Margotlog: Moments in Viterbo
Odd what moments stand out. When I look back on our excursion from Umbria south into Lazio (the Italian province which contains Rome), I find myself outside a church in Viterbo, gazing over the main piazza of the city. Just to my left, high against a stone wall, hangs the stone lion, guardian of the city. As we entered the square, I looked up at the lion (perhaps with a palm tree behind him) and commented, "Mi piace moltissimo il leone." One of the group whom I scarcely knew, a tall man with soft Italian body, someone with a weight of sorrow on his back, spoke to me for the second time that afternoon: "Si, si, e molto gentile." It was the surprise of his response, when I'd been rather diffident in his presence (he was, after all, reported to be a count), plus the charm of the grinning lion that cemented the moment in memory.
As tourists, it's impossible not to be rather vague about where exactly, and how, and what's to come next. We're carried along by those who know--friends, in my case, or tour guides who treat us like friends. Landscape whizzes past. We stop to meander around ruins, examining the fiori di campo (literally field flowers), noting that they're the same malva found among the Roman ruins in Umbria, stooping to pick up a piece of stone, numbered then discarded by archaeologists excavating this site of Roman/medieval baths, theater, etc. Being told by a restorer among us that every piece unearthed must be numbered, but since not all can be fit into a meaningful whole, ,many are left for curious scavengers to lift, finger, and once again discard.
Italy, with its rocky, hilly terrain, its centuries of wealth (often from outside the region) lording it over peasants, far more familiar with the land and seasons, crops and produce than those nominally in charge, is full of opportunities for such charming encounters. Little fragments numbered according to some other system than our own tumble suddenly into view. An American friend, entering Venice with her sister and a tour group, steps into a gondola and is wafted away by a gondolier singing an aria from Italian opera. Suddenly running toward them along the canal comes a woman with a cerise scarf floating behind her. She's in full voice, offering to the world and the throaty gondolier, the female accompaniment to his role. Her husband, their friends, run after her and tug at her clothing. "Stop, stop," they insist, but she breaks free and runs beside the gondola, as together, she and the gondolier complete the love duet. I can't forget this, and it didn't even happen to me.
Following association and memory through the labyrinth of Italian story, I find myself in a rocky field, on the huge island of Sardinia, off the western coast of Italy. Edging her way toward the stone hut of a goatherd is the youngest daughter of a wealthy, landlord family. The daughter, lonesome, cooped up by late 19th-century etiquette, by boredom and isolation, has found a friend. Perhaps she reads to the old man; or he tells her about his goats, his memories of her family years ago, his own children and wife lost to the years.
She grows up. There is a war. She moves to the mainland and sets aside afternoons to write while her own children sleep. This is Grazia Deledda and the novel containing this story is published as Cosima n 1937, the year after she has died. Though DeLedda won the Nobel prize for literature in 1926, very few of her works have been translated into English. We can thank Italica Press for bringing us a fine English translation of Cosima by Martha King.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Tuesday, November 9, 2010
Margotlog:The Step-mother of the Bride
The Step-Mother of the Bride
Thanks to the suavity and generosity of the upcoming bride and groom, the parents involved in this soon-to-be wedding have sat down to a meal together. It was a heady affair, at least for the older generation. We discovered paths where our lives crossed: groom's mother and bride's father both attended the March on Washington. Bride's stepmother and stepfather discovered a fine yoga teacher in common who used to babysit the bride. And so on.
The wedding itself will be rather secretive--only one parent of the six involved will stand up with the couple. But not so the wedding dinner. We of the older generation will congregate again. Not that we'll outnumber the kids, far from it. In fact, I expect the cousins and various offspring of the 0-5 generation to people the front of the stage. Lots of hands grabbing toddlers and restraining the wild "5's." We of the older generation may be pushed to the wings.
So why do I keep returning to the question of poetry? Why do I want to make a spectacle of myself by reciting some verse when the call comes to toast the happy couple? Though I don't remember this, rumor has it that my husband, the current bride's father, embarrassed the younger generation at our one other family wedding a few years ago by reciting something the couple considered way too sexy. It was probably e e cummings. (Try "i like my body when it is with your/ body...") I've been warned by my own daughter not to bring "The Owl and the Pussycat"into this upcoming affair. "Oh, Pussy, my love," you understand, has salacious undertones.
Think back, I tell myself. Remember how you felt about your own parents at each of your weddings! The first was very solemn: held at Riverside Church on Morningside Drive in New York City, a gothic gem near the Columbia University campus. I wore constraining white and trembled with the chill. The dinner afterwards passed in a haze. If anyone toasted us, I was either too blinkered or too cold to notice. The second wedding, thankfully, took place in May at the Presbyterian Homes in Roseville, Minnesota, where I taught a writing class for old ladies. They with their remembrance and enjoyment cut heavy peonies to decorate the chapel, sweet heavy swoon. Yes, poetry would have been welcome at that wedding. (e e cummings: "i like my body when it is with your/body") Maybe it's that wedding I want to commemorate with Keats' "Bright Star."
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
Which is more objectionable, eh? The "ripening breast" or "swoon to death?" Since Keats died a few years after writing this poem in 1819, the death may be literal, yet we don't believe he meant literal death, but that swoon of satisfaction, the swoon of earthly bliss.
No, I probably won't read "Bright Star," though its lines keep sparkling through these last warm days like the late chrysanthemums blazing along the sidewalk. Or the absolutely clear evening star in the half-dark sky.
If I read anything poetic, it will probably be Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds," etc. Yet, yet, it is a cold poem with its argument thoroughly under control and its daring to bring time's sickle into a poem of love and marriage. Or, maybe this sort of marriage is all of the mind, and very little of the body. That's what chills me. Not to mention its ending with "doom." I don't count that tidy regular coda. Keats and Shakespeare both end their supposed love poems with mention of the grave's chill. We are to be reminded to "gather ye rosebuds while we may." I'm afraid we older generation bring too much of that reminder into the hallway of love. Though we may still propel ourselves forward, even skip once in a while, we do not bloom so naturally, nor sing in a clear, sweet voice.
Plus, our children truly abhor the idea of our bodies. Especially in any but the most chaste of love's acts. "Ewww, Mother," I can hear the daughter cry when she was a teen. Too ishy for words. Aversion personified. Hints of incest.
