Ghosts of Sappho 🧿🐃 31 Marx 2025 ⛩️Day 10,516 ⛩️

you know Sappho, the ancient poet whose work we only have fragments of? a student noticed that her estimated total number of lines written is about the same as the number of lines of TMG lyrics, so they randomly removed most of the lyrics and made a compilation of what was left

it's incredibly haunting. to read these titles and fragments and feel gathering around me the ghosts of lines of songs I know and others I have heard before but don't quite remember and all the lines I've never heard, and think about all the missing lines from Sappho and from other writers, and eventually my own lines swallowed up in Time.

that's actually a big theme in Terra Ignota, the love of projects which transcend lifetimes and the pain of losing them.

anyway here is a link to the paper if you're curious

https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/36mzvspydj28ticr77epy/leave-no-trace-_-a-New-Complete-Translation-of-The-Mountain-Goats-3.pdf?rlkey=hw3w9ff3m1o3njd0xu47no9qp&e=1&st=1rr21uq2&dl=0