tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-44373896870791542552024-03-12T20:00:26.081-07:00Mythical RealismThe work and ramblings of novelist Michael WilliamsMichael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.comBlogger61125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-59030607734739766512015-10-01T05:06:00.001-07:002015-10-01T05:06:37.145-07:00On Canterbury, the Black Prince, and David Mitchell<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
Twice I have spent some time in
Canterbury. Both, when I was there, were more triumphal parades than
pilgrimage, because of course <i>everything</i> was about me. The first was in the early 1990s as a part of
what I remember as the “<i>Weasel’s Luck</i>
Victory Tour”, the second a few years later, my circumstances heightened,
improved, and (I thought, even more arrogantly) changed entirely and for the
better. Visiting and re-visiting is an
odd form of pilgrimage, I think: your mind gathers anticipation, the
experience, and the memory of the first visit into the anticipation of the
second, and it becomes very much like Wordsworth records his experience of
Tintern Abbey in the famous poem:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>These beauteous
forms,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>Through a long
absence, have not been to me<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>As is a
landscape to a blind man’s eye:<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>But oft, in
lonely rooms, and ‘mid the din<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>Of towns and
cities, I have owed to them<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>In hours of
weariness, sensations sweet,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>Felt in the
blood, and felt along the heart;<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>And passing even
into my purer mind,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>With tranquil
restoration:—feelings too<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>Of unremembered
pleasure: such, perhaps,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>As have no
slight or trivial influence<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>On that best
portion of a good man’s life,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>His little,
nameless, unremembered, acts<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i>Of kindness and of
love. </i><o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
These lines I have always taken to be the poet’s take not only on how
nature heals and cures you, but also of how memories, seen and unseen,
deep-buried to where you can scarcely summon them, continue to shape and define
your days like a form of imaginative karma.
And so it was that two trips to one of the most revered sites of
pilgrimage, spaced only a few years apart, shape me these days as I come to the
place for a third time—this time entirely in memory and reconfiguration. I
discover new lessons in those old journeys, and how a pilgrimage might shift
and move within your thoughts until it is equally immediate, equally vivid, but
meaning altogether something different from what you had expected it would
mean.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Let me begin with the second time there.
It was, in many ways, a marked improvement over the first. I was years wiser, had ended a bad marriage
and embarked on a second that, to this day, remains the best journey I have
taken. I was riding the crest of my most
critically successful book, <i>Arcady</i>,
and was literally commuting to London, where I dined with editors and relaxed
into seeing the London I had wanted to see on the first trip. Canterbury was a tranquil spot after these
hectic days, and we had a room that overlooked the cathedral close, so that the
mornings were peaceful as well, and quietly beautiful, the soft, glassy ringing
of bottles unloaded on doorsteps by the milkman, and the bells beginning at a
courteous hour, when the sun was fully up and we were, too, on our way to visit
the pedestrian-friendly streets around the cathedral.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nDHSdin8Uzc/Vg0eutPDW-I/AAAAAAAAAY8/pDY56HepUAk/s1600/Canterbury%2BCathedral.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nDHSdin8Uzc/Vg0eutPDW-I/AAAAAAAAAY8/pDY56HepUAk/s320/Canterbury%2BCathedral.jpg" width="214" /></a>We saw the Cathedral, and I remembered a special fascination with the
tomb of Edward the Black Prince, whose very militant Christian tomb was undermined
by the mourning faces of “green men”—Celtic vegetation spirits whose presence
on Edward’s catafalque were touching and at the same time rather funny, even
though they seem to weep over his death.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
A death, by the way, that arrived a bit too soon. Edward ruled as the longest Crown Prince in
British history: serving ably, at times even brilliantly, commander in
victories over France in Crécy and Poitiers, he died a year before his father, and for all
his service, for all his place in the line of succession, never became
king. Perhaps the sculptor who carved
the green men did so not only in a spirit of mourning, but also in an awareness
of the rich irony of things. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
For the time of the green men was over.
No doubt they never saw it coming.
They receded to forests, to moonlit crossroads, to catafalques where
they teased the One True Faith of the Black Prince with their leafy presence.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
But theirs was not the only cultural subversion I saw in Canterbury. High on one of the arches is unobtrusively
carved a naked woman in a rather compromised posture. The story goes that the carving was the
sculptor’s revenge for having been stiffed in payment. Or so David Mitchell told me.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Yes, <i>the</i> David Mitchell. <i>Cloud
Atlas</i>, <i>The Bone Clocks</i>, among a
number of brilliant books. One of
Britain’s visionary young novelists, who is no doubt headed for literary
immortality as I write this. He was
“Dave” to me, though, on my first trip to Canterbury, where he was a clerk at
Waterstone’s, to whom I happened to mention that one of my books was sitting on
the shelf not that far from the cash register.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ueuEKKR2yvE/Vg0e5ld_siI/AAAAAAAAAZE/FvjbIxBrvxk/s1600/David_Mitchell_by_Kubik.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ueuEKKR2yvE/Vg0e5ld_siI/AAAAAAAAAZE/FvjbIxBrvxk/s200/David_Mitchell_by_Kubik.JPG" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo by Kubik. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
His reaction was charming. Polite,
engaged, initially a little nervous. It
was flattering, but at that time in my career, a few people were familiar with
my books (mostly Dragonlance readers, who tended to see me as a minor
celebrity, whether they liked or hated my work, and it was one or the other
back then). So I was used to a little
deference, the slightest star-struck demeanor, though it now happens less than
once in a couple of years, and I am always astonished when it does these
<o:p></o:p></div>
days. I talked to Dave briefly, and then
he asked me to join him for dinner and some beers with several of his graduate
school friends from the University of Kent.
He was nice and gracious and very, very smart, so it seemed like a fun
possibility.<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I joined Dave, then, and his friends Matt and Martine, for a graduate
school fare of beer and pizza, and for happy conversation that lasted into the
late hours. I remember being flattered
by their attentions—partly because being regarded as a professional novelist
was new to me, and also because at home, the full-time faculty and the graduate
students I brushed against in the university were dismissive of fantasy
fiction, and it was the first group of academics who seemed to believe I had
street cred. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
All in all, it was a friendly encounter with some good college kids. Matt and Martine seemed to be a couple, and
Dave spoke lovingly of his girlfriend in Japan.
We parted happy to have met each other: Dave and I both agreed that our
chance meeting and hours together had been the highlight of our summer. We would correspond briefly after I returned
to the States, but like 99% of overseas encounters, we lost touch after an
exchange of a couple of notes.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Until, of course, I made the connection between the ardent, bright
student and the novelist he had become.
And for a few days at first I was, I hate to admit, a green leafy face
of envy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
You see, David Mitchell has my job.
The one I had in mind for myself years ago. A serious writer (and by any definition he is
that) and one who has been able to make more than a living from his work. A house in Ireland, a way of life that seemed
to me glamorous when I began to write, and still has an enticing gleam to it as
I write this.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
But it never happened with me. Thirteen
novels now, some well-reviewed, but farther from making a living than seemed
possible when that first book, Weasel’s Luck, was released to sales I never
expected, even in my pipe dreams. By the standards I set for myself almost
thirty years ago I’m a failure: mid-shelf writer, untenured professor subject annually
to the budgetary whims of a finance-strapped university, passed over for
promotions on several occasions. <i>Was I not smart enough?</i> I ask myself. <i>Not talented
enough? Too lazy? Unlucky in where I grew up? Unwise in my professional choices? </i>Probably yes to all of these questions.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-aZdqAv-DxiM/Vg0hclbFRnI/AAAAAAAAAZY/0HBRC7aZKiM/s1600/Edward_Black.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="151" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-aZdqAv-DxiM/Vg0hclbFRnI/AAAAAAAAAZY/0HBRC7aZKiM/s200/Edward_Black.jpg" width="200" /></a><o:p> </o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
So much for the visions of a young man—how the life turns from what you
thought it would be to what it is. I
think that if any of us looked back thirty years, dredging up the images of our
ambition (“What will you be like 30 years from now?”), we all aim high. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
But we’re aiming at the wrong thing.
Notice I said that my envy lasted “for a few days.” After which, I faced some hard truths.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
David Mitchell’s artistry and hard work have won a deserving place in
life. Something in myself or my
circumstances gave me my road, my station today as a writer. And what is important is the process of
delight in the work: I still love putting words on the page, teaching students
in a classroom. And if that work goes
unacknowledged, that’s not what is important finally. If you’re the Black Prince and not a king,
there’s more than enough glory in your battles and your victories. If you’re not a prince but a feudal peasant,
same rules apply: your battles and victories remain your own, so fight the good
fight and enjoy the combat—physical, mental, imaginative, spiritual, no matter
the terrain. At one level the green men’s
presence may mock you, but at that level they mock us all: in the passage of
years all works vanish, and I realize it’s up to me to do the work given me, to
do it when and where it matters. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 115%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
I never stopped wishing David all the goodness he seemed and seems to
deserve. I celebrate him and his next
novel. I know the forest beckons, that
eventually all green men go back and hide, but I’m in this goodly light for a
while to come.<o:p></o:p></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-63698975583916605592015-06-28T10:51:00.003-07:002015-06-28T10:57:21.820-07:00On the Duomo in Milan<div class="MsoNormal">
It is like a holy forest, Carlo told us.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The design of the Duomo in Milan is more northern, more
gothic than its counterparts I have seen in Florence and Turin. There a more Romanesque style greets
you—astonishing in Florence, as you emerge from narrow Renaissance streets onto
a piazza where the cathedral greets you with not only its beauty but its
imposing size, which you encounter like some divine manifestation. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]-->The approach to
Milan’s Duomo is more like that to Turin’s, where you see the cathedral from a
distance, like a pilgrim might have seen it in the past, and the approach to it
sets your thoughts on holy ground. In
the holy forest.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FRceP3V6i5k/VZAyxP9dIqI/AAAAAAAAAXc/hv6jY-b6pHM/s1600/100_3134.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-FRceP3V6i5k/VZAyxP9dIqI/AAAAAAAAAXc/hv6jY-b6pHM/s200/100_3134.JPG" width="150" /></a>In comparison with the cathedrals of Florence and Turin, the
stone of this church is pale, almost white.
The movement of its architecture is highly vertical: its spires twist
like ascending tree boles or descending vines, and this before Carlo had
provided the metaphor. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I had always been told that the medieval cathedral was an
imitation of the city of God presented in the Book of the Apocalypse (or the
Book of Revelations). To think of it as
a forest is to draw from a whole new series of associations. There were things I noticed (and things I
didn’t) that the forest metaphor went a distance in explaining.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]--><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KGT5FhH5BRc/VZAzuZtcLTI/AAAAAAAAAXs/6_PzIIrIbsM/s1600/milan_duomo_506914.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-KGT5FhH5BRc/VZAzuZtcLTI/AAAAAAAAAXs/6_PzIIrIbsM/s200/milan_duomo_506914.jpg" width="200" /></a>The vault of the cathedral, extraordinarily high, is like a canopy of trees, and this instantly made me think of Lorien in Tolkien’s <i>Lord
of the Rings</i>. Furthermore, as Carlo
was to explain, the columns of the cathedral were not equidistant, their disproportion
accomplishing two things: the irregularity was about movement more than stasis,
the columns’ asymmetry is not apparent unless you go in looking for it, and the
slightest disproportions are used to guide the pilgrim’s or worshiper’s eye subliminally
toward the altar. Moreover, it recalls the medieval comparison of earthly life
to travel through the wilderness (remember, that’s where Dante starts in <i>The Divine Comedy</i>), but this is a
wilderness transformed, shot through with the prismatic light of God, through
which its particular and small
imperfections are made perfect in the whole of the design, much as (I am
guessing) the intentional “flaws” in Japanese pottery reflect how natural
things are skewed in particular, but amount to an overall sense of coherence
and wholeness.<br />
<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
And so it reminded me of Lorien. How the Fellowship had endured much already,
wanderings in inclement weather and over terrain that ended up being
impassable—ended up sending them on the dangerous journey through the Mines of
Moria, through battle with their enemies and the loss (apparently final to
their despairing eyes) of their leader Gandalf.
