Where They Talk of Walls and Sun
My last stop in Italy was with my wonderful friends, the visual artist Patricia Glee Smith (born in Savannah, Illinois) * and her Italian husband Giangi Poli. Giangi used to create documentaries on science and politics for Italian public television; in fact, my first night there, we viewed some of his 1970 films made in the United States. The subjects were protest and the environment. Particularly powerful, I thought, was one about Staten Island where huge scows carried garbage from the other New York boroughs and dumped it. Giangi documented a fish kill along the shores of Staten Island where children flitted into the waves, nudging or lifting dead fish onto the beach, then kicking them around like beach balls. I had forgotten that along with protesting the Vietnam war, young Americans sang and marched for clean air and clean water. The legacy of that protest remains in the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts, still constantly under siege from various interest groups.
Over thirty years, Pat and Giangi have moved from the center of Rome to a hill town just inside the next northern province of Umbria. The town, Otricoli, exists on two levels: the ancient Roman city of Oriculum along the Tiber where the ruins are overgrown with vines and herbs, adjacent to vineyards, olive groves and sheep meadows; and the upper town, truly a hike from the river valley.
As I stroll around reconstructions of the upper walls, I pause by a placard describing the various stages in which the walls were built. The most ancient were constructed three or four centuries before Christ, as complements to the lower and much grander town--a kind of fortification. Those walls were made with huge blocks so well shaped that they rested together without mortar, imposing variations of the low New England walls made by carefully selecting and arranging stone upon stone. Later, in Otricoli, when the barbarians arrived in the 800s and the Tiber changed its course, the inhabitants abandoned the river site and moved up into the hills. There, medieval walls still ring the oldest part of the town--with its grey stone buildings, inner courtyards adorned with low wide arches, outside stairways, and small windows. Truly another kind of architecture than the braver and more sweeping Renaissance style with its classical balance and bold facades.
Yet, when the inhabitants moved to safety, they made regular forays on the ancient Roman site, hauling up columns and bits of freize. I pause at a corner where a low marble column fits into a medieval wall; and another where a bit of marble frieze shows an enraged eagle. Pat and Giangi's three-story tower house sports no Roman marble, but one of its inner walls is shared with the outer medieval wall. Thus opposite their computer rises the heavy, mortared blocks of medieval protection. Once cleaning and reconstructing this outer/inner wall, Giangi unearthed a battered metal vase filled with ancient coins, probably stashed there during a siege or famine or plague.
Today the threat is global warming. Friends across the valley in San Vico face a huge, newly installed field of solar panels.
"Wonderful," I say. "I just read that Italy may soon become one of the most important producers of photovoltaic energy in Europe." None of these Italians and Americans living in Italy are thrilled by this. The field of solar panels blights their view of plateau and hills, of tiny stone chapels catching the sunsets.
"These panels should be installed in industrial sites," they argue. "This is a power grab to make money." Yes, I think, they are probably right about where the panels should be situated. But what's wrong with individual efforts to make money? Isn't that exactly what the United States is based on? Of course, but in cases involving elements of sky, air, earth, water, land, which are held in common, national or even international regulation are crucial. Do I or these friends in Italy truly believe that regulation will trump commercial effort? No. Regulation will probably come later, piecemeal, fought over again and again, like our Clean Water and Clean Air Acts. What curious and interesting parallels and differences exist between the U.S. and the incredibly old and compelling Tiber Valley with its hill-top towns, inhabitants with ancient lineages and more modern American residents who love its history, views, food, and companionship.
* Note: to find out more about Pat's art visit her website. Google Patricia Glee Smith.
Tuesday, October 19, 2010
Wednesday, October 13, 2010
Margotlog: The Land of Eels
Margotlog: The Land of Eels
In Ferrara, Italy, not far from the Adriatic Coast, my friend traveling with me recounts the eel festival in Commachio. In Ferrara, the streets are paved with small stones worn smooth by the huge Po River which brings agricultural wealth to the middle of northern Italy. The stones, called ciottoli, make walking rather hard, but they give an antique appearance even to the streets of Ferrara. Ferrara founded in the middle ages and enhanced by the d'Este family in the Renaissance wears a lovely brick warmth; even its cathedral tower is covered in warm pink and white marble. It is a quiet old city because motorized traffic is prohibited. Everyone rides a bicycle or walks. And the bicycles are adorned with woven or wicker backets, bells, soft seats, and leather covers over their wheels, which I puzzle out and decide help to keep the tires from getting wet. But even as I write this, I realize it's probably not correct.
In the Archaeological Museum, we wander through rooms of vases and amphora, plates and other serving dishes dug out of preChristian tombs in the Po Delta. I'm particularly taken with the flat fish dishes adorned with various kinds of fish, especially cuttlefish, a kind of octopus; flat flounder-type fish and many other kinds whose names are given in modern Italian. Generally, signage in Italian museums leaves much to be desired: there is a lot of arcane information, but almost nothing that makes sense to the casual observer. True in this case except for the fish bowls, wonderfully explicated; for the tombs themselves which are represented by skeletons drawn in fake sand with the amphora and dishes presented in the same positions as originally found. And for the amber necklaces which the placard tells us came originally from the Baltic.
