Uncategorized – wanderwarbler

March 3, 2024March 11, 2024

Marrakech: Confusion

Allahu Akbar. The words stretch and turn like yarn from the spindle, glistening in the sun with the crackling from outdated amplifiers. From the rooftop terrace of Café de France on Jemaa el-Fnaa Square, one can see a group of men gathering in the dark triangle of shade behind the souk. They have taken off their shoes and kneel on colourful carpets laid out on the cobblestones. Their eyes are closed, their hands rest firmly on their thighs as they bend forward in devotion. Then another muezzin from another mosque nearby begins his adhan, his call for prayer. Allahu Akbar. Then, from another mosque somewhere in this city, another, then another, and another, and another. Allahu Akbar. Allahu Akbar. In the air thick with Saharan heat the words float; they plunge and surge like the swallows, entwine in mysterious patterns, weaving a thick fabric that envelops all.

It is unusually hot this February, which could easily pass for June. But the people in the streets wear long-sleeved woollen shirts called haiks under hooded, ankle-length kaftans called djellaba or chalwar, under down jackets called Northland or Columbia. They’re dressed for the freezing nights of the desert, for the snow-capped peaks of the Atlas towering behind the city. What saves from the cold, saves from the heat, Abdel the taxi driver says. The old Moroccan adage might explain why no one died from heat stroke last summer, when on three consecutive days the mercury soared to some unprecedented 52C. As the orange fireball of the African sun melts into the palm studded skyline, it is only the tourists’ shoulders at Café de France, that shimmer salmon red like the city below.

Al-hamra, the red one, as Marrakech is dubbed, was built from red clay of the Sahara. Nomadic Berber tribes had roamed the dunes for tens of thousands of years. (Or possibly much longer: In 2017, 300,000 year-old human fossil were discovered in North Morocco, the earliest evidence of homo sapiens.) A thousand years ago, the then ruling Almoravids, the first Muslim Berber dynasty, whose empire stretched from present day Dakar far into present day Spain, drafted craftsmen from Cordoba to build a new imperial city and turn this deserted land into the Land of God: Amur n Akush, from which the name Marrakech is supposedly derived, literally means the sanctuary of God in the local Amazigh (Berber) language.

The master builders applied a construction technique. As evidence suggests, Tabia, or rammed earth, had been used on African soil since neolithic times. This method consists of mixing damp clay with sand, straw, and lime, then compress it to half its size inside a high wooden frame. The process is then repeated over and over until the frame is filled. When the wooden scaffolding is finally removed, a solid brick wall stands on its own. Upright soil, pointing skywards.

This way they built palaces, gardens, bathhouses, and mosques, and a city wall around it all, everything bearing like navels small holes in their facades. These are where once the frames’ wooden beams held up the still damp clay. Pigeons nest in these holes, but it is said that through these holes the walls breathe.

It is impossible to not get lost in Marrakech. The historic center, the medina, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, is overwhelming in its abundance of colours and sounds and scents. Sputtering mopeds fly by like jinns, leaving but a whiff of black diesel smoke. There is the demure clacking of ragged donkeys, and the rattling of their overloaded carts. At the shopfronts, polychrome ceramic pots are piled man-high. Leather-slippers in primary colours dangle from every wall as eagle-eyed vendors prey on hapless, disoriented tourists, and lure them into their cavernous shops where more carpets and pillows and copper lampshades wait. The medina is one never-ending souk – or has one been going in circles? As the lanes twist and turn, the destination is out of sight, or long forgotten. The sky is but rare blue glimpses between the sun sails, the cotton veils suspended from the roof tops; daylight is but glowing pillars of white that lift the intricate wooden trellis above. The entire city is veiled.

Moroccan women don’t cover their faces. Some wear a headscarf; some flaunt long black hair and golden earrings. Moroccan Islam is traditionally moderate. (In 2017, ahead of any European country, the Moroccan government ruled out the production and import of burqas.) In the tradition of the Imazighen, the Berbers, only men cover their faces with a tagelmust or litham. The long piece of indigo-dyed cotton is wrapped around the head, its loose end covering mouth and nose to protect from the sandy Saharan winds. This fashion stems from prehistoric times, as desert rock engravings depicting human faces without mouth or nose suggest. But within the city walls, there is no need for protection. The city itself is a turban, a veil, a head wrap: the lanes spiral endlessly, narrow into dead-ends, disappear into underpasses that lead to another souk, another house, another souk. Marrakech is a cacophonous cocoon that keeps warm and cool, and safe.

Within the chaos and confusion, there is silence. It can be found at every corner: a zawiya, Arabic for corner, is a sufi prayer room or monastery. Silence waits in the myriad mosques and madrassas, the quranic schools, secret hideouts in the back lanes, given away only by a heap of shoes at their doorsteps. Peace and calm drift from these doors like heavenly scents.

Contrary to the mosques and zawiyas, Madrassa Ben Youssef from the 14^th century, is open to visitors. The square building with its courtyard is captivating not only in its serenity, but in its disorienting melange of patterns, patterns, patterns. The tiled floors are kaleidoscopic arrangements of contrasting triangles and shingling loops, of greens and blues and yellows, of brilliant whites and sparkling golds. Sunlight filters through wood-laced windows, staircases lead up and down, a cool breeze spirals like the water that flows upwards from ancient cisterns. Lost in the multitude of shapes and shades, one wanders. It is a pleasant feeling to be lost. To be lost is a solace.

The Medina is scarred. There are cracks running through the old buildings. Shockwaves of the catastrophic earthquake of September 2023 in the nearby Atlas mountains caused many of the old buildings to collapse. Now, after 1,000 years, scaffoldings are back up in the Medina. They secure the buildings barely left standing. The locals walk by with equanimity. They tell of this or that neighbour that was buried in the rubble. Are they scared of another earthquake? They shrug their shoulders. It’s God’s will, they say. Inshallah.

The birds are always singing in the Medina. Goldfinches and weavers, chaffinches, and buntings whistle and warble from the walls, from shop doors, from upper floor windows one hadn’t noticed until then. The tiny birds are kept in little cages furbished with mirrors and fresh fruit and water fountains. Their owners look after them with great care, they shower them, feed them, keep them warm in the night and cool in the day. It’s because these birds weren’t born in the wild, they say, that it is up to them to provide for them. Safeguard them from the stray cats that are out on the streets in the thousands. Do the birds sing in gratitude? Or do they sing to remember and honour their ancestors, those who flew freely?

In the black of the night, Jemaa el-fnaa Square vibrates with rhythm. There are drums. There are wailing songs and croaky call-and-response chorus. There is the ragged, cyclic galloping of the qraqebs – heavy, double-headed, cymbal-type instruments. And there is the all-commanding reverberating bass of the guimbri, the three-stringed African lute. Its player sits cross-legged on a threadbare carpet and slaps the strings with his thumb while his curled fingers knock against the camel-skin-face of the wooden corpus.

“I determined to go and live where I could be surrounded by sounds like those, because there seemed to be very little else one could ask for in life,” Paul Bowles wrote in the 1950s.

The musicians are Gnawa. The term, which refers to the music and its players as an ethnic group, means ignorant or black in the Amazigh language. The Gnawa are the descendants of sub-Saharan African slaves who for centuries were walked through the desert to be traded in Marrakech, not far from Jemaa al Fna, on Rhaba Khedima square where today only spices and carpets are sold. The slaves brought with them their African music styles: The polyrhythms, the call-and-response chanting, the dances: music to heal the wounds of exile. Music to remember; to honour their ancestors.

Uprooted and orphaned, the slaves didn’t find solace in their music alone, but also in Sufism. The mystic branch of Islam had arrived from the east around the same time. Contrasting with the stark, then Andalusian Islam, it established itself as a counter reformist Islam. Its soothing message of love and transformation appealed to the poor, and was easily married to traditional African belief systems. Half prayer, half folksong, a new Moroccan music was born, mirroring the winding lanes, the intertwining patterns, telling of a life in search of freedom and home, like the songs of caged birds.

Traditionally, Gnawa rituals are held in the secrecy of private homes, religious ceremonies, to enforce social bonds and mental healings. It is only since Western musicians had fallen for its charms, that Gnawa is performed on stage, and – stripped of its spiritual and social importance. Paul Bowles, who had set out to record and preserve strictly authentic Moroccan music, had with his recordings Music of Morocco of 1959 kindled its full commercialization: American musicians from Jimmy Hendrix to Frank Zappa, from Pharao Sanders to Ornette Coleman, from Paul Simon to Madonna have since integrated Gnawa in their music. Gnawa, the mysterious Blues of the Sahara.

A circle of onlookers has formed around the musicians. In the middle, young men in bright coloured robes are dancing, twirling, whirling their heads on their necks, slowly entering a state of trance. Or appearing to. For all of a sudden, they stop, take off their hats and approach the sunburnt tourists in the crowd. The coins clink as they tumble and whirl in the crocheted cotton hats, an intricate counterpoint that could be taken for noise.

It is safe to say, that the Qraqebs on Jemaa el-Fna don’t evoke any animal sprites or Sufi saints, but the marketable image of the mysterious Orient, the dances spark showers of gold. Dollaruh Akhba.

Marrakech is Africa’s most visited city and tourism its major economic driver, especially in the aftermath of a major tragedy like the 2023 earthquake. But tourism in Africa can never be separated from the continent’s colonial past: since the days of French colonialisation (1923-56), Marrakech (and its Medina) have served as a screen for Western projection of exotism and orientalism, a role with troublesome ethical implications: the romantic poverty of the back lanes, the thrill of tragedy, the moral inferiority of deprivation and misery. ‘No one escapes Orientalism’, Edward Said, who coined the term, wrote. Not Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, nor George Orwell who, while criticising colonialization, described in their famed travel accounts of Marrakech a city of poverty, chaos, and conflict, peopled by mysterious, dark-skinned donkey-drivers. A Haunting, undecipherable place; not God’s land, but a city in distress.

It is not without irony the notorious pushiness of the vendors in the souks, the notorious henna tattooists and snake charmers of Jemaa el-Fnaa, that shatters all illusion. With a merciless determination — undoubtedly owed to a bitter cocktail of poverty and questionable entrepreneurial cunning — they act their part in a play all tacitly agreed to play: but this is not the play of an entrancing, adventurous journey into the mysterious Orient. It’s that of capitalism, and the tourists’ role is to keep the money rolling, and the show running.

Marrakech has always been a marketplace and will always be: then of camels and slaves, now of tourists and babouche slippers. Maybe the real Marrakech is the enthralling ornaments, the very action of getting lost in the mazes of streets, in the kaleidoscope of songs and colours and the smell of cumin and peppermint: A reminder that one is never centre of the world, the measure of all things, but a tiny piece in a giant, colourful mosaic. That life is one sparkling maze in which one is lost, until one dies. Marrakech is multitude; a city to help us transform from a unitary character to one that includes the other; or to quote Edward Said: A meeting of counterpointing lines that make for a great composition.

February 2, 2024February 5, 2024

Madagascar: Sticky Tongues

Lizards are stealth predators. Motionless, they blend in, turn invisible. They crouch into oblivion, waiting, suspending time. Why hurry? the Madagascan poet Raharimanana wrote, watching a gecko on the ceiling of his room. Things are bound to happen. The fly won’t know what hit it when the reptilian tongue darts out, faster than lightning. There is no escape from its sticky grip.

Ny vava tsy ambina no ahitan-doza – an unguarded mouth spells danger – is a Malagasy proverb. The people of Madagascar live up to it. They speak with deliberation. They avoid confrontation. They search to agree. Even though the twenty different peoples of the world’s fourth largest island share one language, the Malagasy prefer to leave many things unsaid. It’s an eloquent silence. On this island of natural marvels and unique biodiversity unspeakable things have happened.

The language Malagasy, originating in Melanesia, from where a few thousand years ago the first settlers arrived, holds traces of Arab and African languages, and English and French. As if history had added syllables like rings of a tree, the words are long, sinuous, and dizzying. Ambohimanatrika, Fianarantsoa, Ampandrasoatanimbary, Analamitsivalana, are typical names of typical towns that huddle along the National Road RN7. Running from the capital Antanararivo in the center to the sea town Toliara on the West coast, it is one of the island’s few tarred roads, an anachronism in a society that mostly relies on sandaled feet for locomotion, and cattle-pulled carts for transportation. There are no traffic jams on the RN7. The overloaded trucks or climatized tourist cars that manoeuvre around the potholes move with slow consideration. As the RN7 winds up high mountains, passing by the intricately laid out rice terraces, street vendors and cattle herders, then descends straight into the fairy tale formations of the canyons of Isalo and finally reaches the palm studded beaches at the Mozambiquan channel, it girds the fishermen on the coast to the cattle herders in the South to the rice farmers on the highlands like a dark, dead snake.