It was in Lorien, in a holy and still forest, that they were harbored,
nurtured, and redirected.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And that, to me, is the heart’s core of things. To harbor and nurture and redirect. Tolkien’s work is my most loved book, as most
of you know, and it is the book that, in ways, defined my spiritual posture
toward the world. Lorien was a place in <i>The Fellowship</i> that resonated with me, that
was curiously more my idea of heaven than the versions the church had taught me
in preceding years. Lorien was a
readying for more adventure: it was not a stasis alone, but a readying for more
of the quest. The pillars were
asymmetrical there, and its colonnades, like those in the Duomo, suggested at movement. An idea of heaven that I like in this moment
on earth: I’d like to be at rest and also headed somewhere, and though the
eventual goal may be a more absolute stasis, the journey and the beauties and
perils it holds seem like a heaven I’d set my sights on.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5dH7YWRZxzI/VZAzFxsEVhI/AAAAAAAAAXk/8PhDBAbUddU/s1600/100_3147.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5dH7YWRZxzI/VZAzFxsEVhI/AAAAAAAAAXk/8PhDBAbUddU/s200/100_3147.JPG" width="200" /></a></div>
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</v:shape><![endif]--><!--[if !vml]-->The climb to the roof
of the Duomo is steep, but comprised of landings where you can pause, gather
yourself, and continue. And the view
from its apex, as Milan extends itself around and below you as you stand like
vigilant angels or sentried elves, is a kind of repose in itself, but no
stasis, not yet. Breathing a little
hard, I took in the city, and the moment atop the cathedral seemed to me kind
of like the place T.S. Eliot talks about in “Burnt Norton”:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<i>At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>But neither arrest nor movement.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>And do not call it fixity,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<i>Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,</i></div>
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<i>There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.</i></div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-58708546940202741412015-06-23T07:11:00.001-07:002015-06-24T08:32:33.605-07:00On Milan and San'Ambrogio<div class="MsoNormal">
My friend Carlo is
Milanese, his family going back for generations in that impressive city. We were lucky to have him as a guide on a
Sunday this late spring, when it was a day of churches and sights ranging from
the picturesque to the breathtaking. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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As the second largest
city in Italy, Milan sprawls like its North American counterparts. It feels in ways more “modern” than
Rome. Its business and fashion
centrality may account in some ways for the stylish dress and the astonishing
physical beauty of many of the young adults I saw as Carlo steered us through
the streets of the central city. Indeed,
the first encounter with things Milanese had been before we were reunited with
our friends: we had shared a train compartment with two young Israeli women,
one civil and polite, the other model-lovely and absolutely refusing to shift
her entourage of luggage so that we could fit comfortably in our seats.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_7fCQZVha-g/VYln-kjt5iI/AAAAAAAAAVw/95sZLejsgdU/s1600/100_3096.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-_7fCQZVha-g/VYln-kjt5iI/AAAAAAAAAVw/95sZLejsgdU/s320/100_3096.JPG" width="320" /></a>Things moved uphill
from that rude introduction, which took place, granted, before our arrival, and
frankly had little to do with the graciousness and hospitality that Carlo and
his family would show us. I believe,
though, that there is a kind of heartlessness to beauty and wealth, and perhaps
we admire them both because something in us is ready to acknowledge that both
beauty and wealth are all too willing to exclude us. But maybe this was a lens through which I
unfairly glimpsed Milan now and then, born out of reading and film and popular
culture, because our welcome was warm, with good food, good wine, and the humor
of one of the wittiest of my friends. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Wit, by the way, can
have about it a whiff of heartlessness, too—an odd part of its attraction, I
think. There’s a cruelty, for example,
in a number of Wilde’s more brilliant observations that makes us gasp and laugh
at the same time, and part of the laughter comes from the fact that we have
gasped and caught the mean streak in the comedy. But wit becomes amiable and benign—becomes
gracious and graceful—when it is
generous while remaining sharp, and appreciative of the same qualities in
others. That is a European wit at its
best: in America there’s an edge of one-up, of the cutting remark made by
someone running with scissors. But none
of that was at our dinner table that night in Milan: Carlo is impossible to
keep up with in matters of wit, but he makes you feel entirely at home when you
make the effort.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dV_uyLM-uGQ/VYloqv2PwMI/AAAAAAAAAWQ/CLw5_hw4wRs/s1600/100_3100%2Bedit.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="154" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-dV_uyLM-uGQ/VYloqv2PwMI/AAAAAAAAAWQ/CLw5_hw4wRs/s200/100_3100%2Bedit.jpg" width="200" /></a>Bear with me. I am not simply praising a friendship. I have something to say that applies to the
Basilica San’Ambrogio.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A convivial night
turned into a morning that was brisk but not hectic. We hopped a bus that took us into the center
of the old city, where we attended Mass at this Basilica, a 12<sup>th</sup>
century church that sits comfortably with the Roman structures acknowledged
from its foundation (after all, the city was the Roman Mediolanum after it
passed from Celtic hands, and the ruins underlie the medieval and Renaissance
plan of the town). Part of the genius, I
think, of medieval Christianity lies in those moments when it looks the
Classical tradition square in the face and does not forget its beauty and its
humanized scale. The church’s arcade is
like something out of Rome, and directly outside of the cloister is the Colonna
del Diavolo—the Devil’s Column. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The story has it that
San’Ambrogio defended himself from Satan’s attack at this very spot. It seems the saint pushed the devil against
the column, and Old Nick got stuck the<o:p></o:p></div>
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YVq88oUG4YE/VYlodQ93dgI/AAAAAAAAAWI/cp7sCD8RKnQ/s1600/100_3098.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YVq88oUG4YE/VYlodQ93dgI/AAAAAAAAAWI/cp7sCD8RKnQ/s200/100_3098.JPG" width="150" /></a>re, lodged in the stone when his
diabolical horns pierced it. It was
further believed that you could smell sulfur coming from the holes, and Carlo
told us that if you placed your ear against the column, you could hear the
sounds that emanated from hell itself. Which
was why you see Rhonda listening at the column, because her faith and goodness
of heart would be proof against infernal influence. I, on the other hand, stood at some distance
beside Carlo, and though one of the principal Milanese tourist sites observes
laconically that<i> The holes that were once
present have been recently filled in,</i> I wouldn’t trust that all the ways to
hell are sealed.<br />
<br />
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The other churches we
would see that day—San Maurizio al Monastero Maggiore and, of course, the Duomo
di Milano, were more impressive in their lavish beauty. They will be the subject of two later
entries. But the smaller—and in some
ways plainer—Basilica had, in its hybrid and humbler structure a kind of beauty
that eludes the colder magnificence I was to see elsewhere in the city. It reflected our hosts and embodied one of
the better gifts I received from the city of Milan—that beneath its opulence
lay its quiet and more intimate humanity.<o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2015 Michael Williams</span></div>
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<br /></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-56919262492355870412015-06-15T05:12:00.000-07:002015-06-23T11:56:40.728-07:00On Returning to Courmayeur<div class="MsoNormal">
The first time we went
to Courmayeur ended, to be honest, in a
number of disappointments.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-u8EF2-u-QOs/VX7A7xZDawI/AAAAAAAAAVQ/Qs0feTr0FpE/s1600/Courmayeur1.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-u8EF2-u-QOs/VX7A7xZDawI/AAAAAAAAAVQ/Qs0feTr0FpE/s200/Courmayeur1.JPG" width="150" /></a>The little village
near the base of Mont Blanc was, at least on the Italian side of the mountain,
the point from which you could ascend the famous mountain—at least high up its
slope—by funicular. It was a promising
prospect, but the first time we went there, back in May 2014, we were waylaid
by the ATM machine.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Italy is a country
where the commerce of shops and restaurants is less…credit-intensive than at
home. And though, as we were to discover
later, the people who ran the funicular up the side of the mountain were more
than willing to accept VISA, our way from Courmayeur to La Palud where the lift
began was a good 4 km away by a bus that was cash only. So we had reached the end of our road for the
day, quite literally.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Let down but not all
that distressed, we spent some time wandering through the pedestrian areas of
the town, its streets picturesque almost (but not quite) to the point of being dull. It struck me as a kind of “movie Switzerland,”
a little more tidied and boutiqued than I was inclined to enjoy, but not a bad
place <o:p></o:p></div>
for a few hours’ lingering. Since this was a Sunday, and since it was the
middle of May, two weeks or so past the
end to Courmayeur’s principal
tourist season, we were a little out of luck even in falling back on
traditional touristry: half of the shops were closed, and a number of the more
interesting regional restaurants didn’t keep Sunday hours. <br />
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<br /></div>
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Lunch ended up as pizza,
which I seldom mind, especially in Italy, but the one I order included a raw egg as one of the
toppings—something more interesting to see than to think about or eat, and a
reminder to me that a very rudimentary grasp of the language is occasionally
not enough when you’re trying to negotiate a menu. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But it was right
before we went home that our financial inconvenience became a little more than
just inconvenient. Became, in fact, embarrassing.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Rhonda wasn’t feeling
that good, so we stopped in a little café for some pastry and coffee. The snack served and finished, I discovered
to my dismay that the place didn’t accept credit cards, either. A stumbling explanation in bad Italian brought
out a manager—a young man name Luca—whose English and generosity were more than
my ignorance deserved that afternoon. In
short, we had the coffee and pastry gratis, and I would remember his kindness
in the coming year, starting from the moment our bus headed back to Aosta, on board
two passengers defeated at the low levels of global finance by inexperience and
bad luck.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Needless to say, we
set upon ourselves to right some wrongs when it came to Courmayeur. A return trip, we decided, to ascend the
mountain. I announced as much in my
Facebook status:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 70.5pt;">
<i>Headed to Courmayeur this
morning, then an ascent of Mont Blanc. No, not with piton and rope, but in safe
vehicles in which you can stop for coffee at dizzying heights. My kind of
adventure these days.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So much of my
prediction was (once again) wrong. Which calls for a little commentary, beyond
simply advising other travelers never to predict how the day will go.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Safe vehicles” was, I
believe, more or less accurate. The
funicular turned out to be less like the stately one we had ridden in Ljubljana
roughly a year before: shaky with bumps and scrapes, crowded with German skiers
(and their skis), but all in all not death-defying, so yes, that would pass for
“safe”. And “stopping for coffee at
dizzying heights” was true as well—perhaps even better, in that we had lunch
with a view at a place called Summit 3842, where excellent polenta made amends
for sausage that was so-so, and the view, though intermittent because of cloud
and mist, ended up trumping it all. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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It was what lay in
between that I hadn’t bargained on. 228
stairs, straight up and steep, no landings on which to lean or even
collapse. Even the skiers around us were
panting. It was my daily workout—perhaps
my weekly one—and reaching the top, winded and sweaty, I had to allow that the
food up there tasted better for the exertion, the view more beautiful because
it was earned. It was a couch-potato
version of my own Mont Blanc climb, and laugh at me if you will, I was still
able to make my climb without aid of piton or Sherpa.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And the view. You understand Shelley: <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<i>Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Mont Blanc appears—still, snowy, and serene; <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<i>Its subject mountains their unearthly forms <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<i>Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales
between <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<i>Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps, <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread <o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<i>And wind among the accumulated steeps<o:p></o:p></i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
All natural drama and
cataract and grandeur. Extraordinary
beauty made even more beautiful because it’s on a scale where we don’t figure
in. Indifferent Nature , the world
before us and after us. A kind of
curious face to face with the Romantic Sublime—Edmund Burke and all that bunch,
and knowing that our footprint is so light upon the mountains that they would
be indifferent to our feelings of smallness and of insignificance.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2aCj3MkLl_8/VX7AvH1DxjI/AAAAAAAAAVI/jaH1y8JK4OU/s1600/courmayeur2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-2aCj3MkLl_8/VX7AvH1DxjI/AAAAAAAAAVI/jaH1y8JK4OU/s200/courmayeur2.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
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<br /></div>
<br />
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It’s hard to come down
from those heights without a little humility.
Another form of which was on my mind as we parted. I returned to the little café, 10 euros in
hand, intending a year-late payment of my debt.
The place was more bustling this time, having set up a gelato bar. An amiable, tall Frenchman who managed the
place let me know that Luca was gone now.
Time had passed, it seemed, regardless of the places in which my memory
had stopped. The new manager graciously
declined my repayment, thanking me for remembering and considering, and
returning with the intent to make old debts good. It’s something you can never quite do, at
least not in the way you intended: but the sublime is better, more humanized,
when it contains good will. <o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2015 Michael Williams</span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-34998445893449080392015-06-13T23:32:00.000-07:002015-06-23T11:57:05.245-07:00On Genoa and the Port Town Aesthetic<div class="MsoNormal">
Something about port towns asks for a different aesthetic,
and Genoa demands its own terms entirely.
Its harbor widens into the Mediterranean, of course, and its place by
the sea has almost entirely dominated its history. The Genoese were famous as navigators and
sailors, and their banking and financial community rivaled that of Venice,
their neighbor and rival on the other side of Italy. <o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Going to Genoa would prove to be a great adventure, because
for once I had no idea of what would greet me.
My images of other Italian cities I have visited—of course Rome and
Florence, but also Turin and Milan and Venice—had been shaped beforehand by the
things I had read, but Genoa was fresh to me;
I knew the salami and Christopher Columbus, but little else.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We got off the train at Genoa Piazza Principe, the main
station in the town. It was built in the
mid-nineteenth century, and it was only upon our return that I would get a
good glimpse of its exterior—marbled and squat and beautifully sturdy, as
though somehow solidity counted for a unique beauty in this decaying city. Our hosts Anna and Carlo met us right off the
train: Anna dear to us for some time, Carlo her boyfriend soon to be a welcome
addition to our circle of friends. We
walked immediately into the heart of the town, and almost as immediately, I
felt that it was unlike the other Italian cities I had visited.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-L43Sg3JHMTQ/VX0fFJxiEII/AAAAAAAAAT8/pm0WmWtv26w/s1600/Genoa%2BLong%2BView.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-L43Sg3JHMTQ/VX0fFJxiEII/AAAAAAAAAT8/pm0WmWtv26w/s200/Genoa%2BLong%2BView.jpg" width="200" /></a>The city slopes up from its harbor at the same steep angles
I had seen before in San Francisco and in Wellington, New Zealand. But the age makes a difference: Wellington,
though set on perhaps the steepest incline, is a sloping city of parks and open
spaces, and San Francisco has a certain consistency of architecture, all its
beauty residing in its nineteenth-century buildings and its gracious pact
between Victorian charm and modernity. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Genoa is quite a different character. Yes, it has some of the alluring seediness of
a place like Venice—another city that gathered its power and reputation through
sea commerce, from medieval times to the present. But if you were to liken the two cities to,
say, a pair of old courtesans, still shimmering in rich decay, Venice would be
the one who had better preserved her looks, either through cosmetics or some
lucky genetic gift. But Genoa was far and away the one who was better company,
filled with good stories and shady transactions.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The streets of this city bristled with a canny, subversive
life, and today it was overcast, the rain imminent. Right from the start I saw the street
vendors—not unusual in any Italian city, but more prevalent here, and perhaps
more aggressive. There were a number of
Africans, migrants from what were no doubt desperate circumstances on that
troubled continent, selling bead bracelets and small, cheaply carved
animals. There were also the Romani
(Americans generally know them as “gypsies,” a term most of them resent); and
then, quite common, the native Italian beggars, who migrate from table to table
at the cafes, pleading insistently (and sometimes at great length). Our
friend Carlo, who seemed a calmly quiet young man, refused one beggar again and
again, and yet again as we had coffee in a Genoan piazza. I could see that, eventually, even his
extensive patience was taxed, and I wondered how porous the “safety net” might
be Italy, since a whole subterranean world seems built on a kind of drifter
culture, especially in the slow, seedy climate of the port town.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8GxNHMQjSiQ/VX0fZTNcUFI/AAAAAAAAAUE/l3sB-5FBDz8/s1600/Genoa%2BColumbus.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-8GxNHMQjSiQ/VX0fZTNcUFI/AAAAAAAAAUE/l3sB-5FBDz8/s200/Genoa%2BColumbus.jpg" width="150" /></a>It wasn’t long until, almost reluctantly, we were shown <i>the statue</i>. Christopher Columbus was honored rather late
in Genoese history, with the monument erected roughly 150 years ago. A deeply romanticized portrait,
Columbus like someone out of a Byronic poem, his hand resting on a “subdued
Indian maiden,” as some descriptions would have it. The sight was uncomfortable, and when you put
it together with the street-vending refugees and vagabonds, you couldn’t help
thinking that it all tied together ultimately—that the glamour of the city had
kept its shifty undercurrent for centuries, and where other cities had found
ways to make street life less visible, Genoa had kept it in a noticeable
tension somehow as part of the picture.
It was a city that showed you the shadier side of the mercantile and
capitalist economies in its balance with beautiful palaces and architecture. Where American mythology would blame the
beggars, and where the Left would blame the dukes in the palaces, Genoa set the
whole picture before you with an Italian shrug:
<i>è quello che è</i>, or “it is what
it is”—a maddening, cliché phrase to the American ear, but particularly apt in
this complex city.</div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dtSU-DLaqjw/VX0fiEzesQI/AAAAAAAAAUM/t94jafwp-0g/s1600/Genoa%2BFountain.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="142" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-dtSU-DLaqjw/VX0fiEzesQI/AAAAAAAAAUM/t94jafwp-0g/s200/Genoa%2BFountain.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">To please the tourists, the powers
that be had dyed pink the water of the fountain at the Piazza Ferrari.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Anna and Carlo were mildly horrified, I
think, by what was certainly a gilding of the urban lily, but we, of course,
were those tourists in question, sucked in by the coat of paint, and also with
little girls waiting at home, whose favorite colors were pink and purple.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">So we took the photograph.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">And it was only later that it occurred to me
how this publicity stunt brushed against the edges of marketing—presented a
place in a manufactured prettiness, when its real beauty lay in something more
harsh and compromised and durable.</span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">“Are you shocked?” Anna would ask
me later, as we passed through a narrow, Renaissance alley on our way to her
flat.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The dark, cramped passage was the
haunt of Genoese prostitutes.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">
</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Prostitution is open in Genoa, although technically illegal: the women
work the daylight hours, standing in little alcoves off the alleys and the older,
narrower streets.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Indeed, there was
little to shock in the arrangement, unless it was how policy conflicted with
practice.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Again, the city’s conflict
between a nebulous idea (perhaps put forth in generations of advertising and
tourism committees) and the essential heart and spirit of the city, rougher
than any travel guide and yet alluring, an unabashed, unsentimental landscape
in a long Italian history of maritime commerce.</span></div>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TjzXAdvC31I/VX0fphtJ4VI/AAAAAAAAAUU/ItMZpH4S9O8/s1600/Genoa%2BSailing%2BShip.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TjzXAdvC31I/VX0fphtJ4VI/AAAAAAAAAUU/ItMZpH4S9O8/s200/Genoa%2BSailing%2BShip.jpg" width="200" /></a><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">The 18</span><sup style="text-indent: 0.5in;">th</sup><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> century sailing
ship docked at the harbor was testimony to the city’s wonderful paradox.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Romanticized, like something out of Disney’s </span><i style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Pirates of the Caribbean</i><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">, it seemed to
be readying itself for a voyage on the high seas, for trading towns and
swordplay on the deck.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Next to it an
African vendor hawked his bead bracelets, and it was only a short walk to a
gelato shop and a restaurant whose front door seemed to open on the sluggish,
oily water of the Mediterranean.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Genoa has
it both ways in those moments and places when it is most thoroughly itself, a
haunt for the pirates of adventure stories and for the subtle, nuanced piracies
of today.</span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;"> </span><span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">I left the city persuaded that
I had yet to get a handle on it, but the rust and verdigris and decay that
revealed itself through its prettier masks was part of its true and enduring
beauty: that much I knew.</span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2015 Michael Williams</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-40501481892535863582015-06-05T01:32:00.000-07:002015-06-25T22:59:45.595-07:00On Turin and the Shroud<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">I would imagine that in our time, with the exceptions
of Rome and Jerusalem, Turin has become the most frequent destination of the
Christian pilgrim.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>After all, it is the
Duomo of Turin, the Cattedrale di San Giovanni Battista that holds the famous Shroud.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>And
for Rhonda, and a little bit for me, we found ourselves moved in the middle of
May on a pilgrimage of sorts, to view an artifact that I doubt and that she
