Difficult loves

Difficult Loves is a collection of early works by Italo Calvino.  Already many of his later pre-occupations can be seen.  In the eponymous stories, we have a series of eleven short tales, bound together by a common thread, yet looking at the same world from different angles.  This was to come to full fruition in Calvino's Invisible Cities, an amazing refraction and re- creation of Venice through a series of similarly different but related stories.

In all of the Difficult Loves, there is a an attention to telling minutiae which immediately stamps the works as Calvino's.  This is not some preoccupation with trivia, but is born out of a close observation of the texture of life.  For example the Adventure of a traveller turns into an almost Proustian savouring of the separate and varying sensations of travelling in a train at night.  There is also an organic logic which leads us beguilingly through the twists and turns of the narrative.  A constantly questioning and inquisitive mind is at play: does this mean this or that?  What were the real motives?  Has this any significance in the larger scheme of things?  In this way the narrow focus of these apparently slight tales is widened until their ramifications seem to spread out to everything. 

Of course, in this respect the initial choice of Difficult Loves as the framework aids the author greatly.  We are dealing with grey situations, cases where there may or may not be a resolution.  The format of eleven stories allows Calvino to encompass all classes and concerns.  Their short span means that no resolution is expected or given.  They are open-ended, the beginning rather than the end.

The longest of them, and perhaps the best and most profound, is the Adventure of a reader. How, you might well ask, can someone whose main characteristic is reading, have an adventure?  But he does, as one slides up to him like the sea beside which he is trying to read.  The fact that a beautiful woman seems intent on seducing him becomes an increasingly tiresome distraction as he gets into his book.  Although we see everything through his riveted eyes, Calvino maps out an impatient world beyond mere books, one that will keep on insinuating itself.  As they begin to make love, the main concern of the reader is that he should not lose his place.

Each of these stories inhabits its own little world which is clearly part of a larger, fuller one.  Each is written in a beautifully economical prose which never intrudes. Each is a gem. 

The other two stories in the volume are rather longer, and less satisfactory.  Smog is a curiously obsessive piece about pollution, both environmental and moral.  As an anti-city polemic it is weakened by its oblique approach.  As a first person narration, it fails to grip.  Similarly, A plunge into real estate begins as a homely story of people getting out of their depth as they try and work with a flash harry property speculator.  But gradually, we realise that this story too has a strong moral overtone, and is all deeply symbolic about La Bella Italia being sold off.  We can be grateful Calvino did not pursue this avenue.

(29.3.86)

Index

Being there - again

There are two main classes of pleasure to be derived from travelling. The first is visiting cities and lands for the first time. The second and more subtle pleasure arises from going there again.

No one can forget the first sight of the Venice, with the water shimmering between the crumbling and delicately-faded palazzi.  The first glimpse of New York, all futuristic towers reaching high into heaven, is breathtaking and indelible.  To walk along the silk road to China in Samarkand, passing the great ruined madressehs with their glistening tiles, is to take footsteps in time, and ones that will remain forever in the memory.

That first shock is understandable enough.  As you stand there, repeating to yourself that you are really in Leningrad, Florence, Cabourg, that this is the place you have read about, imagined, and that there is no other; this huge bridging of expectation and reality is itself such an experience that inevitably it remains with you for ever.

For some people this is enough.  The terrible cry of "I have seen Paris" and therefore lived sates the desire to travel, to see.  For others this is all that they must expect.  After all, there can be no greater folly, and no greater disappointment than returning in the hope of reliving those first pristine experiences.  If you do, you instead become aware of only the flies, or the rain, or the chemical works on the horizon - all things which were present before, but which were swept aside in that first burning vision.

But for those willing to take the risk and persevere in the acquisition of a new travelling skill, the return to a loved and remembered site has its own special rewards.

