Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  He was a philosopher and a scientist, inventing systems for space navigation and instruments for overcoming gravity in this field; he read Kant, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche as well as the great mathematicians, wrote philosophical aphorisms full of wit and revelatory in their disenchantment. But Francesco de Grisogono was – and he knew it – isolated from the great scientific and philosophical culture of his time, which was living a prodigious period of revolution, to which he probably would have been able to contribute and which certainly would have nourished his mind, freeing it from the asphyxia and the lucubrations of solitude. He himself observed that the projects and the ideas that proliferated in his head without ever being realized, seeds falling into sunless soil that rendered them consumptive, these things left him at once oppressed and excited, like a machine with too great a head of steam, blocked and forced into awareness of his situation.

  Those “seeds of a new science” – to quote the title of his main and posthumous work, which caught the interest, many years after his death, of the Nobel prize-winning physicist Enrico Fermi – in truth these managed to bear fruit thanks to the most strenuous effort which he felt it was his duty – to himself and to others – to disguise in a genial levity. In his modest study and at the little fold-away table he used to carry with him even on Sundays when the family went for the day to picnic up on the Carso, while his three children played and his wife tried to get him to eat plenty of eggs to keep his strength up, Francesco de Grisogono wrote down stern aphorisms and pathetic fantasies, elaborated the acute principle of minimal distinctions, and contemplated the creation of a positive critical philosophy freed of metaphysics. He unmasked commandments and moral prohibitions and demolished the concept of truth with an ethical absoluteness and a dedication to the real that was worthy of his legendary martyr-ancestor. He developed his theory on power as the goal of knowledge, and lived the impotence of his condition serenely. Above all else he worked at the fundamental dream of his life, the “conceptual calculus”, an ars combinatoria based on rigorous mathematical foundations and capable of producing all the operations, the discoveries and the intuition of genius.

  Francesco de Grisogono sought to free human creativity from the whims of chance and from the injustice of fate which, as he well knew, conditioned it and clipped its wings. To this task he brought a titanic impetus compounded with a genuine scientific rigour, a prophetic intuition, outdated impedimenta and a naïvety that was unavoidable in an isolated provincial. And if genius is inevitably subject to hazard, then conceptual calculus, with its machinery providing every possible operation, and imposing on them its inflexible logic, floats free of the randomness in which men, even geniuses, are ensnared.

  The most interesting aspect of this Promethean design is the arrangement of the tables that the writer composes in his Seeds of a New Science, to catalogue the infinite variety of the world, in such a way as to organize the material for those combinations that will extract from reality all possible inventions and discoveries. It classifies types and subtypes of elements (unentwineable: bacillary, arched, contorted, “circuent”), the thirty-six determinations of a “ponderal” or the twenty-one determinations of an event, the locutions and the translocational operations, the “electriferous” instruments and the “sonifers”, the seventeen parts of the “alteragifers”, the 143 modalities of an action, the twenty-eight physiological phenomena and the same number of psychic phenomena, the divers substances – the friable, foliaceous, mucilaginous, foamy, pungent. It suggests scientific research ranging from the brilliant to the hare-brained, enquiries into the influence of a vacuum on the variations in the electric resistance of selenium, through the effects of light or experiments to verify whether the given X(2)n contains properties that will arrest the decomposition of corpses.

  Among those tables, those calculi and those mathematical signs, pigeon-holed and untouchable, sit the seduction and the prolixity of the world, the immensity of the celestial vaults and the chasms of the heart. That all-encompassing hubris, which toys with omnipotence, exposes the individual in his smallness and helplessness, lost as he is amid the infinite and even more so amid the enigmas of finite things, overwhelmed by love for life; all of this he tries to capture like a fisherman who seeks to capture the sea in his net. Only plain mathematics, with its signs as abstruse to the layman as hieroglyphics, can elicit the mysterious and terrible grace of living; here we have the glum, positivist, nineteenth-century honesty, with its rigour and its ingenuous faith in being able to eliminate metaphysics, which authenticates the sense of mystery – unstated and indeed doggedly banished like an error in a computation.

