradoxical role for it both connects and separates, marking that two are not one, irradiating the absence whose presence is demanded by eros. When the circuit-points connect, perception leaps. And something becomes visible, on the triangular path where volts are moving, that would not be visible without the three-part structure. The difference between what is and what could be is visible. The ideal is projected on a screen of the actual, in a kind of stereoscopy. The man sits like a god, the poet almost dies: two poles of response within the same desiring mind. Triangulation makes both present at once by a shift of distance, replacing erotic action with a ruse of heart and language. For in this dance the people do not move. Desire moves. Eros is a verb.
___________
2 The two most recent commentators on this poem assemble scholarship for and against jealousy: Burnett 1983, 232-43; Race 1983, 92-101.
3 See Dover 1978, 178 n. 18; Race 1983, 93-94.
4 On seeming in this poem, see Robbins 1980, 255-61.