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Ianuarie Wing by the Rapallo exit in sheeting rain heading west toward Genova, then north toward Milano and the Gotthard Pound moved to Via Marsala 12 on the beach in Rapallo in 1924, "with mountains and the sea and olive trees and no library but his own" Portofino, the Gulf of Rapallo A pair of partisans arrested Pound in Olga Rudge's Casa Sessanta by Sant' Ambrogio above Rapallo on May 2, 1945, the day after the Americans arrived The partigiani took him to Chiavari just down the coast, then to the Americans in Lavagna, the next town along The day afterward the FBI began interrogating him in Genova Tunnel after tunnel the zinging autostrada cuts straight and true along upslope from the twisting coastal roads and ancient towns and villages perché Like a lofty opera set, the Riviera di Levante where his Second World War episodes were played out "The Cantos open with the noise of the sea and clattering oars; the fragments with which they end evoke quiet houses, the stillness of nature, the silence of mountains" Pound's vicious, unmitigated, visceral anti-Semitism skewered him early on. Try the ugly little poem "Brennbaum" Or Canto XLV, the "With Usura" canto, that leads into the angry chaos of Canto XLVI, "Said Mr RothSchild, hell knows which Roth-schild" If he hadn't been such an earnest cultural archeologist and brilliant poet he would have been just another expatriate crank "Pound's poetry was very new and very old at once. The man seemed to live deep in history and yet he was the present" What's left of all his impassioned anger are the American military cemeteries left across Europe, his poetry and critical influence, and all the peppery anecdotes from the St. Elizabeth days In 1958 he arrived at Schloss Brunnenburg in Trentino-Alto to begin to finish his life in monkish silence His daughter was married to the Italian Egyptologist who owned Brunnenburg In his son-in-law's castle he was established in a tower room overlooking Merano
His books and papers arrived from Rapallo Pound's treason was funny-money anti-Semitic vitriol on Rome Radio's American Hour for 350 lire a go, Vivaldi recordings at the opening and closing of his talks He must have been ambivalent about his nationality Ð he asked to be buried in Haily, Idaho And he went down the hill into town from Olga's on the day the Americans arrived in Rapallo to formally offer the GIs his knowledge of Italy "One hardly needs to seek out personality as it never can be avoided" Treason is a strange and almost archaic word now These days code clerks and intelligence sergeants in the Washington area practice it to pay for their predictable indulgences North from Genova, the A7 autostrada follows the fiume Polcevera up through narrow Apennine valleys, proud stone-stucco farms and villages on the steep castagna slopes Then down the Scrivia into the interior and out onto the great central plain through Tortona to the Po Flat well-tilled naked winter fields waiting for the sun, ditched and ordered, now and then a bare tree, the granges as symmetrical highlights at the edges In Pound's Italy and before into antiquity people instead of absent minded-machines worked the land here, big farms à la Bertolucci's Novecento These long-cultivated European plains, nearly empty of people in the age of factory agriculture, this Po Valley plain perhaps the largest before the eastern steppes La Mancha is comparable but broken by arroyos now and then — the windmills have been gone there for decades The Île-de-France's, as seen approaching Chartres, is tidier, the fields are on a smaller scale and going suburban Two, three thousand years of intensive cultivation of these Western European plains Chartres was the center of Druid worship for the Celtic tribe, the Carnutes. The site of the great assemblies of the Druids The Valley of the Po, well... the culture of the Valley of the Po is Turino, Pavia, Piacenza, Cremona, Ferrara, and the Po's tributary cities Civilization propagated As well as possible in the near infinity of human experience and expression Adrift across the bottomless depth of cultural history Each era's awareness, every consciousness elevated and extended on what has gone before Pound, miner of ancient cultures, practiced the humanist creed of finding the best of the past and passing it on Still overcast late in the day now in Lombardia Lombardia's one of the most complex and intense spots on the planet, like Tokaido or the East Coast Megalopolis or London or São Paulo-Rio or the modern Île-de-France Bypassing Lombardia's core, urban Milano, through poplar plantation flats at dusk to Como at the foot of the Alps Wait there with the car in Piazza Volta near the Duomo In the Black Death — eight in ten citizens of Como may have succumbed in the first outbreak in 1347 — immense piles of bodies in front of the Duomo An the early Christmas Eve's tableau of rich Italian women parking in Piazza Volta in from their villas on the lake for an aperitivo, or flowers or a gift or to pick up clothes or food, or for a holiday rendezvous Mostly sleek blondes in black BMWs, black Alfas, black Porsches, black Mercedes hogwagons, one red Maserati Assetto Corsa, and even a metallic green Lamborghini Murcielago Each consigned to the effusively avuncular, leering guardiano with a snappy little blue pudge uniform cap who took tips with a buss while copping upper-body feels from the friendliest The Murcielago pulled into the little piazza muttering powerfully, the fastest production car in the world Cold night brilliance up into the steep hills off the lake on toward the Swiss border A good meal from no-nonsense Sri Lankan Tamils at the only restaurant open in Bellenzona before the push up the long Ticino Valley to the Gotthard Into the massive barrier of the Alps and down into Northern Europe Thinking Cimbabue, Duccio, Giotto Duccio, Chimabue, Giotto Duccio, Giotto, Chimabue And of small, low-doored, dark, thin-brick (mattonella) San Sisto in Pisa on via Santa Maria between Campo dei Miracoli (the Tower, the Battistero, the Duomo) and the center (Piazza dei Cavalieri) restored brilliantly from 1087 Of the Christmas concert in the Chiesa di Santo Stefano dei Cavalieri Of the