tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-55362098527789656812024-03-13T11:20:33.956-07:00Letters from CalibanTo ride; to string a bow; to tell the truth.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.comBlogger22125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-56550717464965749962012-11-16T13:59:00.001-08:002012-11-16T13:59:09.984-08:00Letters from Caliban's Winter HaitusDear readers,<br />
<br />
I will speak plainly and to the point. I have grown uncomfortable with my own writing. Frankly I have come to dislike it, thematically and especially structurally, and to dislike even more the whole idea of a creative writing blog. The blog should be a kind of display case -- "Look, here are the things I've made! Come and buy." Any cabinet-maker or sculptor or butcher, such that those breeds have not been driven into extinction, does the same thing. What I need right now is a workshop, not a display case. <br />
<br />
(What a horribly maligned word, workshop. The schools have ruined it with their "writer's workshops." Maybe I should say I need a garage like an auto mechanic's; its apter, anyway.)<br />
<br />
I have made some errors on this blog, not dreadful but serious and in need of serious attention. You will permit me to say that I would prefer to work on these errors by myself. One of my errors has been my compromising my need for privacy to write. There have been many others, and you probably know them almost as well as I do.<br />
<br />
I need to separate myself from this blog. I considered deleting it, but I trust that my work will remain safer on blogspot than on my hard drive, so I'll let it be. I am going to the Pyrenees in a few weeks and won't be back to the States until spring or summer. Check in occasionally, but be aware that there won't be much to report that I foresee.<br />
<br />
The old principles do not change. <br />
Ride, string a bow, and tell the truth.<br />
-CarloAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-81503159071793939872012-11-07T16:11:00.002-08:002012-11-07T16:11:25.736-08:00Gold of the Mountains
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> Outside
it was raining. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
dreamed last night,” she said. “I dreamed of money.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “You
had a nightmare.” They were speaking English.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Oh,
no, it was – marvelous. It was a beautiful dream. I was bathing
in money.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “That
doesn't sound beautiful. Money is filth. Open the newspaper, you'll see what I mean. I wouldn't bathe
in money if the stuff cured cancer. You keep telling yourself that
getting money is such a great thing and ”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
didn't tell myself anything. I dreamed it, that's all. I dreamed
that I was bathing in a shower of money.” She looked away from the
mirror she was polishing. “Are you mad, Paul?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “No.
I'm peeling potatoes.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “You
sound mad. Are you mad at me?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I'm
peeling potatoes. How could I be mad while I'm peeling potatoes?”
He turned around in the shaky wooden chair. “Alright, alright.
Tell me about your dream.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “So I
was standing.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “That's
good, I guess.” He was intent on his peeling.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
was standing, and the moon was out, and the sun was out, and on the
right it was nighttime and fresh and cold and all the stars were out.
And on the left side it was daytime and the sun was shining and it
was warm and blue.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Where
were you standing?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Right
in the middle. And there was a river.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Was
I there?” He had finished peeling and had turned the chair around
to face her. One of the legs was giving out, and he shifted a little
to lighten its load.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Where?
In the river? No, silly, you weren't there.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Hang
on a second, the water's boiling.” He stood up and carried the
bowl of potatoes to the range. With a knife he skewered them one by
one, almost to the handle, because it was not a very big knife, and
pushed them off the blade into the water. Then he scraped the
peelings into the bin, along with the damp newspaper he had spread
out over the table to absorb the juice. The girl in the meantime had
finished polishing the mirror and began straightening out the bed.
When it was finished she sat down on the foot, and the bed being
across from the kitchen door she watched him bending over the bin,
swearing in Georgian, with his short legs and his dark hair. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> When he
finished he gave the potatoes a quick look and sat down at the table.
His glass from yesterday was sitting there, a lowball, and a jug of
no-name California red next to it. He picked it up by the neck, very
carefully, and let a little stream out of the mouth, so slowly that
it didn't bubble or make a purple foam in the glass. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “So,”
he said, “there was a river. Do you want some wine?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “The
river was underneath me. So on the right it was nighttime, and on
the left it was daytime, and below me there was this river. Exactly
below me, and it was flowing backward.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “What
do you mean?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
mean away from me. The water was coming toward me and then under me
and then passed me behind.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Oh.
What was above you?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Well,
so I looked up, and there was this cloud, a storm cloud, but not
black. It was silver, and gold. And it started raining coins on me.
You know, quarters and pennies.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “It
must have hurt.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Oh,
no, not at all. It was marvelous. It was like a warm shower. And
all these coins – they were piling up around me, and on me, and in
my hair. I sat down and they kept pouring down. I was catching them
in my hands and scooping them off the ground and they went down my
shirt and into my shoes, and when I looked up it was so beautiful,
Paul, because all I could see was the cloud and the coins like rain.
Have you ever done that?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “No,”
he said, “I can say pretty certainly that I've never been rained on
by money.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
mean have you ever looked upward while it was raining.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> He
considered the question and took a sip of wine. Then he stood up
with his glass in one hand and the chair in the other and stepped
through the door. He set the glass down in front of the mirror and
the chair next to the bed, backward, and sat down so that his belly
was against the chair back. Then he thought better of it and sat
down on the bed, glass in hand, next to the girl. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
think I have,” he said finally. “I think – yes. Actually, I
have looked up when it was raining. It's not what you expect. I
mean it's not what you expect to see.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> She had
waited patiently to continue. “So you know what I saw when I
looked up. But then guess what happened.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “More
money came down.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Yes,
but paper money. Hundreds and fifties. The coins stopped and
hundreds and fifties started falling. But they were falling slowly,
because they're paper. It was like snow.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “You've
never seen the snow.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “On
TV I have.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “That's
not the same. It's different in real life. It's nasty, actually, it
gets all black and dirty, and you slip and you can't drive on it. Do
you remember when we lived in Moscow, or were you too young?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “No,
I don't remember. But it doesn't matter, because this was like
perfect snow, like the snow you see in the movies, but it wasn't snow
because it was money.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Actually,”
said Paul, “when it snowed at home it was nice. It didn't get
black. Or maybe it did, I don't know, I was a little kid. You were
just born.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “And
it fell and fell,” she continued, “like the coins, except more,
and longer, and it was all clean and crisp like when you get it from
the bank and it hasn't gotten all wrinkled yet. It started piling
up, and it covered all the coins even, but you could feel the coins
underneath, and they were warmer than the paper money. It was like
warm soil under warm snow.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Thousands
and thousands of dollars. Tens of thousands,” he said, “maybe
millions.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “And
I started rolling around because it felt so good, and I tried to make
a snow angel but there was too much and it kept on falling, and my
clothes were full of money, and when I stood up I fell over because I
was so heavy, but it even felt good to fall. And then I looked down
and I couldn't see the river anymore.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “The
river? You mean”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Right,
the river from in the beginning. There was just money on the ground
all around me, big piles, and I was laying down on my back all heavy
with money and my hair and my feet were covered.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Was
it still night and day at the same time?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Oh,
yes, dark on the right and bright on the left. That didn't change.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> She
stopped and drew her feet up onto the bed, and sat on them. Paul lay
the glass on the floor and sat cross legged against a pillow, facing
her.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “And
then what happened?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Nothing,”
she said, “I was just laying in the money and it was beautiful.
The end.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “The
end?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Yes.
The end.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> He
looked away. “Well, it sounds lovely.” Then after a moment he
spoke again. “You know I had a dream last night too.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> She
turned to look at him. “Really?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Do
you remember Grandfather Michael, who lived in Mestia?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “No.
Was he the one who has a cigar in all the pictures?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “That's
him. When I was little they would send me to go stay with him on
school breaks. He had this little house in the middle of nowhere
near Mestia and he would take me up to the mountains. Well, I
dreamed about those mountains. First I saw this mountain that was
like a tower with two peaks, very sharp peaks, and there were fir
trees around it. All gray, very very tall, and the forest underneath
it. Other mountains around it. And then the mountain, the big one,
was Grandfather Michael.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> She
smiled. “It was a mountain and it was Grandfather Michael?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
wish I could explain it to you. It was a mountain. I mean, it
looked like a mountain. But it was also him. You could almost see
him, his face, in, I don't know, the cracks and all. It's hard to
explain.” He swore softly and whistled. “I don't know. I
couldn't tell you if it was a real mountain that I remembered from
being a kid or if I just made it up. If it's real it doesn't look
like that anymore. They're all ski resorts and stuff like that. Big
money from Russia and Tblisi, vacation villas and resorts and all
that.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “But
not in the dream.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “No,
no. Good God, no, just mountain. Just rock and trees. And
Grandfather Michael, kind of.” He stared back toward the kitchen.
“But what a mountain. So tall.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> They
sat still for a while, and then she got up to check on the potatoes
and make dinner, and Paul picked up the day's paper from where he
left it, on the floor by the front door beneath their jackets, and
carried it into the kitchen to read at the table. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Do
we have any fish in the cupboard?” he asked.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “No,
I was planning on making eggs. Do you not want eggs? I can run to
the store”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “No,
no, eggs are fine. Eggs are fine.” He turned to the international
section and started reading aloud to himself. At dinner they sat
elbow to elbow. The smell of frying had penetrated the walls and the
linoleum.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “That
Russian from the City,” said Paul, “are you still seeing him?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Gregory.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Him,”
he said. “Mr. Cufflinks. Does he still call you?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “No.
Not for two weeks.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Good.
I know his type, I knew when I saw him. Actually I knew when you
first told me about him.” He said something in Georgian that made
her look down sharply toward her plate. They kept eating, slowly,
because there wasn't much left in the pan, and when they finished
they refilled their glasses, hers fuller than his. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Were
the eggs good?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “They're
always good.” The paper was open on his lap again, wrinkled and a
little damp from sitting under the dripping rain jackets, so that the
ink smeared a little on the front page. He squinted in annoyance.
