Travelogue 1238 – 16 February
Snow Again

This morning, the snow is all gone. None of it is left on the ground. That was a strange episode, yesterday, dream-like and sudden. I couldn’t even make it home on my bike in the afternoon, the snow was blowing so strongly into my face. The cars were slowly trudging along next to me on the Nieuwe Binnenweg, inches from my shoulder, and I could barely see. I decided to stop.

There was a table available at the Pelgrim beer pub, a table by the window. I slowly warmed my hands, slowly shrugged off the jacket. The snow was thick and wet on my back and my arms. My backpack was wet. The morning had been sunny and moderate, so I hadn’t brought any gear for rain or snow. It had come as a shock to emerge from the Wijkpaleis and encounter the snow swirling the air, the wind sharp in my face, the street covered in snow, the cars slowly crunching their way through it. My bicycle looked shrunken and abandoned, standing locked in the accumulation of new snow.

I had been at the Wijkpaleis reading through a new play with a group of actors. It had been a fun event, and even successful, if success is measured by the amount of constructive criticism. If measured by praise, the play was as successful as I my weather prediction. As often happens in my early drafts, a fine cast of characters find themselves lost in a poorly managed plot. There is a logic underneath the surface, but they stumble over the awkward arrangement of elements and lost themselves in the lacunae, the things unexplained.

I thought it was a sad play, written in a sad season. The actors did not see what I saw, and it made me question myself. Mood is a tricky tool in writing. Mood is a tricky thing in life. It comes and it goes. You cannot really make someone sad with writing. You can remind them they are sad, at the most.

Mood is not a story. Plotlines are not sad or happy; they are tragic or comedic. Characters may be sad. Like most people, our characters will be sad alone. Tragic events are more likely to trigger other things than sadness, such as indignation, curiosity, a thrill of recognition, or contemplation.

Perhaps my characters are victims of a sad season, brought to life against their will, as we all are, by a sad pater. I feel some responsibility. As I rewrite, the same characters will remain trapped in their tragic plot, like a Nietzschean loop, hashing out their sad fates over and over. One ought to have compassion for their characters.

The snow didn’t let up. I had been watching it fall over the canal outside the pub, while cyclists passed unsteadily, covered in layers that are dark against the snow, that made them bigger and clumsier, that made them seem faceless. People on foot were laughing, gathering snowballs. When my triple was finished, I left. I was done with the bike; I would pick it up tomorrow. I bowed my head, and I headed for the Metro station.

Travelogue 1237 – 8 February
The Beautiful Things

The weekend was a pleasant distraction from computer problems. My girls had their moments to shine. Little Ren competed in a gymnastics tournament. This only happens once or twice a year. During the tournament, girls compete in four events over the course of a couple hours, while parents resent each other in the uncomfortable bleachers. It was Ren’s first time trying a floor routine with music, and she was very nervous. I gave her hugs on the way there, telling her everyone gets nervous. She didn’t answer, and upon arrival at the sporthal, she ditched me as soon as she saw her teammates. But she was smiling, and she was fidgeting with anticipation.

All in all, it went well, in that halting, swaying way of young girls. To me, it was a gold-medal performance. She had a few signature moves in her routine, things she had been proud of for years, including the “bridge”, in which she manages to arch backward until her palms lie flat on the mat, and then push with her feet and roll through a handstand until her feet touch the floor on the other side. It’s quite a feat of flexibility, at least for a proud father.

On Sunday, both girls had ballet class, and the lessons were open for parents. I was impressed by how hard they work for an hour each week. Baby Jos is at an age in which the teacher can teach, rather than just show and drill. She pays attention to detail; she corrects; she explains why each move should be executed the way it is, the visual effect and how it flows into the next move. Such a simple thing was moving to me, the passing on of a tradition centuries old, and in such a matter-of-fact way that it was the very expression of hope for me. Of course what we are doing here today is important. Every beautiful movement counts. Every calibration makes the art form work, justifies it, illuminates it, and illuminates our lives. This is important.

They have started working on the bar, too, which warms my heart for some reason. The rows of girls stretch one arm toward the bar, hold the other delicately in position, and they are run through various positions and moves, rising and dipping, and it’s all so lovely. When Baby Jos, the oldest, started ballet, I learned the names for the positions, but I have forgotten. I will have to review them.

Travelogue 1236 – 7 February
Machine RIP

February had a rough start. My trusty old computer died. Picture a cartoon jalopy and the sound it makes as it collapses, like the sigh of an abandoned squeezebox. The poor machine had been pushed pretty far. So far that I had already begun to worry. I had begun with some expediencies in the fall, opening the laptop up, replacing the battery, adding RAM. I was just figuring out how I would replace the hard drive when the thing seized up.

It was a February when I bought the little monster, back in 2019! Suddenly I had to buy a new one. There was no other way. Now an alien machine sits in its place on my desk. We are getting to know each other, the new one and I. She is thinner than the old one, but longer. Her dimensions throw me off. The keyboard doesn’t match the one I’m used to, so I make mistakes. She makes more noise when I touch her, and that is exciting, as though we might go farther.