thinks might be.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Yes,
there are nuances and details, spaces between my skepticism and her
entertaining possibilities.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>She’s a good
Catholic girl, and I am one of those people not hardwired for belief, <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>but this would have something to do with the
both of us, we figured, so we left Turin’s Porta Susa—a long and horizontal
(and disappointingly immaculate) train station in the western part of the city,
bound for the cathedral by a meandering city bus. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Perhaps
on trips like this, the pilgrim attunes his mind to approaches.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Perhaps it was why the passengers on the bus
volunteered to locate our stop for us, an older man signaling well beforehand
the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">prossima fermata</i> virtually in
front of the Duomo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As always, a simple
and benign <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">prego</i> to our thanks, the
helpful and genuine friendliness of everyone we encountered from the train
station to the presence of the Shroud a testament to civility at the least, to
the courtesy of this solid and open city.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Turin struck
my imagination as a city of piazzas and colonnades.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Of course, you could say the same of many of
the large Italian cities, but somehow in Turin this arrangement called
attention to itself, nowhere so strikingly as around the Duomo.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>There sat the major cathedral of the city,
San Giovanni Batista, blockish and externally plain when compared with its counterparts
in Florence and Milan, tented and scaffolded in parts by the continual
reconstruction you see around the monuments of this country.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Hugging a brick wall to our right, we walked
a block or so and turned right, as we had been guided, toward the Giardini
Real, the expansive park that abuts the cathedral and the Palazzo Real, the
grand palace of the city.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6qF-Z0xUpys/VXFdegmCzHI/AAAAAAAAATY/0ugPpZdmf-w/s1600/Duomo%2Bin%2BTurin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-6qF-Z0xUpys/VXFdegmCzHI/AAAAAAAAATY/0ugPpZdmf-w/s320/Duomo%2Bin%2BTurin.jpg" width="240" /></a><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">It was here
that the pilgrimage began in full, and the shops lining the streets—not simply
the cramped, provisional booths selling photographs and wall-hangings of the
Shroud (and even, on one occasion, a splendidly blasphemous dish towel), but
also more respectable shops, it seemed, their wares a bit more permanent and a
lot more expensive.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This was the stuff
of medieval pilgrimage, where like the 1<sup>st</sup> century Temple in
Jerusalem itself, part of the space was ceded to Mammon.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">This mercenary
part of the journey didn’t bother me.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>Perhaps it was my cynicism, in full flourish since we had learned that
the Shroud itself, not its replica double, would be on display this summer in
Italy.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>At the time we discovered this, I
remember thinking, “And the difference is…?” Because it makes no difference if
the original Shroud is not <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the </i>Shroud,
I thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>What, after all, could
distinguish one version from another when both are images of some imagined thing,
a representation of a collective desire for something to be more than it is?</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Here we were
on the sidewalk now, passing booths will all kinds of food—nourishment for the
pilgrims, no doubt, though the sandwich of Sicilian sausage could also have
been something more than it was.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The
highlight of the movement through the booths was a young vendor selling
pastries, who told me, in impeccable and subversive English, “That will be one
hundred dollars.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>We fill them with
diamonds, you know.”</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">We had been
told to expect hours of waiting.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>The day
was warm, and the prospect seemed miserable to me, as the one thing I hate more
than lines is hot weather, but as we passed through a friendly but thorough
security check and into a tented walkway, the temperature was not unpleasant
and we seemed to be moving at an unanticipated pace.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>All around us were languages we did not
speak: I hear Italian, of course, but French and German as well.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I heard the recognizable inflections of
American English, but missed the words in our surprisingly swift movement in
the queue.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">We were bound
toward shadows together, I thought.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>And
for some reason, it was no Biblical verse that came to mind, but the last lines
of Bergman’s Seventh Seal:</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;"> <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">They move away
from the dawn in a solemn dance away towards the dark lands while the rain
cleanses their cheeks of the salt from their bitter tears</i>.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%;">Toward the dark lands we hastened, now being divided into
small groups.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I clung to Rhonda out of
the silly fear that the ushers would somehow divide us, and we would enter the
presence of the Shroud separately, losing each other in the crowded
shadows.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Fortunately, nothing like that
was remotely possible, and we entered the cool dank air of the Duomo and were
guided to a long, illumined display that I first mistook for the Shroud itself
until, on closer approach, it was evident that what stood in front of us was a
photograph.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>A display in several
languages described the Shroud for us, pointing out—almost like a lecturer’s
highlighting, complete with pointer and </span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">magnified
slides, the visual evidence marshalled for a crucified body, lacerated and
pierced in the hands, feet, and side.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">When you knew
where to look, you were prepared for the viewing. Even the pastries are filled with diamonds.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Into the
hushed darkness we were guided, cautioned against flash photography, of course (sh the attached picture of the Shroud is not my own). This attention to protocol intensified the shadow, made it a place outside of place, the courteous whispers of elderly ladies
arranging us in rows and tiers before the famous artifact.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>I thought of Rudolf Otto’s
famous definition of the numinous: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">mysterium
tremendum et fascinans</i>. The idea of the holy as mysterious, inspiring fear
or awe and yet drawing in or attracting the beholder, and doing both at the
same time.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WC_XFrM_Czk/VXFdhb2z-vI/AAAAAAAAATg/ByfQr0bIngs/s1600/Shroud%2Bof%2BTurin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="182" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-WC_XFrM_Czk/VXFdhb2z-vI/AAAAAAAAATg/ByfQr0bIngs/s320/Shroud%2Bof%2BTurin.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;">Beyond a
ranging curiosity, seeing something that you owe it to yourself to see if it is
on display, I confess to having no sense of the numinous on the fabric.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Yet in the hush of the room, the devotion was
palpable: what these fifty people or so had carried with them from the reaches
of the city, the continent, perhaps the world.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>To some, this was the grail at the end of a journey, and to say, as has
become customary, that it was the journey that mattered more than the
arrival—well, that’s presumptuous, to tell this assembly of the devoted what
meaning they were to gather in the presence of the Shroud and, even more presumptuously,
how they were to gather it.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>As for me, I
needed no artifact to notice that the quiet around me was welcoming, that
unlike the religion I have often encountered in my experience of coming up, of
my struggles with a faith in the fifty years before I sat it aside at last,
this was a quiet that beckoned me in with no agenda and a simple, abiding
silence.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>It seemed like a place at the
table I might have taken had it been offered, or had I seen it, years ago.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: 35.4pt;">
<span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Emerging into the spacious, far more secular
grounds of the Palazzo Real, I was glad for the light despite the stillness I
had left behind. I could explain away the Shroud in a dozen ways, just as its defenders could stretch explanation to defend it. But all this was wasted argument, between those of faith and those of skepticism, or perhaps more accurately, between people whose faiths settle differently. I took those thoughts from the quiet space, realizing in that first breath of commotion and Palazzo and sun that, if
the world is all I have, it contains places of turmoil and calm, and that,
perhaps, is more than I could bargain for. </span><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2015 Michael Williams</span><span lang="EN-US" style="font-size: 12.0pt; line-height: 115%; mso-ansi-language: EN-US;"><a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a></span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-82612188904661480882015-06-01T06:14:00.001-07:002015-06-05T02:46:56.936-07:00On Visible Cities<i>Note: This to be used as the head of a section to a proposed book of travel writings.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i><br /></i>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
There’s a quote from
Baudelaire I’ve always found funny: apparently, when asked why he didn’r write
any nature poetry, his answer was simple and direct: “I don’t worship
vegetables.” Just the right amount of
bluntness and smart-assery that reveals a genuine creature of the city.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The city is, for many
of us, the landscape of record. I didn’t
grow up where that was the case: my two principal childhood homes were suburban
and country, and the circles of my travels seem to take me back to small
towns—places of mixed blessings that seem to be where I settle, as a rule. But I believe the city is the arena in which
the drama and situations of the 21<sup>st</sup> century inevitably take place,
and I believe there is nothing particularly fresh or insightful in saying that. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-71uFlrzpMrs/VWxaPjNpPSI/AAAAAAAAASM/MBZ1rDueCpE/s1600/Prague%2BVisible%2BCity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="142" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-71uFlrzpMrs/VWxaPjNpPSI/AAAAAAAAASM/MBZ1rDueCpE/s200/Prague%2BVisible%2BCity.jpg" width="200" /></a>As far as I know, the
city became the center of the Modern soul about the time it became a character
in imaginative literature. For all the
Romantics’ infatuation with Nature, you have old Willie Blake writing <i>Songs of Innocence and Experience</i> in the
height of their heyday, and you can’t imagine those poems outside an urban
setting. The city pervades them, even
the crazy visionary stuff, but “London” and the Chimney Sweep poems are shot
through with the dirt and noise and claustrophobia that would enter our
imaginations for the next two centuries.
There’s Dickens, and Baudelaire like I mentioned. And Joyce, and Eliot, and Kafka. Yes, lots of writers tried to get out of
town, but so many stories begin and end in the city these days: we are
condensed, overpopulated, forced to live and die in the presence of each other.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But it isn’t as bleak
as that. In Milan only a week ago, I
again brushed against the ideas of the Italian Futurists—Marinetti and Boccioni
and their celebration of the art of machinery and noise and combustion. Too bad some of them filtered that passion
into Fascism, because they were certainly on to something in the human spirit. We love the new, the brilliant and
violent. We love the crash and clamor of
things, especially when we’re young, but in my case some of the affections
lingered into middle age, so here I am—part of me Futurist, while another part
romances the past and the layers of cities.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And as character in
modern fiction, cities in modern times take on personality. You get to know them gradually: at first they
are mysteries, broad stereotypes of what you have sometimes heard,
perhaps. For me, the cities often take
shape through what I have read: I cannot imagine Prague, for example, other
than through the lens of Franz Kafka, although in doing so, I no doubt miss the
city on a number of levels. As it
reveals itself through exceptions to type, the city unfolds slowly and with
nuance, like Molly Bloom or Quentin Compson, and you acquaint yourself in
stages, learning streets and districts and skylines as you might countenance
and expression.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So this entry is
intended to head up a section of my travel writings called Visible Cities. The homage is obvious: Calvino’s book <i>Invisible Cities</i> is one of the most
beautiful things written in the 20<sup>th</sup> century, and I owe him much
more than a title. Calvino’s cities were drawn as rich prose poems, fantasies
on ideas and on the way we organize, construct, and give meaning to the raw
materials around us. No wonder he used the
city: it is always a chaos almost always struggling to become something:
experts on chaos theory (of which I am certainly not one) claim that it is the
only way to explain the traffic patterns of cities, and since that assertion
requires a knowledge of physics above my pay grade, I will just assume they
have a point, and that the city’s disorder was a kind of vehicle for larger,
more conceptual orders that Calvino managed to discover in its parts and unruly
complications.</div>
<o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mguzzqx_VrU/VWxZ_nsJkEI/AAAAAAAAASE/H4mHCFDGcnw/s1600/Milan%2BVisible%2BCity.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-mguzzqx_VrU/VWxZ_nsJkEI/AAAAAAAAASE/H4mHCFDGcnw/s200/Milan%2BVisible%2BCity.jpg" width="200" /></a>My approach is more
myth than science. I plan to start with cities observed rather than conceptual,
from the brick and mortar of American towns to the marble and stone of Europe,
dwelling in the tactile and, I hope, balancing how they were once imagined with
some of the accidents of their growth into what and who they are. Budapest and Vienna, Prague and Turin and
Genoa and Milan, Detroit and Dublin, Chicago and my own home town of
Louisville, smaller than each of these and in almost all ways more parochial,
and yet revealing wonders if you look long enough (It was Pogo, after all, who
said, “If you squint your eyes just right, you can see the gold of the Incas”).
The idea is that there is connection and order behind the building blocks of
this very world, that the makers of London, say, or of Venice, had an idea they
were building toward, perhaps unconsciously, and that idea was an expression of
a basic way in which they were who they were.
That it isn’t crazy to personify Prague in Kafka, Genoa in Columbus or
Venice in the cholera of Mann’s great novella.
That our imagination imposes myths on a place, or extracts the myth from
its foundations, and it is sometimes, even almost always, hard to tell the
difference between those two imaginings. <span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2015 Michael Williams</span><o:p></o:p></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-86787618610827362672015-03-07T08:24:00.001-08:002015-06-05T02:47:22.386-07:00Of Ten Thousand Buddhas Summit Monastery and a Place Close to Home<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s a roundabout five miles or so from my doorstep to the
Ten Thousand Buddhas Summit Monastery.
The road there leaves Corydon and slips onto the Old Forest Road (for a
Tolkien student, the perfect road on which to leave the familiar). From there, it winds over farmlands, reaches
an unforeseen fork and takes a left, dipping between small houses and trailers,
past a house complete with car-pursuing border collie (it happens every time:
he lurks by the fence row waiting), then takes a left on Mathis Road, where a
pair of broken-down barns announce your final turn—a mile-long driveway,
rain-rutted and muddy, impassable for a goodly third of the year as it ascends
toward the sprawling little complex where the monks live.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The first time there, back in the spring of 2013, we missed the final turn. The sign for the monastery is a painted arrow
on a boulder at the foot of the drive, but it is only visible from one direction, and
the direction wasn’t ours. So we wandered
for ten minutes up Mathis Road until it was all but clear that we had missed
the turn-off. On the way back, we saw it
easily, turned and started the climb.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8SHxNU64-ss/VPsl14qjgWI/AAAAAAAAARg/YyPc3A5cmcA/s1600/13.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-8SHxNU64-ss/VPsl14qjgWI/AAAAAAAAARg/YyPc3A5cmcA/s1600/13.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I am sure there are not ten thousand Buddhas at the crest of
the hill. Do we count the statues? the sangha
(the Buddhist community)? a combination of both, or another form of reckoning?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Whatever the case, what does greet the traveler is an array
of statues, fifty or sixty Buddhas, perhaps, in inviting postures of calm and
welcome. Coming up the hill for the
first time was a kind of coming home—not in any profound sense of conversion or
epiphany, because I’ve always been secular, skeptical, and (I hate to admit)
perhaps even cynical when it comes to religious matters. No, this homecoming was something more in the
country of imagination and emotion, that feeling that you get when, after a
long trip, you reach your own threshold, and the tension of wandering slides
away and you feel that you can rest here, can put up your feet.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was a feeling that surprised me, stripped of all but a
residual spirituality—the call of the soul that a writer feels mid-novel. For the thing that had brought me to the
monastery was research—nothing academic or theological, but the kind of
research all my novelist friends know about, the creation of the experience, of
presence in a place, of paying attention to the senses as they take in what is
around them. In this case it was the
glow off the white ceramic statuary, the smell of the surrounding forest and a
faint undercurrent of sandalwood incense.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And most of all, the profound quiet of the place. But more of that in a moment.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sc4sQiU2hWI/VPslJvz8oHI/AAAAAAAAARY/Ma3rR-PUKAE/s1600/6a00d8341c7c3b53ef0115711ad264970b-800wi.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-sc4sQiU2hWI/VPslJvz8oHI/AAAAAAAAARY/Ma3rR-PUKAE/s1600/6a00d8341c7c3b53ef0115711ad264970b-800wi.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I was a few chapters into my work in progress, working title
<i>Ghost Month</i>. One of the novel’s heroes
was turning out to be what I characterized at first as a “rock star Buddhist”—a
Westerner with a sentimental attachment to the media image of Eastern
serenity. What happens, though, as a
novel unfolds, is that a character surprises you; it became apparent early on
that Dominic, in order to be anything beyond a shallow dilettante, would have
learned something or other about the religion he embraced. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I knew then I would have to brush against Buddhism in a way
that was a bit more than a passing acquaintance. So I began an internet search for nearby
monasteries or centers, and with surprise (and a little embarrassment at my own
ignorance) discovered the Summit Monastery not fifteen minutes away. Hence the winding drive, the few minutes of
being lost, and the arrival at this spot in the midst of this quiet.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The silence, oddly, did not carry with it a sense of removal. I had grown up in a wide array of settings—city,
suburbia, military post, and farm. And I
was reminded of my grandfather’s farm, the sloping field and the pond, behind
it a still ten acres of woods. A
surprising sense of safety amid those trees, the high-pitched, percussive call
of a cardinal and the ratcheting of cicadas.
It was all sound you could rest in, comfortable with the nearby road and
the passage of the everyday. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
But with your feet on pavement, your thoughts could return to these woods. It reminded my of something in Wordsworth, when the young man thought over his recollections of Tintern Abbey:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Of towns and cities, I have owed to them,<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart,<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>And passing even into my purer mind<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>With tranquil restoration...</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And it was later, not with Wordsworth's eloquence but with a gratitude to that eloquence, to that other monastery up in the Indiana hills and to the journey that had taken me there, I began to assemble my own thoughts and decided I would go back--this time, not simply as a matter of research. Ultimately to make
it a regular journey.<br />
<br />
Over two years have passed since that first encounter. I make regular trips to the Summit Monastery to meditate with the Rev. Thich Hang Dat, who has become friend and mentor in the interim. And my understanding of what happened there that first time has changed in two years.<br />
<br />
My failures of
faith have been numberless—side roads taken hopefully, leading to dislocation
and disappointment, steep roads I was too lazy to endure, roads through unsightly
and mean country that I figured could not lead to where I was headed. Whatever the case, the monastery settled in
my later thoughts, I hope not superficially because I return to it again and
again, practice the meditation I began there, consider it a wayside spot of
sustenance and odd peace.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
I will write more about it in the coming spring. <o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2015 Michael Williams</span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-9507857417591004322014-12-24T05:46:00.000-08:002015-06-05T02:47:49.381-07:00On Pilgrimage to Wellington: The Road to and from the Shire<div class="MsoNormal">
Imagine a park high above the city of Wellington, New
Zealand, a hemisphere and two seasons away from home. There was a place where you stand on a
woodland trail and look over and up through a canopy of trees into gray
December light—it was gray that day, even if the season in the Southern
Hemisphere was late spring. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Wellington slopes as steeply as any city I have visited. The incline leads from a kind of windy pinnacle (at least in the area where we stayed), the home of colleges and hospitals, down to a bright blue harbor and museums and level ground. Your legs ached from walking the long journey, and the way back to where we stayed was strenuous as most mountain hikes.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lyz-2SxnIHc/VJrC45VVGXI/AAAAAAAAAQw/Wc0tgt_EITA/s1600/Mount%2BVictoria%2BWellington.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-lyz-2SxnIHc/VJrC45VVGXI/AAAAAAAAAQw/Wc0tgt_EITA/s1600/Mount%2BVictoria%2BWellington.jpg" width="200" /></a>Mount Victoria was our principal hike when my Tolkien students and I visited Wellington. Small by mountain standards, it lies well in walking distance from the city, and upon its slopes lay the spot where, early in the Jackson movie, Frodo
looks down the path, sees the air buckle and blur, and urges his companions to
get off the road. It was a moment in the first film, <i>The Fellowship of the Ring</i>, and consequently, a moment on that hill took me back to another occasion, many years before and much closer
to home.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A moment that, like so many good moments, had begun with a
gift. Bed fast for a summer because of a
baseball back injury, I was lucky to have a pair of cousins, both wiser and
more hip than I could hope to be; they set before me a copy of <i>Lord
of the Rings</i>—a long book, they told me, to shorten the summer boredom. And shorten the boredom it did: I read the
trilogy three times that summer. But
during that first reading, there was an instant of awareness that sealed a
summer’s (and a lifetime’s) devotion to that book, to fantasy literature, and
to reading itself.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In chapter 3 of the <i>Fellowship</i>, at perhaps the first
iconic moment in the trilogy, the hobbits are leaving the Shire on a mission
that none of them truly understand yet.
