An important event

Expose the Castle officials!

La Tenuta di Spannocchia

Over at my friend the Gypsy Scholar’s blog, there’s a post with a very moving poem, and an example of Gustave Doré’s illustrations of scenes from The Divine Comedy.

The mention of Doré brought me back three and a half years. During the Summer of 2003, I worked on a farm in Tuscany, about 50 miles south of Siena. The farm and surrounding property had been passed down through the generations by a family with the last name of Spannocchia, before being bought by another family, the Cinellis. The Cinellis have set up a website which gives details about the nonprofit organisation that is now in charge of the property. They welcome people such as myself to stay and work about 35 hours a week in exchange for room, board, and Italian classes.

Here is a link to Spannocchia’s web page.

On the Tenuta di Spannocchia are found about 1000 acres of forest, along with vineyards, plantation fields, and old Tuscan buildings they fixed up and turned into little cottages where pecuniarily endowed folks stay and enjoy a semblance of bucolic life.

I spent the mornings working in the bosco with a German forester named Udo. The community living on the property was close to sustainable, meaning almost all the food and wine were produced on the property, and the heating system was fueled by wood chopped by foresters such as yours truly and our German friend Udo. The forest itself was also sustainable: 1000 acres is a lot of ground, so they would cut all the trees of a certain width (about 2 inches or more) in one part of the forest (as I remember, 10 acres) each year. The next year, they would cut the 10 acres next to the previous year’s 10 acres. By the time they would have made their way around to the first 10 acres, 100 years would have gone past. This is the kind of thinking we should do more of, if we wish to live on the Earth for another millenium. One hundred years is a long life for a poplar.

How to describe Udo? He was of slim stature, a head of thick greying hair which he kept short, and a mustache whose shape changed from week to week. All his teeth had spaces in between them. I mistakenly took his uninhibited simian smile for a sign of goofiness the first time something funny came up in our conversation; I imagine this was the first day of work that Summer. Udo’s smile was deceptively foolish looking. He spoke pigeon English, and would tell me stories often consisting of as many gestures as words. He was always able to perfectly convey the crux or the humour of whatever story he was telling me. And he had many stories to tell. He’d been in several relationships with Italian women, and always had something to say about one of them. I didn’t even know whether to believe his stories about all these women. However, I met the woman he was with the first time I went to visit him in the nearby village (whose name I cannot now recall. All I remember is that it was on top of a hill, like most of the Tuscan villages), and she was, dico, bellissima. She was actually German. An ex-girlfriend who had called him up and asked to come live with him in Italy. They had a son, who was 4 or 5 years old. She was just about to leave him, I suppose for the second time, unless he had left her the first time. I can’t remember the details. He was not a very responsible man. He played guitar, and had musicians constantly visiting to play with him when he wasn’t working. I once tried to play the keyboard with him, but the keys on his keyboard were smaller than those of a piano, and I wasn’t happy with my performance. I just went up and down whatever blues scale they were playing on. I never liked playing the keyboard, and I rarely like keyboard-generated music. The sound of the piano has yet to be accurately imitated by technology despite the noble efforts of Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock and Hiromi.

I remember him talking about his son once, and how he felt that he wasn’t a good father. Tears came to his eyes.

He’d lived in India a few times, and had stories of Hindu temples decorated in images of Tantric rituals. He would tell me about LSD trips in the mountains, and Hindu priests who sat cross-legged in the streets, whom one would approach, and say something like “I’m not here to get stoned, I only want to listen to you!” They would put some ganja in a pipe, offer it to you, and start sharing their wisdom.

What does Dante have to do with all of this? On the Tenuta di Spannocchia, there was an old bridge which went across a river. I’ve forgotten the name of the river, but the bridge was called Ponte della Pia, or Pia’s bridge (the English translation doesn’t do justice to the poetry of the Italian name). It had been destroyed by the Nazis in their retreat, and later reconstructed. According to a legend I heard, it was this bridge that a certain Sienese femme fatale named Pia had thrown herself off, around 900 years ago. Dante meets Pia in Purgatory, and there’s a drawing by Doré of the scene, which is what made me think of all this when I read about Doré on my friend’s blog.

However, a search on google questions the validity of this myth:

Here is the bridge in question, with four people dressed color coordinatedly making a mad dash up the bridge!

Round 1:

According to this page I found, the name of the bridge has nothing to do with our witchy woman:

“Questo ponte medievale è situato nei pressi dell’Eremo di Rosia, vicino al castello di Montarrenti, ed è chiamato ‘della Pia’ (niente a che vedere con il celebre personaggio dantesco di Pia dè Tolomei)”

My (approximate) translation:

“This medieval bridge is situated near Rosia (the nearby village), close to the Montarrenti castle, and is called ‘Pia’s Bridge’ (nothing to do with the famous dantesque character of Pia dè Tolome)”

Pia dè Tolome? Do my eyes deceive me? Had I been singing an untruth, raving about a Dantesque bridge, which was just another bridge among others, these last few years whenever I spoke of it to friends?

