by Rod Mengham
The path leading north from the Murray campsite was scarred by the violent puncture marks of Kim’s walking poles, many filled with rainwater that had collected in the night. After only fifteen minutes’ walk, all my clothes were soaked through, since many of the forest leaves were designed to trap as much moisture as possible. The ferns were uncurling vigorously after a good drink, while the tree ferns resembled a display of inverted shower heads. The many spiders’ webs, beaded with miniature droplets, were especially dense where the path joined forces with a creek. The junction was marked by a hastily assembled rubble of doleritic rocks. Even the birdcalls were affected by the weather. One soloist in particular recalled the sound of an improvising washboard.
Around mid-day, I stepped on the remains of a fire in the middle of the trail, showing that not everyone reaches camp before nightfall. After that, the path climbed steadily to a thousand feet where it was crossed frequently by kangaroo trails – the Oz equivalent of sheep tracks in England – and then began the descent into a valley lined with black, shattered rocks and cool pine forests. The bird sounds fell away in this Mediterranean ambience, apart from the gushing cries of two Splendid Fairy-Wrens preparing to forage. It was at this point I made the astounding discovery I could hear better with the hat-cord tucked behind my ears instead of in front of them…
The third night was spent at the Swamp Oak campsite, where I joined the two brothers Mark and Russell. Russell had damaged his shoulder badly and had been hoping to find a chiropractor in Dwellingup (the small logging town that I was due to reach the following day) but he had had no luck and was forced to choose between carrying on or abandoning the idea of walking the length of the trail. He had decided to press on, although he could only walk for twenty minutes before having to stop. The brothers were prone to bicker more often than not, and it struck me that Mark’s best chance of tricking Russ into speeding ahead was to get him into a huff. Their mutual exasperation was beginning to reach a pitch when we were joined at the point of dusk by a party of four, somewhat delirious, middle aged women laden with baggage and supplies. Dolly, Nancy, Wendy (‘Wen’) and Cassie flopped down and proceeded to screech, hoot, cackle and whistle for the next three hours, which was the length of time it took them to cook spaghetti bolognese followed by cinnamon bun and custard. They freely admitted they were the only people who had actually put weight on while following the trail. I crept off to my sleeping bag at 9.30, already frozen, but soon fell into a heavy sleep that lasted half the night, despite the constant revelry.
The next day passed quickly. Notwithstanding my four hours of rest, I was now desperate for uninterrupted sleep, my thoughts were sometimes hard to focus and there was a curious effect of magnification on the edges of my vision. A swelling on my left knee was itching badly and I worried that the cause might be a kangaroo tick. I began to fixate on the Community Hotel I would reach by evening, on its restaurant, its bathrooms, and above all its beds. I thought of the pint of lager awaiting John Mills at the end of his desert trek in the film ‘Ice Cold in Alex’ and decided the equivalent for me would be ‘Electric Blanket in Dwellingup’. The trail was strewn with shattered red rock, the whole area seemed to be breaking up in the wake of repeated forest fires. Nothing was intact apart from the great bare sheets of granite among pine trees that were lit by dazzling shafts of sunlight. Young tree ferns were coming up out of the earth like musical staves, while an unseen bird nearby was singing the two bar blues. There was another birdcall, perhaps that of a golden whistler, which took the form of a militaristic trill, a kind of brittle nineteenth-century march that I can still hear in my head. Not long before reaching Dwellingup I crossed some patches of private land that had been fiercely logged. Two entire hills had been blasted and now resembled an elephant’s graveyard dotted with a few huge immoveable gum trees totally fire-blackened. On the forest fringe were two kookaburras, howling with glee.
The hotel had everything I needed: a communal shower, steak and chips, a whole bottle of red wine, and a king-sized electric blanket. After these miracles of solace and ease, the bush retreated into the imagination, back to the place it had come from, in the continent I had brought with me, the one in my head. I felt that I had walked to one side, or between, stretches of the real bush. The people I had met had all been white and urban, with no relationship to traditions of life in the forest. Nothing I had seen or heard spoke to me in its own language, I had given it subtitles in a faux documentary scripted in advance. The conventions of Aboriginal art now seemed anomalous, more eccentric, more archival than before, more lost.
I had not finished walking entirely; there was still one excursion to make from Dwellingup that passed by the Holyoake townsite. This had been settled in 1910 and abandoned in 1961. Everyone who ever lived there had been equal in the eyes of the South West Timber Hewers Cooperative Society. They had logged the immensely hard jarrah wood for railway sleepers that had been sold all over the world. But the market had tailed off and the mill closed in 1958. Holyoake was dying before it was wiped out in the Dwellingup bush fires of 1961. The place was over and done with but had the air of unfinished business. The buildings had been levelled down to the height of a single brick. The fabric had deteriorated much more seriously than my own body during the same time. I wandered through the remains of mill, school and several cottages, and came to the edge of everything. Beyond were hundreds of miles of forest. It was good to think of three generations being raised in a spirit of equality, but their collective livelihood would have depended on the removal of the indigenous peoples. The Nyoongars would always return in the year following any bush fire, but modern commerce is a series of extinction events, and its cycles are the ghosts in the insurance machine. The forest is the risk assessor’s Sublime. With the townsite just behind me, and the hat-cord behind my ears, I was picking up star-noise, insect frequencies, marsupial wave bands; but in the void beyond that there was the silence of dead languages, of entire language families, organised around the words for all those attitudes and activities I had not performed in the bush. I could not have been further from the landscape of southern England, but I could not have been closer to its passage in time between history and prehistory. There was no need to take a step further in Australia, and no point, since all I had done, or could do, was to walk in the bubble of my own language, with its shrink-wrapped baggage allowance, and its cultural carry-on.