They encounter the first of the Black Riders, the reconnaissance of the
Dark Lord of Mordor. That moment I
remember distinctly, as the hobbits slide off the road into cover, as the Rider
paces above them, sniffing for them in country forever transformed for them. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And for me.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
My eyes lifted from the page, and I emerged from that world
knowing that <i>this </i>story meant business.
It was not the first serious story I had ever read, I am certain;
however, it was the first time I had understood the seriousness of a
story. All of a sudden, the elements of
the fantastic that had offered escape in the other books I had read no longer
offered the same refuges. They were no
longer a departure from reality—not even merely a <i>commentary</i> on
reality—but a reality unto themselves, thresholds to a way of apprehending
things that transformed me forever and entirely. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I gave myself to that story at that moment. To fantasy fiction. To story in general. It was life-changing, and I hope all of you
have or have had a moment like it, the start of an adventure that tells you who
you are.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Thirty-five years later, I would find out some interesting
things about that scene. In a 1938
letter to his publisher, Tolkien maintained that in this very chapter, the
story had “taken an unpremeditated turn”.
I can’t imagine that the turn did not lie in this moment, that it surprised <i>him</i> just as much as
it surprised <i>me</i>. Just as much as
it surprised and drew in two of our New Zealand guides—Colin Bleasdale from
Flat Earth New Zealand Enterprises, and Hammond Peek who had both worked on the
movie (Peek won an Oscar® for sound mixing on <i>Return
of the King</i>). Both told us that <i>this</i>
was the moment in the <i>film</i> that sold the story to them, that drew them into Jackson’s world and
Tolkien’s behind it.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Of course, the place was really decades and continents away
for me. A summer, sunstruck and tedious,
when it hurt to move and when the only real joy felt like Middle Earth. It struck me in Wellington how the act of
pilgrimage was simply the wedding of yearning and place, that the shrine could
be Jerusalem or Canterbury or a tree-hooded road in a park you had never
imagined when the journey began. The
journey was always one of soul and heart; yes, it was the travel more than the
destination, as wise pilgrims are fond of saying, but there needs to be a place
where soul and heart can rest and take sustenance, where they look back in wonder
and tell you how far you have come.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KAA1fg0b618/VJrDHme03SI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/wwjwuWhnp8c/s1600/Mount%2BVictoria%2BWellington%2B2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="150" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-KAA1fg0b618/VJrDHme03SI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/wwjwuWhnp8c/s1600/Mount%2BVictoria%2BWellington%2B2.jpg" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
We did the obligatory pictures. I huddled with my students at the spot where
Elijah Wood and Sean Astin had eluded Jackson’s Dark Riders, and comedy crept
into the journey. I was reminded that
part of the wonder of the stopping place was how things beckoned you not to
take the destination seriously, that its greatest importance was, like all
other places, as a signpost for where you have been and where you are going. <o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-40767977014538582062014-11-28T07:11:00.000-08:002014-12-01T02:47:47.426-08:00Of New Zealand, Tolkien, and Pilgrimage<div class="MsoNormal">
The act of pilgrimage takes a number of turns across a
lifetime. Sometimes you embark with the
destination in mind, as medieval pilgrims did to Jerusalem or Rome or Canterbury,
and sometimes you find out (as I imagine some of those medieval pilgrims did)
that the meaning of the journey lay in the process, in what you encountered
along the way. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pqDWI8STCME/VHiQH_tSHqI/AAAAAAAAAQY/cUaabxKnN68/s1600/Hobbiton%2BNew%2BZealand.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-pqDWI8STCME/VHiQH_tSHqI/AAAAAAAAAQY/cUaabxKnN68/s1600/Hobbiton%2BNew%2BZealand.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We have all heard versions of that simple (and simplistic) “either/or”;
it’s not much more profound to say that every pilgrimage is a combination of
both the planned and the accidental, the destination and the
getting-there. What interests me today,
though, is a different take on pilgrimage—one that arises from both these
categories and yet veers away from being comfortably either or both.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Sometimes you are on a pilgrimage, and you don’t notice
until you get there.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s been eight years since Rhonda and I made the journey to
New Zealand, along with several colleagues and a handful of remarkable students
from the University of Louisville’s Honors Program. It was a journey to be envied, if you asked a
number of my writer friends: a Tolkien seminar that included The Lord of the
Rings, then Peter Jackson’s movie treatment of the great novels, would be
followed by two weeks among the film sites in New Zealand. We carefully selected these students, guided
(at least in my case) by their love of the books. We passed over worthy candidates in a search
for those whose application essays showed a respect, a curiosity, and an
affection for Tolkien’s work, so in some cases the almighty GPA was less a
factor (though these were Honors students with excellent grades) than a passion
for the subject. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was a good standard to apply. We chose excellent company—bright and
creative, irreverent and intellectually engaged. I don’t remember what the grades were (A’s
and B’s, no doubt), but I remember the people and their work with fondness, as
the class evolved into a mutual labor of love.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The trip was, as you might imagine, a kind of crown to the
experience. Yes, they were supposed to
work in New Zealand, but I kept assignments feather-light, the idea being to
leave them to their resources, to let them become a Fellowship. All disciplinary matters were in the capable
hands of my colleagues, John Richardson and Luke Buckman, and to this day I
have no idea whether any student was upbraided or even corrected.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The travel experience was not uniform. There was pleasant and funny testament to
this (one young woman boarded an airplane for the first time, and her exuberant
whoop when it lifted off the ground kept me smiling from Louisville to Chicago on
the first short leg of the journey), and there were circumstances more perilous
and accidental: my passport was “inquired into,” as my name is not the most
uncommon in the world, and one young man implied, loudly and teasingly and in
the middle of LAX airport, that the inquiry had to do with “alleged connections
to the IRA”. Those connections were so
deeply alleged that he had made them up on the spot, but the post 9/11
discomfort in an international airport was, believe me, very real. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Despite my close brush with cavity search, the rest of the
trip to our destination went according to plan.
And here we return to the subject at hand, because it was on a hilly
little farm near Matamata on New Zealand’s North Island that it became clear to
me how I had been a pilgrim all along.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Some of you may know this story, but when I was fourteen, a
baseball injury placed me on my back, more or less, for an entire summer. It turned out that the problem rose from my
having a mild and undetected spina bifida, apparently more common in our region
than was known at that time, mostly (oddly enough) in males of Welsh
descent. While I was laid up, my cousins
Tom and Gary (two other males of Welsh descent) introduced me to the trilogy in
the hopes that a long book could tide me over in a long, inactive summer. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It did just that. And
in addition, it redefined me, as epiphanies are supposed to do. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The revelation came for me, as I will tell in the next entry,
in the third chapter of <i>The Fellowship of
the Ring</i>. For now, it is better to
consider where it led me. For after
having read the trilogy, I knew that my story would center on stories, on
reading them and telling them. I would
discover in the years to come that stories were my principal way of
understanding the world, of vesting it with meanings both evident and veiled,
both communal and deeply private. Myths
were stories, after all, and through telling tales we brush the edge of myth,
even now in a world where the most simplistic among us pride themselves in
being myth-free. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was a lesson I took with me, through college and graduate
school, to my stay in publishing and on into writing, through my conflicts with
fellow academics who considered the trilogy a “children’s book” without having
read the trilogy (or, I would guess, much children’s literature), and who
considered me (verbatim) “not a real writer” for embracing Tolkien, heroic fantasy,
speculative fiction in all its shapes and forms. Things have changed with the academicians,
and with me as well, because it took me a while to realize that my journey and
its branching, resultant conflicts were all pilgrimage as well.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wqp7K-sUA2A/VHiQX9aHyoI/AAAAAAAAAQg/jC0L0DNObaw/s1600/Hobbiton%2BNew%2BZealand%2BII.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wqp7K-sUA2A/VHiQX9aHyoI/AAAAAAAAAQg/jC0L0DNObaw/s1600/Hobbiton%2BNew%2BZealand%2BII.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a>On the Matamata farm it hit me. This was a place Jackson had negotiated with
a sheep farmer, who refused to speak to the eminent director until a contested
televised rugby game was complete. This
was the place that housed the movie’s version of Bilbo’s Party Oak and the
opening scenes set in the Shire. Green
slopes tumbled down to a fence row and a small, weedy pond not much bigger than
the one in my grandfather’s east field, visible from the house in which I had
read much of <i>Two Towers.</i> The smell rose in the warm December air,
fragrant and fresh, though there were sheep turds underfoot you’d have to watch
for. One of the students sat on the
slope above what had once been Bag End, which was now a white oval framework
bedded in the bright green of the hill, and he leaned on his knees, quiet and
teary, on the edge of being overwhelmed by his emotions, fixed to this spot he
was no doubt coloring and peopling in his memory and imagination. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I sat down by him, put my arm around his shoulders. Cautioned him that, if he started to cry, I
would, too. We looked off to the west,
at the tree and the pond, each imagining a different Shire that was our mutual
destination and home. One of the young
women produced a recorder and began to play the soft, solitary theme song of
Jackson’s trilogy, and it never sounded so good and so lonely and so
transformingly communal. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was, indeed, the stuff of pilgrimage. The search for meaning and healing, in which
the destination is less the goal than the place you set down the things you
carry. <o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-58472838927411246032014-10-19T08:47:00.007-07:002014-12-01T02:47:33.457-08:00On the Pont d'Aël and the Colossal Wreck of Time<div class="MsoNormal">
It was 40◦ C in Aosta that afternoon. I was afraid to do the computations, and I
wasn’t yet aware that this would be the night I spent in a lawn chair on the
balcony of the flat, hopeful for breezes and night air. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
After helping grade the examinations in what would be my
last duty of the term, I took off up into the Alps with my colleagues and
friends, Anna Anselmo and Rosie Crawford.
We were headed toward the bridge at <span lang="EN">Pont d'Aël, the largest and most formidable of the bridges in the
region. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lc3RGuAuGtQ/VEPcj8rBkZI/AAAAAAAAAQI/sJbuEHUg_d0/s1600/PontdAel%2BAnselmo4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Lc3RGuAuGtQ/VEPcj8rBkZI/AAAAAAAAAQI/sJbuEHUg_d0/s1600/PontdAel%2BAnselmo4.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></div>
I was assured
that at that height the temperatures would be more forgiving, and Rosie drove
us smoothly over the narrow, winding roads, pointing out the occasional sites
of stories that were what I would call “Italian Gothic”—tales of child-murder
and isolation, strewn with public and private tragedy. We stopped for a drink part of the way to the
site, as Rosie parked the car with magnificent disregard for traffic laws and
we headed to a little pub equipped with good beer, a friendly Corgi, an
overlook of Alpine meadows, and a cool late afternoon that gave respite from
the heat in the town.<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN">We were hastened,
not rushed. Most Italians are not
rushed. But if we were to meet our
colleagues for dinner at Taverna di Gargantua (which was, by the way, a
remarkable little restaurant back on the outskirts of Aosta), we would have
only a small space at Pont d'Aël. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN">It was to be an
exalted space. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span lang="EN"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sOEHrP8WW50/VEPcgKzUltI/AAAAAAAAAQA/fbEVKMxsabc/s1600/PontdAel%2BAnselmo3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-sOEHrP8WW50/VEPcgKzUltI/AAAAAAAAAQA/fbEVKMxsabc/s1600/PontdAel%2BAnselmo3.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a><span lang="EN">We walked out
over the bridge (which had served as an aqueduct in the first century of the
Christian era). It spanned the rapid
current of the Torrente Grand Eyvia, a stream or creek full worthy of the name
Torrente. The Grand Eyvia rushed south
under the bridge, its roar audible even from the great height of the Pont d'Aël as it was lost in the narrowing
tunnel of bluff and pine and bright deciduous green. Again I thought of Shelley’s brush with the
sublime at the foot of Mont Blanc, not an hour from where I stood:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN"> </span><i>Dizzy Ravine! and when I gaze on thee<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i>I seem as in a trance sublime and strange<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i>To muse on my own separate fantasy,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i>My own, my human mind, which passively<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i>Now renders and receives fast influencings,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i>Holding an unremitting interchange<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i>With the clear universe of things around;<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i>One legion of wild thoughts, whose wandering wings<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i>Now float above thy darkness…<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
It was Anna,
more compassionate than I, who speculated as to how had many lost their lives
in the building of this structure. She
was right, of course, but it was a thought lost to me in the huge sublime of
history.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
This bridge,
like all Roman structures, was built as a show of <i>imperium</i>. Of course it
provided transport and water—I’m not denying that—but the idea of it all was
more than pragmatic: it was a footprint, a sign or presence and dominance, and
as I thought that, Anna’s observation resonated in melancholy and irony. The
inscription on the bridge attributes its making to a Caius Avillius Caimus,
who, along with Augustus himself, are the names commemorated on the structure,
while hundreds, perhaps thousands, labored in anonymity on a span that is
nearly lost now, the roads to it obscure and narrow and winding, the woods encroaching
to claim it. The <span lang="EN">Pont d'Aël, Rosie told us, is relatively unknown even by the
neighboring school children, though efforts have been made to acquaint them
with the history of the region. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN"><br /></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WHD23kdLBgk/VEPcYLXhqCI/AAAAAAAAAPw/UIvJ2R5eMjw/s1600/PontdAel%2BAnselmo1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-WHD23kdLBgk/VEPcYLXhqCI/AAAAAAAAAPw/UIvJ2R5eMjw/s1600/PontdAel%2BAnselmo1.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span lang="EN">I thought of Shelley again, a line from
another famous poem: <i>Look on my works, ye
mighty, and despair</i>. We took a
selfie atop a 2000 year old </span>effort at permanence, at the longevity of
names and images. I think we were aware
of the ironies. At least Rosie, who knew
the valley the best, mugged amusingly as the day slid into evening for us all. <o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-10637294545037311152014-10-12T10:08:00.000-07:002014-12-01T02:46:57.368-08:00On the Roman Bridge in Aosta<div class="MsoNormal">
Next to the other two bridges I consider in this triad of
entries, the little Roman Bridge in Aosta is smaller, more sunlit, more wed to
the business and architecture of the town that grew up around it. Small enough to be considered charming, lined
with 17<sup>th</sup> century shops and dwellings, it is domesticated unlike the
bridges at Pont d’Aël or Pont St. Martin.
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet a message survives in its making, its orientation—difficult
to translate at this late date, but still apparent if you simply follow your
gaze west through the town.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zJ6nNl08JT4/VDq1SeggueI/AAAAAAAAAPg/kVWa-sp7ecE/s1600/Roman%2BBridge%2BAosta.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-zJ6nNl08JT4/VDq1SeggueI/AAAAAAAAAPg/kVWa-sp7ecE/s1600/Roman%2BBridge%2BAosta.jpg" height="239" width="320" /></a>The little bridge empties on its western side at a spot
where you can look across a leisurely circle of road, neither compact nor
businesslike enough to be called a roundabout.
The circle hedges in the great Augustan Arch of the town, and standing
at the foot of the bridge, looking through the arch, you can catch a glimpse of
further structures—the Praetorian Gates, and to the right of them, scarcely
visible above the rooftops, the ruinous <i>scaenae</i>
of the Roman theatre. It is a rhetoric
of arrivals, far smaller and less intimidating that the paths to the Fora in
Rome, but a formidable approach nevertheless.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The terms under which you make the journey have changed in
two millennia: time was when you were to be awed by Roman power, here at a
far-flung outpost where the builders would no doubt have been insulted to hear
their bridge described as “charming”.