Score: Myth is beating Truth, 1-0.

Intermezzo:

Click on this link, then on the picture under which is written “Hermitage of Rosia” to find a photo of the monastery I worked on(they spell Siena with 2 n’s). It was toward the end of the summer, we went out one morning with sickles and other cutting tools. The monastery you see in the photo is nothing like it was. The entire space between the two walls was overgrown with thistles and weeds, a few feet high. It was like the secret garden. There were a few paths where someone had cut through all the brush in order to get to the monastery, but other than that, it was overrun. Nine or ten other workers and I went to town on it all morning, we were like diligent ants, and by 12:00 it looked something like what you see in that photo. Well, not that bare, the earth was covered with cut brush, but something like that.

Round 2:

This next link google brings up tells a different story about this Pia dei Tolomei:

After quoting the passage in Dante, the author of the page writes:

“Lungo la strada vecchia che da Siena porta in Maremma, c’è il ponte della Pia, un vecchio e stretto ponticello in pietra che si dice portasse al castello dove la donna morì; non si può passare di là senza voltarsi e pensare al dramma di questa nobildonna senese, che Dante ricorda con tratti così soavi.”

Again, the best translation I can muster:

“The old road is long from Siena to Maremma, where one finds Pia’s Bridge, an old and narrow stone bridge which is said to have brought the woman to the manor where she died; one cannot pass by here without turning and thinking of the drama (the word dramma in Italian doesn’t have the irony of the English word. -ed. (oh, to be an editor named Ed)) of this Sienese noblewoman, whom Dante painted with such delicate strokes.”

So, she didn’t throw herself from the bridge, but died in one of the manors of Spannocchia? Good enough for me! Myth and Truth are tied, 1-1.

I could keep typing about that Summer, but I think I’ll bring this post to a close here.

I’ll continue this agon another evening, and leave the question up in the air. I really liked the idea of working on a farm where a woman from THE epic of the second millenium of Western history had earned her place in the cast of characters! Although if I remember correctly, the suicides in Dante are found in limbo are they not? This warrants further investigations…

I’m thinking about taking a class on Heidegger next semester, which will be a close reading of Being and Time. I read a few introductions, and am beginning to make my way through the introduction to B & T. If I were to describe him at this point, I would say he was a really brilliant evil bastard. It’s a struggle to read someone and let them tell you about life when you know that person was a Nazi. Nazis are after all the worst kind of human being, aren’t they? I can’t think of a worse kind of person. Child molesters? Serial killers? Fox news announcers? (just kidding) This guy was a supporter of the most horrible political regime ever invented by man. But I can see the attraction of his philosophy. It’s addictive; it’s one of those philosophies that seem to spell out things you tried to think about as a child but could never find the words to express. What is Being? Why is there something? How can anything exist? And he’s not trying to answer the question, but just to find a way to pose it, in order to wake us up from our ontic obsessions.

Hyper-cyberbabble anyone?

I’m starting a book by Esther Leslie on Walter Benjamin’s thought, called Overpowering Conformism, and came across a paragraph remarkably pertinent to certain bloggerly discussions I’ve been involved in the last day or so. The book is written from a decidedly Marxist stance, which means I’m very cautiously reading it, but it has made some interesting points so far. What attracted me to it was the back, which stated that it was an attempt to wrest Benjamin from his post-structuralist appropriators, as well as some tasty chapter titles, such as “Dream Whirled: Technik and Mirroring”, “The Work of Art in the Age of Unbearable Capitulation”, and “Berlin Chthonic, Photos and Trains and Films and Cars”. I am no Marxist, but I’m not blind to the power of Marxism to analyse society’s ills, the relation of the individual to society, sometimes predicting the path of history, othertimes bringing humanity to the brink of self-destruction. I don’t think extreme Marxism should be implimented into actual politics, but it can be used as a tool to look at society. So, here is the paragraph that struck me as à propos. She’s talking about Benjamin’s notion of Aktualität, which is the capture of “the underlying, decisive ’spirit of the epoch’”. Benjamin had a remarkable talent for taking little objects of popular culture, such as magazine illustrations, and showing how they were representations of the Zeitgeist of the first few decades of 20th century Europe.

