On Sicily: Tears

　
　

What is the purpose of suffering?

If you are considering this question while on vacation, among pleasant people in a beautiful place, of course, something is seriously wrong. In Sicily, I didn’t attend to the news, didn’t follow the spread and progression of Ebola or the course of the various wars and rebellions and insurgencies raging in the world. Intelligence of a sex scandal back in my hometown reached me, but only remotely and as an abstraction. Traveling immerses you in immediacy: the taste of certain foods, weather, the relative hardness of mattresses, the efficacy of air conditioning, humidity, traffic, the logistics of passing from one place to another, the location of toilets. If you are fortunate, you are blissfully unaware of the larger significance of events or experiences. The world presents itself as a buffet wonderfully replete and close at hand. Later, if you reflect upon your travel, however, other questions arise and, although those questions may be unanswered – all truly important questions have no single answer – patterns, perhaps, are discernible.

1.

Suffering...

For instance: once upon a time, in Siracusa, a husband and wife yearned for a child, but they were infertile. At last, the wife became pregnant. But, as her pregnancy progressed, she suffered from toxemia and convulsions. One of these convulsions left her totally blind. After many hours of blindness, the pregnant woman’s sight returned and she saw an image of the Madonna on the wall of her bedroom shedding tears. The Madonna was a cheap terra cotta plaque, bas relief, from Tuscany, a devotional image that had been mass-produced, painted in blue and white with a garish sacred heart clutched like a tumor under breast. The plaque had been a wedding gift to the couple, Antonin and Angelo Iannuso. The little statue protruding from the plaque wept for four days, although she withheld her tears when in the custody of the police summoned to investigate the phenomenon. The priest of the local parish in Siracusa collected a vial of tears, one of several samples taken. It was said that the tears accumulated in a hollow above the sacred heart displayed on the figure’s chest. Tests on the fluid in the vial supposedly demonstrated that the liquid was comprised of human tears. Pope Pius XII declared that the miracle was authentic and asked rhetorically: When will men come to understand the Madonna’s mysterious language of tears? The woman was cured of her convulsions and, apparently, delivered a healthy child.

One might imagine this story to be something told about the Age of Faith, a miracle from the Middle Ages. But, in fact, the plaster-cast Madonna shed her tears in late August, 1953 and the Pope confirmed the miracle in a radio address broadcast on September 9, 1953.

The miracle’s location was a humble street in Siracusa, the Via Deggli Orti II. In 1967, a great church was built at that site, a construction project that lasted many years. The church is called the Cathedral of the Lachrymosa and it towers over the skyline of the white city of Siracusa. The church was built next to the ruins of a Byzantine chapel, a broken facade and some stone walls squatting over a large and labyrinthine catacomb. The new cathedral is supposed to look like a teardrop falling from heaven to moisten the earth, but the architectural style is Brutalist and the structure, if conceived as a falling object, crashes earthward like a meteorite, seeming to obliterate the humble neighborhood in which it is located. Curiously, the church is impressive when viewed at close quarters – the interlocking piers of pre-stressed concrete rise like folded hands above an intricate pedestal of ramps and terraces – but its scale is all wrong and its silhouette risible: to me, the church looks like a Plains Indian teepee, a wigwam twenty stories tall, and incongruously plopped into the elegant old Mediterranean-style apartments encircling the building.

In the church, a vitrine holds the holy relic: a vial of tears. They have crystallized and glisten like a dust of silica and salt. When will men learn the mysterious language of tears?

　

2.

Residents of Palermo (Palermitans) call the intersection dividing their city into four quadrants, "the Theater of the Sun." This name identifies a characteristic of the monumental architecture at that intersection: as the day progresses, the sun illuminates, in turn, each of the four Baroque facades forming an amphitheater around the intersection between Via Roma and Via Vittorio Emmanuel. The crossroads is a busy place at the bottom of a sort of cistern or well made by the curved facades frowning down upon the intersection. Each facade forms an arc of about 90 degrees, towering over the meeting of the streets: a sculptural ensemble of columns and figures – at eye-level the feet of four patron saints, all of them women, stepping forth from deep, dirty-looking niches over a fountains that vomit water from the flayed faces of giants; above the impassive saints, there are more columns and pediments, architraves over pedestals where heroes in armor survey their city, and, then, yet higher, against the sky, four more women, allegorical figures representing the four seasons, swathed in swirling drapery and arms bearing baskets of flowers or fruit, staring at one another across space framed by the Sun-theater. Traffic and smoke has soiled this Baroque city-center and, at the street-level, it is gloomy within the amphitheater where lost trucks are making u-turns and Vespas spinning in tight, spiral pattens, and the architecture has been stained grey with grime, the color of an old, battered metal garbage-can.

One of the Palermo neighborhood, a quadrant to the northeast, is called Kalsa and this is where I walked, a day before the guided tour began, looking the Palazzo Abatellis. This renaissance palace houses an art collection and a notable work, a great and maleficent fresco called the The Triumph of Death. In Kalsa, some of the streets dead-end at the harbor where the claustrophobic maze of narrow alleyways and small, filthy piazzas opens to the sea entrapped in the harbor, under beetling cliffs across the bay. I passed some ancient churches, more like geological phenomena than buildings, tiers of gesturing martyrs and stone torches, palms cut into the stone and vases holding big pine-cones, grimy rock encrusted with battered-looking ornamentation that seemed to have grown in place like the formations in a limestone cavern. Some of the alleys were scarcely wide enough for a single car to pass and the buildings seem to nod together overhead to roof the passages so that they were like underground tunnels. Africans stood in small suspicious-looking groups on the corners of the rubbish-filled plazas – the men were either resplendently clean in white smocks and tunics or filthy, wearing stained soccer shirts and torn jeans. I passed a miserable-looking little obelisk in an piazza the size of a small bowling alley, an old church squatting in a corner like a mangy dog, some taverns with men standing in front of them operatically waving their hands at one another and crying out in tones of histrionic abuse and grievance. The high walls of the palazzos were windowless, festooned at their cornices with grotesque animal spouts and gutters. I came to a kind of college or high school and young men stood bickering on the street and, behind them, there was the sea, caught under a kind of mud-colored stone curb.

I found the building that I thought to be the Palazzo Abatellis but was afraid to approach too closely. Six or seven men in casual clothing were standing at the threshold, engaged in some kind of bellicose disputation. I couldn’t tell who was defending the door and who was just visiting for the purpose of the debate. The men embraced one another and, then, pushed apart and someone’s voice sang out like the tenor in an opera, a high crying sound with laughter fluttering around it. Although it looked to me like a fist-fight was about to erupt, in fact, the men were merely entertaining one another with arias of discontent and abuse and they were all friends. At last, I screwed-up my courage and pressed through them to the door – one of the men blocked me, said something in Italian, and, then, slapped a ticket into my hand. Inside, it was hot and sweltering as is the case with all public buildings in Palermo – there is no motion of air and the confined atmosphere is muggy and smells of plaster dust and effort of climbing the clammy marble stairs is enough to drench your hair and ribs in sweat. The place was completely inscrutable, empty rooms with fading frescos decorating the walls between 12 foot high windows, an interior courtyard filled with rubbish, a tower like the structure from which Jimmy Stewart fell in Vertigo, open colonnades looking down on the maze of tenements and alleyways. Some teenage girls were picking at the scabs on limestone figures lying recumbent on sarcophagi and fans were whirling, pushing hot air around in the room – it seemed to be some sort of high-school project involving the restoration of medieval tombs, dragged out of the crypts and lining the wall of the 18^th century ballroom. Putti leered at me and big mirrors all foamy with dust cast distorted reflections. If this was the Palazzo Abatellis, there was no art inside, just fragments of sculptures, tombs with abscessed figures carved into eroded limestone, vaguely salacious gods and goddesses roving the tops of walls and the ceilings that were painted as if to open upon the faded blue of the sky. After ten minutes in the stifling building, entirely ignored by the teenage girls bent over the dead princes and princesses, I fled the place. I went to a church on the waterfront, a little mound of statuary and pillars under a crescent-shaped dome. I thought to sit down on the steps of the church and look across the water to the cliffs, big escarpments such as I imagine the Rock Gibralter to be. But there was a woman at a desk sitting in front of the church, well-dressed and with a friendly smile, and she beckoned me to approach her. She sold me a ticket to the church interior and I went inside.

Again, it was hot and the air was motionless and suffused with water – my face was soaking with sweat and my eyes stung with that moisture. The inside of the church was white with freshly cleansed marble walls, but plain. Some big sarcophagi mounted on porphyry clawed-feet stood along the sides of the nave. Putti incongruously slumbering on skulls like pillows sat atop the sarcophagi. After a couple minutes, I wanted to leave and so I went to the door and pushed on it, but it didn’t budge. It was like pushing against the marble wall. An complex sort of lock with various latches and levers and handles presented itself to my touch – it was dark by the door and the lock seemed to present an insoluble problem. I rattled the lock and pushed at the latches, shoved levers up and down and between, but the door didn’t open and the great wooden panels at the threshold were immobile. Panic overcame me briefly. I was trapped in the empty, suffocating church where innumerable marble skulls were grinning at me and there was no way out. I slumped in an uncomfortable pew and, at last, I saw a sort of armoire shoved against the back of the nave, a kind of closet with a small wooden door like the entrance to a confessional. I went to the dark cherry-wood box and pushed on the door and it creaked inward and, then, I saw that the woman at the desk was sitting outside, guarding the door and so I was freed from my confinement.

Later, with the tour, we were guided through some of these same airless alleyways, slot canyons in the ancient masses of buildings. Of course, with a guide leading us we saw more and better. In one small piazza, we stood on irregular, ankle-cracking cobble-stones in front of a Baroque church, a dowdy affair like decomposing wedding cake, studded with handless and noseless martyrs. The church was the color of concrete stained by road kill and a modest obelisk on a fat, grafitti-smeared pillar of stone thrust its thumb up to the sky. Storm clouds, blue and intense with watery shadow, were scudding over the domes and spires of the city. Ms. Accardi told us that more than 3,000 Frenchmen were buried in a mass grave under the unprepossessing monument. The French were the victims of an episode called the Sicilian Vespers, a massacre that occurred on Easter evening in 1282.

At that time, Sicily was ruled by the Normans and the king was Charles of Anjou. After evening mass, some French soldiers groped Sicilian women in front of a church on the outskirts of Palermo. One of women’s husband used his dagger to kill the Frenchman pawing his wife. This triggered a general slaughter – mobs churned through the narrow medieval streets hacking to death any French-speaking person that they encountered. A shibboleth was used to discern who should be killed – the Sicilian word ciciri means chickpea. French tongues and lips can’t pronounce that word; there is something about the repetition of the "c’s" and the "r" embedded in the word that thwarts proper pronunciation, at least when ciciri is voiced by a Norman. People who pronounced the word incorrectly were summarily butchered. In the end, as is always the case, the savagery proved contagious – not only men, but, also, Norman women and children were killed and, at last, Sicilian women, as well, known to have consorted with the French were slaughtered. One woman, it is said, had her womb ripped open by a knife-thrust so that the fetus protected within, claimed to be half-French, could be dashed against a wall.

