Blog Posts

Gubbio in Umbria

9/8/2017

This is my fourth blog post describing my trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy this past July. My last post recounted our two days in Ravenna. Next stop was Gubbio, in Umbria.

Umbria is quite craggy above its little rivers. The Via Flaminia, the ancient main road from Ariminum to Rome, bypassed the important Umbrian city of Iguvium, located on a defensible slope above a well-enclosed mountain valley. The modern name of this city is Gubbio.

The Via Flaminia in Roman Times. (Wikipedia.)

Under the empire, Iguvium was safe and luxurious, a rather elite spot as evidenced by the remains of the massive classical-era theater.

Gubbio. Roman theater on the left. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Iguvium, before the Roman conquest, was Ikuvium, capital of the Umbrians. After the fall of the Etruscan League and the Roman conquest of Tuscany, the Umbrians were the next to be absorbed militarily by Rome. Like written Etruscan, the Umbrian written language remains undeciphered. The longest known texts of Umbrian writing are the bronze Eugubine tablets from Ikuvium. After the Roman victory, Ikuvium kept its population and its name.

Gubbio and environs seem to have been prosperous in medieval times. It is said that the city sponsored 1,000 knights for the First Crusade, and the knights of Gubbio legendarily recaptured the site of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. A “knight” as a unit included at the minimum not just an armored warrior on horseback, but also a squire or dogsbody, a stable hand for the horse, and a man-at-arms. Gubbio's 1,000 knights, if an accurate number, would represent a 4,000 man expedition, which is larger than a modern American infantry brigade. That seems a lot for such a little place, but Gubbio was nearly continuously at war throughout the medieval and Renaissance era.

Some centuries after the First Crusade, Gubbio warded off incorporation by Florence, but was ultimately incorporated by the Papal States. Family alliances came and went, but through it all Gubbio remained a tough nut to crack. Medieval/Renaissance Gubbio was a walled fortress city, a stony maze of streets and towers with no weak spots. Considerable sections of the walls remain today.

In Gubbio: inside the walls, a street runs under the medieval ducal palace of the Gabriellis toward the Renaissance ducal palace of the Montefeltros.

The ducal palace and its piazza. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

View from the piazza (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Gubbio — close quarters. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

The modern steed. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Climbing to the top of Gubbio.

Gubbio from above — along the upper wall.

Olives above.

When archery wasn’t a sport. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Essential Gubbio — walled terraces.

Gubbio is a gastronomic capital of food and wine.

A free ad: drink this. Fly as far and as fast as you have to, to drink it.

We were especially smitten with the wild boar sausages.

But the prince of epicurean Gubbio is the truffle. Until Gubbio, I did not know what a truffle (tartufo in Italian) actually was. Real truffles are not a faintly flavorful dried dust, or something hinted at in a tincture of olive oil. The key to truffles is life itself — you have to eat the truffle alive. Their fragrance, the weird alien density of the fragrance, suggests some powerful esters. A single live tartufo will fill a room with wit and humor, like a great raconteur, and leave everyone within nose both amused and delighted. But a whole basket of tartufi will leave you on the outside looking in, as the funghi communicate with each other and ignore you. The effect is like a helpless drunkenness. The truffle caves where masses of tartufi are held seem drug-like in their intensity.

Basket of living truffles. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

Truffles on beef carpacchio — like eating poetry!

When, after an already colorful and adventurous young life, Saint Francis was thrown out of Assisi in exile and disgrace, he fled to Gubbio. At the time, Gubbio was troubled by an abnormally huge wolf, the Wolf of Gubbio, who is said to have eaten well over a hundred persons. The local farmers lived in understandable terror of being next. But Saint Francis called this wolf to Jesus, and the wolf stopped eating people and became a pet. It might have been the first of his many miracles, as a saint.

Saint Francis redeems and pardons the Wolf of Gubbio.

Late in the afternoon we found the Chiesa di San Francesco, completed in 1256, and now refreshingly almost free of the baroque, although the edge of some such is plainly visible at the left in the photo below. There are also the scraped-at remains of some very early remarkable Francis Cult frescos.

Chiesa di San Francesco.

Early Franciscan fresco.