“Speaking of bathing in money,” he said, more to himself than
her. “Good God.” </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> After
dinner she washed the plates by hand and he dried them. He opened
the cupboard, but then closed it. “I'm tired,” he said, “I
think I'll do this tomorrow.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “So
am I,” she said, “don't worry about it.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> They
both undressed without much ceremony, taking turns in the bathroom,
and they went to bed, one on the left side, the other on the right
side, and Paul kept the lamp on while she wiggled down into the
warmth of the sheets. After a while he turned his head toward her.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Does
the light bother you?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Mm.
No.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Hey,
Martha. Are you awake?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Mm.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “That
mountain I dreamed about. Grandfather Michael used to call it Gold
Mountain. How do you like that?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Mm.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Gold.
The Gold Mountain. I don't know what its real name is, but it was a
real place. Gold Mountain. Huh.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> She
rolled a little and sighed in her sleep. Paul stared at the ceiling.
</span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “The
Gold Mountain. How do you like that.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> He
reached for the drawstring of the lamp. It was an old lamp, second
hand, and had once been purple but now was a dull reddish brown.
“Like old blood,” he thought, “the color of old dry blood. And
the gold, golden mountain. Gold, gold, golden gold.” And he, too,
drifted into sleep.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-78613139822632905972012-10-29T16:05:00.004-07:002012-10-29T18:31:17.464-07:00Sketches from the Campagna: Nino and the Bicycle<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> When
the crisis hit, and no one had any money at all, the roads that lead
into Nicosia became full of bicycles. People who worked started
cycling to work and people without jobs cycled to wherever they spent
their day. Far fewer cars made the rounds on account of the price of
petrol.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> This
pleased Giovanni Catalano, called Nino, who had previously driven to
his job in Nicosia and had always wanted to cycle. He hated the
heavy, sterile frame of his car. He hated having to roll down a
window (it was fairly old, the car) to feel the wind. Every day
since the bicycles started to appear he would stare in envy at the
people leaning over their handlebars in the full flush of the good
clean air, up the hills and down the hills, who could smell the
orange blossoms as they passed the orchards. He hated having to find
a few meters of empty space in the crowded street when others could
simply lock their bicycle to a streetsign or shoulder it into work.
When he filled the tank he would swear viciously. “All you do is
suck life. A bloody stramaladetto vampire. It's not enough that you
suck my wallet dry. You have to leave my bloodless in this miserable
box. You rusty old carcass.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> Nino
envied the commuter cyclists and admired them. He had seen a TV
documentary on Denmark, where it seemed that everyone rode a bicycle
everywhere, even politicians and famous people, and he burned up
inside. Apparently Holland was the same way. And so was Nicosia
once, he reflected, because his grandfather had ridden a bicycle to
work for as long as he worked, and even his father – Nino's father
– had commuted by bicycle as a young man, before his first car.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> He
brought this up at the table one night. His mother nearly dropped
the pot she was holding.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “What?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> He told
her again.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “What's
gotten into you? You want to give up the car?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> His
father chewed the tip of his knife, slowly. “I used to ride my
cycle to work, before I got a car.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Before
you could afford a car.” --His wife.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Right,
before I could afford one. It wasn't so bad. The old one-speed.
And anyway with fuel prices being what they are.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “The
price is not the point. The point is that a man of almost thirty
years doesn't ride a bicycle when he could drive. He simply doesn't.
One doesn't do that. Nino, you are going to drive and you are going
to forget this bicycle business immediately.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> The
father placed the knife delicately back next to his plate. “My old
bike,” he said calmly, “is in the garage under a tarpaulin. The
tires'll be flat. But that's where you'll find it.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> The
next day Nino stuck the old singlespeed into the back of his Fiat
and, having managed to get out of work early, shouldered it and
walked a few blocks to a cycle shop. He waited in line a good
quarter hour before he got to the counter.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Fix
it up so you can commute?” asked the mechanic, a bored-looking boy
with long hair and a rakish beard. “Right. Give me your number,
we'll call you.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> And by
the following Monday Nino had a well-oiled, properly pumped bicycle.
He left the house early, much earlier than before. He took the same
road that he had taken to work for years to school for years before
that, past an orange grove, intersecting the highway, over the hill
into town; but it was like a new road, a new country, and he felt
himself an explorer in uncharted territory. A new old country. A
new old world. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> He
learned. He learned that the stretches he'd always thought were flat
were actually on an incline. He learned what gravel felt like under
the tires and how easy it was to slide clear off the road, and how
the air dries as the sun rises, which he knew but didn't remember
ever feeling. As he travelled day by day he began to recognize the
rabbits on the roadside and the doves in the cypresses, and they were
no longer little flashes of color but real animals. He had found a
new country in old Nicosia town and its outskirts. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> What
new disdain he now felt for his old car, his great rusting
life-sucker! When his coworkers complained about petrol prices his
smiled. On the road he wondered what a gearshift must be like, to
slide easily in and out of the fast-spinning little gear and back
into the great slow heaving first, to control the flow as he willed,
to make music from the rhythm of the clacking, whispering chain. He
whistled at the doves. The rabbits sat on the roadside and and
waved. Spring came; flowers opened up for Nino on his ride. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> On a
Thursday night he sat on the bed of his friend, the girl who worked
mornings at the Bar Belfiore, and talked about the bike as he pulled
on his shoes. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
like it,” she was telling him. “Take me some time. Your rabbits
sound adorable.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> He
stood up to fasten his belt. “I will.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
don't know anyone he rides a bike. There's a young guy who comes in
for a cappuccino all sweaty and flushed every morning early but I
don't know if he rides his bike or a scooter or what. Does that
happen to you?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “What?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
mean does it wear you out. Do you show up to work all sweaty?”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “A
little.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “It
doesn't seem to wear you out too much. Not in a bad way, anyway.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “No,
it gives you energy.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
can tell.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I'm
serious, though,” said Nino, “you live when you're on a bike.
You breathe. You move... I don't know how to explain it.” She
smiled and kissed him.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> The
next morning was a Friday, and the sky was clear and and Nino saw
magpies busy with their nest building. The bees were singing in
choirs, and the sky arced wonderfully and the cypresses smelled
wonderful and everything lost its dimensions and became like a
painted image, all on the same plane and glowing. A little bit
faster he pedaled, and a little bit faster; he was the wind that blew
the pollen now, the warm spring wind that stirred the grass. His
thighs burned with the speed and the hill and sang out to each other
in turns, call, response, right, left as he topped the hill, left,
right, right, right. Down the hill he sped, blind in the wind. He
never saw the truck, and when it caught him broadside he flew forward
in an arc, headfirst with his body whipping behind him like a tail.
Up, up, up and then down, down, down; and when he smashed into the
asphalt it was like he had been swallowed by the curving side of the
Earth, and the bits of his body here and there on the road were the
only proof that he hadn't.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-29083845317611678172012-10-25T14:03:00.001-07:002012-10-25T14:03:56.148-07:00San Giorgio - Monferrato
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Colli,
vigne, orti e campi:</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">un
registro di timbri dolci</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">e luce
bionda, e foschia</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">leggera
e garbata.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Ametista
ed oro dei colli e campi,</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">chiarezza
chiodata dai pini solitari. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Ma sotto
quel suolo che tiene le vigne</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">c'è
roccia, roccia</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">né
ametista né oro, plutone</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">roccia
cieca, che sa l'antico canto</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">dei
falchi che gridano lassù.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
–<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">O San
Giorgio!</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Tu vedi
il dorso delle Alpi</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> l'orrore
del sasso sorgente</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> come
carne solida, vivente, sì</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> le Alpi
le vedi, San Giorgio</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> potenti
e sfrenati, sì tanto</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> la coda
scagliosa del tuo drago</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-69535799468683118512012-10-19T20:21:00.003-07:002012-10-19T20:21:46.415-07:00Si torna
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">E
la vita eccheggia nell'arco dei secoli</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">di
vita in vita.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ecco:
stamattina ho raccoltato il grano</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">davanti
allo specchio.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Cadeva
il grano, fino e dorato; ed al campo è rimasta</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">l'ombra
della stoppia, comprendomi il mento</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">e
le guance.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">E
la memoria eccheggia nell'arco di tempo</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">di
occhio in occhio.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Vedi:
ho aperto un libro</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">e
là fra i fogli i disegni d'inchiostro</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">si
son riformati.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">E
vedevo il carro, il gran cacciatore</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">le
sette sorelle ed il fiume ed il cane</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">e
gli altri sillabi della lingua</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">del
cielo.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">E
la vita corre nel torrente di sogno</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">di
cuore in cuore.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Penna
in mano comincio la vendemmia.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ecco
finalmente il mosto.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Guarda
quant'è scuro</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">e
che profumo fa.</span><br />
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-34687258243339741102012-10-19T20:14:00.003-07:002012-10-25T14:07:58.983-07:00Incantesimo di Merseburg: Sassonia, anno 900 d.C.<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Fol ed Wodan passavan pel bosco</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">e la caviglia del cavallo di Balder fu
storta.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ed allor lanciò
l'incantesimo Sinthgut sorella di Sunna</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">ed
allor lanciò
l'incantesimo Frija sorella di Wolla</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">e
lanciò
l'incantesimo Wodan al meglio possibile.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Quanto
rotta l'ossa tanto rotto il sangue</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">e
tanto rotta la storta.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Ossa
all'ossa</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Sangue
al sangue</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Nodi
ai nodi</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> come
fosser legati.</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"></span> </div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial;"><em>(per un cavallo ferito)</em></span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-78729433486031766142012-10-11T11:29:00.004-07:002012-10-11T13:57:15.957-07:00The White BullA white bull, a king of the field.<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Magnificent. Who else could match you?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
The chest scraping the clover</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
the massive haunches and the shimmering
flanks</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
the powerful roll of the shoulders</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
the ripple of throatflesh
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and the circumspect twitch of the tail.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Whose bone was it that splintered your
crown?</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
How many calves now grazing in your
field</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
came to the sunlight from your dreadful
loins?</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
One comes to the kingdom to meet the
king.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
One comes to the pasture to meet the
bull.</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Life straddles horsebacks and drips
from horns</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
And I to see life with my own eyes</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and breathe it with my own lungs</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
have come to you, to the field of
dung<br />
and dandelions</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
at least to sit upon a splintered post</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and watch you graze</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
swallowing green life to produce
white--</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
And</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
if not to feed you clover with my hand</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and feel the stormcloud of your breath
against my skin</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
then to have your hide, tight drawn
like a bowstring</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
stretched and nailed, embracing the
house wall;</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and your bullslaying rack</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
I would paint red
</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and fix to the lintel</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
to catch the hearthglow in the
night</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
and blaze by day when the door is open</div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
crowning the field of blue with red.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-91030697565766230132012-10-02T21:15:00.002-07:002012-10-03T14:25:05.552-07:00Sketches from the Campagna: The Chickens<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> One
morning the sky was especially blue, and the lawyer decided he wanted
chickens. Actually he had always wanted chickens, but now that his
new house had space for a henhouse he could finally have some, and
eat fresh eggs whenever he wanted. When he arrived at the office the
first thing he did was make a couple phone calls; when he came home
for one o'clock dinner he announced that he was buying chickens, that
a hired man was coming over on Thursday to put together a nice
henhouse, and soon they'd be eating fresh eggs.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> His
wife was delighted and began dreaming aloud of all the wonders she
could cook up with fresh eggs, and laughed with triumphant derision
at the store-bought eggs that they wouldn't be eating much longer.