In the neighborhood of the monument to the dead French, bomb craters from World War Two were visible. Atrocity, it seems, is eternal. On some of the shops and taverns, there were orange-yellow stickers announcing that the proprietors did not pay pizzo – that is, protection money to the Mafia. The window decals said Addiopizzo. (Pizzo means "a beak-full.) Verdi composed an opera on the subject of the massacre of the French. In The Siclian Vespers, a princess of Austria, Helene, sings an aria Sorte fata! Oh, fier cimento ("Fatal destiny! Oh fierce conflict!). The French governor of Sicily, Monfort, announces that Helene may be married to her beloved, the Sicilian rebel, Procido. As bells toll, Sicilians storm into the garden of the Monfort’s and kill the French.

　

3.

At Siracusa, the ancient Greeks chiseled their theater into living rock, limestone benches stepping down an arid sunbaked hill from low cliffs crowning a stony ridge over the harbor. Silt accumulates with time and the theater was erected above a stream flowing down to the water and so the sea is now remote from the theater, a quarter-mile away, beyond an ugly industrial development of small metal buildings and fuel tanks. The theater is large – crowded, it would have held 18,000 people and, from this capacity, a census can be established for ancient Syracuse: assuming a ratio of seven slaves for each free citizen, the city was probably inhabited by about 125,000 people, the second largest city-state in the Greek world.

Greek theaters are remarkably beautiful and elegant, although they must have been miserable places to attend: uncomfortable and exposed to the glare of the sun. A great semi-circular of elegantly sculpted benches forms a huge curved stairway leading up to the white cliffs. In the center of the cliffs, a round cave overlooks the theater, an empty socket like the Cyclops’ ruined eye glaring down at the pale tiers of seats and the stage and the blue sheet of sea beyond. The cave seems to be artificial, a grotto excavated into the cliff above the center of the last, and highest, row of seats. A spring is captured within the grotto, held within the deep, wet rocky niche, and water surges from stone, then, spills downhill beneath the theater. The top of the cliff is musical with flowing water and, indeed, the center of the theater also whispers with stream flowing through cool channels under the hot white benches. This theater sighs with mysterious rippling water, concealed in the rock, a sort of literal inspiration for the plays that were presented here, a sort of divine afflatus. Along the hilltop, the cliff has been hollowed into arched openings for Christian burials, and ten yards from the cave overflowing with water, a tiny cascade sluices down the escarpment, the stream embedded in a shaggy emerald growth of moss. The sun is hot and it glares against the white benches and the stage undercut with deep, rectangular pits – these were innovations of the Romans who later occupied the site and favored spectacular effects in their blood-and-thunder productions, animals and ghosts and monsters arising on elevators from underground. But despite the heat and the blinding light, the air in the theater is fresh with the scent of flowing water and its remote music tremulous under the chiseled benches.

Next to the theater, there is a quarry, now abandoned, with spikes and pillars of rock swathed in vine, cup-shaped hollows filled with water and flowers, luxuriant shade for the paths that wind over the irregular terrain, ground that seems toppled and tumbled as if from rockfalls and landslides from the sheer cliff backing the garden. Solemn, sacred-looking cats prowl the green corridors of the garden. There is a kind of monumental calm about the garden, great monoliths of stone rising from the dim, verdant shadows, pillars left half-carved in situ. A large cave, forty-five feet high and opening into a lofty L-shaped space within the rock, stands like a colossal, shadowy presence at the rear of the park. A rippling fold in the stone at the peaked vault of the cave seems vaguely anthropoid, human-shaped, the color of flesh, like the ear of Dr. Spock on Star Trek or a satyr. And, in fact, the cave is dubbed "the Ear of Dionysius," named after one of the tyrants of ancient Siracusa, a potentate said to have imprisoned political dissidents in the big, echoing cavity in the escarpment, poising his spies overhead to listen to the whispers below funneled up from the darkness under the cliff. In the Ear of Dionysius, tour groups are engaged in competitive singing: German and French and English voices all intermingled, the echoes reverberating endlessy against the stone-walls textured with innumerable chisel marks.

During the Peloponnesian War, Athenian forces attacked Siracusa. The background for the conflict in complicated: the city-state of Segesta, another Sicilian kingdom, was allied with Sparta and the Athenians threatened them. The inhabitants of Segesta successfully petitioned Siracusa for assistance. An Athenian armada was launched against Siracusa to punish that city for supporting Segesta, an ally of Sparta. Alcibiades led the expedition, a military adventure inaugarated under bad auspices – someone, it seems, had mutilated the phallic herms defending Athens and the Greek general was accused of that wrongdoing and, indeed, later sentenced to death in absentia for treachery. (Indeed, when Alcibiades was summoned back to Athens on charges of having desecrated the herms, he blithely switched sides and began to assist the Sicilians against his home-city.) The Athenian army fought the Syracusans for several years and there were several bloody battles. At least, the Athenians were routed and seven-thousand prisoners were taken. The prisoners were dragged in fetters to the quarry at Siracusa and forced to labor there in appalling conditions – they were granted one cup of water and one bowl of rice a day. Within a few months, almost all of the Athenians were dead, killed by starvation, thirst, and over-work. A dozen or so escaped to bring the news of the catastrophe to Athens.

The quarry is now a beautiful garden, lush with flowers and fruit trees and vine-entangled piers of unfinished columns. "This place," the guide says, "was a kind of concentration camp." On a pathway, a cat has maimed a small lizard. The lizard’s back is broken and, it seems, only one of the little creature’s legs is still sufficiently articulated to move. The cat is smooth, silky, inscrutable. The cat drops the lizard on the hot stones, lets it scuttle helplessly slinking sideways and spinning on its one intact leg. Then, the cat bats the lizard, lifts it gently in its teeth and carries it another twelve or so feet, before dropping the animal so that it can again attempt escape. Several German tourists film the cat torturing the lizard with their elaborate cameras, clever optical instruments that they brandish.

Each Spring, before it becomes too hot, Greek tragedies are presented in the ancient theater. The tragedies are about atrocities so remote and grotesque that they have become the occasion for art. The Greeks displayed no violence in their theater, although every horrific act was lovingly and graphically described by actors or the chorus. The tour guide at Siracusa notes that Greek plays arose in a matrix of civic responsibility and that they educated citizens in the values of their city. "When the chorus denounces Medea for butchering her children," the guide said in her sweetly accented and reasonable voice, "they are explaining that the heroine is a bad mother." This seemed a bit of an oversimplification to me.

Beyond the Greek theater, a Roman amphitheater is gouged into the stony soil. The amphitheater is a caldera and the site still seethes with implicit violence – at the center of the crater, there are pits where gladiators and wild animals were concealed before making their entrance in the sand-covered arena. The Romans, by contrast, showed every form of violence on stage as realistically as possible – it is said that they killed criminals in the course of plays by Seneca to mimic the murders enacted in his tragedies. The law-abiding, totalitarian, spectacle-seeking Romans, hypocrites all, are our forebears – the Greeks are too remote, too religious, too weirdly abstract and, even, oriental for us to claim as ancestors.

A glad was a short sword used in gladiatorial spectacles. When a gladiator was wounded, the victor turned to the audience and the imperial box for advice as to whether the disabled man should be killed. People held out their hands – if their thumbs were aligned with their forefingers, this meant that the losing gladiator was to die. If the thumb was curled back into the palm, this gesture signified sheathing a blade: in that case, the verdict was mercy.

In the evening, I wandered alone the hot streets of Siracusa. I became completely lost. The alleyways narrowed to tiny passageways, stifling and hundreds of feet long, wormholes between malodorous tenements, balconies almost touching overhead, wet laundry dripping onto my head, bleach-scented, like the limestone-infused water sliding from overhead stalactites in a cave. The passageways were strewn with trash and damaged-looking dogs trotted here and there and, sometimes, I encountered groups of women who glared at me as an outsider, an intruder in this subterranean labyrinth. A couple of men shoved past me. They had the bruised and sorrowful faces of gladiators. I felt the same panic that I experienced in the church – there seemed no way out of this stony and dark maze. But, then, the narrow passage opened on a street wide enough for cars to be parked along the curb and I saw a restaurant with tables set under an awning and the city’s fortified mole thrust out into the sea and, from these landmarks, I could navigate my way home.

4.

The Museo Mandralisco occupies a nondescript structure built into the stucco wall of a street in Cefalu. The place was originally the home of a 19^th century nobleman, Enrico de Mandralisco, and it displays his collections. The walls are white and the galleries small and airless, opening into a tiny courtyard concealed within the closely-packed houses comprising the block.

Mandralisco was an indefatigable antiquarian and naturalist. There are cases crowded with small, embalmed songbirds. The bright feathers of the little creatures have faded into a uniform and dowdy drabness. Most of the birds look alike as do the ancient coins, no longer glittering but scuffed and abraded, the tyrants adorning the little irregular and twisted shields of metal disfigured, noses rubbed away and crowns (or, perhaps, laurel-wreaths) worn to indistinct filth on their brows and in their curly hair. In this museum, everything is fading and half-erased. The hot picture galleries are full of martyrdoms and tortures, but the pictures are so eroded and dark that the horrors displayed in them are close to illegible. A shadowy figure flays a howling satyr; his blood has darkened to a trail of grey-brown slime extruded from his faded yellow wounds. St. Lucy with dark craters where her eyes should be displays her eyeballs on a silver tray. In another faded picture, St. Agatha richly dressed presents her amputated breasts, presented like hors de ouevres on a platter that she holds in a slender white hand. (In Catania, under Aetna’s peak, Sicilians eat minne di virgine – Virgin’s breasts, a dense sugary cake armored in white frosting with a maraschino cherry nipple.) Antiquity has blurred the paintings and you see them as if from a great distance.

The museum’s greatest treasure is an enigmatic portrait of a man, apparently a seafarer. The picture is small, gemlike, and it has been lovingly restored – the flesh tones on the little canvas glow as if lit from within. The canvas is by Antonella de Messina. The man smirks very slightly. The smile on his lips is very faint, but his eyes, which seem cruel and remote, are merry. The martyrs, with their palms, were tortured and died so that pictures could be painted of their sufferings. The unknown sailors indecipherable smile is indistinguishable from a grimace.

　

　

5.

Example: Herodotus recounts that the Persians punished the rebellion of the Ionian Greeks by dispatching an army to destroy the city of Miletus, a large and beautiful Greek city built where the River Maeander flows down from the mountains of Asia Minor to the sea. The inhabitants of Miletus defended their city courageously, but the Persian army was persistent, undermined the city’s defensive walls, and destroyed it. The men were killed, the strongest and handsome boys were castrated and sent to serve as eunuchs in the imperial courts of the Persians, and the women and girls were deported as slaves.