During a 19th century restoration of this church, the bones of a huge wolf were found under the altar. These were reburied in the churchyard, with no marker since the wolf, although a Christian, was also still an animal. This rings true to me. The Wolf of Gubbio may have frightened more people than it ate and Saint Francis was neither the first nor the last person to tame a wolf, so I find it easier to believe this story than to disbelieve it. Some have observed, on a more intellectual plane, that this foundational Franciscan legend is a narrative inversion of the Roman legend of the wolf that parented Romulus and Remus. We may make what we can of it or let it pass. There probably aren’t any wolves left in Umbria anyway.

In my next post I'll discuss Carsulae and Nemi, and some other thoroughly untouristy spots. Here, then, is as good a place as any to say something about the curse of tourism. Yes, tourism is a sort of curse. Of course people would come to Gubbio just for the truffles and wine and boar, both to eat and to carry away and eat later. That is actually commerce, however, and not tourism. The thing spills over when people come specifically to walk around and look at the view. The resulting hotels, restaurants, stores and gift shops quickly come to dominate the local economy. This is a mixed blessing. It preserves local crafts that might not survive otherwise except as fine art, for instance the technically complex and expensive faience ware of Gubbio. It helps pay for preservation. But these visitors are strangers. If the visitors become the point of the place, the the result is commercial dilution. One can hardly describe this as a tension; it is more in the nature of a relaxation, as the polis with its generations-long centered identity succumbs to the cosmopolis and its more diffuse values, and things that are real risk becoming merely quaint.

Of course, as a tourist myself, who am I to pontificate on these matters concerning places far from home. Walking the cobbles of Gubbio, I meditated on the contradictions.

Paradise if we only knew it.

What Gubbio might be without its tourists can still be loosely imagined. The locals have been invaded but not displaced. Maybe this is also what happened when the Romans came. By comparison, Belluno seemed undiscovered in the tourism sense, a Rough Guide sort of locality, while Venice was all but inundated by its tourist tide. Ravenna was a political capital for centuries in the classical Mediterranean world, and a cultural capital ever since, but the reliquarian past does not define Ravenna. In the summer of 2017 Alex and I found only a thin scattering of tourists in the ruins, while the now of Ravenna was crowded with thoroughly modern young shoppers and diners, designers, artists, students, musicians, and more besides — in no particular order, but ganging up rather thickly around the main gelato stands.

Gubbio seemed very different from the other places we had visited — far up on its mountain, still holding on to an age-old interior self. The Great Outside has found it, but not overwhelmed it.

Twilight settles in — The tourists leave and the locals come out. (Photo by Alex Mawyer).

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Ravenna

8/28/2017

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This is the third blog post describing my July trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy. My last post recounted our two days in Venice. Next stop was Ravenna.

Ravenna, on the Adriatic seacoast, has a complex and fascinating ancient history. In the year 402 C.E., when the city of Mediolanum (today Milan), the capital of the Western Roman Empire, was overrun by a Alaric's Visigothic army, the Roman Emperor Honorius fled eastward to Ravenna. Ravenna then became the final capital of the Roman Empire in the west—and later the capital of the Visigothic and Ostrogothic kingdoms in Italy until the annexation of Ravenna to the Byzantine Empire in 553 C.E.

In those days, Ravenna was on a lagoon in the Po River delta, separated from terra firma by miles of undrained swampland and small malarial islets. It was a port city with an important harbor. To this natural refuge, Honorius added a massive encircling brick wall, a state-of-the-art city fortification. Inside this fortification, Honorius raised chickens as a hobby and “ruled” helplessly as Alaric’s army sacked Rome, and then civil war broke out within the Roman mercenary military establishment.

The Favorites of Honorius, by William Waterhouse. (Wikipedia.)

Alex and I were halfway from Venice to Ravenna by Autostrada when we realized we were missing two important opportunities -- lunch (we found a Famila grocery store) and the back roads. That is to say, the ancient main roads. In mere minutes we discovered secondary and tertiary roads, including a maze of farm lanes connecting the dykes of the modern drainage system. Roads turned to tractor lanes, barely wider than our car, with spindly bridges over deep drainage creeks. Abandoned swaybacked farmhouses of rosy brick sprawled dusty and golden-green under the sun. The roadway swarmed with dragonflies of all sizes. We gradually wandered onto sections of former highway nearly deserted by traffic and reached Ravenna by the back way.

