A Renaissance tale makes Pulitzer list

Among yesterday’s announced Pulitzer Prize winners was Stephan Greenblatt’s, The Swerve–How the World Became Modern. This is the story of the 15th Century Florentine book hunter Poggio Bracciolini, who rescued and recopied long-forgotten ancient texts he found stashed in the scriptoriums of remote German monasteries.

The lead story of the Pulitzer announcements was that they found no works of fiction worthy of the fiction prize. I’m sure they hunted around, so it’s interesting that a non-fiction prize would go to a book about a man who made difficult journeys to hard-to-get-to places in search of great books.

Unlike the Pulitzer folks, Poggio found great books. He found some lost oratories of Cicero, Commentaries on Virgil. He would copy them in his own hand in the monasteries, and then bring his copies back to Florence.

The most significant find, according to Greenblatt, was a previously unknown Roman poet. That would be Lucretius, whose “On the Nature of Things,” supercharged the secular humanism of the Italian Renaissance. After Poggio copied the book in his own handwriting, a script we now know as Italic, the Roman poem became widely read in the circles that included, Galileo, The Medicis, Machiavelli, and later Thomas Jefferson, Darwin, Freud and Einstein.

Greenblatt is the founder of a school of literary analysis called, “New Historicism,” which views history something that has properties of a all-at-onceness, rather than linear. With its subtitle, “How the World Became Modern”, Greenblatt’s book stands as a testament that events of the Italian Renaissance remain in play in our own era. I think one way to look at this is that our mindsets operate as part of a collective consciousness with past mindsets.

Vargas Llosa and the Florentine Literary Tradition

Like Dante in The Commedia, Mario Vargas Llosa casts himself in the dual role of both the author and the self-exiled narrator-character in the Storyteller We’ve seen this act before. In those few pages of the novel where Llosa speaks directly to the reader he speaks of his time in Florence, Italy. It’s here where Vargas Llosa plays with the Florentine literary tradition.

There’s a feeling that this Peruvian Mario is a man who to has lost his way. He is unhappy, sad, working his way through the circles of recollection, a kind of Purgatorio. He is remembering an old friendship, a faraway culture, and wanders the Florentine Streets whole world away from family and home.

Vargas Llosa’s account of his stay in Florence leaves the reader with the feeling that he means these months to be a period of self-exile. Throughout the account, Vargas Llosa experiences a longing for his homeland, together with sadness over the state of its political affairs back home. Meanwhile, he tells us, he spends hours in cafes and the libraries reading Dante and Machiavelli.

Why Machiavelli? Why Dante?

The simple answer is that modernist writers like Vargas Llosa tend to reference literary figures in their works. Beyond that, it’s a little risky to guess what is in the mind of a living writer. You never know. Vargas Llosa may one day Google himself and see this blog. Not likely, but you never know. The comment box is below. So, lets continue with this thought experiment in conjecture.

While Machiavelli is best known as the author of The Prince, a little how-to manual for despots on the art of political manipulation and deception, the bulk of Machiavelli’s writings are more benign than that. There’s plays, poems, history, and one work that praises the virtues of republics. Yes, bad old Machiavelli was an advocate of representative democracies that govern with the good will of the people. Machiavelli was also pragmatic. When he was out of a job after the Florentine Republic fell, he wrote The Prince and offered it as a gift to the city’s ruler. It would be the French who would later tag Machiavelli with Machiavellianism.

Dante and Machiavelli lived in much different times. Machiavelli lived during the high Renaissance, as opposed to Dante’s middle ages. And yet the thing they have in common is that both held high public office in Florence, and both the became exiles from Florence when the political tides changed. Here’s the risky part, Vargas Llosa appears to be identifying with their experience. Vargas Llosa was politically active in his country. He even ran for President. He fell out of favor with his country’s ruling party after he fought Peru’s nationalization of banks, and again when he protested against his governments human rights violations.