Years of notes are gone. The desktop is blank. Even my photo of old Rotterdam has vanished, to be replaced by a generic AI image of sand dunes. Apps need to be reloaded. Old files need to be reloaded. Some are just lost. It’s uncertain territory, something like the AI wasteland in the picture, lacking real features. One finds he hasn’t been aware of all the character that was accumulating inside the flat little box on the desk, the box that has a lid that lights up when you open it.

Travelogue 1235 – 31 January
Focus On Them

For better or worse, I’ve been scrolling through social media a lot since Minneapolis was invaded. I have a few tips for content creators.

1: Measure the Outrage
Expressions of outrage and woundedness are not unimportant. They form a genre that should be carefully cultivated and protected.

 

But

 

You risk burnout. Allies are just as wounded; finding sympathetic hearts is rewarding, but acknowledge that there is a next step. The middle-to-right consumer is not interested. If anything, that reader might consider it a good thing that libs are feeling wounded. An unvarying chorus of outrage and woundedness risks consumer burnout and loss of credibility.

 

2: Be concrete

When Katie Phang mentions Trump, she mentions him as a felon, a 34-time felon to be exact. It’s good to be reminded, but it is not so effective as it seems. If the rule of law is in doubt, or in flux, convictions lose meaning. J6 criminals were pardoned; many – even those who despise the J6 insurrectionists – don’t remember what the exact charges were. Don Lemon was recently arrested for charges related to his coverage of the church protest in Minneapolis. The right-wingers who cheered the arrest would not be able to name the charges. He’s just a bad guy who was somewhere he shouldn’t have been, so of course he should have been arrested. My point: we don’t understand our own legal system anymore. That leads to loss of faith. And calling someone a felon means very little to most people.

 

3: Don’t Separate Yourself

“If this doesn’t make you scared, I don’t know what will.” How many times have I heard this line in videos? It’s patronizing. Sure, we are all frustrated by the passivity of Congress and the American people in the face of this crisis. But when you express your frustration in this way, it motivates no one. Allow people to come to their own conclusions when well-informed.

 

4: Morality is Human

Blunt cries that something is immoral achieves very little. The human mind challenges imperatives. Unless you are parroting someone’s previous conclusion, your imperative only arouses resistance in that person. Humans are stubborn and rebellious, and that can be irritating when you are trying to persuade. But if you have faith in humanity, their independence can be rewarding. Place the facts before people and see whether their moral conclusions are the same as yours. Morality is as fundamental to our mental apparatus as breathing is to our physical apparatus; your moral conclusions are not privileged, any more than your breathing is. And, by the way, when someone denies your facts, they are tacitly acknowledging your morality. Declaring that he didn’t do what you say is immoral is an admission that the act is immoral. All that is left is the proof of the fact, not the moral persuasion.

 

5: Focus on Them

All this to say, take yourself out of the message for the most impact. Talk about the wrong-doers. Bring it to them, and speak concretely. Put them on the spot. Let people judge their actions. Maybe I have become partial to Euro-snark, but I found this video to be refreshing.

Travelogue 1234 – 25 January
Keeping Up

The streets are cold. Ice has formed on the canals again, a delicate layer that only the seagulls can step on. A light blanket of frost has descended upon us during the night, and the morning is quiet. Little Ren and I are travelling to her hockey games. We walk slowly through the housing development between our building and the Metro, and up the final stairs to the transport hub at the top of the hill. Beside the stairs the grassy incline is powdered white with frost. The fenced-in, asphalt football pitch is still. The tram tracks shine a dull silver amid their shallow tracks of mud and ice. No one is stirring.

It's never been the most attractive plein in town. While many transport hubs and stations in town are pleasant, thoughtfully designed and clean in their realisation, this one has a feeling of haste; it is function first, and it has the atmosphere of the postwar boom, the thirty or forty years when much of the city we see was actually built. It is a forlorn sight this morning, abandoned and grey, lacking grace.

Little Ren is scheduled to play as keeper, so I have the big keeperstas on my back, the bag with all her equipment. The game is out of town, so we will meet a teammate’s father two Metro stops away, and he will drive us. Little Ren is cheerfully marching forward, plunging into her day. She is happy to be keeper; she likes being useful to the team. She is buzzing with the energy of a new day, chatting busily about cheese crackers and the latest toys her friend Issa has acquired. I struggle to keep up; I don’t want to miss a word. Her voice rises in the cold air, unanswered even by an echo in the empty square, dissipating quickly into the rare Jan sky, no one else but me nearby, listening. Then we are swept into the dank hall of the Metro.

Travelogue 1233 – 23 January
One Must Understand Their Time

Dante lived in feudal times. As a citizen of one of independent city-states of northern Italy, key agents in feudalism’s decline, he saw through the cracks in the system, without knowing what he saw. He himself was something of an agent of the system’s decline, without understanding what he did.

Some see feudalism coming. There are serious thinkers like Yanis Varoufakis who hypothesize that we have already entered an age of ‘technofeudalism’, a new round of lords and vassals and serfs, this time with the tech lords owning everything and the rest of us working their digital land. Their vassals receive rents in exchange for their fealty and their arms.

Some of us catch, like through the holes of a closing net, glimpses of the world to come, but we can’t make sense of what we see. We might even be contributing to the rising new order without knowing what we are doing. While Dante wrote in support of imperial rule of Italy, he could not know he was part of something bigger than emperors, undermining the order that needed emperors.