I love best the two piroques which were first unearthed from the Po Delta in the 1920s or 30s, but almost immediately recovered with muck, then fully excavated in 1946. For two years archaeologists worked to preserve them--difficult to do with wood which would normally disintegrate if left to the air. Now these long log boats, from the 2nd or 3rd century after Christ, are housed in their own dimly lit room. As I study the placards I think I hear the cack-hoot of a heron; then the cries of gulls. Actually I am hearing these bird calls because just beyond the piroques is showing a slide-show accompanied by sounds of the Po Delta. In this watery world, the piroques would ride easily across the shallow water; flamingos still step their strange backward-jointed legs--they're not pink like the ones we see in Florida but mostly white since the shrimp that contain the agent that colors their feathers isn't always available in the Po Delta.
This dreamy flowing water, dotted with strips of land, makes me feel enchanted. "The next time you come to Italy," friends here insist, "you must go to Venice. From there it is easy to take a tour into the Po Delta." I know, it's time I visited Venice, but even more, I am drawn to this watery world, more water than land, flowing quietly and insistently into the ancient seas across which very early Italians ordered vases from Greece, glass from the Phoenicians in Sicily or North Africa, and amber like clotted gold from the frigid Baltic.
In Ferrara, Italy, not far from the Adriatic Coast, my friend traveling with me recounts the eel festival in Commachio. In Ferrara, the streets are paved with small stones worn smooth by the huge Po River which brings agricultural wealth to the middle of northern Italy. The stones, called ciottoli, make walking rather hard, but they give an antique appearance even to the streets of Ferrara. Ferrara founded in the middle ages and enhanced by the d'Este family in the Renaissance wears a lovely brick warmth; even its cathedral tower is covered in warm pink and white marble. It is a quiet old city because motorized traffic is prohibited. Everyone rides a bicycle or walks. And the bicycles are adorned with woven or wicker backets, bells, soft seats, and leather covers over their wheels, which I puzzle out and decide help to keep the tires from getting wet. But even as I write this, I realize it's probably not correct.
In the Archaeological Museum, we wander through rooms of vases and amphora, plates and other serving dishes dug out of preChristian tombs in the Po Delta. I'm particularly taken with the flat fish dishes adorned with various kinds of fish, especially cuttlefish, a kind of octopus; flat flounder-type fish and many other kinds whose names are given in modern Italian. Generally, signage in Italian museums leaves much to be desired: there is a lot of arcane information, but almost nothing that makes sense to the casual observer. True in this case except for the fish bowls, wonderfully explicated; for the tombs themselves which are represented by skeletons drawn in fake sand with the amphora and dishes presented in the same positions as originally found. And for the amber necklaces which the placard tells us came originally from the Baltic.
I love best the two piroques which were first unearthed from the Po Delta in the 1920s or 30s, but almost immediately recovered with muck, then fully excavated in 1946. For two years archaeologists worked to preserve them--difficult to do with wood which would normally disintegrate if left to the air. Now these long log boats, from the 2nd or 3rd century after Christ, are housed in their own dimly lit room. As I study the placards I think I hear the cack-hoot of a heron; then the cries of gulls. Actually I am hearing these bird calls because just beyond the piroques is showing a slide-show accompanied by sounds of the Po Delta. In this watery world, the piroques would ride easily across the shallow water; flamingos still step their strange backward-jointed legs--they're not pink like the ones we see in Florida but mostly white since the shrimp that contain the agent that colors their feathers isn't always available in the Po Delta.
This dreamy flowing water, dotted with strips of land, makes me feel enchanted. "The next time you come to Italy," friends here insist, "you must go to Venice. From there it is easy to take a tour into the Po Delta." I know, it's time I visited Venice, but even more, I am drawn to this watery world, more water than land, flowing quietly and insistently into the ancient seas across which very early Italians ordered vases from Greece, glass from the Phoenicians in Sicily or North Africa, and amber like clotted gold from the frigid Baltic.
Thursday, October 7, 2010
Margotlog: THe Moon's Fingernail
Hanging in the night sky and scratching at the window, the moon's fingernail insists upon entering. What exactly it brings--fear, loathing, cold distance, even a brief respite from self-absorption with its reminder of a pearl, a shell--the moon links me to absolutely encompassing night thoughts.
I've been listening to George Guidall read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Even from the next room with a door closed, my husband comments the next morning, "He has an amazing voice." It's true and more. The voice entices, strengthens, seduces, terrifies, evokes pity. And though it's in the lower register of male voices, in the voice box of this master interpreter, it can evoke the Christ-touched Sonia, the harlot, as well as this fiction's version of the grand inquisitor. Not to mention the murderer at the heart of the novel: Raskolnikov.
The voice also hangs a sliver of moon outside my imagination, memory. I read Crime and Punishment for the first time in my 20s. Too young, my husband and I agree, to fully appreciate both the absolute encompassing penetration of the author, and the range of human experience he depicts. When I think of truly great literature, works of words that take the time to evoke the beggar boy sweeping the street for a pence and the faltering aging lord whose wife will ultimately die against the pauper's grave whom she has never forgotten (Dickens in Bleak House), or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, or Melville's Moby Dick, or Mary Gaskell's North and South, I have to return to the 19th century.
Time, and a willingness to elaborate, to carry the reader deeper and deeper into a voice--such as the minor inquisitor who has Raskolnikov in his pudgy clutches as I turn off the CD player and try to close my eyes. We sit there inside Raskolnikov's fevered brain, waver with anger, fury, despair, intelligence while the inquisitor spins himself like a billiard ball, says the author, around his tiny office, weaving a web of little laughs, distractions, assurances, all the time coming in tiny steps toward some kind of revelation.