It’s less risky to say that writers and poets generally enjoy toying with the literary canon.  Dante and Machiavelli are clearly part of the canon, and there’s no reason to think that Vargas Llosa would not be deliberately putting the Dante and Machiavelli at play in his work. One can hardly be in Florence without sensing something of the  presence of  Dante. You can walk right up the Alighieri home, then cross the Ponte Vecchio and stand in the doorway of Machiavelli’s digs.

If one is a writer or a poet. one is going to be especially mindful of the likelihood down this or that old street,  or these stairs Dante or Machiavelli walked. If you write, and know something of your literary history, and have spent any time in places like Florence, or Paris,  or Stratford, you know this feeling.

Mario Vargas Llosa on Florence’s Mosquitos and Art

Mario Vargas Llosa once traveled to Florence with a plan to forget about his native Peru in “absolute solitude”. The 2010 Nobel Prize winning novelist tells us about this trip in the opening and closing chapters of The Storyteller. Florence’s Renaissance art was supposed to help with the forgetting. The mosquitos didn’t help at all.

The Storyteller is a postmodern novel in which Vargas Llosa is not just the author, but also a character and narrator in those chapters. It turns out that Mario’s time of solitude were mobbed by summer crowds and menaced by mosquitos he remembers attacking the tourists on behalf of displaced Florentine natives.

Even while viewing Florence’s Renaissance art, the mosquitos bite Mario. He can’t forget Peru. The mosquitos won’t allow it. The swarms continue to remind him of Peru and the Peruvian mosquitos that bit him on the arms, legs and neck years earlier when he visited the jungle’s Machiguenga people

While Florence’s art is clearly at play in the opening and closing chapters, specific works receive scant mention. The narrator mentions Botticelli’s Primavera and Paolo Uccello’s Battle of San Romano. That’s it, and he mentions these only to praise a contemporary photograph taken in the Peruvian jungle, a photograph displayed as part of a temporary exhibit in a little gallery near Dante’s house.

In the jungle picture, a storyteller performs among a gathering of Indians. Mario is so captivated by the image that he says the photo is as much a masterpiece as those two paintings hanging in Florence’s famed Uffizi Gallery. The story is, after all, a novel primarily about the immense cultural value of storytelling, and a Jewish man who disappears from modern Lima to live among the indigenous Machiguenga people as their storyteller. And as a postmodern Latin American novelist, author Vargas Llosa means to undermine the old Eurocentric grand narrative.

The Mario in this story rents a room in a pensione and spends his days either in galleries viewing paintings and photographs, or in cafes reading Dante and Machiavelli. He tells us that the stream of tourists inundate the streets like a flooding “Amazonian River.” So, instead of a comfortable and reflective solitude, he experiences a sense of isolation among the crowds, and a sense of loss and sadness in seeing foreign invaders occupy Florence. He says, “…there are virtually no natives left in Firenze.”

That part is an exaggeration, although it is true that some of the city’s streets become choked with foreign tourists in the summer. It’s true that many Florentines schedule long vacations from the city in the peak tourist season. Vargas Llosa is too good of a storyteller to let the facts spoil his story.

With his exaggerated crowds and mosquitos, Vargas Llosa raises those big questions of cultural hegemony and threatened native populations, and applies those questions to both the Machiguenga and the Florentines. While the Machiguenga are displaced by the corporate exploitation of their jungle homeland, Florentines see their lives altered by the tourists and the travel industry. And so, he asks, “Are the mosquitos the zanzare of the Firenze totem animals, the guardian angels of Leonardos, Cellinis, Botticellis, Filippo Lipis, Fra Angelicos?” He wants to know if the mosquitos are that, “or are they the weapon that the absent Florentines try to put their detested invaders to flight?”
–rs

Next time: What Vargas Llosa lifts from Florentine literary traditions.

Mario Vargas Llosa’s Florence

Who would expect the city of Florence to figure prominently in a novel about a man who lives among a threatened Indian tribe in the middle of the Peruvian jungle? The question came to mind last week with the news that writer Mario Vargas Llosa was being awarded the Nobel prize for literature.

