Fine Arts – wanderwarbler

October 20, 2023October 22, 2023

Venice: Mal De Mare

Ladies, you who find yourselves still free and unbound

by those strings of love

in which I and so many others are entwined.

If you long to know what this

Love is, who made himself Lord and God

Not only in our, but in ancient times.

It’s a burning affliction, a vain desire

A deceptive shadow, a wilful deceit

for whom you forget yourself and your own good;

a breathless quest for a little pleasure

that you never find, or if you do,

will only cause you sorrow and ruin.

The Venetian poet Gaspara Stampa was born 500 years ago. In her lifetime she was hailed as the greatest female voice of the Italian Renaissance: a sought-after singer and performer at the accadamie, the literary salons, she was dubbed a “Sappho de’ nostril dì” (a Sappho of our days) not only but most notably by fellow poet Benedetto Varchi. Like the ancient Greek singer, Stampa too was a poet of love, of loss and recollection, and like Sappho’s, her poems were of great musicality: to be sung and performed. Her only published work, Rime di Madonna Gaspara Stampa, which tell of her suffering from an unhappy love affair with a noble man, appeared in 1554, six months after the aforementioned lover had announced his marriage to another woman, and six months after Gaspara Stampa’s sudden death at thirty-one.

All the fires of hell together

next to my great flame

are nothing, or little;

for where hope is gone

the soul, bound to always part,

accustoms itself to a grief that never changes.

My torment is greater

because it tastes of yesterday’s joys

thanks to hope;

and this wavering pattern

of joy and torment

makes my suffering all the greater (300/231)

The book was published in a hurry – most likely to benefit from the scandal her presumed suicide caused in the Venetian society. Stampa was only thirty-one, childless and unmarried. The parish register of Santi Gervasio e Protasio recorded the cause of death as mal de mare, seasickness.

Despite the book’s instant success, Stampa soon fell into oblivion. When she was re-discovered, in the late 18^th century, the literati of the early enlightenment romanticized her as the devoted, suicidal lover, or discredited her as a courtesan; in any case they belittled her work. With the honourable exception of R.M. Rilke, it was only within the last two decades that the multi-layered grandezza of Stampa’s work been rediscovered, and her name restored as a confident, idiosyncratic poet. Stampa was not (only) a female, but a feminist voice that addressed the obstacles women faced then, and half a millennium later, still do.

Weep, Ladies, and may Love weep with you, since he who hurt me does not cry.

Stampa’s legacy has too long been overshadowed by the question of her sexuality. Much energy has been put into proofing that a woman who writes as beautifully and lovingly could not have been a courtesan. But to answer this question, after 500 years, we must pose many more questions, and most importantly ask ourselves: Why do we need to know so urgently?

Like her contemporaries, Stampa wrote in the Petrarchan tradition, but undermined the patriarchal codes through female agency and sensuality. Whereas Petrarch adored his Laura from afar, Stampa lay in her lovers’ arms. Whereas Laura was voiceless, Stampa spoke as a woman to women. While Petrach’s gaze was male, Stampa did more than gaze: She lived. She lived in Venice, a city embedded in the sea.

The little fish

that only in water lives, and breathes,

expires, the moment

he exits the water.

View from Stampa’s home – where later Rilke stayed.

If the city of Venice is shaped like a fish, then Stampa’s neighbourhood, now called San Trovaso, is the gills. Indeed, water in all its forms plays a vital role in her poetry: tears, rain, fountains, waves, and, of course, the Adriatic Sea.

My life is a sea and the waves are my tears

the winds are breaths of sighs

my hope is the ship and my desires

the sail and the oars, that chase it forward.(40)

Stampa’s Venice is not the city of lavish, stuccoed palaces, but the foggy lagoon. L’umor, liquidity, represents the female, the nurturing, the all-embracing element. In its progression, from spring to sea, water symbolizes life, and in its eternal spiralling outwards, self-realisation. As pelago, the stormy sea, it stands, in Stampa’s poetry, for love, death, and oblivion.

You women who have recently embarked

upon these waters full of treachery

and full of error, love’s deep and boundless sea

where so many ships have been snapped in two,

Beware! And don’t go out too far,

or you’ll loose your chance of ever escaping;

Don’t trust in calm waters or favourable winds

that change course so quickly, as happened to me. (64)

Water, like life, like love, is ungraspable. But to Stampa, a highly educated Renaissance woman, water was not bestowed with any magic or divine powers, as it was according to the hitherto popular (medieval) teachings of Natura Magica. Nature was not governed by occult celestial forces anymore, but had become explainable, calculable, comprehensible through our senses.

Wicked Woman, turn your face to me

My lord cries out, suspended from the cross,

And my blind senses fail to grasp

His angry voice that’s mingled with pure pity.(279/307)

A century before Galileo, Venice had pushed God from the pedestal as the “unmoved mover, il motore immobile already. The Venetian Republic was pioneering in natural sciences, as the long list of inventions – from double-entry book-keeping to quarantine laws to the first factory line – proves.

Philosopher and scientist Bernardino Telesio, teaching at the time at the near-by university of Padua, then the most renowned university of the Western world, postulated that the world was made up of two forces – the sun, hot, and the earth, cold. Water, he said, is the only state for us to comprehend the incomprehensible.

In the run of 310 poems that make up the collection Stampa’s identifies her lover as the nobleman and mercenary Count Collaltino di Collalto. That Stampa positioned her alter ego Anasilla as the active, desiring lover in a consumed, yet unrequited love affair with a real man, demonstrates the oxymoronic standing of women in Venetian society.

O night, to me more luminous and blessed

than the most blessed and luminous of days,

night, worthy of being praised

by the rarest geniuses, not just by me,

You alone have been the faithful minister

Of all my joys, all that was bitter

in my life you’ve rendered sweet and dear

and placed me in the arms of the man who bound me. (104)

The city was torn between a stark catholic veneration of the Virgin Mary and of Venus Anadyomene, the goddess rising from the sea, who served as the city’s icon. In the 16^th century, the long tradition of eroticism in Venetian art culminated in Titian’s portraits of the Belle Veneziane, Venetian Gentlewomen with their breast exposed, or Tintoretto’s Gloria del Paradiso at the Palazzo Ducale, which alludes more to an orgy than to an angelic convention. Even altar pieces and church ceilings were peopled with saints in the throes of passion: Taunt skin over bulging muscles, as seen in the Fumiani’s ceiling painting at church San Pantaleone, or in Titian’s assumption of the Virgin Mary in the chiesa Sta Maria Assunta, where he depicted the angels flanking Virgin Mary in the throes of passion.