There, I've done it--grossed out myself. Nope, I won't mention a word about love or coupling or, heaven forfend, breasts. I'll just give you Shakespeare as a mental exercise, to admire the balanced lines, the measured rhyme, the various sedate metaphors.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI)
Thanks to the suavity and generosity of the upcoming bride and groom, the parents involved in this soon-to-be wedding have sat down to a meal together. It was a heady affair, at least for the older generation. We discovered paths where our lives crossed: groom's mother and bride's father both attended the March on Washington. Bride's stepmother and stepfather discovered a fine yoga teacher in common who used to babysit the bride. And so on.
The wedding itself will be rather secretive--only one parent of the six involved will stand up with the couple. But not so the wedding dinner. We of the older generation will congregate again. Not that we'll outnumber the kids, far from it. In fact, I expect the cousins and various offspring of the 0-5 generation to people the front of the stage. Lots of hands grabbing toddlers and restraining the wild "5's." We of the older generation may be pushed to the wings.
So why do I keep returning to the question of poetry? Why do I want to make a spectacle of myself by reciting some verse when the call comes to toast the happy couple? Though I don't remember this, rumor has it that my husband, the current bride's father, embarrassed the younger generation at our one other family wedding a few years ago by reciting something the couple considered way too sexy. It was probably e e cummings. (Try "i like my body when it is with your/ body...") I've been warned by my own daughter not to bring "The Owl and the Pussycat"into this upcoming affair. "Oh, Pussy, my love," you understand, has salacious undertones.
Think back, I tell myself. Remember how you felt about your own parents at each of your weddings! The first was very solemn: held at Riverside Church on Morningside Drive in New York City, a gothic gem near the Columbia University campus. I wore constraining white and trembled with the chill. The dinner afterwards passed in a haze. If anyone toasted us, I was either too blinkered or too cold to notice. The second wedding, thankfully, took place in May at the Presbyterian Homes in Roseville, Minnesota, where I taught a writing class for old ladies. They with their remembrance and enjoyment cut heavy peonies to decorate the chapel, sweet heavy swoon. Yes, poetry would have been welcome at that wedding. (e e cummings: "i like my body when it is with your/body") Maybe it's that wedding I want to commemorate with Keats' "Bright Star."
Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art--
Not in lone splendor hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors--
No--yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillowed upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel forever its soft fall and swell,
Awake forever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever--or else swoon to death.
Which is more objectionable, eh? The "ripening breast" or "swoon to death?" Since Keats died a few years after writing this poem in 1819, the death may be literal, yet we don't believe he meant literal death, but that swoon of satisfaction, the swoon of earthly bliss.
No, I probably won't read "Bright Star," though its lines keep sparkling through these last warm days like the late chrysanthemums blazing along the sidewalk. Or the absolutely clear evening star in the half-dark sky.
If I read anything poetic, it will probably be Shakespeare's Sonnet CXVI, "Let me not to the marriage of true minds," etc. Yet, yet, it is a cold poem with its argument thoroughly under control and its daring to bring time's sickle into a poem of love and marriage. Or, maybe this sort of marriage is all of the mind, and very little of the body. That's what chills me. Not to mention its ending with "doom." I don't count that tidy regular coda. Keats and Shakespeare both end their supposed love poems with mention of the grave's chill. We are to be reminded to "gather ye rosebuds while we may." I'm afraid we older generation bring too much of that reminder into the hallway of love. Though we may still propel ourselves forward, even skip once in a while, we do not bloom so naturally, nor sing in a clear, sweet voice.
Plus, our children truly abhor the idea of our bodies. Especially in any but the most chaste of love's acts. "Ewww, Mother," I can hear the daughter cry when she was a teen. Too ishy for words. Aversion personified. Hints of incest.
There, I've done it--grossed out myself. Nope, I won't mention a word about love or coupling or, heaven forfend, breasts. I'll just give you Shakespeare as a mental exercise, to admire the balanced lines, the measured rhyme, the various sedate metaphors.
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Saturday, November 6, 2010
Margotlog: Danish Gymnasts, African Students & American Political Hype
In Minnesota Scandinavia, the Danes figure, along with their more populous cousins the Swedes and the Norwegians, as contributors of delectable (and hard to make) holiday treats; civic accountability; spare, appealing furniture design; and the Danish Gymnasts. Friends took me to view this smiling, blond, thoroughly fit and friendly troupe last night. In between ohhhs and ahhhs at double, triple twists, lovely swirls of girls in turquoise leotards, etc., we talked about Copenhagen as a place to visit--expensive food, I learned. Beautiful porcelain called Royal Copenhagen.
We, in fact, dined off a lovely set before the program: each plate hand-painted with a soft blue flower. And the eatables presented by our Danish friend from Tyler, Minnesota: first course of herring, pickles, and buttered brown (homemade) bread; second course of vegetable-beef soup with tiny dumplings made of the same stuff as cream puffs--no surprise that they melted in the mouth; and finally dessert of the most amazing combination: butter cookies made with Hartshorn, which must be obtained from a pharmacy; blue cheese, more brown bread, and succulent pears.
The Italian in me, who not so secretly believes that the best food in the world comes from Italy, had to sit back and leave the field to the Danes: that dessert could not be beat by any other ethnic combination. Or at least that's what my tongue told me. Lest you think this Tyler-bred cuisine is off-the-beaten path, let me point out that the Danish Gymnasts, who are touring the world in ten months, will stop at Tyler, Minnesota. Where, I have taught several writers-in-the-schools residencies over the years and remember a culture hall, dedicated to Danish culture and conviviality.
One of the best things about being American is savoring our ethnic and racial differences. That's one reason I enjoy teaching at Metro State where an upper-level writing class for nurses is likely to include recent immigrants from Africa. This year my class contains students from Kenya, Nigeria, the Sudan, and Uganda. Not to mention other immigrants from Southeast Asia, Greece, and all over Europe (but those with European roots come from families in the U.S. for many generations). The African students working for their nursing degrees are acute observers of the U.S. and their own countries. For the second paper, the class wrote on the huge topic of global warming, based on Lester Brown's important book, Plan B. 4.0. (A friend who works for a Minnesota legislator says that Brown's book informs many environmental debates at the legislative level.)
Two papers from African students caught my attention for their startling revelations about population. One, about AIDS in Uganda, pointed out that when a middle-aged man with HIV is treated with anti-retrovirus drugs (the "cocktail" that keeps many HIV patients alive for years), he may then live long enough to marry three more wives and father perhaps a score of children--all of whom will be infected with AIDS. Another paper began with a surprisingly humorous announcement of a death in Kenya: relatives of the 94-year-old deceased contributed three-quarters of the mourners at his funeral: he had been married 130 times, fathered almost 300 children and untold numbers of grandchildren (V. Duham, Oct. 2010, "Kenya's Akuku....polygamy hall of fame"). My student followed this with a compelling description of Kenya's deforestation, largely caused by clearing land for farming to feed the country's rapidly expanding population.