There is again that unreality of the experience: it is hard to believe that you are really where you are, so outside mundane experience does it lie.  But allied to this there is a strange haunting familiarity, a familiarity deeper than the knowledge acquired passively from books or friends.  It is the fruit of the seeds of that first trip.  A fruit that can only be enjoyed by those who return.  It enables you to see a city or valley with eyes which are wiser for their previous knowledge, and which allow you to seek out those loved aspects, the better to latch on to them, cherish them; or alternatively, to find new depths in half-familiar surroundings, to expand on that first knowledge.

Such were my feelings on returning recently to Aldeburgh.  To see the neat main street, the houses along the sea-front, the pebble beach; all of them were at once old friends but strange.  Strange because I had not seen them for so long, and yet they had an inevitability about them that was striking.  I allowed myself - my memories allowed me - the luxury of wandering at once without direction, and at the same time in the sure knowledge that nothing had changed.  The cinema was still there, the Moot Hall, the fishing boats on the beach.  And as I passed slowly round the town, I felt that I was walking through my own past. And like that past, the town seemed out of time, both old and new.

(21.6.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence (After James Elroy Flecker) 

Index

A walk on the Wildenrath side

You are unlikely to have heard of Wildenrath.  I certainly had not.  It is distinguished for nothing, except being near a minor RAF base.  It lies between Maastricht and Düsseldorf, near the meeting of Holland, Germany and Belgium.  As well as lying at this geographical crossroads, it is situated in the middle of the immense north-western plain of Europe.  The land around it is very flat.

As you approach the area, the flatness becomes more than just a feature; it becomes oppressive. It is not natural, and you feel as if your glance will run away to the horizon and never stop.  It is land without real features; move ten, fifty, a hundred miles in most directions and you will find the same.  Because it exists everywhere, nowhere round here exists at all. 

Wildenrath, then, is just another exemplum, not defined in itself, but only existing as a possibility amongst hundreds of others throughout the region.  It is the very model of a respectable German village. It has dour brick and stone church with a clock-tower and gilded hours on its faces, defining time for all to see.  It has a post office, another sturdy institution which carries no connotations of individual place, only function which is infinitely transferable.  It possesses a butcher's, baker's... and very little else. 

Except for the savings banks, of which there are two in Wildenrath.  For an English town, two would suffice for many thousand people.  Here it seems to cater for a few hundred at most.  The fact that these two members of a chain are present, just like the church and the post office, is not so surprising. The landscape demands it, since it could never take the rooted particularity of a corner grocer's shop, or a restaurant, say.  But more than that, the German character, if one can stoop to such a oversimplification, also seems to demand it.

It says do not waste your money: save it.  It says tie up the loose ends of your domestic economy.  It says keep Germany tidy.  Like the roads, and the houses and the gardens and the cars and the fields.  Even though it was autumn, there hardly seemed to be a leaf out of place.  And yet there were no obvious teams of road-sweepers ready to swoop at the first sign of recalcitrant foliage.  It was as if the trees accepted their Germanness, and themselves kept the roads so neat and tidy.

The houses too were perfect; too perfect.  There is no endearing graceful change with age like the darkening of varnish on an old master, or the criss-cross of lines on an old loved face.  The village stands as a reproof to somewhere like Venice which has resolved to acknowledge time, show its age, but do it with infinite grace.  Instead we have this refusal to accept these frailties.  Like the landscape, time itself has been rendered flat and featureless, with yesterday and tomorrow indistinguishable.

What, then, was the significance of the cigarette dispenser on the wall of a private house?  Is this what they mean by a walk on the Wildenrath side? 

(7.10.86)

Index

The Hills of Venice

Try this simple experiment.  First, find a comfortable chair. Sit in it. Really feel the sensation of being seated - the pressure of the chair on your back, on your haunches, the weight of your hands in your lap.  Relax, feel the shoulders drop under their own weight, feel yourself flow into the chair.  Now wait: thirty seconds, perhaps a minute; think about anything.  Then begin to think - don't do it - about getting up.  Think about the action required, how it will feel. Now try to observe yourself thinking, and start thinking about the sensation of thinking about getting up.  You should find yourself sinking into a pleasant loop: thinking 'I could get up any time - this very instant...but instead I'll wait a little longer and just think about it.'  And you wait a little longer, and think the same thought, and you realise that you could stay like this forever, trapped in the loop, unable to get up. And then, suddenly, you get up.
 