Then there are others who gleefully advocate for a new feudalism. Greenland is meant to be a test case for a tech-age feudalistic state, if the ghoulish Boys of Paypal and their lapdog JD Vance get their way. These self-appointed gurus of futurity, in between their immortality treatments and the drug-enhanced mystical rites they perform for shareholders and social media, preach from Olympus about how we need this. We the people.

 As the Greenland case ought to illuminate, the tech bros are trapped in their own fantasies, inspired by too much TV and too much time in role-playing games. These are the dues we pay for guilty pleasures like “Game of Thrones” and “The Tudors”. Billionaires with stunted or deformed moral identities start confusing their scifi with their false history. It all seems very glamorous. We will be new kings and lords! We will commute to Mars! The villagers will watch with awe as we pass through their villages. They will worship us. It’s a new age! Et cetera.

It's interesting to note that the romanticism that attaches itself to medievalism is to some portion traceable back to our troubadours and poets. They collaborated on a wildly successful propaganda campaign for the feudal lords, inventing the entire notion of chivalry.

But I do think of the unlucky king, from almost a century before Dante’s time, who did nothing more than he thought were his rights as king, but who died a miserable death in the field, being hounded by rebellious barons. That was King John of England. John was unlucky in his timing, living through an inevitable decline in his family’s fortunes; he was unlucky in his own unfortunate temperament, arrogant and grasping. Unlike the current U.S. president, he was not pursuing wealth for its own sake, but to recover the lands in France that he had lost during his youth, a development that even the most likeable and strategically minded king might have been unable to stop. John was blind to the shifting sands beneath his feet. The romance of feudalism, the glory of being a great lord, it only allowed him so long a tether, and no more.

One must understand their own time.

Travelogue 1232 – 15 January
His Gentle Heart

To return to Dante’s sonnet, “A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core,” I wanted to consider the last two words of his first line, “gentil core”. He is addressing his audience: to each captive soul and gentle heart. And he is defining them. I had suggested that not every word is equal, and this word “gentil” is fraught with meaning for reader and poet.

Dante wrote the sonnet in 1283 or so. In the thirteenth century, the culture of courtliness and gentility had ripened, an outgrowth of feudalism and the Germanic social codes, stewing with Christian and Latin culture for centuries. Medieval courts, royal and noble, kept poets and musicians as a part of their retinue. This was where our literary movement began, in the telling of stories that resonated within this ascendant culture, what we call the High Medieval, that peaked in the century of Dante’s youth.

Feudal cultures generate a set of ideals appropriate to their structures, valuing courage, lots of combat, service to the lord or king, and religious virtues. In medieval Europe, Christian virtues meant piety, submission, compassion, and humility. The signs of virtue included not only loyalty to the lord, but devotion to one’s lady. This latter, perhaps fusing weirdly with a devotion to Mary, became exaggerated by the poets into romantic and erotic devotion to a worthy lady.

Courtly poetry had a few templates, models based on the tales of mythical heroes. These heroes lived in Charlemagne’s time, some four hundred years earlier, or in the mythical time of Arthur, some eight hundred years earlier. Like most mythologies, this one taught that there was a golden age of feudal values, and that the present times were corrupt.

Integral to the Arthurian mythos was the knight Launcelot, who blindly loved Arthur’s Guinevere. The troubadours, or travelling musicians and poets, worked this model into images of pure, unrequited love and devotion. They resurrected the classical god Amor or Eros as a kind of tutelary spirit, and Launcelot’s hopeless devotion became the sign of real nobility.

Dante’s first stanza identifies his preferred reader, the soul taken (by love) and whose heart is gentle. But “gentle” isn’t describing someone given to soft caresses. It means someone of noble character. Only the noble heart can love, only an aristocrat of the heart. Feudal mores, defined just as the feudal age was faltering, breaking down before the press of incipient capitalism and the rise of the nation-state, feudal sensibility could only define value in the terms of feudalistic nobility. The worthy man was a knight. He had aristocratic blood, perhaps secretly, or perhaps through some spiritual transformation.

It is worth noting that Dante himself was from a noble family. It was a minor lineage, and his father’s line was one of the poorer branches. But he was of noble blood. The opening line of the sonnet is as much a challenge as an invitation: “To every captive soul and gentle heart ….” It is as severe as it is compassionate. Are you worthy?

Travelogue 1231 – 9 January

Stop the Greatness!

 

I write in order to think aloud. It’s healing. As Vittoria Colonna wrote five hundred years ago, “Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia.”

 

I have to say something about Wednesday’s events. Maybe no one will read it. Everyone is talking, and no one is listening. Maybe I have nothing new to say. But I must speak.

 

The public murder of Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis has made me feel sick. I have been feeling despair viscerally, in my gut, and I haven’t been able to concentrate. I want to account for it. I want to reach some understanding, even for myself.

 

The violence is sad and senseless. It is maddening. Watch the video, and outrage rises to the skin. If you admit to any humanity, you react with horror, or something like it.

 

But then ... then there is more. If you feel horror at violence, what happens afterward should trigger waves of repulsion and shame. What follows is textbook shamelessness, something so distilled and unadulterated, it is rare and ugly.

