Margotlog: Tintoretto

Margotlog: Tintoretto

If you stare across the lagoon from the northern edge of Venice, the world seems an immense roil of waves, tongues of land lapping out of them, and sky contesting above for prominence. In the Cinquecento, 1500s, with only candle and lamplight, interiors must also have risen into the heights of vaulted ceilings and domes with the same cloudy immensity.

Before I came to Venice this October, Tintoretto was simply the name of a painter, less important than his grand Venetian contemporary, Titian, one of a few late Renaissance masters whose work had barely impressed itself upon me. That's all changed. Venice is Tintoretto's playground, and the play is so immense, so vividly charged with chiaroscuro--that wonderful Italian word meaning light-dark--that you feel the man must have continually dipped his brush in the city's vast watery essence. The painting above, "Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple," hangs in the church of Madonna dell'Orto, near Tintoretto's family chapel, for it was his family church. Two other immense works of his also transform the altar area: "Worship of the Golden Calf," and a "Last Judgment." These are all huge works, wide and tall. My favorite, the Presentation pictured here, hangs to the left of the altar against a wall, and thus takes part the natural play of chiaroscuro of the church itself.

The church of Madonna dell'Orto is in the northern area of the city called the Canareggio. The church has a lovely rounded top to what we'd call its steeple; its made of warm red brick with edgings of off-white stone. A spacious piazza opens in front of the church, leading to one of Venice's ever present canals. As I stood admiring the church, a large, immature herring gull descended on large, mottled-grey wings and strode about, looking for grubs, perhaps, or bits of bread. Herring gulls are the biggest gulls I saw among the many white gulls following the boats or wheeling over the canals. Venice is not a city filled with parks--it guards its bits of land jealously for piazzas--those like the one in front of San Marco and the Ducal Palace crammed with people, and those like the several I crossed frequently from the northern edge of the city as I made my way south toward the Grand Canal, the Arsenale or a few times toward San Marco.

Thousands of bridges cross hundreds of canals. I had to smile at myself: the map I brought from home showed only a few bridges. How do the Venetians get across their canals? I wondered in my innocence. The experience of Venice on foot is largely that of climbing up and down the steps of bridges. This is exactly the effect Tintoretto has captured in the "Presentation of the Virgin." Light sweeps across Saint Anne's robust figure and follows her hand pointing up toward the temple. She and little Mary are climbing up steps, as do thousands of citizens everyday, crossing their many bridges.

What's so compelling about this painting is its daring use of chiaroscuro to compel the two figures up the steps. Their backs are toward us--the meaning of their action is read entirely in their bodies' motion. Beside them loll another mother and child--at first I was sure this was a prostitute or courtesan, but perhaps not. Perhaps merely a less ardent mother, less devoted to her child's religious education, less compelled by fate. In any case, the contrast emphasizes the action of Saint Anne and little Mary. The mother points the way, pushes the child forward, they will reach the top--which my camera couldn't capture, but which is not at all the focus of the work. It's the effort, the zeal of the climb that Tintoretto had poured into their figures.

He was evidently a religious man who often (especially at the beginning of his almost entirely self-taught career) gave works to religious sites, but who was not at all laggard in pushing himself forward. In competition for the commission to decorate the Scuola Grande di San Rocco he positioned his entry on a wall of school--outbidding all others simply by hanging his entry where it eventually would go. The work he did for this religious school took him twenty years and accounts for some of his most lavish works, loosely painted, full of motion and chiaroscuro--very effective when viewed on high from below.

I studied one other Tintoretto, "Adoration of the Shepherds," an earlier work which hangs in the Castello in Verona. As the placard (or was it the printed guide) noted, the faces show no emotion, but the figures of Mary and baby, Joseph and shepherds, and a lovely young woman wearing cloth of gold, even the head of the sympathetic cow pushing into the scene--all display their adoration through the motion of their bodies, motion as if caught in a moment of intense desire to see, to relate, motion so huge and fleeting it must have been snapped by a camera. The drapery molding the thighs and knees and legs of the old shepherd, drapery on Mary's legs and shoulders and arms, the bend head of Joseph leaning for strength on his staff, the doffed cap of a young shepherd as he holds his hand to his heart--all this motion as the baby Jesus himself lifts his haloed head off his pallet of straw to welcome the visitors.