Instead, they would have thought in terms of imperium, that quality,
according to Cicero, <i>sine quo res
militaris administrari, teneri exercitus, bellum geri non potest</i> (which, if
my Latin is not far more ruinous than the bridge, translates to something close
to “without which military matters cannot be governed, the army cannot be held
together, and war cannot be waged”). These days <i>imperium</i> is masked by the layers of years, but a straight arrow
shot by an archer more powerful than we could imagine could carry through two
arches toward the far end of Aosta, where Mussolini’s wolves, symbols of two
imperial visions layered atop each other, would mark the end of the line.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
This is not an elegy about Time’s erosions. Things have worn away, indeed, but what
interests me is what is still there. <i>Imperium</i> remains by implication. You have to look for it in a latter day,
removed from the time in which it towered in front of you in confrontation.
Instead there is the loud daily life of the town, giving the impression of
variety and scarcely guided chaos, as the souvenir shops clamor for your
attention in the streets and you have to look and dig, intuit and guess, before
you can see the direction of it all, the map that underlies generations of
maps, the history that still shapes us as we travel unaware. <o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-12058571642920400642014-08-17T05:25:00.000-07:002014-12-01T02:46:43.058-08:00On Bridges #1<div class="MsoNormal">
They figure largely in the stories I know and love, from the
Billy Goats Gruff through Horatius at the Sublician Bridge. Concord, Kwai, Remagen, and Khazad-Dum. Almost always at a moment of reckoning, in a
crucial juncture in some history. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Of course, we wouldn’t know these
bridges were it not for what happened on or across them. But they are a transitional structure,
liminal and also rhetorical in their insistence that they are the one and only
way across a stream, a river, a gorge or chasm.
Perhaps we make them beautiful because they embody a language of connection—of
links between what we know and what we have yet to discover.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1N57d__ChAs/U_Ce5lEcobI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/oM5sqlLDLQw/s1600/1280px-Pont_romain-Pont_st_Martin.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-1N57d__ChAs/U_Ce5lEcobI/AAAAAAAAAPQ/oM5sqlLDLQw/s1600/1280px-Pont_romain-Pont_st_Martin.jpg" height="212" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Among its Roman ruins, the Aosta
Valley contains three notable bridges: the Pont de Pierre in the town of Aosta
itself, the Pont-Saint-Martin, and the Pont d'Aël. All are remarkably preserved—the Pont de
Pierre a bit occluded and domesticated by the late medieval buildings that
surround it—but each suggests at more than a simple overpass or viaduct. They are part of the Roman language of
conquest, if you look at them carefully and consider what you see.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
Of the three bridges, the
Pont-Saint-Martin (built probably sometime in the 1<sup>st</sup> century BCE) is
the most famous. A medieval legend has
attached itself, and it goes something like this: Saint Martin, the Bishop of
Tours, was returning to France, but found his way blocked by the river Lys, which
had swept away the only crossing passage during a flood. The resourceful saint cuts a deal with the
Devil, who promises to build a bridge over the river in exchange for the soul
of the first one to cross it. Martin
accepts the proposal, but in a nice reversal of the “devil in the details”
stories we all have heard, triumphs on a technicality: he throws a piece of
bread across the river, enticing a hungry dog to cross, thereby foiling (and
infuriating) the devil, who vanishes in the river with a sulfurous explosion,
leaving the bridge behind. The carnival
at Pont-Saint-Martin celebrates this confrontation, and concludes by burning an
effigy of the devil under the bridge.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
A fanciful story, its rhetoric
evident. The Romans and their culture
translated into devils and demons, the bridge baptized in a display of
Christian ingenuity. Christ supplants
Caesar in the clear-cut dynamic of good and evil, the burning effigy a fire
ignited early, not long after the great transition of Constantine and Rome’s
official embrace of the Faith (both Constantine and St. Martin are 4<sup>th</sup>
century figures). The Pont-Saint-Martin
spans an historical era, the passage from one world to the next. Of the three bridges, this one has the
clearest argument: you have to look closer to read the others. <span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span></div>
<o:p></o:p>Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-10447856843320481912014-08-09T04:07:00.001-07:002014-12-01T02:46:31.510-08:00On Visiting and Staying: A Reflection<div class="MsoNormal">
Everyone recognizes that our style of living when we travel
is much different than when we stay at home.
The anonymity of the hotel room, the level of observation when sights
and sites that are everyday to a resident are things that we, as visitors or
vacationers, see for the first (and possibly the only) time. Understandably, there’s a tolerance
(especially in tourist areas) toward the blunders and misdirection of strangers:
despite American tourists’ return to the States with horror stories about our
mistreatment at the hands of resentful locals, I’ve received far ruder
treatment from my countrymen than I ever do from people I meet abroad (though I’m
sure the Italians have their share of inhospitality, you’re not very likely to
find it in a tourist area, where livelihood depends on courtesy to strangers,
and sometimes even the most discourteous ones).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ThQwLsWHTpg/U-YAKUPUW-I/AAAAAAAAAO4/b-kca28yZNg/s1600/100_2548.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-ThQwLsWHTpg/U-YAKUPUW-I/AAAAAAAAAO4/b-kca28yZNg/s1600/100_2548.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a>So it’s different when you travel from when you stay. But when have you ceased to tour and begun to
take up residence? I think I have a
domestic streak that finds myself at home readily—a lucky quality to have as a
traveler. When I return to lodgings
after only several days, there is a sense of gaining my bearings, as though
some interior sense of balance is restored in the play where I am staying, the
vestibular system signaling my acclimation, the road anxiety kicking back into
my recesses. The flat in Aosta with its long
corridor, bulky, almost monumental furniture, and glimpse of the Alps over the
rooftop (I've inserted pictures of both), became home within the week, and the neighborhood became my
neighborhood (after one irritating and hot afternoon of getting lost only a
block or two from the place). I adjust easily:
as habitual as the old man I am becoming, my first trepidation at any change
falls away quickly, and I find the routine in the strange and set my feet
there.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Lnk8c-vwhNA/U-YAaQdiWOI/AAAAAAAAAPA/hvPFrIuVnYU/s1600/100_2552.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Lnk8c-vwhNA/U-YAaQdiWOI/AAAAAAAAAPA/hvPFrIuVnYU/s1600/100_2552.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a>But how does the transition go? When do we stop visiting and start
staying? <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You begin to stay, I think, when domestic tasks return to
your daily patterns. You cook at home,
clean the apartment, shop for groceries and for little, temporary items (a
paring knife, a cheap alarm clock) unavailable in the place you are staying. The
curiosity of Italian supermarkets—handling the fruit and vegetables with
plastic gloves, large butcher shops and a dearth of pre-packaged meats, the
glory of an extensive wine aisle—becomes customary eventually, and you adopt a
version of the pattern you had at home.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You begin to stay when you learn your neighbors. When you <i>have </i>neighbors, actually. The woman at the laundry who knows no English
and negotiates task and cost through signs and pantomime, the brilliance of her
invention a source of marvel to you at first, but customary as you return. The barber who slyly compliments your
virtually non-existent Italian, and reveals on the second visit that he was a
jazz drummer back in the day, in Greenwich Village, showing you his CD, where
his own able compositions are fitted among popular standards like “Over the
Rainbow” and “Someone to Watch Over Me”.
The lovely green-haired young woman behind the counter in the bakery,
who begins to use your visits as an opportunity to learn English and progresses
remarkably as the weeks unfold, her learning curve a product of intelligence
and youth, but also an intense curiosity about the world around her.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
You begin to stay, oddly enough, once the wanderlust returns. When there’s a part of the town
or the region that provokes another curiosity, sets your steps away from the
neighborhood—your neighborhood by now—toward a new street, a new stop on the
rail or bus line, toward a land you have heard of. You begin to stay when you become restless,
and in that sense, staying is a prelude to wandering once again. <span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-19411281394756616432014-07-26T07:42:00.000-07:002014-12-01T02:46:16.957-08:00On Owning Up<div class="MsoNormal">
I’ve told my travel writing students to check facts. It’s not simply a matter of honesty,
though. Very often questions of courtesy
arise out of the impulses of responsibility, and the issue is not only one of
truth but of an even wider integrity.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sOgM69TkRfY/U9O95vBwNII/AAAAAAAAAOg/Uudv-JzJ94Q/s1600/pictures-TB_region-1-2007-ljubljana_141661.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-sOgM69TkRfY/U9O95vBwNII/AAAAAAAAAOg/Uudv-JzJ94Q/s1600/pictures-TB_region-1-2007-ljubljana_141661.jpg" height="131" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Which is why, today, I am owning up about my Ljubljana entry
late last month. That it was an honest
error I hope you’ll believe. But I stand
here corrected nonetheless, and in a way I hope will enlighten some of you as
it did me.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A while after I posted the article about our Slovenian trip,
I received an email from my friend Vlado, who corrected—with his typical
graciousness and good humor—a mistake I made in the chronicling. Let him speak for himself, in the words of
his amiable letter:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
by the
way - got a phone call from Slovenian president (it is a small country!) and
some "anonymous threatening letters" (probably nationalists) about
that "jeans matter”<span class="apple-converted-space"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space">Typical
of his humor—sly and playful—but he goes on to make a point about a situation that
at some time I had known, but had conveniently shed the knowledge as I wrote my
entry on Ljubljana:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span class="apple-converted-space"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
former
Yugoslavia had quite open borders and also all same/similar consumer goods as
in Italy/Austria and rest of the Europe (of course there were some import
restrictions as well, but only for very special goods or quantity limits for
personal import)... so - no typical "border bribes" in form of
jeans. I'd been talking about Czechoslovakia
and Russia (Soviet bloc - no jeans or jeans factories there) - former Yugoslavia
was not in the same bloc.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Yes, I’d known about Yugoslavia’s
non-alignment under Tito and after, known that the more open borders and the
dramatically varied terrain had served as locations for U.S. and Western films
as varied as Kelly’s Heroes to portions of Fiddler on the Roof. But one border story—Vlado’s about crossing
into Czechoslovakia in the old days—had dispelled my previous knowledge and pushed
me back onto the stereotype of my American raising: how everything behind (or even
remotely around) the “Iron Curtain” was barbed wire and statues of Stalin, tinted
in relentless grayscale and sunless because we chose to see it that way.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And Vlado, gently but with a
focused wisdom, pointed to the heart of the error:<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
seems in
the rule, "the big one" or isolated countries don't have much or
correct information about the rest of the world (or perhaps even about real
situation in their own country - who knows)... on other side small
nations/countries collect all possible information and learn as much as they
can about big countries - what do you think?<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Well, Vlado, I think you may be
right. Bargaining and traveling from a
tradition of economic and global privilege that has lasted my life, my countrymen are too ready to assume that
the world is the way we see it, forgetting that we bring the vision, the
outline, the colors of the country with us on our journey. We characterize others according to the
images we have nurtured and often distorted for generations (and I believe
other countries more economically powerful do this as well—particularly Russia
and China at the moment) and are surprised when others don’t match our
assumptions. And yes, smaller countries
do this as well—it’s all part of what Richard Pryor used to characterize as “a
lot of people getting together to not understand each other,” and therefore
part of a human condition. But maybe people in power tend to misunderstand more because the margin of error is
greater. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
What to do about this? Listen, read, and be willing to stand
corrected—all difficult activities for most Americans I know, and I trust the
resistance can be found in other
countries as well. But you can still be who you are, stand in integrity, and do
those things. Some of our biggest
mistakes come when we think we can’t. <span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-1757227305729295922014-06-18T02:51:00.002-07:002014-12-01T02:46:02.277-08:00On a Side Trip to Ljubljana<div class="MsoNormal">
I remember a melancholy conversation, twenty-five years ago
or so, with a dear friend of mine who had spent a large part of his childhood
in Mexico. He was telling me about a
recent trip there, and about his return, standing at the very edge of Texas and
looking south across a rather sparse and forbidding landscape. Thinking of Mexico, thinking, <i>I wish, just once, that God would bless this
country.</i><o:p></o:p><br />
<i><br /></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
There are places throughout the world where that thought
arises, and at the time when we were having that conversation, Slovenia was one
of them. Part of what we called “the
Soviet bloc”, it was lumped with a dozen or so areas in Eastern and Central
Europe that the American schoolchild was hard pressed to distinguish or even
identify—which one, after all, was Estonia among those former republics along
the Baltic? They were the villains in
our Cold War mythology, or at best the unwilling but submissive assistants to
the villain—a villain who wore Khrushchev’s or Brezhnev’s face, and had
promised to bury us just as it had buried them.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You could see traces of a sorrowful history in the small
antique market set up on Sunday morning along the banks of the Ljubljanica:
from the imposing Habsburg architecture to the medals adorned with the SS runes
and the swastika, the Soviet red star. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>Surely, after of
centuries of this, God would bless this country</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And sure enough, the signs are there.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Traveling north with Vlado (whom we met before in Prague
[see the January 19<sup>th</sup> entry] and Rudi, our Slovenian friends, we
watched the landscape change from the dry, poplar-studded Italian terrain to
something more mountainous, thick with evergreens, familiar sights to those
whose vistas include the American North.
A terrific ice storm had struck this region in late winter, and all around
lay the wreckage of trees, and far from the highway, the occasional collapsed
roofs of older buildings. But it was a
healthy land just dealt a punch, by no means a chronic condition.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And that health extends to the human landscape. As we neared the Slovenian border, Vlado,
always one for smart (if prankish) humor, asked us if we had our
passports. As I reached for mine, he
broke into a grin, announcing, “Because you don’t need them!” This not only marked what I really did not
realize until this year—the friendly and convenient fluidity of European
borders—but also was the occasion for our friends’ recounting of times they
passed through checkpoints when they were twenty-five, thirty years
younger. Apparently, those gates were
not manned by Kalashnikov-toting party faithful, but usually boys like they
were themselves back then, sleepy and bored and bribable, Vlado assured us, for
a pair of Levis. He said that you never
knew, the fact that I was wearing jeans that day might end up coming in handy.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Embarrassing as well, I thought.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--qRoqAMHako/U6Pb5BDHo3I/AAAAAAAAAN4/hbxhQ4y1hRg/s1600/LibraryLjubljana.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/--qRoqAMHako/U6Pb5BDHo3I/AAAAAAAAAN4/hbxhQ4y1hRg/s1600/LibraryLjubljana.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a>After my travels in Budapest and Prague, I had suspended
most preconceptions as to what I would find in a Central European capital. Even so, Ljubljana is a fresh and beautiful
surprise. Its central city reminds me of
Dublin’s for some reason—curled around the banks of a quiet river, a wedding of
18<sup>th</sup> century streets and modern boutique commerce. The weekend we were there was a bit overcast,
but I’ve found that the clouds and the banked sunlight evoke the brighter
colors in older areas of European cities—Dublin and Venice and Prague and now
Ljubljana, all of which emerge beautifully in a grey day. If you take the funicular—one of the inclined
railways you see on occasion in this part of Europe (though this is one of the
nicer ones)—you arrive at Ljubljana Castle, where a once-military view of the
city, where the brick-red roofs of the central pedestrian zones give way to a
modernized, extraordinarily new-looking expanse of cityscape. You wonder how Western attention has passed
by this beautiful place, and part of you suspects that the oversight hasn’t
been the worst thing in the world for the city.<o:p></o:p></div>
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In its central areas, Ljubljana is a community of statues. Poets and artists, for the most part, and it
was humbling to realize that 1) these were exactly the people I always maintain
a city should honor, and 2) that I recognized so few of them. Among them were France Prešeren, a Romantic
poet known for historical and mythic narration as well, and Jože Plečnik, an
architect who virtually defined the look of this city. Prešeren is for another time, perhaps: I’m
ashamed to say I haven’t read a line, and therefore have nothing yet to
say. As to Plečnik, my lack of knowledge
is a hindrance here as well, but the buildings make immediate statement to the
eye, and what struck me was something that lingers in my thoughts of
Ljubljana—its brilliant eclecticism.<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
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Plečnik’s buildings sit side by side with the city’s
Habsburg imposition—the monumental, 18<sup>th</sup> century Viennese
declarations of dominance and power. I
mentioned to my resident Plečnik expert, the remarkable 17-year-old David
(Rudi’s son and Vlado’s nephew—see again January 19<sup>th</sup> entry), that
the Habsburgs “had a habit of sticking their nose into things,” to which he
slyly responded, “and we Slovenians have a habit of complaining about
them.” It was David who pointed out the
mix of design and medium that characterized Plečnik’s work—from the wedding of
brick and stone in the National Library to the church Rudi took us to at the
margins of the city. </div>
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YDXqVOQBIsY/U6FgpT-Q8bI/AAAAAAAAANo/WAwQfmABZGI/s1600/Plecnik+Church.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YDXqVOQBIsY/U6FgpT-Q8bI/AAAAAAAAANo/WAwQfmABZGI/s1600/Plecnik+Church.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
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And this quality, above all others, was what struck me about
Ljubljana, as well. The brilliant,
improvisational nature of its tradition, both historical and contemporary: from
its integrity and artistic rebellions against the cultures that overwhelmed it
by force but not by genius, to its transformations within our lifetimes from a
world where young men bribe border guards with Levis to beautiful, open-air
cafes, where at least half a dozen languages can be overheard at late dinner,
it seems to have wedded tradition and change like Plečnik’s merging of brick
and stone—a young old city in lovely and fascinating transition. <o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-2832942154125722272014-06-12T11:29:00.000-07:002014-12-01T02:45:39.804-08:00On Mussolini's Wolf<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
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Alongside the Roman ruins in Aosta, not far from its
crumbling medieval and Renaissance churches,
the Piazza della Repubblica frames a fairly busy intersection, a
roundabout on the Via Vodice, a number of vending stands, restaurants and
bars. All kinds of bustle that, if
you’re an attentive pedestrian trying to avoid being run over in a crosswalk,
might distract you from a good look at the piazza itself, famous for its
Fascist architecture and sculpture.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We get uncomfortable with the word “fascist”. Justifiably, it draws forth nightmarish
associations. Less so in Italy, where
the films of Mussolini are generally those of him speaking from a balcony,
clownish and overwrought, mugging for the crowds and the cameras. Our associations are those of totalitarian
darkness, wrongful imprisonment: Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, Pinochet—though not
all are technically fascist, we have come to lump their crimes together, and we
know them, to some degree, for who they were.