There is little danger that the U.S. Danish-population will expand so much as to cause an environmental crisis in western Minnesota. In fact, my years of teaching as a writer-in-the-schools in farming Minnesota suggests that, if anything, these communities suffer from the reverse: dwindling population due to the consolidation of smaller family farms. What strikes me as I mull the experiences of the last few days, personal and public, writerly and political, is how complex are the policy decisions facing us, worldwide. Our recent election hoop-di-do raises angry voices, confrontative politics, and an awareness on my part that the U.S. swings wildly between apparently irreconcilable poles. Yes, within a decade we as a nation can experience wrenching contests and demanding alterations. Our excesses of hope, greed, and manipulation can wreck certain kinds of stability. The housing crisis, for instance, seems wrought in part by banks and mortgage companies who enticed families of very modest means and no experience in home-owning into accepting variable-rate mortgages. When the rates rose sky-high, what had been affordable became impossible. Who is most at fault: the ignorant home-buyer or the companies that lured them into this trap?
Maybe a portion of the American dream needs revision: instead of every family housed separately with a green swatch around us, we need to look back to the cities of Europe, with their apartment buildings, lovely green thoroughfares (sometimes), and, best of all possible worlds, no cars in the city center. I'm thinking of Munich, or Ferrara where I recently visited. We've eaten up all the wilderness we should; the forests and grasslands that remain need to stay as they are, protecting us from the damages of global warming, as we draw closer together, not so prickly of our neighbors, careful of our own expenses, and teaching each other about the future.
We, in fact, dined off a lovely set before the program: each plate hand-painted with a soft blue flower. And the eatables presented by our Danish friend from Tyler, Minnesota: first course of herring, pickles, and buttered brown (homemade) bread; second course of vegetable-beef soup with tiny dumplings made of the same stuff as cream puffs--no surprise that they melted in the mouth; and finally dessert of the most amazing combination: butter cookies made with Hartshorn, which must be obtained from a pharmacy; blue cheese, more brown bread, and succulent pears.
The Italian in me, who not so secretly believes that the best food in the world comes from Italy, had to sit back and leave the field to the Danes: that dessert could not be beat by any other ethnic combination. Or at least that's what my tongue told me. Lest you think this Tyler-bred cuisine is off-the-beaten path, let me point out that the Danish Gymnasts, who are touring the world in ten months, will stop at Tyler, Minnesota. Where, I have taught several writers-in-the-schools residencies over the years and remember a culture hall, dedicated to Danish culture and conviviality.
One of the best things about being American is savoring our ethnic and racial differences. That's one reason I enjoy teaching at Metro State where an upper-level writing class for nurses is likely to include recent immigrants from Africa. This year my class contains students from Kenya, Nigeria, the Sudan, and Uganda. Not to mention other immigrants from Southeast Asia, Greece, and all over Europe (but those with European roots come from families in the U.S. for many generations). The African students working for their nursing degrees are acute observers of the U.S. and their own countries. For the second paper, the class wrote on the huge topic of global warming, based on Lester Brown's important book, Plan B. 4.0. (A friend who works for a Minnesota legislator says that Brown's book informs many environmental debates at the legislative level.)
Two papers from African students caught my attention for their startling revelations about population. One, about AIDS in Uganda, pointed out that when a middle-aged man with HIV is treated with anti-retrovirus drugs (the "cocktail" that keeps many HIV patients alive for years), he may then live long enough to marry three more wives and father perhaps a score of children--all of whom will be infected with AIDS. Another paper began with a surprisingly humorous announcement of a death in Kenya: relatives of the 94-year-old deceased contributed three-quarters of the mourners at his funeral: he had been married 130 times, fathered almost 300 children and untold numbers of grandchildren (V. Duham, Oct. 2010, "Kenya's Akuku....polygamy hall of fame"). My student followed this with a compelling description of Kenya's deforestation, largely caused by clearing land for farming to feed the country's rapidly expanding population.
There is little danger that the U.S. Danish-population will expand so much as to cause an environmental crisis in western Minnesota. In fact, my years of teaching as a writer-in-the-schools in farming Minnesota suggests that, if anything, these communities suffer from the reverse: dwindling population due to the consolidation of smaller family farms. What strikes me as I mull the experiences of the last few days, personal and public, writerly and political, is how complex are the policy decisions facing us, worldwide. Our recent election hoop-di-do raises angry voices, confrontative politics, and an awareness on my part that the U.S. swings wildly between apparently irreconcilable poles. Yes, within a decade we as a nation can experience wrenching contests and demanding alterations. Our excesses of hope, greed, and manipulation can wreck certain kinds of stability. The housing crisis, for instance, seems wrought in part by banks and mortgage companies who enticed families of very modest means and no experience in home-owning into accepting variable-rate mortgages. When the rates rose sky-high, what had been affordable became impossible. Who is most at fault: the ignorant home-buyer or the companies that lured them into this trap?
Maybe a portion of the American dream needs revision: instead of every family housed separately with a green swatch around us, we need to look back to the cities of Europe, with their apartment buildings, lovely green thoroughfares (sometimes), and, best of all possible worlds, no cars in the city center. I'm thinking of Munich, or Ferrara where I recently visited. We've eaten up all the wilderness we should; the forests and grasslands that remain need to stay as they are, protecting us from the damages of global warming, as we draw closer together, not so prickly of our neighbors, careful of our own expenses, and teaching each other about the future.
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Margotlog: The Lemon Tree and a Hunchback Moon
The Lemon Tree and a Hunchback Moon
The Israeli film, "The Lemon Tree," moves sedately and with scarcely any dialogue, but once it ends, the message is unmistakable: a huge concrete wall has slid into place, separating the Israeli Defense Minister's fancy modern house from a West Bank lemon grove which has been cut down to stumps. Fear of terrorism cannot coexist beside a dense, much-loved grove.
