Water

 

All the water melting off the ice sheets (‘ghiacciaio’) floods into the sea below. Tipping the mind into a direction of loss. Boats speed alarmingly over the great rising arc of waves. Everywhere where water can rise, where water spreads. The planet (‘pianeta’) itself. Gradually small news recedes behind the news of water. It has taken time for glaciers to reach the ‘frontpage’ (‘copertina’). Now that they have, we read the news with some reluctance, like most news on the ‘frontpage’. More recently it has been reported the seas’ surfaces warm at higher warmth than heretofore. Heretofore is a Shakespearean (‘eloquente’, ‘rinascimento’) way of saying previously. An alarming number of statistics are supplied to support this fluid situation. Ships sail calmly on. Internal human responses are more difficult to monitor, complicated by the desire to know more and, at the same time, a desire to want to know less. Each day includes a random half-hour of money, fame, disaster, ambition, and exotic locations, called the news (‘notizia’). News is always followed by a couple of minutes’ abstract disquisition on water, called the weather forecast (‘tempo atmosferico’). These disquisitions attempt realism (‘realismo’). Forecasts ignore melting glaciers, as a rule. All of this is by way of paraphrasing and modernising Giovanni Battista Fontana, not Giovanni Battista Fontana the Baroque composer, or Giovanni Battista Fontana the painter and engraver, the other one. ‘La nave preziosa calma continua a veleggiare’, to quote his Preface. In his rediscovered seventeenth-century manuscript ‘Acqua Alta’ (‘High Tide’ or, if you live nearby the lagoon, ‘High Water’), Fontana conjectures on the unlikely prospect he calls Noétà, which we might translate as the Noah Event, the remote possibility of his beloved city of Venice going completely underwater. The thought occurs from time to time, especially in the mind of his time traveller (‘viaggiatore del tempo’). Yet what do Venetians do? Fontana cannot decide if Venetians are stoics, pessimists, hedonists, procrastinators, canutes, clowns, or are simply too proud to do other than go down with the gondola. Instead of shifting to terra firma, instead of constructing an ark, they relocate upstairs, converting gothic windows into jetties for ready mobility. Are they realists, or romantics, or have they finally lost their marbles? He needn’t have been concerned, it is all for him just a fanciful idea. Fontana’s manuscript, printed in a limited edition on best cloth paper using an untraceable serif typeface, is popped back into the cabinet. Science fiction has its limits. Reclining on the sea-blue couch sends the mind into a sense of false security. Imagining the height of the sea, the breadth of horizons, the volume of the melt, it is time to switch off the lamp and sleep until daylight again.