2009
Strange Weather
I want to try to account for the allure of Giorgione’s painting known as ‘La Tempesta’. This work has mystified art historians of the Renaissance, but it has also seduced art-lovers with no special knowledge of Renaissance iconography. When I say ‘mystified’, I mean that it has divided art historians, many of whom have been convinced by their own interpretations while remaining sceptical of others. Edgar Wind believed that the choice of figures – that of a soldier and a young woman with an infant – was a standard Renaissance pairing designed to recommend the combining of fortezza with carita.18 Maurizio Calvesi has since argued that the female figure represents the earth itself, pointing to the extent of early sixteenth-century fascination with the idea of a copula mundi, an act of union between the feminine earth and a masculine ‘elemento fecondatore’ identified with ‘il moto celeste virile’.19 And Jaynie Anderson has offered a detailed reading of the painting, connecting it with a scene from Francesco Colonna’s romance Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, in which the young hero Poliphilo encounters the goddess Venus in his quest for the spirit of antiquity. Anderson records a number of parallels in the imagery of both painting and romance, including ‘broken columns, the miraculous appearance of Venus suckling Cupid, and the fantastic architecture’; and she finds irresistible the possibility that the prominence of the column alludes to Colonna’s own surname.20 The problem with all these attempts to explain the symbolism of the painting is that they depend on a guarantee that what Giorgione means to represent with his pair of figures is an attempt, or a desire, or the necessit
y, to unite them. Even a casual observation of the painting suggests something very different; the two figures are about four metres apart, they are physically separate and mentally isolated. They do not propose the inevitability of embrace, or of recognition, or of any reciprocity at all. They appear divergent rather than convergent and their juxtaposition does not make them stand out from the rest of the painting but enables them to frame and support a landscape infused with a mood of uncertainty, vulnerability, suspense, and even of menace. The change of names given to the canvas (we do not know what title Giorgione himself had in mind) from ‘The Soldier and the Gypsy’ to ‘The Tempest’ reflects a growing awareness on the part of viewers that the real focus of the work might not be the dramatis personae but the overall atmosphere of the scene in which they are placed. If Giorgione is trying to call to mind the potential cooperation of fortezza and carita, the counterpointing of the earth and celestial motion, or the gravitation of Poliphilo towards the figure of Venus, his point is surely that the conjunction hinted at in each of these scenarios is precisely what is being suspended; what is being kept quite literally beyond arm’s length.
Pietro Zampetti goes as far as to claim that the landscape plays a part equal to that of the human figures in generating a pervasive mood or, one might almost say in the style of Auden, a distinctive climate of opinion: ‘[the paintings of Giorgione] mostrano che il paesaggio assume per l’artista altrettanto importanza, come espressione di stato d’animo, quanto le figure’.21 However, Zampetti associates this condition with a timeless truth rather than with a time-bound reality: ‘L’arte di Giorgione e essenzialmente contemplativa, non si lega al contingente, quando all’assoluto.’22 But if the historical analysis of the leading motifs seems unsatisfying, this does not necessarily lead to an ahistorical contemplation of the background; rather, it arouses curiosity about the historical origin of the state of mind projected into every aspect of the painting, the psychology distilled into the strange weather still enchanting viewers many centuries after the moment of composition.
That moment came at some point in the years between 1505 and 1510 (I have stretched the period in question to allow for a range of conjectures about the chronology; a majority of commentators are in favour of the much narrower interval 1506–08). At the beginning of the sixteenth century, storms depicted in works of art were commonly identified with Fortuna in her aspect of bad luck; but if we look beyond the iconography to the weather reports of the period and to the adverse fortunes of the Venetian Republic at home and abroad, we find a remarkable coincidence of natural disasters, industrial accidents and military stand-offs. There were earthquakes in Crete (controlled by the Republic), killer storms in the Adriatic, conflagrations around the Rialto and, towards the end of this period, an explosion at the Arsenale so massive it covered the entire city with a thick cloud of dark smoke: ‘habitaque pro ostento res fuit’ notes Pietro Bembo in the Latin text of his Historia Veneta [‘the incident was taken as a portent’].23 But by far the most sinister influence on the prevailing mood of the Venetians during this period was the threat of a German invasion. Maximilian actually did invade the Tyrol and Friuli, prompting the Senate to levy soldiers throughout the mainland territories, and in the period 1507–08, precisely the interval to which the execution of the painting has been most frequently assigned, there was a series of nasty engagements between the two armies.