Arousal seemed to be the end of Venetian poetry as well, as demonstrated in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, or the obscene writings of Pietro Aretino. If Stampa wasn’t as explicit as these two superstars of the 16^th century literary scene, she left no doubt:

Since every hour I learn new delights

In love along with joys unusual,

Ever seeing in that angelic beauty

Some new pleasure or some new miracle.

Venice’s Virgin-Venus-dichotomy can also be expressed in numbers: For a population of 180,000, there were 138 churches, and, as an English traveller in the 17^th century wrote home, 11,000 courtesans. The number of courtesans might have been exaggerated. Not all of the so-called honourable or honest Courtesans, cortigiane oneste, were listed in the “Catalogo di tutte le principali e piu honoreate cortigiane di Venezia,” a kind of telephone book for upper class men, or a travel guide for noble gentlemen from abroad. Gaspara Stampa’s name is not in the book.

Instead, Stampa likened herself to Mother Mary. On the occasion of Christmas 1548, which happened to be the time she met her lover, Count Collaltino for the first time, Stampa allegorizes her heart to the virginal womb:

It was near the day the creator

came in human form to reveal himself

when he could have stayed in his lofty domain

issuing forth from the virginal womb,

that my illustrious lord, for whom

I have scattered so many laments,

and who might have lodged in a place more sublime,

made himself a nest and refuge in my heart. (II)

In this stanza, Virgin Mary is not merely the vessel, but the a virginal creator, the single producer of God’s human form. Stampa depicts her heart as a womb that cradles however not a lover, but love per se – an important distinction: while Mary is sanctified as Mother of God, Stampa makes herself Mother Of Love: she places love above the lover.

In a reversal of traditional roles, her male lover becomes her muse, and not her Lord. While she gets to speak, to write, to act, her Count Collaltino is not given a voice. He goes down in history as Stampa’s doubtable lover.

Apparently, Stampa never hoped for a child. In her time, pregnancy was a life-threatening state for a woman. Aware of the high risk of death during childbirth, women wrote their will with every pregnancy – starting at an early age and writing many wills in the run of their fertile years. Stampa never wrote a testament – her poetry is testimony enough of her suffering:

I burned, I wept, I sang, I weep, I burn

I sing, I’ll weep, I’ll burn, I’ll always sing

(till death or time or fortune dissolve my wit,

my eyes and heart, my style, my tears and fire. (XXVI)

Stampa’s poems are of an extraordinary passion – rivalling Rumi in his heart break, and yet, her suffering does not lead to spiritual delivery or heavenly assumption. Her suffering is immediate, physical, existential.

Those hot tears and those sighs that you see me

expelling so forcefully they could bring

the storm-tossed sea to a sudden halt

when it’s at its wildest and most violent. (58)

In a mercantile society like the Republic of Venice everything was purchasable. Art, faith, and love were business like any other, in form of commissioned art, sacral art, arranged marriages and prostitution.

Prostitution was regarded a source of income for the city. The courtesans’ taxes filled the city’s coffers, and, with tourism already a major economic driver, their fame and the prospect of sexual adeventures attracted noblemen from all over Europe. Besides, the image of the honest or honourable courtesan, a beautiful, sophisticated, and independent woman, served Vencie well flaunting the legendary personal liberties the city supposedly afforded her citizens through everlasting peace and democracy.

The courtesans’ social standing differed wildly from that of the lowly prostitute. Courtesans were highly educated, polyglot, trained musicians and fashion-trendsetters – often charging for their services (conversation, music, or sex) separately. Honest courtesans were unaffordable but for the highest echelons of Venetian circles and more often than not hailed from wealthy families themselves, the mother acting as go-between for her daughter. Forming part of intellectual circles, and often hosting salons themselves, they were well-known socialites, performers, poets, and musicians in their own right.

Tintoretto at Scuola Grande di San Rocco

Although in earlier centuries prostitution had been heavily regulated, the city administration changed its policy in the 16^th century due to a rise of homosexuality within the population. Considering female prostitution the lesser evil of the two, they started actively supporting brothels. At the Ponte delle Tette (Bridge of tits) prostitutes were decreed to advertise themselves bare-breasted, a sight believed to convert young men to heterosexuality.

Homosexuality was not the only thing on the upswing in the 16^th century. So were book publishing and vernacular literature. The rising number of independent printers and publishers made literature easily accessible, also for those traditionally barred from education: women.

Oh Love, what strange and wonderful fits:

one sole thing, one beauty alone,

can give me life and deprive me of wits (Rime 28)

Titian at Sta Maria Assunta in Canareggio district

While social mobility and personal freedom in a mercantile democracy were indeed greater than in the aristocratic or feudal city states, women were excluded from politics and public life. Only men were citizens; only men bore arms; only men could be lords or kings. Women were subject to their fathers, then to their husbands or – since the costly dowry system afforded even in patrician families only the first-born daughter to get married – a convent. Sumptuary laws explicitly regulated women’s outfit, from hairdo to jewellery and clothes, precisely indicating their marital status. A woman was but a daughter, a wife, a nun.

Love, how can you put up with this? While you insist

On my fidelity

I’m left with no mercy-

No, without life, myself in the balance! (310)

While men were famously granted great liberties in Venetian society, women were expected to live in taciturn chastity. In fact, the entire system relied on women’s chastity. A household would only be continued if men could rely on the legitimacy of their offspring; A man had to be sure of his daughter’s chastity to transfer her to another man’s household. As property, women were not worthy of erudition.

Stampa was lucky as were few Venetian women. Born into a well-off bourgeoise family, after her father’s death, she and her sister received the same education and training as her brother. It was her mother who made sure of it. In her salon in Santi Gervasio e Protasio, which was frequented by leading artists and intellectuals, Stampa was early on introduced into the artistic circles of Venice. Later, she became a member of several other literary salons, accademie, where she was praised for the beauty of her voice. An acclaimed singer and influential socialite she was high in demand by various writers and composers who hoped to gain fame and access to higher echelons if she interpreted their works.

