Travelogue 1249 – 31 May

My Cell

Why shouldn’t I play the monk, don the white habit and the black cappa, be properly old, like a man who has worn his service like heavy shoes?

There was a cat yowling in the yard this morning. He caught me dozing over my reading. It was that hour before Lauds again, when I like most to read and contemplate. Even the hard tile under my knees isn’t enough to keep me awake some mornings. I glance at St Dominic in Fra Angelico’s fresco, offering his own penance to Jesus. Forgive me my sloth, I murmur. I murmur, and I startle myself with the sound of it. Mary will forgive me if I like the echo as much as the words.

I met Fra Angelico in passing on an earlier visit to Florence, a mild man, a cheerful man. I see why everyone is so fond of him. He had left for Rome before I came to live. The brothers speak of him like a saint, an artist who cried for Jesus as he painted his suffering.

The face of Dominic is so expressive. It whispers things to me.

Travelogue 1248 – 14 May

My Cell

Sometimes I return to the cell at San Marco, settled within its white walls, and I recollect the sounds there, the echoing halls, their hollowness a hint of God’s nature; the birds in spring, as the day breaks, as Lauds approach; the rustlings of being human.

Forty-four cells there, and endowed with a small fresco by Fra Angelico. I dream in the cell with the picture of St Dominic kneeling at the crucifixion with a scourge over his bare shoulder. They say this picture is Gozzoli’s, in fact. I don’t love it less for that.

My floor is red tile, less than two metres each direction. I have one window, small and arched, with a heavy wooden shutter that I swing shut in winter.

From the hallway, all sound is echoing. From outside, all is sharp. I am content to pray while the sounds find their place.

Travelogue 1247 – 19 April
La Beltà 

Per mirar Policleto a prova fiso
con gli altri ch’ebber fama di quell’arte
mill’anni, non vedrian la minor parte
de la beltà che m’ave il cor conquiso.

This is how Sonnet 77 of Petrarca’s “Canzoniere” begins. There doesn’t seem to be agreement on which of Petrarca’s sonnets in the “Canzoniere” was written first. But I will follow the lead of one scholar, who identifies this sonnet as the earliest.

Petrarca’s first compilation of his “rime sparse”, his stray poems, took place in 1336, and it included 23 of his own poems, and two by friends. What we now know as Sonnets 77 and 78 would seem to be the first recorded into that manuscript.

The music of this stanza already feels different to me than what we have seen before. It seems softer, more melodic. It flows more naturally. It’s more personal, I would say. Dante’s love is cosmic and symbolic. Amor himself must participate. The Sicilians were courtly; their love was mystical. Petrarca’s is human.

We still must start with a classical reference, of course, in this instance to the famous sculptor of Ancient Greece, Polyclitus. That visionary artist, along with all his peers, could have gazed a thousand years and never seen the smallest portion of the beauty that had conquered Petrarca’s heart. So says the first stanza.

But, fortunately, Petrarca’s friend, the painter Simone Martini, perhaps inspired by heaven, captured something of Laura’s true loveliness.

Ma certo il mio Simon fu in paradiso
(onde questa gentil donna si parte),
ivi la vide, et la ritrasse in carte
per far fede qua giu del suo bel viso.

Travelogue 1246 – 7 April

The Colonna Connection

The Colonna family played a role in Petrarca’s life. That started in Bologna, where young Giacomo Colonna was also studying. Years later, Giacomo became the Bishop of Lombez, a town in the southwest of France. He invited Petrarca to his new see, and they became close. When Petrarca returned to Avignon, he took up residence at the home of Giacomo’s brother, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. He lived there for seven years. This branch of the Colonna family was very kind to Petrarca.

The father of Giovanni and Giacomo was Stefano, a Senator of Rome. Stefano had a brother, Agapito. The children of these two brothers would form two major branches of the family. Stefano’s progeny led to the “Palestrina” branch. It was Agapito’s line that would produce many of the famous Colonna of the future, including Pope Martin V in the next century, and including Vittoria.

When we arrive at the fateful year of 1336, where I began a few weeks ago, we find Petrarca living in Avignon with the Cardinal and finally making a first compilation of the poems that would become the “Canzoniere”.

Giacomo had already returned to Rome a few years earlier, in order to defuse a crisis between his family and the Orsini family. This feud between families had defined much of the medieval history of the city of Rome. An attempted ambush of Giacomo’s father, Stefano, had turned badly for the Orsini, and their leader had been killed. Only Giacomo’s leadership in Rome and Giovanni’s relationship with the Pope in Avignon calmed the situation.

With Rome secured, Giacomo sent his invitation to Petrarca, “Come to Rome”. This was a dream come true for Petrarca. He rushed down, via boat out of Marseilles, and via Civitavecchia. For fear of Orsini partisans, he had to sit some weeks in Capranica, north of Rome, until Giacomo could come with troops to fetch him.

He found Rome glorious. He wrote to the Cardinal, “You may well be looking for an outpouring of eloquence now that I have arrived in Rome. Well, I have found a vast theme, which may serve perhaps for future writing ; but just now I dare not attempt anything, for I am overwhelmed by the miracle of the mighty things around me, and sink under the weight of astonishment.”

The theme was the life of Scipio Africanus, hero of the Second Punic War, and this theme would form the substance of his work, “Africa”, a long epic poem in Latin about the man and about the ancient republic. Though Petrarca never finished this poem, it became his most famous project, and it formed the basis for his claim to be named Poet Laureate five years later.

Travelogue 1245 – 1 April

Morality

Arthur Miller said once in an interview that what distinguished the great playwrights through time was a “fierce moral sensibility”. He said that that sensibility was “unquenchable”.

I find that interesting. It would imply that the not-so-great playwrights, like me, have at least the ambition of a “moral sensibility”. I would not have thought so.