Men are like the creeping stem of the pumpkin and if traced they are found to be one. The Malagasy adage is expressed in the concept of Fihavanana, which, not unlike its African Bantu counterpart Ubuntu, defines the individual but as a part of the group. Fihavanana can loosely be translated as solidarity or interdependence: People help each other when in need, lend a hand when the fields must be tilled, or the rice planted, or a zebu cattle was lost. As charmingly altruistic as this sounds, it is a solidarity confined to family, or those regarded family. Life in Madagascar is lived along bloodlines.

Lineage is paramount. The Malagasy adhere to a strict hierarchical system that places age and ancestry on top. It decrees the young to serve the elders and the elders to serve the ancestors who in return offer guidance, protection, and identity.

The Malagasy spend their lives in closest proximity to their dead. Villages are laid out around family tombs. Lavishly decorated, painted, sometimes colourfully tiled, they stand by little rice plots, or in the midst of vast grazing fields. In the rocky canyons of Isalo, caves up the holy mountains serve as family crypts. The deceased family member lives on as part of the family, albeit one of elevated standing. Death is a step up the social ladder.

A family tomb towers over the terraced rice fields

Almost half of the world’s species of Chameleons are endemic to Madagascar. The gecko’s spectacular lizard-cousins famously change colour, although not according to background, as it is commonly believed, but to their emotional state. They turn dark in fight mode, and bright to assert dominance. To attract a mate, they transform their scaly skin into an enthralling kaleidoscope. Colour is their only means of communication, for they are completely mute: chameleons possess no vocal cords, no words. Their eyesight, however, is excellent. Equipped with the uncanny ability to swivel their eyes 360 degrees in their sockets, each eye individually, they see all. The Chameleon sees the future with one eye and the past with the other, another proverb goes. The Malagasy believe chameleons to live in the world between tomorrow and yesterday, between here and there. They’re regarded ambassadors of the dead. Most Malagasy fear chameleons.

It takes years for a deceased to enter the ranks of the ancestors, a status, which, due to its proximity to God, instils them with divine powers. The progress of decomposition of the body is therefore closely monitored. Every three to seven years, the bodies are exhumed, and their silk burial shrouds exchanged. Extreme importance is placed on this so-called turning of the bones, or dancing with the bones – Famadihana – a ritual for which even émigrés regularly return from abroad. In 2017, during an outbreak of the Plague, the government searched but failed to outlaw these reburial rituals, a failure which purportedly claimed the life of several hundred people from contagion.

To constantly renew the bond with the ancestors is essential. Ancestors are still invested in the here and have the power to interfere should they be displeased: The harvest will fail. The rains won’t come. A zebu will be stolen. To be dead is a position of ultimate power, a power that is invisible, ubiquitous, and omniscient.

To recapture a stolen or escaped Zebu is a group effort

As the dead appear alive and the living dead, paralyzed in constant fear of admonition or malediction, time is suspended. The past bleeds into the future and drowns it.

Immobility is an impossibility, Raharimanana writes, still watching the gecko on the ceiling, the transparent skin, the large eyes, the foetus face; an oxymoron, born from all that’s impossible. A living dead. A fast stillness. A visible invisibility. The Gecko is everywhere, in the folds of sleep, in the fear he induces. And yet, the Gecko eats mosquitoes.

Communities define themselves through their oaths, their symbols, their ordeals, the late American anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber wrote in his seminal work “Lost People.” Before he became a figurehead of the Occupy Wallstreet movement, Graeber studied the communities of the Madagascar highlands. According to Graeber, in Madagascar a king didn’t rely as much on military success as on his ability to gather everyone regardless of descent and make them agree upon his rule. In the beginning, people became a people by agreeing with each other.

Betsilea people in the central highlands

Graeber argues that Malagasy societies were hence an early form of enlightened democracies – contrary to the Western belief that concepts like democracy and enlightenment were brought to Madagascar (and Africa) by Europeans who arrived from the sixteenth century on, in form of traders (from Portugal), missionaries (from England), pirates (from the Caribbean), and ultimately colonialists (from France).

This idea might explain the typically Malagasy avoidance of the slightest conflict or disagreement even in the face of severe discomfort or disadvantage, which to a visitor is often disconcerting . But it could also be, Graeber concedes, an expression of a society kept at bay by fear. (It is equally surprising to a Western visitor how openly people admit to their fears in Madagascar, be it arachnophobia, bovinophobia, or xenophobia.) It is possible, Graeber says, that people purely recognized someone as a king due to his power of having brought them together and agree in the first place. It was a power they considered otherworldly. In the beginning was the word, and the word was magic.

Magic still plays an important role in Madagascar, and even Western-educated Malagasy will surprise a visitor with their belief in the supernatural and their belief in oaths, taboos, and charms. While more extreme expressions of what the Western world calls superstition, or paganism, like animal and human sacrifices, ordeals, witch trials and floggings, are certainly a thing of the past, charms are still in use.

Every object, animate or inanimate, material or immaterial, can be instilled with magic powers and act as a charm. A stone, a tree, a bead can be instilled with a person’s fears and desires, the rain, the wind, nature, can all be but extensions of a single person. And mostly so the word. The island of Madagascar is not a place of natural wonders, but of ultimate human agency.

All magic is political. Malagasy traditional life went within strict social strata that drew their legitimacy from spiritually influential ancestry. The top class of nobles who claimed direct ancestry from the founding kings benefitted from many privileges, like wearing red beads or tiling their family tombs, but most importantly from Fanompoana. This was the obligation of the lower class of commoners, whose royal descendants lay more than seven generations in the past, to perform free services and works for them. The commoners themselves could rely on the free work of the lowest class, those who didn’t have family tombs and couldn’t claim any royal descent at all, for they had been brought against their will: slaves.

Madagascar’s history of slavery is long and complex. Thousands of years ago, when the first settlers arrived in Madagascar, they raided the surrounding African coast for slaves, and continued to do so within the island. Kidnappings happened between neighbouring villages and kingdoms, the captives were then traded in highland slave markets, purchased for labour on the rice fields, or exported to the nearby French and British colonies, Mauritius and Réunion. In 1895, when the French annexed Madagascar, dismantled the monarchies and in 1897 abolished slavery, the complex societal pyramid toppled. The nobles fled and took on administrative jobs in the capital or in Paris; the former slaves took over the rice fields and, at least in the fertile areas of the North, reached relative wealth.

Urchin. Poverty is extreme in Madagascar

Graeber argues that to some extent, colonialization had a unifying effect on Malagasy society. Those who remained identified as a single people, made equal by a common oppressor. They suffered equally from an exhaustive colonial tax system and the corvée – the unpaid work for the colonial power. Yet, the deep dividing lines within village society itself remained: the line between former slave owners and slaves. Although no one talked about it, nobody could ever forget it.

To this day, Graeber describes in Lost People, Malagasy people are proud of a noble descendance yet afraid to come across as a slave holder, as a person who has the power to command another one. Slavery remained – as an invisible, intangible silence. A word not uttered. An impossibility.

As a species, chameleons have been around for hundreds of millions of years. While it is believed that there are still undiscovered species hidden in the wild, many known species have already gone extinct. Forty percent of all Madagascan reptiles are threatened. It hence came as a pleasant surprise when in 2018 Furcifer Voeltzkow was rediscovered, a little, green chameleon believed to have gone extinct one hundred years ago.

Furcifer, the scientific name for the genus of chameleons endemic to Madagascar, translates into yoke bearer, which was derogatory term for slave.

Voeltzkow’s chameleons have a tragically short life span. They spend the biggest part of their life enshrined in their eggs, then die four months after hatching.

Almost a century into the Anthropocene, the era of human interference into our ecological system that caused the fastest mass extinction ever faced by this planet, the tiny, ephemeral Furcifer Voeltzkow seems to be laughing open-mouthed into the face of modern humanity. But this might just be its physiognomy. Chameleons don’t laugh.

Malagasy bibles for sale in Antananarivo

Madagascar stumbled into independence in 1960. But the ancient hierarchies that had dominated social life for so long remained at odds with modern notions of democracy. The island’s post-colonial past was characterized by instability and military oppression, the country dogged by corruption and poverty. In the 1970s, the government took on vast loans for development which it could not service. The results were insolvency, dependence on the IMF, austerity measures that slashed the state budgets and led to the withdrawal of welfare and services from the countryside. Impoverished rural communities became “temporary autonomous zones,” where police never went, nor the fire brigade, nor the tax collector or public schoolteachers. There, magic took over the reins, again.

Gold Dust Day Geckos are sometimes called living jewels for their colourful skin. Their tongues are forked, and like their snake-cousins they flick them to taste the air and so track down their prey. Their eyes are 350 times more potent than human eyes, but they lack eyelids. Condemned to see all, they clean their eyes with their tongues.

The Madagascan Day Geckos are currently under threat of extinction due to loss of habitat through deforestation and mining activities. When in January 2013 conservation groups protested against the Mandena titanium mine run by the Canadian company the Rio Tinto (QIT-Fer and Titane, Inc.) in Taolagnaro, the military used tear gas to dispel the protester. In 2021, uranium levels downstream were at 52 times the WHO drinking water standard, lead 42 times.

Words, Raharimanana writes on the flap of his book “Les Cauchemars du Gecko,” are his passion. Born in Antananarivo in 1967, as a child he often stayed with his grandmother in Northern rural Madagascar, where he became entranced by the tradition of oral story telling. “I cherished the words in my mouth. I cherished my listeners, keeping them glued to my lips.”

Malagasy didn’t have a writing until British missionaries put it on paper in the early 19^th century. Raharimanana bemoans the stiffness and inflexibility of the written, official language – a language that to him reflects the brutal military oppression of the Ramanantsoa presidency that incarcerated his father. He left Madagascar to study literature in Paris. Now he writes in French, the language of the former colonial power. Though an official language in Madagascar, many Malagasy refuse to speak it.

Participation at a political rally (here for the 2023 presidential election) is often remunerated and therefore abundant

Raharimanana says, once he too was lost for words: The gap between the beauty of nature and the stark political reality was unbridgeable. Unspeakable things have happened. He searched for a language, for the distance of another language – not the cumbersome language of politics, of ancestry. All Africans are condemned to being bilingual, he says. Or we are destined…

In his poems, Raharimanana uses words like tools he etches from stone, like weapons. He attacks them, he grinds them, he mixes them until their musicality penetrates the reader and absorbs them, it says on the flap of his book. Apparently, that’s how he cleanses them from the past, instills them with meaning, and saves them from extinction. Words have died, buried by slogans, he writes. Rahirimanana turns the words. He dances with words. He exhumes them and redresses them.

We don’t name things anymore, we have drowned in a pre-fab language that reassures, flatters, that kills time, that makes one forget death and masks our fall.

Nothing is more important, than words that carry death with them, and the fear of death. Nothing is more important than the cold lucidity of fear. To be alive. To be of this world. To inherit the foolishness of the centuries. To stuff oneself with words and die laughing.

December 22, 2023January 4, 2024

Madagascar: Supernatural

One night in 1589, the survivors of a shipwrecked Portuguese caravel camping on the beach, were woken by eerie, unearthly sounds. Someone was wailing in the dark, weeping at the top of their lungs. Looking around in the black night, they saw, to their horror, eyes glaring at. The Portuguese sailors believed that these were the ghosts of their drowned companions. Shaken to the core in their catholic belief, they named them after the restless sprites of ancient Rome, lemures. Or so goes the lore of how Madagascar’s iconic lemurs got their name.

There must be something supernatural about lemurs. For the local Malagasy people, who had been living on the island for about 2000 years before the Portuguese supposedly discovered it, also called them ghosts, gidro, and revered them as reincarnations of passed away family members. It was therefore a fahdy – a taboo – to hunt, let alone eat a lemur. According to other Malagasy legends, lemurs are our human ancestors who had become lost in the rainforest and turned into lemurs to survive. Despite their fox-like faces and monkey-like bodies, their demeanour is indeed humanesque.