The tall, skinny boy twisted up his face and laughed at the idea of
chickens, and the little girl clapped her hands in oblivious joy.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> That
Thursday the workman came. The lawyer took the day off to supervise,
standing in the sun and dust, directing the old man as needed. There
was a terrible wind blowing, and the palms shook, and all the olives
that stood along the edge of the property wailed and threw their
leaves into the air. By dusk the old workman had more or less
finished, as good as done, and the lawyer dismissed him.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> When
all was done the lawyer drove back to his office and made another
call, this time to a chicken farmer. He greeted the old farmer over
the phone with extravagant courtesy, inquired after the price of a
few good layers, and immediately set into bargaining. The farmer had
little patience for it and invited him to come tomorrow, and then bid
him good night and hung up. The lawyer was not offended; he was too
pleased in his handiwork to feel resentful. He had knocked the price
down a considerable number of lire, he was sure, and anyway he'd be
eating fresh eggs within a few days. The next morning he went to see
the chicken farmer on the latter's little holding in Marausa. When
he arrived he parked his car on the potholed street and called to the
farmer's son, who was just snapping up the kickstand of his Vespa to
leave, to open the gate. He was a big hulking boy in his late
twenties, wearing a mustache and a shiny jacket; there was a piece of
flesh missing from under his eye, as though scooped out like a morsel
from a block of cheese. The son obliged silently, and the lawyer
made his way to the farmhouse, where the chicken farmer greeted him
without wasting much breath and showed him what chickens he had for
sale. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> The
lawyer walked down the short corridor of the barn, stroking his chin
and hmming and scratching meditatively at his belly. He wanted big
ones, he said, nice big fat ones to lay nice big eggs. He pointed to
a great lethargic black hen on a top shelf; the farmer chuckled
grimly and advised against it. They walked a few more steps and the
lawyer, a bit desperately, asked about a second one: the farmer said
no, that one laid very little. In the end the farmer chose two good
layers, accepted the lawyer's offer without complaining, handed him
the chickens and went back inside, coppola pulled firmly down on his
head.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> At
the lawyer's house everyone crowded around to look at the chickens,
to poke at them and admire their fine plumage, and the lawyer threw
open a window that faced the sea and proclaimed how much he enjoyed
living in the country, what a good contadino he made. The little
girl clapped and danced in the excitement, the dog barked in the
yard, the wind howled in the olives, the skinny boy tried to poke the
birds with a stick. Neighbors passing along the road heard the
ruckus and stopped by the open window, smiling and appraising the
fine hens that the lawyer had bought. The chickens themselves
clucked and twitched and blinked their round chicken eyes.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> That
night at supper the lawyer took second and third helpings of
everything, put away almost a liter of wine, and had two glasses of
bitters after dessert. He slept like a baby, curled up under the
covers, his snores almost drowned by the sirocco that was shrieking
through the fields, churning the sea and bending the trees.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> He
waited in breathless anticipation all the next day for news of eggs;
he checked before going to the office, again when he came home for
dinner, and even called his wife that afternoon. Nothing yet. The
lawyer came home with his lip a bit twisted, yelled at his son for
making too much noise, yelled at the television because Napoli had
beaten Inter three to one, drank too much wine at supper and went
straight to bed. The next morning he woke up before light, and
wrapping himself in a bathrobe crept outside to the henhouse. The
wind had let up for a moment, but the air was cold. The henouse
itself, mostly finished, loomed in the dark like an apparition. The
lawyer glanced around nervously, then retied the belt of the
bathrobe around his belly and unhinged the little wooden door. There
were the chickens, their open eyes unnerving in the dark. He slipped
in his hand awkwardly under the first one, almost embarrassed to
disturb her, and suddenly the ghostliness of the scene melted into
joy: he felt an egg. Grinning he thrust his hand under the other
chicken and felt shell. He chuckled to himself as he turned on the
flashlight he had brought in his pocket. But he stopped short, his
mouth open in confusion, because in the light he saw that both eggs
had been shattered in the nest, that there were bits of yolk along
the wood plankings, and that both hens had their beaks and breasts
specked with mutilated egg. One even opened its mouth to squawk in
annoyance, and he saw that there was more egg in the bird's mouth.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> He
went back inside at a run to find the chicken farmer's number. He
called immediately, not caring that it was barely six in the morning.
It hardly mattered though, because the farmer was awake, having his
first coffee after the early morning chores; as taciturn but
uncomplaining as usual, he listened stonily to the lawyer's story and
advised bringing the chickens back to the farm as soon as possible.
The lawyer threw on whatever clothes he had on hand, and without his
usual morning shower and shave and aftershave he seized the birds by
the feet, threw them into the car, and drove to Marausa.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> Light
was leaking over the hills, but the sea was still dark; the farmer's
son was just arriving home on his Vespa, the crator on his face
twitching a little, and opened the gate for the lawyer. The farmer
himself was outside smoking in overalls a size too big and his
coppola pulled down over his eyes.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “This
happens,” he explained. “There isn't much you can do.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> The
lawyer was desperate.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Well,”
said the farmer, “we can try this.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> He
went inside and called his son to fetch a saw. A moment later the
big, broad boy was walking around the side of the house, not at all
sleepy, with a hacksaw in his huge hand. Without a word he handed
off the saw to his father and seized one chicken with his hands and
laid it on a wooden bench. The farmer calmly sawed about half the
beak off. The son grabbed the other one, laid it down, and the
farmer sawed its beak off as well. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “Hopefully
that stops it,” he said, and excused himself, flicking his
cigarette butt onto the road and plodding back inside.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> Back
at home he explained everything to his wife, who nodded wearily
because she knew of chickens who ate their own eggs. She was a
country girl herself, and had grown up with all sorts of animals, and
knew their vices. The next day the wind returned. The lawyer
banished the chickens from his mind to concentrate on his work. But
every time the windowpane in his office shuddered he lost his train
of thought, and thought of the chickens and their vileness.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> The
next morning he went out after coffee with his wife to check on the
eggs. There was nothing to be done. The broken shells lay on the
floor, and the stumpy, mutilated beaks were covered in yolk and the
clear drippings of the whites. The birds stared and twitched. The
wife sighed; the lawyer ran clumsily inside to call the farmer. The
farmer answered almost at the first ring and knew who it was. The
lawyer explained in a rush, tripping over his words. The farmer
cleared his throat.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> “I
knew it. When a chicken gets the taste of its own blood in its mouth
there's nothing to be done. It gets the taste for it and the taste
never goes away. All those birds are good for is eating. At least
they're young, they'll be tender.”</span></div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> The
lawyer and his wife sat at the kitchen table, sipping coffee. The
wife suggested they take the birds to her mother, who could wring
their necks. The lawyer started and knocked over his chair. If
anyone would be killing the chickens it would be him. He had bought
them, he declared, so he was going to knock them off. It didn't
matter that he had never wrung a chicken's neck before, or watched it
done. How difficult could it be? He wasn't an idiot. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"> Imperiously
he marched to the henhouse, followed by his young son, wheezing with
laughter, and his weeping young daughter; the dog slept by the woodpile,
and the wife lingered by the telephone, ready to call her mother.