 

I will abbreviate:

1.     Not only is a physician onsite barred from helping the victim of the shooting, he is threatened with violence himself.

2.     ICE bars an ambulance from parking nearby and delays their response. Whether the emergency response was too late to save Ms Good is irrelevant.

3.     The shooter illegally leaves the crime scene and faces no inquiry.

4.     Kristi Noem, betraying no sign of concern or decency, and based on the slimmest pretence of reviewing the facts, insults the victim and protects the murderer.

5.     The FBI takes over the case and denies local law enforcement access to evidence.

 

The news makes my flesh crawl. I feel disgust and grief in the pit of my stomach. It calls into question my fragile faith in humanity. There is a video out there in which an elderly man in Minneapolis is weeping for shame. “I am ashamed,” he cries. Yes, that is the proper response. Finally, some relief from the gaslighting of this shit culture. And still the interviewer asks, “Why are you crying?”

 

Are the violence and the shamelessness signs of “greatness”? I believe they are. These are the hieroglyphs left by the Greatness movement for us to read. This is who they are. And I must say, given that this is so, these avatars of Greatness are justified in declaring – indeed they are obliged to declare, – “You are with us or against us.” Yes, that is manifest. That is necessary at an existential level. If we are to maintain any hope that humanity has meaning, has grace, has evolutionary potential, we must be against you.

 

I want to hear a chant struck up in America: “We don’t want to be great.” We don’t want it.

Travelogue 1230 – 6 January
Winter Colour

This is the most snow I remember seeing since Little Ren’s first birthday. It has been coming down in big flakes, sometimes densely in the air around our yellow and red buildings, among the bare branches of trees, collecting on the grasses in medians, settling into the collars of our coats, settling into the grooves of our tram tracks.

It is all very exciting for the girls. Getting home from school takes quite a long time. The sun has temporarily broken through, but only so recently that the snow has not melted. They are gathering snowballs, and they are pummelling their papa. The snowballs get larger and larger. They like rolling the balls in the snow until they are the size of their heads and then running at me, laughing.

We are still cycling. Most major bike paths have been cleared. The neighbourhood roads are ruts of ice. We can carefully zig and zag our way to points nearby, to stores, to school, and down the hill toward home. I can even carry Little Ren on the seat in back. She has to sit still; the subtlest shift in weight can anger the ice gods. The challenge has its own rewards. The crisp air is refreshing. And the change in scenery, trading the gloomy spectrum of fall browns and grey for winter white is a dose of inspiration. The novelty feeds the spirit.

Travelogue 1229 – 4 January
Words from Long Ago

In looking at the first sonnet (“A ciascun’alma”) from Dante’s book about his youth, “Vita Nuova”, we have studied several features of the dolce stil novo, the sweet, new style that Dante declared that Guinizelli before him and a few of his generation had perfected. There is the troubadour’s dedication to Amore, the focus on romantic love as something divine. There is an argument being presented in the poem, a quirky one in Dante’s case, a kind of narrative argument, a technique familiar to us from his Divine Comedy.

Still to consider are the style and the language itself. Earlier, I had reduced his opening statement for convenience to: “Greetings in the name of Love to any who may see these words.” But, in fact, the opening comprises a whole stanza. I can allow Dante’s namesake, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a voice from the nineteenth century to translate: 

To every heart which the sweet pain doth move,
And unto which these words may now be brought
For true interpretation and kind thought,
Be greeting in our Lord's name, which is Love.

It seems appropriate to allow a nineteenth-century voice here, from an age still capable of and enamoured of ornate rhetorical expression. In the thirteenth-century, a poet was expected to give voice to courtly culture and chivalry. His sonnet derived from the troubadour tradition. Extreme formality, strict poetic form, and words of strong feeling were de rigueur; they were a tonic to the brutal times. To us, the result appears as tortured diction and forced metaphors. It can be difficult to translate. All the time that has passed weighs heavily on the tone and the meaning. Medieval poetry seems inauthentic, in the same way that painting before Renaissance perspective seems like bad art. We can’t unsee what we have been taught.

A more modern translation – leaving aside metre and rhyme - sounds like this: 

To every captive soul and gentle heart
into whose sight this poem may come,
that each may write back with his impression,
a greeting to his lord, that is Love.

Words are not equal in value. One word stands out to me, though Rossetti dropped it entirely in his translation. The word “gentle” is a code for many things, dropped lightly as it is, as an adjective for “heart”. It identifies Dante’s reader quite explicitly, and it offers a definition of his cultural milieu.

Travelogue 1228 – 30 December

A Ciascun’Alma 

Dante is quirky. The use to which he puts poetry is something unique. I was young when I read the “Vita Nuova”, and that is appropriate. The book is a collection of poems by a young man, a self-conscious genius, dangerous to himself, and perhaps to others. He desired to braid a story thread, upon which to string a set of poems, the works that had made his reputation. It was a story to make sense of a decade of his life, the shape of which might have left him uneasy, a period of his life he felt should be interpreted for the public. And he sculpted a story of unrequited love and the death of his beloved, of great chivalry and mystery and romance. He gave it coherence and appeal. He gave himself a mission.