The wall of Honorius still stands in various guises all around Ravenna, frequently attached to later structures.

A large section of Ravenna’s Roman wall was updated by the Venetian Empire into a Renaissance-era fortress, today a city park.

The wall of Honorius was repaired and enlarged by Theodoric, and repaired again in medieval and Renaissance times, when frequent wall repair was the price of survival. In places the overlapping wall repairs are still visible.

The lagoon long ago silted in. That, and the rise of Venice, turned Ravenna into a backwater. The old harbor is now a canal, opposite the railway station.

In most of the cities and towns we saw in Italy, the churches and monuments are from what we could call the Catholic Era, which is still ongoing. Ravenna is different; its classical-era core is dominated by the churches and monuments of the Arian period and the kingdom of the Ostrogoths.

While the great churches of Ravenna have been Catholicized, the chief glory of these churches has always been their Arian/Byzantine architecture, and above all their glass mosaics. These structures survived intact, as a cluster of some of the oldest Christian churches anywhere, because Ravenna became unimportant, lost its wealth, and became harder than ever to get to through the swamps after the Roman drainage systems broke down and the Roman roads were swallowed in the mire. Malaria took hold. All this was certainly very fortunate. For these structures, at least, if not necessarily for the inhabitants.

Ravenna’s Old Gates Are Still Landmarks. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Caffe Teodora, Ravenna. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Late in the Day. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Professional photographers have labored for years to capture the jewel-like quality of the Ravenna mosaics, and failed. Alex and I did the best we could. For a superb job, see the Italy video lectures in the Great Courses lecture series (which my wife and I enjoy via subscription to their streaming service.)

Basilica of San Vitale. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The Gothic Kingdom in Italy was not particularly barbarous. San Vitale is in many ways a monument to the relative peace and prosperity of Theodoric's reign as King of the Ostrogoths. Construction of San Vitale began in 526, the year of Theodoric's death and six years before the beginning of construction of Hagia Sophia in Constantiople. San Vitale was completed in 547 C.E., as the principal religious monument of the Ostrogothic Kingdom. Its Byzantine glass mosaics are the largest and finest outside Constantinople, or possibly anywhere. The church was the work of Julius Argentarius, a Roman banker and architect who donated 26,000 gold solidi for its construction.

Theodoric achieved a certain fusion of western Roman and eastern Byzantine culture, within the context of the Arian religious tradition of the militaristic and proto-feudal Gothic culture of Central Europe--including protection for Ravenna's Jews. In Theodoric's kingdom, religious harmony prevailed--arguably for the first time in the Christian west and certainly for the last time over the next dozen centuries of on-and-off religious strife.

Very little monumental architecture survives from this period, which alone would make San Vitale a building of immense interest. Argentarius may have based the design on the audience chamber of the Imperial Palace in Constantinople, which no longer exists.

Architecturally, San Vitale Is Not a Basilica at All. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, with Sarcophagi of the Last Roman Emperors.

The Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, across the courtyard from San Vitale, is an older Roman structure. It is a somewhat mysterious building, originally attached to the Church of Santa Croce built in 417 CE as part of the Imperial Palace complex. Santa Croce and the last Roman imperial palace fell to ruins except for this structure, which may have originally been the oratorio of the church before being adapted as Galla Placidia's family mausoleum. Without going into the extreme complexities of the last western emperors and their Visigothic family connections, it is clear enough that the mausoleum contains three sarcophagi. These are traditionally believed to be those of Emperor Constantius III, Galla Placidia's husband; Empress Galla Placidia herself; Emperor Valentinius III, Galla Placidia's son; and her brother, the Emperor Honorius. That is one more emperor than there are sarcophagi and both Galla Placidia and Honorius are also said to have had mausolea in Rome under the current site of St. Peter's. On the other hand, tradition holds that Placidia, or more accurately her embalmed body, was wrapped in her imperial regalia and seated on a throne above the central sarcophagus for more than a millennium. That would account for why four emperors had three sarcophagi. It is safe to say no one is entirely sure.