The chickens stared with their round chicken eyes, twitching their
heads. The lawyer bit his lip and thought for a moment. He rolled
up his sleeves and slid off his tie, draping it over the unfinished
henhouse roof. He slipped on a pair of garden gloves. Then with his
tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth he grabbed the first
one around the head and held it in the air. With his left hand, not
entirely steady, he held the body with his thumb pressing into the
chest, and he fastened his right hand over the bird's neck. It
twitched and squawked once. Then with one tremendously exaggerated
pull, far too strong, he twisted and yanked with his right hand. The
bird screamed: all he had done was pull all the feathers from the
bird's head. A cloud of dirty white feathers floated toward the
ground as the bird, now entirely bald, screeched horribly. The dog
woke up and began to howl, the wind whipped the olive trees and cut
furrows in the fields, and the little boy laughed and laughed.</span></div>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
***<br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Postscriptum: I have been told that this story's scientific accuracy is dubious. I countered, and counter, that this is in fact a true story, related to me by one who saw it happen, and that whoever wants scientific accuracy can find it easily enough in a scientific paper.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-48905501576837554672012-10-02T13:53:00.003-07:002012-10-07T13:53:19.382-07:00A Message from Letters From CalibanDear readers,<br />
<br />
The output has been a little less than prodigous these last few weeks. Allow me to explain.<br />
<br />
Before I started this blog I kept much of my writing on my computer. Computers, as you know, can be temperamental -- especially mine. Out of what I imagine must have been pure spite, my laptop some how did away with dozens of my documents a few weeks ago. (An IT guy can probably help, but that would mean a lot of work that I'd rather not do. The lazy will inherit the earth.) <br />
<br />
Among those documents were two or three short stories and several finished poems. Luckily, I had printed copies or rough drafts of most of them; the task of late has been to dig them out of file drawers and backpacks, transpose them onto the computer, and tidy them up so as to be presentable. Don't worry, you'll see them soon.<br />
<br />
So this week, if I can offer you nothing else, at least let me give you an idea of what the editors here at Letters from Caliban are reading. The mood here has been decidedly modernist: <em>Ulysses</em> (at the point where Bloom encounters the Citizen-Cyclops); the Cantos (having left the thirteen hundreds, Jefferson and Adams are writing each other about money and freedom); Isak Dinesen's <em>Winter Tales</em>; and a little bit of Baudelaire. And also Tad Szulc's <em>Chopin in Paris</em>.<br />
<br />
I admire Pound, but I don't see much that I can borrow (read: steal) from the Cantos for my own poetry. That's not to say I haven't learned from him. My poem "7 September" is based in part on Pound's explanation of Chinese characters in the beginning of <em>ABC of Reading</em>. But those choppy, heel-pounding Poundian rhythms (pound Pound pound), such as you see later in Gary Snyder and some of Robert Lowell, are not a key that I can sing in. <br />
<br />
As far as Joyce goes, I have found in <em>Ulysses</em> a voice from heaven, a complex of word and feeling and thought and image sublime in its dimensions. Only once have I ever read anything like it, and that was the Divina Commedia. <em>Faust</em> comes close, but is too fragmented in its form and its music, not nearly as perfectly controlled a vision as Dante's or Joyce's. <br />
<br />
In practical terms, I have the most to learn from Dinesen. At first I didn't like Dinesen. She struck me as too artificial, overwraught. But I've read more craefully this time around. What primal power! She is a teller of tales, the voice of all the legends of childhood - the Arabian Nights, Robin Hood, the stories from Homer and Ovid and the Eddas. More importantly she is a surgeon and a craftsman of the highest grade. She presents a story; but she has already dug deep into the weird, murky, eternally dark cavity of the story and found its mad beating dreamheart. Having seen this strange subterranean soul, she returns to the surface story and dresses it with such elegance that the reader has no conscious idea of its primal force. But she does. That's the sly smile that characterizes Dinesen. It's not the postmodern wink that promises emptiness beneath the gilding. It's the opposite. The gilding is unimportant. There is a heart in the story, buried but beating. <br />
<br />
My dear readers and friends, don't hesitate to comment or ask questions. And expect more stuff, soon.<br />
<br />
-Carlo<br />
<br />
<em>To ride; to string a bow; to tell the truth</em>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-48906976792655123932012-09-25T21:47:00.001-07:002012-09-28T09:16:29.597-07:00Dream of the Angel<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">I
dreamed an angel in the desert,</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">astride
a horse. The stars were piercing,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">so many that the sky
burned more in icy white</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">than
dripping dark.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">
An angel in the saddle in a diamondbright night.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Arms
bare, head wrapped,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">black skin
like rivermud shining with silt</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">holding
a gun like a bolt</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">of
miscarried lightning, his waist wrapped </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">in
constellations</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">tucked
in belts and piercing in the night. The horse was white</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">in the
face, like its head were just a skull,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">some
long-toothed totem, some mask </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">fixed to four hairy legs</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">brown
and clay-stained and liver and white</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">tail
sweeping like the river of the stars.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">And
after he vanished, I saw only stars,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">stars,
stars</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">and a
long white ladder where he'd stood,</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">soaked
by a rain that I hadn't seen fall.</span><br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<br /></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-77240444233140216162012-09-14T09:54:00.003-07:002012-09-14T09:59:41.756-07:00From a Line in Callimachus<br />
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Dawn
came like a black horse.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">I
had not slept the night for fear of day.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Now
the sunlight crept in cold</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">and
I thought of you:</span><br />
<br />
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Your
smooth hips, your horseblack tresses,</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">of
how I might lay silent in your arms.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">What
more could I have asked than that, if not</span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">six
pips of a pomegranate </span><br />
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">from your soft white hand.</span>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-86437194840429073242012-09-14T09:49:00.003-07:002012-10-09T10:27:08.181-07:00The City of David<br />
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">I
never saw his city but in dreams</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">the
tall block towers of his crownèd head</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">stone
sinewed walls along the ridge of his arm</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">and
between the spires and his hard bent knee (the foot </span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">planted
flat in the desert)</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">the
valley of his beard, dark with pine trees</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">and
white with smoke.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">And
the city, steady on his shoulders,</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">shines dully, burnished</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">though
his eyes on the rooftops burn golden.</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">A
thousand cobbled wrinkles run their maze</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">Palms
and arches shade his countless courtyards,</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">the
craggy men of his narrow lanes,</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">the
pearl-fingered daughters of his dusk</span></div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;">and
the Cave of Kings in the cavity of his chest.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span lang="he-IL">דוד
מלך ישראל</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span lang="he-IL">,
</span></span><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span lang="he-IL">חי
וקיים</span><span lang="en"></span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
***</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
</div>
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Postscriptum: I was in San Diego, taking coffee and a paper after a walk through Balboa Park, when I saw nearby a young mother and her infant child. The mother was singing in Hebrew, to the delight of the child. The song had only one verse, the line quoted at the end of this poem, transliterated as David melech yisrael hai v'kayam. I didn't know what it meant. Neither did a certain other young mother, who asked the first what she was singing. She responded, "David, King of Israel, lives forever."</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-79786331474078805292012-09-13T10:08:00.003-07:002012-09-16T19:32:19.402-07:00Welcome to Letters from Caliban<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Generally this is the first page in a
blog to be published. Not here.</div>
<br />
My name is Carlo Massimo. For the
record, I am the Caliban from the title – more of that anon. This
blog is where I'll be posting my completed work, and any of you who
write know that for every work you complete about a dozen embryos and
half-constructed pieces lay buried somewhere in your notebook. The
content will change periodically: expect a book review and an essay
about poetic form in the next few weeks. You might also find film
reviews or essays about matters not strictly literary (though I would
argue that films are a kind of visual literature), or academic papers
like “Dionysus in the Fin-de-Siecle.” Mostly, however, I hope to
put up poems and stories.<br />
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
Do feel free to leave comments or to
contact me by email. If you have any questions I will be happy to
answer them; if you have requests <span style="font-style: normal;">I will try to accommodate
them. If you are a publisher I will invite you to my house for a
bottle of wine, and we can speak further at our leisure.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">So:
why Caliban? Well, I like the name. It was also Robert Lowell's
nickname, or rather Cal, and so I chose it in Lowell's honor as well.
But mostly Caliban symbolizes my own aesthetic, my own view of life.
He is ugly and monstrous: am I not? (Are we not?) But he is a child of the Earth,
a creature of flesh and dirt, and given the magic of the spoken word
he howls and swears with it. I have howled; I have sworn; I worship
the body and the soil in an age of plastic magic and computerized
Prosperos.</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">Let me
tell you a brief story to illustrate what I mean. Maybe you know a
folk group from Ireland called The Dubliners. They happen to be a
favorite band of mine. Sometime in the sixties they were invited to
play the Ed Sullivan show. Now generally, the musicians who played
on Sullivan's stage fit neatly into one of two types. There were the
“good boys,” like the early Beatles, who wore suits and ties and
smiled and wanted to hold your hand. And then there were the “bad
boys,” wild and long-haired, who jumped around like animals and
leered at girls in the audience and did everything that bad boys must
to distinguish themselves from the good boys. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">The
Dubliners arrived at Sullivan's studio and started warming up for the
evening's show. Sullivan came in to meet them, and was dreadfully
confused. For here before him were not pseudoadolescents but mature
men; moreover their hair was wild and bushy, and they sported long
beards, and they were all wearing suits and ties. They were not the
good boys or the bad boys. They sang about drinking and courting,
and played with careful virtuosity. They wore beards like the bad
boy rock'n'roll stars, and suits. They would never </span><i>not</i><span style="font-style: normal;">
wear a suit. It would never have occurred to them not to wear a
suit. </span>
</div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-style: normal;">These
were children of the Earth, singers of the flesh and blood of man,
who needed no disguise, no wild uniform. On Prospero's island they
were mooncalves. Really they were Parzifals. They had no agendum
but to follow those words of Herodotus, and later of Nietzsche, and
Isak Dinesen, which are now inscribed at the top of this page:</span></div>
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<i>To ride, to string a bow, and to
tell the truth.</i></div>
<br />
<div style="font-style: normal; margin-bottom: 0in;">
Welcome to Letters
from Caliban.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-78597309234940722662012-09-11T21:09:00.002-07:002012-09-11T21:09:12.787-07:00The Romantic Past
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">I
first learned the last stanza of Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn”
as a young boy, from an encyclopedia. That was some thirteen years
ago; and for thirteen years I had misunderstood what Keats was
saying. The last stanza’s sixth line reads, “When old age shall
this generation waste.” I had always interpreted “this
generation” as being the line’s subject, and “old age” as
being the object. In other words, I thought the line referred to a
time when this generation, having been given the gift of old age,
would waste it. Only recently did I realize that what Keats meant,
more likely, was for “old age” to be the sentence’s subject and
“this generation” to be the object– referring to the time when
this generation becomes old and loses its vigor. Upon reflection,
however, my former, mistaken interpretation rings strangely true.