Florence is the setting of the first and last chapters of The Storyteller. The rest of the book is set in Lima and the jungle, as the narrator tells the story about a friend who had become a traditional storyteller, traveling from one jungle village to another.

Stay tuned. Will follow-up.

Improvisations on the Madness of Piero di Cosimo, No. 9

In the beginning, Piero’s madness was low-hanging fruit he let ripen upon an unpruned tree, it’s weight bending slender sucker limbs into the reach of goats. Except for the painting, he was letting everything go.

 After painting the air full of the light of the day, and painting the earth full of the shadows of the land, Piero looked to see how faun-like the goats had become. They were then rearing up on hind legs to take his misshapen gnome-faced fruit. Worm-eyed the apple gnomes scowled upon the cloven hooves and horns, but then Piero said it was good. He was pleased to see beasts up on twos, and pleased to see them under that one tree, and pleased with what ever it was that lead them closer to finishing off the apples, and closer to finding the hive, then abuzz in the hollow of the lightning-struck trunk.

“The Discovery of Honey” by Piero di Cosimo

Piero’s madness was the uncut grass through which the painter’s untamed vine had escaped from a teetering arbor, then coiled around that trunk, where he once swore he heard a hissed call to the goats, who came, and then trampled into the dust all the green grass and all the pretty kinds of flowers Botticelli painted in the Prima Vera.  ”Let that be a bed,” Piero said of the dry spot where he envisioned a she-faun would lie and suckle her young. By then the beasts had evolved to where they could play pipes, lyre and tabor in celebration of honey.

One night Piero took a spade to the earth, careful not to spook the goats. For someone they said lived more like a beat than a man, a little moon and a little hole was all it took to make a bed to plant a rib.

–RS

That madness and art thing

Madness is that low-hanging fruit in the Eden of our art and literary history.

I was going to save that line for the next in a series improvisational prose poems I want to do, but that will have to wait. The truth is that I’m not ready to do the poem today. Perhaps tomorrow. I have what we called in Journalism school, “more reporting to do” here. So, even if there is a poem in that, today I’m doing the non-fiction prose thing. Journalism. That is, reporting on Humanity’s long and sometimes misguided tradition of yoking madness with creative output.

Here goes: Van Gogh cut off his ear.

No, wait, everyone’s heard that story. Besides, the meme is problematical here. This narrative of madness-induced creativity reminds us that it sometimes ends with a self-inflicted gunshot wound. The madness stopped Van Gogh’s paintings from coming. Hemingway never completed the short piece Jack Kennedy asked him to write for an inauguration reading. Old Robert Frost filled in with a reading of The Gift Outright. Same problem with Silvia Plath’s suicide, but not before she went to the trouble of letting us know that her affliction impeded her art, “When you are insane, you are busy being insane – all the time,” she said. “When I was crazy, that’s all I was.” So much for the crazy romanticizing.

Who else? Ezra Pound? He lived a long life, thanks in part to his madness having saved him from execution for treason. Some said it was feigned.

No, lets do this: There was a Florentine painter who claimed he could see a city or landscape in phlegm and blood stains. That’s crazy, no? He found these compositions on a wall that the sick and dying had coughed and spat upon. His neighbors talked, saying he lived more like a beast than a man. They could not help themselves from thinking that there was a connection with the half-human figures in the paintings.  Ever since then, men and women  have come and go talking about the madness of Piero di Cosimo, 1452-1521.

Novelist George Eliot was among those who talked. After living in Florence in the 1860s, Eliot could not resist writing a historical novel about Florence. Perfectly understandable, of course. While she was writing her Florence novel, Romola, she could not resist giving Piero di Cosimo a crazed speaking part, tossing into the game some colorful madman eccentricities. A girl comes to Piero’s door with a basket of boiled eggs. Piero got to where he would only eat boiled eggs. He was so afraid of fire, he never cooked. He made one exception to that rule. He had to boil glue to seal the oils on his paintings, so he braved the fire for that, and while doing so he set out another pot to boil fifty eggs at a time. I particularly like the toads in Eliot places in his living room, and also the rabbit and roosting pigeons.