Enough of this: I don't want to warn you off the book. Because it contains characters of clear mind, moral discernment, beauty of heart (Raskolnikov's mother and sister, for instance; his best friend)--each in his or her own pugilistic or shrinking or careful behavior. Perhaps it's the range of humanity these works offer that compels me to remember and praise them long after I've "listened" to them.
There are works of fiction in the 20th century which aim at such largess. James Joyce's Ulysses; Proust's seven temples dedicated to memory of pampered, distracted childhood and adulthood. Another that comes to me probably because I'm heading to Italy is Elsa Morante's History: A Story, set in World War II Italy. Let's add Catch 22, for an American view of that global infliction.
I know: there's a lot to be said for smart, snappy narratives. Tinker, for instance, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, is far more than smart and snappy, though it's relatively short, and the narrative veers off all the time from anything like chronological development.
Yet, after penetrating to its business, appreciating its set pieces and the compassion of the author for the characters (epileptic tinker, for one; his wife driven to distraction for another), I found myself putting it aside, not furiously compelled to hear it out.
This judgment strikes me as so limited on my part--as the sky begins to lighten with the promise of a sun returning to brighten us after all--that I refer to you, dear readers, whoever you are: remind me of more modern works which have taken you in their grasp after scratching at your night window.
I've been listening to George Guidall read Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Even from the next room with a door closed, my husband comments the next morning, "He has an amazing voice." It's true and more. The voice entices, strengthens, seduces, terrifies, evokes pity. And though it's in the lower register of male voices, in the voice box of this master interpreter, it can evoke the Christ-touched Sonia, the harlot, as well as this fiction's version of the grand inquisitor. Not to mention the murderer at the heart of the novel: Raskolnikov.
The voice also hangs a sliver of moon outside my imagination, memory. I read Crime and Punishment for the first time in my 20s. Too young, my husband and I agree, to fully appreciate both the absolute encompassing penetration of the author, and the range of human experience he depicts. When I think of truly great literature, works of words that take the time to evoke the beggar boy sweeping the street for a pence and the faltering aging lord whose wife will ultimately die against the pauper's grave whom she has never forgotten (Dickens in Bleak House), or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, or Melville's Moby Dick, or Mary Gaskell's North and South, I have to return to the 19th century.
Time, and a willingness to elaborate, to carry the reader deeper and deeper into a voice--such as the minor inquisitor who has Raskolnikov in his pudgy clutches as I turn off the CD player and try to close my eyes. We sit there inside Raskolnikov's fevered brain, waver with anger, fury, despair, intelligence while the inquisitor spins himself like a billiard ball, says the author, around his tiny office, weaving a web of little laughs, distractions, assurances, all the time coming in tiny steps toward some kind of revelation.
Enough of this: I don't want to warn you off the book. Because it contains characters of clear mind, moral discernment, beauty of heart (Raskolnikov's mother and sister, for instance; his best friend)--each in his or her own pugilistic or shrinking or careful behavior. Perhaps it's the range of humanity these works offer that compels me to remember and praise them long after I've "listened" to them.
There are works of fiction in the 20th century which aim at such largess. James Joyce's Ulysses; Proust's seven temples dedicated to memory of pampered, distracted childhood and adulthood. Another that comes to me probably because I'm heading to Italy is Elsa Morante's History: A Story, set in World War II Italy. Let's add Catch 22, for an American view of that global infliction.
I know: there's a lot to be said for smart, snappy narratives. Tinker, for instance, which recently won the Pulitzer Prize, is far more than smart and snappy, though it's relatively short, and the narrative veers off all the time from anything like chronological development.
Yet, after penetrating to its business, appreciating its set pieces and the compassion of the author for the characters (epileptic tinker, for one; his wife driven to distraction for another), I found myself putting it aside, not furiously compelled to hear it out.
This judgment strikes me as so limited on my part--as the sky begins to lighten with the promise of a sun returning to brighten us after all--that I refer to you, dear readers, whoever you are: remind me of more modern works which have taken you in their grasp after scratching at your night window.
Thursday, September 30, 2010
Margotlog: Facebook, Twitter, Social Change and How to Save the Planet, etc.l
Facebook, Twitter, Social Change, and How to Save the Planet & Ourselves
Yesterday I read a startling article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker about "weak" and "strong" connections (Oct. 4, "Small Change"). According to Gladwell, the young African American students who started the wave of lunch counter sit-ins in 1960 knew each other personally, face-to-face. The first four from North Carolina A.&T., in Greensboro had stayed up late in the dorms of their all-black colleges, arguing the tormented questions of segregation and racism. Young, radicalized by the pressure and degradation of racism, they eventually "dared" each other to take seats at an all-white drugstore lunch counter and attempt to order coffee. What began in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, spread to other North Carolina and S. Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee communities, and within a month sit-ins were occurring across the south, where thousands of young black people challenged the status quo.
It was dangerous business, and the young protesters dressed up as if they were going to church--suits and ties for the young men; nice dresses, hats and heels for the young women. They were harrassed by police, by teams of thugs (sometimes football teams from neighboring white high schools or colleges). But the movement spread because, Gladwell argues, face-to-face personal relationships sustained these daring young people.
The Civil Rights Movement was tightly organized around black churches. For example, the MOntgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 sustained a year-long alternate transportation system for black people in Montgomery because black churches from ministers down to "captains" to "troops" kept private cars running to transport black workers throughout the city, day after day, week after week. Such an effort demanded frequent, personal accountability which centered around the huge black churches in the city. The drivers, their organizers and their passengers knew each other; if they let each other down, they would suffer the personal disgrace and humiliation of witnessing their failure before God and their entire congregations.