Like humans, lemurs have opposable thumbs. They cast meaningful glances like humans do, especially since they are only other primates in which blue eyes occur naturally; and, like humans, they smile as a sign of sympathy or submission. Other than that, they follow their own idiosyncratic habits. Most lemur species – there are more than a hundred – organize in matriarchal troops. When cold or frightened, or when in need of some TLC, ring-tailed lemurs cuddle up in one furry lemur ball, interlacing their long tails. Male ring-tailed lemurs settle their disputes in non-violent ‘stink-fights,’ in which they wave their tales to overwhelm each other with their scent. But things get stranger still. While the Indri lemur grows to 70cm in height, Madame Berthe’s mouse lemur reaches only 9cm, and is therefore the smallest primate in the world. The slightly bigger Northern giant mouse lemur has testicles that make up 5.5 per cent of its body mass – imagine a man with testicles the size of cantaloupes. Or, rather, don’t. The Aya-aye, a solitary, nocturnal lemur, has teeth that never stop growing and a third finger that is double the size of the rest of its ten fingers. The white-furred sifakas, excellent tree climbers, have lost their ability to move on the ground and once down from their lofty treehouses, they leap only sideways – a strange way of locomotion, but impressive nonetheless, given that lemurs jump the length of ten meters in one single bounce. Perhaps the most astonishing fact about lemurs, though, is that they are still around. Lemurs are critically endangered.

Lemur eccentricity is the result of having evolved in the isolation of a remote island for tens of millions of years. The island of Madagascar began breaking off the supercontinent Gondwanaland and drifting east 180 million years ago. The oldest lemur-fossils date from around 60 million years ago, but, strangely, were found on mainland Africa. How the lemurs crossed the Mozambique channel is still a mystery. But crossing the channel was what saved lemurs from their direct competitors with whom they and we humans share a common ancestor. Apes were much more adaptable than lemurs, but also much more aggressive. Madagascar became the lemurs’ safe haven and their paradise: an entire tropical island covered in forest. Rain forests. Dry forests. Spiny forests. Alongside other strange creatures like giant and tiny chameleons and giant and tiny birds and long necked beetles and transparent frogs (90% of all species are endemic to Madagascar and occur no where else in the world), lemurs not only thrived. As mammal pollinators they became quintessential to the island’s ecosystem. Then humans arrived. The Indri that haunted the Portuguese back in the 16^th century knew why they were crying.

If Madagascar was a paradise for lemurs, it was so for humans as well. But it could not be a paradise for both. The fertile volcanic soils offered themselves for the cultivation of rice, and as grasslands for the large cattle herds. However, the traditional slash-and-burn-method led to imminent deforestation. By 1600, the arrival of the Portuguese, Madagascar’s central highland forests had to the biggest part already disappeared. French colonialization exacerbated deforestation, a process that hasn’t stopped since the independence of Madagascar in 1960, and, even though slash and burn became illegal in 1987, still goes on, undisturbed by changing governments, the bloody coup of 2009, and the political upheavals of the past years. Today 80% of Madagascar’s original forests are gone. And with them, the lemurs.

If Madagascar is not the poorest country in the world, then one of the poorest. The island’s population has doubled since the year 2000 to 30million people, of which 80% are currently living in extreme poverty (less than $2 USD per day). The pandemic brought tourism, the country’s main source of foreign currency, to a complete halt, and it still hasn’t fully picked up. On top, climate change and deforestation have made cyclones more frequent, more unpredictable, and more devastating. Many Malagasy, long suffering from poverty’s usual side effects – malnutrition, poor health, crime, corruption, prostitution, and lack of education – are now threatened by starvation, if not for a tiny rice field to feed a scrawny zebu cow. Where that doesn’t yield enough, the fahdy of not eating lemurs is ignored. If one can find a lemur.

Millions of years ago, lemurs crossed the Mozambique channel to survive. Now they are one of Madagascar’s main tourist attractions – especially since the movie Madagascar turned them into pop icons of the natural world. Ecotourism could indeed be one way out of the misery, when done sustainably, and in combination with conservation and educational programs: Nature can provide for the locals, for every player in the ecosystem, as it did for millions of years. If lemurs can provide for the Malagasy they will be more important than zebus to the locals, and original forest more important than rice fields. And if lemurs can pollinate the trees again, they can re-create their own habitat, and make sure that children don’t starve, don’t work the rice fields, but go to school. That way, to some extent, they will provide for all us, by helping us in our joint effort to stop climate catastrophe.

Lemurs aren’t the ghosts of our ancestors, but they might have the super powers to save us. Indeed, they are supernatural.

Until then your donation is welcome:

https://www.lemurreserve.org/

Or:

Planet Madagscar

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.

August 28, 2023August 28, 2023

Paris: Cherry Blood

Car l’heure de la chute est l’heure de l’orgueil; Because the hour of downfall is the hour of pride, Victor Hugo wrote in the May section of his poem “The Terrible Year.”

The terrible year was 1871. Spring wasn’t marked by the sweet scents of cherry flowers that May, or by lovers strolling along the Seine, but by the bloody and violent smashing of the Paris Commune. In an unparalleled massacre, the French army gunned down thousands of ordinary citizens, men, women, and children alike, flooding the cobblestoned streets of Paris with the blood of the Communards, or of anyone suspected to be a sympathizer. French President Thiers, safe in distant Versailles, had given his soldiers carte blanche for on-the-spot executions – and they performed them with remarkable brutality and hatred. The so-called Semaine Sanglante, the bloody week of May 21-28 1871, cost the lives of more than 20,000 Parisians, and remains a grim example of state terror and popular resistance: of how far a government would go to protect itself against its own citizens, and to what cruelties the dehumanisation of the opponent can lead.

A Street in Paris in May, 1871 by Neo-Impressionist Maximilien Luce; Musee d’Orsay

The Paris Commune lasted for only 72 days, but its spirit still resonates: as a first socialist uprising, as the realization of a social utopia, as a state run by workers in their own interest. Although its many laws were quickly revoked, the commune kept inspiring the political left in Europe and beyond. Engels called it the first dictatorship of the proletariat, Marx wrote: ‘Its martyrs are enshrined in the great heart of the working class.” To a modern ear, however, the commune’s decrees don’t sound radical at all: Municipal democracy; obligatory schooling for all children; the separation of state and church; equal rights for illegitimate children; women’s right to divorce. Some demands remain pressing today, like the dedication of vacant buildings to homeless people, or access to art for all.

At age 70, Victor Hugo eyed the Commune with sympathy, yet caution. To the elderly politician and social activist, the communards appeared too radical, too heedless, too militant. They were indeed a motley crew of revolutionaries that mostly met in coffee shops, socialists and anarchists, among them many artists and writers. Their economic and political views were widespread, but what united them was a profound distrust of the church, and a passion to end the hair-raising economic injustice and social inequality of the Belle Epoque.

Montmartre as seen from the Musee d’Orsay. Neither the museum nor the cathedral on top of the Montmartre hill were around at the time of the Commune. The Cathedral was built in spite of the Communards’ Anti-catholicism, because the neighbourhood was a Communard stronghold. The museum was established to unite the painters of the 19th century, those who opposed and those who supported the Commune.

The 19th century was a turbulent time for France, marked by many political upheavals. The last revolution, the one of 1848, had ended with Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, a nephew of Napoleon Le Grand, as the first elected President of France. Backed by small group of wealthy supporters, he had quickly established himself as an authoritarian ruler, and in 1852 declared himself emperor Napoleon III of the second Empire.

The second Empire had brought wealth to the city and seen the rise of the bourgeoisie. Technological progress had turned Paris into a centre of industry, finance, commerce, fashion, science, and the arts. Factories sprouted in the city’s East and attracted thousands of workers from the surrounding countryside. The city grew not only in size to its present boundaries, but also in population, doubling to two million within a few decades.

Napoleon had two railway stations built, and many public parks; a new Opera House for this wife, the Opera Garnier which however would remain unfinished until after the Commune, and a flashy glass palace as a new central market – Les Halles. He gave the Royal Gardens (the Tuilleries) and Royal Palaces an overhaul to make them glitter and sparkle like in their heydays. Numerous museums attracted tourists, as did the absinthe-serving cafés, the établissements, and the courtesans: the alluring demimonde of male phantasies come true.

The courtesan Apollonie Sabatierat in full frontal display at Musee d’Orsay

Il est grave : il est maire et père de famille.

Son faux col engloutit son oreille. Ses yeux

Dans un rêve sans fin flottent insoucieux,

Et le printemps en fleur sur ses pantoufles brille.

Que lui fait l’astre d’or, que lui fait la charmille

Où l’oiseau chante à l’ombre, et que lui font les cieux /

Et les prés verts et les gazons silencieux ?

Monsieur Prudhomme songe à marier sa fille.

He is serious. He is a mayor and family father

his faux collar swallows his ear, his eyes

in an endless dream wander without worries

And the flowers of spring sparkle on his pantoffles.

What is the Golden Star to him, what the hornbeam

where the bird sings in the shade, and what the skies

and the green meadows and the silent turf?

M Prudhomme dreams of marrying his daughter.

In Paul Verlaine’s satirical poem Monsieur Prudhomme of 1863, Paris is a pair of pantoffles. Spring has moved indoors. The wildflowers were tamed and domesticated, a deceitful embellishment on a container of a not so well-fragrant inner life. For if the bourgeois were comfortable in their chic apartments, they were also petty, catholic, and strictly hypocritical.

Before he became the famous poet of his later years, Paul Verlaine, of privileged, catholic background himself, was a married clerk in the townhall. He wrote poetry only in his spare time as part of a lively literary scene in the Salons and cafés when the revolutionary movements were gathering momentum. During the Commune he became and Communard, joining the National Guard, and kept his post at the town hall as Head of the Press Bureau, though it is not clear what he actually did there. Only after the Commune’s downfall, would another revolutionary heart and an unbound love affair derail him from his brilliant career.

Homosexuality was not illegal, but frowned upon.

The recent architectural changes had highlighted the division between the beaux quartiers in the affluent West of the city and the sordid, industrialized East. Although Napoleon had installed several social reforms that increased workers’ rights and made education accessible to girls, the fabulous splendour of Paris remained off-limits for most of the Parisians: The workers, crowding the hilly and densely populated quarters Montmartre in the North and Belleville in the East of the city, and Le Marais in the centre, scarcely made ends meet. Wages were low, and women got half the salary of their male counterparts. Although workers fueled the industrial revolution that brought riches to the rich, they themselves didn’t benefit from it.

By 1870, half a million Parisians, a quarter of the population, were living in extreme poverty, and the narrow grey streets of central and Eastern Paris were still gloomy and excrement-ridden as in medieval times. Appalled by the squalor of the workers’ quarters, Hugo started writing Les Misérables. Despite the many revolutions, the conditions of the poor had always remained the same.

‘Belleville is coming down the hill‘ was a wide-spread fear in the beaux quartiers. The growing number of poor people worried many Parisians, as one could expect from devout Catholics. Ambling through the ménagerie of his Jardin des Fleurs maybe, admiring the elephants or the leopard, even Napoleon was appalled by the filthy conditions of the workers’ quarters. So he assigned Baron Haussmann to make Paris Great Again and have them bulldozed. 100,000 apartments and 20,000 buildings were destroyed for the creation of the palace-lined boulevards that still cut straight, starshaped lines into the city.

Hausmann’s ‘beautification’ of Paris was a costly undertaking financed through the augmentation of taxes on goods and custom barriers, (plus a little proxy-bond-scheme that would later fail and get Hausmann fired from his job). Of course, the ensuing increase on prices on daily goods on top of the housing shortage, further aggravated the living conditions of the working poor. But, so Napoleon had schemed, the new boulevards would prevent a popular uprising: by running through possibly insurgent quarters and hence hamper the organization of insurrection, and, should that fail, by making for an easy access route for imperial troupes.

That Napoleon had sensed that a revolt was in the air had nothing to do with political or economic insight. He had been informed by his numerous police spies, the so called mouchoirs, that had infiltrated the intellectual and artistic circles of Paris. The 2nd Empire was in fact a police state. But ultimately, Napoleon knew, that what he really needed to gain public support, was a wide-spread sense of patriotism. In other words: a war.

Luckily, the Prussians were at hand, and he swiftly declared war on Bismarck over a minor matter. Bismarck gladly accepted the offer. (He could use a war himself to solidify the new North German Empire.) But if Bismark, as history would prove, was an astute military strategist, the only talent Napoleon III had inherited from his famous uncle was an oversized sense of entitlement. As a military leader at least, he was not the brightest candle on the chandelier, or as the famous painter Gustave Courbet put it, he was ‘an idiot.’

“Monsieur Napoléon has declared a dynastic war for his own benefit and has made himself generalissimo of the armies, who is proceeding without a plan of campaign in his ridiculous and criminal pride.” Courbet wrote home to his family on the countryside.

The well-equipped and excellently trained Prussian army found an inferior opponent in the disorganized French army that lacked everything from maps to ammunition. Within weeks, the Prussians were in Paris, laying siege and starving the population.