The Romantics uniformly placed high value and honor on the ancient
past: the very fact that Keats composed an ode to a Greek vase
reminds us of this. This aspect of Romanticism is crucial: by
understanding the Romantic fixation on the past, we can better place
Romanticism as a historical movement, and better see how the poets
and writers of its pantheon helped beget the future, for better and
for worse.</span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
Romantic obsession with the past is a continuation of their
veneration of nature. Rousseau, who deserves the title of progenitor
of the Romantics perhaps more than anyone else, believed in the
superiority of the society that existed before property, when man
lived “naturally.” Oppression, according to Rousseau, was a
recent development; and just as he escaped to the fields around Lake
Bienne to escape injustice, so could man escape the injustice of
tyrannous property by returning to his natural state. This natural
man, existing before the taint of civilization, is also manifest as
the child whom the Romantics adore. Children appear so often in
Romantic poetry because their perception of the world is uncorrupted,
their sensibility unprejudiced by social constraint. Man is
“natural” in his childhood, be that the springtime of his
civilization or the early years of his life.</span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">Later
writers, more strictly Romantic than Rousseau, also saw a connection
between times past and the value of nature. We are moved by the
mountains immortalized in Coleridge, Wordsworth’s “Sea that bares
her bosom to the moon,” and the lonely moors of John Clare not only
for their beauty and their immunity to human pettiness but because
they are so much older than we could possibly fathom. In fact, the
feeling of the sublime – best illustrated by Coleridge, by the
Alpine descriptions in </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Frankenstein</i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">,
or by the painted crags and storms of Caspar David Friedrich and
J.M.W. Turner – is often conjured by reflection that nature is so
unthinkably longer-lived than humanity. Nature and the past are
inseparable: it is befitting, therefore, that the generation of
artists who so thoroughly threw themselves into mimesis of and
mediation on nature should come to venerate old age and the past with
an equal zeal.</span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">It
is also befitting that a generation so obsessed with forces outside
society should also have so much to say about the classical,
pre-Christian world. Keats, after all, was apostrophizing a Greek
urn, and figures from mythology appear frequently in his verse.
Shelley paid homage to the “true Poetry of Rome.” Hölderlin
wrote an entire novel, </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Hyperion</i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">,
set in Greece; and although the story takes place in the nineteenth
century, during the independence struggle against Turkish domination,
Hyperion’s visit to the Parthenon is a glorification of classical
Athens and everything that entails: the pristine marbles of
Praxiteles, the eloquence and magnanimity of Pericles, the
high-minded thoughts of Socrates. All of these are voices calling
from a world as devoid of modernity’s unpleasantries, at least in
the 19</span></span><span style="color: black;"><sup><span style="font-size: small;">th</span></sup></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">
century imagination, as the meadows of the Swiss countryside, the
rugged hills of Scotland, or the tumbledown shepherds’ cottages of
rural England. </span></span></span>
</div>
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">But
Hölderlin’s enthusiasm for the past stretched even further back.
The name of his protagonist comes from a Titan, one of the divine
beings that preceded the Olympian gods. On the same note,
Hölderlin’s poem “Kunst und Natur” is a denunciation of
Jupiter in favor of Saturn. Saturn, like Hyperion, came from a
generation of mythological spirits that existed before civilization;
Saturn was associated, among the Romans, with time and the cycle of
seasons, familiar motifs in the Romantic canon. In the worship of
Saturn, Hölderlin gives us a vision of man whose spiritual focus is
nature, observation and celebration of nature, simple and without
trapping. He gives us natural man. Jupiter, desposer of Saturn and
giver of mighty laws, is thus the great violator of natural man. He
is the property that Rousseau sees as causing man to live everywhere
in chains; he is the religion that so revolted the adolescent
Shelley; he is the man who, like Mary Shelley’s narrator Walton or
even Victor Frankenstein, violates the will of older generations and
plunges himself into misery. He is the generation of whom I
misunderstood Keats to write, receiving the gift of old age and
squandering it.</span></span></span></div>
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">The
influence of the Romantic attachment to the past goes beyond these
poets. Romanticism had political ramifications and reverberations,
not the least of which was the bold Prometheus of French
revolutionary liberalism – Bonaparte, who dared to snatch fire
from the gods of history and thrust it into the hands of Europe.
Napoleonic art was Romantic, but also strongly neoclassical. We can
imagine both Percy Shelley and his stuffy professors approving of a
painting like David’s </span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;"><i>Oath
of the Horatii</i></span></span><span style="color: black;"><span style="font-size: small;">;
Canova’s tomb for Napoleon’s sister has the graceful proportions
of the Aphrodite of Knidos, and yet we can see the marble woman as
the girl sitting on John Clare’s lap in one of the simple
ploughman’s love sonnets. The nationalist movements that followed,
or revolted against, the changes in Europe ushered in by Napoleon all
hearkened back to times past. The image of revolution in politics,
just as in poetry, began to derive from memory, and would continue to
do so even after the rise of Marx, realism, and the disdain for
sentiment. </span></span></span>
</div>
<br />
<div align="LEFT" style="line-height: 100%; margin-bottom: 0in; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="color: black;"><span style="font-family: Arial, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">For
this reason, the political adoption of the Romantic love of the past
has proved a dark legacy. The romantic nationalists of Germany had
as clear and unique an image of natural man and the natural past as
had Rousseau and Wordsworth. This in itself was nothing to lament;
in fact, it gave us such classics as the collected folklore of the
Brothers Grimm and the sweeping symphonic epics of Wagner. But
looking at history, we see a direct line of descent beginning with
these attempts to reclaim the natural spirit of a nation and ending
with the torchlight processions of Nürnberg and the twentieth
century’s most fearful and hideous scar. This, too, was the
legacy of Romanticism. We see, at last, the face of Frankenstein’s
monster, created in the best of faith and carried out in the worst;
and we find it in the same history to which Rousseau appealed against
tyranny, to which Hyperion turned against the wretchedness of
modernity. Old age can be turned to; its lessons, however, can also
be wasted. Keats’ line in the “ode to the Grecian Urn,”
whether he meant it so or not, was prophecy.</span></span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-16005549814035370742012-09-11T20:53:00.005-07:002012-10-06T10:23:26.987-07:00Sketches from the Campagna: Soil and Rain<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The man wore sunglasses and the driver
wore a cap, but neither helped much. The sky was unbearably blue.
Sweating through his blazer the man stared, annoyed, at the stunted
brush and gnarled cactus on the roadside. The driver was talking
ceaselessly, his third cigarette on his lip, and occaisonally the man
replied. Every time the driver adressed the man directly he used a
plural pronoun, which made the man cringe.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “I can assure you, signuri, I can
personally assure you that this is a fine piece of land. You won't
find better in this zone.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “Right.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The truck was rounding a curve by a
thicket of dead cane. Evidently a creek had run through this part,
but had not survived the ravages of August. The road had at one
point been paved.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “I know it doesn't look like much,
signuri, but that's because the summer has been very dry. If you
wait for the rain you'll see how good it is. Good soil. Personally,
signuri, if I was the padruni of a piece of land like this I'd have
vines – vines, vines like you never saw before. All it needs is a
little rain.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The man had given up trying for an
internet connection on his phone and had resumed staring through the
window.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “The first thing we'll need here,”
he said, “is a decent road. Do you do asphalting as well?”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “Certainly, signuri.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “Good. Add that to the estimate.
Can we do anything about the internet reception?”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “Well, to tell you the truth,
signuri, I really can't answer that. I don't know. As soon as we
get back to the office I'll ask the principale about fixing the
internet here. I'm sure--”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “Just take the measurements,” said
the man, “and write up the estimate. I'll call the director when
we stop.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> They drove a while in silence. The
driver glanced over at the man and licked his dry lip. He was a man
of undeterminable age, the driver, in a Diadora shirt, his
fingernails thick and cracked on the steering wheel.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “Bellissimo, this piece of land.
Perfect soil. Madonna, the grapes you could grow here.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “Our firm is not interested in
grapes,” said the man without looking away from his cell phone,
“and frankly neither am I.” He'd had quite enough. The driver
raised his eyebrows, and flicked the cigarette butt out the window.
Two thick brown fingers teased a new one out of his side pocket.
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> When they finally arrived the driver
opened the passenger door, and then with his feet firmly planted he
began explaining the layout of the property, where he advised
building the garage, which hill to level to make room for the trucks,
how much that might cost, which road led to the autostrada and which
to the airport. His lecture finished, he strode around back to open
the truck bed and remove his equipment. The man remained standing on
the cracked yellow ground, pecking away at his phone, sweating and
refusing to remove his blazer. The heat was unbearable. The
blueness, the unrelenting blueness of the sky was rippling in the
heat; the thistles had all lost their purple and had withered until
they looked like bones.
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The driver worked and the man stood
pecking at his phone. The sky was heavy with heat, so heavy that its
unbroken blueness was like mockery, a false promise of serene
weather. The driver looked over his shoulder. “Signuri, if you'd
like to call the principale in the shade the truck is still open, or
you can stand in the casetta over there.” He pointed with his
thumb to the faded ruin of a shed or barn, one of those skeletal
hovels that pockmarked the countryside. There was no door and there
didn't seem to be windows, but its roof at least was mostly intact,
which promised shade; it had probably lain abandoned for some seventy
years. The hovel stood on the edge of the property, choked with
yellow weeds and the skeletons of thistles.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “I'll make the call from there,”
said the man.