What the Defense Minister has perpetrated, of course, is also a form of terrorism on the widow (quite beautiful, stately and determined to save her grove) who with an ancient helper tends the trees and picks the lemons. First the Defense Minister has the grove fenced, padlocked and the widow's care of it prohibited. Then he has a huge tower erected where a stupidly amusing guard tries to learn some sort of logic from a tape-player which drones on while he sleeps. When the minister and his increasingly disturbed wife throw a party and forget the lemons, he sends soldiers into the grove to steal some fruit. The widow, outraged, comes after them with a stick (she's easily climbed the fence). They start mauling her, until the Defense Minister's wife cries out in horror for them to stop.
All this time the widow and a charming young West Bank lawyer have been pursuing the case all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. During this effort, they start a sweet, subdued love-affair, which never really goes anywhere, just as, in the end, the Supreme Court composed of three women judges (so as not to make the gender-divide too stark) rules that, though the grove should not be uprooted, it must be pruned to allow any terrorist to be immediately visible.
If the film contained nothing else, we would be thoroughly outraged against Israel, but the Defense Minister's wife, whom he neglects and rather obviously cheats on, gradually comes to hate this attack on the lone woman and her beautiful grove. Though at first the wife mouths agreement with her husband, toward the end of the film she gives a friend, a newspaper journalist, an interview. There she quietly objects to the treatment of the lemon grower, to the huge fence which both women can now scale, to the ridiculous notion that cutting down a grove will prevent terrorism, which of course rains down from the sky.
When the wife leaves the Defense Minister, we understand that she represents the heart of the film. She is appalled by Israel's bellicose attitude toward its neighbors because it duplicates the way her husband treats her and because she can see that the widow who grows lemons is herself a good neighbor. Conversation, sympathy, accord are far better protection against hatred and attack than building a wall and cutting off a beautiful grove at its knees.
Seeing this film set me to thinking about what damage modernism in all its vices has perpetrated against land, water, trees, animals, sky. Outsiders, who haven't lived for centuries and centuries on a particular stretch of land, find it easier to wreck what we call "natural resources" than do very ancient states. Outsiders, especially if they come to settle from distant areas and must uproot peoples long-suited to working the land and gathering its bounty, are quite vulnerable. They're ignorant, to begin with; they don't know the seasons, climate, soils; they also have to battle the current inhabitants for supremacy.
This warlike, defensive behavior continues even after the battle is won--I'm thinking of the United States. We still extract our "natural resources," as if we lived somewhere else and weren't hurting our very own air and water, etc. The conservation movement, which began with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," has educated us that such behavior harms ultimately ourselves. Not only does pollution and degrading of forests, grasslands, rivers, air kill off wild creatures, but such damage ultimately deprives us of rich soil and timber as well as clean air and water, leading to respiratory illness and cancer, etc.
We reap what we sow, or in the case of fisheries, if we reap and reap and reap, eventually nothing remains. There's an excellent case study of recovery from such excess in the Environment Defense Fund's work with Atlantic fishermen on a "catch share" program. Here "fishermen are given secure shares of a total catch limit, set by science, to which they are held strictly accountable"(Turning the Tide: Fishermen Embrace a New Approach to End Overfishing" special report 2010).
Why am I reminded of the recent construction craze in the United States when I read about the collapse of Atlantic fisheries? Because during the craze, hundreds of thousands of houses were built on unsecured loans, gobbling up farmland, and spreading suburbanism even further from city centers. Columnist Bonnie Blodgett wrote recently in the StarTribune, that so many houses were built, each American family would have to acquire four to make use of them all. Of course this was nuts, and once the unsecured loans collapsed, first homeowners who saw their "adjustable rate" mortgages go up so high they couldn't make the monthly payments, then developers themselves went belly up, leaving in their wake, what is surely a blight: empty boxes dotting acres of farmland, where nothing lives, but wind blows. A scene that deserves to be set beside Dust Bowl fields billowing away.
Let's argue that ancient civilizations guard the land and its amazing plenty with the most passion and knowledge. Italian fields today look like those in the background of Renaissance princely cavalcades. Italians, even those who live in cities, love to get dirt under the fingernails. Two Florentine friends come immediately to mind as examples: Grazia has run a "collectibles" shop in the heart of FLorence for years, yet every Saturday she tends land in the country, with apple and plum trees, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, as well as roses and perennials. She also is a mushroom hound, heading off to collect with her friend Antonio, and returning to cook me five dishes with "funghi" which she names over and over until I can repeat them.
Antonio, though working as a tailor or "sarto" in FLorence all his life, was born in Puglia in the boot. One evening he and Grazia drove me through the Cascine, the huge park on the western edge of FLorence, under a beautiful three-quarter moon. They began reciting a saying they both learned as kids from their parents who were farmers. I listened from the backseat, not quite understanding:
Gobba a levante, luna calante
Gobba a ponente, luna crescente.
Gobba means hunchback. I study the moon: yes, its hunch changes as it waxes and wanes. In English the saying goes
Hunchback to the east, moon is waning,
Hunchback to the west, moon is growing.
Of course, to decipher this, you must be able to know east from west. Finally I learned to do this in Florence. The Arno flows west, toward Pisa and the sea, away from the mountains which you can see through the arch of the Ponte Vecchio.
Telling east from west here in Saint Paul isn't all that difficult either because I can see the sun rise in the east and set in the west from my upstairs windows. Still, I have a much harder time telling the waxing and waning moon here in the US than I do in Florence. It must be that the moon responds to local dialects and we don't have an English saying to help us.
Postscript: lest someone accuse me of excessive fondness, Italians have a horrible environmental history vis-a-vis tuna which Italian fishermen are rapidly depleting. Not to mention the practice of snaring songbirds in huge nets, a practice which continues to decimate songbird populations along the Mediterranean. It makes me very sad.
The Israeli film, "The Lemon Tree," moves sedately and with scarcely any dialogue, but once it ends, the message is unmistakable: a huge concrete wall has slid into place, separating the Israeli Defense Minister's fancy modern house from a West Bank lemon grove which has been cut down to stumps. Fear of terrorism cannot coexist beside a dense, much-loved grove.
What the Defense Minister has perpetrated, of course, is also a form of terrorism on the widow (quite beautiful, stately and determined to save her grove) who with an ancient helper tends the trees and picks the lemons. First the Defense Minister has the grove fenced, padlocked and the widow's care of it prohibited. Then he has a huge tower erected where a stupidly amusing guard tries to learn some sort of logic from a tape-player which drones on while he sleeps. When the minister and his increasingly disturbed wife throw a party and forget the lemons, he sends soldiers into the grove to steal some fruit. The widow, outraged, comes after them with a stick (she's easily climbed the fence). They start mauling her, until the Defense Minister's wife cries out in horror for them to stop.