A Greek poet, Phrynicus composed a tragedy called The Sack of Miletus, presented in Athens only a couple of years after the city was destroyed. Miletus was a patron of Athens and the Athenians thought of the city as a colony. Phrynicus was an innovator – he is said to be the first writer of Greek tragedies to deploy female masks in this theater. Before Phrynicus, the choir commented and a single actor declaimed the play’s narrative. Phryinicus established a second character in the presentation, thereby, in effect, inventing dialogue. Greek tragedy was intended to achieve catharsis – that is, the purgation of powerful emotions of pity and fear by the representation of terrible events. Phryincus seems to have succeeded all to well with his productin of The Sack of Miletus. The Athenian audience was moved to tears to the extent that Phrynicus, who won the Olympiad competition for playwriting, was also fined 1000 drachmas for disturbing the peace. After Phrynicus, Athenian theater shifted largely to mythological themes, eschewing historical events from the recent past.

Suffering, it seems, is an occasion for art. Tragedy and grand opera are a kind of remote and abstract mourning. The meaning of suffering is that it provides the raw material for a certain kind of artistic endeavor important to human beings.

This answer is insufficient to the question.

On Sicily -- A Birthday and a Birthday Greeting from a Dead Friend

　

1.

On the morning of my 60^th birthday, I sat with my wife on a bus marked with the nickname "Tiny." A dignified Sicilian gentleman named Antonio with white hair and wearing a short dark tie was driving the bus. We were en route, as part of a Rick Steves’ tour, from Cefalu to Mount Aetna.

The highway was broad and well-maintained, passing across high barren plateaus. Sometimes, the road was borne over deep, stony valleys where water-courses, dry and choked with pale, white gravel, could be seen. Italian highway planners seem reluctant to damage the terrain of their ancient landscape by cutting roads across it – often, the freeway was carried on concrete viaducts traversing the valleys from hilltop to hilltop. These long viaducts had a noble aspect, monumental and severe, a kind of classical gravitas.

On one upgrade, Mount Aetna came into view, a high blue dome hovering like a distant zeppelin over the slopes of the mountains closer to the highway. Above the steepest slope on the plateau, lifted up toward the bright sun like an offering on a brown altar, was the city of Enna. Compact and pale, the town spiked a summit, a crown of cathedrals and fortifications.

It excited me to see Enna and I thought of Milton’s simile for the garden of Eden in Paradise Lost:




Not that fair field

Of Enna, where Proserpin gath’ring flowers,

Herself a fairer flower, by gloomy Dis

Was gather’d, which cost Ceres all that pain

To seek her through the world...

Mari Accardi, the tour-guide, remarked that the Greeks had built a shining temple to Demeter at Enna above the fertile uplands where grains were grown in great abundance. The high fields hanging over the highway were all plowed, the grass tucked under clods of brown earth, but seemed fallow.

The bus stopped near the exit to Enna at an Auto-Grill, a kind of resting place with a large and modern truck stop. On horizon, Enna on its lofty peak was visible; on the other horizon, we saw Aetna signaling its volcanic heart to the world with a diaphanous plume of smoke.

In the Auto-Grill, on a counter, books were displayed. These were hardbound volumes, marked for sale at 9 Euros apiece, classics of literature. I perused the titles: Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Dickens’ David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, a volume of novels by D’Annunzio, and, most curiously, a bilingual edition of Edgar Lee Masters’ The Spoon River Anthology, sumptuously bound, each epitaph in English faced with its Italian translation.

Of course, I was thinking about death, my own and the deaths of those that I had known. The day was sunny and bright, not a cloud intervened between my face and cheeks and brow and the sun.

　

2.

But, later, of course, it was foggy on the slopes of Mount Aetna. Clouds concealed the summit and dampened the lava fields congealed on the mountain’s flanks.

On the grim outskirts of Catania, an industrial city on the Ionian Sea,"Tiny" had turned toward the mountain, wrapped in stormy-looking blue and green clouds. Aetna is vast and covers many miles, less a mountain that an enormous landscape sloping inexorably toward the calderas 11,000 feet above the sea. At first, the bus passed between jagged ridges of charcoal-black lava – the lava fields were intricate badlands cleft with deep fissures and bulging pinnacled domes, places that seemed literally impassable, serrated teeth of stone poised to shred your feet and disembowel you if you slipped and fell. Among this moonscape, on stark promontories, there were small factories, aluminum foundries, plastic injection molding plants, warehouses and machine shops. These industrial facilities stood atop spiny ridges or in pits hollowed out of the lava fields.

The road wound upward, twisting and turning through small villages. The ancient houses were built from stacked and rough-hewn blocks of lava. As the narrow highway climbed the peak, we passed zigzagging retaining walls of lava stone and sometimes the road ascended through narrow grooves with stacked basalt sides, a kind of canal that led up toward the heights. The landscape was a slanting checkerboard of small fields, some of them vineyards or olive groves, walled off from one another by chest-high mounds of volcanic rock.

It was gloomy with fog and the roadway was wet. Once, the clouds opened for an instant and we could see a towering ridge overhead, livid with tongues of reddish and brown lava poured down from above in huge avalanches of tumbled rock. Different flows of lava were superimposed on one another and in the ash next to the road a kind of broom-shaped plant, something like sage brush, was slowly devouring the boulders and turning them into black soil. Some parts of the mighty rampart had eroded into dust and pebbles and there were even a few forlorn-looking grooves of trees, folded into hollows on the hillside. An abandoned monastery stood in a pit surrounded by low cliffs of lava – apparently, prayer had stopped the lava flow at the very threshold of the structure, although, I supposed that if anyone had been in the building the heat of the magma would have roasted them alive. Next to a bend in the road, a house’s tile roof protruded from field of black, fissured stone. The texture of the hillsides varied: here slick with eroded, particulate pebbles and ashen dust, sometimes rigid with long, slanting dikes of unbroken rock. In places, the lava seemed very fresh, excremental, the shit of the volcano smeared in huge landslide-shaped flows across the slope.

The fog closed around the bus and the windows were damp with dewy sweat. Some tourist buildings swam into view, a chalet-like exterior riding a knuckle of barren volcanic rock. Many buses were parked around a crater and a chairlift ascended toward the hidden peak, only a few of its iron pillars visible on the sheer hill.

It was chilly here, 6000 feet above the sea. A big dining hall, mostly open to the elements extended across a terrace. On some video monitors, a DVD showed recent eruptions of the mountain, red spires and plumes of dancing lava with dramatic music, narrators on different monitors speaking a babel of tongues. Girls set out Dixie cups of liqueur, a 160 proof cognac called Lava of Aetna, Limoncello, and some kind of cream drink infused with brandy. The toilets were crowded and people were buying bottles of booze, postcards, necklaces made from polished obsidian, and other souvenirs.

I wandered uphill toward the Silvestry Crater. The ground underfoot was glassy and made a crinkling sound as I walked. It seemed familiar to me. Where I had encountered this kind of earth before? It came to me as I stood on the edge of the crater: it was cinder, the surface of the athletic tracks on which I had run when I was a young man in High School.

The crater yawned below, a foggy abyss lined with black and yellow pebbles. A German guide was squatting at the edge of the caldera, speaking to some fellow Germans who seemed to be kneeling in homage to the vast crater. The German was using very dramatic language and I could hear many picturesque verbs, words like "bursting forth" and "falling inward," all separable verbs signifying both violence and motion. The clouds ruptured for just an instant and, in an nearby pit, I saw a sort of spiral labyrinth made from loaf-sized stones, projectiles with rounded edges that had been ejected from the volcanic and, then, arrayed in this decorative pattern.

The fog was alternately very close and dense, and, then, diffuse but it was impossible to see anything above us. Sometimes, pebble-like rain pelted the side of the volcano.

My wife had told people that it was my birthday to my discomfort and embarrassment. Several women came from our group came to me as I stood overlooking the huge crater foaming with mist where the stentorian German was discoursing on the science of eruptions. The women were very sweet and congratulated me on my birthday. They assured me that life was good and a gift and that we should be grateful for remaining alive to see such wonders as the volcano hidden in the clouds swirling around us.

Conversations of this kind make me uncomfortable. I said something to the effect that I had come to Aetna to hurl myself into the caldera like Empedocles, but, based on their kind words, had changed my mind. The ladies looked at me, a little aghast, and with incomprehension. I said that I had never thought that I would live to the age that now afflicted me.

One of the women said that two of her brothers had died before they were sixty. I nodded my head. "I’m glad to be alive," I said. "There are many who didn’t make it." The woman shook her head and sighed to agree with me.

The road coiled down the side of the mountain, passing folds in the lava fields where there were wet groves of trees dripping with moisture. We emerged from the pale, wraith-like clouds into a glittering landscape of vineyards and small villages clinging to the precipitous slopes. Below, the sea shone with light, marked with strange patterns, like causeways in the blue-green water.

3.

Plato says that men were taught to write so that they could forget. Before written language, human memory was stronger and more resilient.

I tried to bring to memory the faces of those that I had known who were now dead: my father, grandmothers, my college friend, Jim LeClaire, who died suddenly at 38 when his heart burst, my father-in-law, Dick Hart and my Aunt Rose, who taught English in St. Peter, as well as Professor Terry Dilley, who was my closest friend and who perished at the end of this icy Spring. I thought of the many lawsuits on which I had worked involving deaths on lonely highways, during blizzards, people slaughtered by drunk drivers, vehicles upended in frozen drainage ditches and filling with water, slips and falls that had been fatal for elderly people, children killed by cancers and blood diseases, a young mother smitten with cerebral hemorrhage and dying as she gave birth to her daughter.

Once, when I was about forty, a man bearing my name (although spelled "Beckman" without the double ‘n’), was killed when he lost control of his pickup truck after a night spent drinking in a tavern in Blooming Prairie. The accident occurred in March on a gravel road and the man’s vehicle was not discovered until the next day, tipped over on its cab in a half-frozen drainage ditch. I didn’t know about the accident until someone called me from a law firm that was my adversary in a case that I was litigating. The lawyer on the other end of the phone connection asked me if I "was still alive." "As far as I know," I said. "Well, there was a report that you were killed last night near Blooming Prairie," the man said. ‘It must be a mistake," I told him. The lawyer opposing me was a woman named Becky. She had been afraid to place the call because she knew that I had children and a wife and did not want to face the possibility that I had been killed in the crash. "I will tell Becky that you are okay," the lawyer said to me.

It was strange to see obituaries and a death notice bearing my name. The dead man was my age, although born in a different month of the year.

　

4.

The Greek philosopher, Empedocles, lived in Akragas, now called Agrigento, around 450 BC. He practiced medicine and wrote two books, On Nature and Purifications. On the basis of fragments surviving from these works, we know that Empedocles thought that all things were rooted in earth, air, fire, and water. He proclaimed the conservation of matter: according to his doctrine, elemental matter could be neither created nor destroyed. The four fundamental elements were unchanging because divine, manifestations of "shining Zeus, life-giving Hera, Aidoneus, and Nestis, who with her tears fills the springs from which mortals draw the water of life." The power of Eros, or Aphrodite, mingles "water, earth, air, and sun together...(thus creating) the forms and colors of all mortal things..." Aphrodite’s love is opposed by a cosmic antagonist, strife, a power that tears the elements apart. Nature is the spectacle of these deities combining as a result of love and, then, separating under the influence of strife.