Florentine society was a public one. There was essentially no private life. Someone like Dante would have accrued a set of unedited public stories that dogged him from youth, like fragmented scenes that everyone had seen, that no director had moulded into a play. At best, they contributed to various unflattering portraits that gossips traded in the marketplace. Dante wanted to be the director of an epic film, rather than stock character in a commonplace farce.

The first poem in the book is a sonnet. He wrote it when he was about 18. It was a poem he circulated among his peers, among other poets, inviting their responses. 

A ciascun’alma presa e gentil core
Nel cui cospetto ven lo dir presente,
In ciò che mi rescrivan suo parvente
Salute in lor segnor, cioè Amore.

Greetings in the name of Love, he says, to any who may see these words. He tells the story of a dream. It is three in the morning, and he sees Love walking with his, the poet’s, heart in one hand and Beatrice attending him on the other. He cheerfully bade her eat Dante’s heart. She did, and Amore left, weeping.

Dream literature is not too unusual in medieval culture, but now, recorded in a sonnet, an ornate form still new, evolved from the troubadours’ songs of devotion, and sent around for comment among the young poets of Florence, this was provocative and odd.

“To this sonnet I received many answers, conveying many different opinions; of the which one was sent by him whom I now call the first among my friends [Guido Cavalcanti], and it began thus, ‘Unto my thinking thou beheld'st all worth.’ And indeed, it was when he learned that I was he who had sent those rhymes to him, that our friendship commenced.” This is from Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s translation in the nineteenth century.

A friendly rival, Dante da Maiano, ridiculed him, writing back in his own sonnet response that it sounded as though Dante ought to consult a doctor and have his testicles washed. This anecdote did not make it into the “Vita Nuova”.

But this is how he started. Dante’s work was always personal. He made the general particular. The god Amore took a vivid interest in him. And any description of Hell ought to be eyewitness.

Travelogue 1227 – 27 December
Cold Holiday

It’s been a cold Christmas. There is a thin layer of ice on the canal behind our building, though there is none on the rivers. The waters still dance on the River Schie, under the busy bridges, and the gulls and ducks bathe there, as though it were summer.

The skies are clear, a bright and untroubled blue, like desert skies, like polar skies, perfect as stone, though scarred by the trails of planes. The air they provide us is sharp to the taste, crisp. I cross the bridge with a gaze held up in wonder.

The streets of the city are holiday calm, a relief. I cycle through the cold, grateful for the subdued traffic. There are others. They are bundled up against the chill. They lumber along like bears on their delicate bikes, in heavy coats and hats. They hold the handlebars with gloves. And they pedal less as though they have somewhere to go and more as though they are curious or lost. They might never arrive, though they have left early.

Passing over the river again, I travel down the road made of bricks. The trees have done their work, spreading roots underneath the layer of human work, and rippling the surface, making the bricks buckle and testing the tires of the bicycles that pass there. The bike rattles. I navigate the wrinkled map of the road, as I have done a hundred times before. There is no hurry.

Travelogue 1226 – 25 December

Next Came Padre Mio

And then came Guido Guinizelli, Bolognese poet of the mid-thirteenth century, probably born about a decade before the death of Giacomo da Lentini, and a decade after the birth of Dante. Guinizelli never met the great Florentine, Dante Alighieri, in life, but they met in Purgatory. 

Dante was passing through the seventh terrace of Purgatory, where lust is punished, Someone volunteered to explain to him what he was seeing, and when Dante discovered the name of that soul was Guido Guinizelli,

 

quand’io odo nomar sé stesso il padre
mio e de li altri miei miglior che mai
rime d’amor usar dolci e leggiadre;

 

he is humbled and grateful. He called him his father, and father to all those who wrote in the dolce stil novo.

 

But what was the substance of this “sweet, new style” that Dante celebrated? It was beautiful language, of course, but it was more. Consider Giacomo’s lovely sonnet, “Molti amadori la lor malatia,” and the case he built for the patient’s diagnosis. This penchant for constructing logical argument continues in Italian poetry. It appeals to examples from nature, to primitive scientific observation, and to philosophy.

 

Consider the beginning of this canzone by Guinizelli, one of the most famous poems of the era,

 

Al cor gentil ripara sempre amore,
com’ a la selva augello in la verdura,
nè fe’ amore avanti gentil core,
nè gentil core avanti amor natura;
ch’ adesso che fue il sole
sì tosto lo splendore fue lucente,
nè fue avanti il sole;

In two lines, he compares love retreating into the heart to a bird retreating into the woods. And then he spends five lines exploring a rather fine distinction. Neither does love come before the heart, he says, nor the heart before love; just as light does not precede the sun, nor the sun precede light.

 

It is in precise constructions like this that the roots of our sonnet spread. Poets compare and contrast; they offer definitions and delicate analyses. And these, in turn, define the poet. This makes the sonnet the poetic form of the Renaissance and Age of Science. Michelangelo wrote sonnets, as did Galileo.

Travelogue 1225 – 20 December 

The First Ever?

There might be a contender for first sonnet ever written, or at least, earliest surviving sonnet. It’s written by Giacomo da Lentini somewhere near eight hundred years ago. What survives of Giacomo the Notary’s sonnets escape from their own time only thanks to Tuscan collectors, and they survive only in Tuscan translation. None have arrived in the original Sicilian dialect.

