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.