Empedocles described his philosophical method as "stepping from summit to summit, not plodding along a single track to the end." He said: "What is right may properly be uttered even twice."

Vain and, probably, quarrelsome, like all Greek philosophers, Empedocles warranted his theories by performing miracles. He prophesied his own death – or, perhaps, transfiguration – since he seems to have asserted that he would simply vanish from the earth, specifying the date when this would happen. At the appointed hour, he is said to have climbed to the crater of Mount Aetna and hurled himself into the chthonian fires. Other sources claim that when Empedocles’ prophecy as to his doom failed, he fled Sicily for parts unknown and was never seen again. A legend arose that a search party on Aetna found one of his boots, turned to bronze by the volcano’s magma and, then, spit from the caldera.

　

5.

The Benanti vineyard lies on the gentle slope of Mount Aetna, a couple kilometers inland from the shining sea. The winery occupies a 17^th century palazzo in a garden with spacious, ancient outbuildings, large open sheds roofed with slumping orange tiles, a damp cellar lined with concrete where portly wine barrels repose, and a swimming pool-shaped vat where grapes are crushed. Four or five acres of grape vines staked in rows in the black volcanic soil occupy the hill that slants upward behind the buildings in the direction of the sheltering volcano. In this part of Sicily, Mount Aetna is simply called "our mountain" and is regarded as kind and infinitely generous.

An attractive young woman led us up the slope behind the buildings to the vineyards. We sampled a few of the purple and green grapes – they were sweet but very acidic. A blight had ruptured some of the grapes in the bunches, shrinking and withering the skin about the empty core. The young woman said that this was the result of excessive rain. The higher ground above the vineyards was haunted by pale mists that seemed to ooze from the earth and the groves of olives and old ilex. Our guide probed the cinders underfoot and I picked up one of them, a pumice bomb about the size of my thumb that was remarkably light, a combination of fire and earth and the moist air.

The owner of the vineyard, Caballero Benanti, had an intelligent face, bespectacled eyes above a noble nose and a neatly trimmed grey beard. He spoke with great passion about the process of making his wines. When Italians speak English, their prosody is very musical – they articulate with great clarity, singing each syllable, and, almost always, accenting the "ed" in words like "formed" or "embraced." Sicilian gentry are concerned to tell you their genealogy, emphasizing their ancestral homes, usually on the mainland of Italy, the venerable nature of their family, their nobility and impressive history of dynastic marriages and Signor Benanti was no exception – he spoke, at length, of palaces, tracts of land and the villages indentured to those acreages, princesses, counts and countesses. He said that his vineyard produced grapes at various elevations on the slopes of Mount Aetna and that the flavor of the wine made from those grapes was determined by the altitude at which the vines were grown, their exposure to the sun, and the different constituencies of the soil. When someone asked him if he irrigated his fields, Signor Benanti responded with horror: "Oh, no," he said, "that would destroy the proper chemistry of the wine." Signor Benanti had been educated as a pharmacist and he told us that the manufacture of wine required the most acute scientific observation and attentiveness.

At the conclusion of his discourse, Signor Benanti made a melodramatic gesture of groping within his own entrails to draw forth his beating heart. He cupped his imaginary heart in both hands and, then, offered it to us: "my wine is made from the sun and from this heart." Of course, it was a sales pitch, but emotionally effective, nonetheless.

We sat at large tables in a side-building open, on its sides, to the landscape, a dignified presence of great beauty and immemorial age. Lackeys poured wine for us and we ate hors d’ouevres: various cheeses, olives, caponata and bruschetta. People became drunk and hilarious. Women posed for pictures with the stylish and handsome Signor Benanti. He told the ladies that the word "Minnesota" meant "stiff tits" in Italian. There was much giggling and the wealthier members of our group ordered cases of his wine, a great extravagance since the bottles sold for 35 to 40 Euros each with a shipping charge of 12 dollars per bottle. Mari Accardi told us that the young woman who had led the tour over the porous black cinders of the vineyard had been a professional basketball player – "she is from the North," Ms. Accardi said, "but she became fascinated by this place and is now an apprentice here, learning the business."

Signor Benanti insisted that the group visit his family chapel. We entered through a door inside the estate, behind the big ivy-covered walls surrounding the palazzo and its property. The chapel was shaped something like a kiln or an old oven, a sort of dome rising over a marble altar in the center of the structure. A painting of an effeminate-looking Jesus, made in the 18^th century, was mounted at one end of the building. Others sacred objets d’art hung overhead – a grisly 16^th century crucifix of lime-wood and a life-size terra-cotta Madonna with child whose age and provenance Signor Benanti also explained. He said that the altar was consecrated and that a priest came to celebrate Mass in the chapel, sometimes as often as twice a month. The Mass was sung in Latin and Mr. Benanti demonstrated, chanting some phrases in a remarkably pure, and beautiful, tenor. Like most Sicilian gentlemen, there is something priestly about him – his religious education is impeccable, of course, and once he aspired to holy orders. He voice resounded in the vault overhead. "Listen to the acoustics," he said. "It is magnificent." He told us that there was a relic authenticated by Catholic authorities concealed in the altar. "If you have such a place," he said, "if this is your heritage, then, you must make use of it, even if it costs you more than a hundred-thousand dollars to renovate the chapel." Signor Benanti said that he opened the double doors behind us, an entry to the chapel on the public street, so that wayfarers and villagers could come into the little church and celebrate Mass with him.

Mike S– suggested that we say the Lord’s Prayer together in the chapel. Mike S– has a vibrant and commanding personality and his suggestions, of course, are persuasive. We spoke the Lord’s Prayer, a blessing upon our travels. I found myself moved. Perhaps, it was the great quantity of wine that I had consumed.

　

6.

From the slopes of Aetna, we rode the bus to Taormina. The road was serpentine, twisting through little villages that seemed to blend into one another. Sun erupted through the clouds and on the volcano’s vast incline, I could see small domed churches, orderly orchards of lemon and citron and orange, grape arbors, ancient farmhouses with white stucco walls and brightly tiled roofs, the entire landscape glittering as if with dew. Raindrops decorating green plants and orange-tiled roofs coruscated in the flood of sunshine now breaking through the clouds. The sea, mysterious and bright, edged the land, rising up to meet the shores of black sand.

The mountain’s slope seemed to display the landscape, holding the villages and farms up to the sun’s inspection. The whole world was suddenly visible, disclosed in all its abundance and fertility. This was an ancient place, sacred for five-thousand years to many tribes and peoples. Under the volcano with its head garlanded with clouds, everything sparkled and each thing insisted upon its own particular revelation.

My wife saw a rainbow over the sea. The rainbow was bright, only a radiant arc, that launched itself from the zenith and plowed down into the turquoise water. "Terry Dilley is greeting you on your birthday," my wife said. I thought of Professor Dilley’s intelligent eyes and his kind smile. He died at home at the end of Spring and I had pronounced his eulogy at his funeral. "Do you recall," my wife said, "that Terry came to see you just two days before Angelica was born?" Angelica is my youngest daughter. I wasn’t sure that I remembered the encounter. "He pointed to the sky and said that there was a double rainbow and there it was!" my wife remembered. "You talked to him for a long time." In the recesses of my memory, I recalled seeing a double rainbow but the image was confused with paintings and photographs of such phenomena. I wondered what Terry and I had discussed – probably, a book that Terry had just finished or something that I was reading, local gossip, theology, perhaps (for a time, Terry had been a monk). But, try as I might to recall, nothing remained for me from that day.

"It’s Terry Dilley’s greeting," my wife repeated. I agreed with her. "It’s Terry Dilley’s greeting," I said. Empedocles reminds us that what is right may be uttered even twice.

The rainbow vanished. Near Taormina, the sea beat the shore with such fury that men and boys were surfing in its wild grey waves.

　

7.

At the hotel in Taormina, a few people were kind enough to gather on the terrace for my birthday. They were other travelers from Minnesota. A watery sunset had painted the sky with colors like those in a late painting by Turner, whorls of mist tinted with oozing reds and yellows. The volcano was hidden in dark clouds. Another hill-town, even more impossibly lofty, crowned a huge column of bare stone overlooking Taormina and the hotel terrace. We opened a bottle of wine, a process that was difficult because of the way the flask was sealed. Constellations of little lights twinkled on the sloping landscape that the volcano had made.

"Would you have ever thought you would celebrate your 60^th birthday in a place like this?" someone asked me. "No, never," I said.

Mike S– offered a toast. He dared me to write it in this essay, so here it is:


Here’s to the heat

But not the heat that burns shanties,

Rather the heat that drops panties.

H said his father had offered this toast, Irish in origin, at his own wedding.

　

8.

Two days after I returned to Minnesota, the postman brought me a stiff brown envelope from Terry Dilley’s sister in Pierre, South Dakota. Several times, she had called me and indicated that she was going to send a photograph, but the picture had never arrived. I was afraid to open the envelope. Obviously, it contained the promised photograph. I hoped it wasn’t an image showing Terry and I engaged in discussion, laughing and happy on some long-forgotten evening – for some reason, the idea of a picture like that was upsetting to me.

At last, I opened the envelope. The photograph was a picture that Terry had taken forty years ago, before I knew him, an image of trees and snow at the Nature Center. I recalled that the framed picture had been displayed at Terry’s funeral.

The picture is very serene. It shows deciduous trees reduced to graceful, tapering columns by the winter’s cold. An unbroken mantle of snow covers the ground between the trees, perfectly white and pristine – not even a tiny arboreal animal has passed over these fields of snow. The bare trees and the snow and the wan winter light almost too weak to imprint the white with shadows are almost abstract: it is Winter’s silent temple.

　

9.

This quote comes from a short story by Lydia Davis:


That fall, after the summer when they both died, she and my father, there was a point when I wanted to say to them, All right, you have died. I know that and you’ve been dead for a while, we have all absorbed this and we’ve explored the feelings we had at first, in reaction to it, surprising feelings, some of them, and the feelings we’re having now that a few months have gone by – but now it’s time for you to come back. You’ve been away long enough.

On Sicily -- Proverbs

On Sicily – Proverbs

　

　

　

I read several books by Sicilian writers when I was on that island. The authors cited these proverbs, among others:

"A woman is more dangerous than a shotgun."

"Arguing with a woman is like trying to wash the face of a donkey."

On crime and the mafia: "The soil of Sicily is so rich that no sooner do you uproot one weed, than two weeds take its place." (The name "Sicily" means "the fertile place.")

"Water is the best of all."

The latter phrase is something that the old Prince brings to mind as he is dying in Lampedusa’s great novel, The Leopard.

Our tour guide, Mari Accardi, had recently published a book, a series of linked short stories probably autobiographical in nature. The name of the book is Il Posto piu strano dove me sono inamorata – she translated this title as "Strange Places where I fell in Love." The book is shortlisted for a prize and has been well-reviewed in the Italian press. Ms. Accardi showed us a hand gesture used by Sicilians: she slid the side of her thumbnail down her cheek, pressing hard enough to pull her lower eyelid down a little. Acura – she spoke a Sicilian word that I am undoubtedly misspelling. She said: "Means ‘beware,’ or I cut your face." The tourists gasped at little at her audacity. "We use it mostly as a joke," she said. "Mostly."