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> Suddenly, quietly, a dog emerged from
the darkness of the casetta. Its ribs jostled against the slack
skin; great fat ticks, black and gray, clung to its ears like snail
shells or embroidered beads. It lowered its narrow muzzle, eyeing
the man calmly and without malice, and went back in. A minute or so
passed before it popped its head back into the light, retreated into
the dark again, and finally padded out into the sunlight, swaying a
little with each step as thin dogs do, and licking its mouth
energetically. The man had not ventured to approach the whole
time; the driver noticed this and laughed.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “He won't hurt you, signuri, don't
worry,” and he threw a dry clod at the dog, swearing in dialect.
The dog tripped downhill and disappeared into the cane.
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The driver nodded and the man entered
the casetta, phone in hand, blinking. He had not expected to find
the ruin as dark as it was. Once inside he stood still, staring into
the blind darkness. The first thing he noticed was the smell. Then
as his eyes adjusted he saw the shoes, soles up, then the denim of
the legs, and then the three clean holes in the back, and how the
head had been nearly blown off; and then when his eyes had adjusted
to the darkness he made out the bullet casings on the ground, and the
congealing black pool that the dog had disturbed. It is impossible
to say<u> </u><span style="text-decoration: none;">how much time had
passed before he found himself able to move again, to take a single
backward step, and then another, until he had left the darkness and
stood in the unforgiving brightness of day. </span>The driver was
working some twenty meters off.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “Almost done, signuri.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “Let's go. Let's go.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> The driver shrugged and stubbed out
his cigarette. Back in the truck he threw the stick into reverse and
waved a thick cracked hand at the property.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “Just needs rain. Wait for the rain
and it will be beautiful.”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> “Just drive,” said the man. “God
damn it, just drive.”</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-7847630583468918882012-09-10T15:03:00.001-07:002012-09-10T15:21:05.194-07:00Dionysus in the Fin-de-Siecle<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">Dionysus,
a god of death and rebirth, died at the hands of post-pagan Rome, and
only crept back into the European psyche in the nineteenth century.
There he peeked his head through the lines of Goethe and Byron and
grinned darkly over Schopenhauer's shoulder. But only in 1872 did
Nietzsche introduce the god of the thresholds by name, and
thenceforth Dionysus became a fixture of Western thought. Why
Nietzsche, and why 1872? How could Dionysus, of all gods, make his
entry into the European mind through the pen of a German scholar in
the staid late-nineteenth century? This was, after all, the age of
Victoria. Its popular oracles were Bentham and Mills, whose gospel of
cheery conformity and strict rationalism had no room for the wine-god
and his maenads; the heavy handed militarism of Prussia, and the
imperial projects of Britain and her competitors, certainly afforded
no more. </span>
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The
truth was that Europe, thundering forward in its industrial and
technological development, obsessed with progress, constantly
decreasing the size of the world and increasing the size of world
markets, felt haunted by a sense of decay. Progress had dehumanized
Europe. The money that fattened its middle classes had been wrung
from the flesh of colonial labor; the huge, gray metropolises that
supplanted traditional ways of living left people physically feeble
and spiritually ill; the obsession with linear progress that Weber
documented in <i>The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism</i>
had sucked dry the creative spirit. Each nation's drive to empire
threatened its neighbors. The specter of war hung over the Continent,
bringing to fruition its nightmare promises in the meaningless
slaughter of 1914. The working classes, in the thankless misery of
their labor, began to listen to the voices of change and the prophets
of armed revolution. Europe faced a political crisis; and moreover,
it faced a human crisis.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The
last time Dionysus had appeared in a major work of literature was in
the sixth century before Christ: in the <i>Bacchae</i> of Euripides,
written in the long shadow of Athenian social decay. Athens, the
great empire and long the pinnacle of Greek culture, had lost the
Pelopensian War. The Spartans stripped Athens of its colonies, its
city walls, and its relevance as a superpower. Euripides himself,
shortly after composing the <i>Bacchae</i>, left in exile for the
barbarous kingdom of Macedon, which within very few years would
conquer all of Greece in one sweep. But certainly we cannot attribute
the fall of Athens to exterior forces, the armies of Sparta and
Macedon, and exclude the probability of interior decline, a decay of
order and power. Or at least, Euripides did not. For the incarnation
of (implicitly Athenian) social order in the <i>Bacchae</i> is
Pentheus, Pentheus the rigid, the obsessive and obstinate upholder of
rational authority. Euripides' audience knew very well that the
empire had failed, and that the spouting of its hyperrational
apologists had no meaning. Dionysus, as a character in the drama,
knows that just as well. Only Pentheus cannot see it, and in the end
the sick society that he has tried to hold together with his high
words, the very society that he has helped create, tears him to
pieces.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">By
the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the sick society was
back. Pentheus sat stiff necked and smug in the pulpits and
parliaments of Europe. And following him, naturally, came Dionysus,
the Dionysus of the age of imperialism, of monopoly capitalism, of
middle classes who could sit content and turn a blind eye to the
slavery and murder that bloodied their hands. The Belgians had
brought hell to Earth in the Congo, and justified the slavery, the
mutilations, the murder of their schemes with the high pretences of
bringing civilization and Christianity to a benighted race. And at
home, the Europeans who bought the ivory and rubber of the Congo, who
wore the clothing sewn by child laborers, struggled and agonized to
keep themselves in line with the moral ideology of the time – the
school of thought that held that homosexuality was a mental illness,
that there is a difference between pure love and physical love; that
there are highs and lows in the human spectrum, the lows belonging to
the animals and lower races, and the highs being proper to the higher
races and classes. These two boiling contradictions, these crimes
against the human spirit wrapped in the robes of righteousness, were
inseparable. They were two symptoms of the same sickness, the same
illness, the same decay of society. </span>
</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Of
the literature of the time, there are perhaps no two better texts
that describe this twofold decay than Conrad's <i>Heart of Darkness</i>,
published in 1900, and Mann's <i>Death in Venice</i>, from 1912. Both
of these short novels speak directly to their era. <i>Heart of
Darkness</i> addresses the darkness of empire, and <i>Death in Venice</i>
the human darkness weakly repressed by culture. They both have a
Pentheus figure: Conrad has Kurtz, Mann has Aschenbach. And both show
Europe at the fin-de-siecle in the world of Dionysus, far from
rational order, giving way to chaos and its own repressed humanity.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The
similarities between the two novellas are striking. In terms of plot
structure, both take place on the border of ultracivilized empire and
the primitive colony. Both are set in a place where the security of
land meets the wild fluidity of water. Both involve a man who, having
borne the banner of civilization to the fullest of his ability, comes
to the colony and is swallowed up by its human wildness. This
conversion is not a change but a continuation: the colony brings
civilization to its ultimate conclusion. This conclusion has
historical, cultural, and erotic implications. Both men realize this
reversion to the savage, and attempt to overcome it by making it
exterior, making the world around them into a kind of perverted
symbology. And both men succumb to tropical illness, Kurtz having
finally opened his eyes to the “horror” of his own Dionysian
self, and Aschenbach having resisted resolutely any breach of his
pure consciousness.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">From
this very basic sketch we see Dionysus clearly. A god of thresholds,
neither male nor female, citizen nor foreigner, patrician nor
plebeian, god nor man, Dionysus is fully at home amid the splendors
of Venice, sinking into the sea, or on the banks of the Congo, deep
in the jungle. Both Aschenbach and Kurtz have that fundamental
ambiguity in their national identity. Aschenbach is half Silesian
through his mother. He is half colonizer and half colonized, sprung
half from stoic German stock and half from the implicitly more primal
Central European races. Kurtz is part English, part French (“All
Europe had contributed to the making of Kurtz”); and yet he sets
himself up as a god, a tribal leader, among the natives of his Congo
fastness. He is no longer European, but still not quite African.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">The
illnesses that haunt <i>Death in Venice</i> and <i>Heart of Darkness</i>
speak directly to the Dionysian contagion that infects and maddens
whole populations. The route of the cholera from India to Italy that
Mann describes parallels the route of Dionysus to Thebes in the
<i>Bacchae</i>; the malaria in <i>Heart of Darkness</i> does not
follow such a route, but nevertheless refers back to the same.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Both
novellas explore the erotic element of the Dionysian experience in
great depth. In the <i>Bacchae</i>, Pentheus shows an obsessive
hatred for female sexuality, and betrays an obsessive interest in it
when Dionysus offers him the chance to see the Maenads in the throes
of their madness. He also seems to harbor a homosexual desire for the
beautiful young androgyne. Aschenbach refuses to approach eroticism,
matching Pentheus in his hubristic disdain for sex. Instead he
channels his lust into an image of platonic love and beauty, of eros
as something aesthetic, unsensual, even socially beneficial. But like
Pentheus he has hidden his sensual desires, his homosexual desires,
from sight: he too desires to see the secret object of his lust, he
too has hidden passions that for social reasons he could not afford
to betray. Kurtz's descent into the Dionysian is less overtly sexual.
The ivory he collects are still tusks, huge white phalluses born by
black slaves. The phallic imagery returns with the spears and arrows
of Kurtz's thralls, Marlowe's vision of the horned masks of the
dancers, and the heads impaled on spears that surround Kurtz's house.