All this time the widow and a charming young West Bank lawyer have been pursuing the case all the way to the Israeli Supreme Court. During this effort, they start a sweet, subdued love-affair, which never really goes anywhere, just as, in the end, the Supreme Court composed of three women judges (so as not to make the gender-divide too stark) rules that, though the grove should not be uprooted, it must be pruned to allow any terrorist to be immediately visible.
If the film contained nothing else, we would be thoroughly outraged against Israel, but the Defense Minister's wife, whom he neglects and rather obviously cheats on, gradually comes to hate this attack on the lone woman and her beautiful grove. Though at first the wife mouths agreement with her husband, toward the end of the film she gives a friend, a newspaper journalist, an interview. There she quietly objects to the treatment of the lemon grower, to the huge fence which both women can now scale, to the ridiculous notion that cutting down a grove will prevent terrorism, which of course rains down from the sky.
When the wife leaves the Defense Minister, we understand that she represents the heart of the film. She is appalled by Israel's bellicose attitude toward its neighbors because it duplicates the way her husband treats her and because she can see that the widow who grows lemons is herself a good neighbor. Conversation, sympathy, accord are far better protection against hatred and attack than building a wall and cutting off a beautiful grove at its knees.
Seeing this film set me to thinking about what damage modernism in all its vices has perpetrated against land, water, trees, animals, sky. Outsiders, who haven't lived for centuries and centuries on a particular stretch of land, find it easier to wreck what we call "natural resources" than do very ancient states. Outsiders, especially if they come to settle from distant areas and must uproot peoples long-suited to working the land and gathering its bounty, are quite vulnerable. They're ignorant, to begin with; they don't know the seasons, climate, soils; they also have to battle the current inhabitants for supremacy.
This warlike, defensive behavior continues even after the battle is won--I'm thinking of the United States. We still extract our "natural resources," as if we lived somewhere else and weren't hurting our very own air and water, etc. The conservation movement, which began with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," has educated us that such behavior harms ultimately ourselves. Not only does pollution and degrading of forests, grasslands, rivers, air kill off wild creatures, but such damage ultimately deprives us of rich soil and timber as well as clean air and water, leading to respiratory illness and cancer, etc.
We reap what we sow, or in the case of fisheries, if we reap and reap and reap, eventually nothing remains. There's an excellent case study of recovery from such excess in the Environment Defense Fund's work with Atlantic fishermen on a "catch share" program. Here "fishermen are given secure shares of a total catch limit, set by science, to which they are held strictly accountable"(Turning the Tide: Fishermen Embrace a New Approach to End Overfishing" special report 2010).
Why am I reminded of the recent construction craze in the United States when I read about the collapse of Atlantic fisheries? Because during the craze, hundreds of thousands of houses were built on unsecured loans, gobbling up farmland, and spreading suburbanism even further from city centers. Columnist Bonnie Blodgett wrote recently in the StarTribune, that so many houses were built, each American family would have to acquire four to make use of them all. Of course this was nuts, and once the unsecured loans collapsed, first homeowners who saw their "adjustable rate" mortgages go up so high they couldn't make the monthly payments, then developers themselves went belly up, leaving in their wake, what is surely a blight: empty boxes dotting acres of farmland, where nothing lives, but wind blows. A scene that deserves to be set beside Dust Bowl fields billowing away.
Let's argue that ancient civilizations guard the land and its amazing plenty with the most passion and knowledge. Italian fields today look like those in the background of Renaissance princely cavalcades. Italians, even those who live in cities, love to get dirt under the fingernails. Two Florentine friends come immediately to mind as examples: Grazia has run a "collectibles" shop in the heart of FLorence for years, yet every Saturday she tends land in the country, with apple and plum trees, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, as well as roses and perennials. She also is a mushroom hound, heading off to collect with her friend Antonio, and returning to cook me five dishes with "funghi" which she names over and over until I can repeat them.
Antonio, though working as a tailor or "sarto" in FLorence all his life, was born in Puglia in the boot. One evening he and Grazia drove me through the Cascine, the huge park on the western edge of FLorence, under a beautiful three-quarter moon. They began reciting a saying they both learned as kids from their parents who were farmers. I listened from the backseat, not quite understanding:
Gobba a levante, luna calante
Gobba a ponente, luna crescente.
Gobba means hunchback. I study the moon: yes, its hunch changes as it waxes and wanes. In English the saying goes
Hunchback to the east, moon is waning,
Hunchback to the west, moon is growing.
Of course, to decipher this, you must be able to know east from west. Finally I learned to do this in Florence. The Arno flows west, toward Pisa and the sea, away from the mountains which you can see through the arch of the Ponte Vecchio.
Telling east from west here in Saint Paul isn't all that difficult either because I can see the sun rise in the east and set in the west from my upstairs windows. Still, I have a much harder time telling the waxing and waning moon here in the US than I do in Florence. It must be that the moon responds to local dialects and we don't have an English saying to help us.
Postscript: lest someone accuse me of excessive fondness, Italians have a horrible environmental history vis-a-vis tuna which Italian fishermen are rapidly depleting. Not to mention the practice of snaring songbirds in huge nets, a practice which continues to decimate songbird populations along the Mediterranean. It makes me very sad.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Margotlog: The Girl with the Snow Queen's Kiss
Margotlog: The Girl with the Snow Queen's Kiss
Yes, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when it first came out. We were in the Hawaiian Islands, on Kauai, and I sat in the garage-lanai the first morning and afternoon, mid-December, bathed in easy warmth, a flowering cactus just outside the doorway, and read about depredations on sanity, Swedenesque. Last evening, one of the few Sunday Halloweens I remember, the neighborhood graves opened and out poured a werewolf who peered in my window like a mask out of Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Princesettes in pink tulle pirouetted; one face-painted pumpkin bobbed her real pumpkin handle attached to reddish hair, and some plump teens gave shame-faced grins because they hadn't bothered to doll-up.
The last and favorite was a tiny girl wearing the Snow Queen's Kiss--all in white, with spangled slippers, bunny fur wrap, and a wand with sparkly silver star. A premonition of the season to come? Or a character from Crime and Punishment which I've been listening to with my late night exercises? The waifs and discards of society find their makers in mid-to-late 19th-century European fiction--Dickens., Mrs. Gaskell, and Dostoevsky are the best. American writers don't take up the theme of the earth's outcasts until later, and then wrap them in outrage--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, for instance. Our myth of human perfectibility and the New Eden doesn't easily admit extreme human need.