Facebook, Twitter and other so-called "loose" connections, argues Gladwell, cannot sustain such dangerous, personal, daily commitment to change. He cites the studies of social scientists to back him up. Imagine, for a moment, putting yourself among the traffic on highway 94 to leaflet, pester, try and convince. These are the long lines of cars I see daily stalled, going east day after the working day. There are simply too many cars for the highway capacity, for this ironically termed "rush hour." Because there is no rush possible. Too many vehicles, driven by single people, clog the roads for any single car to rush anywhere.
I don't know how long it takes for each car and driver to reach its destination, but I can tell you, I wouldn't want to sit in that traffic after working all day. I'd do quite a bit to avoid it. But obviously many many people either cannot or will not make necessary changes to prevent this. Necessary changes such as mass transit, including buses that carry perhaps 50 people per vehicle; or trains, light rail, for instance, where hundreds are transported by one carbon-spewing engine. Or better yet, light rail and buses fueled by electricity created by wind or solar.
What would it take to educate these drivers, to bring them to the point of making or at least accepting change? One person couldn't do it. I couldn't, by myself, go car to car, trying to convince the drivers stalled there, that this mode of exiting the city for the eastern suburbs is harmful to themselves and to all of us because it contributes to huge carbon emissions, which up the carbon in our atmosphere and contribute to global warming (euphemistically called "climate change").
Facebook, Twitter, and this very medium I'm using now, Blogging, can present ideas, notions, tidbits; they might gather poets at a reading, they might encourage readers at "the click of a button" to protest this, that, or the other, but they will not rouse groups of people to risky, face-to-face encounters necessary for change. Neighborhoods, perhaps, can organize, especially if they have an already existing structure of organization like a church or community center with a leader, a site and a cadre of lieutenants. I know, the war metaphor isn't the greatest, but it does convey the need for discipline, commitment of time, energy and risk, plus something the military also creates sort of by default: a personal attachment to one's buddies, to saving lives if they are hurt in the contest. To being in this together for the long haul, my arm linked in yours, my ideas and hopes and fears and body beside yours. Despite its attraction, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc. do not provide this lively contact.
One last, humorous example. One of my favorite graduate students was writing her final master's paper on internet dating agencies like Match.Com. One day as we worked together, she blurted out in frustration: "But we had such good chemistry!" She meant that the emails she'd exchanged with this failed guy had been witty and lively and enticing. As the flurry of on-line messages flew back and forth, her heart beat faster. She liked the guy's picture on the internet. She became very eager to meet him. This was the "chemistry" she was talking about.
"Darling," I said, "there can be no chemistry over the internet. Chemistry is about real, flesh-and-blood encounters. The scent of hair, flash of eyes, the swagger or slump--it's almost indescribable until you've experienced it face-to-face." It was no surprise to me that her on-line build-up didn't necessarily translate into whole body affection. Internet dating and whole body dating aren't the same thing at all. What anyone puts out in the privacy of their home on the internet doesn't have much to do with the way they behave when confronted by a real person, who will want real things that begin with coffee or a glass of wine but can go much further to commitment. Or to flight or embarrassed stammering, which is what she got across the coffee from her internet beau. No real chemistry face-to-face, was what she experienced. Real failed chemistry.
Yesterday I read a startling article by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker about "weak" and "strong" connections (Oct. 4, "Small Change"). According to Gladwell, the young African American students who started the wave of lunch counter sit-ins in 1960 knew each other personally, face-to-face. The first four from North Carolina A.&T., in Greensboro had stayed up late in the dorms of their all-black colleges, arguing the tormented questions of segregation and racism. Young, radicalized by the pressure and degradation of racism, they eventually "dared" each other to take seats at an all-white drugstore lunch counter and attempt to order coffee. What began in Greensboro and Winston-Salem, North Carolina, spread to other North Carolina and S. Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee communities, and within a month sit-ins were occurring across the south, where thousands of young black people challenged the status quo.
It was dangerous business, and the young protesters dressed up as if they were going to church--suits and ties for the young men; nice dresses, hats and heels for the young women. They were harrassed by police, by teams of thugs (sometimes football teams from neighboring white high schools or colleges). But the movement spread because, Gladwell argues, face-to-face personal relationships sustained these daring young people.
The Civil Rights Movement was tightly organized around black churches. For example, the MOntgomery Bus Boycott in 1955 sustained a year-long alternate transportation system for black people in Montgomery because black churches from ministers down to "captains" to "troops" kept private cars running to transport black workers throughout the city, day after day, week after week. Such an effort demanded frequent, personal accountability which centered around the huge black churches in the city. The drivers, their organizers and their passengers knew each other; if they let each other down, they would suffer the personal disgrace and humiliation of witnessing their failure before God and their entire congregations.
Facebook, Twitter and other so-called "loose" connections, argues Gladwell, cannot sustain such dangerous, personal, daily commitment to change. He cites the studies of social scientists to back him up. Imagine, for a moment, putting yourself among the traffic on highway 94 to leaflet, pester, try and convince. These are the long lines of cars I see daily stalled, going east day after the working day. There are simply too many cars for the highway capacity, for this ironically termed "rush hour." Because there is no rush possible. Too many vehicles, driven by single people, clog the roads for any single car to rush anywhere.