  Those infinite spaces – which de Grisogono strove with his genuine acumen to render navigable for men – often contract into his solitary researcher’s rented room, where he lacks even an interlocutor in whom he can confide, someone to whom he can present results and projects, and he has to be careful that the solitude does not lead him to start raving over nonsense.

  Francesco de Grisogono knew the inner perils of isolation and melancholy, the excesses in which a heart, too rich and big for the cramped reality in which it may find itself, chokes and suffocates. As he said of himself, “Patiently and playfully he bore the sight of all his dreams dying one by one … and in this bitter disappointment he did not come to hate men nor things and neither did he tire of loving life which lavished only thorns on him…. Thus he grew old in a peaceful melancholy and carried the cross of his dark destiny in the guise of an ordinary man, in order not to render himself ridiculous as a misunderstood genius.”

  It is difficult to say which of the two, the martyr or the scientist, suffered the harsher fate.

  “Well … I don’t know,” says Arcadio Scaramuzza, “at home he never spoke about it, and we never asked … you know in those days, between his arrest and the trial, he’d lost all his hair, that was when he went bald, and we felt it wasn’t right to ask him questions, to remind him of that period….” So at home his father, Antonio Scaramuzza, had recounted nothing of those days in Kotor, which under his leadership seemed to have transformed the Dalmatian port into Kronstadt and to have brought the Red October to the Adriatic. According to his son he had brought his baldness back with him from the Revolution, an upset which, in the eyes of his relatives, seemed to add more weight to the courage and the glory of those deeds.

  Antonio Scaramuzza was one of the ring-leaders of a revolt that broke out in Kotor on 1 February, 1918, when the sailors of the Austro-Hungarian fleet took over some ships, including the flagship, the armed cruiser Sankt Georg, arresting the commander, Admiral Hansa, with his officers and forming the Revolutionary Sailors’ Committee, elected by the crew mustered on the quarterdeck.

  The Sankt Georg and the other ships – all but two of them ready to join the mutiny – had raised the red flag, but among the sailors, of all the differing nationalities in the empire, the echo of the Russian Revolution and proletarian demands – the ending of the war, freedom to establish trades unions, international brotherhood, the democratization of civilian and military life – were enmeshed not only with the immediate reasons for protest arising out of the treatment they received aboard, but also with the separatism of the various peoples of the empire, each aiming at the dissolution of Austria and their own self-affirmation, almost always at the expense of their neighbours.

  Resolute in its execution, but hesitant in the management of its brief success, the mutiny had been prepared in most efficient secrecy; Scaramuzza, who had had a leading role in the organization, recalled the varied character of its objectives fifteen years later in the Piccolo, Trieste’s newspaper: “To the Italians we promised freedom, to the Croatians a Serbo-Croat state, to the anti-Serbian Slavs the sale of the ships to the allies (excluding Italy) and the division of the proceeds, to the Bohemians a republic and to the Germans and Hungarians better treatment from their officers, good and plentiful rations and more money.” But on board the ships the Marseillaise was being played and the Revolut
ionary Committee’s despatch, telegraphed to the government in Vienna, requested immediate peace negotiations, acceptance of the principle of self-determination, together with Wilson’s Fourteen Points and above all the democratization of the state.

  The revolution, which seemed to be spreading, in fact collapsed in three days: three days of discussions, messages sent to Vienna, negotiations, some shots which chased off three German submarines, a piece of shrapnel from the fort which decapitated the Viennese Zagner, one of the leaders of the insurrection who had climbed up on the gun tower of the Kronprinz Rudolf to give the command to return fire. He was buried solemnly in the bay, headless and wrapped in the red flag.