Galla Placidia's sarcophagus, by tradition, barely visible in this photograph behind the people of today.

Almost inconceivable elegance: mosaics of the mausoleum.

526 C.E. was a fateful year in Ravenna architecture, when one considers the monumental Roman/Gothic mausoleum of King Theodoric. Outwardly it is not so different in form from a traditional Roman mausoleum but its single-stone domed roof, the somewhat brutalist buttresses around the dome, and the interlocking of the stones of the arches are all unique as far as I know. Theodoric's mausoleum was outside the walls, next to the harbor, and may have been a lighthouse as well as a mausoleum. Considering the achievements of Theodoric's kingdom and the rather darker age that followed it, this could almost be called the mausoleum of what might have been, if Arian Christianity had survived as a third path between Greek and Roman Christianity.

A Walk to the Old Port Leads to the Mausoleum of Theodoric, and to a Bee.

Back inside the city walls, we found ourselves at the tomb of Dante. Dante Alighieri finished Paradiso in exile in Ravenna, and died there; his tomb is adjacent to the Church of San Pier Maggiore.

“Whoso laments, that we must doff this garb
Of frail mortality, thenceforth to live
Immortally above, he hath not seen
The sweet refreshing, of that heav’nly shower.”
Dante Alighieri, Il Paradiso. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Ravenna has long been a city of poets. Writers as diverse as Percy Bysshe Shelley, Oscar Wilde and Marguerite Yourcenar have loved Ravenna. George Gordon Lord Byron lived in Ravenna for two years, pursuing his love affair with Teresa Gamba. He wrote Cain, Marino Faliero, Sardanapalus, The Two Foscari, and parts of Don Juan, The Prophecy of Dante and The Lament of Tasso in Ravenna, while accumulating an arsenal on the Via Cavour and plotting with Teresa's brother Pietra Gamba and the Carbonari to overthrow the Pope of Rome. When the Carbonari scheme of revolt failed, the Gambas fled to Pisa and Lord Byron to Greece.

We found Ravenna rife with comfort and delicious food and wine. Munich, Belluno, Venice, things had been getting almost a little hectic. This was a chance to relax.

Ca' de Ven: A Tasty Spot for Wine Lovers. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

As we left Ravenna--something no reasonable person would want to do--we stopped at the Basilica of Sant' Apollinaris in Classe, consecrated in 549 CE and illuminated with yet more of the astonishing Byzantine glass mosaics. Classe was a strategically important part of the Roman port of Ravenna and is now a silted up archeological site.

Sant'Apollinaris in Classe was yet another architectural donation of the Roman banker and architect mentioned above, Julius Argentarius. It is a true early Romanesque basilica in form, with side arcades and the classic timbered roof. Unlike San Vitale, which is rather dark, Sant'Apollinaris in Classe is brilliantly lit by the sun.

Sant'Apollinaris in Classe: A Noble Basilica. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Byzantine glass mosaic showing St. Apollinaris and his sheep. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

St. Apollinaris was legendarily made the first bishop of Ravenna by St. Peter himself, and performed many miracles prior to his seemingly unnecessary martyrdom. His relics are no longer in his home church. In 856 C.E. the relics were removed from this undefended church to the former Church of Christ Redeemer Inside the Walls, a smaller church dating to 504 C.E. which had been the Arian palace chapel of Theodoric. The former palace basilica still stands and is known today as the Basilica of Sant' Apollinare Nuovo.

Having left Ravenna, and its ancient sights, we drove on to the Mediterranean seaside at Mare Vista. This stretch of the Adriatic coast boasts mile after mile after mile of the most inviting beach resorts.

Alex examining seashells.

And there we found Cnidarians, expiring on the sand!

A putative Cnidarian of some sort, wafted ashore on the gentle tides of the Adriatic Sea.

A morning spent wrestling our way through coastal traffic brought us to Rimini, an important city and the original terminus of the Via Flaminia, or Flaminian Way.

Augustan Gate of classical Rimini, known as Ariminum in Roman times. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Much can be said about this road, a sine qua non of Roman history. Little did we know that the Via Flaminia would come to haunt our imaginations, as we drove over and under it, pulling off occasionally to drive on it, or to look at broken up scraps from it, on the way from Rimini to Gubbio.