Margotlog: The Divine Miss Jane Austen

Margotlog: The Divine Miss Jane Austen

She's been a favorite of mine for years, but in the last decade my appreciation has deepened. She's become a moral guide. Item: in Pride and Prejudice, the configuration of family energy focuses on Mrs. Bennett and the two younger daughters who all fly fervently toward anything "in pants," as my own mother used to sniff. Mr. Bennett and the two older daughters recognize the necessity of prudence and principles, of the dangers of shallow appeals--of chasing after the soldiers stationed in a nearby town. Mrs. Bennett does not think or feel so deeply. She encourages the two younger girls in their flighty ways and when one elopes with a soldier to Scotland, Mr. Bennett comes forward to bemoan his lack of involvement. He is culpable, he tells the second daughter, Elizabeth, his confidant, because he has sat back in quiet disgust and watched his wife and daughters expose themselves to danger. It is not enough simply to have discernment and principles; one must exercise them, one must restrain and guide those who are lacking. I too have learned to exercise discernment and principles in some tense and difficult family passages.

It helps me understand the restraint, clarity, wit, and narrow perspectives of Miss Austen's world to place her in the 18th rather than the 19th century. True, all her work published during her lifetime--Sense and Sensibility, 1811, Pride and Prejudice, 1813, Mansfield Park, 1814, and Emma, 1815--belong to the opening years of the 19th century, but she was born the year the American Revolution began, 1775. She belongs to the younger edge of our American founding fathers and mothers. Think Abigail and John Adams, think George Washington and his devotion to duty, think Thomas Jefferson and his immense learning coupled with a duplicity we now understand in his private life--his long sexual relationship with Sally Hemmings, technically classed a slave. It helps me to imagine Abigail Adams as Miss Austen's American counterpart--highly literary, suffering through serious illness (smallpox in Abigail's case; typhus in Jane's), lives focused on family yet with minds so enlarged by reading and wit, solitude and connections with the larger world, that they become educated as much by limitations as by incursions and excursions. Jane Austen never went across the ocean as did Abigail Adams; she never married nor managed a family farm on her own as did Abigail. But her small family circle of her sister Cassandra and her mother was enriched constantly by visits from her many brothers and their friends, some of whom saw the beginning of the French Revolution.

The Divine Miss Jane has also become a writerly guide. She revised and revised and revised. Looking at the publication dates--1811-1815--we'd guess that she wrote fast and furious, but each of those novels had begun much earlier, changed direction and titles. One also assumes, that their wit and plot devices became more firmly allied to deeper psychological and moral meanings. Reading Mansfield Park now, I see something I have missed in earlier enjoyments: that the amateur theatricals which take place in the first part of the book occur only because Sir Bertram, the head of the household, is away tending to his plantations in Antigua. The theatricals so appall Fanny Price, the poor relation whom the Bertrams have benevolently brought into their household, that she cannot take part in them. Yet she (and we) witness how the young rake Henry Crawford makes love to her cousin Maria under the cover of their roles. Maria is engaged; her betrothed, a rather dim young man, feels the wrongness of her behavior but hasn't the language or force to make effective protest.

Once Sir Bertram returns and finds his household disordered by these theatricals, they are immediately put to a stop. But he has missed witnessing Henry Crawford's offense against Maria's engagement. When he meets Henry Crawford, he sees only a young man who is courting the slowly blooming Fanny Price. Thus when Henry proposes to Fanny and she insists with terror-stricken reticence that she cannot marry such a man, Sir Thomas judges her harshly. He thinks she is too indulgent of finicky dislike, that she would do well to reconsider what Henry can offer her. We and Fanny know better. Thus the simple plot device of Sir Thomas' removal both allows Henry to show his true colors early in the book, and later creates the rising tension between Sir Thomas's ignorance and Fanny's knowledge of Henry. We too have to be reminded of how Henry behaved during the theatricals, for Miss Jane in her skill and wit has turned him toward us in a more favorable light. As Fanny's suitor, he has become admirable and likeable.