And the art of the totalitarian state has something coercive about it,
from Riefenstahl’s breathtakingly beautiful (but malign) <i>Triumph of the Will</i> to the drab
depictions of a Worker’s Paradise in Soviet Socialist Realism—all of it,
whether technically brilliant or ham-handed, pushes us toward embracing an
ideology, a compelled way of life.<o:p></o:p></div>
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But I’ve been struck by the Piazza della Repubblica, and by
the revelation that, in this case, I find the fascist art appealing. <o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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Give me a minute to explain.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Art that enforces an assumed point of view is almost always
far down the list of my preferences.
It’s why I never liked Alice Walker, too, by the way (sorry, friends on
the Left): when ideology trumps exploration and discovery, when art confirms
whatever conclusions you’d already drawn before you encountered it, it loses one
of the ways it can best catch on to our imaginations: the challenge of making
us consider otherwise. <o:p></o:p></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zKlRc3zVzLM/U5nu0dnegMI/AAAAAAAAAM4/ExgKXbicC4A/s1600/Wolf1+Germanetto.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-zKlRc3zVzLM/U5nu0dnegMI/AAAAAAAAAM4/ExgKXbicC4A/s1600/Wolf1+Germanetto.jpg" height="200" width="150" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Morgana Germanetto</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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And the thing about the fascist art of Piazza della
Repubblica is that it enforces less than it inveigles. An obvious thing about the Mussolini period
is its adoption of Roman symbols, very often the animal symbolism that
accompanied the legends of the empire. The
she-wolf—the legendary creature who nursed Romulus and Remus, the founders of
Rome—stands atop a column, perpetually framed by the Alps and the deep, bright,
merciless Italian sky, so that from a distance she is all the nursemaid a
demi-god would want. But with a closer
look, she seems ragged---much more like a wolf in the wild than a symbolic
wolf, a mythic wolf. She is frail up
against that deep sky, her legs spindly and braced, both to nurse and simply to
stand in two worlds—that of legend, and that of an observed and vulnerable
nature. <o:p></o:p></div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lBuPBnn4J6I/U5nvQl3rsCI/AAAAAAAAANA/qMJx4c90fiA/s1600/IMG_0995.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lBuPBnn4J6I/U5nvQl3rsCI/AAAAAAAAANA/qMJx4c90fiA/s1600/IMG_0995.JPG" height="133" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Chantal Piscetta</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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And the same goes for the eagles facing her, the totemic
birds that perch along the gate to the old army barracks, the Caserma
Testafochi. In deep focus behind the
guardians of the gate you can see the Roman eagles, symmetrical and abstract,
fit to top the standard of a legion, but the guardians are bedraggled, all
gristle and feathers, looking back at their ancestors on the cornices of the
building, as though they are measuring themselves against the ideal birds, as
though they sense the gap of 2500 years.<o:p></o:p></div>
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</div>
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FuStajxbEg4/U5nwtnRIiFI/AAAAAAAAANQ/6AoEQDf2kVI/s1600/IMG_1000+(2).jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FuStajxbEg4/U5nwtnRIiFI/AAAAAAAAANQ/6AoEQDf2kVI/s1600/IMG_1000+(2).jpg" height="203" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Photo: Chantal Piscetts</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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And in this is the challenge and appeal of Mussolini’s
artists—that they were better artists than fascists. Stalin and Goebbels longed for a
representative art whose interpretation was simple, direct, and pretty much
unequivocal: you look at the statue or poster or film, and you come away with
what you expected, with your beliefs affirmed. Goebbels himself publicly hated everything
about Modernism—its fragmentation, its abstraction and suggestion, in short,
everything that provoked the audience to imagine, interpret, and think. Earlier movements such as Symbolism and
Impressionism had been condemned as "decadent," as products of mental or visual illness: the
artists, quite simply, didn’t see the world the way it was supposed to be seen.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br />
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In Italy, though, there was less fear of the difficult. In
fact, many of Italian Futurists—artists who embraced the abstract, fragmented,
and mechanized elements of contemporary culture—supported the fascists at
first, and before historic parting of ways, had an influence on state art. And there is something both appealing and
challenging in the sculptures on the Piazza della Repubblica: are we following
in the footsteps of Rome, or are we haunted by its presence, diminished
creatures that can never match its worldly power, though we look over our
shoulders at totemic eagles? The
creatures of the piazza challenge us by their associations and positioning:
they are examples of symbols caught halfway between heaven and earth, and from
that middle ground, casting a kind of ironic skepticism on both the mythic and
the natural world, which interpenetrate so thoroughly that, on beholding the
wolf and the eagles, you’re struck by the thought that neither world has the
whole story. <o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: xx-small; line-height: 18.2000007629395px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-12641652654659509412014-05-31T05:34:00.003-07:002014-07-15T15:13:05.077-07:00On Five Excellent Things About Aosta<div class="MsoNormal">
I promise that there are even more excellent things to this
little town than the ones I list below.
The nuance of a place, its particular beauties, reveal themselves over
time, and with a month behind me and a month still ahead. The sights—the traditional streets,
pedestrian and cobbled, with the ancient ruins among them, the churches and the
historical record of St. Anselm of Canterbury, the daunting and bedazzling Alps
that wall in the town on every side—all are certainly attractive to someone who
would want to visit. Living here, on the
other hand, you notice other things: the patterns of daily life that are and
are not home. Having awakened in Italy,
I have been learning to follow the life in a quiet, remote part of that
country. And I love the experience, the
schooling it gives you about who you are, what you value and assume.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GDm55egUA68/U4nMpe31wSI/AAAAAAAAAMg/ANGRlNilP8I/s1600/100_2560.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-GDm55egUA68/U4nMpe31wSI/AAAAAAAAAMg/ANGRlNilP8I/s1600/100_2560.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
So here
is a list, off the top of my head in no particular order, of five excellent
things about the little town of Aosta, which is my current home. Before I begin, though, I still have to honor
the Alps, despite saying above that I would focus on daily, “non-touristy”
things. In my defense, the Alps are the daily
backdrop for the Aostans, who awake to the mountains encircling them, green to
a height, terraced with vineyards until the soil gives way to the slate-grey
rock and above that, so high you have to tilt your head up from wherever you
stand in the town, the white peaks, as in the photo from the balcony of my flat. Mont Blanc is on the northwest horizon, and Shelley
was no less impressed with it 200 years ago, although he said it a lot better:<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
<pre style="text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif; font-size: 11pt;"> </span><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"> </span><i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,<o:p></o:p></span></i></span></pre>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Mont Blanc appears--still, snowy, and serene;<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Its subject mountains their unearthly forms<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<i><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> And wind among the accumulated steeps. </span><o:p></o:p></i></div>
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It’s beneath that kind of spectacle that the Aostans live, and
from what I can tell, they don’t take it for granted, because who could? But here are elements more everyday, that
upon leaving here, I won’t take for granted myself:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->1.<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]-->The town is extraordinarily
clean. Each morning the shopkeepers wash
and mop down the cobblestones in front of their stores, a dusty stream
trickling into the central gutter of the street, like it did in medieval times,
then flowing down the sewer grates, leaving the streets not only clear but also
scrubbed. This is by nine in the
morning, and though litter may gather on the streets by the end of the day,
it’s kept in check by the merchants’ watchful eyes: like good chefs, they know
part of the appeal is the presentation, and for someone who comes from the
American mid-South, this kind of upkeep is almost glamorous in contrast to
home.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->2.<span style="font-size: 7pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[endif]--> The children are unfailingly
fascinating to watch. Like at home, they
come in all shades of hair and skin—slimmer, more groomed, though, and even if
the clothes are not expensive brands, they wear what they have attentively,
without the high fashion you would find down the road in Milan, or the
bourgeois conformity you get used to seeing around town at home, but a simple,
elegant mindfulness with a few American-slogan T shirts thrown into the mix. And it’s remarkable to watch the swagger of
the little boys when they’re about ten or eleven: they seem to be waiting for
Scorsese’s accelerated frame-speed to slow down the walk, to give it a comic
version of the menace and drama of the guys just walkin’ along in <i>Goodfellas</i> or <i>Casino</i>.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->3.<span style="font-size: 7pt;"> </span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<span style="font-size: 7pt;"></span><!--[endif]--> For a town where little English
is spoken (as opposed to larger cities like Florence or Venice), the world is
surprising easy to negotiate linguistically.
If I say “<i>scusi</i>” or “<i>mi dispiace</i>” enough, people begin to see
that I’m sorry, I can’t help being a virtually monolingual American whose
feeble grasp of Latin will take me only so far down their road before, if they
are kind (and almost all of them are) they have to extend a hand and guide
me. There’s a great passage in Italo
Calvino’s Invisible Cities that it reminds me of, where Marco Polo, newly
arrived from Venice, begins to talk to Kublai Khan, the great Emperor: <i>Newly arrived and totally ignorant of the Levantine
languages, Marco Polo could express himself only with gestures, leaps, cries of
wonder and of horror, animal barkings or hootings, or with objects he took from
his knapsacks: ostrich plumes, pea-shooters, quartzes--which he arranged in
front of him like chessmen. Returning from the missions on which Kuhlai sent
him, the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes that the sovereign had to
interpret. </i>I
negotiated my laundry with an able, brilliant woman who had not a shred of
English: with my dozen or so phrases of Italian, pantomime, pointing to
calendars and clocks, we arranged what I wanted done to the clothing (nothing
needed dry-cleaning, <i>grazie</i>), how much it would cost, and when I would
pick it up. After which, we stared at
one another, sighed deeply and laughed, as though we had carried a piano up a
flight of steps together. Throughout the
town, kindness and good humor have met my sparse and damaged Italian, and
thanks to laughter and resourcefulness, every job has been done.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]--><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AY_MG8vgSSE/U8WnFmDvB0I/AAAAAAAAAOI/E34S_6DaRk4/s1600/Aosta+kids.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-AY_MG8vgSSE/U8WnFmDvB0I/AAAAAAAAAOI/E34S_6DaRk4/s1600/Aosta+kids.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a>4.<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]-->At the University, on the other hand, the level of
fluency has been a great relief and a godsend.
I knew from preliminary correspondence that my colleagues at the
University of Valle d’Aosta spoke English like natives, but it was a great
delight to discover the skills of the students.
The conversations were sophisticated, they got my jokes (except for one
of them, and I’m thinking it was far more likely that the joke was bad than
that their comprehension failed them) and their writing, aside from a few
little quirks in phrasing and idiom, might easily be mistaken for that of my
own students back in Louisville (and this is not a dig at my Louisville
students—the Aosta students were really that good). I spent two pleasant afternoons walking
around town with these young people as I helped them devise and focus the
subjects of travel articles I’d assigned them to write: it was discussion,
question-and-answer, and undergraduate banter without gaps in communication and
interpretation. I think it was that much
more pleasant because I was hungry for English, for good old-fashioned casual
talk, and the students I had were bringers of that joy.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: -0.25in;">
<!--[if !supportLists]-->5.<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]-->Fifth on my list has been the personal joy of new
colleagues. With a small faculty for the
English classes, the university has managed to cover a wide range of
instruction and do it well. It’s obvious
they work hard, and at a number of universities, and yet it’s all done with
good cheer and enthusiasm. Excellent
conversationalists and dinner companions, they all know how to live the life of
the mind while having a fond acquaintance with just plain living in
general. So my thanks for hospitality
extend to Carlo Bajetta, Anna Anselmo, Rosie Crawford, and my friend the
incomparable Allesandro Stanchi, who has kept me from imploding with all the
practical matters involved with living elsewhere for two months (those of you
who know me well, know that practical matters and I don’t readily mix). It’s an extension of this town’s kindness,
and a pleasure to be taken in immediately and without question as a colleague.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<!--[if !supportLists]-->6.<span style="font-size: 7pt;">
</span><!--[endif]-->I said five things. But here’s a little something extra. Also, alive and well in the culture of Aosta
is the concept of what’s called <i>lagniappe</i>
in New Orleans. A custom where the
shopkeeper gives you something extra in your purchase. The most famous example of this is, of
course, the 13th item that makes up the “baker’s dozen”, but examples in Aosta
have been an extra pair of oranges from a fruit shop, extra portions of fontina
cheese, some really decent spreads of food with aperitifs at a restaurant
called Ad Forum, and, at a Chinese restaurant off Chanoux Square in the center
of the city, an after-dinner liqueur, home-made, that would send Marco Polo
packing for the East with “cries of wonder and of horror, animal barkings or
hootings” Of course, a lot of this generosity might come because Alessandro
knows everyone…or knows someone who knows someone who knows someone…and it’s
that connectedness, that spirit of community, that ties so many of these things
together and has become what I love most about Aosta, about the part of Italy I’ve
seen in general. <span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px; text-indent: 0px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px; text-indent: 0px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span><br />
<span class="tag" style="color: #000088; font-family: 'andale mono', 'lucida console', monaco, monospace; font-size: 12px; line-height: 19.5px; text-indent: 0px;"><br /></span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-25571800667060031802014-05-28T01:16:00.001-07:002014-06-02T04:46:25.617-07:00On the Ruins in Aosta<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas,<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>omnia destruitis vitiataque dentibus aevi <o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte!</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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My Latin is rusty, but it goes something like this:<o:p></o:p></div>
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<br /></div>
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<i>Time, devourer of things, and you, jealous Age,</i></div>
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<i>destroy all and, gnawing slowly with your teeth,</i></div>
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<i>a little at a time, consume all in death!</i></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It’s from Ovid, from around the period that the Roman town
of Aosta was being built. Beautiful
lines, but nothing unusual in its sentiments about the doings of time. Time devours, age wears away, and eventually
nothing is left of what is built to last for ages. It’s sobering enough to be no longer
sobering, because we can’t think in millennia.
To me a month spreads out like infinite time when I miss my wife and family,
and though I know intellectually how short a stint that is, within its span,
feeling it with heart and imagination,
it dilates, becomes a small eternity.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Even
more so the stretch of two thousand years, and Aosta is both marked and undergirded
by ruins that old. From the Augustan
arch at the eastern end of the central city, the still-dramatic theater closer
to where I live, literally down to the tunnels and arcades beneath its medieval
and Renaissance street plan, the city is a hive of ghosts. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Is there
a way of looking at these ruins other than Ovid’s gloomy thoughts about the
provisional, the temporary, the way all things must pass? Probably not for any length of time. Thinking otherwise must pass, too, and we are
left with the transitory state of things.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I do
remember, though, the first Roman ruin I saw.
It was far from here: an aqueduct in North Wales. I recall marveling that the Welsh narrow-gage
train track that once had spanned the top of the structure—probably late in the
19<sup>th</sup> or early in the 20<sup>th</sup> century—had fallen to rust and
decay, while the aqueduct, though worn and marked by rooted weeds, was still
steady and upright. There are degrees, I
guess, of permanence. There is a kind of
lingering at the gate before you go.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IvhiX0pchFY/U4WaLyHMrSI/AAAAAAAAAME/G6bIKUqe8zA/s1600/100_2566.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-IvhiX0pchFY/U4WaLyHMrSI/AAAAAAAAAME/G6bIKUqe8zA/s1600/100_2566.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a> It’s
basically common knowledge that all great Roman building depends upon the
arch. Nor are Aosta’s ruins an
exception: the great defining structure of Roman triumph is everywhere, from
the Praetorian Gates to the venturesome arches of the theater, through which
these days, if the weather is clear, you can easily see the Alps.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Which
brings me to something about the ruins that I’ve thought about for several
days. The arch as support is one thing,
but it is also a gateway, a passage.
Beneath the Augustan Arch is now a crucifix: the space it covers is now
marked by the crucified God, inconceivable to the builders of the emperor’s
original monument. And of course the
Alps through the arches of the theater, where the whole of nature can behold
our little plays through the crumbling things we have made. Both sides of the Praetorian Gate open into
narrow, Renaissance city streets, so that the passage through them, in the
footsteps of Roman legions, takes you from one beautiful road into another,
equally beautiful but pretty much the same.</div>
<o:p></o:p><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YuDCVvjoDlo/U4WaptrFMrI/AAAAAAAAAMI/5r4cH6N-0wU/s1600/100_2580.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-YuDCVvjoDlo/U4WaptrFMrI/AAAAAAAAAMI/5r4cH6N-0wU/s1600/100_2580.JPG" height="150" width="200" /></a> Underground,
though, is the cryptoporticus—excavated and restored over the last century—that
is the monument to the liminality of these ruins, how they linger to suggest at
a ghostly passage that underlies us all.