No one from our time would dare speculate about which of Giacomo’s sonnets came first. It takes the optimism of an American writing in the 1920s, indulging in some Victorian romanticism, to think this way. Good for him. It’s fun.

To be fair, Mr Wilkins of Southern Methodist University admits in his short article that it can be little more than guesswork. He applies himself transparently. There were only 25 surviving sonnets. Some are parts of sonnet cycles, so we can eliminate many based on sequence. Some apply rhyme schemes that can be deduced to be later experiments. Some show other characteristics that seem experimental, like equivocal and internal rhymes (though I wonder how he applies this analysis when all poems have been translated into Tuscan). He thinks it unlikely that the first sonnet would be anything too sophisticated or philosophical. It has to be a love poem, since the roots of the form are the songs of troubadours. Of the two sonnets that have not been eliminated, one is already complaining about his lady’s response to him. The final one must be the best candidate.

“Molti amadori la lor malatia,” Giacomo writes, “portano in core….” Many lovers carry their sickness in their hearts, he says. The sickness, or “distress” according to the translation Mr Wilkins has quoted, is, of course, love or the effect of love. The sonnet must be a story of love: this is thirteenth-century Sicilian poetry, written for the court, based on Occitan tradition. So, yes, the topic is amore. And who becomes impatient with that? Who questions the Renaissance painters this way? “Oh, Leonardo, not another ‘Last Supper’?”

The little story inside the sonnet is that the narrator is helpless to hide his love. Amore has made him powerless. He is paralysed. That is the effect of the malatia, the distress of being in love. He can:

nè di meve non ò neiente a fare,

Se non quanto madonna mia voria,

ch’ella mi pote morte e vita dare.

 

He can neither move nor do anything, unless his beloved wills it, she who holds the power of life or death.

 

As we know, the argumentation must change in the final sestet. The octave describes the symptoms of his malatia, and now we must review the result. In the volta, he tells us, “Su’ è lo core, e suo sono tutto quanto.” His heart is hers; everything of him is hers. He continues:

 

e chi non à comsiglio da suo core,

non vive imfra la gente como deve.

 

And he who has lost the counsel of his won heart cannot live in society as he should. It’s like a doctor’s summation of a patient’s case.

 

Lovely stuff. And it is precisely that clinical, analytical nature of the narrative that becomes a part of the code of the sonnet, and ties this form so closely to the development of the Renaissance.

Travelogue 1224 – 13 December
The Notary

We can actually trace the birth of the sonnet back to one person in one time in one familiar place, in Sicily. In those days, Sicily was not yet a subject of Spanish royalty. Spain was not even Spanish yet. It was the thirteenth century, and Spain was a collection of smaller kingdoms, one being Muslim. Sicily had passed from Norman rule to German. It was the fiefdom of the Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick II, who had been born in Italy and raised in Palermo. The Normans before him had unified Sicily and made the kingdom one of Europe’s wealthiest. Frederick was a product of Norman marriages into great European families, and he himself was one of those rulers who popped up in European history, a nexus of all the intermarrying, suddenly in possession of vast swaths of Europe.

There was a notary in the court in Palermo named Giacomo da Lentini, the guiding spirit among a group of active poets, favourites of the emperor, a royal who himself dabbled in poetry. Giacomo wrote many “songs” of the traditional variety, including the eight-line strambotto, a sweet series of rhyming couplets that was usually accompanied by the lute. It was best suited to witty messages of love or satire.

Giacomo the notary also experimented with other forms. He tried adding a turn of six more lines onto the strambotto, with a different rhyme scheme and a different the pace. The resulting “turn” between the two sections, the volta, suggested all sorts of possibilities. The second section could be a new perspective, a change of topic, or even an answer to the question posed in the first lines. This little song, the “sonnet”, became the form most suited to the age, a form that poets turned to for centuries as the most refined vehicle for their most delicate feelings. Some say the sonnet was the very voice of the Renaissance. Some have suggested that the form was indeed a kind of catalyst for the Renaissance.

Maybe half a century after Giacomo had died, Dante spotted the poet Bonagiunta Orbicciani in Purgatory. Bonagiunta had also been a notary, and he had lived in Lucca. He had bridged the generations between Giacomo and Dante. He also bridged the cultures, Sicilian to Tuscan, writing poetry in Tuscan dialect, inspired by the Sicilian styles. Bonagiunta spoke to him:

 

“O frate issa vegg’io,” diss’elli, “il nodo

che ’l Notaro e Guittone e me ritenne

di qua dal dolce stil novo ch’i’ odo!”

 

With regret, he sees how they had fallen short of the “Sweet New Style” that Dante propounded, that Dante’s generation, after Guido Guinizelli’s model, had perfected. Bonagiunta lists himself and the Notary and Guittone d’Arezzo as those who had failed to reach Dante’s heights. But, of course, that Bonagiunta has a cameo in the “Purgatorio” at all suggests that Dante knew what he owed to the Notary and his other thirteenth-century antecedents.

Travelogue 1223 – 8 December
Father Figures

So here we have the strange heritage of Vittoria, of savagery and refinement: Pompeo, her cousin, leading troops into the Vatican in thirsty vengeance, and then returning to a palace to eat figs and write delicate poetry; her husband, her “bel sole”, Fernando, a vicious man in combat, bloodthirsty and self-serving.