Now, we wait to see how Jane, in her wisdom, will unveil him fully and revolve Fanny once again toward her cousin Edmund who has throughout the novel been her protector and confidant. Edmund too must be reminded of Henry's previous behavior. And disabused of his infatuation for Henry's sister Mary. When these two interlopers are dispatched, the author has cleared the stage of their crucial interference--there would be no story without the Crawfords. In the small world of this fiction, there may be only one place outside the household where Fanny can go to resolve her situation--to her former home in Portsmouth, to her mother's poor efforts and her father's drunkenness. Is this what I remember from earlier readings? I'm now prepared to find out how Austen opens this tiny world toward a larger future for dear, beloved Fanny.

Margotlog: Venice First Impressions

Margotlog: Venice First Impressions

The last time I saw Venice I was older than 10 and younger than forty. What I remember: houses standing up to their doorways in water, boats navigating canals, a hotel room with incredibly high ceilings and windows draped in brocade. That was in my doctor's-wife phase. Now I choose intimate, modest-priced hotels like the Hotel Boccassini, near the vaporetto stop Fondamente Nove on the north edge of the city. As I walked along the narrow street from the hotel toward the lagoon, the pink and white cemetery across the water expanded into a glimmering pink and white necklace draped through dark cedars.

Thomas Mann told us it was dreamy to die in Venice. I was determined not to follow suit, but I did catch the local hack and toot, which gave me an excuse to lie abed in my snug Boccassini room and read Thackery's Vanity Fair, bought from Old World Books in the ancient Venetian ghetto. The edition, from 1848, was published in Leipzig by Berhnard Tauchnitz, said John of the bookstore. Its three small volumes were perfect for me, though halfway through the first volume, I discovered an odd insertion: 20 pages duplicating 241-61. The second volume lacked these pages entirely.

For lots of tourists, Venice is surely a parade of vanities: its glorious glitter, windows chocked full of masks, its violins perpetually playing waltz tunes in the Piazza San Marco. Shoving my way through the Piazza with tour guide Judy at my side, I gasped as the glory of two churches across the lagoon: Palladio's great Rendentore, and San Giorgio Maggiore. Now I was standing between two columns at the water's edge: one with the winged lion of San Marco and the other with a man conquoring a dragon, San Teodoro--this is a "no, no" according to Judy. She, Judith Sparks-Zebedeo, has made a forte of concocting specially tailored tours of Venezia: if you want a wedding on a gondola, she's your woman: TUTTOVENE21A@hotmail.com (or hotmail.it). We met standing at a bar to celebrate Tony Green's little exhibition of paintings: Tony Green from New Orleans, Judy Sparks from Connecticut. Who brought us together: John Francis Philimore the bookseller from Old World Books (venezialibri@yahoo.it).

It's wearing to be constantly speaking an outsider language. It's also possible with a compatriot in "la lingua" to receive titbits: such as Judy's story about the water-borne ambulances. "I had a friend call," Judy said, "I was too doubled-over with chest pain. The operator asked the address, said all five city 'ambulanze' were out and then asked was I American? Why? 'Perhaps she is overweight and a smoker?'" Ah, the impression we make on Italians who are far more likely to be smokers than most Americans but not so likely to be obese. Judy's friend took her by vaporetto to the hospital, housed in a marvelous building with trompe l'oeil bas reliefs of men in turbans. The diagnosis: nothing life-threatening.

Usually I went alone, on foot to discover the little surprises of architecture, the little moments of being lost and asking for directions: "straight ahead, Signora and over two bridges." And the little moments of life. In the Campo Santa Maria Formosa (where an ATM machine gave me a receipt but no money), I watched two four-year-olds with a big red ball playing with a small Jack Russell terrier. The dog chased and captured the ball--his white body bright against its red, then he held it firm with one paw, while the kids, one also in red, tried to extract it. Soon the ball was in motion again. The mother smiled as I took their photo.

How was this any different from American kids at a playground? It was the expanse of white pavement, the solemn white church in the background, the huge old pozzo or well as is found in the middle of nearly every Venetian campo or piazzo, and the wide blue sky. Plus the children played as adults gossiped around the well, as strollers passed to and from the fruit-seller or entered the church--all life congregated in one place, not separated and compartmentalized as we do here.

Next: Tintoretto!

