Prologue

Something which I forgot to develop from the previous post, very important: the kiwi fruit. 

It was my wife who noticed it at the Treviso hotel we were staying in. Breakfast. The table of fruit consisted of a mountain of apples, kiwi fruit, and a solitary banana balanced on top. We had noticed kiwi around before, loads of them. The plentiful nature of the kiwi meant that they had to be grown locally, she deduced. 

As with many of the ludicrous suggestions she makes, it turns out to be true. The kiwi fruit was introduced into Italy in 1970. It grows really well, apparently, particularly in these northern parts of Italy, and the country is now the third largest producer of kiwi fruit in the world, following only China (no surprise there...) and New Zealand (which presumably gives the modern name to the fruit) . I find it strange, associating Italy with grapes, olives, tomatoes, you know, that kind of stuff. But that's it.....  

After that, anything else I write will be anticlimactic. But here we go. We can but try.

 

Part One 

The most astonishing sight on the visit to Venice probably occurred before I had set foot on Italian soil. The flight. From Heathrow, the plane headed south over the length of France, I suppose. I didn't take any notice, and it was pretty cloudy anyhow. 

At a certain point, however, as I was beginning to think that it wouldn't be all that long before we hit Italy, I looked out the window at an extraordinary sight. "The Alps" I exclaimed to my wife, who snuggled over to take a look. 

Far below, the skies were clearing, to reveal snow-clad mountains. Not 'snow-capped' but truly snow-clad. After a short time it became clear that these were not just a few isolated peaks, but mountain followed mountain, as we flew eastwards above and alongside the southern margins of this great mountain chain.

The skies cleared some more. Not only could we see the southernmost peaks, but wave upon wave of mountains receding into the distance to the north. The entire range, from its limits in the Po Valley into Switzerland and Austria, was revealed.

Never have I set eyes upon such a vast array of mountains. And never have I seen such a quantity of snow. It was snow, snow, snow, fading into the early evening distance and the plains of far-off central Europe.

I know snow well enough from forays into the Scottish mountains, and I can readily distinguish between a relatively shallow layer and a truly deep accumulation. The quantity of snow that was spread out in this magnificent panorama far below me was almost impossible for me to conceive. Great basins, scooped out by ancient glaciers (at least that's the official story), with snow that I found unfathomable. That's not going anywhere anytime soon. Better not tell Greta....

As the light was beginning to fade, the mountain peaks cast long shadows into the dark valleys etched deep into the mountain fastnesses. I could make out little settlements, stretched out like fragile ribbons, along the valley bottoms. It passed through my mind that the painter Titian hailed from one such, Pieve de Cadore, set high in the mountains north of Venice.

But it was the huge block of snow-and-ice-clad mountains that impressed itself most deeply upon me. It seemed like a miracle that passes actually exist across the Alps, joining Italy to the nations and peoples to the north. There are a few, it seems, though some are only open seasonally, between May and September, for example.

Most incredible is the Simplon Tunnel, carved deep through the rock beneath the mighty peaks, a distance of nineteen kms, connecting Italy with Switzerland by rail. How was such a project possible? And how did the construction teams working from north and south manage to meet, with apparently only a matter of a few centimetres out of alignment both vertically and horizontally?

I dread to think what cost to life was involved in the project. It was mainly Italians who perished - no surprise there. It's amazing that anyone survived at all.

 

Part Two

Gazing down over the Alpine mountains between Italy and the rest of Europe, I was observing history in action. My patchy and cursory knowledge of Italy's past suggests that this great snow-enveloped mountain range has often acted as a great barrier to influences from the north. Like a hermetic seal, it has kept some incursions, at least, at bay.

There have been plenty, of course. Check out the Goths and others. And Lutheranism hobbled over the Alpine passes in the early 16th century, while Napoleon broke down the gates three hundred years later, because that's the kind of thing that he did. But it has meant that incomers have for long periods tended to arrive from the west - France and Spain - or east and south-east: Byzantine influences, especially around Venice. And if you suffered the misfortune to live in Sicily or the south, you were prone to takeover from all and sundry who happened to be making headway this way or that in the Mediterranean.

Communication with the rest of the world was effected more successfully through the trading ports of Italy - Genoa, Venice, and Pisa especially - rather than overland. All of which may go some way to highlighting the conditions that have led to Italy being what it remains today. And which may give a few clues as to my own current Venezia-philia.

 

Part Three 

There's a great quote from one Giangiorgio Trissino, a cultivated dude from Vicenza we are told, who visited Germany in 1515, during the heyday of the Italian Renaissance. There, he was struck by 'the horror of huge forests, deep marshes and barren plains. Winds and snow whip that unhappy land; the soil is like iron and encrusted with ice .... A barbarous people shut themselves up in warm houses and laugh at the Arctic blasts, gaming and drinking far into the night.'