Titian Fresco at Fondamento Tedesco, now Accademia dell’ arte

Apart from some but by no means all convents, the demi-monde was hence the only place for women to achieve erudition and self-realisation. Outside the restrictions of society, as courtesans, they could live in economic independence at least for their working years.

It was however a freedom that came with precarity: Exposed to sexually transmittable diseases, to scorn and contempt, to rape and violence. With no set of laws to protect them, they were at the mercy of a protector, a wealthy man, who might change his taste in women any day. If as lovers they were desired, as wives they didn’t qualify – something hasn’t changed, at least not until Pretty Woman.

My destiny is harsh, but harsher still

Is that of my Count; he flees me

I follow him; other men consume themselves for me,

I can’t look at other beauties.

I hate the one who loves me, and love him who scorns me

If he submits to me, my heart protests

While I submit to the one who gives me no hope

To such strange taste have I educated my soul (310)

Count Collaltino famously married someone else, but Stampa didn’t die from a broken heart as the romantically inclined would like it. Her alter ego Anasilla indulges in her suffering, but then finds herself a new lover in whose arms she lies in the final poems of the collection. Poem 57 reveals an astonishingly ambivalent picture of her adoration:

Why do they wear themselves out.

Painting you on canvas, sculpting you from marble

All those who made a name of themselves in this art

Like splendid Buonarotti, or Titian?

When I have sculpted you openly and plainly just as you are

In every piece of my heart and my mind

So your image will never fade

Whether you’re near or far.

But maybe you would like to be depicted

As loyal and gracious, which I how you appear

In all your acts and dealings with others.

Whereas, alas, I can hardly tell you

I carry you around just as I see you

A little inconsistent and disdainful. (206)

Recent research has revealed that many of the love poems believed to be addressed to Count Collaltino, where in fact directed towards Giovanni della Casa, whom she tried to flatter by calling him count. Della Casa had recently published “Il Galateo”, a popular and influential book on formal etiquette and good manners. Indeed, Stampa’s writing was to a much greater extent geared towards improving her social standing, expressing the hope of being embraced by society and not by a specific, single man. She demanded the standing of a man, not a man.

It is probably in this sense that one must read her solidarity when she warns other women — and probably courtesans — of the moody waters of the lagoon: that the moments of equality were short and limited to soirées at the accademie.

At various occasions Stampa addresses her bassezza, her lower social standing (Egli è nobile, e bel, tu brutta, et vile/ egli larghi, tu hai li cieli avari: he is noble and handsome, you are ugly and base, with him the sky is wide open, for you depressing) and it is through talent and wit and erudition that she in her poems puts herself on par with Vergil, Petrarch, and Sappho. As Rilke would later put it, she earned her gravitas, dignity, through her passion for the infinito – the infinity of her suffering, but not from a broken heart, but from a broken world – a blurred distinction in both poets.

Stampa’s mental health was reported to become increasingly fragile, and short before her sudden death, she suffered a nervous breakdown, or, as it would be called today, a burn-out.

Love has made me like one who lives in flame.

To the world I’m some new salamander;

Nor less strange than that eternal creature

That lives and dies, its nest and pyre the same. (206)

Despite the overwhelming beauty and passion of her writing, Stampa’s emancipation and continuous self-empowerment, her breaking into a male dominated world, her trying to advance in society by her own merits, was probably the most outrageous aspect of her work, and still is. As a woman writing for women, Stampa championed women’s rights. In her poems, she overcame the irresolvable dichotomy with which women are confronted to this day: She was Venus and virgin, lover and beloved, fire and water. And most likely, she was a courtesan, a most honourable profession.

For lack of evidence, the question whether Stampa was a courtesan or not remains unresolved. But if there is a lesson to be learned from her poetry than it is that the answer to this question is irrelevant. Gaspara Stampa died early, unmarried, and childless, in or from a world where carving out a room for one’s own was a matter of life and death.

May 17, 2023May 18, 2023

Paris: The Poet and the Unicorn

Oh, this animal that is not
They didn’t know it, and anyway
-from its gait, its posture, its nape,
to its shining silent gaze – they loved it.

Although it wasn’t. But because they loved it, it was
a pure animal. They always left room
and in this room, clearly outlined
it softly lifted its head, and barely needed to

be. They fed it no grain
always only the possibility to be
and that gave such strength to the animal

that from its forehead it drove a horn. A horn.
To a virgin it appeared in white
and it was in her silver mirror, and in her.

During his stay in Paris, from 1902 till 1914, the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke frequently took the short walk to the Musée de Cluny in the Quartier Latin. The ancient cloister turned museum had recently acquired a set of six medieval wall carpets: colourful tapestries, woven from dyed silk and wool, which depicted a noble woman and her lady in waiting flanked by a lion and a unicorn in a flowery garden.

Little was known of the tapestries’ provenance. Given their high quality, their manufacture, a highly collaborative effort by various professions, must have commanded an outrageous price. Much more than Michelangelo was paid to paint the Sistine Chapel, and of course, much more than Leonardo Da Vinci got for his Mona Lisa (then and now at display at the Louvre) which was, as is commonly known, nothing. Nevertheless, La Dame à la Licorne (the Lady with the Unicorn) was soon dubbed the medieval Mona Lisa, as she was as beautiful and as puzzling as Leonardo’s. Transcending the ages, her gaze too is elusive so enigmatic as if, as Rilke has it, she had in advance erased all the words that could have captured her.

There is indeed something transcendental about the tapestries. Like messengers of an eternal spring the thousand flowers of their millefleur pattern – hyacinths, asters, columbines, jasmines, violets and veronicas and many more – never wither. Together with the frolicking birds and the secretive little creatures like rabbits, sheep, and puppies, they instill a celestial ease into the gloomy museum halls, as if the old, cold cloister were an eternal garden of Eden: softening the electric light, muting the city sounds that seep in through the windows. In this silky, woolen silence, Rilke must have felt respite from the unbearable, feverish chaos of the big city. When he arrived, 1902, Rilke hated Paris. He wrote home:

I want to tell you, dear Lou, … that I’m gripped with horror of everything that, like in an unspeakable confusion, is called life, and how alone I am in between these people, how perpetually neglected by everything I encounter. Cars run through me. Those in a rush make no detour, but stomp full of contempt over me, like skipping over a puddle of old water.