I don't know how long it takes for each car and driver to reach its destination, but I can tell you, I wouldn't want to sit in that traffic after working all day. I'd do quite a bit to avoid it. But obviously many many people either cannot or will not make necessary changes to prevent this. Necessary changes such as mass transit, including buses that carry perhaps 50 people per vehicle; or trains, light rail, for instance, where hundreds are transported by one carbon-spewing engine. Or better yet, light rail and buses fueled by electricity created by wind or solar.
What would it take to educate these drivers, to bring them to the point of making or at least accepting change? One person couldn't do it. I couldn't, by myself, go car to car, trying to convince the drivers stalled there, that this mode of exiting the city for the eastern suburbs is harmful to themselves and to all of us because it contributes to huge carbon emissions, which up the carbon in our atmosphere and contribute to global warming (euphemistically called "climate change").
Facebook, Twitter, and this very medium I'm using now, Blogging, can present ideas, notions, tidbits; they might gather poets at a reading, they might encourage readers at "the click of a button" to protest this, that, or the other, but they will not rouse groups of people to risky, face-to-face encounters necessary for change. Neighborhoods, perhaps, can organize, especially if they have an already existing structure of organization like a church or community center with a leader, a site and a cadre of lieutenants. I know, the war metaphor isn't the greatest, but it does convey the need for discipline, commitment of time, energy and risk, plus something the military also creates sort of by default: a personal attachment to one's buddies, to saving lives if they are hurt in the contest. To being in this together for the long haul, my arm linked in yours, my ideas and hopes and fears and body beside yours. Despite its attraction, Facebook, Twitter, email, etc. do not provide this lively contact.
One last, humorous example. One of my favorite graduate students was writing her final master's paper on internet dating agencies like Match.Com. One day as we worked together, she blurted out in frustration: "But we had such good chemistry!" She meant that the emails she'd exchanged with this failed guy had been witty and lively and enticing. As the flurry of on-line messages flew back and forth, her heart beat faster. She liked the guy's picture on the internet. She became very eager to meet him. This was the "chemistry" she was talking about.
"Darling," I said, "there can be no chemistry over the internet. Chemistry is about real, flesh-and-blood encounters. The scent of hair, flash of eyes, the swagger or slump--it's almost indescribable until you've experienced it face-to-face." It was no surprise to me that her on-line build-up didn't necessarily translate into whole body affection. Internet dating and whole body dating aren't the same thing at all. What anyone puts out in the privacy of their home on the internet doesn't have much to do with the way they behave when confronted by a real person, who will want real things that begin with coffee or a glass of wine but can go much further to commitment. Or to flight or embarrassed stammering, which is what she got across the coffee from her internet beau. No real chemistry face-to-face, was what she experienced. Real failed chemistry.
Wednesday, September 29, 2010
Margotlog: Correction & Mrs. Gaskell
Margotlog: Correction & Mrs. Gaskell
Spelling isn't my strong suit: the author from Ferrara is Georgio Bassani. Title of his work correct: The Garden of the Fitzi-Continis. Other wonderful writers I've encountered in Italy sometimes have nothing to do with Italy. Their books sit on the crowded shelves of my friend Patricia Glee Smith. For instance, Mary Gaskell or Mrs. Gaskell as she was called mid-19th century, the author of Cranford, North and South, and Mary Barton. Her novels contrast middle-class southern England with the mill workers and owners of the northland. Charles Dickens published her and she became an instant success.
Wife of a clergyman who moved from the south to the north to work with mill people, she captures the degredation, pathos, struggle for better working conditions of mill workers, whose lives are enmeshed in the stern, grasping rectitude of the owners. It's her power to depict interiors and landscapes, hovels and moors, crowded streets and workers covered in cotton dust, the frequent deaths, families left destitute, help of neighbors with little themselves, and usually one or two shining angels of mercy. Light and dark, damp and sun, strange twists of fate and law--I'd rank her right up there with Dickens and Dostoevsky.
Then, if you don't have time to enter her large-hearted works on paper, find the BBC productions of Cranford or North & South. Cranford is not set in the mill country, but its portraits of a slew of small town folk coupled with the grand family of the manor are truly brilliant.
More about my artist friend Pat Smith in the next blog.
Spelling isn't my strong suit: the author from Ferrara is Georgio Bassani. Title of his work correct: The Garden of the Fitzi-Continis. Other wonderful writers I've encountered in Italy sometimes have nothing to do with Italy. Their books sit on the crowded shelves of my friend Patricia Glee Smith. For instance, Mary Gaskell or Mrs. Gaskell as she was called mid-19th century, the author of Cranford, North and South, and Mary Barton. Her novels contrast middle-class southern England with the mill workers and owners of the northland. Charles Dickens published her and she became an instant success.
Wife of a clergyman who moved from the south to the north to work with mill people, she captures the degredation, pathos, struggle for better working conditions of mill workers, whose lives are enmeshed in the stern, grasping rectitude of the owners. It's her power to depict interiors and landscapes, hovels and moors, crowded streets and workers covered in cotton dust, the frequent deaths, families left destitute, help of neighbors with little themselves, and usually one or two shining angels of mercy. Light and dark, damp and sun, strange twists of fate and law--I'd rank her right up there with Dickens and Dostoevsky.
Then, if you don't have time to enter her large-hearted works on paper, find the BBC productions of Cranford or North & South. Cranford is not set in the mill country, but its portraits of a slew of small town folk coupled with the grand family of the manor are truly brilliant.
More about my artist friend Pat Smith in the next blog.