“We are passing through an indescribable crisis. I do not know how we shall come out of it.” Courbet wrote. A few months later, he was a leading Communard whose claim to fame was not only the opening of museums and theatres to the poor working class, but the destruction of the Column of Vendome – to him a symbol of imperial barbarity. To others, even among the sympathizers of the Commune, it was just an old piece of architecture. It was radical characters like Courbet that alienated moderate socialists and like-minded dissidents like Hugo. But at the time being, Hugo and Courbet were equally suffering from the Prussians’ siege of Paris. Hugo noted in his diary:

Oct 16: There is no more butter. There is no more cheese. Very little milk is left, and eggs are nearly all gone.

Oct 22: We are eating horsemeat in every style.

Nov 23: It has been raining for two or three days. For two days Paris has been living on salt meat. A rat costs 8 sous.

Nov 27: Pâtés of rat are being made. They are said to be very good. An onion costs a sou. A potato costs a sou.

December 2: It is freezing. The basin of the Pigalle fountain is frozen over. The cannonade recommenced at daybreak.

Jan 2 1871: The elephant at the Jardin des Plantes has been slaughtered. He wept. He will be eaten.

With the French army destroyed, Napoleon didn’t know what else to do than distribute rifles to the civilian population. As Franc-tireurs, they were to take the defence of Paris into their hands. It was a surprising move from someone who had previously relied on spies to monitor his own citizens – and a crucial move for the Communards, who would never turn in their rifles.

But while the People’s Paris, as the working class East was dubbed, held up against the Prussians, starving, dying in the bullet showers of the modern Prussian machine guns, Napoleon surrendered himself, then resigned, and swiftly fled the country. “Napoleon le Petit”, is what Hugo called him.

This was the end of the 2nd empire. Its successor, the third Republic, under the conservative President Thiers, would immediately surrender to the Prussians. The terms of the armistice were harsh – 5 billion francs – and most direly felt by the by the poor: Not surprisingly, the Parisians, who had fought so bravely against the Prussians, were not willing to accept the armistice, nor were they accepting the new government, especially since Thiers was rumoured to install a (Bourbon) monarchy in France again. “It is no longer an army you are facing. It is monarchy, it is despotism,” the revolutionary paper Le Rappel wrote. In defiance and in possession of rifles and cannons, the Commune of Paris constituted itself on March 18, 1871. The declaration read: Paris has no other government than that of the people and this is the best one. Paris is free.

Immediately after the Prussian army had withdrawn from Paris (yet remained close by), President Thiers tried to crack down on the Commune immediately, but failed: his soldiers had fraternized with the Parisians population instead. Thiers went as far as asking Bismarck for help in invading Paris, but the latter preferred to remain neutral. Hence Thiers withdrew to Versailles, where many of the wealthy Parisians who did not identify with the Commune followed him. Soon, Versailles was so crowded that accommodation was hard to find.

In Paris, all the while, the Communards were busy forming a governing body and setting up an army, drafting all male Parisians between 19 and 40 into the National Guard. As it was a democratic grassroots movement, this went painfully slowly. The Communards were stuck in laborious decision-making: in panels and committees and delegations and other intricate forms of bureaucracy. Although a vast number of laws was quickly implemented, it was the lack of hierarchal structure that would later prove fatal. But for now, the Parisians were living their dream: Spring was in the air – it was the time of the cherries.

People from the poor quarters strolled through the fancy neighbourhoods in the west, into which they had only set foot before had they been employed as domestic workers – or had they been displaced by Baron Hausmann, pushed to the peripheries. Now they reclaimed their space. And they did so with a lot of joie de vivre.

On Easter Sunday, the Jardin du Luxembourg was crowded with everybody and their neighbour. Ah! Citoyenne, Au, citoyen, Parisians from different social classes greeted each other. In the Tuilleries, where only weeks ago Napoleon and his wife had sauntered, a band played the Marsaillaise and other revolutionary songs. The Louvre and the Bibliotheque Nationale were open to all, and the cafés were crowded. Only Napoleon’s unfinished new Opera stood vacated. It had been turned into a storage facility for food.

“Paris is a true paradise… all social groups have established themselves as federations and are masters of their own fate,” Courbet rejoiced. As a member of the Commission on Education and President of the Federation of Artistes, he was “…up to my neck in political affairs. I get up, I eat breakfast, I sit down and preside twelve hours a day. My head begins to feel like a cooked apple. But despite all this turmoil of the head and my understanding, which I’m not used to, I’m in an estate of enchantment.”

Maybe the most striking aspect of the Commune is how promptly the situation for women improved. Many women took pride in their role as citoyennes, and their demands were addressed in the meetings, and reflected in the laws. Not all communards thought favourable of equality among the sexes, though, but enough did. Most notable among the prominent citoyennes were Karl Marx’s daughter Jenny and his friend, the Russian activist Elisabeth Dmitrieff, writers Natalie Le Mel and André Leo, and, who was probably the most ardent and charismatic among the Communards Louise Michel.

“If equality between the two sexes were recognised, it would be a marvellous victory against human stupidity,” she wrote. “And so far as rebels go, there are quite a few of us now, simply taking our place in the struggle without asking for it.”

Once the stronghold of the Commune, Belleville is still a synonym for counterculture.

Yet, the question of how to feed the poor remained pressing. The Communards received the modest sum of 700,000 francs as a loan from the bank of France. Not to take control of the bank of France, was, as Engels later pointed out, their main error and the ultimate reason for their downfall:

“The most difficult thing to understand is, indeed, the sacred respect with which the Commune reverently stopped before the portals of the Bank of France. This was also a portentous political error. The Bank in the hands of the Commune – that was worth more than ten thousand hostages. It would have meant the pressure of the entire French bourgeoisie on the Versailles government in the interests of peace with the Commune,” Engels wrote in 1891.

He was right. The Communards had essentially enabled the Bank of France to finance its enemies. The bank of France gave Thiers 258 million Francs to reconstitute an army and on April 2 the Versaillais began the bombardment of the city.

Thiers had not only relied on military weapons to prepare for his attack on the Commune. He had long enlisted the press and the church to whip up hate against the Communards within the population. Communards were depicted as dirty, lazy, immoral – as subhuman, a pest in a moral society, best exterminated. Their anti-clerical stance – let alone their eventual execution of the archbishop of Paris through the radical Communard leader Rigault – made the Communards especially suspect for the devout rural population from where the majority of Thiers’ soldiers stemmed. As did emancipated women who were regarded as a threat to public order, (or God’s divine order), especially women uniform or in pants: since 1800 the wearing of pants by women had been forbidden by a law. (This law was only overturned in 2013).

That the commune was not (only) a political insurrection, but a counter-cultural one, is best expressed in the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud. A teenager in the rural and strictly catholic Charlesville, he dedicated many poems to the commune.

The famous Portrait of Rimbaud as Graffiti.

Although he never joined the fight on the barricades, his poetry, unbound in its defiance of bourgeois standards and catholic values, and in its indulgence in life in its utmost physicality and emotionality, captured the spirit of the commune. The eternal teenager, the poet Arthur Rimbaud (Rimbaud famously abandoned poetry at the age of 20 and became a quite different, rather misanthropic adult) is still a kind of patron saint to the Belleville of today: Paris 20ieme arrondisement is now a multi-cultural hot spot of subculture, and the cradle of French punk. Les Rita Mitsouko gave their first concert at the Bataclan. ISIS chose the concert venue for their attack on the “Western way of life” in 2015. Once the stronghold of the Commune, Belleville is still a hotbed of insubordination and anti-religiosity, its name a synonyme for counterculture, a thorn in the side of any totalitarian regime.

He, hair pomadé, on a desk of mahogany,

Read a bible with cabbage-green lithography.

Each night in his alcove, he suffered through nightmares.

He did not love God, but men, who in the fawn-coloured airs

of dusk returned to their quarters, in blackened smocks;

where town criers, with three drum rolls, made people flock;

Je est un autre – I is another – surely is Rimbaud’s most popular quote, referring to the gap between the inner and the outer self. But in his solidarity and identification with the insurgent workers of Paris, whom he likened to women and suppressed people of the colonies, this could be understood as well as ‘I is the other”, anticipating the both the feminism of Simone de Beauvoir and the anti-colonialism of Frantz Fanon.

“When the unending servitude of women is broken,” Rimbaud wrote, “when she lives by and for herself, when man – until now abominable – has given her her freedom, she too will be a poet.”

When the Versaillais troups at last attacked, it took them only a week to take Paris. This was not merely due to the fact that they outnumbered the Communards’ National Guard by far, and that they simply sidestepped the barricades by entering the buildings; and that they were helped by Parisians who did not sympathize with the Communards: The Commune’s lines of defence suffered primarily from a lack organization, discipline and military hierarchy. Communard officers were notoriously unorganized unreliable, as they were mostly drunk and/or still caught up in some panels and committees where they were more engaged in jealousies and rivalries than actual fighting.

Among the last ones fighting for the lost cause on the barricades, were not the Communard leaders, but ordinary men, boys, and above all women. Some fighting from sheer desperation, having lost their husbands, or others driven by rage and revenge, having lost their brothers, fathers, or sons. Many from conviction to never again lose their newly gained freedom as a woman and citoyenne.

In his poem “The Hands of Jeanne-Marie, Rimbaud wrote:

They are pale, they’re marvelous,

In the great sun of love and ambition

On the bronze of the mitrailleuse

In the Paris of insurrection

These could have easily been the hands of Louise Michel, whom combat didn’t seem to frighten: not “the red teeth of the machine guns flashing on the horizon… It wasn’t bravery, I just thought it a beautiful sight. My eyes and my heart responded, as did my ears to the sound of the cannon. Oh, I’m a savage all right. I love the smell of gunpowder, grapeshot flying through the air, but, above all, I’m devoted to the Revolution.”

The so called Petroleuses, a kind of early female suicide bombers, were rumoured to set Paris on fire whenever the Versaille troups had advanced, reducing half Paris to rubble and ash. Even though there is no evidence for this, their fame reached almost mythological dimensions, both as heroines and public enemy.

It is a matter of fact, however, that Communard women weren’t spared by the hatred by the Versailles soldiers, but received even harsher treatment: humiliation by exposing their breasts or naked bodies, and rape, both before or after getting shot.

In Belleville, where the final fighting took place, the blood shed was outrageous. The Versailles troupes had the Communards stand in double file against the walls, (as the wall of the Fédérés at Cemetery Père Lachèse commemorates) so executions would go fast and efficiently, as a single bullet could kill two – uniting two bodies like a pair of blood red cherries.

The Communard Jean-Baptiste Clément had written the song “Les Temps des Cerises – the time of the cherries” in 1866 already as a simple love song, but in the midst of the massacres, he dedicated the song to the Commune as their blood dripped from the barricades like ripe cherries falling from the trees in May.

Mais il est bien court, le temps des cerises,

Où l’on s’en va deux cueillir en rêvant

Des pendants d’oreilles.

Cerises d’amour aux robes pareilles

Tombant sous la feuille en gouttes de sang.

But it is short, the time of the cherries

When the two of us gathered them pretending they were earrings.

Cherries of love in identical red robes

Falling from the leaves in drops of blood

To this day, it remains a hymn of freedom and justice of the political left in France. For the rest of France, it is still the anodyne love song of lovers with cherries on their ears.

During the Semaine Sanglante Gustave Cobert had managed to go into hiding, then was imprisoned for six months, after which he went into exile. Paul Verlaine, too, survived the week in hiding. He met Arthur Rimbaud in summer 1871 only, and, in summer 1873, after a tumultuous love affair, shot at him. He was subsequently was imprisoned for attempted murder.

Louise Michel survived the carnage. Caught on the barricade, she demanded to be shot like the others, but, for fear of martyrization, she was taken prisoner and deported to the colonies in New Caledonia, where she promptly solidarized with the locals and organized an insurrection.

The commune was only a short chapter in the history of France, but the blood shed was not in vain. France is a laic republic now, and the French are still notoriously revolutionary and prone to strikes and demonstrations. But quickly, the Parisians turned the page. The cafés filled again, and the theatres, the Louvre and even Opera Garnier was finally finished. In 1800, after a general amnesty for all former communards, Louise Michel returned to Paris.

“We lived in the future, in the time when people would be more than beasts of burden whose work and blood other people made use of,” she said, looking back.

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.