The turn of the century had ushered in a new age: modernity, the age of motorization, industrialization, and Paris was the capital of this brave new world: a bustling, pulsating metropolis. The world’s third-biggest city was the centre of science and art. The Eiffel Tower, a symbol of progress and linearity, had only recently been erected and now pierced a sky smudged with the blackish exhausts of machines and factories. The click-clack of horse-drawn carts was replaced by the stinking roar of the stuttering new motor cars. The rues and avenues were crowded with passers-by, passing anonymously, merely transients among transients, abandoned and left to themselves in their own fates, in Rilke’s words. The brimming hospitals, the filthy back lanes, the poverty and misery of the city plagued the pale, blue-eyed poet.

Oh, a thousand hands have constructed my fears, and my fears have grown from a far-flung village into a city, a big city, where the unspeakable happens…” he wrote to Lou. “I arrived last August, in the time when the trees wither without autumn, and the lanes glow, splayed from the infinite heat and one walks through the odours like through many sad rooms.

Rilke had spent the previous years in the sandy solitude of the North Sea coast. Now, he was overwhelmed by a life that, though recklessly driven, seemed to have lost its momentum, like a carousel that, turning faster and faster, appears to stand still. Life, mechanical, technical, anonymous, devoid of its sensuality, has become sense-less. Life lost in superficiality has become death itself.

There is one way to read the “Lady with the Unicorn.” The five smaller tapestries depict the five senses: Taste. Smell. Touch. Sound. Vision. The sixth tapestry, the largest of the series, presents the sixth sense which crowns human existence. Mon Seul Désir, a heraldic banner above the Lady’s adorned head says. But what is this only desire, what this sixth sense? The Livre de Vraye Amour of 1503, a translation of Plato’s Symposion claims that the culmination of all five senses, the final and only object of human desire is beauty – the kind one cannot grasp with the senses: love.

“I’m learning to see,” says the protagonist of his only novel The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge. Rilke wrote the book during his stay in Paris, no doubt to come to terms with the city, in his words, to make something of his fears. It is rather an anti-novel, written in the stream of consciousness technique ten years before Ulysses (James Joyce lived in Paris at the same time), and Mrs Dalloway (Virginia Woolf was an avid reader of Rilke). Malte Laurids Brigge, a young man newly arrived from Denmark, wanders through the streets of Paris, lonely and estranged. He, too, visits the Musée de Cluny and is smitten by the Lady with the Unicorn.

I am the impression yet to transform. Oh, it takes just a little to understand, to approve of it all. Only one step, and my misery would be bliss.

The Venus of Milo, on display at the Louvre since 1821, is the ideal of classic beauty – and one of the Louvre’s main attractions.

This is not purely an existentialist invitation to embrace the absurd – although Rilke anticipated much of the French existentialism that would bloom a few decades later in his old neighbourhood, the Quartier Latin. Learning to see meant to learn to take in: the German einsehen which means both to gain insight but also to understand, to empathize. In a way, Einsehen was his way of creating things of his fears, as he wrote to Lou. But it was also a technique that required him to become both the seer and the seen – Rilke and Brigge – at once. Looking at the headless torso of Apollo at the Louvre, Rilke writes:

…for here there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your life

However, blurring the lines between the outside and the inside came at a high cost for Rilke. Paris, the city that with its museums and art made him a poet, was also the backdrop of his existential crisis.

So then, this is where people come to live, I’d rather say, this is a place to die

This is the opening line of The Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge. In the following pages Rilke gives a detailed account of Belle Epoque Paris, a term coined only decades later, no doubt in post-war nostalgia. To Rilke, the belle ville resembled a ship of fools: There is a man coming round the corner from the Champs Elysées carrying a crutch, there a woman pushing a barrel organ on a hand cart, there are the shop keepers in the rue the Seine, the man selling cauliflowers from a barrow of vegetables, there are the patients waiting at the psychiatric Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, the women feeding the birds, the man with St. Vitus Dance, the blind newspaper-seller. As Brigge observes the squalor and misery of the poor and sick, Rilke is terrorized that he might become one of them. He writes to Lou:

Oh Lou, I suffered, day after day. Because I understood that all these people, though I tried to evade them, couldn’t hide their secrets from me. They pulled me from myself into their lives, through all their lives, all their burdened lives.

Lou was not his wife, nor the mother of his little daughter. Lou was his amour fou, the acclaimed writer and psychoanalyst Lou Andreas-Salomé. Once, Rilke had burned with love for her.

There is another way to read the Lady with the Unicorn. It is hard to oversee the sexual connotation of the erect horn in the presence of a young, beautiful woman. Some historians argue that the Lady with the Unicorn was but no more than a celebration of sensuality, of sex.

The unicorn was commonly known to be a wild creature bestowed with the magic ability to heal sickness and render poisoned water potable. Pure and white, like a virgin, it was also savage and untamed, with a phallic cone growing from its head. In its ambivalence the unicorn unified good and bad, male and female. First described by the Greek Physician Ctesias as pale and blue-eyed with a white horn, it was later mentioned by Aristoteles, Pliny the Elder, and Julius Caesar. It featured prominently in the Bible as well as on altar pieces, where it stood as a symbol for Jesus Christ. Only the council of Trent, held in the middle of 16th century – after the tapestries supposed weaving – banished the unicorn from the Bible, which of course didn’t stop it from roaming freely in the rest of the world.

The banishing – the capture and killing – of the unicorn was common in Europe until the late 16th century. Because of its healing powers unicorn horn was traded at exorbitant prices. Shakespeare gives a detailed description of the unicorn hunt in Timon of Athens. Leonardo da Vinci explains in his notebooks, how alternatively, the unicorn could be lured by means of a virgin: The unicorn, through its intemperance and not knowing how to control itself, for the love it bears to fair maidens forgets its ferocity and wildness; and laying aside all fear it will go up to a seated damsel and go to sleep in her lap, and thus the hunters take it. In other contemporary accounts, the virgin then trapped the unicorn in a silver mirror.