Why? Why at that particular moment, and no other, did you get up, when you had been sitting thinking about getting up just a little while before?  The more you try this exercise, the less it becomes obvious what triggers the final breaking out of the loop.  At various moments you are aware that you could get up, but don't; then, perhaps because you have noticed something around you, because you remembered something, for whatever reason, at that moment and no other, you got up.

Sometimes, when you are climbing a hill, you become very conscious of your feet and their placement, one after another.  You watch yourself just as you did in the chair, but this time the body is active, and part of you is making decisions every second.  Why did you put your foot exactly there next to that stone rather than on it?  Partly because of where you put your previous step - it limited the range of options to perhaps two or three positions.  Then you somehow made a quick judgement about which was best, which one you ‘wanted’.  And so it goes on, each foot determined by its past along with some internal values about where a 'good' foothold is.

A similar but less constrained experience can be had walking round Venice.  The unusual labyrinthine construction of the city means that your path becomes one of simplified choices: shall I turn down this alley, shall I take the left or right path at this junction?  What exactly it means to walk without direction in Venice, trying to walk 'at random', simply choosing the paths you 'feel' like taking, can be tested by noting your route on one day and then returning on another to repeat the experiment.  If you have observed yourself carefully as you made your previous choices it is instructive to watch how often the same basic thought processes seem to occur as if by themselves: I'll turn left here because there is an attractive gateway over there; now I'll go right no, left again, there's a puddle to the right, and so on.

In effect you are still on that hill, your choice this time limited by the streets and junctions you encounter, themselves outcomes of your past selections, with that choice narrowed down by applying a few judgements about which way is 'better'.  Whatever you do, whether you are sitting in a comfortable chair or poised on the brink of a life or death decision, you are always climbing those hills of Venice.

(27.12.93)

See also Moody Sonnets - Invisible Citizen

Index

Invitation to the voyage

Travelling offers a multitude of pleasures. Those of seeing new lands, new peoples; of covering physical distances; of leaving home behind, and with it quotidian cares; of sun, sea, sand or whatever.  But for the connoisseur there is a pleasure which is keener than all these which are achieved once the journey has begun.  It is a pleasure which can be extended indefinitely; a pleasure which is ultimately independent of the act of travel itself.  It is that fine thrill engendered by the preparations for travel.

The idea for travel may come from a thousand sources; books, friends, crossword puzzles, fortune cookies.  But once it is implanted in the mind, it has a habit of taking root, and burgeoning.  Its ramifications and possibilities spread out endlessly; almost involuntarily you find yourself forming images, painting scenes from that journey-to-be.

You begin to read around the subject.  Guidebooks, maps, travellers tales. The destination begins to shape itself; you can hear the street cries, smell the incense, feel the cold tundra wind on your cheek.  As you plan your itinerary, those place-names which were once ciphers stand before you like familiar faces.  Where the map was once a puzzle, an intricate rebus, it becomes now a necklace, where each city and forest is a pearl on the string of your voyage.

At a certain stage, your preconceptions attain the fixity of stars; it is hard to imagine how you could ever have thought otherwise. Yet this knowledge has been flowering inside you from day to day, and started from nothing. Moreover, the growth is rooted in a rich and unique soil; you. 

And so our fantastical images of lands we have yet to see are doubly precious.  First, because they represent a pure, virginal, untrammelled vision.  There are no problems.  If there are beggars in these lands, they are picturesque and touching, like something out of the Old Testament; if there are endless strikes they seem more like eternal fiestas, celebrations of the indomitability of the human spirit; if the food is tasteless and repetitive it is because our Western palates are jaded; we can learn.  The images are precious too because they are shaped by all our previous journeys.  The future affirms the past.