The arcade, as restored, extends for about fifty yards beneath the city,
beneath the cathedral, then doubles back on itself, so that the wanderers
emerge, like characters in a myth, pretty much at the stairs where they first
descended. Pockets of natural light,
fractured through boarded windows, let you know that this passage was once
ground level: a kind of “cloister walk” that framed the holy space of the Roman
forum.<o:p></o:p></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5RE5Pnd84jE/U4WbFKStRMI/AAAAAAAAAMM/fgHk9kRsEaE/s1600/Ao_Criptoportico_Forense_4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5RE5Pnd84jE/U4WbFKStRMI/AAAAAAAAAMM/fgHk9kRsEaE/s1600/Ao_Criptoportico_Forense_4.jpg" height="156" width="200" /></a> And
there is still a residual sanctity to the passage. There’s a hush as you follow its long stretch
beneath a city still occupied by Rome, its Christianity a colony of Catholicism,
its holiness mingled with that of an earlier time. It is hard to travel it unchanged: you
welcome the light on your return, fully aware that what you have brushed against was a gate to the country of myth, but that lingering at the doorway, rather
than turning back or passing through, is itself only a still point, a momentary
stay against the maws of time. <o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-79139274769101158952014-05-24T12:10:00.000-07:002014-06-02T04:46:47.415-07:00On Erbavoglio and the Lost Art<div class="MsoNormal">
I admire chefs the way some people admire painters. Adepts at a mystery that gives pleasure to
the senses, they transform the ordinary—our everyday act of nourishment—into
poetry. It never surprises me to hear
that they are sometimes painters as well, or novelists, or musicians. Or that painters, novelists or musicians
might aspire to be chefs.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JfAS822JMbs/U4DuO2aGPII/AAAAAAAAAL0/YdAGudidJos/s1600/Fontina.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-JfAS822JMbs/U4DuO2aGPII/AAAAAAAAAL0/YdAGudidJos/s1600/Fontina.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
What surprised me a bit more (and, indeed, it shouldn’t
have) was the artistry of those who trade in the food and drink that is known
for nuance and expert attentions. Italy
has a long romance with its food and wine, and it’s both the ignited passion of
first love and the peace and subtlety of a long marriage, which hasn’t lost its
fire, though it minds the flicker of the light now, as well as the blaze and
the heat. In short, they’re
sophisticated in the palate, my current neighbors, as I discovered to my
delight last week at Erbavoglio, on a little side street next to Aosta’s medieval Cattedrale de Santa Maria.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
How could you pass a cheese shop, especially one just opened
for the day? The sharp smells not always conventionally pleasant, underlined by
the resonance of wine, for a bottle or two had been opened in the last several
days. The young man who stood behind the
counter greeted me quietly in Italian, then, realizing I was pretty much lost
after <i>buongiorno</i>, smiled and said,
“We can talk in English, then.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
They know us by our confusion, my countrymen. The deer-in-the-headlights look after the
simplest of greetings says <i>Indiana</i> to
the discerning Italian. But Stefano was
polite, and fairly fluent in English, and after a few minutes of small talk,
less small and (to both of us) more interesting when the subject turned to his
cheeses. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Then the moment of adventure came. Like Vergil to my Dante, he beckoned, saying,
“Things are slow this morning. Would you
like to see the cellars?”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was “would you like some cheese?” to the second
power. He was offering a glimpse of
where cheeses come from, the heart of the heart of the aging.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The downward steps could not have been more perfect: steep,
narrow, and dust-encrusted. Stefano urged
me to watch my head, and it was a good thing he did. Distracted by the sheer atmosphere of the
place—both the smell and the whole Edgar Allen Poe gloom of the business (scary
but only in a kind of moody way, not really frightening at all)—I stood a good
risk of concussion, and ducked at the right time.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Finding myself on a dusty floor, in a maze of shelves. Each cheese was given a wide berth: huge,
encrusted drums that stank in that odd way of promising cheese, where you can’t
imagine how something that foul-smelling could taste so good but it did,
Stefano had sliced a small piece of fontina (the regional cheese of Aosta), so
I knew that the fetid mask hid the musty amazements of the cheeses up in the
shop. Beneath these crusts were the quartz-like shavings of parmesan, the soft gorgonzola with the verdigris of veins, the green that tasted somehow moldy and spectacular at the same time. It was impossible treasure, not a dozen feet below the surface of the town.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
And Stefano knew the farms from which the cheeses
originated. It was almost like he knew
the goats and cattle by their names, but that’s far-fetched. But knowing the farms was somehow splendid
enough, a kind of intimacy with food that had something medieval in it—something
that hearkened back to an idealized version we have of a time when a worker’s
regard for his craft was a romance rather than a task, whether he was a smith
or a stonemason or, as in this case, a casaro, a formaggiao, a curutulu (see,
Stefano? I’ve learned some Italian beyond “hello”). It may not have been that way, or maybe only
for a few. But here in this valley I
have seen it more than once: a colleague of mine raved about the wonderful
smaller dairy farms in the foothills of the Italian Alps. Carlo had talked of them as a kind of
refinement of an old and honorable tradition—like allegory or stone
masonry. And he was right: this valley
has a quiet and remarkable resource in its small producers of cheese (and of
wine, for that matter). And publicity,
production, and distribution could spread wide and far something good, but not as
good as I tasted in Erbavoglio—something that would sacrifice relationship to
profit, intimacy to something that might well be worthy but would never be the
same. It’s precarious footing, like
descending a steep dark stairway, and it is seldom that you’re aware of the
steps that take you from manufacture to craft to art. Perhaps we are unaware because sometimes all
kinds of creation are narrow and dusty, straight down and stinky and with
little headroom, distinguished from each other only by the love in the making. <o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">©2014 Michael Williams </span><br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-19645265034054084992014-05-14T22:23:00.000-07:002014-06-13T01:32:37.547-07:00On Waking Up Italian<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
It’s different from waking up American, which is what I do inevitably
when I travel. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
But this time is
different. This time I’m living in
another country, if even for a short, two months’ space. And there is an adjustment in the psyche when
you come to stay, instead of passing through.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
The schedule of the
tourist is marked with high spots—hotel accommodations, notable (even dramatic)
sights and sites that dominate your days in a place. When you live there, you can notice a gradual
shift in your attentions, until you are waking up in the rhythm of the place
(in my case “waking up Italian”, even though I know I am not, will never <i>be</i> Italian).<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9qcDxmZlVgk/U3dUQ5MQtPI/AAAAAAAAALk/3pAMxAsfMXk/s1600/100_2574.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-9qcDxmZlVgk/U3dUQ5MQtPI/AAAAAAAAALk/3pAMxAsfMXk/s1600/100_2574.JPG" height="240" width="320" /></a></div>
Those who know me,
know I am a notoriously early riser, and right before sunrise, outside the
window of our flat, a flurry of nightingale song lifts us toward
wakefulness. In the past, my European
students (and Australian students, for that matter) have admitted to missing
the sound, and it takes the actual hearing of it to understand their nostalgia. Italians, it seems, do not rise so early, and
it's odd to think most of them sleep through such elation. On the other hand, garbage collection takes
place (at least here in Aosta, at least in our neighborhood) between 11 and
midnight, jostling us awake after new sleep.
Maybe you gain and lose in every daily transaction, so the disruption at
the end of a day is richly compensated by the beginning of the next, the only
problem being that sleep is lost at both ends of the transaction.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
But I don't miss the sleep at all. In the hours following sunrise—what I have always considered “my time of
the morning”—the streets of a town such as Aosta are pretty much left to the
early riser. Only a few shops are open,
the traffic in the “pedestrian area” of the town is sparse and
quiet. It feels as though you have
walked back three or four centuries. The
cobbled streets are narrow, and the muted yellows, oranges, and pinks of the
buildings—particular hues I am sure you only find in Italy—brighten in the
sunlight that here, at the edge of the Alps, is a disarming and unalloyed
white, and by 8:00 or so, the walls shimmer and the colors waken into morning.
It is, in short, a landscape a long breath away from the modern and still fully
Italian. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
Which means, among many things, that there is something unmistakably Italian beneath the technology, the mechanization, the years, that persists at the most quiet time of day in a kind of serene and expectant dignity.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
And dignity, too, in the obituary posters at the gates
of the churches—one of the first things you notice on a walk through an Italian
town. Here the notices of death are
posted for a smaller, more intimate community—those in a church parish, those
who might bask on a town square in the early afternoon when the rarefied sun
intensifies and the shadows slide from one side of the streets to the
other. Death notices, the people
invariably up in years, recording their passing in an old-school way that might
be otherwise lost in the newspapers more central to our tradition, where the
news of death is more impersonal, where it vanishes more quickly. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="text-indent: 0.5in;">Because an old vanished time is still apparent on the
streets of Aosta before the day’s rush covers it. Beneath a very modern Italy there is indeed a
core, an essence, an ancient country whose rhythms still surface in the daily
life of the people, from the aggressive, brilliant music of their language
(which I do not know) to the smell of the bakeries, both of which are rising
from the shops and side streets as I write this. Somewhere among and above the images of the
dead the city is awakening, moving slowly toward a resemblance to the American
cities I know. I begin to wonder if there is a kind of place out of time in the America I know, or whether we are too young a country or too overloaded a people to have developed that place and time to begin with.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
The faint, tart whiff of
cigarette smoke commingles with the aroma of bread and dark, magnificently
strong coffee, until all kinds of enticements settle in the bright Italian air,
the coffee the only temptation I will not resist, as the city and I awaken
together. <span style="text-indent: 0px;"> </span><o:p style="text-indent: 0px;"></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px; text-indent: 0px;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px; text-indent: 0px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span></div>
<o:p></o:p>Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-62794053011401273252014-04-18T09:51:00.000-07:002014-06-03T01:04:38.347-07:00On the Maestro<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I’m already missing the Maestro. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It’s been a long and serious acquaintance, beginning in a
Vermont winter when, as part of a six-week course in Latin American fiction, I
opened <i>One Hundred Years of Solitude</i>
and felt the world and my paradigms shift.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-euWeGpKUL2c/U1FXvGHmZdI/AAAAAAAAALE/rdV22Xf35w0/s1600/Gabriel_Garcia_Marquez.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-euWeGpKUL2c/U1FXvGHmZdI/AAAAAAAAALE/rdV22Xf35w0/s1600/Gabriel_Garcia_Marquez.jpg" height="200" width="133" /></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">It was required reading in a class that both thwarted and
enthralled me. The teacher couldn’t
teach: we had all established that when he marched us through some wonderful
stories by Juan Rulfo and Julio Cortazar, offering plot summaries instead of
the hows and whys of understanding, shedding no light on unfamiliar ground, but
still managing to do one basic thing that a college class should always do—to
make introductions to something rich and strange and entirely new to the
students.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">So here I was, in a snow-smothered New England dormitory, translated
to Macondo, impelled by one of the greatest opening sentences in fiction:</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Many years later, as he faced the firing squad,
Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his
father took him to discover ice.</span></i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">It was the best novel I
read in college. <i> One Hundred Years of
Solitude</i> was many things—a profound meditation on myth and history, a truly,
ardently Latin American novel, and one of the most breath-takingly beautiful
virtuoso performances in the whole goddamned world of storytelling. By now
there are no spoilers: Garcia Marquez’s great scenes and almost musical
narrative sequences are so fixed in our memories that they are icons of
modernism. The visits of the gypsies,
the plague of insomnia, the Banana Company Massacre. If you know the book, the simple phrases conjure
recollection—the convoluted epic, stories popping in and out of each other like
tales in Ovid’s <i>Metamorphoses</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">It was a kind of novel I
had never seen. Something that seemed to
me entirely new in prose fiction, though I would find out later that <i>One Hundred Years</i> had illustrious
ancestors—other Latin American authors like Carpentier and Asturias. European writers
like Calvino and Kafka and strange old Bruno Schultz. The way that the fantastic brushed against
the plausible, the way the voice of the story refused to take sides—it was all
telling me that the space of imagining was wider than the world itself, a
lesson Tolkien had taught me years before, but revisited in new form. Macondo felt historical, and indeed it was. Latin American history—Western Hemispheric
history—with the mythic volume cranked up.
It helped me revisit the fantastic, refashion legend and folklore, in
ways that fast became important to my way of seeing things and telling
stories. If Tolkien’s writing inspired
me, the inspiration was shaped by Garcia Marquez.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Through<i> One Hundred Years</i>
I met my best friend, Gali Sanchez, who shared my passion for the book. It provided us with the first point of
intersection.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">And the book provided me with my
one fanboy moment in adulthood. When
Rhonda and I were in Florence in 2007, standing in a cramped, three-hour line
to enter the Uffizi Gallery, we stood in front of an amiable young woman whose
fluent English was laced with a South American accent—one I could not
place. So I asked her where she came
from, and found out she was Colombian. “Oh!”
I said. “My favorite living novelist comes from Colombia.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">At the mention of the
Maestro’s name she smiled quietly and said, “He’s my uncle.” <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">There was not room enough
in the Uffizi queue to kneel or grovel.
I was not the worst of fanboys, careful not to rhapsodize, to ask about
the health of a distinguished man in his eighties. I left his work to the side, talked to the
young woman about her uncle, trying not to presume that he was my uncle, too,
but at that time, as in the years since that icy Vermont winter, I felt as
though he was.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;">Perhaps my favorite moment
in <i>One Hundred Years</i> was a moment of
goodbyes. Remedios the Beauty, the
addle-witted “most beautiful women in the world”, has cut a wide oblivious swath
through the men of Macondo, leaving behind a trail of ruined suitors: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; color: #252525; font-family: Arial, sans-serif; line-height: 115%;"><br /></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>Remedios the Beauty stayed there wandering
through the desert of solitude, bearing no cross on her back, maturing in her
dreams without nightmares, her interminable baths, her unscheduled meals, her
deep and prolonged silences that had no memory until one afternoon in March,
when Fernanda wanted to fold her brabant sheets in the garden and asked the
women in the house for help. She had just begun when Amaranta noticed that
Remedios the Beauty was covered all over by an intense paleness.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 115%; text-indent: .5in;">
<i> “Don’t you feel well??she asked her.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i> Remedios
the Beauty, who was clutching the sheet by the other end, gave a pitying smile.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i> “Quite the opposite,?she said, “I never felt better.?<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 115%;">
<i> She had just finished saying it when Fernanda felt a
delicate wind of light pull the sheets out of her hands and open them up wide.
Amaranta felt a mysterious trembling in the lace on her petticoats and she
tried to grasp the sheet so that she would not fall down at the instant in
which Remedios the Beauty began to rise. Ursula, almost blind at the time, was
the only person who was sufficiently calm to identify the nature of that
determined wind and she left the sheets to the mercy of the light as she
watched Remedios the Beauty waving good-bye in the midst of the flapping sheets
that rose up with her, abandoning with her the environment of beetles and
dahlias and passing through the air with her as four o’clock in the afternoon
came to an end, and they were lost forever with her in the upper atmosphere
where not even the highest-flying birds of memory could reach her.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 115%;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNoSpacing" style="line-height: 115%;">
What a way to go out. Aloft in a mercy of light. My dear, inventive uncle of the soul, may you
find that mercy wherever you’re headed. <o:p></o:p><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-22021552951570824942014-03-13T13:54:00.004-07:002014-06-03T01:04:57.693-07:00On Sligo and Yeats, Mrs. Furey and an Early Pilgrimage<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">As part of my preparation for teaching a class on travel writing this
May, I've been reading Phil Cousineau's <i>The
Art of Pilgrimage</i>. Some of this very fine book deflects into popular
religious writing—I figured it would, given the traditional associations with
"pilgrimage", so I ventured into it with full knowledge that those
parts of the book would not be too much in my wheelhouse—but I'm still seeing
strong questions raised by a book that is more supple, more searching than I
had first assumed. It's making me think about pilgrimages of my own, of qualities that turn sight-seeing into
pilgrimage, destination into shrine.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The first pilgrimage I took, or at least the first I recognized as
pilgrimage, was in Ireland in the late 90s.