My limited knowledge suggests that Europeans don't do Halloween the way we do in the U.S. For intensely Catholic countries, the day after, All Saints Day, is what's celebrated. Similar to the Mexican practice of visiting family graves with marigolds and skeletons made of sugar. "It's a liminal time," a Catholic friend tells me. Over the years, as my list of dead grows, I've come to understand what she means. Liminal, or of the doorway. In these days of dwindling light, the dead press closer to us, they rap quietly at our awareness; they hover just out of sight. Tears spring into my eyes and I'm mourning my mother, the most recent, profound loss. I picture her sleeping as I last saw her, when I came early into her room in assisted living and sat, watching her in her long afternoon nap. The pallor of her face struck me with the intuition that she would not live much longer.
In the last few months, two Italian-American poets and translators have given us versions of the early 19th-century Italian poet and philosopher, Giacomo Leopardi. W.S. Di Piero's translations and selections of Leopardi's notebooks contains these sentences: "The ancients assumed that the dead thought only about the things of this life...that they grieved or felt contented depending on what had hurt or pleased them here in life, and so as they saw it--and as Christians do not--this world is mankind's home, that other world is exile." (In Poetry magazine, Nov. 2010, p. 130)
I like to think that this liminal period reminds us that living is precious; the earth that supports us ultimately demands our respect and nurturing in kind. We are kin/kind with those who have gone before and those who come after.
I remember loving Halloween: my Swedish-German mother, not given to effusive displays of affection, yet knew how to decorate and conduct a party. She made us elaborate costumes--Pucinellas in ruffed motley or Japanese ladies with wallpaper kimonos. Then she and other Old Citadel mothers gathered us in the three-story, echoing courtyard of the "center building" where we bobbed for apples, touched slimy disgusting things, pinned some kind of tail on a pumpkin, and shared our "trick or treat" loot. "One hundred and fifty children in one block," she would marvel. She who grew up in tiny Hankinson, North Dakota, whose population at its highest couldn't have been more than 1000.
In this night of misrule, we can blame our pranks on the dead, laugh and stuff ourselves with easy sweetness, and put aside any notion that life hereafter trounces such pleasures. I'm all for believing in benign heavenly guidance and malign distrust. But, so far, I'm more convinced that the dead remain with us, nurturing and terrifying.
Yes, I read The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo when it first came out. We were in the Hawaiian Islands, on Kauai, and I sat in the garage-lanai the first morning and afternoon, mid-December, bathed in easy warmth, a flowering cactus just outside the doorway, and read about depredations on sanity, Swedenesque. Last evening, one of the few Sunday Halloweens I remember, the neighborhood graves opened and out poured a werewolf who peered in my window like a mask out of Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon." Princesettes in pink tulle pirouetted; one face-painted pumpkin bobbed her real pumpkin handle attached to reddish hair, and some plump teens gave shame-faced grins because they hadn't bothered to doll-up.
The last and favorite was a tiny girl wearing the Snow Queen's Kiss--all in white, with spangled slippers, bunny fur wrap, and a wand with sparkly silver star. A premonition of the season to come? Or a character from Crime and Punishment which I've been listening to with my late night exercises? The waifs and discards of society find their makers in mid-to-late 19th-century European fiction--Dickens., Mrs. Gaskell, and Dostoevsky are the best. American writers don't take up the theme of the earth's outcasts until later, and then wrap them in outrage--Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, for instance. Our myth of human perfectibility and the New Eden doesn't easily admit extreme human need.
My limited knowledge suggests that Europeans don't do Halloween the way we do in the U.S. For intensely Catholic countries, the day after, All Saints Day, is what's celebrated. Similar to the Mexican practice of visiting family graves with marigolds and skeletons made of sugar. "It's a liminal time," a Catholic friend tells me. Over the years, as my list of dead grows, I've come to understand what she means. Liminal, or of the doorway. In these days of dwindling light, the dead press closer to us, they rap quietly at our awareness; they hover just out of sight. Tears spring into my eyes and I'm mourning my mother, the most recent, profound loss. I picture her sleeping as I last saw her, when I came early into her room in assisted living and sat, watching her in her long afternoon nap. The pallor of her face struck me with the intuition that she would not live much longer.
In the last few months, two Italian-American poets and translators have given us versions of the early 19th-century Italian poet and philosopher, Giacomo Leopardi. W.S. Di Piero's translations and selections of Leopardi's notebooks contains these sentences: "The ancients assumed that the dead thought only about the things of this life...that they grieved or felt contented depending on what had hurt or pleased them here in life, and so as they saw it--and as Christians do not--this world is mankind's home, that other world is exile." (In Poetry magazine, Nov. 2010, p. 130)
I like to think that this liminal period reminds us that living is precious; the earth that supports us ultimately demands our respect and nurturing in kind. We are kin/kind with those who have gone before and those who come after.
I remember loving Halloween: my Swedish-German mother, not given to effusive displays of affection, yet knew how to decorate and conduct a party. She made us elaborate costumes--Pucinellas in ruffed motley or Japanese ladies with wallpaper kimonos. Then she and other Old Citadel mothers gathered us in the three-story, echoing courtyard of the "center building" where we bobbed for apples, touched slimy disgusting things, pinned some kind of tail on a pumpkin, and shared our "trick or treat" loot. "One hundred and fifty children in one block," she would marvel. She who grew up in tiny Hankinson, North Dakota, whose population at its highest couldn't have been more than 1000.
In this night of misrule, we can blame our pranks on the dead, laugh and stuff ourselves with easy sweetness, and put aside any notion that life hereafter trounces such pleasures. I'm all for believing in benign heavenly guidance and malign distrust. But, so far, I'm more convinced that the dead remain with us, nurturing and terrifying.
Friday, October 29, 2010
Margotlog: Nonsense/Cat Sense
Nonsense/Cat Sense
Often this time of year when the light fades and mornings are very dark, my mind wakes up with songs or ideas already formed. This morning it was Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat."Years ago, when I first awoke to books, my mother was sitting between my sister and me on the loveseat in her bedroom, reading to us.
These were the years we lived in The Old Citadel, a block-long fortress spread across Marion Square, which provided us with echoing courtyards, deep tall windows, and incredibly high ceilings. Built to house and train cadets for almost a century before the new campus was built further up the Charleston neck, its architecture helped cool against intense summer heat, at the same time that it announced the school's profound defiance of any attack on Southern values. But, of course, for a while, I was too young for such a sophisticated perspective. To me and my sister, the Old Citadel was simply an entire village in and of itself, with friends at either end of the block, slate slidewalks already set for hopscotch, bums loitering in the park at our King Street end, the bells of St. Matthew's church ringing "Big Ben" style at the hours and quarter hours, and my mother's voice reading us to bed.