As we build Luxor brick by brick, and sculpt the long-eared figures on Easter Island, we draw on that huge library we carry within us, modifying our fantasies only when some external authority like a guidebook offers incontrovertible evidence on the outward form of things. Otherwise, these possible cities populate a purely internal landscape.

Which is why we may ultimately be loath to confront them with reality. It always turns out that Venice smells, or Samarkand has six-lane dual carriageways.  Dreams and truth are uneasy bedfellows. Sometimes, however seductive the invitation to the voyage may be, we might prefer to refuse it, and so, paradoxically, to retain it.  To reap the many pleasures of travel requires many courages; but none is more basic than that of daring to cross the divide which separates the imagination from the image.

(22.11.86)

See also Moody Sonnets - To A Poet A Thousand Years Hence (After James Elroy Flecker) 

Index

The havs and the hav nots

Tolstoy's neat oppositional pairing of war and peace has prompted others to try their hand at the game. An obvious candidate is death.  Woody Allen's attempt, love and death, is plausible, but ultimately undercut by the fact that his film of the same name is a parody of War and Peace. A more appropriate though more cynical pairing might be money and death.

Certainly in these days of leveraged buy-outs and mega-mergers, death seems the only thing which can stop the juggernaut of the great god Dosh.  This is sadly not true of love which, whether through a lack of moral fibre or simply through diminished fashionability, gives up so easily.  And, as often as not, to money.

Without death, money would be unstoppable and omnipotent. There would be no way to fight back; power would lead to more power, lack of it to less.  One of the reasons for the early success of the Christian religion among the Roman slaves and poor was that it promised everything to those who had nothing. More: it even suggested that the old wielders of power might be barred from entering heaven because of that power.  It broke the cycle. 

Death, like the Christianity based on it, changes the money equation.  It is a truism that you cannot take it with you, but few plutocrats realise you cannot even leave it behind - it can only be left.  Money is promiscuous; once you are gone it belongs to someone else.  Cash has no memory.  Which is why the rich hobnob with artists, commission and buy works from them.  What they seek is a vicarious immortality normally granted to artists alone because they alone can create outside time.

People may say that there is no difference between a pile of money and a pile of manuscripts.  Once you are gone neither will do you much good.  And yet still artists paint, write, compose.  Many are not sure themselves why they do it.  Proust, for example, believed the only true, eternal experience was that of unconscious memory.  Conscious evocation - through writing for example - was a sham. But he wrote, and wrote with a driving obsession which kept him alive against all reasonable odds.

The reasons for this seem to be twofold.  Creating for posterity is, it is true, a pretty barren activity. There is some marginal satisfaction in knowing that your name will live on, that your actions will have made a scratch on life's parchment.  But most artists like everyone else live for now.  The works they create - whether they are printed, read, performed or seen or not - are created for themselves.  They represent for the artist a distillation and justification of their life so far – a proof of existence. 

A minor but perfect example is Jan Morris' Last Letters from Hav.  This fantastical conflation of place and memory is more than intricate variations on the theme of travel, of destination, of elsewhere.  It is a kaleidoscopic view of Ms Morris' internal world, all her Venices and Istanbuls and Moscows rolled into one romantic whole, an impossible but uniquely precious landscape of minarets, statues, towers and fountains.  By creating it, she has achieved something which others have not; she has saved part of her life; and the wealthiest are poor in comparison.
 
(8.2.87)

Index

Unshod for water

In Venice, during the eighteenth century, there was a craze among women for a curious kind of shoe called the zoccolo. In design it was very similar to the worst excesses of modern-day platform shoes, possessing soles of truly ankle-twisting dimensions. Historians have speculated that the fashion was introduced by men as an attempt to limit their wives' scope for running around after lovers in the husband's absence.  Although good historical precedents exist for using footwear as a form of social control - the deranged Egyptian Caliph al-Hakim went even further in the tenth century by banning the production of women's shoes completely - there may be another explanation.