American gospel rock group in Florence setting up in the cold rain under the stage right arch of the Loggia dei Lanzi directly under the arrogant tolerance of the copy of Micelangelo's David and right beside Cellini's terrifying Perseus Whose keyboarding front man — the two guitars tuned and the speakers finished screeching — turned to them with, "Joy to the World and let's rock it" All that behind when into the seventeen-kilometer Gotthard Tunnel, maybe the major delimitation within the inherent variety of Europe Province to province, passing through into the Rhine zone so distinct from those of the Po and its Middle Sea Always exciting, these cultural junctures, France to Italy, France to England, Spain to Portugal, Poland to Russia, Holland to Germany, Italy to Austria Even Andalusia to Murcia, Alsace to Lorraine, the Midi to the Massif Central As Simone Weil said, "What is culture? The formation of attention" And if Lucca, Pisa, Florence, Carrara, don't coalesce cultural awareness, then hurry on home to watch telebision like God intended On these new European roads north of the Alps virtually empty on Christmas Eve Stop before Luzern in Beckenried on the Vierwaldstätter See behind the Bürgenstock to phone a cousin Then in barely an hour on into eerily quiet Basel listening to Max Bruch's mild Second in F Minor on the radio Mild Europe's mild Christmas Eve programming on mild Swiss Radio "His [Bruch's] music gives little to discuss and nothing to quarrel about. It is its lack of adventure which limited its fame" A comment that serves also to characterize placid Basel where an intense life crisis is not finding a parking slot Basel, somewhat to the rest of Europe as, say, Columbus or Omaha are to the rest of North America And that's fine because Basel life leaves room, if not motivational opportunity, for everything If you are one of them And across affluent Europe it will continue, there'll be more Chiracs and more Schroeders and more Blairs ad infinitum Who will pontificate, occasionally moralize, and administrate the wealth that is rooted with them almost inherently Capital drawing capital, privilege enhancing privilege After a flushed half a century of prosperity Europe knows full well the inherent value of maintaining its extensive zone of peace Down the line zero population growth could well erode some of the wealth and create shortages and social gaps, but for now it goes on and on And if you are one with them now and not living in the water slums of Lagos, or without hope or a job in Gaza, or in ravaged southern Sudan, or in Tondo in Manila, or dirt poor in Lima or La Paz, you will have your teeth fixed and the oil changed in your car and your kids will learn to read And you will probably travel and you will flourish and the odds are that you will live into your eighties and die well If you are one of them in Basel or Oslo or Barcelona or Krakow or Lyon or Turino And not a born in Detroit to an addicted mother or in Maputo with AIDS or in Abidjan to become a war orphan before you can walk or in Recife to a homeless teenager If you are one with Basel you will have good plumbing all your life, live in well-lighted heated rooms, enjoy fruit in winter and swimming pools in summer, have good public transportation and the means to own a car Almost guaranteed And live out your time alive in the contemporary Pax Europa In Basel, site of psychotropic labs and factories and of Jung's dream book, you will have all the food you can eat and all the consumer junk you can possibly use You will have psychological help when you are depressed and ask for it, cheap yearly passes for the trains and trams, extremely well organized and perfectly safe annual festivals, fine museums, and good water from the tap And none of this will you have if born to people of average means in most of the rest of the world, none of this A whole inventory of these privileges are virtually assured for only something under twenty percent of the world Now But we will be seven billion already in 2012 and then barely over fifteen percent will have clean water from the tap, sleep in full protection from the weather and without anxiousness about thuggery, fanatics or police And all the while in Basel things are better than ever With the latest electronics available in even the supermarkets, charter flights to every attractive place on the planet, a world-spectrum of cars and gadgets, snug cafés and restaurants for all tastes More succinctly, being one with them offers not only internet access to the world but virtual physical access to all worldly needs and desires And in fairly good taste True for those three hundred thousand residents of Regio Basilea Who have been known to visit, say, Bolivia and come home to offer comments like, "It takes a trip like that to realize that we're not the only ones to face difficulties" Bombay to twenty-six million, Lagos to twenty-three, Dhaka twenty-one, Karachi nineteen, Jakarta and Calcutta both over seventeen, Cairo fourteen, a dozen and more over ten, in 2015 Congestion, complexity, casuistry, callousness, chaos And in complacent Basel, in 2015 life will be even more affluent than before A few Baslers will not have jobs, a few will be addicts, a few more alcoholics, a few will be depressed and "unhappy," a few will have AIDs, very few will be in prison With Swazis about forty percent seropositive now, Swazis who early in the 1990s had a life expectancy of 61, now have one of about 30 Most teenage Swazis alive now will die of AIDS Most Baslers will live seven decades or beyond One million South Africans will die of AIDS in 2003 There are fewer than two hundred thousand Baslers, only three hundred thousand in the whole Basel region More than half the patients admitted to the main hospital in Soweto, the largest hospital in the Southern Hemisphere, have AIDS No Swiss anywhere over sixteen and not a drunk or an addict gets by without fifteen or twenty thousand francs in the bank Every life, in Basel or Burkina Faso and Burma or Bern is the same Everyone everywhere is savvy +++++++++++++++ Sampling credits to Hugh Kenner's The Pound Era, Guy Davenport, Steve Reich, H. C. Colles in Grove's 5th. |
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