Sicilian is the only European language that lacks a future tense. Ms. Accardi said that this feature of the language was, perhaps, related to the Arabic influence on the island. "Instead of saying: ‘I will do this,’ Sicilians say ‘Tommorrow I have to do this..." She speculated that this feature of her native language was diagnostic of a certain existential condition: "The Sicilians have never been their own masters," she told us. "They have always been slaves to someone else: the Phoenicians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Arabs, the Norman French, the Spaniards, and, now, the Italians from the north. They have never possessed a future of their own."

On Sicily -- Rain, Africa, and a Fountain

　

　

After returning from Sicily, on the second night sleeping in my own bed, I heard the rain outside the open window. It was an October rain – brisk, soaking the earth and the fallen leaves covering the lawn. The breeze intruding into the bedroom was wet and cold and the sound of the raindrops splashing on the shingled roof was soothing. The falling rain underlined every one of my thoughts and made them vivid. It is a fine thing to feel the shivery cold and, yet, be warm under blankets, listening to the rain tickling the trees and the rooftops and the familiar streets and sidewalks.

One evening, I saw blue clouds rolling over the mountains in their parched golden semi-circle around Palermo. The clouds trailed veils and streamers of falling rain. On the street, the rain caught us outside, between the sultry hotel lobby and a similarly humid and warm restaurant. The falling raindrops were large and warm, processed through some nightmarish sieve of tropical clouds. It was not refreshing, but, rather, like standing under a hot shower. The rain smelled of the sea, rotting fruit, Africa and Ebola, anchovies and shell-fish and mud like mucous and rancid sweat. Palermo’s ancient stones were slippery. Vespas hissed by in the brief and violent downpour. A rain like this one doesn’t revive; rather, it exhausts and weakens. Before we could open our umbrella, the gale had passed.

The restaurant had been chosen for convenience, as a shelter from the storm, and it seemed to be a franchise, something called a Polpeterrio. We had no idea what the word meant. A hostess rushed toward us as we crossed the slick, marble threshold. She held a canister like a wastepaper basket, a place in which to repose our umbrella, although, initially, we had no idea what her gesture or words meant. The menu of the Polpetarrio was gibberish, Italian sentences translated literally into an English that was garishly flamboyant, garbled, and impossible to decipher. Apparently, the place sold only meatballs, although in vast and eccentric variety. There were pork and beef and lamb and horsemeat Polpe, meatballs made from fish and tirimisu, gelato meatballs, even, improbably, enough "vegetarian meatballs." We ordered and, unlike every other Sicilian restaurant into which we had ventured, the food arrived almost immediately – platters with fist-sized meatballs over which a white, creamy and aromatic sauce had been ladled. Sicilians eat late, after 8:00 pm in most cases, and, as we ate our meatballs, the restaurant gradually filled with people, mostly young couples on dates. The menu extolled meatballs as the most venerable of all foods, the most nourishing, and the greatest gift to mankind:

A new way to talk about "Polpetta" (meat balls), a traditional and angent dish.  It's an example of domestic pargmony, artistic manufact of rycicling art, always in the home conversation...Our unique and original recipe in Sicily, use to get just the best meat and ingredients.  These are simple dishes with the best quality.  La Polpeterria's staff is looking forward to let your find our new and traditional flovour from Sicily.

The restaurant's operating principle was stated on the menu in these terms:

The passion for the things you do, you can only grow when the results obtained correspond only in part to those who were your primary objectives.

 Outside, the rain came and went and the traffic churned through puddles. The air was steamy with humidity. Autumnal Sicilian rain is nothing like the rain that falls in October in southern Minnesota.

A week or so, later, in the white marble city of Siracusa, Julie and I walked to the waterfront. Below the piazza, with the metal tables and their umbrellas opened against the hot sunshine, a perfectly round pool, enclosed by a wall bulged outward from the land into the harbor. The pool was a freshwater spring, famous in the ancient world, the Fonte Aretusa. Although Arethusa (Aretusa) was the most beautiful of the nymphs, for some reason, her name has always made me think of gorgons, snake-headed monsters, the Medusa – perhaps, this association is simply based on the rhyme: "Medusa" - "Arethusa." A white duck was paddling languidly through the shimmering fresh water pool and big, torpedo-shaped fish were drowsing just below the surface; a single koi, orange like a jungle flower, loitered in the calm water. The poets say that Arethusa was bathing in the Alpheus River in Greece when the river-god attempted her rape. The virgin nymph fled the god’s embraces, praying to Artemis for deliverance. She crossed the Mediterranean Sea, swimming through its blue caverns, to reach Siracusa. At that place, Alpheus seized her, consummating his passion as the nymph metamorphosed into this lovely, sunken pond, the river-gods waters mingling with hers and the greater flood of the sea also joining the orgy. In the center of the fresh-water pond, there is a bouquet of papyrus growing eight or nine feet tall. The papyrus fronds are golden something like a fern crossed with a sheaf of wheat. It is said that one of the Egyptian pharaohs, possibly of the Ptolemaic dynasties, gave the papyrus plants to the Greek tyrant that ruled Siracusa. The stalks and feathery green leaves of the papyrus and their moist fronds writhed in the hot breeze stirring from the sea, a serpentine floral mass like the snakes wreathing the Medusa’s monstrous brow.

Sicily is close to Africa. Berbers patrol its streets in white smocks like the butchers wear in a meatpacking plant. Old men with forked beards lead little boys through narrow alleyways. It is hot and the air, even in October, is smothering.

On a Race

　

　

　

1. The Fastest Runners

In Book Four of his Histories, Herodotus tells us that the Kingdom of Garamantes was a powerful nation located in Libya. The Garamantean’s occupied lush oases in the Sahara desert. Their lands were well-watered and fertile and their people numerous. For sport, the Garamanteans hunted troglodyte Ethiopians, people who lived in caves in the scorched mountains to the east of their lands. The Garamanteans pursued the troglodytes in chariots drawn by four horses.

Capturing troglodyte Ethiopians was no easy task. The "Burnt Faces" or "Ethiopians" were swiftest runners on earth. Often, they outpaced the chariots pursuing them and they could run without resting for many miles. Herodotus says that the Ethiopians spoke a language "like no other" squeaking like bats to one another. They nourished themselves on snakes and other reptiles. Herodotus’ epithet for the Ethiopians is either "long-lived" or "fleet-footed" – he thought they were the most beautiful people on earth.

Herodotus’ account of the Garamantes and the cave-dwelling Ethiopians was regarded as a charming, if childish, fiction. Then, a few years ago, archaeologists discovered a rock shelter in Libya’s Acacus Mountains with stone surfaces covered with petroglyphs. Several of the paintings on the rock showed chariots apparently drawn by four-horse teams, that is, quadrigas to use the Greek term.

Ethiopian and Kenyan runners are the best in the world. (Kenya shares its northern border with Ethiopian.) Wikipedia lists 393 Kenyan long-distance runners; the same source lists 193 Ethiopian long-distance runners. The ten best times recorded for the marathon were all achieved by Kenyans and Ethiopians. These African runners can run a marathon course in about two hours and three minutes.

The Kingdon of Garamantes, whose nobility drove quadrigas in pursuit of the Ethiopians, no longer exists. The water table withdrew below the level of the foggaras or underground channels chiseled in the desert bedrock. Without water, the Garamantean cities withered and died. Sand eroded their palaces and their famous gardens perished.

　

2. A long distance race

In Austin where I live, a paved trail leads from a city park, through a tract of woods and along a creek to another larger city park with soccer fields and softball diamonds. The distance between the two parks is about 1.3 miles and most of the way the footpath leads through a picturesque forest. It is a good place to walk my dog, although caution is required – bicyclists jet along the trail between the two parks, noiselessly coming and going. On the trail, there is always something to see: basketball-sized white mushrooms growing from trees shattered by lightning, scarlet dragonflies, ornate fiddle-head ferns caressing the trunks of ancient oaks, water in all its varieties – trickling creeks, big loops of still, sullen river, lagoons remaining from floods, puddles black with decaying leaves.

Some sort of race must have been run along the footpath through the woods. I encountered chalk marks scribbled on the asphalt trail, foot-high letters. The first legend inscribed on the trail was near a railroad track, two huge staring eyes chalked on the asphalt and the words: LOOK FOR TRAINS. A little later, the path said U R HALFWAY, then RUN TO LIVE and a dozen yards father down the trail LIVE TO RUN. These last two admonitions were written in bright pink chalk. Another forty or fifty yards down the trail, I encountered a thick line drawn across the path and the words TWO MILES. Beyond the two mile mark, I came to a place where local satanists sometimes celebrated their rituals, a couple pentagrams pecked into the asphalt and a burned spot with some kind of organic substance melted into the tar, a bad, sweet odor over the remains of the bonfire, and, then, more pentagrams and a gang sign shaped like fat, bas-relief italics, the marks contoured with shadows painted onto the path. Not surprising, the trail said KEEP CALM and RUN ON beyond the satanist emblems. The trail crosses a pond, asphalt poured over a culvert through which sometimes a trickle of water flows and, then, there is a hill. On the hill, someone had chalked CHARGE UP THE HILL and JUST DO IT! The trail rode the crest of a river bank for two-hundred yards, then, dropped into the other park, a grassy meadow with swingsets, a steel slide, and a jungle-gym – UR FAST, the sidewalk said and, then, ALMOST THERE! At the edge of the park, the path was marked with white letters: LOCATE and two arrows pointing back down the sidewalk toward a set of brackets painted on the trail.

I would like to have seen some sign of the race’s finish line. But, apparently, the course continued beyond the park, down a residential lane, toward a destination unknown to me.

　

3. Fifteen minutes of Fame

The 1972 Summer Olympics were held in Munich. Terrorists murdered the members of the Israeli wrestling team. Today, the slaughter of the Israeli wrestlers is the only thing that most people recall about those Games. But I remember something else; I have a different memory.

I am watching TV. On the screen, a beautiful young man, blonde and with muscular legs, is trotting along the track in the great stadium. The young man has the classical Aryan features of a member of the Hitler Youth. His face is curiously vacant, indifferent, bland. He lopes along the track with a long graceful stride and his long hair streams behind him like a wreath of victory. The youth has the grace and solidity of an archaic Greek kouroi figure with broad shoulders and thick, powerful thighs and his face bears the same enigmatic, slightly mocking expression, insouciant pride in his strength and stamina. But, for some reason, everyone is howling at the young man, booing and denouncing him, and a great roar rises from multitude of people in the terraced bowl of the coliseum. The spectacle is curiously dreamlike and I have thought about it many times and wondered whether I really saw this young man taking his victory lap in the great German stadium.

