June 6, 2021
The Announcement
You probably know that the Annunciation is when Gabriel is sent down the hill with a lily to tell Mary, who’s never had sex with a man (had she ever had sex with a woman, or someone gender fluid? that we aren’t told), that’s she’s going to have God’s baby. In some paintings, like the one prepared for the Basilica di San Francesco in Siena, there is a golden string of words from the angel’s gently pouting mouth streaming toward the virgin’s ear. In some, God is vomiting down light onto Mary’s head, and she is scared. Some believe it’s the angel’s shadow, cast across Mary’s body, that impregnates her, and others say it’s seeds from the lily, God’s secret message wrapped in each one, so Mary becomes a future wrapped in riddles, just like the sibyl. What annunciation is my great grandmother offering to her lover?
She has already handed over the lily, and this virgin and this angel are obviously already buck naked. Her occluding mouth hidden from us. The wonderful thing is, no one will get pregnant.
My great grandfather wrote a poem in which Dante’s mother conceives him by catching laurel berries in her apron. A poison fruit.
In Eva and Natalie’s version, it must be Sappho’s golden words leaving Eva’s mouth and heading towards Natalie’s ear.
Fragment 83:
]right here
]
](now again)
On the word now her open mouth about to cup Natalie’s nipple.
Eleni Sikelianos
Poet and Author, Make Yourself Happy
Eva Palmer Sikelianos was Natalie Clifford Barney’s lover from adolescence. They met when their families were vacationing in Bar Harbor, Maine. Eva was a woman who pursued ancient knowledge. She studied Greek and Latin at Bryn Mawr College and introduced Barney and Renée Vivien to the poet Sappho in ancient Greek. She worked with Barney to revise and revive Sappho and other models of women’s lives, drawing on ancient knowledge to imagine a different future.
In June 1906, Eva played the bride-to-be Timas in Barney’s Equivoque, a play that reimagined the legend of Sappho’s suicide off the White Rocks of Lefkas when her lover Phaon rejected her. In Equivoque Sappho loves the woman Timas, not Phaon. Her suicidal leap is for Timas when she leaves Sappho to marry Phaon.
After the performance of Equivoque, Eva Palmer left Barney for Angelos Sikelianos, a Greek poet from Lefkas. She lived with Sikelianos in Greece for a quarter century. Together they revived ancient festivals on the site of Delphi. Eva Palmer is buried in the village cemetery of Delphi next to the ancient theater. She corresponded with Barney until her dying day.
Artemis Leontis
Author, Eva Palmer Sikelianos: A Life in Ruins
Excerpt from a letter from Eva Palmer to Natalie Clifford Barney in Bar Harbor, early 1900s, in the NCB archive, Jacques Doucet Library, BLJD C2 2920 Nos. 238-242:
”Would you hold me would you love me when my face is swollen with tears, my eyes red and ugly and my head as hot as a turning coal. The cool beauty of the moon outside is as far from me as the tenderness of your hands. In all my life tonight there is no sweetness but the breath of your lilies. I am searching for the light of my own spirit, which has been dimmed, and over the bay, sadly, strangely comes the sound of the bell buoy telling of danger. My face is not averted dear. It is turned toward you as frankly as tomorrow's night full moon. Would you care for me more perhaps and find me more easily if I were to show you a little crescent slice of myself and then disappear quickly over the top of the hill? A crescent would be such a pretty fairy bed for you to lie in, and as I slipped into the farther valley I would lay you so quietly back on earth, and console you for your decent from heaven by leaving your hands full of light green stars.”