Her father, Fabrizio, was a famous condottiero in his own right, fighting against the French of his day for the Spanish and for the pope. The French king then was Louis XII, and the issue was, again and still, the French king’s right to the throne of Naples. Louis was a bit more successful than his successor. He did manage to obtain the crown, though he only held it for three years. He traded it away in 1504, when the pressure from the Spanish became too much.

Fabrizio was such a famed warrior in his day that he was appropriated by Machiavelli to be a character in his book, “The Art of War”. The book takes the form of a dialog, in good Renaissance form, and Fabrizio is more or less the tutorial spirit in that dialog, lecturing the others on ancient Roman discipline and strategy. In one sense, the dialog was an extension of the humanist hunger for all things ancient; in another, it was a concession to the modern spirit, in which large nations states would deploy large, standing armies and bring to heel the small feudal and mercantile states. Not for much longer would suffice the plucky bands of knights, citizens or mercenaries that skirmished through the Middle Ages.

In a similar way, cultural production was being regimented, lined up in neat rows of well-regulated formats, and the Italians were marking the boundaries. By the end of the fifteenth century, literary forms were firmly decided. By the end of the next century, musical ones would be. In Vittoria’s case, the forms for poetry were well-established; as evidenced by Lorenzo de’ Medici’s tract on the sonnet, her favoured format was already much the fashion by the time of her birth. The nobility were fluent in sonnet structure, as though in a courtly language, specifically in the Petrarchan sonnet structure. Petrarch was their guiding light.

Called the father of the Renaissance, Petrarch did not originate the sonnet, or even the structure that took his name. That was settled upon some time in the mid-thirteenth century. But Petrarch, writing in the fourteenth century, devoted such passion to the project that would become his Canzoniere, his “song book”, composed largely in sonnets, that it became the model of love poetry for hundreds of years. Certainly, in the early sixteenth century, the Petrarchan form was undisputed pinnacle.

Travelogue 1222 – 1 December
Condotta

Pompeo Colonna’s service as condottiero in the service of the Spanish Neapolitans and the Holy Roman Emperor was not done. He participated in the great sack of Rome in 1527, though his military role was a minor one, and though he seemed most concerned with harbouring cardinals and nuns who otherwise would have been in harm’s way. He assumed some degree of control over the Vatican and the Borgo during the darkest days of the occupation, but it seems hard to determine what, if any, control anyone really had in the anarchic conditions. Eventually, he left, as many others did, when plague threatened in June of 1528.

Of course, Pompeo was not a condottiero in the classic sense of the early Renaissance, when free-wheeling generals led their mercenary troops from conflict to conflict, with the only allegiance being to their condotte, their contracts. They played the delicate balance of power among small city-states with little regard for patriotism or loyalty.

But now the field was too crowded with grand armies of grand nation states for the old-fashioned adventurers to thrive. Italy had become a small pond, and the stakes were too high for the small fish. Pompeo never really wavered in his loyalty to the Spanish.

He was rewarded for his service. He became, by order of Charles V, the Lieutenant General of the Kingdom of Naples, and later the Viceroy. And he was ever attentive to the needs of the emperor. In 1532, Charles V was obliged to raise troops to defend Vienna from the Turks. Pompeo

And in Naples, he spent time with his cousin Vittoria. He was not all blood and glory. He was a courtier, and a sophisticate. He held his own in the company of his peers, attending parties and writing poetry. He dedicated one to his cousin, who was becoming famous around Italy for her poetry. It was called De Laudibus Mulierum, “In Praise of Women”. The topic was a minor fashion of the time, and perfectly suited to honour Vittoria. Unfortunately, the poem does not seem to have survived.

Travelogue 1221 – 27 November
Pompeo

Vittoria Colonna’s cousin, Pompeo was about thirteen years older than her. He was a colourful character, a cardinal and a condottiero. He was vicious and jealous; he was also cultivated and politic.

His branch of the Colonna family was high nobility in both Rome and Naples. He grew up fighting the Guelf Orsini, just like any good Colonna, and then fighting for the Spanish rulers of Naples. At age 22, he launched his ecclesiastical career, quickly rising to the rank of bishop under Julius II and of cardinal under Leo X, in 1517.

With several popes, he had very public disputes. His dispute with Julius II led him to invade Rome in 1513, after Julius’s death, and delay the start of the conclave that would choose the new pope. He had felt slighted by the late pope and his Curia, who had condemned him for his rebellion in 1511 over the appointment of foreign cardinals.

A Medici pope, Leo X, was elected in 1513, after he had made peace with the Colonna. Life was good under Leo X and under the subsequent Dutch pope, Adrian VI. The latter was a tutor to the Emperor when he was young, and Pompeo had helped elect him for the Emperor. For a dozen years, Pompeo collected his titles, benefices, and territories.

But trouble began for him when Adrian VI died unexpectedly, less than two years into his papacy. Giulio de’ Medici, cousin to Leo X, had been in the wings for a long time. He had been raised by Lorenzo the Magnificent and had known Michelangelo when the sculptor was coming of age. For his cousin, Leo X, Giulio had been a close advisor and a capable statesman. It was his time.