When Lou Andreas-Salomé met Rilke, she was, although sixteen years his senior and married, a virgin. The intellectual feminist had until then tried to pursue a strictly rational, intellectual life. But Rilke seduced her with his poetry, – or, as the lore goes – with one specific love poem, as haunting and overwhelming today as it must have sounded to her:

Extinguish my eyes: I can see you
slam my ears shut: I can hear you
and without feet I can walk towards you
and without a mouth I still beseech you.
Break off my arms, I will hold you
with my heart as a hand
strangle my heart, and my brain will beat
and if you throw my brain into the flames
I will carry you in my blood.

THe Hermaphrodite was a popular motif in the classical world. In the statue shown at the Louvre, the ancient Greek statue is laid on a mattress sculpted by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

Lou Andreas-Salomé was not only Rilke’s lover. She was his inspiration, his editor, his soul-sister, his mother, his therapist, and, finally, she left him– which made his love burn the fiercer. It transcended the erotic and the romantic, until Lou was not his lover, but his be-loved. One cannot help but see Lou there by the unicorn. Or was he, Rilke, the Lady himself?

Rilke had spent the first years of his life as a girl, long-haired, in dresses with frills. As a fashion, this was not entirely uncommon in nineteenth century Prague, where he was born in 1875. But his mother really wanted him to be a girl, an ersatz daughter for a first-born child who had died young. She gave him a traditional girl’s name, René Maria, which Lou Salomé convinced him to change to the more masculine Rainer Maria. Of frail health and feminine physique, Rilke suffered during his years at the strict military school. In a poem dedicated to Lou Salomé he wrote:

A younger brother’s voice

I’m dripping away, I’m dripping away
like sand dripping through fingers
I have at once so many senses
that all are thirsty differently
I feel myself in hundred parts
swell and ache

But most of all right in my heart

I want to die. Leave me alone.
I believe, I will succeed
in being so scared
that my pulses will burst.

As much as he suffered from being the fille manquée to an unloving mother and an absent father, as an adult he struck his contemporaries as feminine and sexually ambiguous. Freud-disciple Lou Salomé diagnosed the hypochondriac with hysteria. In his writing, private and published, Rilke cultivated such profound love for the feminine, for womankind, that W.H. Auden dubbed him the greatest lesbian poet since Sappho. Stefan Zweig, who visited Rilke in Paris, later wrote in The World of Yesterday: Everything masculine caused him physical discomfort. In conversation, he was more at ease with women, and on paper he corresponded with women freely and frequently. He was freer in female company. In his “Letters to a Young poet,” which he sent from Paris to an aspiring (male) writer in Austria, Rilke wrote:

Women, in whom life lingers so much more fertile and faithful, must be the more mature humans – humans more human than man, who, light and superficial for lack of an unborn’s weight, hastily underestimates what he believes to love… one day there will be a woman, whose name will not anymore signify but the opposite to the masculine, but something in itself, something that won’t need completion or limitation, but will mean only life and existence: the female human…

In the run of his life, Rilke had many love affairs, ranging from the madly erotic to the madly platonic. Yet, with the exception of Lou Salomé, to his lovers he remained distant, ungraspable, shrouded in an air of solitude. If his only desire was to love like a woman, he failed in life, but he succeeded on paper.

Rilke came back to the theme of the unicorn at various stages in his life. In addition to his musings in the Notebook of Malte Laurids Brigge, he wrote three more unicorn poems.

Choosing between the Lady and the unicorn, he might have settled for the mirror.

Lady with the Unicorn

Woman and noble: surely we hurt
A woman’s fate that we don’t understand
For you we are the still not mature
for your life, when we brush it,
turns into a unicorn, a shy white creature
that flees – and fears
and dissolves, disappears
and after much sadness you’ll find it
still scared, warm, and out of breath

then you remain apart, far from us
pass your hands through every day’s chores
the things humbly serve you
but you have just one wish fulfilled
that once a unicorn will find its calming face
in your soul’s heavy mirror.

December 4, 2020January 13, 2021

Italy: Exile

“There should be a history of this Italy, a history outside the framework of time, confining that which is changeless and eternal, in other words, a mythology. This Italy has gone its way in darkness and silence, like the earth, a sequence of recurrent seasons and misadventures. Every outside influence has broken over it like a wave, without leaving a trace.”

In 1935, the anti-fascist activist Carlo Levi was arrested by the Mussolini administration in his hometown Turin in Northern Italy and exiled to Lucania, today’s Basilicata -region, the instep of the Italian boot. He spent a year in the two villages Grassano and Aliano among the poverty stricken peasants. After the war, he published his memories in his book, “Christ stopped in Eboli”, which turned into an immediate best seller – and led to social reforms.

Lucania was an impoverished province deep in the South, far from Rome. A barren landscape jagged with ravines and steep gorges, dented by barren peaks, freezing in winter and suffocating in summer, when Malaria was buzzing in the air. A hostile place, so outlandish, it was barely part of Italy, barely part of Europe, and, as Levi was to find out, barely part of this world.

The vast land lies confined under a heavy, billowing sky. Nature is not an all-embracing source of life here, but a grim, heart-breaking beauty, a moody goddess that demands sacrifice and worship. Packs of wolves and wild boars patrol the valleys, claim their territory in moonlit nights. The villages sit on the hill tops, dwarfed by the immensity of the landscape. Little stone houses huddled together, leaning into the mountain, to hide from the winds: the burning Scirocco that brings the Sahara heat, and the cold storms from the North, that bring the rains. But rains don’t fall in Lucania. They pour down in violent torrents. Until the end of the last century, landslides regularly took with them whatever was in their way – trees, the peasants’ humble stone huts, the little country churches – and left swamps that housed the dreaded mosquitoes.

Levi, then 33 years old, a doctor by training and painter by vocation, was appalled by the living conditions of the peasants. Paralysed by malnutrition, malaria, and various other consuming diseases, they stoically lived on a meagre diet of dark bread with the occasional crushed tomato or a thin slice of sausage. The soil didn’t yield much. The land is fit for olive trees, not wheat, as the peasants were to cultivate, and the goats, the peasants’ only source of revenue, were heavily taxed by the Mussolini regime. Most farmers couldn’t afford their goats anymore and had to kill them. Whether as small-scale farmers or working the fields of the rich landowners in a quasi-feudal system, the peasants barely managed to feed their children. Their life was a struggle, but a struggle they were willing to keep up, for centuries, or rather: since time began.