Somewhere on that route, the fate of the Ostrogothic Kingdom was finally settled by the death of Totila, mortally wounded in the Battle of Tagenae as a Byzantine army led by Narses temporarily reconquered northern Italy for the Byzantine Emperor Justinian. The exact location of the battle and the burial place of Totila are both unknown.

Totila, by Francesco de' Rossi - Musei Civici di Como, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=23063927

Late in the day we reached Gubbio and parked next to the ruins of the Roman theater, said to have been the second-largest theater in the Roman Empire. In the 1st Century, it was as large as a football stadium and could seat 15,000 people. Later the theater was creatively deconstructed to help build medieval Gubbio.

Gubbio’s Roman theater (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

We had reached the heart of Umbria. My next post will describe our experiences in the fortified truffle city of Gubbio, and the food of Gubbio.

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Venice

8/14/2017

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My 8/3/17 blog post described the beginning of my July trip with my son Alex in Germany and Italy. This post recounts the sights and scenes of our all too brief two days in Venice.

A tremendous amount has been written about Venice: about the complex past of the city, Venice’s legacy of independence, democracy, and multi-chambered government, the social instinct for legalism and the accountability of power. Venice’s great maritime empire ruled the Mediterranean for centuries. The Venetian Republic, unsurpassed in the arts and sciences, independent of Rome as well as Byzantium and the Western Empire, became arguably the first capitalist nation. Venetian inventions include matters as diverse as insurance and stock trading, the world’s first secret state police, and the world’s first foreign intelligence system. All this was accomplished while holding back the devouring sea. The Venetians styled themselves the Most Serene Republic, but the Venice of history was a place of strenuous activity and ceaseless progress. Her trading network was arguably the life blood of Europe for nearly eight hundred years.

From Belluno the Alps drop rapidly to the coastal plain of northeast Italy. After an hour's drive on the Autostrada we reached Venice. We parked on the Tronchetto, a modern parking island with an exit off the Autostrada. We then took the public water bus, or vaporetto, to San Marco.

All of Venice’s six sestieri or districts can be reached on foot, though not the outlying islands. Venice in 2017 appeared at first glance to risk being trampled. The summer crowd pouring in and out was phenomenal. One might speculate that Venice needs fewer tourists, and when considering the great achievements of this city in the past, one might conclude that the world needs more Venetians. We outsiders don’t have the realism for Venice—but when your streets are canals that connect with the open sea, and jellyfish can swim up the canal past your door, realism may become second nature.

View from the Public Vaporetto, entering the Grand Canal. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Entrance to St. Mark’s Square, Venice. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

In and Out the Human Tides Flow. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The Grand Canal.

As we quickly found, Venice in summer is quite hot, heat-stroke-quality hot, and Venice is an absolute labyrinth. We also fairly quickly found that the tourists and to some extent the tourist services themselves could be minimized somewhat, just by walking off into the maze. A few twists and turns later, crowding ceased to be a problem. There is nothing to see in Venice as marvelous as the city itself.

Venice street scene. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Streets of Venice

Twilight and night indeed suit Venice well. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Venice at night. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Battered reminders of power.

Byzantine emperors in porphyry, looted from Constantinople.

One of the anonymous mailboxes for inserting denunciations to the Doge’s secret police for examination. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Noble graffiti in the Doge’s marble dungeons.

The lion on the Arsenale gate.

The lion above, on the Arsenale gate, is the only Venetian lion sculpted holding a closed book, representing the Gospel according to Mark. All other Venetian lion sculptures hold an open book with the words Pax Tibi Marce Evangelista Meus -- a reference to the legend that an angel appeared to St. Mark as his boat was passing the sandspit that later became Venice, en route from Aquileia to Ravenna. The Arsenale is the source of the modern word arsenal, and this building was the headquarters of Venice's formidable navy. Hence the phrase Pax Tibi was considered inappropriate for this gate.

The home of the Venetian galleys that won the Battle of Lepanto.