Perhaps far from being wildly impractical, these shoes were, on the contrary, eminently sensible, and designed to cope with that uniquely Venetian phenomenon: Acqua Alta, those conjunctions of wind and tide which contrive to raise the water levels and so flood the city.

As anyone who has experienced Acqua Alta knows, this produces an extraordinary change in a city already unreal.  Where before you had a delicate but well-defined mesh of land and water, of two superimposed but distinct worlds, now you have some indeterminate state.  Along the Zattere, facing the Giudecca, the waves wash slowly in over the stones, covering them to a depth of several inches. The clear boundary between firm land and inconstant water is suddenly gone; you are left only with a sense of vulnerability, of the unnaturalness of dry land when confronted by the dominant mode of this planet – water.

That element's dominion is perhaps demonstrated most clearly in the central locus of Venice: the Piazza San Marco.  Beloved of tourists ever since Canaletto started producing his definitive vision of spatial harmony, the paved arena and its embracing architecture depicted as the quintessence of control and civilisation, under several feet of water the Piazza's area becomes instead a huge mirror of the lowering skies above, and hence nothing so much as an absence.  Its disappearance proclaims the dissolution of all that hard-won order, the peremptory annulment of Venice's presumptuous ancient marriage to the sea.

Elsewhere in Venice its particular geography - it has no hills, only areas more or less above sea-level - means that any rain is condemned to lie where it falls, until the smaller piazzas and streets and passageways become similarly full of spreading sheets of water.

As a consequence, it is almost impossible to walk in Venice at Acqua Alta and to keep your feet dry. With the exception of fully-fledged galoshes, no type of footwear is immune to the effects of the omnipresent water, crept out now of the lagoon like some ancient monster, to take its revenge on the impious inhabitants of this impossible city built on mud-flats and staves.  And so at this time there is an additional melancholy, born of the sight of all the world walking around with cold, sodden feet.  Just as their forebears did one hundred, one thousand years ago.  If nothing else, this water should remind us that it is part of the human condition to get wet feet in this world: to walk on water is only given to the divine.
 
(25.12.91)

Index

Going back

One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was going to the Villa d'Este just outside Rome.  I arrived there one spring afternoon, taking the local train from the capital. I strolled out into the beautiful warming sunshine, and walked down to the Villa.  As I entered, I passed through into a magic kingdom that seemed other-worldly in its beauty and perfection: the steep downward slope with its terraces, each filled with ever more artful fountains whose jets played in the wind, and whose drops caught and fragmented the sun's rays; the huge dark cypresses, swaying slowly, their black greenness a counterpoise to the fountains’ brilliant transparency.  I could readily understand why Liszt was so moved here that he wrote not just one but two of his greatest pianistic masterpieces in an attempt to capture and hold those fountains and those cypresses.

I stayed there for hours, unwilling to leave this extraordinary creation. But eventually I dragged myself away, casting a last glance over my shoulder.  I walked round the town, still dazed from the experience. I remember I bought an ice-cream, real Italian ice-cream, and something about eating it suddenly made me want to see those gardens again.  I gobbled down the rest, and rushed back; it was nearly closing time.  But the gods of the place appeared to be on my side; I paid for the second time, and hurried through to this lost world regained.  As I did so, and began to savour once more the unique sights, something terrible happened: they turned off the water. Before my very eyes the huge and glorious fountains sank down into the ground like deflating balloons.  I was devastated, and left with only the dead husk of my vision.

I learnt from that mistake never to return to somewhere that has provided a perfect experience of this kind.  Or rather never to return soon afterwards.  Because attempting to repeat exactly is bound to fail, bound to disappoint. And yet the urge to return is still there, as it should be for sights really worth seeing. The resolution of this apparent paradox is to wait.  In doing so you can return, and can recapture something - not the same experience, certainly, but a cognate one.