Margotlog: Those Pesky Dialects

Margotlog: Those Pesky Dialects

Reading about Venice, before going for a visit, I discover in Jan Morris' book (named for the city) that the Venetians have a dialect distinctly their own. Not only do they elide standard Italian--removing the ll's in bello to become beo, but they substitute their own words for the usual: fork is not forchetta but piron. A watch is relozo, not orologio. One of the reasons I return again and again to Italy is my love of the language: if I don't rev up my memory (listening to language tapes) and then speak Italian for a week or so, it declines, maybe never to be heard again. But what about a place where "my" Italian is forestalled by ancient, sly alterations? I promise a report.

There are the dialects within our own country. Charleston, South Carolina, where I grew up--a Yankee pomodoro (tomato) within the Southern peaches--has its peculiar speech, drawling its charming (and like Venice facing the sea) somewhat self-satisfied way through languid heat and short winter chill. As a girl, I could hear the whites' drawl and discover meaning in it, but when the black people of the city talked, I was completely cut off. Later I did some research on Gullah, the creole originating on the sea islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, and discovered it's a combination of the African language(s) spoken by the enslaved African peoples and the English spoken by 18th century white Charlestonians.

Charleston was one of the largest ports of colonial settlement: in fact. Wikipedia thinks that half of the African-Americans who trace their ancestry to slavery, came through Charleston. Many of them had a sojourn first in Brazil, then the Bahamas or Barbados. These skilled rice growers (from rice-growing parts of Africa) helped Charleston planters create extensive rice cultivation, on large, remote plantations where the white population was very small compared to the black. Not surprisingly some West African traditions took root: like the "shouts" or dance/sing/cry out religious celebrations which became part of local churches. I remember listening to recordings made by Alan Lomax of these shouts. Vivid, heart-pounding, hard to resist.

The wonderful anthology, Black-Eyed Susans, Midnight Birds, edited by Mary Helen Washington in 1990, contains a long story by Sherley Anne Williams, "Meditations on History," in which a pregnant slave, who's part of an insurrection on a trading coffle, escapes her white captors through communicating with "maroons" or tiny communities of escaped slaves. Her communication is entirely through song/lament/calls--all blended with Christian hymns, but having the stamp of the African shout.

We in Minnesota have so little experience with this part of American history (as do, in fact, many many other white Americans) that we either never consider this current of language and culture among us or pooh-pooh its important. In fact, I'd venture to guess that most African-Americans living in the U.S. today are bi or tri-lingual, speaking a creole among themselves, and a version of "standard" American English to whites. Obviously there will be cross-overs, bits of speech that enter their "standard" English from the creole. When the English teacher in me corrects these cross-overs, I try to remind myself of my own on-going attempts to speak Italian wherever I visit Italy. Venice will probably offer the biggest linguistic challenge I've encountered, though the Florentine dialect has thrown me for a loop more than once. The minute I step off the trade, hotel and museum routes and attempt conversation with a Florentine native, I'm stymied. I'm preparing myself to be soon stymied in Venice!

And why do these pockets of specialized speech persist? In Italy, which resisted unification for centuries and even now has trouble acting as a unified country (we in the U.S. are taking lessons there), the local dialects signified belonging--them and us, outsiders and insiders, those we trust and those we don't. Despite being a relatively small country in area, Italy stretches from the Alps to almost touch Africa. TV and other kinds of mass communication change the persistence of local orientations, yet I bet more Minnesotans have read the poetry of the recent Nobel-prize-winning Swedish poet, Transtromer, than have Charlestonians. Minnesota is peopled by Swedes, Norwegians, Germans. I notice that the king and queen of Norway are now here for a visit. Those of us who grew up elsewhere may come to appreciate local specialities, but we'll never quite assimilate like those who can trace ancestors back two or three generations. I'm not complaining, only commenting, with the hope of showing that lots of other places in the world have their specialized speech and tight-knit insider groups.

Margotlog: Idling

Margotlog: Idling

She has a weak heart--it beats erratically when she is frightened or angry or determined. She wonders, seeing the two Vannguard small trucks both idling along a street near her house, do I have it in me to approach these workers in their citron vests, spraying different colors on sidewalks and streets?