Pompeo didn’t like it, but he was forced to vote for Giulio de’ Medici, at the end of a long conclave, because Giulio threatened to throw his weight behind an Orsini. He gave the Medici his vote, but in exchange he received the highest position possible in the Curia, and a lavish palace in Rome.

Three years later, the diplomatic pressures on the papacy had grown to a boiling point. The pope had agreed to an ill-advised compact with the French. The French king had invaded Italy, and had been captured in his first major battle (by the armies of Fernando d’Avalos). Immediately upon his release, Francis I, the king of France, began building another alliance, which would become the League of Cognac.

Emperor Charles V lobbied intensely for papal support. But when the Spanish ambassadors praised Pompeo, the pope insulted him. The Spaniards threatened to peel away Siena and Florence from his control if he sided against them. But Clement VII sent them away.

Giulio de’ Medici, Pope Clement VII, was known to be an intelligent, refined, and capable man, but history also knows him as a leader with the worst political instincts. He joined sides with the French. The Spanish were true to their word, and they invaded the Papal States. Pompeo himself led an army of nearly 4,000 into Rome. The people of Rome stood down, and they allowed the army to march to the Vatican. There, the troops ransacked the Vatican and the Basilica of St Peter, while Clement VII fled to the Castel Sant’Angelo.

It was an eerie rehearsal of the disaster that would unfold only eight months later, but it was Romans on Romans, and entirely the result of the Italians’ own savage politics.

Afterward, Clement VII unleashed a persecution of the Colonna family. Vittoria’s brother Ascanio spirited her away, withdrawing her from the convent and fleeing to Ischia. Pompeo himself withdrew to Naples.

Travelogue 1220 – 19 November
Weak Cognac

The sack of Rome in 1527 stands in history as unique and tragic in its scale. It left tens of thousands dead, maimed, or in flight. Churches were desecrated, historic treasures were plundered, monuments and ancient buildings were damaged or destroyed. The impact on society, church and history were deep and irreversible. The era of the great nation states was dawning, and this event only confirmed the inexorable fate of city-states, like the misstep of a giant that crushed a cherished old temple.

But it would be a mistake to see the event as an anomaly, as something that stands alone in kind (vs degree). It would be a mistake to see the Romans or the Italians in general, as only victims. In this regard, it is easy for sympathetic readers to forget that the Vatican was sacked only one year earlier, and it wasn’t by the Germans. It was by Romans.

The Orsini and the Colonna were rival Roman lines of nobility that had connived against each other and fought for centuries. The history of the Orsini reached even further than that of the Colonna. There were Orsini popes as early as the eighth century. And by the late Middle Ages, the two families had settled into the division found in many Italian communities, known as Guelph and Ghibelline. The Orsini supported the papacy and the Colonna the Holy Roman Emperors. In the sixteenth century, this became bitingly relevant, as Emperor Charles V inserted himself into the Italian conflicts.

The pressures building on the Medici pope, Clement VII, elected in 1523, were enormous. The French and Spanish began lobbying him relentlessly for support: alliance, money, and troops. The Spanish were juggernauts, and King Francis I – the French king captured by the armies of Vittoria’s husband in 1525 – managed to cobble together a fragile alliance against them in 1526, the League of Cognac. Clement VII joined this group, with Venice, Florence, and Milan. It might have been a good concept, but, with a typical flourish of self-interest, Florence took this occasion to attack Sienna. They failed to take it, and their loss rose like a signal over the land that it was open season on the papacy.

Travelogue 1219 – 15 November
La Doglia

I heard recently that widows are happier after the death of their mate than before, just speaking statistically. Vittoria Colonna never remarried, despite the hopes of all the scheming noble families. She made her position in life and society very clear. She spent nearly a year among the nuns of San Silvestro in Capite after the death of Fernando. And she began to write, and she wrote copiously, about her dear departed husband in sonnet after sonnet. Fernando appeared over and over as her "bel sole", her sun, her "lume eterno", her everlasting light.

“Scrivo sol per sfogar l’interna doglia,” she wrote in one famous sonnet. I write to vent the internal pain.

It's hard to say whether her pain was real or performative. The case is strong for the latter – it lasted an awfully long time, and generated quite a few poems, poems that were shared far and wide, - but generally, I think that “both-things-are-true” arguments get short shrift in modern thinking. We would rather not admit that human psychology is hypocritical by nature, or to put it more gently, that we condemn complex emotion by calling it hypocritical.

After living nearly a year among the nuns in Rome, Vittoria was forced to leave. Her brother Ascanio fetched to take her to safety in their palace outside Rome, in Marino. The Colonna family was quarrelling with the Medici Pope, and their properties and lives were in peril again. Disgusted by Roman politics, she returned to Ischia early in 1527.

“Oh! Che tranquillo mar, oh che chiare onde …”, she wrote upon her return to Ischia. What a tranquil sea, what clear waves! Fortune had smiled on her this once. Only a few months later, Rome was entered by imperial troops, mostly German, and subjected to atrocities that printed themselves on the history of Europe indelibly, locked in the code of violence and hatred that would guide the Reformation for a century and a half. In a year, Rome’s population was reduced by some 80%. Only a wave of plague drove the pillaging army away in February 1528.