“As poets and as readers we are both the users and the transmitters of this lexicon. Today we need to keep adding not subtracting meaning, remembering not forgetting, to connect ourselves to the chain that ultimately joins all cultures.”
Sophia Nugent-Siegal
Welcome to Lexicon
Wittgenstein famously concluded his Tractatus with the memorable comment: “Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must remain silent”.
Unlike Ludwig, Sophia, in whose memory this site is maintained, did not accept “remaining silent” as a viable intellectual option—not because she thought ultimate meaning any more expressible than did Wittgenstein, but because she thought the battle was necessary.
Heroic, doomed to failure, absolutely essential.
The Poet
The Poet of The Poet The choice of poem from Sophia’s work to be set “in conversation” with Todd Turner’s Wondrous Lessons can only be the one which Todd has threaded into the sequence. The Poet comes from Sophia’s first collection, Antiquity. The image accompanying the text of the poem is a photo of Sophia taken at the age at which she wrote The Poet: at age 13. You will forgive the title, The Poet of The Poet. A little joke. Sophie would find the visual bookend of it amusing. However, the title also highlights a truth: she is so
“Out of the Underworld of Loss”…
“Out of the Underworld of Loss”… Todd Turner’s poem sequence, Wondrous Lessons, written for Sophia’s Notebook, is indeed both wonderful and full of rich insight. Reflecting the conversation with time (capital-T Time) which Sophia thought so necessary to both art and society, Todd draws on the life and work of Keats as the frame for the text. Keats, like Sophia, died very young (at 25 to Sophia’s 22), but he also (as did Sophia) achieved a level of insight well beyond those few years, insight which continues to be given voice in his letters and verse. In Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, the
To Love…
To Love…. July 30th, it’s Sophia’s birthday. Thirteen years have now passed since Sophia turned 22 in hospital, her sweet face captured forever in the photographs—so precious to me, so expressive of Sophie—that my sister, Kaye, took that day. Sophie, propped up on pillows, her long hair tumbling across her shoulders, was glad to have reached the milestone, joyously glad—against all odds—to be alive. How grateful I am for that day, and for the days we had after it, the bitter-sweet days of the rest of her life. We’ve reached another milestone this year, Soph. It is ten years since
January 17th: Soul-Written
January 17th: Soul-Written Sophia 30.07.1991--17.01.2014 The Archaeology of Loss Afterwards, I looked for you everywhere, gathering The fragments of your life, these relics left to me How can the note I put in your schooldays lunchbox Found tucked now in a drawer in your room How can this mere thing, its atoms reassembled into meaning How can it be here when you
To Believe…
To Believe... In publishing each new work for Sophia’s Notebook, a corresponding poem (or poems) is selected from Sophia’s own body of work as an accompaniment. Why? Because, as the award in her name highlights, Sophia—that born historian—believed that culture (in particular, art and literature) represents an ongoing conversation across time. As T. S. Eliot stated in his seminal essay on literary tradition, the significance of any poet must be interpreted in terms of the “appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists.” So too, for Sophia, art and literature were an interactive process—one that for historian Sophia
Finding the Light
Finding the Light Paul Kingsnorth’s* stunning poem, Hymn of Entry, is everything Sophia would wish in a work for Sophia’s Notebook.The poem fulfills each of the principles laid out on the splashdown page of this website (principles which Sophia herself lived so fully): Be brave. Seek truth. Love wisdom. Live beauty. Courage. Truthfulness. Wisdom. Beauty. How necessary these are, how precious, and how rare. In its fierce loveliness, Paul’s poem really does speak to the heart. Artist (and Sophia’s aunt), Clare Llewelyn, and calligrapher, Margaret McGinnis, have in their artwork (the cover pen and ink and the printed text respectively)
“Sophie came into the world as herself…”
“Sophie came into the world as herself…” July 30th. It’s Sophia’s birthday. As always, I find myself thinking of the parameters of her life: birth, death, life’s cosmic bookends in this sublunary world. How does one define a life? Sophia had 22 years of it, 22 years of life. Keats had 25. Dante’s Beatrice, 24. The numbers tell us nothing. And everything. So young. So young. It hurts to think of it. How does one measure the dimensions of a life? No scale is large enough, no scale true enough. We get lost in a thicket of adjectives trying to
A Moment to Look Outside the World…
A Moment to Look Outside the World… In the note Sophia left with requests to be undertaken in the case of her death, she asked that a diptych of the Crucifixion and the Resurrection be made and given to St John’s Anglican Cathedral in Brisbane. An extraordinary pair of paintings by Australian artist, Peter Hudson, set in a display case exquisitely handcrafted by traditional craftsman Rob Lamont from Queensland silky oak, has therefore been given to St. John’s in fulfillment of Sophia’s request. (Thank you, dear Peter and Rob, for making her wishes so wonderfully and wholly real, and to
Spoken Soul
Spoken Soul Some lights burn true, whatever the darkness. Sophia 30.07.1991--17.01.2014 Out of the Burning Bury me in garlands Of burning paper With all my pollen sparks of steel Sophia Nugent-Siegal Out of the burning fire Truth remains true Its generative spark whirls up Into the shadowed world Spoken soul, Fæst*, unbroken Of singular self tempered, Made to be Wrought living In a purifying fire By R. Nugent Wrought living,
God Is With Us
God Is With Us Sophia always loved Christmas. As a child, she had loved the joy and excitement, the thrilling expectation written into it all, but she also loved the mystery woven into the story, the sense that a great drama was being played out for us to understand, one with deep symbolic significance. As an adult and as a scholar, the significance was even more real to her. It is for this reason that she asked for a passage from St Athanasius’ On the Incarnation (one of the intellectual jewels of Late Antiquity) to be read at her funeral—where