East Africa was poor in 1972 and the Kenyan and Ethiopian runners who were later to outpace all rivals were insufficiently trained to compete at the Olympic level. The American runner, Frank Shorter, was favored to win the marathon. Shorter ran a strong race. After two-hours and ten minutes, Shorter appeared, running on the road between cheering crowds in the shadow of the coliseum. He was twenty or so seconds ahead of a Belgian runner struggling behind him.

Shorter had a long, easy stride and, although I presume that he was in agony, his pace was steady and his gait graceful. His face was a mask of determination, jaw set and eyes staring ahead of him. Shorter turned and ran through a dark arched opening that lead into the stadium. As he entered the opening, the cameras tracking him could not follow and so, for a moment, he vanished from the screens of the hundreds of thousands of people watching the race on television. In a grandiose long shot, the camera caught the lone runner striding alone down a straightaway. For a moment, the audience was confused – it seemed that Shorter had somehow lunged ahead, sprinted, perhaps, through the dark bowels of the stadium to emerge in the middle of the track under the eyes of the ten-thousand Germans assembled to watch the race. People rose to their feet and began to cheer loudly.

On the BBC, the announcer cried out with exaltation: "It’s Frank Shorter, well in the lead." Similarly, the two ABC commentators, Jim McKay and Eric Siegel, a professor of Greek, bestselling novelist, and Herodotus scholar, shouted that "Frank Shorter has entered the stadium." But, a moment later, the BBC sportscaster howled: "No, no, no – it’s a hoax, he’s an imposter, that’s not Frank Shorter, he’s having a lark. Look at him, he’s as fresh as a buttercup." Jim McKay said: "This is not Frank Shorter." By this time, Shorter had entered the stadium. Eric Siegel was horrified: "Frank doesn’t know that he’s won. He’s looking at the other guy. He thinks the other guy is going to win." Siegel abandoend all pretense at objectivity and addressed Shorter directly: "No, Frank, keep going, you’ve won. He’s fake. Don’t let it bother you – Frank, you’re the winner."

The cameramen did not know which runner to show. In a picturesque close-up, filmed with a long lens, the beautiful blonde runner swept forward, barely sweating, moving with lissome precision. His eyes were opaque and mysterious and he seemed to be scarcely breathing. The crowd roared its approval to the blonde runner, but he ignored the accolades, surging forward toward the finish line. Eric Siegel screamed: "Get him! Get him off the track! Someone should get him!" Jim McKay said that the entire Olympic games had been marred by chaos and confusion and "just when you think that nothing more awful could occur than this happens." Someone signaled to the photographers that they were filming the wrong man. The live-feed cut to Shorter. Shorter was emaciated and haggard-looking. He kept looking to his left, apparently startled and baffled by the runner who seemed to be cruising toward an easy victory 200 yards ahead of him.

Just short of the finish line, the blonde runner suddenly changed directions and ran off the track into the darkness under the stadium. Shorter continued forward and finished the race. By this time, the ten-thousand people in the stadium were booing loudly and whistling and stamping their feet. Shorter continued to trot forward after he had won the race, apparently unable to stop the ceaseless motion of his long, slender legs. "You’ve won," Siegel cried into his microphone. "You’ve won." Shorter glanced over his shoulder and, then, looked around in all directions, gradually slowing. He seemed to be searching for the phantom runner. Clearly, he was baffled by the loud booing and catcalls coming from the stands.

This was not the first time such a thing had occurred. In August 1904, the Summer Games were held in a steamy St. Louis, Missouri. On the day of the marathon, humidity was high and the temperature stood at 90 degrees. The American front-runner, Frederick Lorz, managed nine-miles of the hilly and grueling course. Then, he exited the race and hitched a ride on a motorcar for eleven miles. His conspirator deposited him at the foot of a hill seven miles from the finish line when their car broke-down and he ran the rest of the way to the stadium. Like the German in 1972, Lorz was cheered by the crowd and, even, awarded the medal. Later, his ruse was discovered. Second-place in the race had gone to Thomas Hicks and, ultimately, he was given the gold medal. Hicks had trouble on the last couple hills and seemed on the verge of collapse. His trainers gave him a mixture of strychnine and egg-whites dissolved in brandy and Hicks revived enough to complete the race, although the elixir that he had been administered almost killed him in the aftermath of the marathon. In 1980, the Boston Marathon’s women’s division was apparently won by Rosie Ruiz. Ruiz had run only one mile. She slipped from the middle of the pack and rode the subway to within a half-mile of the finish line and, then, hustled back onto the course and finished the race. Ruiz was a serial cheater; she had qualified for the Boston Marathon by achieving a good time in the New York marathon run a few months before. In that race, she had also used the subway to reach the finish-line. (Ruiz was dishonest in many ways – she was, later, convicted of embezzling, served time in jail, and, then, a few years later, went to prison for cocaine trafficking.) As late as 2000, Ruiz continued to maintain that she was the true victor of the 1980 Boston Marathon.

As the German imposter smoothly rounded the corner of the track, Jim McKay said: "We need to know the name of this guy." Eric Siegel replied: "No, no, I hope no one ever hears his name." The German runner wore bright orange shorts and a blue track shirt with a laurel wreath over his heart. On his back, he wore the number 72. After the race, the imposter was arrested in the tunnel under the coliseum and, immediately, taken to see Willi Daume, the German chairman of the Olympic committee. Daume was a controversial figure; he had been a star athlete during the Hitler period and some people doubted his commitment to democracy. It is not recorded what Daume said to the German imposter. It is also unclear as to whether the man had violated any laws or was ever charged with any crime – is it contrary to statute to pretend to be the winner in a marathon race?

Frank Shorter’s time was unimpressive by Olympic standards – he won the race in two hours, 12 minutes, and 19.7 seconds. (His own best time was two minutes faster). The German police were unable to explain how the imposter had got onto the track. The marathon course was complex – it had been designed in the form of the profile of dog, Waldi, the mascot for the 1972 races. Perhaps, the German had darted out onto the course in one of the many turns and corners necessary to trace the dog’s silhouette on the streets of Munich.

　

4. Redemption

The runner who cheated in the 1904 marathon race in St. Louis, Fred Lorz, ran again in 1905. Lorz was a bricklayer by trade. Photographs show a saturnine young man with a dull, simple-minded face. Lorz always contended that he had not meant to cheat in the St. Louis Olympics. He said that he had collapsed on the course at the nine-mile mark, been picked up by a motorist and driven toward the finish line. When the car broke down, Lorz simply ran the rest of the way to the stadium and did not know that he was ahead of the other competitors. He claimed to have crossed the finish line by accident, spurred on my cheering crowds that he was too ashamed to disappoint. He said he was surprised when he was awarded the medal and meant no harm.

Lorz was a real athlete and he won the Boston Marathon in 1905, completing the race in a creditable two hours and 38 minutes.

The German imposter was a 22-year old student from a provincial West German city. His name, which you can discover on the internet, was N – S –. Herr S– claimed that he had intervened in the race to "cheer people up" since the world was mourning the Israeli athletes murdered a few days earlier. S– said that his appearance on the track was a practical joke and that he had meant no harm. (Herr S– did not explain how his hoaxing a victory in the marathon was supposed to "cheer people up." Why would his fake victory be any more heartening than Shorter’s actual success in winning the race?)

Shorter was angry at the hoaxer and the German officials. He felt that he had been deprived of the glory of his victory. Herr S – sent Shorter a letter a few years later begging for his forgiveness. Shorter tore the letter up and did not respond.

Herr S– decided to atone for his prank by becoming an actual marathon athlete. For several years, he trained and, in fact, qualified for the half-marathon in Munich, a road race run on part of the course where Shorter had prevailed in 1972. He ran full marathons in Berlin and Hamburg. Each time he completed a marathon, he sent a card to Shorter announcing the fact. Between 1971 and 1974, Shorter was victorious each year at the Fukuoka marathon in Japan, a race run on the first Saturday in December each year. Herr S– took an interest in that race, probably because of its association with Shorter, and began traveling to Japan to participate in the late seventies. The Fukuoka marathon is open and no qualifying time is required, but the race attracts world-class runners. In 1981, Herr S– was at the height of his powers as a long-distance runner, a respectable contender in the middle of the field. At Fukuoka, he paced the Ethiopian star, the world-class Tsegaye Kebede, for the first nine miles but, then, stumbled on the wet pavement (it was raining), badly tearing ligaments in his knee. Herr S– was treated in a local hospital and, when he recovered, remained in Japan. He was the son of a German industrialist and independently wealthy and, in Fukuoka, Herr S– was not notorious for his 1972 escapade. By the late eighties, Herr S– was a member of the Board of Directors of the Fukuoka marathon. Each year, he sent an invitation to Frank Shorter to come to the city and run, at least a 10K race or a half-marathon. Shorter, who had become a well-known motivational speaker, declined the invitations.

Fukuoka is famous in Japan for its Yamakasa matsuri (festival). This festival celebrates a 12^th century monk who saved the town from the plague by carrying a shrine on his shoulders through each street, blessing all intersections and dowsing them with holy water. The monk’s exertions were successful and the pestilence departed from the city. Like the original runner of the marathon, however, the monk died of exhaustion. In the matsuri, teams of men from each ward of the city carry heavy wooden altars on their shoulders, lugging the big shrines weighing several thousand pounds, through the streets, completing a course laid-out in nine-hundred years before. The teams compete with one another and the race is both dangerous (shrines have fallen from their platforms crushing competitors) and exhausting. Each year, Herr S– stripped to his loin cloth, the traditional shimekomi, and participated on the team from his neighborhood. In 1991, the race was run in a torrential rainstorm – Fukuoka is sub-tropical and July, the month of the competition, is part of the rainy season. It was hot, almost ninety degrees, (34 degrees centigrade) and windy with typhoon-force gusts and the race was extraordinarily arduous. After completing the course, Herr S– collapsed and died that evening in an ambulance en route to the hospital. No one informed Shorter and, as far as I am aware, he doesn’t know to this day that Herr S– died in Japan in July 1991.

　

5. The Trail

I walked my dog from the park with the playground equipment through the woods to the railroad tracks across the road from the softball diamonds and soccer fields. The scarlet dragonflies still patrolled the trail. Black crickets like tiny frogs hopped from the grass across the asphalt path – I saw them every fifteen or twenty feet. The grasshoppers were lethargic, overfed victims of their own autumnal success – they lay on their bellies on the trail, unable to move, comatose, fat as cigar butts tossed down on the sidewalk,

It had rained several times since my last tour of the trail and the admonitions chalked onto the sidewalk were all washed-away. They had vanished like the oases and palaces of the Garamanteans. An African emigrant jogging on the trail passed me. He moved with long, loping strides. I said "hello" to him, but he didn’t hear. He had headphones over his ears.

On Income Inequality and Poetry

　

　

　

A wise friend told me that the class war was finally over. History has ended, but not as Marx expected: the rich, my friend maintained, have won the class war completely and irrevocably. I don’t know enough about economics to comment on this intelligently. However, most of what I see around me confirms that the game is rigged, that the middle class is doomed, and that our politics is an oligarchy dominated by moneyed interests. Legislation and foreign affairs are not democratically managed; rather the wealthy purchase those laws and wars necessary to serve their interests.