Monday, September 27, 2010
Margotlog: Correction + Ferrara
Margotlog: Correction + Ferrara
More on the Labyrinth: According to Edith Hamilton, expert on Mythology, King Minos of Crete had the great architect Daedalus build a labyrinth around a nasty secret: his wife had fallen in love with a beautiful bull, given him by Poseidon, god of the waves, and given birth (because her love for the bull was prohibited) to a monster, half bull, half man. This Minotaur waited at the center of the labyrinth for the tribute that came from Athens every year: seven beautiful youth of each sex. (Makes me think of the world wide web where daily, youths wander until they're poisoned and fall asleep for 1000 years--no, no, I'm mixing up my myths.)
The king of Athens, Aegeus, who was determined to end this harrowing of his country's youth, sent his son, the renowned Theseus, among the next contingent. Once in Crete and paraded before the King, Theseus took the heart of Minos' daughter Ariadne who couldn't bear that he enter the labyrinth and be eaten by the Minotaur. It was she who contacted Daedalus, the great "fixer," and received the thread from him which she sent with Theseus.
Theseus did as he promised: killed the Minotaur and returned, spooling up the thread to the exit. So much like walking the Christian labyrinth in reverse. He and Ariadne left Crete for Athens, but she perished on a southern shore where he soothingly had rested her, I imagine, because she suffered terrible seasickness. Distraught, he forgot to substitute a white for the black sail, a sign of success arranged before with his father. Now it was the king's turn to fall victim to this convoluted story: despairing of his son, he threw himself into the sea. And Theseus ruled gentle and democratic, one imagines, because his trials had tutored him to avoid high-handed defiance of the gods.
All this by way of turning again to Ferrara where one of the strangest and most enticing palaces in the world sports tiers of exotic frescoes. Palazzo Schifanoia or "Banish Care." At the top, as I remember, run images of court life with beautiful blond women, elegant men, rabbits (for fecundity), greyhounds and horses (for hunting), banquets, dancing, lolling on streams and lounges, flirtation, hazards and rewards. On another tier sparkle the signs of the zodiac, for there were necromancers and stargazers at the court of Count d'Este. Studying these beautifully painted images is a bit like standing in true dark and throwing back one's head to identify the constellations, named so often for Greek mythological figures, at least in our Western tradition. What did the astronomers of Islam call their star-gazing discoveries? Maybe I'll find out on my up-coming trip.
In Ferrara, also, lived one of 20th-century Italy's finest writers: Luigi Barzani, who write The Garden of the Fitzi-Continis. It's been made into a compelling film: I recommend it. Set in the 1920s, the wealthy, gated community of Italian Jews sport away their golden youth--the Fitzi-Continis--until an outsider from the more mercantile and studious class of Jews enters--a bit like threading a labyrinth to the center--fails in some obscure ways to understand what is going on, is lucky enough to exit, as the Holocaust breathes its hot, killing breath over the Alps.
I won't tell you how the story ends except to say it's tragic. What remains is the golden stone wall surrounding what was the real life family estate, the model for the Fitzi-Continis. With its canals and bicycles, its huge old plane trees and intriguing layers of architecture, Ferrara reminds me of how insulated the Italian city states remained virtually up to the unification of Italy in the 1860s-90s. They're still separate little kingdoms, each with its own civic style, locomotion, dialect, favorite restaurants (no chains, thank heaven), foods, art and architecture, on and on.
Who knows what will strike me this time as I stand before the frescoes in the Palazzo or before the portal where my father entered and left, day after day, in the late 1920s. I promise a report.
More on the Labyrinth: According to Edith Hamilton, expert on Mythology, King Minos of Crete had the great architect Daedalus build a labyrinth around a nasty secret: his wife had fallen in love with a beautiful bull, given him by Poseidon, god of the waves, and given birth (because her love for the bull was prohibited) to a monster, half bull, half man. This Minotaur waited at the center of the labyrinth for the tribute that came from Athens every year: seven beautiful youth of each sex. (Makes me think of the world wide web where daily, youths wander until they're poisoned and fall asleep for 1000 years--no, no, I'm mixing up my myths.)
The king of Athens, Aegeus, who was determined to end this harrowing of his country's youth, sent his son, the renowned Theseus, among the next contingent. Once in Crete and paraded before the King, Theseus took the heart of Minos' daughter Ariadne who couldn't bear that he enter the labyrinth and be eaten by the Minotaur. It was she who contacted Daedalus, the great "fixer," and received the thread from him which she sent with Theseus.
Theseus did as he promised: killed the Minotaur and returned, spooling up the thread to the exit. So much like walking the Christian labyrinth in reverse. He and Ariadne left Crete for Athens, but she perished on a southern shore where he soothingly had rested her, I imagine, because she suffered terrible seasickness. Distraught, he forgot to substitute a white for the black sail, a sign of success arranged before with his father. Now it was the king's turn to fall victim to this convoluted story: despairing of his son, he threw himself into the sea. And Theseus ruled gentle and democratic, one imagines, because his trials had tutored him to avoid high-handed defiance of the gods.
All this by way of turning again to Ferrara where one of the strangest and most enticing palaces in the world sports tiers of exotic frescoes. Palazzo Schifanoia or "Banish Care." At the top, as I remember, run images of court life with beautiful blond women, elegant men, rabbits (for fecundity), greyhounds and horses (for hunting), banquets, dancing, lolling on streams and lounges, flirtation, hazards and rewards. On another tier sparkle the signs of the zodiac, for there were necromancers and stargazers at the court of Count d'Este. Studying these beautifully painted images is a bit like standing in true dark and throwing back one's head to identify the constellations, named so often for Greek mythological figures, at least in our Western tradition. What did the astronomers of Islam call their star-gazing discoveries? Maybe I'll find out on my up-coming trip.