The act of penetrating the thick of the Congo is itself a kind of
recreated sexual intercourse. Marlow never explains just what he
means when he recounts how Kurtz would “preside at certain midnight
dances ending with unspeakable rites” ; we infer some violation of
a serious taboo, probably erotic. And of course, Kurtz has a black
mistress, making him not only an adulterer but, much worse by his
society's standards, a willing mixer of races.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Pentheus'
own morbid repression of sensuality cannot stay hidden. Rather it
emerges, and emerges with a vengeance, in the patriarchal strictness
of his government. Order in Thebes, with correct thought and correct
behavior as universal and unchanging conditions of life, is Pentheus
himself, externalized. Likewise Aschenbach and Kurtz externalize
their own condition. With Aschenbach, we first see this
externalization in his choice to go to Italy. The text establishes a
clear dialectic between the sumptuous, sensual, “decadent” South
and the hardworking, civilized, rational North. Of course, no living
human is entirely sensual or entirely rational. Aschenbach is a
human, and has both of these characteristics. But as a good German,
as a good bourgeois, as a good artist, he cannot tolerate the sensual
in himself. High and low must be kept apart. He therefore projects
his own sexual and uncivilized energy onto Italy, onto Venice. It is
the highest kind of self-delusion, for the Venetians themselves turn
out to be sophisticated and efficient in their cynical machinations--
they manage to hide a cholera epidemic from clueless northern
tourists like Aschenbach, who succumb to the beauty of the rotting
palazzi and stinking canals. The crisis of the sensual comes to a
head when Aschenbach falls in love with Tadzio. Human love, all human
love, is sensual. Aschenbach cannot bear sensuality: he therefore
cannot bear human love. And so he transforms his human love object
into exactly that – an object. Aschenbach never considers Tadzio as
a person. He treats him as a piece of art, a plastic and unfeeling
object, and even compares him directly to a statue, that of the Boy
with the Splinter. His fantasies of being Socrates in the company of
his beautiful young pupil are nothing more than another way of
sidestepping the inevitability of sensuality. If Tadzio is a literary
character, and love a philosophical concept, and a logical concept at
that, there is no trace of perversion, of the sexuality that
Aschenbach so desperately fears and hates. Aschenbach is not a
monster, not a pederast: he is an artist, a bourgeois artist <i>par
excellence</i>.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Tadzio
is in effect Aschenbach's answer to Kurtz's ivory, and the Congo is
Kurtz's Venice. Kurtz's lust is less specific that Aschenbach's. It
seems to be a general animal drive, the will to destroy, to enslave,
to fornicate, to rob, to devour men without pity. In historical
hindsight this is not a particularly strange concept for us. We know
that slaves in the Belgian Congo were mutilated by soldiers for not
meeting their rubber quotas; we have read of the massacres and
depredations of colonial armies. But it is an animal instinct, this
will to destruction. It is fundamentally Dionysian; it is the drive,
the human, animal drive to tear living animals to shreds and eat
their flesh-- which is exactly what the Belgian mutilations in the
Congo meant, or the impaled heads outside of Kurtz's house. The
Dionysian, although fundamentally human, is antirational. It is
antiutilitarian. It has no explicit place in the realm of bourgeois
order, and yet it is fundamental to that system. The culture of
Europe, conservative and hinging on rational order, could not afford
to recognize the darkness at its very heart. And so empires were
forged in the name of progress; missionaries accompanied soldiers.
Marlowe routinely refers to his fellow ivory prospectors as
“pilgrims,” a saintly name for the cowardly prospectors, who
shoot Africans as thoughtlessly as one would slap a mosquito. They
are worse, much worse, than the African crewmen, whom Marlowe
christens “cannibals.” The pilgrims are the real cannibals. They
act out the rites of Dionysus while pretending not to; the sparagmos
implicit in the word cannibal belongs exclusively to the whites.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Kurtz
himself came to the Congo on a moral mission. Marlowe finds a
pamphlet, written by Kurtz, at the behest of the “International
Society for the Suppression of Savage Customs.” Marlow, reading the
pamphlet, says “It gave me the notion of an exotic Immensity ruled
by an august Benevolence.” “Exotic Immensity” is a
wonderful turn of phrase. It designates the Europeans as exotic, not
the Africans. The savage European, violating a continent, sits hidden
behind a single adjective. And “Immensity” is an appropriately
Dionysian word, as the Dionysian is a universal principle. Only
“Benevolence” does not fit. There is nothing remotely benevolent
about colonization, about the middle class values of linear logic and
stolid complacency that fed on the blood and rubber of the Congo.
Kurtz realizes this. “Exterminate all the brutes,” he scrawls on
the report's last page. And later, as he dies: “The horror! The
horror!”</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: small;">Kurtz
knew; metaphorically he understood what disease was sapping his life
away. Aschenbach never faces that same reality. In fact, Aschenbach
so thoroughly isolates himself from his own humanity that he not only
cannot recognize his own sexuality, but cannot recognize himself in
the political theater of Europe. Half Silesian, his hero is Frederick
the Great, whose Prussia swept through and conquered Silesia. He
throws his lot in with the Prussian Empire, the saber-rattling
Prussian Empire, whole heartedly. He does not consider the rancor,
the suffering, the rage of empire's many victims. When Tadzio makes
faces at the Russian family, Aschenbach can only see the beauty of a
Greek statue. He cannot see the centuries of ill-will between Russian
and Pole, the clear promises of future strife and violence. His
existence is upper-middle class to the core; the working classes
hardly ever cross his mind. The gondolier that he sees as Charon
really is the ferryman of death; he senses the rumbling of the
workingmen of Europe against his own predatory middle class, but
refuses to confront that lurking anxiety. And the first premonition
of his fate – we might say the first apparition of Dionysus in the
novella, in the form of a red-haired man – takes place in a
Byzantine mausoleum. The mausoleum, which houses the dead, is clear
enough as a symbol. But the fact that its architecture is Byzantine
is in itself very telling. The Byzantium had once been a mighty
empire, the successor of Rome, a receiver of tribute from all over
the Mediterranean. And it crumbled, and collapsed. (We are
well-advised to refer to Mann's contemporary, Yeats, and his poem
“Sailing to Byzantium,” for evidence that the Byzantine Empire
and its fall was already floating in the intellectual atmosphere of
the time.) The German Empire, the British Empire, the Portuguese
Empire, the Belgian Empire, the unofficial American Empire – the
empires of steel, of rubber, of machine parts, of cotton, the markets
that spanned continents at the point of the bayonet – all these
Empires were hurtling toward the same end, the same collapse, that
Byzantium suffered. <i>Death in Venice</i> preceded World War I by
two years, but the buildup was well underway. The nightmare of mass
slaughter, wreathed and bannered with good middle class values, was
not an idea but a destiny.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">When
reading the <i>Bacchae</i><span style="font-style: normal;">, we must
bear in mind that Pentheus and Dionysus are first cousins. This is
more than an incidental plot element: their relation is symbolic.
They are ultimately part of the same person. Pentheus contains
Dionysus within him. Behind virtue lies the wine god, who escapes all
definition and will not suffer the bondage of morality. Euripides
shows a gentle Dionysus as well as a violent one, a god who besides
inciting murder and madness brings hope to bondsmen and women, feeds
his worshipers with milk, comforts them with wine, bringing peace as
well as strife. But by the fin-de-siecle, that side of Dionysus had
disappeared from view. The colonial era, where Europe repressed both
other peoples and its own humanity with the utmost violence, carried
on a Dionysian tradition without redemption, without hope. Small
wonder the Western intellectual world of the time was so obsessed
with social decadence: they had nothing left to hold onto. The great
industrial wheels and smoking furnaces of history had snuffed out the
happiness of man's animal nature, the joy of being one with a
blazing, mysterious god. The double nature of Dionysus had died; the
wine god's rebirth as a whole being, a principle as creative as it is
destructive, cannot coexist with capitalism. Perhaps it will return.
If it did it would herald the coming of a new man, happy with and
unafraid of himself, neither an Aschenbach nor a Kurtz.</span></span></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-39385489133178197682012-09-10T11:58:00.004-07:002012-09-10T12:00:27.759-07:007 September(This one's not titled yet. It's a sort of melancholy lovesong.)<br />
<br />
Coffee foam in an empty cup<br />
Sugar in a glass jar<br />
The maplewood bar where my notebook sits. Also<br />
<br />
White birch after rain<br />
and sanded olivewood;<br />
river otter, mink. But also<br />
<br />
Chocolate borne on heads, in baskets<br />
Coffee beans (the trees sweat)<br />
Soil crowned with the riches of ash<br />
that catches the sap from the rubbertree slits. And sometimes<br />
<br />
My satyr beard, curling round<br />
my jackass jawbone<br />
in the morning mirror.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-18396798001989303512012-09-10T11:20:00.004-07:002012-09-10T15:42:45.295-07:00Cutusìo<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Non
canterò
delle sue stradine</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">bruciate
dal sole;</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">né
del blu del mare né del
verde delle vigne.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Canto
invece di un mattino d'agosto</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">che,
in un campo di stoppia bruciata con cherosene,</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">solo
solo, trovai per la terra annerita</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">lo
scheletro di un giovane cane.</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br /></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">Completo
fu, bianco bianco, dai denti perfetti,</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">e
guardandolo vidi che tanto sangue aveva sparso questo</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">quel
paese di cani morti mi aveva dato quanto:</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">che
sangue fa sangue. Mi ripetevano le gazze</span></div>
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">“Casa,
casa, casa.”</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">***</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"> </span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;">(Postscriptum: la
Contrada Cutusìo,
dove vive la mia famiglia, si trova in una delle frazioni campagnole
di Marsala.)</span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span><br /></div>
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;"></span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-48706779011404492432012-09-10T11:13:00.002-07:002012-09-10T11:13:21.941-07:00ScopaVediamo questo, un giocatore<br />
di carte, come uno di Cezanne<br />
ma reso vivo.<br />
Gioca seduto, tenendo in mano<br />
le carte, ma strette --<br />
stretto, fisso<br />
in gioia quieta.<br />
Tasta il lato della mazza<br />
dolce e lento<br />
Rotola ciascuna moneta in mano<br />
studiando con calma<br />
lo scintillio dorato.<br />
<br />
Sette sette sette<br />
Scopa scopa scopa<br />
Per l'amore si perde tutto.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-81471981595069269722012-09-10T10:58:00.001-07:002012-09-10T10:58:05.028-07:00Past Ithaka
<br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> When I lived in
San Francisco I waited tables at a small bistro that should have
attracted more tourists than it did, a clean place if shabby on the
outside, and open late. One night – I don't recall when exactly,
or what time, but that it was the middle of the week, a Thursday –
I was preparing to close when a man came in and sat down at a table
in the corner. Such latecomers are always an annoyance, and on top
of the annoyance was the strange choice of such a remote table in an
otherwise empty room. But business had been exceedingly poor, and so
I decided to serve him.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> He was an older
man, perhaps in his sixties, short and rather stocky, narrow
shouldered, with hair that had once been fine and blonde and was now
thinning and gray. He wore glasses and an old looking blazer, and
sat very quietly with one elbow on the table top. I bid him good
evening and asked what I could bring him. He asked for the wine
list.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> Carefully he
picked through the list, his tongue pressing visibly against his
teeth.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “Malbec,” he
decided, “this Malbec from Mendoza.” And he smiled.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “That one is
only available by the bottle,” I said.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “And that's
how I want it.”</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> He had a
peculiar accent, distinctly foreign but not exactly recognizable. It
seemed Latin with some words and Germanic with others, with some of
the r's trilled and some flat and American. I brought out the wine
and took a glass from one of the other tables.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “It is late,”
he said. “I seem to be the last customer tonight.”</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> I thought he was
apologizing for keeping me past closing time, so I told him it was no
trouble at all.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “If it's no
trouble, young man, have a seat and help me with this bottle. I
don't think anyone else is coming.”</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> I didn't see why
not, so I flipped the door sign from Open to Closed, took a glass
from another table, and sat down. He had already started.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “You have such
an interesting accent,” I told him. “Are you from Europe?”</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> He drank deeply
and smiled again. “I can see you are a bright boy, bright and
sensitive. I like that. Some men must cultivate sensitivity – ”
he poured another glass “ – but others are born with it. You
can see stories in fragments. Clearly you're some kind of writer, or
something like that.”</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “I write a
little.”</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “Clearly.