There, in a nutshell, we have it: what makes Italy Italy. 

I have found myself reaching for old tomes on the bookshelf that have been more-or-less untouched for years, or decades. Ones that have only narrowly escaped being consigned to a charity shop or worse in one of my occasional stripping-down moods. 

This time it was the turn of a really yellow-stained paperback, albeit a pretty hefty one. It doesn't smell that great these days. First published in 1956, with a republishing in 1961, the front pages inform me that it was bought by one purchaser for five shillings, and later for £1.50. It has a deliberately unclear face of a man on the front cover, rather long, thin, bearded, and serious-looking. The book is by D. H. Lawrence, and is titled 'Selected Literary Criticism'.

I don't go along with everything that Lawrence says, not by a long way. I don't think I'd have enjoyed having lunch with him all that much. But at times he is insightful like nobody else from his time; he cuts to the chase like no other. He can write powerfully, conveying a rare passion, and occasionally his poetry and prose come wrapped in great beauty.

His works that had the deepest impact on me four decades ago are not necessarily his most celebrated. One such is this collection of literary criticism. But it is here that he writes magnificently, in a piece called 'Puritanism and the Arts', about the distinction he draws between 'the spiritual - mental consciousness' and 'the instinctive - intuitive consciousness'.

The expressions speak for themselves - in a way, there is little left to be said. But the vital thing to remember is that Lawrence is not describing different ideas about the world, or ways of thinking about it. They are fully different modes of experience, denoting differing perceptual frameworks and ways of being.

 

Part Four

The spiritual - mental has been in the ascendancy; it has succeeded in infecting almost every nook and cranny of human existence by now. Having said that, it is associated primarily with Europe and cultures north of the Alps; above all with Britain and North America, along with Australia and New Zealand.

This mode of consciousness goes hand-in-hand with Protestantism, especially of the Puritan variety. More speculatively, D. H. Lawrence posits its development with the arrival of syphilis in Europe. This is a very Lawrence-type idea.

According to the author, the spiritual - mental mode of consciousness is characterised by a 'terror - horror' element about the physical body, a flight from the senses and the sensual. "We have become ideal beings, creatures that exist in idea, to one another, rather than flesh-and-blood kin." And with this comes "the failing of our intuitive awareness, and the great unease, the nervousness of mankind. We are afraid of the instincts. We are afraid of the intuition within us." (italics are Lawrence's).

Lawrence talks about looking at paintings: 

"In the past men brought forth images of magic awareness, and now it is the convention to admire these images. The convention says, for example, we must admire Botticelli or Giorgione,.... and we admire them. But it is all a fake. Even those that get a thrill, even when they call it ecstasy, from these old pictures are only undergoing cerebral excitation. Their deeper responses, down in the intuitive and instinctive body, are not touched. They cannot be, because they are dead."

And again: "So those poor English and Americans in front of the Botticelli Venus. They stare so hard; they do so want to see. And their eyesight is perfect. But all they can see is a sort of nude woman on a sort of shell on a sort of pretty greenish water."

An image comes to mind of people at an art gallery, looking at paintings. But before they look at the picture, they read the accompanying description. "Ah, got it. That's the artist, that's the subject, now I understand." And they don't actually look at the painting itself at all. This is common practice nowadays.

As in art, so in life. Which is, maybe, one part of the reason I turned tail and fled to Venice unexpectedly and at short notice.

 

Part Five 

'Beauty is truth, truth beauty, - that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.'

Thus wrote famously and enigmatically the poet John Keats in 1819, in 'Ode on a Grecian Urn'. Interestingly, he and his romantic poet buddies didn't stick around all their lives in these Protestant isles. They all buggered off to Italy, as did D. H. Lawrence himself one hundred years later.

There is also the tradition of 'the Good, the True, and the Beautiful', coming down through Plato among others. 

And today? Well, plenty of the good and the true. But the beautiful? Rarely gets a look-in. The spiritual - mental consciousness is at home with the ideas of truth and goodness. But mention beauty, and it gets very fidgety, wanting to change the subject.

Taking the vaporetto, the canal bus, down the Grand Canal in Venice, it hit me. Making your way down past the Rialto Bridge to San Marco, you pass all these waterside buildings, all decorative in great finesse and splendour. Not just one or two, but hundreds of them. What on earth was going on there? It's not easy building and decorating with such intricacy and attention to harmony and detail, especially if the place is overlooking a deep waterway. But it's what they did five hundred years ago. It was important to them, and not just in a 'my palace is bigger than your palace' kind of way. No. Beauty, physical beauty, was an integral aspect of life, of what gave it worth and meaning.