April 20, 2023May 17, 2023

Johannesburg: Dance Against The Machine

The sky is heavy. Dark clouds threaten to break any second. Unfazed, the dancers are out on the street, ressed in identical lose-fitting pants and smart button shirts. Their impeccably white high-top Converse will soon be caked with the blush red mud of the African soil. Parapara! – one pair of feet stomps the ground, a brisk command for the other dancers to break into a fast, intricate footwork. Their arms move in synchronous precision, as they twist and turn and kick and high jump, their rubber legs flying, their hands shooting through the air like bullets, signalling a secret code. The dancers whistle and shout, as they pound the ground like angry tap dancers, or drag their feet, as if trying to etch a message into the soil, as if trying to leave a trace.

It’s a late summer afternoon in Tembisa, Johannesburg’s 2nd largest township, and one of the largest in the world. The name, in isiZulu, means hope, or promise, but for her inhabitants, Tembisa holds little promise: Unemployment rate is as high as the druggies at the street corners. Where the streets are paved, they’re potholed, pitfalls for the little schoolchildren in short olive skirts and striped ties. There are stinking heaps of garbage sitting next to the makeshift stalls of the street vendors, women in brightly coloured headscarves waiting stoically by their high piles of mangoes, and onions in red net bags, as their chickens cackle noisily from their cages. All around, the squatters’ corrugated iron- and cardboard shacks keep sprouting, growing into the football fields and along the busy high-way to Johannesburg. One of the battered white omnibuses, the perilous but only means of public transport, stops with a jolt, spitting out black billows of fumes. It brings home Johannesburg’s workforce, tired men and women, who live in the tiny, single-story row houses with barred windows and barbed wire hanging like tinsel from the roofs and walls. They walk home slowly, their faces worn and worried.

The dancers, though, look focused and determined. They are in their thirties, about as old as the rainbow nation, the democratic republic of South Africa. They weren’t around when their parents and grandparents fought the apartheid regime for freedom and equality. They weren’t around when their forefathers were robbed of their lands and cultures. The township is all they know, all they have. They call their dance Pantsula – a slang word meaning to waggle like a duck, a metaphor for the demeanour of a gangster. And they call themselves Amapantsula, gangsters, even though dancing is the only thing that saves them from a career in crime.

Dancing is their cultural heritage. Dancing is what their parents and grandparents and grand grandparents did. Silenced, they danced to express themselves, neglected, they danced to re-affirm themselves, oppressed, they danced to keep their faith as their world kept crumbling. They danced to survive against all odds.

Pantsula is a living socio-political document, the expression of black identity in the township. It is a dance of resistance. Counterculture, rooted in African tribal songs and dances, but catalysed by the experience of systematic oppression.

In the 19th century, overburdening taxation and segregation laws of the British colonial administration robbed the native African population of any means of self-sustenance and forced them into labour in their gold and diamond mines. Dispossessed of their land, and resettled in overcrowded workers’ compounds, music and dance were the only creative or emotional outlets. The experience and hardship of migratory work changed the traditional songs and dances. The sung epics of the Sotho, or the expressive Zulu dances soon recounted the misery of the migratory worker. In the compounds, the African working-class hero was born, sung about even on the other side of the Atlantic. In 1925 Langston Hughes wrote his poem about the Witerwatersrand goldmine In the Johannesburg Mines:

In the Johannesburg Mines

There are 240,000

Native Africans working. What kind of poem

Would you

Make out of that?

240,000 natives

Working in the

Johannesburg mines.

The natives made more than a poem out of that. They made music. In the slums andtownships that grew around the mines as more and more men and women arrived, one- stringed guitars were fashioned from empty cases of cooking oil; rusty battered barrels served as drums, and empty bottles as flutes. The townships were flooded with music, the late Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera wrote, because “…with music they soar higher than the clouds, sink deeper than stones in water.”

Despite the squalor, the townships were creative melting pots, giving birth to the first vernacular music styles, marabi, (“junk”) and later kwela (“get up!”), from the wedding of traditional African and Western music – not their oppressor’s music though, but the song and dance of Afro-America.

Black American music arrived in Southern Africa from the first half of 19th century on, in the form of touring minstrel shows and gospel choirs, later with radio and printed sheet music, and finally records. From their first encounters with ragtime, tap dancing, and harmonic singing, Africans were infatuated with black American culture. They admired black Americans for their confidence and their styling, their relative autonomy. But there was also a strong sense of solidarity and identification, as an uprooted and oppressed people, but most importantly, as Africans. Although Afro-American music hails from Western-African traditions, which rely more heavily on drums and poly/rhythms than the more voice and dance-centred Southern African traditions, the arrival of Black American culture was a seed falling on fertile ground; it was its homeland.

That the up-rooting and replanting of Africans came with their loss of cultural heritage, and most importantly their music and dance tradition, was never unintended. Music and dance, which governed every aspect of African life, from daily work chores to ceremonies, was not only an expression of humanity, but it bestowed humanity. The term Bantu – human in the African languages – comprises also the moral aspects of being human, like solidarity, empathy, respect. It was hence what colonizers needed to erase, if they wanted to exploit “natives” as workforce.

Africans were characterized as uncivilized pagans in need of education and saving. Missionary schools (British as well as American) and various Christian churches provided African children with Western clothes, Western education, Western values and beliefs. Not surprisingly, this drove a wedge between the rural Africans, who proudly stuck to their tribal values and mores, and the Westernized, missionary- educated Africans, who strove towards self-improvement, self-realization and personal advancement. The two groups, the new working class, and the trained lawyers and doctors, the new a middle class, eyed each other with growing suspicion. The workers who entertained themselves in the beer halls, with their “marabi” music, were frowned upon by the self-declared “elite,” who had acquired a taste for classical music and spiritual hymns. It was only in their growing discrimination, that they were equal. Restrictive segregation laws and measures like curfews, prohibition, and strict monitoring, subjected all black people alike. Then a miracle happened: Sophiatown.

Dancer Bhanzela Masango in Sophiatown styling — Dancer Bhanzela Masango in Sophiatown outfit

In the freehold Johannesburg suburb, the two classes united. Shunned by whites due its poor drainage and its vicinity to a municipal sewage facility, Shophiatown was home to a fast-growing racially mixed but predominantly black population. Although notorious for its violence, and poverty, it was a place of relative freedom, autonomy, and neighbourly solidarity. Given its racial and social diversity, Sophiatown was as a cultural and political hothouse leading to the renaissance of black African identity. And to Pantsula.

In so-called shebeens, illegal liquor lounges, to the sound of Marabi-Jazz, as it was now called, politics were discussed across social lines, giving rise to new political consciousness. With the help of Langston Hughes, via letters from Harlem, an African intellectual and literary scene flourished. Magazines catered to a black audience, most notably Drum magazine. With its sassy signature style, it featured investigative journalism that denounced the exploitation of black workers in apartheid South Africa, but, maybe even more importantly, it glorified Sophiatown. In the photos of German photographer Jürgen Schadefeld, Sophiatown was a bubbling, sprawling city. Men were cool cats in Borsalino-hats, the dancers at the many dance halls were caught airborne, taps sparkling on shiny patent leather shoes. The singers, songbirds, were sultry and glamorous like Lena Horne.

Although extremely violent, gangs often played the role of Robin Hoods in the tightly- knit communities. They had distinguished tastes in fashion, dressing in Cab Calloway style zoot suits that were all the rage, and music. Particular gangs protected particular orchestras or bands. Most performers were either affiliated to gangs, like Miriam Makeba, or gun-toting gangsters themselves.

Music flourished. Jazz bands and orchestras imitated the sound of Duke Ellington and Count Basie to the T, while tappers and Lindy Hoppers perfected the routines of the Nicholas Brothers or Fred Astaire, in their marabi way.

A dress with Miriam Makeba’s iconic DRUM cover

If Sophiatown didn’t live up to the glitter, its image gave the black urban Africans something to be proud of: an identity and political consciousness. In the Shebeens and dancehalls, where Nelson Mandela clinked glasses with Miriam Makeba, the Anti- apartheid movement was born. To drink and dance was an act of civil resistance.

By the end of the 1950s, the apartheid government put an end to the socio-political utopia that was Sophiatown. Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, Sophiatown bulldozed, and its more than 70,000 inhabitants resettled in townships. Diversity had proved to be threat to totalitarianism, so people were resettled according to their ethnicity, even though in African culture, where people organized their lives along kinship, not race, this had never played a role.

Now there were streets of identical four room houses reserved for Zulu, others for Xhosa and so on. Estranged, the Africans were not only robbed of their past and their newly gained identity, but of their future, as the Bantu Education Act system came into effect: Afrikaans, which black Africans rarely spoke, was legally instated. It was a policy of active de-skilling of the black population. As pupils didn’t understand their teachers anymore, they were rendered fit for menial work as nothing else. Any organizations were monitored and regulated, and as gatherings were forbidden, dancing, the very expression of humanity, pushed into the underground.

“Now when we grouped, the police would beat us. Now when we make Pantsula, they think we are just there for happiness.” Daniel Mokubung says in a documentary about Pantsula. “It’s where we started talking about our lives. It’s not only dancing, it’s where we start to know politics.”

Dancer Msindo Lingo in his home, which serves also as his atelier.

In the 1960s, at the height of the oppression, when tap shoes fell silent, Pantsula took over. The movement didn’t stop, only the shoes changed.

In the 1980s, an international boycott isolated South Africa, but American Hip Hop reached the country on contraband tapes. To the lo-fi sound from rattling boomboxes, the dancers in the townships recreated their style. “You had to respond to the political oppression in creative ways, so that you can have dignity.” Pantsula Sicelo Malume, who danced in the 1980s, says. Politically active musicians like Miriam Makeba were barred, and censorship rendered South African music so anodyne, they called it Bubblegum Music. Pantsula, though, got edgier.

As the death toll rose and the Anti-apartheid struggle turned increasingly violent, the steps quickened. The moves gained a new percussive quality, or fierce abruptness, as if the body was barely able to contain its forces. So was the country. In 1990, Nelson Mandela was released. The days of the apartheid regime were counted.

Redefinition: Dancer Msindo Lingo creates art from discarded soda cans, and recreates Tembisa, the township built by the oppressor, as art.

Now, thirty years after the formal end of apartheid, Pantsula is about carving out a niche in a world that doesn’t hold much in store for those who still suffer from economic discrimination. Since dancing and drinking is no longer an offense, Pantsula has lost its political charge. Many young dancers regard it as a way out of misery. But if they admire American gangsta rap, they have none of the cool nonchalance of Snoop Doggy Dog or Jay Z. The amapantsula rehearse with extreme discipline, matching the military drill of a Russian Ballet school. They dream of an international career – a dream that hardly ever comes true, even though in the past ten years, Pantsula has reached a broader public. TV shows like South Africa Got Talent, frequently feature Pantsula, as did Beyonce in her video to “Girls run the world.”

Pantsula as heritage. The next generation waiting in the wings.

“If we were 20 or 30 in the 1970s and 1980s we would have been using everything we had to fight Apartheid… but now we have the freedom and space to do what we want with our talent and we have the ability to really manifest our dreams…” Poetess Lebogang Masile says, referring to South Africa’s post apartheid youth, dubbed the “Freedom children”. “If our parents fought for freedom, we fight for identity,” Pantsula dancer Malume says.

With the commercialisation of rap, the word township has recently got a sexy ring to it. Media like MagY and youth radio stations, catering to the freedom children, showcase “Ghetto superstars” in glossy pictures and high-end video productions. Local fashion brands like Loxion Kulcha (a malapropism of Location Culture, with location being another term for township) sell high-priced township fashion and converse sneakers to the hipsters in the gentrified neighbourhoods of Johannesburg. But their paying costumers rarely live in the townships.

In Tembisa, far from the craft gin bars and vegan coffee shops of Johannesburg, Pantsula is more than shoes and fashion. It is pride, it is identity. It is hope in a hopeless place. To dance is to be alive, to dance is to be human. Parapara! – the clouds break, and the potholes turn into puddle. The red mud splashes from the shoes of school children as they dash home, and from the flat tyre of an omnibus that got stuck, and from the dancers’ feet, as they keep stomping and whirling, skipping and sliding. The rain falls on fertile ground.

November 24, 2022January 22, 2023

Zimbabwe: Exclosure

It’s been seven years since Cecil’s death. The handsome, black-maned lion was shot right outside his home, Hwange National Park in Western Zimbabwe, by a trophy hunting American tourist. The dentist from Minnesota had paid USD 50,000 for the shooting rights. His action was hence legal under Zimbabwean law, however he had paid his helpers to use an elephant carcass to lure the lion from a protected area into a hunting concession.