The Doge's Private Courtyard and side door into St. Mark's cathedral. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Ceiling panel in the Doge’s Palace. In the endless power struggles of the palace, and with the dungeons ever ready to swallow the losers in the name of Serenity, the nobles of Venice undoubtedly knew first hand what it meant to twist in the wind. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Ceiling panel in the Doge’s Palace: Mercury bringing the news of the world to Venice. In return, Venice is offering Peace. Part of the “Gifts of the Gods to Venice” series. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Venice: unlike any other.

Though neither of us thought to photograph it, one of the great pleasures of our brief stay was our hotel room. Venice offers luxury if luxury is what you want, but we opted instead for old-fashioned. Our room was the sixth-floor garret of a late medieval building, with no air conditioning and no hot water. Instead we had a corner location with windows and a balcony looking out over the rooftops of Venice. At night we opened our unscreened windows and the balcony doors, and let the fresh sea air blow through. So beautiful under the moon that it was hard to go to sleep. The moon on the rooftops behind St. Mark's Square may turn out to be my most vivid and enduring Venetian memory, from our all too short visit.

The best modern history of Venice I know of is John Julius Norwich's History of Venice, and those unfamiliar with the rise, long triumph, and ultimate decline of the Venetian Empire may wish to read it. Venice, though not physically large, is one of the world's great cities and a lifetime studying Venice would not be ill spent.

We left Venice on foot. For 1,200 years or more that would have been impossible, except by wading and swimming the lagoon. But the Tronchetto parking island off the Autostrada is connected to Venice by a causeway. Rail and vehicular access to Venice only became possible late in the 20th Century, and changed the nature of the city. It's a long walk, if you chose to enter or leave Venice by foot. The winding mazes of lanes and squares were never intended as thoroughfares; quite the opposite. But walking out gave us a last couple of hours to meander through the seemingly enchanted city of Venice.

The next post will cover our two days in Ravenna, just an hour or so down the coast from Venice.

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Munich to Belluno via the Dolomite Alps: An Impressionistic Scramble

8/3/2017

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Morning Train to Munich

Early in the morning on July 2, I landed at Munich’s airport, the Flughafen München, following an 8 hour red-eye from Dulles. I had arranged to meet up with my son Alex in the late afternoon. He had been in Munich for several days. The airport is about 40 minutes from the city center and from my immediate destination, the Hauptbahnhof, or main train station. I took the train in from the airport. Knowing that Munich is a city of over two and a half million people, I soon wondered if I had gotten on the wrong train and was headed for some other city – maybe Nuremberg, or Berlin. Munich steadfastly refused to appear on the horizon. Even after arrival, Munich had the appearance of a town rather than a city.

After four hours of sleep in a silvery modernist hotel room well-lit by corner windows and a nice balcony, I went out into the rain to explore the city. Days are long in Munich in July. The air was cool but not cold and the rain came in well-spaced bands of downpour with intervals of misty drizzle.

Munich’s historic core is a roughly thirty-minute walking radius of the Frauenkirche, a postwar-restored Gothic-Baroque cathedral. It was Sunday so there was no shopping, but people came out to walk the town anyway. Munich is a beautiful city.

Frauenkirche steeples

Skyline with Frauenkirche

Pedestrian Mall

Neue Rathaus

St. Michael’s Church: A Baroque Response to the Reformation

St. Michael’s Church, an early Baroque masterpiece, shows the imperial past of Munich. A long list of Wittelsbach dynasts is memorialized there, starting at the end of the 16th century.

The rain squalls seemed to be spaced about one church apart. I next fled into the Peterskirche, the oldest Munich church, which was also repaired in the 20th century. The most interesting relic on display was the skeleton of Saint Munditia, inset with gold and jewels and dressed in silk netting. Munditia, martyred circa 300 AD, was originally entombed in the Cyriaca catacombs along the Via Tiburtina in Rome. She’d only been dead for 700 years when the Peterskirche was first built. She came to Munich as a Counter-Reformation gift in 1675.

Photo byy Andrew Bossi - Own work, CC BY-SA 2.5
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2897314

Young beheaded Munditia is an odd and somehow fascinating sight which would have raised the admiration of Edgar Allen Poe — seemingly the quintessence of decadent morbidity, but the survival of her remains in this condition is a clear miracle.

The rain momentarily stopped, so I left the Peterskirche for the Odeonplatz, where I was driven into the Feldherrnhalle and then the Theatinerkirche by the rain.