I was struck by the peasants’ build: they are short and swarthy with round heads, large eyes, and thin lips. Their archaic faces do not stem from the Romans, Greeks, Etruscans, Normans, or any of the other invaders who have passed through their land, but recall the most ancient Italic types. They have led exactly the same life since the beginning of time, and history has swept over them without effect.

The Lucanians had been living here since 500 BC, working their fields, which they rarely owned. Foreign powers passed through the land on their conquering sprees, the Langobards, the Byzantines, the Saracens, the Swabians, for whom Lucania was only of strategic importance. After the Italian unification in 1961, landownership passed, not to the peasants, but to local aristocracy, or Northern investors, or international companies. But no one ever settled here. They all stayed in their far away palaces in the big cities, and the peasants were left on their own.

Lucanians themselves dreamed of a promised land. Lucania was their homeland, but they wished for another place where they could leave all their hunger and misery behind. They dreamed of America.

When Levi arrived, more men had emigrated to New York than remained in the villages. But many would return after a few years and pick up their previous peasants’ life right where they had left it. Lucanians were, quite literally, inseparable from their land.

Their footprints mark the ancient paths, crossing clearest mountain springs, of which every gurgle transports the voice of the ancestors, a song that sweetens the memories. Hidden in the shadowy shrubs the paths climb uphill to where rusty windmills chew time. Here dreams are made of dust and innocence, and days are uncertain, provisional, and turn to ash in the cry of thunderstorms, in the hurling of landslides, in the growling of earthquakes. Here, where the imaginary is engraved in the sandstone, only the rough fingers of the peasants can decipher what the furious winds have written, her children, in the darkness of Earth.

This is the beginning of Vito Ballava con le Streghe, (Vito danced with the witches), a traditional tale of Lucania. (translated by wanderwarbler from Mimmo Sammartino’s book). It beautifully explains how the peasants’ self-awareness, their identification is entangled, or dependant on their land. Each being is inseparable from the nature that surrounds them: like a leaf to a tree, the peasant belongs to Lucania, like a falcon to the sky. There is no boundary between the world of humans, animals, and spirits. Everything is ensouled. Everything is – not symbolically, but actually – divine.

Like a drop of water in the steady flowing river, the peasant was not individual, but part of a community – a community of peasants, villagers, humans, living beings, of the material world, or the spiritual world. Where everything is connected, acts upon each other, the lines are blurred – between dream and awakening, between yesterday and tomorrow is blurred. Or like Carlo Levi expressed it: They live submerged in a world that rolls independent of their will, where man is in no way separate from his sun, his beast, his malaria, where there can be neither happiness, as literary devotees of the land can conceive it, nor hope, because these two are adjuncts of personality and here there is only grim passivity of a sorrowful Nature.

Because of this pagan view of the world, Levi called his book: Christ stopped at Eboli. Eboli is the last train station before entering Lucania from the North. Jesus Christ, so the peasants say, never came to Lucania. They meant that in their misery they were forgotten even by God. But it also meant that despite the village chapels scattered all over the land, and numerous catholic festivities, the teachings of the Catholic church had never entered their minds. The peasants didn’t believe in free will, and pursuit of happiness, or some personal holiness. They believed in the eternal rule of an ever repeating cycle of nature, where everything is determined before.

Destiny is already written in stone for everyone, so the peasants say.

Stoically, the Lucanians accepted their fate, a fate that is not compassionate or partisan, nor merciful. A fate needed to be faced in patience and silence.

Of what use are words? None. What can you do? Nothing.

What was strictly separated though, was the world of men from that of women. While the man were working the fields, it was the women who peopled the village during the day.

They seemed to me all alike, with their faces framed by a veil folded several times and falling over their shoulders, pale cotton blouses, wide, dark bell-shaped skirts that went halfway down their legs, and high boots. They stood erect with the stately posture of those accustomed to balancing heavy weights on their heads and their faces had an expression of promitive solemnity.

Of course Lucania was, like the rest of the world, a patriarchal society. Decisions were made my men, and women were married off in their teens, with or without their consent. In the course of their lives women bore dozens, or more, of children, running the risk of maternal death, running the risk of still birth. Children they had to care for on their own, children they often had to bury when they were babies, toddlers, or before they reached their teenage years.

Levi was fascinated by these women, who looked so brittle and old, but were impossibly strong; illiterate and yet so wise. In reality, these women were witches.

It’s from here, these mountain ridges hammered into the sky, that angels and witches spread their wings, following the falcons, princes of the highest peaks, at the uncertain border between wakefulness and sleep. (from Vito ballava con le streghe)

In the reality of the night, of the world of dreams, women cast themselves from the mountain peaks and fly with the falcons. They dance and sing. They heal and cast spells with magic words. They fabricate love potions to get any lover they want. And they always want lovers.

Men in Lucania had to be alert. Women could smuggle their love potions into the glass of red wine they served at dinner. These love potions were concocted from menstrual blood, impossible to detect in a glass of red wine.

Men had to make sure they were never alone with a woman other than their wife. Love, or sexual attraction, was considered such a powerful natural force no amount of will-power could resist it. A man and a woman together always resulted in love making. And many children. And gnomes.

The gnomes were little airy creature, capricious and frisky, who liked to play tricks on the people, like tickling the feet of those sleeping, pulling sheets off their beds, throwing sand into people’s eyes, making the laundry fall off the line into the dirt. They hid things in the out-of-the way places. They were innocent little sprites. Little rascals. They were the souls of the children who died before they were baptized.

But of course, the world of gnomes, witches and invincible love was just another exile. In a world, where women where kept from material power, had their wings cut by patriarchy and Catholicism, it was this other world of magic and spirituality where they would hold the reins.

Maybe this could be said of Lucania as a whole: Where love and happiness were second to survival, magic was a dream come true.

Against his promises, Carlo Levi never returned to Lucania after his exile had ended. Back to Turin, he picked up his life from before: that of a political and social activist. “Christ Stopped at Eboli” was published 1945 and raised the popular awareness of the plight of the South. Funds of the Marshal Plan were channelled into Southern Italy. The swamps were drained and Malaria eradicated, and land reforms came into effect.