Cecil’s agony lasted for well over twelve hours. The circumstances of this death could later be minutely reconstructed as he was collared and named as part of a research programme. Aside from the inhumane aspect of Cecil’s unnecessarily painful death due to the inexpert use of bow and arrow, his killing caused an uproar. The act of a rich American so nonchalantly shooting an African animal strongly echoed the not so long-gone days of colonialism.

It was, however, under colonial administration that Hwange National Park was established, namely in 1928, when present day Zimbabwe was the British colony Southern Rhodesia. Over the years Hwange has grown in the country’s largest national park, comprising of a variety of landscapes from dense teak and mopane forests to white Kalahari sands and golden savannas. It’s raw and diverse African landscape, as the safari marketing slogan goes. Hwange is also one of the best managed parks in the world, running various research, educational and conservancy projects. It is a place for endangered species to thrive.

The idea behind the park, though, was far from idealistic. First and foremost, a national park promised huge revenues from tourism to the colonial government. Wildlife conservancy was the means, a fringe benefit. But it was much more than a collateral damage that the establishment of the national park led to the near extinction of a people that like the lions had roamed the land for millennia; a people that mastered the use of bow and arrow, and who were able to turn themselves into lions: the Tjwao, the bushmen of Zimbabwe.

If not physically, then legally, a National Park is a fenced-off area. The aim is not to lock in the wilderness, but to keep the rest of the world out, so the land appears pristine and raw, untouched by human hand: a glimpse of the world as God had created it. However, the land between the Zambezi river in the North, the train tracks to Victoria Falls in the East, and the Kalahari desert in the South-West, is by no means untouched by human hand.

In 1889, Queen Victoria of England authorized the adventurer Cecil Rhodes to economically explore and subsequently administer the lands North of the British Cape Colony. By this time, 35 year-old Cecil was already a diamond magnate, having made his fortune in South Africa. Now he showed great interest in the teak forests, as teak was a sturdy wood needed for the building of fast growing railroad tracks through Africa, as well as in the ivory urgently needed to quench the high demand of upright pianos in the US; Also, the land was rich in coal, another resource the west needed to fire the steam engines of the ongoing industrial revolution promised . He set out immediately.

First, he tricked the local Madebele – a belligerent Bantu tribe that had settled in this region for generations – into granting them the rights to the natural resources. The naturally illiterate Madebele signed the British contracts, foolishly trusting the oral promises of the Rhodes’ agents. Then, under the pretext of hence broken promises, his rifle-savvy British South Africa Company battled them in the First Madebele War, which resulted in the Africans’ defeat. Subsequently, he consigned the Madebele as workers to build a railroad to connect the teak forests in the South with the coal mines in the North. Rhodes meant business indeed.

By the time of his early death, in 1902, the teak forests were cleared to the extent that they wouldn’t regenerate on their own, and the sandy soil wasn’t fit for agriculture, or husbandry, due to the Tsetse fly. On top, not only were the elephants starkly decimated, but all wildlife had been hunted to near extinction. The British considered hunting a noble sport, and killed predators as vermin, and kudus and giraffes and impalas as trophies. To reserve the remaining game for themselves, and for lack of better use of the sandy and dry soil, they turned the area into a private Game Reserve.

The Tjwao bushmen had foraged and hunted in these dry and sandy lands since the beginning of humankind, as archaeological evidence from the Old Stone Age suggests. Their life style, as that of other San (Bushmen) groups all over Southern Africa, was in complete harmony with nature. Their diet consisted primarily of foraged berries and roots, their game hunts were ritualized hunts that lasted for days on end – or longer. Their settlements were temporary, which enabled them to follow migrating game, as well as the rains. This flexibility was a valuable asset in a region so close to the Kalahari desert, a land prone to droughts and climate uncertainty. In their nomadism, they left no traces, no evidence of their presence. aside from carvings and cave paintings. They were invisible, blending into their surrounding.

Most fascinating about the Tjwao and other bushmen cultures though, was their understanding of the relationship between the natural world and themselves. They lived in the truest sense of the word inseparable from nature. All the landscape around them was considered alive, every boulder, every animal once was a human creature, or was inhabited by the spirits of the dead, or those yet to be born. Should the need arise, the Tjwao were also able to turn themselves into animals, into a kudu if they hunted one, or into an ostrich, or a lion.

“My aunt turned herself into a lioness. She sought for us, as she wanted to see whether we were still comfortable where we lived. She, when she had smelt our houses’ scent, she passed in front of us, she roared like a lioness because she wished that we should hear her, that it was she who had come seeking for us.” (from “Stories that float from afar” Ancestral Folklore of the San of Southern Africa)

The Tjwao lived outside the confinements of time and their own physical bodies, but immersed into their land, their identities inseparable from the natural world around them.

*^{young lioness – Cecil’s granddaughter}*

By the turn of the 20th century, when the white settlers and Cecil Rhodes arrived, Tjwao families lived in scattered groups in what is now Hwange National Park. As Rhodes’ administration claimed the land, they relocated the locals to so-called Native Reserves. This was done on the legal basis of the Game and Fish Preservation Act of 1929. The British blamed the Tjwao for “poaching,” and the sudden loss of wildlife, which of course was irrational, given that the Tjwao had lived in these lands for thousands of years without decimating the wild animals, nor the trees. Rather, Cecil Rhodes had a hidden agenda; he considered the natives barbarians and thought that the sooner the Anglo Saxons subjugated the governed the continent, the better for the human race. It was, he said, their obligation. In a letter from 1888 he wrote:

“I contend that we are the first race in the world, and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race. I contend that every acre added to our territory means the birth of more of the English race who otherwise would not be brought into existence.”

Although not the world’s first National Park, Hangwe was hence the first to evict indigenous inhabitants.

In the years to follow the expulsion, during the liberation struggle and after declaration of independence of the state of Zimbabwe, in 1980, the situation for the Tjwao didn’t improve. As a people who didn’t fit in with neither the Bantu societies, let alone the imperialistic Europeans, they were caught in the middle, victims of violence by the hands of the colonial forces as well as, post 1980, by the red berets, the notoriously brutal Zimbabwe Military Police. They were also victims of cultural ghosting. Unrecognized as an indigenous people, in the native reserves, their history and their culture were forgotten. Their homesteads in the Tholotso district south of Hwange National Park is the poorest district of Zimbabwe, their political representation not worth mentioning, their income the lowest in Zimbabwe due to their low literacy rate and lack of higher education.

The Tjwao language, which has no writing, is destined to die out, spoken by only a handful of people of advanced age. The young, who have never been to Hwange National Park, don’t understand it. They mostly speak Ndebele, the prevailing language in the region, and dream of a different future, where their children at least get better education and can find a better life, in Zimbabwe or abroad.

Only the old still dream of returning to their ancestors’ land, where their forefathers lay buried, the land that defined them as a people, and as persons. They still feel the phantom pain from missing the land from which they were once inseparable. To venture into the National Park, even only for foraging for their traditional foods (hunting is out of question within the confines of the park), they need to apply for a license, a bureaucratic obstacle they mostly fail, or are too scared too attempt, or are denied anyway.

Today, the number of Tjwao living in the homesteads surrounding Hwange is estimated to be around 1500 people. There are fewer Tjwao in Africa, than there are lions.

*^{Mopane worm – traditional Tjwao food}*

Lions are an endangered species, as are wild dogs and cheetahs and giraffes, who all live in large numbers in Hwange National Park. In its wildlife conservation efforts of Hwange National Park is laudable. Situated in a dry region that has no rivers and waterbodies, the park management has since the 1930s installed 103 boreholes, first run by wind wheels, then by diesel generators and presently by solar power, to provide the large mammals with water. Without these artificial waterholes, the many large animals, and with them the lions and other predators, would have long died. This concerns especially the elephants, whose population has exploded since the establishment of the park, from ca. 1,500 elephants in 1920 to ca. 45,000 in 2020.

The sight of many playfully entangled trumps, of happy baby elephants as they splash in the waters against the tangerine African sunset is enlightening to the eyes of the paying visitor – affluent Americans and Europeans. The sparkling reflection of the sunbeams on the solar panels does not diminish their joy. Nor does the presence of rangers managing the waterholes or patrolling for poachers. For these licensed rangers, who are highly skilled in tracking and nature conservation, the National Park is not simply a job, or an income, but their love for wild life is evident – and contagious. Hangwe is not the raw African landscape as the marketing slogan goes; it is land carefully managed and lovingly cared for. As it was before it became a National Park, and before Cecil Rhodes ever set foot on the land that is holy to the Tjwao.

That Tjwao aren’t back to the land that complements them in their identity, that their lives have not been cared for, but falsely sacrificed for the lives of lions and elephants, is incomprehensible; it’s another wrong doing of Cecil Rhodes that should be righted before it’s too late, before their culture has vanished into oblivion.

Unlike his namesake, Cecil the lion was an old man at the time of his death. In the run of his long life he had fathered many new generations. His wives, his daughters and sons, and even his grandchildren are the lions that today hunt in Hangwe National Park and who carry with them the spirits of Africa, of those passed, of those yet to be born.

October 16, 2022October 16, 2022

Dante For Future

How a medieval poet leads the way from climate hell to paradise on Earth

These days, I often think of Dante. Like him, in the beginning of his Divina Commedia, I feel lost.

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita /mi ritrovai per una selva oscura/ ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the journey of our lives/ I found myself in a dark wood/ for the right way was lost.

Dante Alighieri wrote these lines, but they haven’t lost their impact. The poem about Dante’s descent to hell and his way up to Paradise addresses our modern struggles with poignancy, as if we didn’t live in a different era, historically and even geologically. But human nature doesn’t change. We are still stuck in a dark wood although Dante told us exactly how to get to Paradise.

The dark wood, of course, is an allegory: it’s hopelessness. In Dante’s case, it was exile. Dispossessed and sentenced to death, he was hopeless to ever return to his native Florence. He died a refugee.

In my case, it’s hopelessness regarding the destruction of our ecosystem. I don’t suffer from climate anxiety. I read the News. And they are News from hell.

For example: I just learned on Euronews that Europe settled a new record of wildfires this year. The wildfires, resulting from the multiple heatwaves and draughts this summer, burned down more than 700,000 hectares and robbed tens of thousands of their homes.

“The pain was bursting from their eyes;

their hands went scurrying up and down to give protection

here from the flames, there from the burning sands

(Inferno XVII)

Summer is over now, but the heatwaves continue in the Eastern Mediterranean, in case I should want to leave for a quick late summer holiday, as an English news outlet reminded me. They omitted the news of the Algeria wildfires, though, that killed 38.

“There are souls concealed within these moving fires.” Inferno xvi

For the rest of Europe, the draught has long given way to torrential rains and flash floods. Eleven drowned as towns and villages were washed away in Northern Italy last month.

… heavy

Rain which goes on forever, coldly cursed,

Whose nature and whose volume never vary.

Huge hail, with water of a filthy texture

And snow comes pouring down through murky air-

The earth stinking that receives this mixture. (Inferno VI)

You surely heard of the flood in Pakistan that drowned 1678, injured an additional 12,860, and turned 546,288 into refugees. But did you hear of the one that killed 435 in KwaZulu Natal, South Africa, this year, let alone the flash flood of Gambia, which killed only eleven, but half of them children?

beneath the slimy top are sighing souls

who make these waters bubble at the surface. (Inferno VII)

In Dante’s inferno, the apocalyptic scenery is not peopled with innocent bystanders or children, but with unrepentant sinners. The rains and fires, the floods and draughts are punishment, specific torments that reflect the sins committed on Earth. Dante was meticulous and creative in assigning fitting punishment for each evildoer. The gluttonous, for example, got to eternally drown in mud – eat dirt, in other words – while those who had committed violence against God and nature (inseparable in the medieval view of the world) were eternally consumed by fires. Others drowned, got stung by insects, bitten by worms, tossed around by storms, or slowly devoured by wild dogs. Dante’s Inferno was nature turned against humanity. But he hadn’t dreamed up these images. He had lived through them.

DANTEAN ANOMALIES

Raising a whirling storm that turns itself

forever through that air of endless black,

like grains of sand swirling when a whirlwind blows. (Inferno III)

In Dante’s lifetime (1256-1321) Europe knew a period of extreme weather events. The so-called Medieval Climate Optimum – a prolonged stretch of remarkably high temperatures that were far from optimal – culminated in a multi-seasonal drought in Italy that lasted almost 2 years, (from 1302 to 1304). The heat was abruptly replaced in 1315 by a period of unexpected cold and bad weather. The sun, scorching until then, now remained hidden behind dark clouds, and the lack of light made the wheat feeble and the bread unnourishing. Long awaited rains came gushing down in violent torrents that flooded Europe and washed away the soil. Fields were guttered and uncultivatable, and the resulting famines and malnutrition led to lethal intestinal diseases. Domestic animals came down with anthrax and foot-and-mouth disease. As food prices soared, so did violence and crime. Riots erupted on every corner. The Dantean Anomalies, a term coined by the late weather Historian Neville Brown, led straight into the Little Ice Age, a period of extremely cold and long winters. It lasted from the 14^th to the 18^th century. From a meteorological point of view, it was but a little climate change. Unlike the one we’re facing now.