I have now learnt that one of the greatest pleasures is that of returning after some time to places that are rich enough to sustain several visions of themselves.  Visiting New York again, say, you recognise your favourite features - the elegant Chrysler Building, the Citicorp slab, the treasures of the museums, the view from the Windows on the World restaurant - but each trip with its different seasons and circumstances adds something new, provides a different perspective of this city's constant metamorphosis. Staying in Venice again is even richer, a constant re-encounter with your memories, themselves many-layered products of other visits.

And so it is that each fresh view builds these special places in time as well as in space.  In a sense they are made of a special, infinitely absorbent material that can hold each of your key experiences without mixing or vitiating them.  But as I learnt that afternoon outside Rome, this material requires a further special ingredient, which cannot be omitted or skimped: time.  Going back to a place is always safe provided we and the place itself also go back - preferably a long way.

(22.2.92)

Index

Start the day: write

I rise at 6 am.  It is cold and dark, and the only sound is of the wind and the rain outside.  Normally I enjoy this darkness and silence only when I am about to set off on a long journey, and need to start early; which is perhaps what I am doing.  The hour also puts me in mind of dawn walks I have taken through foreign cities, my body clock out of kilter, or simply ignored for the sake of experience – Venice, New York, Torino, San Francisco – where initially I met no one, and then later encounter the reluctant first workers of the day, the ones we rarely see – the cleaners, the security guards, the milk train drivers.  I feel a kinship with them.

I sit at my desk, drinking coffee, my word-processor dark, but my mind beginning to fire.  Ideas bubble up, fall back, sometimes link with others, coalesce.  I try not to be too conscious of the process.  After all, how do we wake up in the first place?  Our minds are – what? Somewhere else? Switched off? Silently and blindly processing?  I try to lean into the quickening flow of ideas as a swimmer leans into the water: lazily and languorously, without effort or anxiety.

Then, washed and dressed, I turn on the word-processor.  As it whirrs and flickers into action, the first shot of adrenaline hits my system.  The enormity of what I am about to attempt clutches at my accelerating heart.  I replace the word-processor disc with one nearly empty, holding a few of my previous essays.  A blank screen comes up and I am faced once more with the apparently impossible task of creating something from nothing, of building a bridge across a huge yawning chasm without the use of scaffolding.

I know from experience that the only way to proceed is to emulate those cartoon characters who run out blindly beyond the precipice: they keep running in a straight line as long as they remain oblivious of the fact that there is nothing beneath them.  Reflection is fatal: as soon as they perceive the untenability of their aerial situation, they plummet instantly like a stone, as if to make up for their tardy plunge.  So now I too simply charge in, the opening line clear in my head as if written in neon, but the rest is darkness.  I know – I hope – that once started the momentum will carry me forward until I attain the haven of the page’s end.

I do.  Then I am confronted by what I have perpetrated.  Those words are mine, and no one else’s; I bear full responsibility.  Like someone who has inexplicably committed some terrible crime, I go back over everything, searching the tiniest details, trying to make it better, trying to make it right.  Sometimes I find comfort in replacing one gawky phrase with another less angular.  But it is a crumb cast to a starveling.

However, there is one real consolation which is independent of what I have produced: it is that I have produced.  Already I have won from the day some tiny attempt at order; whatever else happens to me, I have added a grain of sand to the sandcastle.  As I leave home for my other work, it is with a spring in my step, and with smug self-satisfaction in my heart.  I know that I almost redeemed this day of my life, and justified my existence, however poorly and feebly, by starting aright.

(21.10.89)

See also Moody Sonnets - AI’s Secret

Index

Venetian dawn (21.2.86)

I entered St Mark’s Square as the great clock struck six.  It was just before dawn, and a dark-grey light hung in the air.  No one was to be seen; I was the only movement as I crossed the stones.  I was the only sound.  I felt as if I had stepped on to the world’s greatest stage.