“A perspective convinced of past Benjamin’s continuing relevance for the present draws on the Aktualität of his offensive against a technology fetishism that is ignorant of the stipulations accorded by the private mode of appropriation. Such ignorance may be newly prevalent in the hyper-cyberbabble of the new millennialism. The notion of the technoid subject might give a neon-green light to cybermaterialisms and its visions of machinic subjects, enhanced with prosthetics, wired up and plugged into inflowmation (a version of Marinetti’s futurist rhapsody for a postindustiral age). What happens in this cyber-conception of material is that the distinction between machine-technology-worker — a technician producing within technical relations of production — is collapsed into a single, mythic, postnatural subject. This subject embodies, quite literally, technology, technical relations of production and producer, and so can only with difficulty be envisaged as involved in a process of exploitation. But a communion with high-tech that evades relations of exploitation is a rare privilege. Cybermaterialism sets up a frozen concept of technology, a blindly determining force, shooting us back to Second International Marxism, and it is no wonder that Charles Darwin and friends enjoy a new popularity: the talk, for all its rhetoric of revolution, is of evolution. The cybers seek through technology a new determination of the species. Benjamin might sometimes be wheeled on to articulate the early birth of this machine-man, but he would be shocked at the cybermonster’s class-blindness” (Leslie x).

Anyway, just thought I’d throw that out there, for no particular reason other than that it had to do with us technology fetishists, cyberbabblers, and soon-to-be monstrous technoid subjects.

L’élection américaine 2006: Un pas en avant!

Le professeur que j’aide avec les recherches m’a donné quelques questions à propos de l’élection américaine de 2006, pour un article qu’elle va écrire pour Utopie Critique. Voici mes réponses.

1. – pourquoi cette victoire est-elle une joie ? pas seulement pour écraser Bush, mais aussi des raisons moins connues des Français (comme ce vote empêchant l’extension de l’interdiction de l’avortement, etc)

Il y a une réserve naturelle en Alaska qui s’appelle « the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge », d’environ 20 millions demi-hectares, avec un véritable univers de faune et de flore, y compris des rennes, des faucons pèlerin, des aigles royaux, des élans, des grizzlys, des carcajous, des oies et des cygnes, dont les lagons donnent du refuge pendant la saison de migration. C’est aussi le lieu de migration des baleines boréales. Un tribu ancien d’indigènes qui s’appelle les Gwich’in habite cette région, et dépend des rennes pour leur nourriture. Malheureusement, il y a beaucoup de pétrole sur le côte. Bush et la plupart des Républicains veulent pomper, mais la région est protégée depuis 1960, grâce aux efforts de Margaret Murie (la « grand-mère des défenseurs des ressources naturelles » aux Etats-Unis), « The Wilderness Society » (la Société de la Naturalité), et à la pression des groupes écologistes. Bush a poussé très fort au congrès de permettre à commencer le forage, un processus qui risquerait de dédommager assez tragiquement la région et y détruire l’équilibre. En 2000, le « bill » (une loi proposée) de Bush a été approuvé par la Maison des Représentants, mais en 2002 elle a été rejetée par le Sénat, parce que les Démocrates et quelques-uns des Républicains plus modérés ont lutté assez tenacement contre la proposition. La victoire des Démocrates donne un brin d’assurance que Bush ne pourra pas permettre la destruction de cette région précieuse.

2. – que peut signifier aux US ce qu’on se met à appeler une cohabitation (en France, le mot a servi pour la cohabitation d’un Président de gauche ou de droite et d’un premier ministre de l’autre bord) ? (à comparer avec le temps de Clinton avec le Sénat républicain ?)

Il y a un mot en anglais, « rubber-stamp », qui s’utilise pour décrire la situation quand le congrès laisse le président faire n’importe quoi, sans obstacles et sans questions sceptiques. On appellait le congrès « a rubber-stamp congress ». La branche législative approuvait presque toujours les actions et les positions du président quant à la privatisation de toutes sortes de secteurs sociaux, une politique étrangère aggressive, arrogante et tout franchement idiote, la sortie du protocole Kyoto, la destruction des lois qui étaient mises en place pour protéger l’environnement (heureusement qu’il y avait des exceptions), etc. Maintenant, l’administration Bush aura pas mal de problèmes si elle veut continuer sa démarche irresponsable et extrêmiste.

3. – quelles espérances et quelles inquiétudes (par rapport à des méfiances à l’égard des démocrates aussi)?

Qu’est-ce qu’on va faire en Iraq ? Est-ce qu’il est responsable de simplement partir, si ce sont les troupes qui empêchent le pays de tomber dans une guerre civile ? Ou est-ce que les troupes américaines exacerbent les tensions ? Peut-être tous les deux. Une guerre civile pourrait affecter toute la région : l’Iran pourrait entrer en support des Chiites, et le Roi Abdullah de l’Arabie Saudite a déjà dit qu’il protègerait les Sunnis dans ce cas. C’est une situation délicate. On attend maintenant une réponse des Démocrates. Est-ce qu’ils vont demander à Bush d’implémenter les mesures conseillées par « the Iraq Study Group », notamment un retrait échelonné, et l’ouverture d’un dialogue avec l’Iran et la Syrie à propos d’assistance ?