After the war Lucania was renamed Basilicata. It is a quiet place. The people still call themselves Lucanians. At night, the witches are still flying.

November 22, 2020November 24, 2020

Naples: Pulcinella

There’s a strange guy hanging out in the streets of Naples. A jokester with a big round belly, dressed in white with a cone-shaped sugar loaf hat. His face half hidden underneath a black, beaked mask, he splurges on Spaghetti and slurps red wine from the bottle. He waggles when he walks, like a nine month-pregnant woman, and when he sings, it’s with a screeching falsetto voice. He’s everywhere, depicted on posters and advertisements, modelled from lava stone or carved from wood by the puppet-makers in the old part of town. He is Pulcinella, the symbol and personification of Naples.

Pulcinella is both a peasant and an urbanite, both a stranger and a local. He’s clever and naïve, mischievous and loyal. Old but immortal, he’s both a woman and a man, both human and bird. In his unbound laughter lies sadness, behind his bird’s mask the unfaltering determination to face the troubles and the hard times. His eyes tell the story of oppression, of marginalisation, and prejudice.

As ungraspable as Pulcinella is, his life is well documented. In the 1797 book “Entertainment for Children” (Divertimento per Li Ragazzi) the late baroque painters father and son Tiepolo depicted the life of Pulcinella from his birth to beyond his many deaths:

Pulcinella hatched from a giant egg. Legend has is that was an egg incidentally fertilized by the severed testicles cut off a young boy – his father trained the boy as a castrato, a falsetto singer, a wide spread art form in 16^th and 17th century-Europe. Pulcinella’s birdlike nativity could well be a baroque version of the ancient Greek creation myth, which goes like this:

In the beginning, when there was nothing but empty darkness, there was but a bird with black wings named Nyx. With the wind, Nyx laid a golden egg and out of it rose Eros, the god of love. One half of the egg shell rose into the air and became the sky, the other one became the Earth. Then Eros made them fall in love.

In the children’s book, Pulcinella was raised both on the countryside and in the city. He liked to play, and he loved to fly: Pulcinella can be seen swinging on a trapeze, and walking the tightrope. He’s playing shuttlecock, or Badminton, which was called volano back then – Italian for flying. An act, by the way, associated with falling in love.

Oh, how Pulcinella loved to play… To play, being free from restrictions and inhibition, an activity completely unproductive, but joyful, improvisational, and imaginative. Play, so psychology teaches us, is the basis of all civilisation, and so is Pulcinella most basically Neapolitan. Ludere is the Latin word for to play – and Pulcinella was playful and ludicrous, just like the city.

No wonder that high-flying Pulcinella fell in love, and married, and had many children. And of course he travelled the world and lived through many adventures. He worked as a barber, a carpenter, a tailor and an artist. He got arrested, imprisoned and pardoned. He fell ill, he died not one but many gruesome deaths and was resurrected.

In the story of Pulcinella it is impossible not to see the parallels with ancient myths as they were told in Ovid’s Metamorphosis – a book so fundamental to Greek and Roman culture – but also with the bible. Pulcinella has in fact been compared to Jesus, most notably by the French Enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot. While likening Pulcinella to Jesus might not go down so well in radically catholic city like Naples, it is however save to say that Pulcinella speaks on a subconscious level, tells of the constant changing and transformation of life, and radiates the fascination and charisma of Jesus Christ.

Without doubt, Pulcinella is older than Naples. Pulcinella gave birth to Naples, he is Naples and everyone who has ever lived here.

While the myth is eternal, the figure Pulcinella is ascribed to a certain Silvio Fiorillo, an actor and playwright, who lived in the 17^th century, when Naples suffered under the yoke of the Spanish empire, taxes were exorbitant. Fiorillo created a character with a rebel heart, a defiant servant by the name of Policinella, or Policenello, or Policiniela, or Pulcinello, or Pulcinella – depending on the edition and source. All names share a conspicuous resemblance to the Italian pulcino, chick.

Yet, Fiorillo, didn’t invent Pulicinella. Rather, he condensed many myths and lores of his times into this one secondary character in his book of 1632, La Lucilla Costante. Soon, cheeky Pulcinella became a favourite character of the Commedia dell’ Arte, the travelling theatre companies of baroque Italy.

The Commedia dell’Arte itself stems from ancient times, namely from the Oscan Plays. Oscan was the language of the native people who settled in what is nowadays called Campania and Basilicata, the instep of the Italian boot. Later, under the Greeks and Romans, these plays were called Atellean Commedies or Atellean Farces. These highly improvised plays, intermitted by song and dance, were not performed in amphitheatres, but entertained their audiences on marketplaces or town squares, little farces that dealt with everyday problems. The noise and bustle at these gatherings didn’t allow the spoken word to travel far, so the actors had to rely on body language and wore costumes and masks that accentuated their traits. These masks were well-defined stereotypes, such as the clownish Maccus, the gluttonous Buccus, or hump-backed Dossennus among others – characters who would later turn into the well-known and popular characters of the Commedia Dell’ Arte.

Probably blending the clown Maccus and the eternally hungry Buccus, Fiorillo dressed his Pulcinella in the loose white clothes that were associated with the people of Acerra, a little town not far from Naples. Acerra was known for frequent floodings and swamps which bestowed on the Acerrans Malaria , and bad odors. The little city had been founded in the early centuries AD by the Nasamoni, descendents of the dark-skinned soldiers from Northern Africa. The venerated black Saints and black Madonne of the region are still vestige of this early black Italian people. But Acerra was also known for its fertile soils and the Acerran produce: fresh fruit and vegetables sold by the Parulani, the grocers, in the big city, in Naples.

Today still, in the Neapolitan dialect, a Parulano is not only a green grocer, but a person who talks and behaves in a rustic manner, in every sense of the word. The phrase Parulano chi fa la Zeza, (Zeza meaning Lucretia, Pulcinella’s girl-friend) describes a very feminine man, and the Fare il Ballo di Parulano tellingly means cross-dressing, a man in woman’s clothes.

Pulcinella was at the peak of his fame at the end of the 18^th century. In her heydays, the city of Naples was the biggest city of the world, the pulsating capital of the Kingdom of Naples, center of art and erudition. Artists, poets, musicians and scholars flocked to the city. The aristocracy indulged in games and gambling, and Pergolesi, the composer of spiritual music, wrote the Pulcinella suite.