While climate historians still discuss what caused the Dantean Anomalies, there is certainty about what caused our present climate to derail: The heating of our atmosphere through a sudden (in geological terms) increase in greenhouse gases, most notably CO2. The causality between CO2 levels and temperature was first scientifically proven in 1856 by the American scientist Eunice Foote. Alas, her findings remained neglected and for more than a century greenhouse gases were unabashedly pumped into the air: by burning of fossil fuels, largescale farming and livestock. In 2007 scientific consensus was reached that global heating was in fact manmade and the term Anthropocene was coined. Greenhouse gases are still pumped unabashedly into the atmosphere. Why I like to call our era the Misanthropocene.

INFERNO REVISITED

In his book Hothouse Earth emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards Bill McGuire chronicles the current climate collapse in Dantean detail: Backed by hard facts he elucidates the rains and droughts, the storms, the earthquakes and tsunamis (caused be the thawing of permafrost); the desertification of entire regions and ensuing mass exodus; the famines and the new and returning diseases (due to heightened virus and bacteria activity); and last but not least the climate wars and refugees. The book is not in rhyme, but it reads like Dante’s Inferno.

On 29 June 2021, the unassuming Canadian village of Lytton, in southern British Columbia, registered an astonishing temperature of 49.6C, beating the previous record for highest temperature ever recorded in the country by the huge margin of almost 5C. It was also the highest temperature ever recorded north of the 50^th parallel, and hotter than anything ever experienced in Europe or South America. Then following day, the village was gone, wiped from the face of the Earth by one of the many wildfires triggered by the searing temperatures. (Hothouse Earth, Bill McGuire, p33)

Climate Justice

I learned from McGuire’s book that we are all going to hell, some screaming in panic, some unaware, some denying, and some of us are already there. It is indeed outrageous that we earthlings are all punished and tormented, but, unlike Dante’s unrepentant sinners, not in kind and degree. I, unassuming as I am, can’t get over the fact that most of my first world friends keep jetting around the world, eating red meat and shopping fast fashion while I do my utmost to reduce my carbon footprint. I don’t own a car, I take the train not the plane, I live in an apartment building, I limited my pension funds to green energy and haven’t even seen a bloody steak in years. Nevertheless I am enmeshed in energy-dense Western lifestyle and there are millions on this planet who out of sheer economic impotence have sinned to a much lesser degree than I have: the global South, the economically underprivileged. Those living shantytowns that lack electricity and unpaved streets are the ones receiving the direst torment already. Maybe that’s what makes reading Dante so soothing in times of climate collapse. That there will be justice in the afterlife.

The Root of All Evil

In medieval times there was little discussion about what caused the horrific weather events and the crop failures. (God’s punishment for immoral behaviour). For Dante, the reasons why people went astray from the right path was simple: the accumulation of wealth. Greed, (he wrote in his Convivio) creates a vicious circle whereby it can never end but only continually grow.

O Greed, so quick to plunge the human race

Into your depths that no man has the strength

To keep his head above your raging waters. (Paradiso XVII)

In the late 13^th century, a profound change happened in the societies of the many city states in Italy. Early (pre)democratic constitutions had strengthened a new middle class – the merchants and guilds – at the expense of the aristocracy. As feudalism was abolished and as humanism spread, enforcing science and education, living conditions improved for the entire population. Indeed, the climate crisis was better handled by the Italian city states, who erected granaries and infrastructure for food imports, than by the Northern European feudal lords who tolerated outrageous death tolls. However, this development came at a price: capitalism.

The first bankers – moneylenders who invested in textile industry and international trade – soon attained uncontrollable wealth and power. But usury, the financial income not through work but through interest, was regarded a sin and Dante threw usurers into hell.

From Art and Nature man was meant to take

his daily bread to live—if you recall

the book of Genesis near the beginning;

but the usurer, adopting other means,

scorns Nature in herself and in her pupil,

Art—he invests his hope in something else. (Inferno XI)

Around the same time, the world’s first factory was set up in Venice. In the arsenale 16,000 workers manufactured through division of labour one-hundred ships per month. Dante, who had visited Venice, gave a detailed description of the arsenale in his Inferno: it was the dark and vaporous setting where the grafters and barristers – the corrupt politicians and lawyers – came to suffer.

And rightly so. Industrialisation is the root of climate collapse. Bill McGuire pinpoints the year 1771 as a starting point, when in England the Cromford mill introduced the mass manufacturing of textiles. Today the mill is a UNESCO world heritage site, but its true legacy was the first use of carbon-steam-powered engines. From 1771 on, CO2 levels in our atmosphere have been rising continually.

As the last pre-industrial year, 1771 serves as a reference point for present CO2 measurements. 250 years ago, CO2 was at 270 ppm (particles per million), the same as in Dante’s time, and the same it had been for the previous 10,000 years. For millions of years, CO2 levels had never exceeded 300 ppm. We are currently at 420ppm.

Sweet Revenge

If fossil fuels are the root of all evil, then those cashing in on it should pay the prize. Dante would send Gazprom, ExxonMobil, Chevron, Qatar Energy, Saudi Aramco, TotalEnergies, Petrobras, ConocoPhillips, Shell, and CNOOC, their executives, their shareholders and clients, to hell. He would assign them bespoke tortures according to their prevailing sin. The greedy will get to eternally fight each other by rolling great weights towards each other, like bellicose Sisyphuses. The lazy (car drivers) will be left gurgling underneath the surface of the river Styx, the vain (SUV-drivers) forced to lie in a vile slush of never-ending icy rain. Those found guilty of corruption (lobbyists) or destruction (contractors) will find themselves sunken into a river of boiling blood and fire. Worst off are the traitors (politicians), who betrayed their fellow earthlings (violence against kindred and country) by jeopardizing their lives and futures. They will be frozen to their necks in an icy lake. Only us morally superior vegan pedestrians will go straight to paradise. Only we won’t, at least not according to Dante.

Do the Right Thing

For Dante it doesn’t suffice to only disapprove of something. To get to paradise, it takes commitment and sacrifice. Those who live without a stain, but without commitment either, those who remain neutral; those who don’t take up every opportunity to fight for the good for all, those who won neither praise nor blame he relegates to the antechamber of hell, the vestibule. There, they are forced to run after an empty banner while being stung by angry wasps and hornets.

Dante didn’t believe in fate or divine intervention, but in personal choice and ultimate responsibility. Those in charge are responsible to act as moral role models, for if they don’t live up to high moral standards, the population would inevitably adopt their corrupt ways. Accordingly, he condemned three Popes to the lowest ranks of hell (frozen in the icy lake) and various contemporary and historical political leaders, who should have guaranteed peace and stability.

However, their short coming is not an excuse, neither for personal wrongdoing nor for lack of action. Maybe the world’s first existentialist, Dante focused on choice as the defining element of human existence. Everything we do in life we do by choice, he believed, as well as everything we don’t. No one can simply wait for the world, or the system, to change.

“I had not thought death had undone so many.” Dante famously said upon entering the vestibule. It is the most crowded place of all in hell. Back in Florence, he had noticed that the increasing prosperity and wealth of the citizens had led to a general loss of interest in politics and the issues of their time. He described it as a lethargy that lulled to sleep the divine element in every person.

In the 21^st century, I liken those lethargic Florentines to the majority among us who spend their lives transfixed before the screens of their TVs or cell phones, stealing away into a world that includes but does not concern them. A comfortable passivity has taken hold, a consumer’s attitude to every aspect of life: Politics are delivered at the doorstep, like shiny new sneakers, or double cheese pizza, quenching but a personal desire. Consumerism, the love child of capitalism and mass production, has turned humanity into bystanders, passengers on the journey of their life, destined to go to the vestibule. However, the vestibule is the worst place of all as it means to be stuck in agony forever with no way out. Even hell offers an exit route. It’s called Purgatory.

In the Divina Commedia, Purgatory is a steep mountain that leads to Paradise. This too is an allegory. It stands for repentance and purging. It’s painful, but hopeful. Dante named the overcoming of this mountain transumare, a word he created, meaning to overcome oneself, one’s fears and anxieties, and most importantly one’s egoism: the endeavour to contain oneself for the benefit of all. The way to heaven was to do good by overcoming oneself.

In the year 2022 and in the words of Bill McGuire, this good means good for the climate. Only a radical and imminent change in our economic system and the implementation of climate policies can prevent climate collapse and therefor guarantee the livelihood of all. In this case, overcoming oneself means to examine all our actions regarding their impact on our climate: from the perspective of a consumer, the purchase decision from groceries to holiday destinations, from transportation to pension funds. But most importantly, from a responsible citizen’s: to invest in civil action and demand that climate saving economic policies are implemented. In general, it means that both as individuals and a society we must waver our right to “be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground,” as the bible had ordered us. We have to overcome the consumer in us. If this sounds harsh, or impossible, Dante says, rejoice.

The Commedia teaches us that only from rock bottom we will bounce up. Only hell can shake us from lethargy. In hell we meet our essential selves, we find courage out of fear, and hope out of hopelessness, and strength out of desperation.

The Dante Code

Despite all, the way to Paradise turns out to be simple. When Dante was nine years old, in 1264, he saw a girl, Beatrice, and fell in love with her. His love was unrequited. She not once talked to him and died young. But he remained devoted to her all his life. His was true love, he thought, a love that couldn’t possess or be possessed, that could not consume or be consumed. When later in life Dante underwent an existential crisis, love came to his rescue. Beatrice sent him the poet Vergil to lead him through hell and reach paradise.

Dante’s Paradise is a colourful place, of a colour which paints clouds at break of day and in the evening when they face the sun, where birds flock in celebration of their food and a breeze purifies the air, and a hillside rich in grass and flowers looks down into a lake as if it were admiring the reflection of its blooming wealth.

In other words, it is a place where nature embraces humanity. It resembles the place Bill McGuire thinks we can still reach, in a joint effort and in solidarity: a place where trees are planted, and public transport is powered by wind and solar, and with traffic-free avenues for people to get together and rejoice.

Of course, Beatrice and Vergil were allegories, what else? Beatrice stood for love and Vergil for rationality. We can safely sum up the divine Comedy in one catchy slogan: “Be rational and let love be your guide”. Or as Bill McGuire put it more soberly: the measure of society must be how well it cares for the planet and all life thereon.

Dante called Paradise eternal spring, but it’s surprisingly hot there. It’s the heat that emanates from the souls in heaven as they burn with love for each other. This isn’t only a sublime image of all-embracing love. The heat that scorched the sinners in hell, gently envelopes those who have overcome their greed and lethargy, and most importantly the disastrous divide between nature and culture which has governed our thinking and had us treat nature as a commodity.

If paradise is an allegory for humanity inseparable from nature, and nature is love, then we know exactly what to do. We must do whatever it takes to get back the ecosystem that bore us, the Holocene, which ended just a few decades ago. Nothing, compared to 700 years since Dante’s death, let alone the beginning of our planet.

On his way through the Paradiso, Dante stops to watch a hive of bees as they descend on a flower with precious petals. He sees they are angels.

Their Faces showed the glow of living flame

Their wings of gold, and all the rest of them

Whiter than any snow that falls on earth

As they entered the flower, tier to tier,

Each spread the peace and ardour of their love (Paradiso XXXI)

September 25, 2022October 16, 2022

Florence: The Agony and Ecstasy of it All

Florence, rejoice, now that you have such fame,

And over land and sea you spread your wings

The whole of hell is ringing with your name.

(Inferno XXVI)

So opens Canto 26 of the Inferno, the first part of Dante Alighieri’s celebrated Divina Commedia. In 100 cantos, all set in Terza Rima, he retails with high-flying imagination and in sordid detail, how he, with the help of the ancient Roman poet Vergil, descended to the underworld and made his way up through Purgatory to reach highest and brightest spheres of Paradise. Or in simpler words, how he went through hell and was saved.

Dante had written his masterpiece in exile, in Ravenna on the Eastern coast of the peninsula. The Florentine citizen was unable to return to his native city since he had been sentenced to death by burning on the stake. As someone who believed that the individual was inseparable from their community, Dante suffered tremendously.