The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"
Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing!
Oh! let us be married; too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the bong tree grows;
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced to the light of the moon
The moon,
The moon,
They danced to the light of the moon.
I've rarely studied owls close up, but there've been cats galore in my life. How we acquired the first, I can't remember, but it was a tiger cat who would jump into the kitchen window well beside my turtle's bowl. In the evenings, when I watched for my father's car to turn into the cobblestone parking lot, I would pat the cat who purred. Then one day it disappeared. A thousand things could have happened to it. Maybe like a much later Minnesota cat named Archie, this tiger simply belonged to someone else and either went home or was lifted. But that's another story.
I was distraught at losing this first cat, my solace in the window well when my parents argued. Walking to school, I began calling for it, day after day, with no results. Finally, after a week or two of disconsolate searching, a tiger kitten, much smaller than the one I'd lost, hurried up to me a block from school. I scooped it up and carried it to Ashley Hall. Let's say I was in second grade, taught by the lovely Citadel wife with the white pageboy and blue eyes. Her speech could not have been more gentle. She took me and the kitten to the principal's house across the playing field, nestled in a stand of trees. After that I remember only that my mother who did not drive, but walked from the Old Citadel to Ashley Hall, stood in the doorway, talking to the principal. When I came home that afternoon, the kitten was waiting for me.
Living with cats fulfills life's promise that there is warmth and kindness and affection in the world. I know, this sounds terribly sentimental. But there it is, My mother who usually scorned sentiment, especially when expressed by my father (instance of that barbed but seductive resistance I recognize now as an adult), my mother in the case of this lost kitten acted the storybook Good Mother. The only element lacking is the mean wizard who would terrorize our lives until the cat came to save us. The wizard was there, hanging like a noxious cloud in the wings. He was compounded of my parents' alienation from what they'd known in the north, and of the poverty and discrimination in the south. Soon he would flap his terrible wings and drench us with sickening hate. But until that happened, the orange kitten kept me company. And though our bedtime stories from early volumes of the Book House might make us sweat or shiver, they always ended by promising that we would find what we was lost.
Often this time of year when the light fades and mornings are very dark, my mind wakes up with songs or ideas already formed. This morning it was Edward Lear's "The Owl and the Pussycat."Years ago, when I first awoke to books, my mother was sitting between my sister and me on the loveseat in her bedroom, reading to us.
These were the years we lived in The Old Citadel, a block-long fortress spread across Marion Square, which provided us with echoing courtyards, deep tall windows, and incredibly high ceilings. Built to house and train cadets for almost a century before the new campus was built further up the Charleston neck, its architecture helped cool against intense summer heat, at the same time that it announced the school's profound defiance of any attack on Southern values. But, of course, for a while, I was too young for such a sophisticated perspective. To me and my sister, the Old Citadel was simply an entire village in and of itself, with friends at either end of the block, slate slidewalks already set for hopscotch, bums loitering in the park at our King Street end, the bells of St. Matthew's church ringing "Big Ben" style at the hours and quarter hours, and my mother's voice reading us to bed.
The Owl and the Pussycat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat:
They took some honey and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"
Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl,
How charmingly sweet you sing!
Oh! let us be married; too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the bong tree grows;
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood,
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.
"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced to the light of the moon
The moon,
The moon,
They danced to the light of the moon.
I've rarely studied owls close up, but there've been cats galore in my life. How we acquired the first, I can't remember, but it was a tiger cat who would jump into the kitchen window well beside my turtle's bowl. In the evenings, when I watched for my father's car to turn into the cobblestone parking lot, I would pat the cat who purred. Then one day it disappeared. A thousand things could have happened to it. Maybe like a much later Minnesota cat named Archie, this tiger simply belonged to someone else and either went home or was lifted. But that's another story.
I was distraught at losing this first cat, my solace in the window well when my parents argued. Walking to school, I began calling for it, day after day, with no results. Finally, after a week or two of disconsolate searching, a tiger kitten, much smaller than the one I'd lost, hurried up to me a block from school. I scooped it up and carried it to Ashley Hall. Let's say I was in second grade, taught by the lovely Citadel wife with the white pageboy and blue eyes. Her speech could not have been more gentle. She took me and the kitten to the principal's house across the playing field, nestled in a stand of trees. After that I remember only that my mother who did not drive, but walked from the Old Citadel to Ashley Hall, stood in the doorway, talking to the principal. When I came home that afternoon, the kitten was waiting for me.
Living with cats fulfills life's promise that there is warmth and kindness and affection in the world. I know, this sounds terribly sentimental. But there it is, My mother who usually scorned sentiment, especially when expressed by my father (instance of that barbed but seductive resistance I recognize now as an adult), my mother in the case of this lost kitten acted the storybook Good Mother. The only element lacking is the mean wizard who would terrorize our lives until the cat came to save us. The wizard was there, hanging like a noxious cloud in the wings. He was compounded of my parents' alienation from what they'd known in the north, and of the poverty and discrimination in the south. Soon he would flap his terrible wings and drench us with sickening hate. But until that happened, the orange kitten kept me company. And though our bedtime stories from early volumes of the Book House might make us sweat or shiver, they always ended by promising that we would find what we was lost.
Thursday, October 28, 2010
Margotlog: Close Connections
Margotlog: Close Connections
Italy's regions hold fiercely to their cooking. Polenta made of corn in the Po Valley, region of immense corn fields. The Veneto influenced by French, wine-based meat sauces. Olives and bread in Sicily. Cheeses throughout, especially cheeses made from goat's and sheep's milk, some of which reach back so far into antiquity that their origins probably aren't traceable with any scientific exactitude. Languages too, or what in the United States we'd call dialects, remain locked in histories so vastly different that in a country our size, it's hard to believe their narrow specificity. That is, unless you scroll back maybe fifty years to the time before national television dominated our senses. Since I grew up in South Carolina speaking my mother's Midwestern American English, I was keenly aware of how different my classmates sounded from my mother, my sister and myself.
