Everything Old is New Again

It’s a good time to be looking back, maybe because the present is so appalling. History gives us wars we (in the cultural sense — not me, I like my history distant, and preferably fabric and/or homeware-related) can feel confident about winning (WWII), successfully protesting (Vietnam), or understanding (see above). Wars — and their kissing cousins, disasters — are also a boon to past-it celebrities who can no longer hold a tune, let alone write one, but find themselves roles as "elder statesmen" (emphasis on the —men here, as Kabbalah has yet to be officially registered as a disaster; oh, and Susan Sarandon as the honourable exception), making hay while the tsunami pours. The news is full of old men every day, yelling at each other, shaking hands, wearing inappropriate outfits as if this will make them non-suits when it merely points up their suitiness.

These reflections in no way relate to the very fine meal I ate at Gugelhof, Bill Clinton’s Berlin restaurant of choice (possibly for the very spacious washrooms as much as the large portions), but rather to my general boredness with a) war and b) old men. Live8 pretty much needs to be renamed Almost-Dead8, with the combined age of the performers running to something like Nigeria’s national debt and change. At this point I could hit my "Old White Geezers" macro, and a fully-formed rant would come tumbling down, like the rain that’s currently soaking Wimbledon, Glastonbury, my dog’s spirits, and my preparations for a fabulous Pride (in ascending order of importance). But no! Out with the old old, I say. In with the new old — especially given that old is the new new. Far be it from me to wax nostalgic. For me, there’s the museumy past (good) and the past that parents/grandparents bore you with (bad). I’m all for surprising discoveries and things getting dug up, as long as they’re not in the family photo album or some other sinister clanking closet. So Sappho makes the Guardian headlines (and I can’t even get a book deal, but there you go), with her first poem in 2600 years. 100 words rescued from oblivion, found inside a mummy’s wrappings. Talk about a dead letter. http://books.guardian.co.uk/news/articles/0,6109,1513491,00.html

This is huge news, especially to a classicist manquée such as myself (pretentious, moi? It’s only in French, not Greek). The romance of dusty manuscripts makes for magnificent bonkbusters such as A.S. Byatt’s Possession (note to self: must do more archival research as it infallibly leads to fucking hotties), and Sappho’s story is perhaps the headiest. Mythicised shortly after her own time as the tenth Muse, a massive publishing opportunity was missed by the boffos of Ancient Greece, despite the requisite elements — sex, drugs (well, ritual infusions) and rock n roll (OK, lyre music). Instead, as is so often the case with women artists, the myths of her biography (lusty lesbian schoolmistress falls for vain swain, takes a long walk off a high cliff) prevailed, and only fragments of her work survived in grammar books, giving rise to the Sappho industry that has lived off the thin of the land from Ovid to Emma Donoghoe, and inevitably some forthcoming tritefest starring Gwyneth Paltrow.

Where there’s a ms. there’s a mystery, and mysteries are big business. But wait, could this poem be the key to it all — and possibly explain the descent of the Holy Blood through Mary Magdalene as well? Ooops, wrong mystery. The poem apparently ends with a reference to the story of Tithonus, a beautiful young man loved by a goddess. He became antiquity’s cautionary tale, sort of like Keith Richards, after she granted him eternal life but not eternal youth. Sappho, now an elder stateswoman (if you believe the "life into art" reading), has the hots for a toyboy — but reminds herself that age does, indeed, come before beauty.

Cliché alert is fully switched on, no fears — the phrase hove into sight earlier this week at the airport, when I held the door open for a couple in their fifties, and the woman said to me, "That’s right, dear, age before beauty." After quelling my first, sentential-hating reaction (dropping the door on her), I gave her a good, hard stare. Not because I have an irrational hatred of well-to-do, well-heeled, older women — but because I don’t. By any measure of the thing, she was beautiful, but — as custom and L’Oreal advertising has taught us — beauty is merely a function of youth. I could weigh 600 pounds and have leprotic acne, and she would still have sallied forth her sage inanity, because she had maybe twenty-five years on me.

Likewise, our cultural narrative tells us that as an older woman, the Sappho of the poem must be lusting after a younger man, but seeing in his beauty the decline of her own — and thus, eventually, of his. Thus youth glows ever brighter, like the memory of sunshine when it’s raining (even if you hate sunshine and it was super-humid and appalling, and is now cool and sounds lovely). I find myself longing for rain, counting the silver hairs streaking through my pixie cut not in despair, but in pride and wonder. This is my body; this is my life. I’m aiming for 100% silver by 35 (not so sure about grey pubes, however). When I catalogue the women who inspire me (using the Library of Congress system, of course), it’s women who have age written on their bodies like rain on a window: Charlotte Rampling, Marianne Faithfull, Patti Smith, Susan Swan, Claire Denis, Sally Potter, Miriam Makeba. Tori Amos, still as wild and passionate at 41 as she was when I saw her 15 years ago, her face increasingly showing her Cherokee heritage as she grows into her power. Joan Allen in YES, unairbrushed and unmade-up, her crow’s feet crinkling in pleasure. These women may not have their own reality shows — or pet causes — but they have their own reality.

Sappho’s poem focuses on something more than the beauty of the boy — it is infused with the passion of an experienced woman, a body that has tasted, loved, learned, changed, and still feels. While I have been known to utter the squeamish cry of "Old people sex" at seeing Coronation Street characters kissing, as I reach the upper end of the prime demographic, I find that what repulses me the most are the fake machinations of teenagers slobbering over each other on the subway, and the ever-repellent older man/younger woman combo (currently being reinvented by Cruise/ Holmes, Inc.). Not that age should be a limit on desire — I fully intend to grow old disgracefully — but it’s time that the beauties of older women be recognised, not on a one-off basis of "She looks good for her age," or some patronising Dove commercial, but on a regular basis. And young women are not excluded from this: everyone can purchase a "Sontag," a clip-on streak of grey hair (available from the Toronto Women’s Bookstore, http://www.womensbookstore.com) created as a tribute to the elder stateswoman of American letters, a voice sorely-missed in these dark days, when wisdom’s name is Bono. I’m putting mine on, and heading off to hide in the archives until it’s all over.

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