  In those few hours the sailors of Kotor hesitated over the measures to be taken, but they behaved with calm, courage and even excessive liberality, such as when they sent to shore for a physician, Doctor Chersi of Lussino, because Admiral Hansa, their prisoner, had a stomach ache; and, as the doctor prescribed a meat-based diet, they sent another launch ashore to buy him beefsteaks for grilling. Just before being released, the admiral promised that not a hair on a sailor’s head would be touched, but once he got over his stomach ache he forgot the promise and shot four of them; Antonio Grabar, from Parenzo, in particular died displaying remarkable and disdainful courage. Many sentences to hard labour were handed out at the trial, but on the whole Austrian justice was not too harsh on what had been an armed revolt during wartime involving eight to ten thousand men. Scaramuzza was saved because the commission set up to identify those responsible on the Sankt Georg declared, perhaps thanks to his friendship with Ficich, an Italian member of the commission, that he had not been seen among the mutineers.

  That was just about the only stroke of luck Scaramuzza enjoyed. The failed revolution, which he had skilfully helped organize, marked a certain vocation for failure that was to accompany him in his professional life, in the enterprises he embarked on that went wrong; even a cinema that he set up caught fire. But he evidently did not lose heart. In Grado they remember him as big, robust, and fearless under all circumstances. He could not have been too happy when, years later, Fascism sought to glorify the Kotor revolt – and his role in it – interpreting it as a movement driven solely by Italian patriotic fervour against Austria.

  Indeed, in 1934 the Piccolo published a series of articles in praise of the Kotor revolt, with the Italian tricolore rather than the red flag flying over it, all Bolshevik references expunged. The writer, R.D., even went to meet one of the thirteen members of the Revolutionary Committee, the Triestine worker Angelo Pacor, and described him with great feeling, taking care to eliminate any possible communist connotation: “One of our typical intelligent workers … modest … forceful of character…. His face, deeply wrinkled by his resistance to the privations borne out of love for his children, is lit with a smile that inspires trust. Nothing here of the Asiatic revolutionary; nothing frightening in that honest face….”

  The spectre of Lenin is exorcised even from his facial features; the writer from the Piccolo portrays an anti-Bolshevik physiognomy, without ever asking himself why on earth this fine Triestine should have a Mongolian look. Four years earlier, in his play, The Sailors of Kotor, Friedrich Wolf – who in 1922 was a member of the Dresden workers’ and soldiers’ council and an active Communist – had celebrated with revolutionary and proletarian feeling the red flag flying in that Dalmatian bay. The protagonist is the group of sailors, the real chorus of that protest, of that hope, and of that disaster; with the play’s social realism, Wolf brings to light the inadequacy and the contradictions of that revolt, the incapacity of its leaders to see it through to the end and above all the ever-present tragic conflict common to all revolutions, born to eliminate violence and yet constrained to use violence in order to succeed and if they hesitate in its use they are quashed, as happened in Kotor.

  Today Wolf’s revolutionary pathos might seem dated, but on this turn-of-the-century set which tends – with its intelligent special effects – to classify the tragedies and the hopes of redemption in a context of bloody farce, events such as those in Kotor find a searing, touching topicality, that reflects a strangulation point in contemporary history. Perhaps this was one reason why Antonio Scaramuzza did not like to speak about it; he also spoke of it very little because he could not contradict the Fascist version, ultimately so flattering to himself, and he felt embarrassed about acting the positive, admirable role which had been foisted on him. His contributions to those historical pieces of 1934 are in line with the newspaper’s approach, but slight and laconic. He probably preferred to do other things, such as managing the Pine Wood guest house in Sistiana, although he ended up losing that as well.

  Moments when history is made, and extraordinary adventures often render those who have lived them taciturn. Augusto Troian and the other seven from Grado, members of the “Legion of the Survivors of Siberia”, also spoke very little about their incredible Odyssey, errant footnote to Universal History. That Odyssey too begins with the First World War, out of which all that still envelops and conditions us was born, all the possible and still incomplete parabolas of our destiny. Those eight men from Grado – narrates Luciano Sanson, distant cousin of one of them, Beniamino – were called up in 1914 in the Austro-Hungarian army and sent to the Carpathian front. When Italy too entered the war on 24 May, 1915, Troian, an irredentist, had deserted and given himself up to the Russians, and the others had done the same, or had been taken prisoner; at all events they had joined the volunteer forces organized by the Italian military mission with those from Venezia Giulia who had deserted from the Royal Imperial army for patriotic reasons.

