Microcosms (Panther)

by Magris, Claudio

  In his casone on the lagoon the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini used the cine camera to recount the tale of witch and foreign victim par excellence, the story of Medea. Medea was devoted to the grim (but to her familiar) gods of earth and night, and thus was close to the archaic and dark roots of myth – the indistinct totality of life – and she was therefore a stranger in the land of the man she loved, Jason, and a stranger too in Greece, which over the centuries has shone out as the universal homeland. So she was condemned to an even greater trial, to be the most alien of strangers, the most unacceptably different. She was even induced by the violence and the deceit she suffered to violate that most universal of all feelings, maternal love: killing her sons she becomes monstrously at odds with her own self, her own heart, after she had become a stranger in the land of her birth, Colchis, and in her chosen land, Greece.

  Her tragedy re-echoes over the centuries, in countless reworkings, ancient and recent, but her terrible story will not answer to any modern psychological relativism. In the myth of Medea it is reason which ensnares and destroys the grim and ingenuous magic; the potions and the witchcraft of the sorceress are ineffectual against the calculating astuteness of Jason and the Greeks, and her own passion, as intense and wild as life itself, is easy prey for the web of mediations in which civilized society envelops and smothers it. The Argonauts who succeed in their quest for the Golden Fleece – thanks to her, for love’s sake traitor to her own values – have the terrible and irresponsible force of Greek youth, at once innocent and sophisticated, and to them the whole world, even the unknown and threatening parts of it, seems to offer itself up to be seized and plundered. In the various Medeas created and recreated in world literature, the clear Hellenic light is a troubling illumination, a demonic transparency of horror. It is not classical harmony and neither is it Dionysian fury; the Greek spirit – the ship setting off to pillage Colchis – is indeed absolute and candid bad faith, the act of plunder that stops at nothing, a market for everything that is sacred.

  The sea, insidious and boundless, is the space in which this unscrupulous adventure takes place; it corrodes laws, and altars and accepts no prohibitions; it is the space of sacrilegious history. The Greek spirit is precisely this mobility, untrustworthy as the sea; Medea – murderer of her brother and eventually of her own sons – is the custodian of the sacred, not of the archaic sacredness of her rites, which she is magnanimously ready to relinquish, but of the whole sacredness of life. The spellbound immobility of the lagoons of Grado might well be a symbolical backdrop of the myth, a communion of demons and gods, in which Medea grows and from which she is torn, through her love for Jason, by the strength of Greece’s secular and rational civilization.

  Greek civilization wins, but this victory involves a horror that is every bit as dark as the obscurity of Colchis with its dragons. Uprooted from her world, in whose eyes she has made herself guilty, betraying it and cooperating in its ruin, Medea is gripped by this sense of guilt and disorientation, she is rejected and despised by the Greek world to which she had sacrificed her own world and in which she can find no place; humiliated, betrayed and trampled on by Jason, for love of whom she has sacrificed everything, she falls prey to a searing pain, which leads her to the ghastly murder of her own sons, a vengeance directed at Jason, but also, and above all else, at herself.

  In one of her novels Christa Wolf harks back to traditions more ancient than Euripides’ tragedy and suggests that the victors’ memory has falsified the truth, attributing to the barbarian foreign woman a crime actually committed by the people of Corinth, who killed Medea’s sons in an explosion of violence. In mythology nothing really happens, everything is simply recounted and takes effect with each telling of the story. Medea as murderer of her own sons is more credible, more real because she is thus even more the victim: no one could be more of a victim than the person who is tortured to the point of being overwhelmed, to the utter loss of humanity, to being driven to do evil. In Pasolini’s film Medea’s savage vengeance is also the brutalization that western violence instigates in the Third World, alienating that world from itself, it is barbaric disorder reacting to a barbaric order.