There are two factors that dramatize the victory of wealth over the rest of us. First, money now dominates politics and other aspects of the res publica with an impunity and shamelessness that seems unprecedented to me: greed is openly celebrated and the Supreme Court has declared that money is speech, a conclusion that may have always obtained to some extent, but that was never publicly declared as a political principle. (In this analysis, I follow Slavoj Zizek’s notion that to speak a truth that was hitherto operative, but discretely veiled, is a quantum shift in consciousness; it is one thing to torture people secretly in the cellars of an autocratic state – it is another thing entirely to declare publicly that torture is acceptable.) The second symptom of income equality is the imminent collapse of the middle class. Income inequality squeezes the middle class downward – society is increasingly imagined as a tiny minority of oligarchs managing a vast class of minimally educated, impoverished proles. Among industrialized nations, the United States has become less like Germany and Scandinavian countries and more like Chile and Mexico. Indeed, statistical studies suggest that the American division of wealth is rapidly eroding the middle class – in 2014, families with income in the top ten percent saw their wealth increase significantly; by contrast, the families with the least, the lowest 40 % saw their wages and earning capacity decrease substantially.

Of course, the dissolution of the American middle class is a cause of concern. Most politicians promise that they will debate the issue. But, of course, in a society in which all journalism, as well as all other media, are controlled by plutocrats, debate is a form of Kabuki-theater. Democracies debate problems that they are helpless to solve. Indeed, debate is a means of social control. The more thoroughly a subject is debated, the less likely that there will be any solution. Public debate simply lulls the poor into false security: someone somewhere is talking about our problem and so, therefore, we may accept the status quo as natural, ordained and inevitable. In modern America, debate authorized and empowered by media outlets is typically limited: everyone agrees that income inequality exists, is destructive to our institutions, and dangerous; but everyone also agrees that the problem is inexorable and that the only way to ameliorate this peril is to slow its progress – there is no one really suggesting that measures should be taken to redistribute wealth or do anything that would reverse the trend.

One of the most pointed and effective comments about income equality appeared recently in a magazine that is, as it were, the house organ for very rich, The New Yorker. In the September 8, 2014 issue of that magazine, there is published a poem entitled Nursing Assistant: Chapter Review. I think that poem is worth a dozen treatises and tracts on income inequality, its causes and effects. The poem appears over the name C. Malcolm Ellsworth. Ms. Ellsworth is an Iowa poet and on the evidence of this verse, a great writer. (She has published a volume of poems called that I will have to obtain.) It is curious that this excellent poem is printed in a magazine that features an advertisement for Tiffany & Co. on its back cover, cheek by jowl with other ads for expensive vacations, luxury hotels, and Broadway musicals with tickets that cost $250 dollars per seat. Because this poem is superb and, even, important, I think, I shall quote it in full:

NURSING ASSISTANT: CHAPTER REVIEW

After we shave balloons,

but before the test on decubitus ulcers,

a shamelessly bellied

Venus of Willendorf talks trash

and recounts every detail of her long-past pregnancy,

her meltdown in a family photograph at age ten,

and the recent transgressions of a drunken live-in.


In the chapter on mobility,

two h’s are silent, eschar,

as in necrotic tissue, a black wound,

and trochanter, as in trochanter prominence,

as in there are many ways to be broken.

In keeping with its ostensible subject, the poem divides neatly into two stanzas – one of them is descriptive and the other analytical: we are presented with a symptom and, then, diagnosis or commentary on that symptom. The poem replicates the way that medical practitioners are trained: we are taught to see something clearly and without sentimentality and, then, provided with scientific analysis of that phenomenon. The portrait in the first stanza is labeled and described in the second part of the poem.

The poem’s first seen lines describe the kind of person not ordinarily portrayed in verse: she is a student, vulgar, fat, and garrulous. The text’s heroine is not reticent, intelligent, elegant or blessed with a refined artistic sensibility. Her training seems oddly pointless – she is tested on her ability to shave a balloon, presumably one slathered with lubricant cream, without puncturing the latex. (Shaving balloons was intended to educate nurses to use razors safely. Surgical sites on hairy patients have to be shaved in preparation for incision and, presumably, bedridden men also need to have their cheeks, lip and jaws dewhiskered. This work is ordinarily done by electric razor, but some nursing programs still require that students complete this exercise – this is a nice photograph on the internet of two handsome nurses in cap and white dress shaving a balloon sometime during World War Two. The Nevada School of Nursing posts two pictures of contemporary nursing students using razors to carefully scrape shaving cream off a balloon on which a face has been drawn in magic-marker.) We are told that the nursing assistant student will also be tested on decubitus ulcers – that is pressure or bed sores. These ulcers are a condition arising from immobility. Patients who are paralyzed or too weak to move are prone to develop penetrating ulcers at pressure points where their motionless body rests upon the bed in which they are lying. Accordingly, the student is being prepared for menial labor, presumably shifting or turning bedridden elderly patients to keep them from suffering decubitus ulcers as a consequence of their immobility. The ballooning latex mirrors the student’s rotund and slovenly body, her "shamelessly bellied" form. The razor poised over the swollen balloon threatens it with deflation, just as the decubitus ulcer pierces the body of the motionless patient inflicting injury upon his or her flesh.

From description, we imagine the nursing student as heavy-set, a niece to Dr. William Carlos Williams’ "Elsie" in his great poem that begins with the lines "the pure products of America/go crazy":

some Elsie –

voluptuous water

expressing with broken


brain the truth about us

her great

ungainly hips and flopping breasts...

Ellsworth’s nursing assistant student looks like the "Venus of Willendorf," a prehistoric figurine showing a voluptuous female figure with broad, fat hips and pendulous breasts. The birth of her child (or children) has been the principal event in her life and she regales those listening to her with "every detail of her long-past pregnancy" – presumably a gory and intimate narrative. We understand that she may have had an unhappy childhood, although this is not clear – perhaps, she has impulse control problems that resulted in "meltdown" when posing for a family photograph. She "talks trash" about her boyfriend, described in the demotic, as her "live-in," a man who is apparently a drunk and, also, perhaps abusive. These details serve to delineate a specific type of woman. She is middle-aged. After an impoverished and chaotic youth, she now seeks training to do the menial and backbreaking work of nursing assistant. The pathos in her situation is that she is engaged in seeking certification for dead-end, low paid employment that no one else desires. She can’t afford to care about her appearance. She lives in a world of drunkenness, casual male abuse, and difficult pregnancies. Her horizons are defined by violent drunken men and reproduction. When certified, she will work with dying patients and the demented, paralyzed elderly. Her plight is essentially hopeless although she doesn’t see her situation in those terms – indeed, she seems cheerful, robust, even, vibrant, talking trash about her uterus, unhappy childhood, and drunken boyfriend.

Ellsworth’s accomplishment in the first stanza of the poem is noteworthy. She must describe her female subject and her milieu without condescension. The poet treads a rhetorical tightrope in the text’s opening lines – she has to be accurate but not condemnatory, truthful without being patronizing. In part, this trick is accomplished by cunning deployment of the pronoun "we" – like William Carlos Williams’ poem, this Venus of Willendorf expresses "the truth about us" – she is shown to tell us something important about American society.

The last five lines of the poem are Ellsworth’s oblique commentary on the plight of her heroine. The poem is a "chapter on mobility." If we are unable to move, then, certain pathologies will afflict us. These pathologies include decubitus ulcers that appear as "necrotic tissue," or "black wounds." In medicine, it is important to call things by their proper names – this is Ellsworth’s ethic in first half of the poem and applies as well to her analysis. "Eschar" is the scab covering an open wound, in this case an injury caused by immobility. (Ellsworth’s diagnostic language here departs slightly from clinical reality – eschar is not always dire and may, in fact, be symptomatic of the body healing itself; however, the emotional valence of the word "eschar" in this poem is controlled by the words "necrotic" and "black wound. The injury here is not one from which anyone recovers.) The "chapter on mobility" teaches us that a person who has fractured their "trochanter," that is the bony prominence at the upper end of the femur, will be seriously immobilized. A fractured trochanter is a hip-fracture, a frequently fatal disease of old age. "Trochanter" is the Greek word for "runner" – if we can’t "run," if our hip is broken, then, we will be immobilized and, presumably, exposed to the risk of diseases of immobility, including, most notably, decubitus ulcers.

Of course, the word "mobility" alerts us to a common usage of that term: a healthy society is one in which there is "upward mobility" – that is, people are rewarded for their labor by improved wages and social advancement. But Ellsworth’s nursing assistant occupies a world in which there is no meaningful mobility – if you are born poor and had a baby when you were young and unmarried and if you live with an abusive drunk, you will stay poor. This woman is studying to achieve a certificate authorizing her to do a minimum wage job. Her employment will not lift her out of poverty and will probably not improve her situation economically – she might well do better to simply remain on the dole. Furthermore, it’s likely that her children and their children will be mired in same poverty. The "trochanter" of our society is broken, the "runner" doesn’t work any more – there is a "black wound" festering at the center of our economic system.

Why does the poem emphasize the silent "h" in "eschar" and "trochanter?" The "h" in the spelling of the two words is a relic of the medical terms linguistic prehistory. Once the "h" was pronounced but now it remains in the words as an artifact of their past. In this way, the "h" in "eschar" and "trochanter" is like the Venus of Willendorf, and, also, an attribute of the nursing assistant – once people like her were integral to the world and the source of its fertility and life. But, now, no one needs her; she has no skills that can be profitably transferred to the modern world. She is a person that history has passed-by. A poignant aspect of the poem is Ellsworth’s protagonist is loquacious – she likes to talk. But her voice is silenced both in our society and culture at large. No one writes poetry or novels about nursing assistants working with old ladies with broken hips in nursing homes. There are no TV shows about such people, no movies, no representations as to their lives. Like the "h," they are unvoiced – nursing assistants are an important part of the social integument, they hold certain parts of the world together, but no one talks about them.

Ellsworth’s poem probably has other meanings as well. The two parts of the verse resonate against one another and each stanza illumines the other in a complex dialogue. The poem attracts our attention with its exotic and intriguing elements – shaving balloons, the Venus of Willendorf, curious specimens of medical jargon. The poem is challenging; on first reading, the relationship between the two stanzas is unclear. But a moment’s reflection suggests an interpretive strategy linking the first stanza portrait of the student to the lines diagnostic as to her condition. The reader experiences a shock of recognition and a sense that the poem has revealed something that was previously hidden. In my estimation, "Nursing Assistant; Chapter Review" is an exceptionally good poem and deserves to be anthologized.