  Those groups were supposed to have been repatriated to Italy and then to have been sent to fight against the Austrians on the Isonzo front. The first of the staggered groups reached Archangel and before embarking were blocked by ice and by the Russian Revolution. Troian and others decided to head for Vladivostok, so as to reach Italy by sea, and in an epic Anabasis they crossed Siberia. But on arriving at Vladivostok they were asked to join up with an expedition sent by the allies – including Italy, via China – to try to block the Russian Revolution, which weakened the Entente because it was starving the Central Empires’ eastern front of manpower. Troian remained in Vladivostok at the headquarters of the Italian expeditionary corps; the others went back to Siberia and found themselves in the chaos of that immense territory, the Revolution and the Civil War, in a space that was too big and empty of things, but too full of history and changes. Odysseys are long, all homecomings are difficult; the men from Grado did not return to Italy until 12 April, 1920, on board a Japanese steamship that took them to Trieste.

  Of that journey through the snows of the steppes and history, of that wandering which traces in miniature the many escapes and peregrinations of individuals and peoples that mark the century, almost nothing remains, apart from Luciano Sanson’s article in the Piccolo. There is no mention of battles, which the legion must have contrived to avoid, slipping between one military confrontation and another as though through showers and hailstorms. In any case, everyone who lived through those extraordinary happenings tends towards silence; perhaps because they do not know how to speak, perhaps because they think that if they speak they will get it wrong. Or perhaps it is because while living an adventure it seems like something exceptional, but then when one gets home, and is about to start telling the tale, the words don’t come; those things that seemed remarkable have disappeared, flown away, or they no longer seem so marvellous, and little by little nothing comes to mind, after all perhaps nothing happened and one knows not what to say.

  The “Anzolo” San Michele, who rotates around the top of Sant’ Eufemia, is big and handsome too, with his wide wings, fluttering and fringed strips of cloud, his arm and index finger extended to indicate the direction of the wind, his body erect and ready for battle, an archangel aware that the fight, even in the heavens, is certainly not over with the provisional victory that resulted in Lucifer and his rebel
s being locked up down below. But every now and then the Angel Saint Michael is removed for some restoration work and is installed inside the basilica. Erudite chroniclers and journalists seeking local colour describe him, there on the floor, awkward and graceless, a clumsy and inoffensive giant, his pupils lifeless. It is known that captive albatrosses lose their nobility, their aura of distance. Up high, among the standards of the sky and the wind, the Angel seems to see and dominate many things; but once he’s down even he is embarrassed, like a man who knows not what to say.

  Barbana, the most famous of the islands thanks to its sanctuary, is beautiful from far off, with its maternal dome and the belltower protruding from the thick green and arching in a harmony of curves over the water. On landing it’s the wind blowing through the great pines, elms and cypresses that strikes one more than the church, and the ex votos which, like sacred ancestors of the strip cartoon, recount disasters and catastrophes of all kinds miraculously averted. The Perdon de Barbana takes place on the first Sunday in July; it is a great procession of boats all decked out in honour of the Madonna who, tradition goes, was brought to the island by a storm at the end of the sixth century: the wooden statue was found among the branches or leaning against the trunk of a tree. Today’s statue of Mary, looking anxiously into the distance, with her son in her arms, is more recent, albeit still many centuries old; it is not the first and perhaps not even the second image of the Virgin to be venerated on Barbana. Perhaps the first was a black Madonna on the prow of a dromond or a Byzantine bilander and came from distant seas, or perhaps it was simply a female carving, a figurehead gazing at the sea with her awestruck eyes and looking out for imminent storms; perhaps she became a Madonna only when she touched land.