In the 1990s, one could still speak of morality without blushing. Miller himself had survived one of the great moral reckonings of the American polity, the postwar Communist scare. While sorting the new world order – the one Trump is so busy disassembling, – some Americans had nothing better to do than inventing conspiracies involving Russian spies and saboteurs lurking around every corner.

Morality has lost some of its stature. It’s unfashionable. On the right, American primacy is amoral. America is good just because it’s America, a kind of circular, sola fide argument from modern nationalism. Connoisseurs on the left have found morality too distastefully bourgeois to entertain. Artists have used morality as a whipping boy for generations. At a time when dusty, old-time morality could come in handy, we struggle with it, like with a bulky sweater from the bottom of the drawer.

When I was young, I might have followed those trends. Morality was for simple minds. But life grinds slowly and patiently on, and the precious intellectual spaces we create end up under its wheel some time. Every choice becomes a moral one. To the extent that I am a philosopher at all, I realise that I am a moral philosopher. Metaphysics have come to bore me. The human project seems the valid one. And morality unfolds with increasing complexity. Aesthetics and rhetoric become moral sciences, our choices and our connections with others.

Doesn’t metaphysics follow moral thought, anyway? Physicists have established that observation shapes reality. And we have found ourselves stuck on the wave-vs-particle conundrum for a half-century or more: what is the nature of a photon or a subatomic unit? It seems it can be both, or either. If it’s a particle, it’s a thing; if it’s a wave, it’s an event.

For most of its history (the time we have been aware of it), the atom has been a thing. We are materialists, and I suppose it took a materialistic society to analyse things, to want to break them down into their composite parts. We discovered nothing moral down there, in the depths of the atomic and sub-atomic … until we discovered that things might be (quantum) events. In the shift, there is a challenge. Inside an event is an action, and inside action is a decision. Plato might disagree that there is no decision in things, but we have lost any sensitivity to that.

Is there a decision inside quantum events? Who knows, but there might be an opportunity in thinking so.

Travelogue 1244 – 29 March
The Foundering Ship

I interrupt the story of the man whose spirits were strong, a man who may have been heart-broken but who was not a sad man but, rather, a hopeful man, I interrupt to ask myself the question, why did I pick up the Richard Ford novel at the library?

Maybe it was an acknowledgement that I had failed in writing sad. A month ago, I had tested myself on a new script. It was born of a sad thought but failed to capture sadness in its language. Ford is a bona fide sad writer. It is in his language, something in his technique, inherited from Hemingway and Carver, crafted by hand. Maybe he is a happy man. Cheerful Petrarca wrote about heartache, in language that resonated for centuries.

Maybe reading Ford is for me a tender regard for sadness. Deep sadness doesn’t wash out with moods. It abides, as the Dude might say. It doesn’t succumb. The body succumbs, or the mind, before sadness does.

I haven’t finished reading the book; analysis is premature. There is an early moment that fascinates me. The overarching plot is about the dissolution of a marriage, but the moment of change is poignantly placed outside the arena of play. The husband is accused of stealing at his job, and he is fired. Later they admit they were wrong, and they offer to take him back, but he refuses. He won’t consider it. He drifts, and he thinks about other pursuits. The character is something of a meditative.

Baby Jos went through a phase of fascination with tornadoes a few years ago. I found an old drawing in pen of a tornado. She had cut the drawing out in the tornado, so there is only the spiralling winds of the tornado and, beside it, a small sailing ship. I keep that little drawing inside my laptop now, and I set it beside my screen while I write.

Travelogue 1243 – 25 March
His Twenties

Some ten years passed between meeting Laura and the first compilation of the poems that would eventually become il “Canzoniere”, the Book of Songs, the collection of Italian sonnets that would shape poetry for centuries. How did Petrarca spend those years?

He had two missions in his twenties. First, to study and write. Early on, freed from his father’s rule, he traded his study of law for the minor orders in the church, trading one career path marked for medieval intellectuals for the other. He read. He studied extensively: ultimately, his mastery of the Latin canon was nearly unmatched. He looked for guidance among the collected wisdom in Avignon. There was plenty to be had in the new papal enclave. It had quickly become an intellectual centre, following the Pope Clement V’s move there in 1309. He sought out mentors. He reminisces in later life about an old man from Florence, one Giovanni, an advisor to the pope, who urged him never to be discouraged. The road to good scholarship was a long one.

Petrarca wrote. Before he had written his first sonnet to Laura, he had already made a reputation for himself as a poet, locally (in the birthplace of the great Provençal tradition) and even among some in Italy. None of those early poems survive. When Petrarca compiled his first version of the Canzoniere, he destroyed everything that came before.

He travelled. Petrarca has been called the first tourist. Wherever he went, he stopped in monastic libraries and searched through ancient manuscripts. His early travels are in the north. In Liege, “hearing that there was a good quantity of books there, I stayed and detained my companions while I copied out one of Cicero's speeches with my own hand and another by the hand of a friend, which I afterwards published throughout Italy. And to give you a laugh, I may tell you that in this fine barbaric city it was a hard matter to find a drop of ink, and what we did get was exactly the colour of saffron."

In Paris, in 1333, he discovered a friend in Dionigi from Borgo San Sepolcro, which was a village near Arezzo, Petrarca’s birthplace. Dionigi was a friar and scholar, who taught philosophy and theology. He was an Augustinian friar, and he introduced Petrarca to the saint that would inspire a lifelong devotion, to St Augustine. He gave Petrarca a copy of the “Confessions” that the poet would treasure the rest of his life.

There were Italians everywhere; they provided scholars, artisans, soldiers, and churchmen for many courts in Europe. Working in Avignon and having studied in Bologna, Petrarca had a far-flung network that he could tap.