Not to mention my father who on Saturday, roaming around our apartment in The Old Citadel, uttered Italian diminutives like "porcheluzza"--big fat ugly pig, or porcellina--sweet little pig, or the worst, porcaccia--gross, disgusting sow! He delivered each, depending on our behavior and his mood. He also occasionally lapsed into a kind of ditty,
Uno, due, tre cancella
Suona, suona, suona bella
Ecco si, ecco no, then came
Bum bum bum and some
sense that the opponent
was leveled to the pavement.
The most I ever deciphered suggested that this rhyme had to do with a fight, bells ringing to announce the funeral, and then some sort of victory dance. But this is almost pure fabrication. I have no idea what the ditty implied.
My father, the lone Italian-American in Charleston, surrounded by his Waspish family of three women, Waspish colleagues and communicants in school and church, and then many African-Americans whom I, for one, could barely understand--my father could have propounded any number of strange Italian dialects on us and we wouldn't have known the difference.
Had I been older and wiser, more given to rumination about origins and tongues, I might have paused in my scorn of his silliness (scorn mixed with affection and even curiosity). I might have written his account of this ditty. But I was speeding out of immigrant identity toward one that could "pass" among Charleston's two ethnic/racial groups: English/Scotch-Irish (with a sprinkling of French Huguenots) and African-Americans. In my grade school classes at Ashley Hall, the private girls school paid for with my North Dakota grandfather's money, there was one other dark-haired girl. She was Jewish, which I knew nothing about, and thus in my headlong, unquestioned sprint toward uniformity, never investigated.
Over the years, as I return again and again to Italy, I relish the localism of its food, but can't really penetrate its dialects, though I can hear the broadening of "sc" sounds in the Tuscan. My friend Grazia, born in FLorence but with a Genovese mother, speaks standard Italian with that slight aspirated element. I hear the hint of the Veneto in Giangi, my friend Pat Smith's husband. These tiny intimations of the vast dialectical riches in Italy remind me of a saying that describes the best Italian: "lingua Toscana in bocca Romana" or the Tuscan dialect spoken by a Roman--literally, the language of Tuscany in a Roman mouth.
The one and only time I met my father in Italy, he slumped on the bed in a Neapolitan grattacielo, or literally sky-scraper, depressed because an airport taxi driver had tried to swindle him. But what truly troubled him was the fact that the man spoke the Neapolitan dialect and my father couldn't entirely penetrate it. "What happened to la lingua d'oro?" he moaned. The golden language of Dante, he went on. Well, Dante's Italian was Tuscan, on its way to becoming standard but not there yet. Probably my father knew this, except in the shock of arrival (I'm guessing a decade had passed since he'd last been in Italy), he cried out for the uniformity of language that allows strangers to enter an unfamiliar town and, especially if they're compatriots, communicate easily with each other. We're getting there in the United States, at least in airports and train stations. But visiting the byways by car, one can still hear localisms and pronunciations that sound odd. Vive la difference, I say. Why would we ever want Kentucky to sound like Montana?
Italy's regions hold fiercely to their cooking. Polenta made of corn in the Po Valley, region of immense corn fields. The Veneto influenced by French, wine-based meat sauces. Olives and bread in Sicily. Cheeses throughout, especially cheeses made from goat's and sheep's milk, some of which reach back so far into antiquity that their origins probably aren't traceable with any scientific exactitude. Languages too, or what in the United States we'd call dialects, remain locked in histories so vastly different that in a country our size, it's hard to believe their narrow specificity. That is, unless you scroll back maybe fifty years to the time before national television dominated our senses. Since I grew up in South Carolina speaking my mother's Midwestern American English, I was keenly aware of how different my classmates sounded from my mother, my sister and myself.
Not to mention my father who on Saturday, roaming around our apartment in The Old Citadel, uttered Italian diminutives like "porcheluzza"--big fat ugly pig, or porcellina--sweet little pig, or the worst, porcaccia--gross, disgusting sow! He delivered each, depending on our behavior and his mood. He also occasionally lapsed into a kind of ditty,
Uno, due, tre cancella
Suona, suona, suona bella
Ecco si, ecco no, then came
Bum bum bum and some
sense that the opponent
was leveled to the pavement.
The most I ever deciphered suggested that this rhyme had to do with a fight, bells ringing to announce the funeral, and then some sort of victory dance. But this is almost pure fabrication. I have no idea what the ditty implied.
My father, the lone Italian-American in Charleston, surrounded by his Waspish family of three women, Waspish colleagues and communicants in school and church, and then many African-Americans whom I, for one, could barely understand--my father could have propounded any number of strange Italian dialects on us and we wouldn't have known the difference.
Had I been older and wiser, more given to rumination about origins and tongues, I might have paused in my scorn of his silliness (scorn mixed with affection and even curiosity). I might have written his account of this ditty. But I was speeding out of immigrant identity toward one that could "pass" among Charleston's two ethnic/racial groups: English/Scotch-Irish (with a sprinkling of French Huguenots) and African-Americans. In my grade school classes at Ashley Hall, the private girls school paid for with my North Dakota grandfather's money, there was one other dark-haired girl. She was Jewish, which I knew nothing about, and thus in my headlong, unquestioned sprint toward uniformity, never investigated.
Over the years, as I return again and again to Italy, I relish the localism of its food, but can't really penetrate its dialects, though I can hear the broadening of "sc" sounds in the Tuscan. My friend Grazia, born in FLorence but with a Genovese mother, speaks standard Italian with that slight aspirated element. I hear the hint of the Veneto in Giangi, my friend Pat Smith's husband. These tiny intimations of the vast dialectical riches in Italy remind me of a saying that describes the best Italian: "lingua Toscana in bocca Romana" or the Tuscan dialect spoken by a Roman--literally, the language of Tuscany in a Roman mouth.
The one and only time I met my father in Italy, he slumped on the bed in a Neapolitan grattacielo, or literally sky-scraper, depressed because an airport taxi driver had tried to swindle him. But what truly troubled him was the fact that the man spoke the Neapolitan dialect and my father couldn't entirely penetrate it. "What happened to la lingua d'oro?" he moaned. The golden language of Dante, he went on. Well, Dante's Italian was Tuscan, on its way to becoming standard but not there yet. Probably my father knew this, except in the shock of arrival (I'm guessing a decade had passed since he'd last been in Italy), he cried out for the uniformity of language that allows strangers to enter an unfamiliar town and, especially if they're compatriots, communicate easily with each other. We're getting there in the United States, at least in airports and train stations. But visiting the byways by car, one can still hear localisms and pronunciations that sound odd. Vive la difference, I say. Why would we ever want Kentucky to sound like Montana?
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