  But Medea is a tragedy, and it would not be a tragedy if it did not sanction the need for those horrible events of which it is nevertheless so morally critical. Greek civilization, despite everything, is a light which in the end serves to spread humanity, far more so than primitive Colchis with its dragons and darkness. The tragedy is that the man who bears this torch is Jason, the unworthy, and with him the rulers and the people of Corinth, of Greece. Jason is a liar skilful not only in deceiving others, but also himself, thus stifling his awareness of his own guilt and committing evil while convinced that he has no choice; he is prepared to do anything to the point of losing all substance, to becoming a man without qualities, with neither core nor depth, a mere surface cloaked in seduction, in diplomatic and erotic charm, in beautiful heroic gestures. He is the prototype of male vanity, unsure of itself and devoted only to its own image, cynically ready to absolve itself in the name of an overriding necessity.

  Even in her homicidal fury it is Medea who is aware of the authentic sense of love, of feelings, of values. But Colchis, with its tribal ferocity, is not a possible alternative to the Greece of Homer, Socrates and Plato, of myth and logos which are rooted in being. It is tragically cynical, a whim of the gods, that the herald of Hellenic illumination in the midst of dark barbarism should be the wretched Jason and that his victim – the price paid for the epoch-making enterprise, the Argonauts’ expedition – should be Medea, so much greater than he. But it is still more tragically cynical that this whim of the gods should be an essential element in Greek civilization. This relentless dialectic allows for no dreams of uncorrupted paradises and even less for any comparison with the West; in the film, too, the spellbound somnolent oblivion of the lagoon mitigates, but only for a moment, the unbearable horror of the story.

  Every Medea is the story of a terrible difficulty in comprehension between differing civilizations; a tragically topical warning on how difficult it is for a foreigner to stop really being such for others. Medea reveals the triumph of extraneousness and objective conflict between different people and peoples. For this reason too, in Grillparzer’s play Medea, she is able to say that it would be better not to be born and that when this happens all we can do – without falling into tearful self-pity, like Jason – is to bear the pain.

  The Grado lagoon finishes at Anfora and at Porto Buso. Up until the Great War, just beyond it lay Italy, and the irredentists of Grado, the republicans from the Ausonia club, used to cross the channel at night to touch the homeland. In 1915 an Italian torpedo boat fired a few shells at the bunker on the island, the Austrians replied with a couple of shots and abandoned the bunker and thus began the worldwide bedlam which threatens to break out again today.

  That channel was a fatal border, the front line in a world conflict. Grado itself is a border, a strip marking several frontiers. Between land and sea, between open sea and closed lagoon, but above all between mainland and maritime civilizations. Grado was born of Aquileia, but the eleven kilometres dividing the two towns mark a notable distance. From ancient times Aquileia extended its authority over the inland dioceses; its great history together with that of its patriarchs extends towards Germany, Hungary, towards central and imperial Europe. Grado became a metropolis for the dioceses of Istria and maritime Venice, opening up to an Adriatic and Mediterranean culture. Even the dialect changed over those eleven kilometres between Grado and Aquileia; Friuli set its mark on it.

  Those eleven kilometres mark the passage from the airy marine ethos of Venice to a continental and problematic Mitteleuropa, grand, morose laboratory of civilization’s discontents, expert in emptiness and in death. That cultural continent – and Michelstaedter’s nearby Gorizia was already an extraordinary barometer for the apocalypse – was a world well wrapped up and buttoned down, in its heavy greatcoats, against the wind of life. Before the
Great War when Marin, a schoolboy in Gorizia and founding member of the Ausonia club, used to swim across that channel to touch Italy, he certainly must have enjoyed getting undressed, stripping off all those defences learned at the big Mitteleuropa school and throwing himself into the water, letting himself drift with the flow of life. He would cross the channel and come back no longer knowing which was his place, his homeland, which side he was on. He did learn once for all a few years later when he declared at Vienna University, where he was studying, in a stormy interview with the rector, that he was an Italian patriot and meant to go to war against Austria. A few weeks later, however, in Italy, he was protesting to a boorish captain in the Italian army which he had joined as a volunteer, that he was an Austrian, and accustomed to a more civil style and tone.

  Borders often require blood sacrifices, provoking death; in 1023 the great Patriarch of Aquileia, Popone, devastated Grado in a bloodbath and, between 1915 and 1918 Italy’s eastern borders were a slaughterhouse. Perhaps the only way to neutralize the lethal power of borders is to consider oneself and to put oneself on the other side, for ever.