Before saying more about Piero di Cosimo, lets dig a little deeper into the history of this tradition of linking this madness thing with art and creativity.

Socrates, proclaimed, “If a man comes to the door of poetry untouched by the madness of the muses, believing that technique alone will make him a good poet, he and his sane compositions never reach perfection, and are utterly eclipsed by inspired madmen.” Is this like, if you’re normal, don’t even bother? Stick to sales or accounting.

Poe bragged about being so touched. “Men have called me mad,” he said. “but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence.”

Freud was in the game. After observing the body language of Michelangelo’s Moses sculpture in Rome, the doctor diagnosed the sculptor as laboring under a repressed rage against his patron Pope Julius II. Freud saw all that in the positioning of Moses’ marble foot, along with the way Moses fingers his beard. That sounds like a stretch, but it did turn out that Michelangelo eventually unleashed that rage on Pope. He nearly brained Julius with scaffold planks that he tossed from his high perch in the Sistine Chapel.

Coincidence or not, Sigmund Freud published his analysis of Moses-Michelangelo shortly after reading Giorgio Vasari’s artist biographies. Vasari was commenting at length on the peculiarities of many of the artists’ personal behavior. That was in the Sixteenth Century. Freud was writing about Michelangelo’s rage in 1914.

More recently, there’s the case of Martin Ramirez too. After being confined for decades in a mental institution, Ramirez became the poster boy for  artistis mental illness.  In 2008 a New York times article declared  Ramirez  “simply one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.”  Ok, he is good. Got that.   Now get this, the Wikipedia article on Ramirez leads with a line that reads, “Martín Ramírez (1895–1963) was a self-taught artist who spent most of his adult life institutionalized in California.” See, Ramirez here is not an artist who happens to be mad, but a madman who makes art.

"Courtyard" by Martin Ramirez

We also have the poets weighing in their verse. Like Freud, some of them look at the art, and then think they see something of the artist’s mind.

Jean Valentine’s 2009 chapbook , Lucy, includes a poem called “Outsider Art”, about  Ramirez  and his art. In this case, Valentine acknowledges a whole lot more of the artist who happens to be insane, and gives him a place in our shared humanity. In the context of the rest of the chapbook, the Ramirez poem is among other poems thematically linked to “Lucy” a protohuman hominoid who died three million years ago. If Lucy is one of us, so is Ramirez.

Poet John Stone brings us back once last time here to Piero di Cosimo with “Forest Fire”, a meditation on the Cosimo painting of the same name. Just by making the painting the object of a poet’s attention, we are lead to wonder if “Forest Fire” has anything to do with Piero’s pathalogical fear of fire, or the beast-like nature that Giorgio Vasari claimed had strayed increasingly to the feral side over the course of his life. We wonder what, if anything, in the picture came out of the Rorschach visions of phlegm stains on a sickroom wall?

"Forest Fire" by Piero di Cosimo.

Vasari said Piero lived more like a beast than a man. Beast?  These words have lead to speculation about the Painting, “Forest Fire.” How can you help that when the painting is filled with beasts, one of which includes a pig with a half-human face, and a person with deer-like features.

Look here. Stone walks us back to a beastly primal myth time when people and animals were more alike. Lucy’s time, perhaps. The stories and pictographs of Native Americans sometimes speak of a myth time “when people and animals were not so different.” Stone observes in the painting:

A human snout
floats in the face of a swine.
A bearded man-deer nudges his doe.

Stone says all of them are “being” and because of the fire these beings are “being” driven out as the fully-formed humans discover the uses of fire. This brings on end of Eden and it’s low-hanging fruit. And so, Stone’s poem concludes with the expulsion:

…like God, Di Cosimo
conjured up a reason
to take it away.

–RS

(Thanks to Stefano Sandano, of Romanguide.com for passing along his take on Freud’s Moses of Michelangelo)

This post is dedicated to all my writer and poet friends who I met in those crazy days at the “Writers Asylum”.