She's seen cars idling in front of neighbors' homes--often because the owner of car and home is "running inside for a minute, oh don't worry, I'll be back in a jiff." Idling, odd word for a car engine that is running in place. She does some research:
*Idling for more than a second uses as much fuel as restarting the car.
* Idling 10 minutes is the equivalent of going 5 miles
* Idling 10 minutes a day for a year uses 27 gallons of gasoline

Idling. There is no poem for idling. No poem for adding carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, sulfur dioxide, and carbon dioxide, not to mention benzene to the atmosphere. We like to burn ourselves up, she thinks. We like to dump as much toxic material into lakes, streams, ground, air as possible. We do not connect"idle" with children breathing, with plants, trees, birds, beavers, etc etc--you fill in the blanks. We are quintessentially idle, loungers across the landscape. Or hackers, yup, many of us like to hack and hew. Now she's thinking of Gerard Manley Hopkins, grateful for an overlay of beautiful language to help quiet her erratic heart.

She looks up Vannguard (two n's) Utility Partners. They have offices in DeForest, Wisconsin, ironic, DeForest, meaning "of the forest," when this idling of their trucks, if prolonged and repeated, will surely help deforest, meaning wipe away those stands of green needles and leaves, the soughing of wind in branches, the partners in replenishing oxygen which we humans do like to breathe, it's one of our favorite pastimes, this breathing of clean air, children especially being smaller, have a harder time with polluted air, which idling cars/trucks/school buses makes more difficult, more problematic, children with asthma on the rise, according to a medical website. No known reason. Ha, she has a reason right here.

The worker in citron vest returning to the Vannguard (two n's) small truck, still idling, laughs a short "Ha," when she suggests (was it kindly?) that idling isn't great for the car--she's making this up on the spot, but now finds it's right, something about spark plugs gathering carbon deposits since the car is not burning off all its impurities in the gas.

This "Ha," a kind of snort, which she's heard before, usually out of the snouts of men rather than women, a happy dismissal of any curtailment of easy-going ways. Not that she's opposed to taking it easy. In fact, easy would be cutting the engine.

Isn't this guy in his citron vest just a little bit worried that as he leaves his Vannguard (two n's) truck idling near her home,that someone might jump in and drive away with it, keys certainly still in the ignition which is on?

There, she's done it, confronted the Idler. And is her heart erratic and jumpy? No, surprisingly. She's filled with righteous energy. Decides to follow through on her frequent pledge to print up a card against Idling--Vermont, where idling is illegal, displays just such a thing on its state-sponsored website against idling. Wouldn't it be a good thing too in Minnesota--to make idling illegal? Then she could take down the license number and file a complaint. Which she will do, in any case, hoping that Vannguard (two n's) takes to heart this message against idling.

Vannguard Utility Partners, 5927 Haase Rd., DeForest, Wisconsin 53532, telephone: 608-223-2014. They might find it easy to respond if they received lots of letters or phone calls about their idle ways.

Margotlog: History as Story

Margotlog: History as Story

My father used to complain that in my mother's house, he walked on flowers, sat on flowers, ate on flowers and slept on flowers. My mother must have taken this as a compliment because she never changed the decor. It was equally true of him that he talked history, walked history, ate it, and no doubt dreamed it. Since he taught it as well, at The Citadel in Charleston, South Carolina, his passion for the past seemed insatiable.

And also skewed. Recently I've been discussing the telling of history with my students. Especially African-American history. The amount of history that rises above the ocean of drowned daily incident tends to be pushed there by the people with muscle, brains, and dough. For decades, white people told the story of slavery. It was a kind of whitewash. Forgive me, but it largely went like this: happy darkies blent their blood, sweat and tears with the rich loam of American plantations, and in payment were Christianized and civilized because, of course, they came from darkest, barbaric Africa. Then along came Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin to flip that story on its ear and display the ugly fact that white owners and overseers committed far worse barbarism than any imported from the dark continent.

Fast forward to the last quarter of the 20th century and the present. Here's another truism: sometimes fiction can get at complicated interactions from the past with greater nuance and precision than even enlightened history. Item: we just read an amazing piece of short fiction by the African-American writer Sherley Anne Williams. "Meditations on History" (1976) collected in Black-Eyed Susans/Midnight Birds (1975-80). I know, some thirty-five years have passed since this story was published, but for my money, that does not mean it's outmoded, simply perennial.

