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.

Travelogue 1242 – 12 March
Laura

The story starts in the church of Sainte-Claire in Avignon in France. Our young man, not more than 23 years old, catches sight of a beautiful woman during a service.

It was April 6, 1327, and our hero had just experienced two life-changing events within the past year, the passing of his father and the completion of his training in law at the prestigious faculty at Bologna. He was back in Avignon, working as a clerk somewhere among the ranks of church hierarchy gathered in the city. The papacy had moved to Avignon in 1309, and Petrarca’s father had followed a few years later, because he was a notary and needed the work. His father had been friendly with Dante, but Dante had been exiled from Florence some years earlier, and Petrarca had never met him.

So Francesco catches sight of Laura, and it’s one of history’s great stories of love at first sight, and also of unrequited love. Laura is married. Petrarca tries to court her, but she refuses him. It is both important and not important to us who the real Laura is. It’s the ideal Laura that we encounter. What follows the fateful encounter at church is nearly half a century of Petrarca’s writing life and then centuries of admiration via his poetry.

It is likely that Petrarca’s Laura was a woman named Laura de Noves. We know of her because she was aristocracy, married to a count. There is at least one portrait still existing of the real Laura de Noves, beautiful, modest, blonde. She died in the first wave of the Plague.

But Laura the ideal has never passed away. This unique creation, somewhat chivalric in origin, but developing into something very human and individual, does indeed endure the way Petrarca predicted. Literature has sent forth a raiding party to retrieve the soul. Poets will now tend for the welfare of the animating spark.

Perhaps it begins when Dante writes that Virgil, an ancient poet, has led him through Christian hell, and that Beatrice, his chivalric ideal, has led him through heaven. And we are led to question whether Beatrice lives on because she is in heaven or because we are reading about her. Dante has posed us this question.

Petrarca poses us a slightly different question, something humbler, less heroic: might beauty be enough? Might a pure heart be enough? Might a lover’s devotion be enough? Would these small things save the soul of the beloved?

Shakespeare writes of his own ideated love in Sonnet 18,

“But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand’rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow’st.
    So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
    So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

By “this” he means the poem. The prestige of the artist and the artwork has grown through the Renaissance. Shakespeare is familiar with Petrarca, even if only indirectly. Renaissance proteges have played their part, poets like Vittoria Colonna.

Travelogue 1241 – 5 March
The Rhetorician

A century after its inception, the sonnet found its master. This is someone unavoidable, a figure dead centre in the road of cultural history, the indispensable man. Though one wouldn’t want to lose Dante, one could, and history would flow past him with barely a ripple. But one couldn’t tell our story without Francesco Petrarca, the father of the Renaissance, the first humanist, and the consummate poet.

I wrote a forgettable thesis about Petrarca at university, in my baccalaureate days, and he has haunted me since. Even after reading about him for months, I sense that I didn’t really understand him. His legacy is complex. His persona is complex. He is the fox to Dante’s lion. Where Dante stood tall, stood alone, stood proudly; Petrarca sought out company, linked arms with others, chatted, lectured, and sang.

It is meaningful for history that Petrarca was simply a more congenial man, someone who cared about and cultivated the opinion of others. He became the first modern poet laureate by courting important people across Italy and charming them, by exciting them with ideas. He was persuasive. He was a rhetorician. He revived the study of Cicero, one of the great rhetoricians in European history. To study Renaissance intellectual history is to study ancient Greek and Roman history. To the ancients, rhetoric was the linchpin of education. It was fundamental to politics; it was a tool in social advancement.

We in our time say we don’t like rhetoric. We are suspicious of it. Even as we make up the most manipulated societies of all time, swimming in floods of persuasion, drowning in advertising and targeted messaging, though we are subject to psy-ops nearly every day of our lives, we turn our noses up at the word “rhetoric”. It seems “inauthentic” to engage in formal rhetoric. I guess we would know from inauthentic, living in the Trump era.

The truth is, rhetoric can be a tedious study, boring. So is math, but we would never eliminate math from our curriculum. Instead, we dropped rhetoric and civics. We think we have grown beyond these topics. Never mind that in two generations, we have lost all feel for how we are governed, how our own government works; never mind that we are inarticulate in the face of oppression. Never mind that Donald Trump, a man forcing a national dialogue about dementia; a man who cannot finish a sentence; a man whose vocabulary is that of a middle-schooler; a man who cannot make an intellectual case for any one of his devastating policies, and has recourse only to primitive emotional ones; that this man is called, with great seriousness, a “great communicator”.

Travelogue 1240 – 24 February
The Birds

The birds have started singing in the mornings. This is a sacred time of year for me. Before the sun has risen, there is a songbird settled outside my window. She is not there every day. But the mornings she is there are made special by her voice. The timing feels perfect because winter’s mood has begun to pall.