It took a conventional form: we took a bus up to Sligo from Galway, the
idea being to touch the hem of Yeats' garment and to see the country of his
poems.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I would have preferred train to Bus Eireann. Everyone who knows me knows my love of
rails. But the Intercity Line—then and
now, as I understand—sent the traveler way east into central Ireland to connect
from Galway, and so we took the bus, on roads that were still winding and
through a cloudy West of Ireland terrain that reminded me how I loved the
countryside there, but how it always felt as though you took in the landscape
at a gloomy slant, at wintry dusk even though our trip was in June.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">We arrived in Sligo at an equally somber moment. Our June was the June of 1997, and the
Troubles had flared up again following the shooting of two members of the Royal
Ulster Constabulary. The political climate
was as somber as the weather, and we were dropped off in a hushed, even gloomy heart
of the town, where we made our way to the tourist center and stood in line for
one of the standard tours until a Mrs. Furey came up to us and offered her
services as chauffeur and guide.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Needless to say, it's a good rule of thumb to avoid offers you meet in
these circumstances. I accepted, though,
relying on what I'd admit was a degree of sexism (yes, women would be <i>capable</i> of a good old-fashioned
kidnapping or drygulch, but let's face it: they are <i>much</i> less likely to do so than men), but also on my seasoned intuition
when it came to character. Mrs. Furey
was warm, humorous, but altogether businesslike: we would pay for the trip, but
she would deliver our money's worth.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Also, wasn't Michael Furey the young man from the west of Ireland who
died for the love of Greta Conroy in James Joyce's magnificent story, "The
Dead"? The one that Gabriel Conroy
dreamed his wife was dreaming of? A
young man obscured in the fiction of memory, in the memory of memory, and then
to make obscurity complete, only a fictional character to begin with? And was Michael Furey Mrs. Furey's oblique ancestor,
recalled vaguely by a latter-day writer
on a quest preoccupied with visiting a dead poet's grave in Sligo? The temptation deepened enough to give in to
it, to surrender the facts and the good sense, and we were off in Mrs. Furey's
van through winding, obscure roads, to Innisfree and Lissadell and the grave at
Ben Bulben. </span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Yeats people know these places filtered through the glamour of the
poems. So in ways it becomes superfluous
to go on about how one or the other of them might have disappointed when you
see them firsthand. Yeats brought poetry to them to understand
them, to connect them with his life and people,
and now we bring that poetry with us, and a dim island like Innisfree
becomes unique and evocative because the poetry mediates our experience. And Lissadell, the great home of the
Gore-Booth family and the center of what Auden called "that parish of rich
women" who were Yeats' patrons and companions,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.4pt; margin-bottom: 6.0pt; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 4.8pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><i>The light of evening, Lissadell,</i><br />
<i>Great windows open to the south,</i><br />
<i>Two girls in silk kimonos, both</i><br />
<i>Beautiful, one a gazelle…</i><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">was barely furnished, the floors checkerboarded
with dust framed by the carpets' stripped-down warp and weft. Mrs. Furey's story about Yeats and the male
friends of the Gore-Booth family sitting in the kitchen and throwing knives at
rats seemed appropriate in the surroundings.
<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">I understand that there is no longer public access
to Lissadell. The current owners restored
it then raised objections, whether from some dog-in-the-manger possessiveness
or from a justified nervousness about trespassers. In either case, it was good to go when we
went, years before that litigation, and to know, having seen the place, that
the great poet was right about something more than its decrepit beauty:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: .5in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in; text-indent: .5in;">
<i><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Dear shadows, now you know it all,<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All the folly of a fight<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">With a common wrong or right.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">The innocent and the beautiful.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<i><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Have no enemy but time.<o:p></o:p></span></span></i></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JK1K81maEEE/UyIabVhROjI/AAAAAAAAAKk/gSLOK_WlhO8/s1600/IMG.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JK1K81maEEE/UyIabVhROjI/AAAAAAAAAKk/gSLOK_WlhO8/s1600/IMG.jpg" height="141" width="200" /></a><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">On from there we went, Mrs. Furey and Rhonda and I, to the banks
of Lough Gill, staring out across the waters at the famous Isle of Innisfree, a
shoulder of green amid gray waters. At that
distance the "bee-loud glades" and the perpetual, beckoning call of
the Isle were inaudible. The only wonder
that I felt was the one I had prepared myself for—the resonance of the place, having
decided its meaning before I arrived. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">All I remember of the island was there before I saw it. I had done my share of traveling, but I was
new to pilgrimage.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div style="background: white; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When we arrived at Drumcliff Churchyard, under the distant hulking
shadow of Ben Bulben, it was the moment of epiphany. It was my version of Canterbury, Bodh Gaya,
the Kaaba. Because I've lived my days in
more secular poetry, and though Yeats was hardly a saint, the poems were to me
the relics of sainthood. <o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.4pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uEeZZAxFZI0/UyIagwc7mgI/AAAAAAAAAKs/iNK3kD9llPA/s1600/Ben+Bulben.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-uEeZZAxFZI0/UyIagwc7mgI/AAAAAAAAAKs/iNK3kD9llPA/s1600/Ben+Bulben.jpg" height="135" width="200" /></a><o:p><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.4pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">But
of course, the grave was the shrine.
Limestone, stark in its simplicity, inscribed with the famous epitaph he
wrote for himself (about casting "a cold eye/on life, on death"—I knew
it by heart in my 20s, still recalled from memory all of the poems I've used in
this piece, an indication that I've never quite left the faith). But no epiphany, no cemetery revelation. A reverent hush, a sense of homage, but no
different from that by any graveside. It
could have been anyone buried there.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.4pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.4pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eY0H7-XXNLI/UyIameYxHxI/AAAAAAAAAK0/rsLBrDRqfsE/s1600/Yeats+Grave.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-eY0H7-XXNLI/UyIameYxHxI/AAAAAAAAAK0/rsLBrDRqfsE/s1600/Yeats+Grave.jpg" height="157" width="200" /></a><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">And
the funny thing is that, indeed, it could have been anyone. A decade later I learned that it is probable
that Yeats is not buried in Drumcliff Churchyard after all. Yeats died in France in early 1939, his body buried
there, intended for transport back to Ireland when, according to the poet, the
newspapers would have forgotten about him and the final internment could happen
with a minimum of fuss. But 1939 marked
the outbreak of the war. The body in the
French grave was ostensibly moved to Drumcliff in 1948, but in the intervening
years, confusion has risen, Yeats not alone in being "transplanted"
after the conflict. In short, though the
body in the Sligo grave might be Yeats', it is far more likely, people think
now, that some unknown Frenchman awaits eternity on a high rocky spot in
Ireland.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.4pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.4pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Which
speaks to pilgrimage, doesn't it? I've
traveled since, and I've thought more about my travels, and now I think that
pilgrimage is less a journey to a place than one guided by an inner prompting—something
you need to do, perhaps, to get out of your system, to say you have done it, to
follow, in some way, the poetry to its source.
Only to discover, perhaps, that the poetry itself was the source, and
that wherever you go, that pilgrimage is with you. It's what the old man said in "The
Circus Animals' Desertion," or something near it:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.4pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="background: white; line-height: 14.4pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in; margin-left: 1.0in; margin-right: 0in; margin-top: 0in;">
<i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Heart-mysteries
there, and yet when all is said</span></i><i><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><br />
<span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">It was
the dream itself enchanted me:</span><br />
<span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Character
isolated by a deed</span><br />
</span><span style="background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;"><span style="font-family: Helvetica Neue, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">To
engross the present and dominate memory.</span></span></i></div>
<br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span><br />
<i> </i><i><o:p></o:p></i>Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-19027913310662949602014-03-01T04:55:00.000-08:002014-06-03T01:05:22.559-07:00On Pest and Heroes Square, and Alms for Oblivion<div class="MsoNormal">
"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Wherein he puts alms for oblivion."</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Shakespeare, <i>Troilus and Cressida</i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br />
<br />
Buda is the glamour half of Budapest, east side of the Danube, home of the Castle
District, Matthias Church, the Fishermen's Bastion, and highly expensive
housing.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Pest, on the other hand, is the place where Hungarian things get done,
from the Parliament east to Heroes Square, that brilliant, almost sepulchral
plaza of arches and statuary nearby our lodgings while we stayed in the city.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The first night in Budapest, wearied by the long flights and
a delay in London Heathrow, we decided on a walk toward<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;"> </span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Heroes Square</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;"> (or </span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Hősök
tere)</span><span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; font-family: Verdana, sans-serif; font-size: 8pt; line-height: 115%;">, </span> the
tourist site on my map that was closest to the hotel. I was unprepared for Heroes Square,
proceeding under the assumption that it was the Statue Park, the odd reliquary
for Soviet communism that in reality lies a short distance outside the city—a
place that we ended up not visiting this time in Budapest. So I imagined those dismal Eastern Bloc
constructions—outsized remnants of socialist realism, where the men all looked like
Stalin, and those women who didn't look like Stalin looked like Stalin's
mistresses. We were headed, I assumed,
toward the kind of display that our own Cold Warriors would have warned us
about in the Missile Crisis days had they cared anything at all about poetry or
art, had they not vied with the bleak propaganda of communist art by simply not
caring about any form of artistic expression that didn't sell.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In short, I expected very little. It was a first-night, off-the-plane
excursion. I was pleasantly surprised.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Mn_yJozqAEM/UxHXPtbgIeI/AAAAAAAAAKM/AXRNgLe_bnw/s1600/Hungarian+Witch.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Mn_yJozqAEM/UxHXPtbgIeI/AAAAAAAAAKM/AXRNgLe_bnw/s1600/Hungarian+Witch.jpg" height="158" width="200" /></a>The statues around Heroes Square were indeed outsized, and a
kind of late 19<sup>th</sup> century Romanticism that's not necessarily to my
liking. But at least it wasn't the Politburo.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Two colonnades form a half
circle at the eastern edge of the plaza, atop them symbolic figures
representing War and Peace, Work and Welfare.
Within the colonnade stand the Heroes, and it is immediately apparent
that War is the most influential of the stone emblems: kings and commanders
dominate the lineup. I suppose that the
sentiment of its time was not unlike 19<sup>th</sup> century America's love
affair with its generals. And yet among
them were men of peace—or at least the peaceful faces of men of war. King Matthias and his scholars. Coloman of Hungary, king and bishop, who
stood against the witch burnings of his time, burnings still recalled by the sculpture
at our hotel entrance, where the witch, entangled in blackened bronze, fades
into the surrounding buildings and the power lines.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rjcRtRiIrPk/UxHWyYs7oSI/AAAAAAAAAKE/57fJFHuquNQ/s1600/2013-12-21+05.17.14.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-rjcRtRiIrPk/UxHWyYs7oSI/AAAAAAAAAKE/57fJFHuquNQ/s1600/2013-12-21+05.17.14.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
A more magnificent statue dominates Heroes Square. Standing
tall and brilliant in front of the intersection of the colonnades is the famous
statue of the Archangel Gabriel. We were
told by our guide the next day that this statue was "voted the best statue
of Gabriel in the world, by those who know"—an enigmatic statement that
left me wondering who those Gabriel experts might be. Nevertheless, the statue—the archangel
holding a crown—is impressive, and perhaps “those who know” are altogether
right in this matter.<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="_GoBack"></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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The square is framed by art museums. On the north side is the Museum of Fine Arts,
which when we visited was, to my delight, housing a traveling Caravaggio
exhibition. The Palace of Arts, on the south side of the square, was a center
of performing arts, and the events scheduled for the time of our stay were
specifically national and contemporary, so we picked tradition over exploration
and planned our Caravaggio visit for the following day.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Which speaks to a point.
As an artist of sorts, I am usually inclined toward the new and
experimental. But here on markedly
foreign turf, more tourist than artist, I gravitated toward the known, the
sanctioned, the familiar. Caravaggio
wasn't even Hungarian, I would remind myself in the days that followed, as the
opportunity offered by the Palace of Arts faded behind me on the train to
Vienna. In Hungary I brushed against a
vivid culture and history almost completely alien from my own, and it made me
think about anonymity, that sometimes good work is lost in place as well as in
time. </div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And as an artist of minor sorts, I am more and more humbled by the inevitability
that the survival of my own work is dependent on these large and immovable things: that it is
limited by the restraints of home geography and sequestered talents. That as writers we see things pass from print,
search for recommended books to find they haven't been published in years and
that the search in the most obscure sites may roust no words out of oblivion
and decay.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Only a block or two from the square is the bizarrely
eclectic <span style="background: white; color: #444444; mso-bidi-font-family: Calibri; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin;">Vajdahunyad</span><span style="background: white; color: #444444; font-family: "Arial","sans-serif";"> </span>castle,
a relative newcomer to the cityscape when you consider the old origins of some
of the structures across the Danube. Built in the same era (and with the same
impulse) as Heroes Square, it is a gallimaufry of architectural styles—Baroque,
Gothic, Renaissance, Romanesque all gathered together and lost in a strange
larger purpose—entire in its oddness, occasional awkwardness, and beauty. It houses two famous statues: one of Bela
Lugosi, of course, and another of Anonymous.</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SWC2XhAEr5s/UxHXuqONBAI/AAAAAAAAAKU/YHj-A-J5OdQ/s1600/2013-12-21+05.07.10.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-SWC2XhAEr5s/UxHXuqONBAI/AAAAAAAAAKU/YHj-A-J5OdQ/s1600/2013-12-21+05.07.10.jpg" height="150" width="200" /></a></div>
<br />
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A testimony to all writers, artists (and people in general)
whose names have been lost to geography and time, the statue supposedly commemorates
a chronicler of King Bela (not Lugosi, but a 12<sup>th</sup> or 13<sup>th</sup>
century Hungarian monarch—for here the trouble lies, in that there are several
King Belas, and we don't know to which this writer attached himself). At the foot of the statue, I'm told by a
favorite student of mine, the mathematician Paul Erdos met with a number of his
fellows, apparently an unparalleled assemblage of mathematical genius, although
again these are names as lost to me as that of Coloman, Matthias, or the "true
identity" behind this statue. The
pen the statue holds is the subject of a local superstition: it seems that
students rub it for good luck on their exams, summoning recall out of bronze
and oblivion, hoping that memory and insight will have their academic backs until the
test is over and time begins again. <span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span></div>
Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4437389687079154255.post-48905068681243779652014-02-15T06:11:00.004-08:002014-06-03T01:05:55.221-07:00On the City, and Freedom, and Light<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
So there it was, and here I was.
Alone in the last room of the museum, in front of me a floating display
of a city caught in mist and light.</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was supposedly Prague, of course: Prague filled with the
light at the end of the Burrow you glimpse on occasion in some of Kafka's
fiction—the Castle, perhaps, or the world born from Grete Samsa's music in the
last section of "The Metamorphosis".
Kafka calls it "the unknown nourishment". Gregor Samsa looks for it and fails to find
it, as does the Hunger Artist:</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;">"</span><span style="font-size: 10pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Because," said the hunger artist, lifting his head a
little…"because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it,
believe me, I should have made no fuss and stuffed myself like you or anyone
else." These were his last words, but in his dimming eyes remained the
firm though no longer proud persuasion that he was continuing to fast.
("The Hunger Artist", tr. Ian Johnston)</span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
<div style="margin-left: .5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Calibri","sans-serif"; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ascii-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-latin; mso-hansi-theme-font: minor-latin;"><br /></span></div>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">That
search for the missing place, the forgotten place, or the place that may not
exist (or if it does, is remote and bathed in impenetrable light) is a part of
the desire and yearning of Kafka's work that drew me from the start—not only
because it was so well rendered but also because I shared it, have always
shared it. And in a way, this trip—and for
that matter, all my trips and journeys—are toward a place I imagine very much
as the museum notes proposed it, rather vaguely and tentatively and perhaps even mundanely, as "free
of evil".<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-f9TPraK0RS4/Uv9z3IrorRI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/GJTIO5oPWGo/s1600/Prague+Distances.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-f9TPraK0RS4/Uv9z3IrorRI/AAAAAAAAAJ0/GJTIO5oPWGo/s1600/Prague+Distances.jpg" height="240" width="320" /></a><span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">"Free
of evil," indeed. If it can't be a
place of good, an eternal place (because such places have always been
impossible to imagine, at least for me), let it at least carry that much freedom
and release. <o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">As
I had entered the museum, for the first time I had been asked by the clerk if I
were eligible for the senior discount.
Of course it was insulting (I am still a few years away), and Rhonda kindly assured me it had to do
with my hair, gray since 40. But for some
reason now, it made sense in the presence of that nebulous light, the buildings
in the fog, a lone man walking.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">We
don't have long in any place, people. Our stay here is a trip, a journey, a holiday. There's a good in that as well as a sadness. No matter how often epiphany comes, no matter the moments of time outside time, the holidays of soul, we slip back into the mundane and forgetful, where nourishment fades and vanishes into imagined distances. And perhaps knowing that for what it is, settling
into it and finding the good there, is one form of difficult nourishment.<o:p></o:p></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></span>
<br />
<span style="font-size: 11pt;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">I
walked back into the city, lightstruck and cold on the west bank of the Vltava, and over the Charles Bridge, where dozens of statues
played at immortality, their subjects and inspirations eternally free
somewhere. </span><span style="font-family: Calibri, sans-serif;"><o:p></o:p></span></span><span style="background-color: white; color: #545454; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: x-small; line-height: 18.200000762939453px;">©2014 Michael Williams</span>Michael Williamshttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14694229538179899186noreply@blogger.com0