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  Myth has it that in these lagoons the Danube reached the sea through a river that rose out of its tributary, the Sava. This river was the Istro, which in other versions was the Danube itself. The Argonauts too reached the Adriatic up the Danube, carrying the ship on their shoulders and relaunching it in other waters until they reached the sea. It is right that the Danube – the river of continental Mitteleuropa, of its greatness, its melancholy, its obsessions – should flow into the Adriatic, because the Adriatic is the sea par excellence, the sea of all persuasion, all letting go, of true life and of harmony with life. The Argonauts, fleeing from the fogs and the monsters of Colchis, reach Cherso and Lussino, the perfect enchantment of the Apsyrtides, then the Isle of Circe. But those absolute islands were born of the blood spilled by the Argonauts themselves from the body of Apsyrtus, Medea’s brother, who was treacherously killed through the sorceress’s deceit – guilty again because of her love for Jason; he was hacked to pieces and thrown into those immortal waters. Even that beauty and harmony are children of crime and fraud; on these banks and in these ambiguous, yielding courses of water, the Danube carries Medea, her pain, her fury and her perdition and Jason’s treachery.

  Beyond the channel, which opens up in front of the On the Slate restaurant at Anfora, lies the Marano lagoon. The Maranesi pass for brave, aggressive fishermen, people talk about their casual incursions across to the other side of the Adriatic, challenging the Jugoslav, later to become Slovenian and Croatian, patrol boats; people also complain about their incursions into Grado’s waters, and happily recall a certain Graziadio who in recent times kept them away from Porto Buso with his shotgun. From outside the Mistral arrives, a breath of the real sea. The line dividing the sea from the lagoon is visible, precarious and unavoidable like all borders, with their requirements and their vanities, it matters little whether they be borders between waters, colours, countries or dialects. A fisherman on his way back from the Banco d’Orio has caught a sea bass weighing almost three kilos, even the scales of that fish, sparkling and imperceptibly changing colour thanks to the sun outside and the death inside, are a heaving of borders.

  Cristiano asks if we want to go with him on the dunes at Anfora, to look for clams. He is twelve and has a fresh, determined face; he is the skipper, he knows where and how to take the boat and, with instinctive respect for the hierarchies of experience, one follows his orders. His calm rowing inspires confidence. He doesn’t miss the two dots on the sand freed by the tide, indicating the clams’ hideaway. The knife disturbs the black mud, seething with minimal and obstinate life, extracts the animal closed in its valve. The beach is white with light, with shells, with breaking waves. Just over there among the coarse grass and the seagulls’ nests, the carcass of an enormous sea turtle rots. A few days ago near that turtle Cristiano found and saved a dog. He found it by chance, almost dying of thirst and so exhausted that it couldn’t manage to climb into the batela. It must have been on the dune for a long time. At home it drank one bucket of water after another and then slept for almost two days. Cristiano has grown fond of the dog, a beautiful setter, old and a bit deaf, with noble, puzzled eyes. He hopes that its owner had wanted to get rid of it, so that he can keep it, and he’s called it Ivan.

  He didn’t invent the name: Ivan was a Maremmano sheep dog which some twenty or more years ago belonged to a policeman from the small station at Porto Buso, now abandoned; nearby, Giuseppe Zigaina recalls, was the house of the buoy-keeper who lived alone with his offshore buoy and had to keep its lamp filled. One day the policeman, tired of the animal, took it onto the dune and shot it. The dog was wounded but survived. It survived for a long time, never letting anyone come near, and learned to feed on gulls’ eggs and the odd animal; only at night did it come to drink from the fountain at Anfora.

  That white dog, appearing and disappearing among the sand and the tufts of grass on the shore, remained in the people’s memory. Its name is remembered and giving it to another dog, as Cristiano has done, is a little rite that conveys an inheritance and grants authority to the new animal. The new Ivan was in fact a lost dog, and when his master came to collect him Cristiano perhaps felt that all stories have an end. But the name of the old white dog remains, while nobody remembers anything of the policeman, not even his name.