Then I’m hearing birds as I travel around town. They seem to have nested among the branches everywhere. Or were they always there, and my ears have been opened by the first visitor to my window? I’m riding along the bike paths in a dream, as though I have headphones on. I’m listening to music, or listening for it.

And something magical did happen yesterday, among the birds. Among the green parrots that have become familiar in South Holland in recent years. We were returning on our bikes from Little Ren’s gymnastics in the evening. Ren sat behind me in the kid’s seat, so I don’t think she could see what I saw. Baby Jos was on her bike, riding behind us. We were coasting down the hill on the bike path next to Horvathweg. It’s a busy road, and there is a lot of traffic at this hour.

Suddenly a flock of parrots glided by, and they were calling as they went. They swooped by, just over the roofs of the cars on the road. Their flight was not smooth and light, but erratic. They dropped, and they rose; they veered left and right, though all the while speeding recklessly together. They skimmed over the cars in a way that seemed both graceful and clumsy, and was also alarming, as though they could have been hit at any moment. I was mesmerised by the sight. And it seemed like I was the only one who saw it. I didn’t see any response from the cars. I saw no one pointing. The girls said nothing. It was happening so quickly, I wouldn’t capture the girls’ attention fast enough. Then the parrots were gone.

Not totally gone. They had swept off the road and into the park ahead. That was our direction. I heard the daredevils. I spotted them. They had found perches at the top of one of the slender trees along the canal, among bare branches. They were happy to chatter there. And again, we were past before I could point or explain. They remained my little secret.

The birds have returned. Above, in the gloaming hour of evening, the Canada geese call.

Travelogue 1239 – 20 February
The Animal Arena

Baby Jos took a friend to the movies yesterday. Which means she also brought her sister and me. The outing was very exciting for them, riding their bikes downtown, buying treats, navigating the theatre complex. That something so easy can still be exciting for them makes me happy. Who knows how many years I still have for these simple pleasures, creating joy with an afternoon outing into town, enjoying their guileless smiles, being their ally in life, sharing in their laughs?

The film was an optimistic one. I can recommend it. “Goat” has a simple plot, the triumph of an unlikely hero. The animated cast are animals, and the field of triumph is a jungle version of basketball. His triumph is a fun story, and the animation is beautiful, looking more like paint on canvas than digital.

Because the heroes and villains are animals, they are easily typed. The goat is a “small”, playing against typically powerful animals. It isn’t that the animals have to act their types – e.g., the giraffe is a rapper and the rhino is sensitive, - but the separation between them is clear and visual. The result is a parable about diversity and acceptance. We know this – animals in fables have been put to this purpose for decades now. 

It's what I don't see that is more interesting to me. Because the characters are visually distinct, and their roles in the plot are established early, there should plenty of film time for character development, for exploration of personality and crisis. The plot’s crisis is also simple, easily resolved. There should be room for surprises, for revealing the kinds of foibles and contradictions that can make even children’s characters interesting.

But we don’t live in a time that values character, do we? In times when personal roles and goals are rigid and clear, foibles and contradictions can enliven art and lead to complex thought. But this just isn’t an age for great character development. We love plot and action. We love political and moral messaging. It may appear that we’re seeing character development because we identify with and we love our movie and series characters so much. Ironically, the instant love we experience may be more a sign that we are being expertly manipulated than that we are being offered challenging characters. The truth is, we need these friends; in a time of moral desolation, we need our fictional friends more than we need intellectual challenge.

Ultimately, the conclusion I’m led to is that the (unconscious?) function of movies like yesterday’s is instruction. It reminds me of lessons I am familiar with as a language teacher: what do I say in a situation like … (example)? Everyone feels lost in new territory. Our society (and I mean Western societies in general) is so fluid, and so lacking in boundaries, restrictions, guidelines, and instruction, that many of us are lost; we have little real security in our identity. This goes some distance in explaining the forcefulness with which some people identify themselves. Being a nationalist is not enough, for example, but one must shout it, wear red hats, assert egregious positions, make sure someone is prone on the ground so they know who they are confronted with. But it’s not only the bad guys; everyone is desperate for identity.

Teens and pre-teens are hungry for behavioural guidance. The characters in this film never miss a beat. They always say the right things for their type. The newcomer is humble and salty in just the right proportions. The supporting characters have wit and wisdom. The awkward character never crosses the line into being unbearable. The foil is present in just the right measure. And the dialogue is perfectly pitched between cool and sincere. I can feel the kids soaking all this up. This is gold for them.

Here is where we are with character. Because of my forever book project, I’ve spent a good deal of time skimming through what is popular among new books in my genre. And I’ve sampled lots of agent and publisher advice. Characters are meant to be formulaic. Certain combinations of types are a must, and each main character should have one complication to make them human. More complication is only distracting. Do not slow the reader down! The character’s job is to propel you through the pages. You can deliver a small arc to the character flaw, offer minor reader satisfaction there, but don’t resolve it completely, especially if you plan a series with this character. Do not lose focus on the movement.

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.