The Egg of Columbus

In the words of Kurt Vonnegut, Columbus was a sea pirate, a high Renaissance sea pirate, a slaver and a con man. We’ve all heard how Columbus presented the king and queen of Spain with a scheme to bring the riches of the Indies back to Seville and Barcelona. Bait with the Indies, then switch to the Bahamas.

In his novel, Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut’s narrator undermines the traditional narrative by taking the usual issues with the notion that human beings discovered America in 1492. That year “… was simply the year sea pirates began to rob, cheat, and kill” human beings who already lived in the Western Hemisphere. He goes on to say, “The chief weapon of sea pirates, however, was their capacity to astonish. Nobody else could believe, until it was too late, how heartless and greedy they were.”

To astonish?

Yes, there’s stories about Columbus’ capacity to astonish. He says in his journal that the “Indians” were so primitive that they were astonished to find out that swords would cut their hands when they grabbed the metal blades. One wonders about the manner in which those swords were presented to make that happen. And then there was his parading of captured people and animals from the Caribbean through Spanish streets, which did astonish the crowds as much as anything P.T. Barnum could have ever dreamed up. Another story with some bearing on that is “The Egg of Columbus” There is an unfortunate metaphor involving this trick with a broken egg, and it’s something less than an omelette for the people of the Caribbean.

Columbus and the old egg trick.

The story is most often attributed to an Italian historian Girolamo Benzoni, who in 1565 published an account of a Spanish banquet for Columbus after his return. Columbus confounded a group of noblemen who sugested the Admiral was not as special as he might think. Sooner or later another sailor would have bumped into that land mass by heading west, probably a Spaniard. According to the account, Columbus did not immediately respond. Instead, he asked that an egg be brought to the table, and then said, ‘My lords, I will lay a wager with any of you that you are unable to make this egg stand on its end like I will do without any kind of help or aid.’ Sooner or later, somebody would figure out the trick.

One can see how the story speaks well of Columbus. He was, after all, the most clever man in the room.

One of the many monuments to Columbus is a modernist egg sculpture by Julio Bauza, installed in 1992 on the Spanish Island of Ibiza. A replica of his ship, the Santa Maria, is anchored within a hole in the egg. Some Ibizans claim Columbus was not Genoise, but one of them. That is their grand narrative.

And, in 1883, physicist Nikola Tesla, created a electro magnetically driven device that made a brass egg stand up for the Chicago World’s Columbian Exhibition. He called the machine, “The Egg of Columbus.”

And yet, there is a problem. Like the Ibizan monument, there’s a hole in this narrative. Just as Columbus is erroneously credited with “discovering” America, the famous Egg of Columbus is erroneously credited to Columbus.

Before all that, in 1418, there was this Florentine sculptor and architect named Filippo Brunelleschi who was competing with other architects to be awarded the job of designing a dome for the uncompleted Basilica di Santa Maria del Fiore. No one had built so large a dome before. It was still unclear how it could be done. Brunelleschi refused to reveal any drawings or present a model. He claimed that if he did any of that, then his ideas would sooner or later be stolen and the commission might just as easily go to any builder willing to employ them.

Instead, says Giorgio Vasari, writing in 1550, Brunelleschi “… made a proposal that the building of the cupola should be given to him who could make an egg stand firmly on the smooth marble, for by doing this he would show his skill. And an egg being brought, all the masters tried to make it stand upright, but none found the way. And when they bade Filippo set it up, he took it, and striking it on the marble made it stand. “

Inspiration from the Tuscan Farm:

This is my Flesh

Normally, I don’t eat meat.

I’d be lying if I said I never do.

When I work on the farm in Tuscany

they have me build fences

to keep Apennine Wolves

from the lambs, cows, pigs and sheep.

The animals seem happy.

I am only the hired hand at the table.

So, I eat the food they offer.

So, anything they’ve killed.

I sleep and work there,
to travel on,
and travel
on the cheap.

The house dates
to the lifetimes of Renaissance men,
and women.
In the celler there is red wine,
and salami hung among hams
with cloven hooves attached.

This is my flesh.