In Ferrara, also, lived one of 20th-century Italy's finest writers: Luigi Barzani, who write The Garden of the Fitzi-Continis. It's been made into a compelling film: I recommend it. Set in the 1920s, the wealthy, gated community of Italian Jews sport away their golden youth--the Fitzi-Continis--until an outsider from the more mercantile and studious class of Jews enters--a bit like threading a labyrinth to the center--fails in some obscure ways to understand what is going on, is lucky enough to exit, as the Holocaust breathes its hot, killing breath over the Alps.
I won't tell you how the story ends except to say it's tragic. What remains is the golden stone wall surrounding what was the real life family estate, the model for the Fitzi-Continis. With its canals and bicycles, its huge old plane trees and intriguing layers of architecture, Ferrara reminds me of how insulated the Italian city states remained virtually up to the unification of Italy in the 1860s-90s. They're still separate little kingdoms, each with its own civic style, locomotion, dialect, favorite restaurants (no chains, thank heaven), foods, art and architecture, on and on.
Who knows what will strike me this time as I stand before the frescoes in the Palazzo or before the portal where my father entered and left, day after day, in the late 1920s. I promise a report.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Margotlog:: The Labyrinth & Ferrara
Margotlog: The Labyrinth and Ferrara
In Crete, a king secreted a bull in the middle of a labyrinth. Captured maidens sent in to dance with the bull flung themselves over his horns, but eventually the bull trampled them, for once they got in, how could they get out? Only Ariadne with her thread escaped. Eventually heroic Theseus stabbed the bull and ended what we might call a "sex trade" between warring Greece and Crete.
Medieval Christendom transformed the labyrinth into an alternate pilgrimage route, a home version of the expensive journey toward Jerusalem in its sea of Islam. I was surprised to discover a labyrinth carved on an exterior column in Lucca. This medieval Tuscan town was an early Roman settlement with amphitheater and all; also visited by traders from the east. Above the church portico leered strange beasts, half human, half bird; with monkey faces and terrible claws. Many of us know the more famous labyrinth in the bowels of Chartres, or grassy labyrinths drawn in appealing rings beside Catholic schools or religious houses.
Last weekend I walked a labyrinth at Villa Maria. I know it sounds Italian but this Villa Maria faces huge Lake Pepin where the Mississippi lolls its way south between Minnesota and Wisconsin. Villa Maria, now a retreat center. was once a convent/school, founded by Ursaline Sisters from St. Louis, whose ancient Christian community was established in Brescia Italy, during the mid-1600s by Angela Merrisi, a peace-maker.
This labyrinth, lucky for me, was inside, out of the pouring rain which was flooding Southern Minnesota. As I turned north, then south, east and west, walking the complicated loops of the labyrinth to its beautiful lobed center (both tree and trefoil), I pondered a trip I'll take soon to Italy. I'll revisit Ferrara, near the opposite coast of Italy, the Adriatic. I've been there twice before, but not for years. Each time I've searched out the home where my father boarded in the late 1920s. It was on Via Saracena. To medieval Italy, the Saracens meant the Turks with their onion-domed mosques and secluded harems, their architecture that turned inward around walled gardens, but kept their faces veiled, blank to the street.
Paradise means a walled garden. We like to think that "western civilization" sprung "di nuovo" meaning fresh and new from the forests of Western Europe, but it ain't necessarily so. Try walking the twisting medieval streets of Florence or Ferrara, and you'll believe in labyrinths imported from the east. My father's history in Ferrara began when he was not yet twenty. Sent to the Instituto Frescobaldi to study the violin, he boarded with an Italian family on Via Saracena. The only clue left of that first sojourn was a photo of him and his father and brother, holding up their family's saggy female middle. My father lifts his face to an imaginary wind; light touches his features and turns him into a Greek statue of Adonis. If I'd met him then, I'd have "drooled," as we used to say when I was a teen. In fact, my first real boy friend looked something like him.
Another turn of the labyrinth, and this time I am holding the tiny journal where he recorded impressions on his much later return in the early 1970s. His handwriting sprawls across the tiny pages. He has found the house again and recorded the address, thus letting me, in the mid-1990s, stand in front of it. It has a modest Renaissance facade with two peering eyes, a nose and a welcoming mouth--not blank and suspicious at all. A bar is open nearby where I stop and ask in my halting Italian who lives there. I don't remember the response.
Now a sudden turn: the labyrinth faces me toward a startling vista. Between his second visit and mine later ones, my father and sister went to Ferrara together. I knew they'd taken off because he and I had met in Naples, driven into the mountains to his father's hometown. Then returned a few days later to sit with my sister at a seaside cafe drinking and chatting. What he and she did after that, I hadn't bothered to find out. "I thought he'd get us completely lost," she told me, "but he took me directly to the house in Ferrara where he'd lived as a young man. And standing there looking at it, he began to cry. He said something about falling in love with the daughter of the family, years ago, a blond beauty. 'How different my life would have been,' he said and tweaked my cheek."
My sister's voice softens into that affectionate humor which also infects mine when I recall his familiar gesture. "'Your mother and I have never been entirely happy,' he said" my sister continues. "I was shocked."
How can she not have known? My parents' troubles with each other have been obvious to me for years since I was a teenager living with them. How can she, two years younger, not have noticed.