All of Venice is theatre.  Everywhere you go there are backdrops.  Along the canals the palazzi form an ever-changing display of forms that is strangely two-dimensional.  As you walk through the myriad back streets, along narrow alleyways, round sharp corners, you are constantly assaulted by the sudden view, the sight from a bridge, half a facade, teasing like a dramatic revelation.

And yet you are always a player, never part of the audience.  You cannot step back from this stage.  The only spectator is the sea.  The rest of us skulk down the passageways or across the small piazzas like minor characters in a never-ending play.

The most you can hope for is a soliloquy.  Around dawn, even the Venetians sleep.  There are only the buildings, which are not still because the water around them is never still.  There is the constant slow dripping, the waves that lap the stones, the weeds in the water.  You stalk this silent world like a villain in a pantomime, like a lovelorn swain in a vaudeville, like an outcast hero in a melodrama.  But Venice never takes you seriously.  It has history on its side.  It has seen the real thing for centuries.  Besides, who could ever hope to impress a city built on water?

Just after dawn, the first chorus enters.  The light by now has seeped through Venice like the water which reflects it.  Old women move silently, criss-crossing the city.  They carry brooms and mops.  They are the cleaners bound for an office somewhere.  They look more like witches or secret servants of the Night, tidying up yesterday’s loose ends, making room for today, but perhaps they are just stagehands, clearing the stage for the first scene before returning to the shadows which are their home.

After them come the men, the first workers who march out into the lightening air like a deputation from the people, charged with the prologue and waking the audience up.  They move briskly, with decision; some smoke, some whistle; all radiate an air of solidity.

Thereafter there is the first of many crowd scenes as men and women bustle about, and the wakening city gains momentum.  The plot now becomes too complex for mortal eyes; it is hard to tell who is the prima donna and primo uomo.  Perhaps they constantly change; perhaps all parts are equally important.  Besides, you too are part of it now that the first choruses are done and scene has been set.  You must join in or the prompter will be barking ill-temperedly behind you.

And so after seeing the city wake up, the stage swept and the day’s prologue announced, I made my way back through the bustling St Mark’s Square, which was flooded now with the morning sun’s glorious limelight.

(29.7.86)

Index

First steps with Lorenzetti

Some two months after the events which started the gestation of “Walks with Lorenzetti”, I have entered into the phase of writing which I enjoy the most: the sketching-out.  I have spent this afternoon trying to draw up the basic ground-plan of the edifice I wish to construct; once that feels right, in some sense, the writing is simply a matter of time.

For the last eight weeks I have been trying to prepare myself for this spiritually.  I have re-read from time to time my notebook of Venice; I have listened to Vivaldi, read parts of the biography of him; I have gone through a study of Canaletto, read books on Palladio and his influence on the development of art in Britain; I have joined the British Library in an attempt to winkle out information on Visentini, and on that most elusive of characters, Lorenzetti himself.  During this time, even when I have not been actively thinking about the book and its plan and content, I feel the subject matter bubbling away within me like some rich broth which must be reduced down to its concentrated essence.  Nothing is too obscure or too remote from the central subject; nothing is irrelevant.  Those things that I seek and find I may not use; those central elements I have hunted and have so far failed to obtain may well turn out to be unimportant.  Although everything is contingent, this does at least mean that whatever structure I end up with has its own incontrovertible logic.

Now is the best time because everything seems possible.  I can envision a work of stunning originality, enormous amplitude, profound thought and moving insight.  I know it could be the best thing I have ever written; each part could serve the whole and yet offer sharp contrast; the themes I treat will weave deftly in and out of the narrative like weft and warp; the uniquely apt structure, with all its balance and symmetry, offers the chance of near-perfect work.  Above all, this stage is best because I am unhampered by the crude facts of my failure in one or all of these areas, which I shall be forced to confront as the writing itself progresses.