Nowadays, beauty rarely gets a look in. Look at most modern building: monuments to satanic Saturn if anything. Beauty is regarded as a side-show, or as a luxury we cannot afford. Which is clearly not an objective appraisal, but a cultural value judgement, as evidenced by the importance granted to beauty in previous civilisations of lesser material abundance. 

The thing about those who live in the spiritual - mental consciousness is that they are very easy to fool and manipulate. This is what I observe in the UK, at least. Here, this consciousness remains supreme; it exerts a grip and a monopoly over everything. 

Spiritual - mental means living in ideas, and ideals. Now, there are many people here who are quite good. And they want to be good, to do good. They are desperate to do good. And so they can be very prone to deception through manipulating their desire to be good. In their anguish at not being good enough, they are gullible. And so they will fall for any kind of bullshit that is placed in front of them, provided it comes with the label 'for the greater good' or 'good for the planet'.

This is the basis for all the climate change measures, the ULEZ penalties in nice clean bits of London, the fifteen-minute cities, the net zero (unattainable) procedures. It is all bollocks, all of it, but it comes packaged in 'saving the planet' or, since some people have seen through that, at least 'doing your bit'. Many more people are sceptical then even a few years ago, but there remain far too many who continue to support this destructive nonsense out of their spiritual - mental consciousness.

Climb a mountain in many parts of Scotland and you will see how the wind farm gold rush has completely obliterated the wild places. From below it's not always so obvious, but get more of a bird's eye view, and you'll see them; in places all around you now, half a dozen or more in clear view.

It's the acid test. You see, the person identified with spiritual - mental consciousness will probably gaze around the panorama, and utter something about how we all need to make sacrifices, and how it's all worth it. Or something about climate change targets, and how the climate seems to be really changing this year. The sense of beauty and its value, and the instinctive - intuitive consciousness, are gone. Totally. Dead.

While anyone with even a glimmer of the instinctive still functioning will look at the regimented mechanical grid overlying the natural contours of the hills and feel revulsion. Their intestines will probably tighten up and they will feel a bit nauseous. Intuitively you know this is the opposite of the good, true, and beautiful. This is bad, false, and ugly. There is no good that come of it. 

 

Part Six 

For years I had recourse to 'alternative media' as a source of ideas and information which might be more reliable than the mainstream. When the convid card came into play, rather more than four years ago now, I found myself diving into these places in a focussed and concerted attempt to get closer to the bottom of what was really going on.

For the first two years of convid especially I spent substantial portions of a typical day immersed in the worlds of the many more independent and alternative media. This was necessary, and preserved the remaining shards of personal sanity in an increasingly insane world. I am deeply grateful to those who stood up and spoke up, and who continue to do so. They helped to save my life. At the same time, I now feel all this work has come at a price.

For all its courage and intelligence, the alternative media - or at least the vast majority - is rooted firmly in spiritual - mental consciousness. It champions the good, waves the flag of the true; but the beautiful? I cannot recall any mention of beauty in any of the multitude of articles I have read.

A Protestant and puritan mindset often rules. In the United States especially, a good portion of 'alternative news and opinion' emanates from a world of traditional Christianity. A lot of real Christians have felt themselves marginalised by the atheistic and technocratic culture which has been on the rise over recent decades. They have understandably been more alert to the nefarious activities of 'the cabal' than those who place their faith in (one-eyed) science and 'the authorities'. 

So they come with their insights, but also with their quotations from the Bible, with their literalism, with their own dogmas. With their own dualistic frames of reference, and with their discomfort at the physical, the sense-based, the nudity of the Venus, the sensuous pull of the Titian Madonna.... I need to keep myself at arm's length.

        

So I feel like a walking contradiction. On the one hand I do not grant the physical world the level of reality that it is customarily given. It is not 'absolutely real', but is a function of moment-to-moment interpretation of data by our brain, which is tuned in to decipher on a particular channel or wavelength. On the other hand, I am scathing of living in a world of thoughts, ideas, and opinions, instead championing a world of colour and form as manifested in Renaissance art. I guess I'll just have to live with it for now..... 

 

Images: 1. Venus asleep in the Veneto countryside. Giorgione, c1510

              2. Excavating the Simplon Tunnel

              3. D.H. Lawrence

              4. Martin Luther by Lucas Cranach the Elder, German Renaissance, 1532

              5. Pope Paul 3rd by Titian, Venetian Renaissance, 1543