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.