And as the work progresses, so shall my sense of that failure.  Each day it will become harder to motivate myself to continue with this grand fiasco.  I will see that I have over-reached myself, that my pretensions outrun my limited abilities, that what I have tried to create is collapsing under the weight of its own cumbersome superstructure.  Every word I write will be like treacle, squeezed out of me with pain and labour.  Every sentence will be irredeemably stamped with my petty mark, rank with my own stylistic stench.  If and when I finish, I shall be heartily sick of the whole enterprise and doubtful whether I shall attempt anything so ambitious again.

Then, many months or even years later, as I prepare to write what could really turn out to be the best thing of my life, or after I have tried to write it and, once more, failed to bridge the yawning chasm between aspiration and realisation by means of my all-too limited inspiration, I may, perhaps, turn to my poor “Walks with Lorenzetti”.  And although I shall not think it a masterpiece, nor even particularly good, I shall be amazed, as I am amazed now by my other poor work of the past, that I, and no one else, wrote this small work which exists, now, independently of me.

(5.3.88)

See also Walks with Lorenzetti site

Moody Sonnets - Walks with L.

and Moody's Black Notebook Travels - 1988 Venice

Index

Quick, quick, Oslo

I went to Oslo today.  This is not a metaphor.  I drove to Heathrow at five o’clock in the morning, and arrived at six; I checked in at seven, and flew off at eight; I arrived in Oslo at eleven, and left again at six in the evening, arriving back in England at seven.  I was in Oslo for six hours, and travelled for around the same length.  But the question is, was I really in Oslo?

The physical facts are clear; but the mind is not so impressed with the mundane.  It possesses a kind of deep continuity, an in-built resistance to change.  I was at home this morning, and this evening too; therefore, the mind would argue, what seemed to be Oslo in-between was in fact something else – a dream, an illusion, a fantasy.  This effect might be called a kind of mental momentum.

And yet the aerial view of the green land, the thousands of sparkling inlets, the tiny settlements and the fragile network of roads seemed real enough; as did the airport and the drive through central Oslo.  Though even then I felt disoriented: how could I possibly be in Oslo?  Nor was this the first time I had had this difficulty with travel.

Of Oslo I had no pre-conceptions, nor would I have had any chance to test them since my visit was cursory and perfunctory.  But visiting say Venice for the first time is quite different.  There you are encountering your dreams face to face; you meet the reality behind a thousand conjectures.  Perhaps even more so than for the flying visit to Oslo, that crucial first sight of Venice is not of this world.  It is almost impossible to come to terms with the fact that you are in Venice, the Venice.  I distinctly remember saying to myself “this is Venice” in an attempt to locate myself in that new and fabulous landscape.

The problem is that we carry around within us a very strong map with a large sign marked “you are here”.  Changing that map is not easy.  When we are in Venice, the map is still marked London.  The same is true when we are in Samarkand or Delhi or New York.  It seems so incredible that we are there that it is easier to believe instead that it is a kind of heightened and extraordinary vision granted in ordinary but invisible surroundings.

So travel begins to require a real effort on the part of the sensitive traveller.  They must practise gaining a sense of a new place, of being somewhere other.  They must learn to use the expected and unexpected features of a topography as handholds which allow them to clamber – however unsteadily – onto the moonscape of fresh experience.

There are ironies here.  The best traveller always retains a sense of how a place is different.  To do that they must measure against the yardstick of their home environment.  And yet to be truly in another place, they must shift maps, and so lose that yardstick.  Furthermore, we only truly know a place when it is literally familiar to us; but at that stage it is no longer strange, no longer special.  So the end result is that we cannot for the life us think why we wanted to go there.  At least I still want to go to Oslo – or rather, to go to Oslo really.

(13.8.87)

See also Moody's Black Notebook Travels - 1989 Oslo

Index