Then perhaps you who are so sensitive to stories would like to hear
mine.”</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> I nodded. He
poured more wine.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “My name is
Enrique Kessler, and I was born in Buenos Aires. My father, Heinrich
Kessler, was from Baden, an officer in the army and a well-known
equestrian. His grandfather, my great-grandfather, served with great
distinction in the cavalry against the French. My grandfather I
never knew, because he was killed in East Africa during the First
World War. My father was a great tall man with blond hair. He met
my mother on a skiing trip. She was the daughter of a prosperous
Tyrolean landholder. From her I inherited my sturdy body and robust
health; I got my father's coloring and fastidiousness.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “My father was
an officer. I said that already. The army was not nearly as well
managed as people think it was, not on the personal level. My father
did poorly as an officer. He perhaps would done better in the Waffen
SS. In the army were no gentlemen, apart from my father, and the
discipline was lax. He stayed with the Wehrmacht out of respect for
his father and grandfather and all the Kesslers who had served before
them with horse and sword.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “Maybe it was
the army that made him leave, I don't know. In 1939 he and my mother
and my brother Franz, later Francisco, left Baden for Buenos Aires.
I was born in 1943. My father worked at the Banco Central.
Francisco played football and rugby. He was very much like my
father.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “I never knew
my father as he was, because in spring of 1945, when I was two years
old, he had a heart attack. He was sitting in the parlor reading the
Times of London, and stared blankly at a photo of some American
soldiers in Poland – the first thing his eyes landed on, you see –
and simply fell over in his chair. His family had heart problems,
you see, and he ate so much sausage and meat that it must have only
gotten worse with him.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “He was never
the same after that, they say. He began to drink and smoke many
cigarettes. When I was a young man your age my father was already
old and tired looking, and his athlete's body had gone flabby. I
promised myself then that I would never smoke-- and look where it's
landed me. The doctors said the smoking killed my father. I, on the
other hand, have perfect lungs.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “When I was
sixteen I went to Havana to work as an apprentice manager in a small
cigar factory, owned by the brother of one of my father's colleagues
at the bank. Or anyway I tried to go to Havana, but the mutiny there
prevented me from leaving Veracruz harbor. I wired my mother to ask
for money, and spent some time in Mexico City as a bohemian. I lived
on a street where everyone was a student or an artist. Of course I
couldn't stay there. I needed to work. The next year I went back to
Buenos Aires. I didn't know what to do. I didn't want to go to
university or the army. My mother's second cousin lived on a ranch
in Paraguay; I thought it might prove something of an adventure to go
there. It wasn't. It was hard work and the food was bad, and all
the old man ever did was talk about the war.
</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “So I was
twenty years old, and I had lived in three countries, and I was
bored. That was the year my father died, and I received a decent
inheritance. At his funeral was the man from the bank whose brother
had owned the cigar factory in Cuba. He introduced me to an American
gentleman who worked in the transport industry, shipping things
across the Atlantic, I don't remember what exactly. Anyway I
impressed this second man and he hired me, and sent me to work in a
company office in Tel Aviv, where I lived five years.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “I saw the 67
War on the cover of the Times and talked to soldiers who had come
back from the front. They were ecstatic because they had won. I was
unhappy, though, because I was not making much at my job, and Israel
was beginning to bore me. Beach towns are all boring, I think. I
quit and went to Cairo, which was crowded and filthy, and then to
Alexandria, which was as boring as Tel Aviv but with a number of
Germans who liked me and welcomed me. I had a little difficulty in
Alexandria with a certain girl – German, not Arab, thank God –
and I decided to take this opportunity to see Europe. I had never
been. In all the time I spent in Israel I never left Tel Aviv.
</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “You're very
young, so you can't know that Europe was a mess in those years. Only
the Swiss remained civil, but I couldn't get in – passport
problems. Italy was filthy. The people were like South Americans,
like the Indians, with the same gangster tendencies. Everyone was on
strike. But my mother's family lived there, near Bolzen, and I
stayed with them for several months before I moved to Trieste to work
with another shipping company.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “In 1972 I
found out that Francisco had died. My mother had written a letter to
her sister in Bolzen, and one of my young cousins who admired me
brought it to my office. Francisco had moved to Chile some several
years before and had joined Allende's party, the idiot. Now he had
disappeared. They were unpleasant times everywhere.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “An American
girl worked in the office with me, and taught me English. We got
married and moved to Virginia. She worked while I looked for a job,
which took some time. Then I got hired and we moved to Seattle. I
didn't want to be so near her parents, who were so prying, and the
doctor there was stupid enough to tell me to stop drinking even
though my health was perfect. I don't like prying in-laws and I
don't like doctors, especially not idiot doctors, so I was glad to
move. We had two sons, and then later two more kids who must be about
your age. The oldest two are in New England. Susanna is studying in
Chicago. Henry was working in Colombia, and I'm not sure where he is
now; he hasn't written me for some time. My wife is back in Virginia
with her parents. I live in Seattle now.”</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> He sat back and
delicately wiped a drop from his lip. I asked him, “What brings
you to San Francisco?”</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> He smiled again.
“I knew you were bright. You were born sensitive. That's why
you're a writer. You can read where there aren't any words written.
You can hear an old man's tale and see a novel.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “I come here
for the air, and for the little cafes like this one. I come for the
fog. I like the bridges over the water.”</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> He stood up
stiffly and removed a wad of bills from his blazer pocket to pay. He
looked at me rather sharply.</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> “Listen
though, young man. I know you're a writer and that you're smart.
But don't write down any of this. You must promise me that you'll
never write down that story.”</span></div>
<span style="color: black;">
</span><br />
<div style="margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="color: black;"> I promised, and
held the door open for him as he left. His little form melted in the
fog. I followed him with my eyes as long as I could, and went back
in to lock up. When I left the streetlight was out, and a crumpled
newspaper, half drowned in the gutter, fluttered weakly in the
breeze.</span></div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-41452221894829925312012-09-10T10:20:00.003-07:002012-10-09T10:23:23.391-07:00Rabbits of Ramona<em>for Scott McLean</em><br />
<em></em><br />
Man from mud<br />
and the blue sky was born.<br />
His blood colors the clay.<br />
<br />
Saying this we picked our way<br />
through buckwheat and toyon,<br />
carrying the .22, and over barbed wire<br />
<br />
past red ants and meadowlarks and endless<br />
yellow clay<br />
and we looked for rabbits.<br />
<br />
Stillness: not a fissure of the rock<br />
disturbed; nothing to disrupt<br />
the commerce of snakeroads and blackbird choirs<br />
<br />
till night brought stars and sage smell<br />
and coyotes yawned in their hollows.<br />
We had shot enough<br />
<br />
To recognize that in the very dust<br />
there by the dark-haired oaks and powdered clay<br />
lay fossil traces of our breath, and names.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5536209852778965681.post-73424996305033430202012-09-10T09:49:00.003-07:002012-09-12T10:12:49.224-07:00Homenaje a Diego RiveraA hummingbird sang to a hawthorn tree:<br />
<br />
I saw your mouth, my love<br />
on the painted image of an Aztec whore,<br />
dark-eyed and shining -- lovely.<br />
And there by her side stood a strong man, <br />
a man of war,<br />
who for the softness of her gracious thighs<br />
and the lingering kiss of her gaze<br />
held out in offering a severed arm, white<br />
like her skin<br />
and red like her lips.<br />
<br />
What can I give you, my lady of the buds,<br />
for the gift of your nectar?<br />
These are for you, then: my shining throat<br />
and the lance of my mouth<br />
and the wind and the drone of my wingbeat.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10415602599115620111noreply@blogger.com0