Something wicked on this bridge came

So much for the romance of Florence’s bridges, so much for strolling honeymooning couples after destination weddings, and so much for lovers attaching locks and tossing away the keys. We’ve done that. That was the other day.

Something different now. Bridges have a dark side. We’ve heard the diabolical histories of trolls, suicides, executions and assassinations. Take for example, Ponte alla Carraia. This bridge spans Florence’s Arno River two bridges downstream form the more famously picturesque Ponte Vecchio.

It’s the year 1304, May Day. Dante has been exiled from Florence for the past two years, so he has nothing directly to do with this story, except he would have heard the news of the disastrous outcome. Perhaps it’s at this point Dante begins thinking up some lines from the forthcoming Inferno If so, he would could be thinking about them as he wanders a dark Tuscan woods. He imagines coming across those gates of Hell, and he composes the first a of the lines.

Midway through the journey of life, I found myself ln a dark forest, lost to the straight path

Meanwhile, word goes out on the narrow and cobbled streets of Florence that the Devil can be met at the Ponte alla Carraia. The “Carriage Bridge”. The streets on each side of the bridge become tributaries to the human stream flowing toward the river. Creative works and performance art depicting Hell and the Devil’s rule over his realm seems to be in vogue on these days.

…and after it came so long a stream of people…”

What they discover is that players have floated a barge toward the bridge. This is the stage, complete with elaborate scenery and scaffolding depicting the different levels for that City of Woe, as Dante called it. He made them rings.  Far from abandoning hope, this a festive affair for the Florentine spectators looking for a good time.

Still, this bridge’s dark history would not be lost on the audience.

There was a medieval belief that the Devil expected his due once a bridge was completed. The expectation was that the Devil would take the first soul to cross the completed bridge. The sly Florentines devised a plan for tricking the Devil. The plan entailed running a goat across the bridge. The plan worked.  Everyone said so. There were no reports of missing human souls.

It was not as simple as that. According to accounts collected by 19th Century folklorist Charles Godfrey Leland in Legends of Florence, on many nights an apparition in the form of a goat appeared on the bridge, running and casting flames in its wake, running and then inexplicably vanishing in a flash of fire.

Back to the May Day performance.

A significant portion of the city’s 30,000 population must have joined that human stream flowing toward the river and the Ponte alla Carraia. They way it turns out is not good. So many people came to see the Devil and his woeful souls  that the bridge collapses under the weight of the spectators. Hundreds drown, maybe more than that. News of the disaster would spread throughout Tuscany, and surely make it to an exiled poet.

…I never would have believed that Death so many would have undone… Dante Alighieri, Inferno.

Also:

…A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had undone so many… T.S. Elliot, The Waste Land

Mark Twain’s Italian Buzz Cut

Mark Twain was living in the hills north of Florence when he was complaining to a New York Times reporter about the Italian language, and describing his difficulties in learning to converse with the locals. “Why should there be fifty-seven ways of conjugating the verb, ‘to love’, and none of them convincing,” he asked. That was in the Spring of 1904.

Here’s some of the rest of the story, as reported in the Times:

One day Mark returned home to Settignano, where the family had a villa. To the horror of his wife, his beautiful white mane was cropped close to his head, after the manner of Italians in the Summer. When asked to account for this mutilation, he explained in his comic way what he had resorted to this as forlorn hope, a last desperate effort to learn the Italian language. He had, he said, slept for weeks in vain with an Italian dictionary under his pillow. Finally, it occured to him to watch the natives and see if he could catch any peculiarity of theirs that might account for their capacity to master the language. Then he noticed that their heads were all as smooth a billiard balls. Who knew whether the secret did not reside here? Perchance his heavy crop prevented the tongue from filtering through. So he went straight to a barber, with this result. However, this drastic measure does not seem to have proved sucessful, for he expresses himself as much as ever at sea with the tongue.

“I never got hold of an entire sentence” he said. “Just a word here and there that comes in handy, but they never stay with me more than a day.”

(Yes, of course, the picture is Photoshopped. And, no, Italian is not as difficult a language as Sam pretended that it was.)