You shall leave every single thing behind

Which you hold dear; and this is but the first

Arrow that exile shoots, and your first wound.

You shall experience the bitterness

Of eating strangers’ bread, and feel how hard

Going up and down another’s staircase is.

(Paradiso, XVII)

Dante died in exile, having contracted malaria. The year was 1321, and the medieval was world crippled by diseases and famines, by serfdom and injustice, by superstition and ardent Catholicism, by feudal violence and brutal warfare in the name of God. Yet, to our ears, Dante’s words sound modern. And they are of current concern, given the more than 100 million refugees worldwide, given the pandemic and climate collapse, given growing economic and social injustice and loss of democracy. Indeed, the Commedia tells a universal, timeless truth. If Dante was lamenting his homesickness, he did so for the whole of humanity. Wasn’t human experience an exile of some sort? Wasn’t exile the human condition? It was this a philosophical thought, for the first time expressed in vernacular, the language we all possess and not in haughty academic Latin, the language of the elite. Dante’s ideas were hence accessible to the illiterate, uneducated people. A novelty. And by placing human experience in the center of his thinking he opened the gates for what was to finally bring an end to the Middle Ages: the Renaissance and, ultimately, the Enlightenment.

Consider well your origin, your birth,

You were not made to live like mindless brutes

But to pursue to gain wisdom and worth.

(Inferno XXVI)

^{_{Dante died in Ravenna, but his honorary tombstone stands in Chiesa Sta Croce in Florence}}

Dante Alighieri changed the world in many ways. He was a poet of Shakespearean eloquence. Some consider him a love poet in his veneration of his beloved Beatrice and the final and profound realization that God is love, found in nothing but love, requited or not. Others take him to be the first existentialist philosopher, who replaced fate and divine will by choice and responsibility. Some scholars praise Dante’s early feminism in his portrayal of Beatrice and of God as an androgynous entity. The Risorgimento, the movement propelling the unification of Italy in 1861, made Dante their patron saint, since it was him who had literally unified Italy by defining the Tuscan dialect as the one Italian language. Out of the many Italian dialects spoken all over the peninsula, Tuscan was the one that … left its scent in every city but made its home in none, belonged to every Italian city yet seemed to belong to none (De Vulgari Eloquentia). Mussolini believed to recognize in Dante the Italian Übermensch, at the same time as Jewish writer Primo Levi found solace and spiritual liberation in reciting Dante while detained at Ausschwitz concentration camp. The medieval church vilified Dante, calling the Commedia a poisonous vessel of the father of lies covered with false and fallacious beauty, but Pope Francis in his 2021 apostolic letter urged the world to read the Commedia.

Little is known about Dante the man. Reportedly he was of medium height and of dark complexion. In contemporary descriptions a beard was sometimes mentioned, a facial feature that contradicts the austere, hollow-cheeked representation of Dante as it was repeated throughout history. Fellow writer Giovanni Villani claimed that he was “presumptuous, contemptuous and disdainful.” Boccaccio, who never met Dante and had to rely on oral testimonies, described him (in his book “In Praise of Dante”) as a good dresser, always fashionable, and melancholy and thoughtful, but proud and disdainful and prone to losing temper. Dante, it seems, didn’t make many friends in Florence. On the contrary. When setting out to write the commedia, he seemed to have many scores to settle. He peppers the Inferno with many of his adversaries. On his way through hell, Dante gets to watch many of his fellow citizens smother in hell, his fellow writers and teachers, even a handful of popes, one of which, pope Boniface VIII, hadn’t even died by the time of writing. But in the first circle of hell, Limbo, he also gets to meets his great idols, the poets Homer, Horace, Ovid, and Lucan. They greet Dante as an equal. What honour, how flattering. And so the Commedia tells us more about Dante, the man, than he probably intended, while painting a colourful picture of his time and his universe which, of course, was Florence.

Surely, Dante an ambitious man, and industrious: he was a politician, a diplomat, a soldier, a father of four and a husband, albeit not Beatrice’s. He met Beatrice Portinari only twice. Once, at church, when he was nine and she eight, and then again in 1283, when his was eighteen, at the river Arno, close by Ponte Vecchio. Beatrice greeted him then, but later denied having done so. They never met again, Beatrice died young.

Dante chronicled his love for Beatrice in a collection of poetry called Vita Nova (the new life) as it turned from romantic love, when in a strange dream Amor fed his fervent heart to Beatrice, to her death, when his love his turned into spiritual devotion:

because the pleasure of her loveliness,

once it had left our sense of sight behind,

became great spiritual beauty then,

which through the heavens sends

the light of love, which blesses angel-kind,

and their high intellect, unperishing,

amazes, it is such a gracious thing.

Hell is a Place on Earth

In the Commedia, Beatrice appears both as herself, Beatrice Portinari, and as a symbol of spiritual love. It is Beatrice who sends the poet Vergil to help Dante, when in the opening verse, he is lost:

Halfway along our journey to life’s end

I found myself astray in a dark wood

since the right way was no where to be found.

(Inferno I)

This is of course an allegory: Dante set the beginning of the Commedia on Good Friday 1300, the year he was thirty-five. According to the medieval belief that a life lasted seventy years, he was exactly at the mid point of his life. The dark wood stands for midlife crises: depression, the hum drum of a life that lost its meaning, the anxiety of sins committed, of punishment yet to come. The dark wood alludes to the garden Getsemani, where Jesus, doubting, prayed to his father. Indeed, Dante based his Commedia to a great extent on the bible. His other literary inspirations were Vergil’s Aeneid and St. Augustine’s confessions. Like Aeneas he is lost and searching, like St. Augustine Dante is looking for salvation – but not yet. First, Vergil must take him on a journey to show him the true nature of existence. In the realistic depictions of suffering and eventual exhilaration Dante is literally brought to his senses.

Accordingly, the Commedia is an allegory in physically realistic terms. Inferno, Purgatory and Paradise are peopled with characters of mythology and history who in their own voices relate to Dante (and the reader) how they got into their unfortunate situation. Their deeds on Earth, it turns out, are not forgotten, but magnified in the afterlife, and they pay dearly for them. Dante faints frequently at the sight of hacked-off limbs, of bodies ripped (open) from chin right down to where we fart. He sees two (bodies), frozen within one hole, where one head wore the other like a hood. Some are walking backwards with their heads turned back on their bodies; there is a headless trunk moving around, holding up its own severed head. There are sinners consumed by flames, there are sinners immobilized in ice up to their neck,

Their eyes, which had been only moist within,

Gushed over at the lids, until the cold

Congealed those tears that locked the lids again.

(Inferno XXXII)

And so it goes on for thirty-four gruesome cantos. Infernal punishment works along the lines of the so-called contrapasso – the (very creative) reversal of the committed sin. For decades to come Dante’s horrific imaginations will inspire painters in their portrayal of the last judgement. But Dante’s visions didn’t come from nowhere. They were very much grounded in Florentine reality.

^{_{Detail fresco in Cuppola of the Duomo: Last Judgment by Giorgio Vasari, inspired by Dante’s Inferno}}

A child of his time.

In the year of Dante’s birth, 1265, Florence was like the rest of Tuscany, in the throes of a bloody feud between the supporters of the papacy (the Guelfs) and the Holy Roman Emporer Frederique II (the Ghibellines). The Guelfs was the party of the nouveaux riches, the bankers and traders, who wished for a looser, less rigidly controlled society. The Ghibellines were more conservative and feared the Pope and the territorial expansion of the neighboring papal states.

Even though the city state was a republic since 1115, these battles were not fought in the Signoria, the parliament, but in ferocious street fights. Tongues were cut out and hands amputated. Enemies were thrown in dungeons and left to starve, disemboweled, dragged through the streets, burned at the stake. They were imprisoned and tortured, exiled and their property was confiscated, their houses razed to the ground. Rich families, who had their own private armies and notorious mercenaries on their payrolls, fortified their residences with thick walls and towers and little windows to guard themselves from their neighbors. By 1200, there were hundred towers in the city. Shakespearan dramas like that of the Montagues and Capulets were real and frequent.

In the Commedia, Dante tells, how in 1215 such a tragic love story lay at the beginning of the murderous feud. The unlucky lover was slain at the Ponte Vecchio at the foot of a mutilated statue lay at the beginning of the murderous feuds. Today, these words are still engraved in a stone at Ponte Vecchio:

But Florence was a destined sacrifice

To that disfigured stone which guards the bridge

A victim in her final days of peace

(Paradiso XVI)

^{_{Ponte Vechhio, the old bridge that spans the Arno river}}

Ghibellines were eventually killed or exiled in the city, but the surrounding lands remained a Ghibelline stronghold until the decisive battle battle of Campaldino near the city of Arezzo in 1289. Dante, who was twenty-four at the time, participated as a knight in this rather fierce clash, which involved 20,000 combatants and lasted only a day. He still talks of the battle in the Commedia:

I have seen troops of horsemen breaking camp,

opening the attack, or passing in review,

I have even seen them fleeing for their lives;

(Inferno XXII)

Immediately after the Ghibellines had been exiled or killed, the winning Guelphs fell in two rival blocks – I neri e I bianchi/the black and the white – and they continued their feuds with unrestrained fervor and brutality.

_{^{Detail coppola Duomo, Last Judgment by Vasari: Satan as described in the Inferno}}

The son of a money lender (the earliest form of banker) of moderate wealth, Dante sided with the Guelphs. But, believing that the Pope’s powers should be limited, he sided with the Bianchi. Unfortunately for Dante, it was the Neri who gained power just when he served his two month term at the Signoria, the parliament. He was heavily fined for corruption and exiled, to be burnt alive at the stake should he ever set foot to Florence again. He spent the rest of his life in misery, wandering from city to city.

You go through me to everlasting pain

Abandon hope entirely, you who enter

These words are written on the gates of the Inferno. But when Dante, the protagonist of the Commedia, descends to hell, he doesn’t walk, but he falls. Dante the poet uses the word rovinare (Inferno I)which means to collapse or fall to ruin. Dante, the man, was at that point faced with the question of how to continue a life in ruins. By writing his Divina Commedia, Dante found a way to overcome the sorrow, and the sins of the past: those afflicted, those self-afflicted and those suffered at the hands of others.

Dante was lost only to find himself. For this process, he invented a new word. Trasumanare (trans – su – manare) as to transcend oneself, one’s own anxious self. Only in the moment of hopelessness, he claims, one’s proper humanity is revealed, in the heroism that stems from humiliation, in the resolve that grows from resignation, in the courage to let go and define new reasons for being. Only through self- confrontation do we get to know ourselves, to forgive and love ourselves – and others.

^{Self portrait Sandro Botticelli: one of the acclaimed painters of the 15th century, he became so impressed by the Commedia, he abandoned his paintings to work on an Illustration of the Commedia but never finished it.}

Of course, this stands in stark contrast to the medieval idea of divine will and stationary order. For Dante, men and women acted upon choice and free will and were to be held responsible. Accordingly, every sinner had acted upon choice they had therefore chosen their own punishment – the contrapasso, unless of course, self-knowledge trickles in, the moment of true repentance.

A place of suffering and torture, the Dante’s Purgatory was not unlike hell, yet with one decisive difference: there was hope, and hope turned suffering into learning, pain into purging. Eventually everyone who truly repented would be forgiven and welcomed into Paradise. For Florence, this notion had major consequences.

The city’s immeasurable wealth was based on the banking system, but usury was regarded a sin. In order to repent each Florin made, the shrewd bankers of Florence hence invested their money in sacral art –commissioning churches and chapels and baptisteries, they had themselves depicted as saints and martyrs. They flooded Florence with art and changed city’s face for good.

^{golden ceiling of babtistery in Florence}

But was this good enough? Surely not. For Dante the outsourcing of repentance didn’t function, neither to artists nor to Jesus. It didn’t even suffice to live a life devoid of sin to go straight to heaven. In fact, the refusal to decide for or against the Good was the worst of all sins and the antechamber of hell was reserved for those who failed to make choice, take risk out of conviction, failed take responsibility working towards the common Good. Rejected by both Paradise and Hell, they are:

Sorry creatures: the lives they lived were such

They earned no infamy, and earned no praise.

Now they mingled with that wicked sort

Of angels who were neither with the rebels

Nor true to God, but simply stood apart

(Paradiso III).

Dante was saved by Vergil who was sent by Beatrice, by rationality inspired by love: God. Once he reaches the highest spheres of Paradise, Dante gets to meet Beatrice and in her eyes he sees the one light that brings unique human happiness.

But now all my will and my desires

were turned like a wheel in perfect motion,

by the love that moves the sun and all the stars.

(Paradiso XXXIII)