A critic who praises should be prepared to blame as well. I think it illustrative to examine a poem that is similar in many respects to Ellsworth’s lapidary gem but that seems unsuccessful to me. For this exercise, I suggest consideration of a very late poem by Paul Celan, a Rumanian who wrote his verse in his mother-tongue, German. Celan’s lyrics are highly regarded, but I think much of his late poetry is overrated. The poem that I have chosen for analysis is untitled but called "Was bittert" or "What embitters" after its first words. Like Ellsworth’s verse, the poem is very short: it is only fifteen truncated lines to Ellsworth’s 12 line verse. (Neither poem cleaves to any obvious structural form – they don’t t rhyme and seem idiosyncratically constructed.) Both poems reference medical textbooks and use recondite clinical jargon. Furthermore, both poems require the reader to solve a riddle: in each case, the challenge posed by the poem is to establish meaning by construing links between radically disparate elements – for instance, the Venus of Willendorf and eschar in Ellworth’s poem; the auditory cerebral cortex and thumbscrews in Celan’s poem. Although the poem’s inhabit very different contexts, I think it is useful to compare them.

Celan was the pseudonym for Paul Antschel, a Rumanian-born Jew who spent much of later life in Paris. Celan was a survivor of the Holocaust in which all other members of his family perished. Certainly, he was badly damaged by his wartime experiences and, probably, seriously mentally ill as well. (Celan drowned himself in the Seine in 1970; he seems to have attempted suicide in the context of the attempted murder of his French wife, Gisele Lesestrang, on at least two prior occasions.) Celan’s principal subject is the extermination of the European Jews, a subject to which he returns with obsessive and, sometimes, tiresome frequency. In my view, many of Celan’s last poems are gibberish. However, I should remark that this is a distinctly dissenting view. Indeed, Celan’s late work is often praised exorbitantly and said to verge on the ineffable. Furthermore, I must declare that a couple dozen of Celan’s poems, including the astounding "Todesfuge" ("Death-Fugue"), are among the very greatest German lyrics. But I don’t count "What embitters" in that number.

Here is the poem in my translation in its entirety:

What embitters

going in


The great solitudes

are dwarfed

in auditory cortex hymns


blessed

the thumbscrews mutter in

more cheerful

rack-torture heights,


the deciding

pauses

receive

provision,


in the counting room

the rings

worship rebelliously

what remains.

It is often alleged that Celan’s works are untranslatable. (This has not prevented writers from attempting translation – indeed, Celan is the most translated of all modern German poets.) However, to avoid any assertion that I have cheated in my translation to make Celan seem more difficult or bizarre, I append the actual German with some comments:

WAS BITTERT (the adjective "bitter" used as a verb)

herein ("herein" suggests motion inward)


Die grossen Alleinigkeiten ("Alleinigkeiten" – the condition of being alone in the plural)

verzwergen (a "Zwerg" is a dwarf– "verzwergen" means to stunt or dwarf)

im Hoerrinden-Hymnus, ("Hoerrind" literally means "edge" or "skin" – as in fruit – of hearing)


selig
tuscheln die Daumschrauben ("Daumschrauben" – thumbscrews)


heiterer
Streckfolterhoehe (literally "stretch-torture-heights)


die enscheidenden

Pausen
erhalten ("to give, receive, offer, present")

Zufuhr ("supplies" or "provisions" but with a sense of something brought somewhere)


in der Zaehlkammer ("counting chamber")

rebellisch,

beten die Ringe ("the rings worship")

den Rest an. ("Rest" – what’s leftover, the remains or remnant.)

We know that Celan wrote these words in February 1970 about two months before he killed himself. It is possible, of course, that the words are merely sketches for a poem that was never completed. But Celan’s hyper-compressed and cryptic style of utterance is consistent with other late poems that we know the poet considered to be finished. Scholars have discovered the sources for some of the imagery in the poem. Apparently, critics have examined Celan’s copy of books that he was reading at the time and have located underlined passages that correlate to certain words in this lyric. Specifically, Celan seems have been perusing a textbook on physiology, a volume called Leitfaden der Physiologie des Menschen (Introduction to Human Physiology). In that book there is a reference to the auditory cerebral cortex, a portion the brain to which nerves convey signals from the ears. Those signals are received by the "Hoerrinde" – the auditory cerebral cortex – at various locations that may be mapped according to the frequencies of sound experienced at the ear. The last several lines in the poem alludes to another underlined passage several hundred pages later in the textbook. At that location, the book describes the process of using a microscope to count red blood cells – this accomplished by: "in a purified counting room, a convex piece of covering glass is pressed down until the Newtonian rings emerge at the points of contact." The rings of Newton are concentric interference patterns that arise when a convex lens is forced down onto flat plane of glass; tiny angles of refraction in the light passing through the convex lens creates a wave interference pattern apparent as uniformly spaced concentric patterns of shadow or darkness.

The torture imagery in the poem derives from a completely different source, a collection of aphorisms written by the Jesuit priest Balthasar Gratian (d. 1651) in the 17^th century. Gratian’s aphorism are collected in The Book of Worldly Wisdom, sometimes called The Pocket Oracle. These aphorisms were highly regarded by Nietzsche and Celan read them in a translation by the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. (It’s worth noting that these book, construed as a manual for success in the business world, achieved brief bestseller status in the early years of this millenium. The book was on The New York Times Bestseller list in 2003). One of those aphorisms contains these words: "The malicious cunning of others uses such moments of temptation to search the recesses of the mind: employing such thumbscrews as are wont to test our best intentions." The February 1970 issue of a Rumanian literary magazine (published in German) revived allegations made by the widow of the poet, Yvan Goll, that Celan had plagiarized the French writer’s verse after translating it into German. Celan vehemently denied these charges but seems to have felt that Goll’s widow was part of a cabal of enemies maliciously inflicting "torture" by accusation on him. No doubt exists that these accusations that were fraudulently made seriously unhinged Celan. In a letter to the German poet, Ingeborg Bachmann, Celan said that those responsible for traducing him as a plagiarist were worse than Nazis. (Celan thought of these accusations as anti-Semitic, an attempt to discredit him similar to the Dreyfus Affair in France prior to World War One.)

Armed with this information, can we successfully construe the poem? Celan’s words describe, and, possibly, enact some kind of process. We might hypothesize that Celan imagines the innermost self as a kind of inaccessible fortress of solitude, a place that is lonely but well-defended, "the great solitudes." When sound penetrates to this solitude and is mapped onto the cerebral cortex – described in German as a kind of permeable skin ("Hoerrinde") – the self experiences itself as limited by the outer world impinging upon it: sensory data "dwarfs" the majestic loneliness. The core of consciousness, this dark Ding-an-sich, suffers torture by compression ("thumbscrews") and extension ("rack torture") – a previously unbounded entity is "embittered" by being cast into physical dimensions involving painful compression and torturous extension, that is, a physically material realm. Entrapment in space, which is ultimately an illusion, is painful but the experience of sound encroaching on the "solitudes" of the self also makes possible some sense of the divine – the auditory cortex generates "hymns." (Celan uses the Latin form of the old Greek word humnos – meaning a "song of praise.") The first part of the poem dramatizes the experience of hearing something. The poet’s attitude toward hearing is ambivalent: what is heard destroys the great solitude and tortures, but also makes possible praise. (Rilke said that the poet’s function was "ruhmen" – that is "praising".)

I am skeptical about my own explication but it accounts for most features of the poem’s first part. But the last eight lines are wholly indecipherable. There is no way to know what Celan means because the language that he uses is dauntingly abstract and not moored in any kind of physical reality. Celan describes some sort of relationship but we don’t know the nature of the objects or ideas involved in the relationship. Consider this sentence: Fish live in water. Celan’s poem omits the tangible words "fish" and "water" – we are left with "live in"; in other words two things are in a relationship to one another, but Celan doesn’t tell what those things are. (This is exemplified the opening lines of the poem: "What embitters/going in" – so something makes bitter when it goes in; but what is the something and where is going into? "Pauses" offer "provisions" or supplies? And this is decisive? Provisions or supplies for what? The concept of Newton’s rings echoes the imagery of compression ("thumbscrews") in the "counting room". But what is being counted and why? What does it mean for interference rings to "worship" something that "remains?" What remains? Why is it worthy of worship? And how does compression induce worship? Celan might be saying that the experience of torture or martyrdom is related to worship. Celan exegetes always fall back on the Holocaust as their explanation for everything that is problematic in this writer’s poetry – but I’m not sure this glib explanation is always tenable or relevant. One might argue that the destruction of the European Jews leaves a "remnant," so few that they can be readily counted – they have been pressed into extinction and that what remains of them is surrounded by concentric halo-like rings, both the evidence of their slaughter and a kind of aureola of divine glory. But if this is the meaning of the final four lines, then, how does this relate to the "great solitude," the auditory cerebral cortex, and the rack torture. Ultimately Celan suggests that the real location for misery and martyrdom is somewhere buried deep inside us, some intractable zone of incurable wound – but is this implicit in his poem, or am I merely reading the verse in light of Celan’s subsequent suicide? If Celan had lived into a ripe old age like Robert Frost or John Ashberry, we would read his poems in a completely different light.

Further, we must not discount the possibility that Celan’s mental illness, his paranoia, motivates much of the poem. In Celan’s late work, his sense of private grievance often assumes a metaphysical cast. We should remember that Celan hysterically accused his enemies of being "worse than Nazis,’ that he interpreted accusations of plagiarism as being anti-Semitic and evidence of his Dreyfus-style persecution. It’s certainly possible that the sound that "embitters" Celan as it penetrates to his cerebral cortex is false witness, an accusation that he is a plagiarist. The lurid imagery of torture might simply mean that Celan is wounded by allegations made against him by the widow of a man that he thought that he was his friend. Ultimately, it’s impossible to say what the poem is about. We can’t define its meaning and must accept the possibility that the words may be gibberish. Celan himself may not have known what he intended to express. Furthermore, the poem doesn’t repay the labor required to construe it. The allusions are purely private and hermetic – if we didn’t know that Celan had marked words with underlining in the two books identified in his library, the source of the metaphors would be wholly mysterious. Unfortunately, once we are aware of the sources of Celan’s allusions the poem’s difficulty is not ameliorated – if anything, the poem becomes even more impossible to understand. By all criteria, Celan’s untitled 1970 poem is fatally flawed – if it doesn’t communicate anything than why should we read it?

Of course, Celan’s poetic objective is ultimately a foray into the incommunicable. His subject matter is largely inexpressible – it is fortunate that most of us can’t imagine what it would be like to endure a death camp or experience suicidal depression. These experiences are probably beyond words, capable of depiction only by silence and enigmatic bursts of words, inarticulate ejaculations that are meaningful only in the most painful and problematically private way. Further, Celan’s case is complicated by the fact that his sense of historical grievance is blurred by mental illness – ultimately, it is impossible to distinguish between miseries inflicted by genocide and the trauma of Celan’s disabling (and ultimately fatal) depression. As a result much of his verse is private, secretive, and, ultimately, self-defeating in a way that may seem irritatingly self-indulgent. By contrast, Ellsworth’s poem addresses things that we have in common. We can check her description of the nursing assistant against people we might see caring for an elderly relative and her metaphors as to the pathologies of immobility appeal to our actual experience. Poetry is not a political act. Poems don’t vote in elections just as verse can’t set a bone or feed a starving child. But poetry written for others is a public utterance. Poems that are published operate in the world, among people, and guide their thinking. For this reason, Ellsworth’s poem about the nursing assistant and her test is an important and moving commentary on the pathologies of income inequality.