On Five Excellent Things About Aosta

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.

               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:

         Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky,

                   Mont Blanc appears--still, snowy, and serene;

                   Its subject mountains their unearthly forms

                   Pile around it, ice and rock; broad vales between

                   Of frozen floods, unfathomable deeps,

                   Blue as the overhanging heaven, that spread

                   And wind among the accumulated steeps.

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:

1.      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.

2.      

      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 Goodfellas or Casino.

3.     

      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 “scusi” or “mi dispiace” 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:  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 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, grazie), 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.

4.      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.

5.      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.

6.      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 lagniappe 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.   ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Ruins in Aosta

tempus edax rerum, tuque, invidiosa vetustas,

omnia destruitis vitiataque dentibus aevi              

paulatim lenta consumitis omnia morte!

My Latin is rusty, but it goes something like this:

Time, devourer of things, and you, jealous Age,

destroy all and, gnawing slowly with your teeth,

a little at a time, consume all in death!

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.

               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. 

               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.

               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^th or early in the 20^th 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.

               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.

               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.

               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.

               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.   ©2014 Michael Williams

On Erbavoglio and the Lost Art

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.

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.

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 buongiorno, smiled and said, “We can talk in English, then.”

They know us by our confusion, my countrymen.  The deer-in-the-headlights look after the simplest of greetings says Indiana 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.

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?”

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.

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.

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.

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.    ©2014 Michael Williams 

On Waking Up Italian

It’s different from waking up American, which is what I do inevitably when I travel. 

               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.

               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 be Italian).

               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.

               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.  

          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.

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. 

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.

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.    ©2014 Michael Williams

On the Maestro

I’m already missing the Maestro.

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 One Hundred Years of Solitude and felt the world and my paradigms shift.

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.

So here I was, in a snow-smothered New England dormitory, translated to Macondo, impelled by one of the greatest opening sentences in fiction:

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.

It was the best novel I read in college.  One Hundred Years of Solitude 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 Metamorphoses. 

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 One Hundred Years 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.

Through One Hundred Years I met my best friend, Gali Sanchez, who shared my passion for the book.  It provided us with the first point of intersection.

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.” 

At the mention of the Maestro’s name she smiled quietly and said, “He’s my uncle.”

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.

Perhaps my favorite moment in One Hundred Years 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:

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.

   “Don’t you feel well??she asked her.

                Remedios the Beauty, who was clutching the sheet by the other end, gave a pitying smile.

                “Quite the opposite,?she said, “I never felt better.?

                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.

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.  ©2014 Michael Williams

On Sligo and Yeats, Mrs. Furey and an Early Pilgrimage

As part of my preparation for teaching a class on travel writing this May, I've been reading Phil Cousineau's The Art of Pilgrimage. 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 capable of a good old-fashioned kidnapping or drygulch, but let's face it: they are much 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.

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.

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,

The light of evening, Lissadell,
Great windows open to the south,
Two girls in silk kimonos, both
Beautiful, one a gazelle…

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. 

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:

Dear shadows, now you know it all,

All the folly of a fight

With a common wrong or right.

The innocent and the beautiful.

Have no enemy but time.

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. 

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.

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. 

 

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.

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.

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:

Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.

©2014 Michael Williams

On Pest and Heroes Square, and Alms for Oblivion

"Time hath, my lord, a wallet at his back,

Wherein he puts alms for oblivion."

                        Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida

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.

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.

The first night in Budapest, wearied by the long flights and a delay in London Heathrow, we decided on a walk toward Heroes Square (or Hősök tere),  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.

In short, I expected very little.  It was a first-night, off-the-plane excursion.  I was pleasantly surprised.

The statues around Heroes Square were indeed outsized, and a kind of late 19^th century Romanticism that's not necessarily to my liking.  But at least it wasn't the Politburo.

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^th 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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

Only a block or two from the square is the bizarrely eclectic Vajdahunyad 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.

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^th or 13^th 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.  ©2014 Michael Williams