  Knotty fisherman’s hands, knots of wood in the boats or on the boards on which clams and lobsters have been emptied, knots in the nets that are thrown into the water or in the ropes that moor a boat: throughout the engravings of Dino Facchinetti these images of strength and patience recur, learned from the long slow rhythm of the waters, of the toil, of work down the generations. Poetry is pietas, humility – closeness to the humus lagunare, evoked in a work of 1991 – and the fraternal pleasure of living. The waters of that immemorial humus are dark, the batela glides calmly, the hand guiding it knows how to sculpt a face mined by the years, to etch the profile of a landscape. Grado and its lagoon have known artists who celebrate them in colours or in pencil sketches: the Siroccos of De Grassi, the twinmasted bragozzi of Coceani, the dykes and the waves of Auchentaller, who bears the same name as the unhappy Contessina of Morgo. Those patient and knotted hands are like the rough goodness of old trees; the ancient lagoon life suggests an art that is careful about things, that serves reality.

  Starting back, to complete the circle. The island of San Giuliano, with its sixth-century church, glorious orchards and the chiuse, the locks for capturing the fish; on the mud of the shorelines the Istrian rock stands out white. The people of Grado used to go over to Istria carrying sand and come back with these bright stones. The islands of the Gran Chiusa, Casoni Tarlao, Isola Montaron, Isola dei Busiari; on the horizon the belltower of Aquileia, high up over the splendid basilica, hidden away from view, symbol of the city, of civitas. Like the tapo flower, the city rises out of these marshes, as does history. Out of these lagoons Venice was born. When Attila fell on Aquileia, heralded by a burning dry wind and reviled by the Aquileiesi in their dialect as fiol de un can, “son of a dog”, the refugees who hid among the islands laid the foundations of one of the world’s great states. A ballad, attributed to the Bishop Paolino, narrates the destruction of the forums and the palaces, the deserted churches became dens for foxes and nests for snakes. The lament for the ruin of the city – from ancient Sumerian Lagash to Bath in Anglo-Saxon elegy – recurs throughout world literature, a true literary genre dealing with the transience of all that is high and mighty.

  As with Rome and the flight of Aeneas, empires are born out of exile; the foundations of the future are preceded by an exodus, by the painful loss of the past. On these waters the beginning and the end of the Serenissima are there for the touching; on the Centenara, now reclaimed, a Gradenigo, descendant of the family of the Doges, ended up as caretaker of the fish farm, slopping out when there was too much mud, burning the brushwood and the dry grass.
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  Towards the east, more or less in front of the Mula di Muggia bank, lies the small submerged island of San Grisogono, from the name of the Aquileiese martyr who, tradition has it, was decapitated and buried in those sands when they were still above sea level, in the time of Diocletian. Therefore the batela, in this brief diversion from the channels of the lagoon, if tradition is to be relied upon, slides over a family tomb, because from those Grisogono of remote Greek and later Dalmatian origin, minor magistrate-nobles who settled in Split and produced men of letters and science who gave lustre to various Dalmatian cities in the time of the Serenissima, there came, too, Francesco de Grisogono, maternal grandfather, who had come close to genius and visited every facet of melancholy, passing on to his grandson the nostalgia and the hubris associated with the business of enclosing the world in a cage of signs and words.

  In one of his last pages, written to be read after his death, Francesco de Grisogono had written that, “He had ceased existing without ever having been able to start living.” He had soon realized that his “burning vocation” was destined to burn in absolute solitude, and that his life would depend upon his capacity to prevent the bitterness of his misfortune and isolation from degrading his intelligence into sterile, brilliant eccentricity and the richness of his heart into compulsive resentment.

  Born in 1861 in Šibenik in Dalmatia, Francesco de Grisogono grew up in difficult conditions and, after being prevented from completing his cherished studies in philosophy and mathematics in Vienna, he spent many years as an officer in the Royal Imperial Navy. He was an Italian irredentist, but was in love with German culture and knew and appreciated much of Croatian culture, to which another branch of the family belonged. Eventually he became a simple teacher in the vocational schools in Trieste. Frustrated as he was by all manner of adversities, he found himself excluded throughout his life from any contact with the world of research.