The male figure in Giorgione’s composition is a soldier contemplating a vulnerable young woman and child; the deadlocked meanings of the painting are not unconnected to the prolonged military stalemate in the Veneto that was underway for a significant part of this time, and the historical limbo in which the Venetians existed for a number of years is reflected in the mutual wariness of the two figures, in the tense waiting game that holds them in relation. Any Venetian would have connected the portrayal of a soldier with the problem of the Germans during this period, but Giorgione could not have kept the connection out of his mind; he would have been supersensitive to its implications, since he was in the process of painting frescoes in the newly rebuilt Fondaco de’ Tedeschi, the trading centre for German merchants that had burned down in 1505, in one of Fortuna’s many strokes of bad luck during the first decade of the sixteenth century. The woman in Giorgione’s painting cannot be said to welcome the presence of the soldier, her attitude is a guarded one. If I hesitate to put it more strongly than that, it is because any more would detract from the powerful reticence that is widely recognised as the condition for inclusion in Giorgione’s imaginative world. But we cannot pretend that the Venetians would have hesitated for a moment to anticipate the causes of apprehension, or the nature of the threat posed by the figure of a soldier in the Veneto at this time. During the siege of Cormons in 1508, the Venetian commander Giorgio Corner was under no illusion about the need to protect the female population from violation by the troops by locking them inside a church: ‘Cornelius mulieres omnes, uno in templo compulsas, ab iniuria militum defendit’.24
We could say of ‘The Tempest’ that it is partly the study of a passage in time, of a time when the future was uncertain; but it is also a very Venetian painting in its attention to the insubstantiality of place, to the geographical presence of a state whose physical foundation has been conjured up out of nothing. There is a bridge at the very centre of the painting; like Venice itself, Giorgione’s landscape is an extended bridge passage, a long-drawn out moment of transition, exhibiting an awareness of being suspended between two pieces of terra firma, and between two sets of stable conditions: between night and day, between town and country, between nature and culture. But most of all, it is about being stranded, exposed, vulnerable, lost between the ruins of the past and a future struggling to be born, with small chance of survival, to a single mother overlooked by a male witness who might conceivably be on the look-out in the guise of protector, or who might be closing in on the last woman trying to escape the infanticide of a sixteenth-century Herod. In which case, this is an updated Bethlehem in an alternative universe, in the history of a Christianity that never happened, of a Venice in peril, of a city that defined itself as the bridge between East and West, as the barrier between Christian and Muslim worlds. And its entire ideological reason for being is crumbling at a touch, collapsing into a black hole. Giorgione’s ‘La Tempesta’ was created in the same episteme as Antonella da Messina’s Annunciation, that astonishing painting in which the Virgin is shown in the middle of a deep distraction, imagining all that might have been – the last reverie about a life gone forever – with her extended hand both warding off the angel and beginning to let go of everything the angel has banished, alternative histories of the world pivoting around a single moment.
2010
The Folding Telescope and Many
Other Virtues of Bruno Schulz
Bruno Schulz was born and was killed in the Polish town of Drohobycz, now in the Ukraine. The road there from Lviv (which Schulz knew as Lwów) is today lined with barren fields. There are patches of cultivation a few yards off from the garden walls of roadside villas, but everywhere else the land is ragged with tares and other weeds. The long battle lines of combine harvesters tackling endless miles of grain can be watched only in old film stock, most of it black and white, or only in memory. The towns and villages have shed the more obvious emblems of Soviet uniformity, especially in Drohobycz itself, where an unusual number of old houses survives. Much of the town centre still looks like the environment that Schulz grew up in. In fact, the material remains of the command economy are more obsolescent than the physical evidence of a largely nineteenth-century townscape. On the outskirts are shunting yards full of rotting iron, with a classic Soviet billboard showing a cartoon Stakhanovite worker balancing a huge girder on one shoulder. These give way to acres of unused bricks, stacked mysteriously in a series of upside-down arches. The traffic slows when the hoarded debris of overproduction has been passed and you reach the edge of what feels like an older, more domestic economy. There is an a
pple orchard, with a black and red woodpecker resting on a telegraph pole. Across the street is a wooden house sporting bright new tin drainpipes. The clapboarding is cracked and warped, but this one storey dwelling sports a row of stylised metopes. Sparrows are having a dustbath on the pitted pavement outside. Next door, a small girl pushes a pink-clad Barbie doll through the ironwork of her front gate. A cockerel is crowing in the front yard. There is a garden area with a large and robust crop of dandelions and a shabby old hexagonal summer house, a compost heap propped against one side. Between the road and the pavement is a narrow verge with untidy stacks of hay at regular intervals. Schulz’s own house is found at 10, Florianska Street. I approached it with two friends, poet Leo Mellor and translator Piotr Szymor. We stood under the walnut tree across the road to avoid a shower of rain.