But also, Italy was under attack by the French under Napoleon, the Enlightenment a veritable threat to the kingdoms and states on the Italian peninsula. A strategy of defence was needed, a figure of identification, of unification. A nation had to be created, and who better for the job than Pulcinella, who had hatched from an egg like Eros, resurrected like Jesus Christ? Someone who meant everything and embraced everyone.

Italy was unified in 1861, and Naples degraded to an insignificant city at the outskirts of Europe. The South soon became the poor and unloved sibling or the rich, industrial North, where cities like Milan and Turin garnered fame and money in fashion and automobile industry. Southern Italians were dubbed the “Africans of Italy”, and this was not meant as a compliment.

It must not be forgotten, that the original Pulcinella, was in fact in an immigrant, a person of color, shamed and ridiculed for their origins. A character who transcended myths and beliefs, gender and categorization, who turns struggle into game, hobble into dance, ridicule into laughter. A character just like Naples, a city whose pure mentioning evokes chaos, poverty, and gangsterism, a dance at the foot of a furious fire-spitting volcano. A city buried under ashes and resurrected. Old and immortal.

October 5, 2019October 14, 2019

Vienna: Beyond Redemption

Last Friday, the streets of Vienna were thronged with children. Children chanting. Children forsaking meat, cars, planes and even school. Children demanding action in fighting climate change. It was, in relation to population, one of the biggest turn-outs of the Fridays For Future-movement worldwide. And yet, despite the looming climate catastrophe, the children remain unheard. Is all hope is lost?

500 years ago already, the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch wondered whether humankind, immoral and sinful, was beyond redemption. Catering to the illiterate medieval society, he depicted the horrors of the punishments of the mortal sins in hitherto unmatched creativity, in horrific perversion and brutality: A toad in a nun’s habit frying the gluttonous sinners nicely chopped up in a pan. Naked sinners of lust impaled on a bare tree, one guilty of wrath getting his head blown off by a grenade fired from a bizarre engine of war.

The Last Judgement Triptych, from which the above mentioned scenes are taken, is one of the world’s outstanding masterpieces in late medieval art and the uncontested high light of the Paintings Gallery of the Academy for Fine arts in Vienna. (Where a hundred years ago, Egon Schiele studied, to name but its most famous student.) One of Bosch’s most important oeuvres, the Last Judgment Triptychon disappeared after its creation around 1500 in the Netherlands, but re-surfaced in a Habsburg collection in the 17^th century. The notoriously catholic Austrian Habsburg dynasty was one of Bosch’s major commissioners.

The Last Judgement Triptychon is currently at display at Theatermuseum Wien, as the Paintings Gallery is undergoing complete renovation until 2020

Bosch was a religious man, a devotee to the Virgin Mary deeply anchored in the catholic doctrine. He designed his paintings after the altar pieces of the catholic churches: three connected tables that could be read like a story, from left to right. The Last Judgement starts with the expulsion from Paradise on the left wing, then on the center piece, zooms in on torments of the sinners, where cyborgs, demons and other hybrid monsters have their way with the sorry souls, and ends, on the right wing, in burning hell.

Detail on the left panel: Evil looms in paradise. And it’s pretty sexy.

Among art lovers, Hieronymus Bosch is considered a masterful painter of landscapes. On the Triptychon the meadows and trees on the left panel are rendered in impeccable beauty, teeming with colorful birds. But the charming fields turn into barren land, wastelands and dumps on the center piece, and into burning fields on the right panel. The bright cerulean skies of Paradise turn black in the smoke pillars rising from hell’s fires: This is the destruction of nature, literally, by the hands of humanity. The Last Judgement Triptychon remains topical to the present day. A medieval Sunday for Future.

The Paintings Gallery invites artists to “correspond” with Bosch. Ali Banisadr, an Iranian painter living in New York, suffers from or enjoys synaesthysia. While painting, he hears internal sounds. His dynamic brushwork, which oscillates between figuration and abstract expressionism, reflect a chaotic world, an explosion reminiscent of Bosch.

However, Bosch, who sported a tonsure, defined the root of all evil not in corporate greed, but in the moral failing of the individual. Lust makes all men untrustworthy was a popular proverb around 1500. Accordingly, it was any sex that didn’t serve the purpose of procreation that caused of human downfall. (Like a thornbush out of your ass, keep an arrow in your head, to save one in your heart, was another popular saying of time, which must have given Bosch some ideas.) But then world was more spiritual back then, and art more allegorical than it is nowadays. What seems like insane perversion in the 20^th century, must have made complete sense in the 15^th.

On an even sourer note Bosch didn’t stop at scapegoating beautiful women and homosexual men. Jews (wearers of the obligatory yellow badges in medieval Europe), Africans and Muslims alike were responsible for humanity’s demise. Another radical catholic point of view that sadly finds its adherents to this day: in the rising extreme right movements of the 21^st century.

Four Trees by Egon Schiele, from 1917. Like Bosch, Schiele is not known for his landscapes, even though he painted them masterly. The Four Trees, on permanent exhibition in Vienna’s Belvedere Castle, is rumored to have been coerced from a Jewish family during the Third Reich in Vienna.

But what is the morality of the Last Judgement? A novelty in his time, Bosch did not call on Jesus and Mary for redemption. Rather, he had the holy family watching passively from the center panel as the world went to shambles. Each and every one has to make an effort, the Triptychon tells us, to not stray from the right path, on the journey of life. Evil looms everywhere.

It was the rich, the nobility and the aristocracy, whom Bosch accuses of sanctimony, guilty of the seven mortal sins, in his paintings. Another novelty in his days: wealth and high social standing would not safe anyone from hell. And so Bosch, despite his radical pessimism, despite his fatal thinking and hopelessness, opened the doors to the new world order of the Renaissance, the age of science and enlightenment.

Fridays for Future at Heldenplatz, Vienna, in front of the Imperial Castle.

While at the general election that took place two days after the huge climate strike, the majority of Austrians still voted for right wing and neoliberal parties that favor industries over environmental protection, the Green party was pushed into parliament as the strongest Green party in the world. Not all hope is lost.