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.    

Xanadu

 

Inspired to re-read Italo Calvino, I am at present in ‘Invisible Cities’ (1972). It’s a fantasy dialogue between two 13^th-century contemporaries, Marco Polo and Kublai Khan, in which accounts of exotic cities leave one wondering if they existed, or are all in the mind of Italo Calvino. Remarks by a critic on the jacket are a spoiler: “Calvino is describing only one city in this book. Venice, that decaying heap of incomparable splendour…” It is true Marco Polo was a Venetian, that he travelled to Shangdu, and that on page 86 he says, “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice.” But this is too literal an explanation, too final, as if the author’s intentions could be summarised. Each city described by Polo, or in Kublai’s dreams, is one of childlike impressions grounded in adult experience. The cities enjoy an existence that is only spoken about, that may have been like that then, but may not be now. Their precariousness is as valuable a quality as their beauty, or the specific mystery details that Polo finds memorable. Any of them could be a place closer to home for Kublai, because every time Polo describes a city he is saying something about Shangdu, a city that no longer exists except in archaeology and imagination. In our own indwelling, if we turn our mind to it. This is what Samuel Taylor Coleridge did after taking too much opium and reading Samuel Purchas’ 1613 paraphrastic translation of Polo: “In Xandu did Cublai Can build a stately Pallace…”, writing a poem about Xanadu, the archaic anglicised version of Shangdu in Mongolia, pleasure domes, mazy motions, and all. Calvino was fortunate not to be visited by the Person from Porlock, which means we are lucky enough to read dozens of versions of ‘Kubla Khan’ in his novel, each one different. Later in the story, Kublai says to Polo, “confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies!” In other words, he speaks from memory of these many named cities that conjure Venice, a city that has survived, but also Xanadu, one that has not. Because this is the mood of the novel: to relate that which exists, or existed, but may now only exist in words. They are states of grace in which we may imagine our own city past, present, and future. The Melbournes, say, of river mangrove, Victorian sepia, and creambrick expanse. Australian cities in general, hardly imaginable in this medieval tale. Polo’s accounts are elegies of Venice, yet of what Venice may become, Xanadu. Life lived in a metropolis sinking into a lagoon is precarious. And what Xanadu was and became, words of fortunate travellers to foreign parts, translated words transformed by an opiumhead. Polo’s writing continues to raise debate while Kublai wrote very much poetry almost all of which, like his summer capital of Shangdu (or Xanadu), is now lost.     

Monteverdi

3.     The 1610 Vespers. French, Spanish and Italian music of Claudio Monteverdi’s time, especially anything Venetian, has been a passion of mine since my early thirties. At home we sometimes play nothing but Venice (Lassus, the Gabrielis, &c.) whole weekends, especially at Easter, which has the effect of floating continuously hours on the second glass of prosecco. The operas and madrigals delight in their discovery of a colour, light and movement (‘mo-bi-le’ as the Italians say, also ‘so-a-ve’) not previously translatable into sounds. Jerusalem is the centre of the world, but when I hear Venice singing about Jerusalem in 1610, Venice is the centre of the world. I had cassette copies off the radio of this 1966 recording, which is a landmark of Early Music. Concentus Musicus Wien (pictured on sleeve) play on original instruments under the inspiration of Nikolaus Harnoncourt and direction of Jürgen Jürgens. ‘Original instruments’ was an emerging concept that assisted in the almighty war of attitudes about how to play and sing this music that has raged ever since. That’s their problem and our good fortune if it makes more prosecco music. I have several recordings of the 1610 Vespers that chart fifty years of progress, from Monteverdi-if-he-was-Beethoven to Monteverdi-if-he-was-Ligeti. I bought this set (‘Grand Prix du Disque’) for $5 at the Spensley Street Primary School Fair in Clifton Hill in 1997. I could hardly believe what I was looking at in the milk crate.