"'I think we should separate,'" he said," and my sister's voice quivers. "He asked me 'What do you think?'"
What she thought, I don't believe I remember. Or maybe I do. Maybe I can still hear a touch of pride in her voice which signals that she believes she is now the favored daughter. He has revealed his inner soul to her; something he'd never do to me, after our years of conflict. Yet, as I tread the labyrinth, turning this way, then that, I'm not so sure about that. Because a vague memory stirs: I hear myself responding in shocked determination: "I hope you told him how stupid that was! He could never make a life for himself at this point. Can you imagine him trying to live on his own?"
When I reach the starting point, I have decided that all the above is true. My sister's response, mine to her, ours to our father, his to Ferrara. The only voice missing is my mother's.
In Crete, a king secreted a bull in the middle of a labyrinth. Captured maidens sent in to dance with the bull flung themselves over his horns, but eventually the bull trampled them, for once they got in, how could they get out? Only Ariadne with her thread escaped. Eventually heroic Theseus stabbed the bull and ended what we might call a "sex trade" between warring Greece and Crete.
Medieval Christendom transformed the labyrinth into an alternate pilgrimage route, a home version of the expensive journey toward Jerusalem in its sea of Islam. I was surprised to discover a labyrinth carved on an exterior column in Lucca. This medieval Tuscan town was an early Roman settlement with amphitheater and all; also visited by traders from the east. Above the church portico leered strange beasts, half human, half bird; with monkey faces and terrible claws. Many of us know the more famous labyrinth in the bowels of Chartres, or grassy labyrinths drawn in appealing rings beside Catholic schools or religious houses.
Last weekend I walked a labyrinth at Villa Maria. I know it sounds Italian but this Villa Maria faces huge Lake Pepin where the Mississippi lolls its way south between Minnesota and Wisconsin. Villa Maria, now a retreat center. was once a convent/school, founded by Ursaline Sisters from St. Louis, whose ancient Christian community was established in Brescia Italy, during the mid-1600s by Angela Merrisi, a peace-maker.
This labyrinth, lucky for me, was inside, out of the pouring rain which was flooding Southern Minnesota. As I turned north, then south, east and west, walking the complicated loops of the labyrinth to its beautiful lobed center (both tree and trefoil), I pondered a trip I'll take soon to Italy. I'll revisit Ferrara, near the opposite coast of Italy, the Adriatic. I've been there twice before, but not for years. Each time I've searched out the home where my father boarded in the late 1920s. It was on Via Saracena. To medieval Italy, the Saracens meant the Turks with their onion-domed mosques and secluded harems, their architecture that turned inward around walled gardens, but kept their faces veiled, blank to the street.
Paradise means a walled garden. We like to think that "western civilization" sprung "di nuovo" meaning fresh and new from the forests of Western Europe, but it ain't necessarily so. Try walking the twisting medieval streets of Florence or Ferrara, and you'll believe in labyrinths imported from the east. My father's history in Ferrara began when he was not yet twenty. Sent to the Instituto Frescobaldi to study the violin, he boarded with an Italian family on Via Saracena. The only clue left of that first sojourn was a photo of him and his father and brother, holding up their family's saggy female middle. My father lifts his face to an imaginary wind; light touches his features and turns him into a Greek statue of Adonis. If I'd met him then, I'd have "drooled," as we used to say when I was a teen. In fact, my first real boy friend looked something like him.
Another turn of the labyrinth, and this time I am holding the tiny journal where he recorded impressions on his much later return in the early 1970s. His handwriting sprawls across the tiny pages. He has found the house again and recorded the address, thus letting me, in the mid-1990s, stand in front of it. It has a modest Renaissance facade with two peering eyes, a nose and a welcoming mouth--not blank and suspicious at all. A bar is open nearby where I stop and ask in my halting Italian who lives there. I don't remember the response.
Now a sudden turn: the labyrinth faces me toward a startling vista. Between his second visit and mine later ones, my father and sister went to Ferrara together. I knew they'd taken off because he and I had met in Naples, driven into the mountains to his father's hometown. Then returned a few days later to sit with my sister at a seaside cafe drinking and chatting. What he and she did after that, I hadn't bothered to find out. "I thought he'd get us completely lost," she told me, "but he took me directly to the house in Ferrara where he'd lived as a young man. And standing there looking at it, he began to cry. He said something about falling in love with the daughter of the family, years ago, a blond beauty. 'How different my life would have been,' he said and tweaked my cheek."
My sister's voice softens into that affectionate humor which also infects mine when I recall his familiar gesture. "'Your mother and I have never been entirely happy,' he said" my sister continues. "I was shocked."
How can she not have known? My parents' troubles with each other have been obvious to me for years since I was a teenager living with them. How can she, two years younger, not have noticed.
"'I think we should separate,'" he said," and my sister's voice quivers. "He asked me 'What do you think?'"
What she thought, I don't believe I remember. Or maybe I do. Maybe I can still hear a touch of pride in her voice which signals that she believes she is now the favored daughter. He has revealed his inner soul to her; something he'd never do to me, after our years of conflict. Yet, as I tread the labyrinth, turning this way, then that, I'm not so sure about that. Because a vague memory stirs: I hear myself responding in shocked determination: "I hope you told him how stupid that was! He could never make a life for himself at this point. Can you imagine him trying to live on his own?"
When I reach the starting point, I have decided that all the above is true. My sister's response, mine to her, ours to our father, his to Ferrara. The only voice missing is my mother's.
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