The story opens with two main characters in a slave community--the gardener Kaine and the field hand Dessa who are lovers. Their talk and love-making shimmer and shout from the page until Kaine is killed by the master, and Dessa, great with his child, sold to a slave trader. This is now related by a white historian, probably from the north, intent upon capturing the truth about Dessa and others in the coffle who've staged the murder of one of the white traders, and allowed some in the coffle to escape. The historian finds Dessa confined to a root cellar, and at first she refuses to talk to him. He cuffs her for her hostility, then backs off, chastizing himself for descending to cruelty when he must keep a sane attitude toward her if he is to get the story from her.

This is one of the story's first ironies and comments on making history. History is made from outside the black community, item number one. History transgresses across the line of civility to get that story, item number two. And as the relationship between Dessa and the historian develops, and she begins to relate what happened to her and Kaine, to her in the coffle, the historian's prejudice and her mistrust soften until it appears that they both see each other simply as humans, and we readers begin to think maybe what he's reporting is coming closer to what really happened.

Interspersed with her bits of conversation, Dessa sings. This annoys the historian. What good are songs when he is after facts and motivations? He is intent upon writing a guide to help slave-owners avoid slave rebellions. Then comes the day when the historian is distracted, heads off with local whites after a group of "maroons," which is what hidden escaped slaves are called. These fugitives lead the whites on a wild goose chase, never revealing themselves. When the historian returns, he finds the unthinkable has happened: Dessa has escaped. By then we have picked up the message contained in her songs: "Oh, it won't be long. Say, it won't be long....Soul's gon' ride that heav'nly train."

Like the quilts made by slaves, their songs carried a message of flight and hope for freedom, which most whites like the historian here, never grasped. This is a cautionary reminder to us who attempt to penetrate histories for which there is little written record from both sides of the power divide. Sometimes what families pass down and what later generations fashion into story penetrates closer to what may have happened than any notebook created by the dominant, self-assured partner. Yet, the story and the history of slavery are told by both parties, both races. We must exercise caution, humility and irony in its pursuit, suggest Sherley Anne Williams.

Margotlog: Fire, Fire, My Heart, My Heart

Margotlog: Fire, Fire, My Heart, My Heart

Lately I've been smelling smoke. My heart is tamped down, the fire banked, but the melody lingers on. Robert Frost's poem "Fire and Ice" (1920) comes to mind:

Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

Our woods are burning near Canada. Earlier this year, late July, the smell of smoke from a huge swatch of Ontario on fire drifted over the big lake Superior and settled into my loft. There were no flames visible, yet we were burning.

In our Saint Paul neighborhood, I am developing a modest reputation as the "tree lady." Summer bulletins about watering trees--slow flow in drought once a week--contributes to put leaves over my head. Yesterday in a yoga session, I mentioned tree watering again, and one of us said, "I called Target to tell them their new trees planted along Hamline Avenue are dying. Target was very concerned." Slow hose, an hour a week until moisture once again falls from the sky. We have just completed the driest September since the 1880s.

Floods or droughts of Biblical proportions. The Senate in the relative absence of the House passed a bill recently to keep the U.S. government operating (Good of them, no?). A big part of the Federal Emergency Management allocation were funds for rebuilding New Hampshire and Vermont from their recent floods. Should we also mention a Texas fire that recently burned out over 1000 homes?

Frost's poem predicts death by fire which rhymes with desire. Or hate which does not rhyme with ice but shares its chill. There are Dantean undertones. Last evening two houses down, the young couple sat outside around a campfire (in the city?) with flames sending sparks spiraling toward their roof. I smelled the smoke and from various windows, caught sight of the leaping flames. Finally my heart took fire. Opening the front door quietly, I softly tread the few yards and turned into their driveway. The young gent stood at the outdoor spigot with a watering can. "I've been keeping the grass around the fire wet," he assured me. I urged caution, I mentioned illegal burning in the city proper. I called myself a "sorry nudge."

We need songsters of Movement capacity to set us on fire for righting climate Earth.