Feldherrnhalle

Theatinerkirche

Lions of the Feldherrnhalle

Allied bombing devastated Munich in the last great European war. The modern city would be inexplicable without this fact. The city was to some unassessable degree rebuilt to show its losses along with its past. No outsider or tourist is very likely to understand what today’s Muencheners really think about this. The Feldherrnhalle, an altar to war which was not hit by the bombing, is a reminder in stone that history is not blind and, unlike the nearby Unknown Soldier from the 1914-18 war, does not sleep.

Tomb of the Unknown, Asleep Since the Great War

The rain having paused, it seemed the time had come for a dash up Ludwigstrasse toward the university. However, before I could reach the Geschwister-Scholl-Platz, the plaza where I was to meet Alex, the skies opened once again, and I took refuge in yet another huge church. This one reminded me of some of the abandoned churches of Brussels, except the door wasn’t locked. The vast interior was empty, dim, and not yet completely restored from its midcentury damage. Some interior walls were still faced in naked brick. In my drenched state I failed to appreciate this structure fairly. I retreated outside to the porch, and noted a classic example of heavy blast damage on the brickwork of the building across the street. Munich has lots of secret sights and odd corners. I later learned that this was St. Ludwig’s, the architecturally influential neo-Romanesque university parish church built by King Ludwig I in the early 19th century.

I could not realistically get wetter, so I resumed tramping through the downpour to the university. Finally I waited in the atrium of the main building, a lovely and well-used space, gradually steam drying, and also wondering if a person could catch any ancient diseases wandering around European cities in the rain without a handkerchief.

A convenient meeting place

Stately lecture halls

This turned out to be my favorite place and my favorite moment in Munich. LMU had the somewhat musty bookish odor that inevitably accompanies serious learning. The air was thick with residual determined thought. Waiting for Alex, I must have spent the best part of an hour reminiscing on my own college and grad school days haunting the Rotunda and the Alderman.

Then Alex showed up, it stopped raining and the sun came out. We walked through a corner of the Englischer Garten, certainly one of the finest public parks in the world.

The Monopticon in the Englischer Garten

We went on to revisit the downtown area, after which we indulged ourselves in beer and sausages, sauerkraut and dumplings. Alex had been in Munich for days, I for hours. Neither of us had seen enough. Munich is a bewitching city, and if we had not had immediate plans a good hypothetical argument could have been made for spending the rest of the month in the sleek metallic hotel room I had stumbled into. But we had plenty of immediate plans: for instance, to cross the Alps. It was time to look for our elephant – which turned out to be a very nice blue Opel with lots of electronics and a good engine.

The Dolomite Alps

Geologists divide the Alps into over two dozen distinct mountain ranges. It is heartbreaking to encounter the Alpine Massif for the first time and realize that one must just as abruptly leave it. We chose an autobahn route across Austria, past Innsbruck and into Italy over the Brenner Pass, then turning off the main highway at Sciaves to Chiens and Dobbiaco, or Toblach. The route from Dobbiaco to Cortina D’Ampezzo would take us through a big unit of the Dolomitic Alps. The Dolomites began in Mesozoic times as a series of coral islands and the undersea sedimentation around them. This lost island-scape was edged into tectonic collision 65,000,000 years ago and has since ridden up over another geological plate to reach peak elevations of over 10,000 feet above current sea level.

The Alps rise abruptly. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The road to Dobbiaco. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The Alpine valleys of the Tirol, or Austrian and Italian Tirol as they currently are, have a long and complex history of independence and annexation. As landlocked islands in a sea of mountains, the valley systems have different traditions and local histories that disappear into the mists of time, different foods and specialties, and different dialects of Austrian, Ladino, or Italian. Driving through, however, one only senses that Tirolean custom is relaxed and familiar with visitors. It’s a bicyclers’ and hikers’ paradise in the summer.

A week or a month would be well spent here, for day hikes and short drives and general amazement. The paleness of the Dolomites reacts to light almost as readily as water. The mountains and lakes change color from minute to minute under the play of the clouds. We parked at Lago di Landro, or Dürrensee, and gradually worked our way on foot for a few miles into the Parco Naturale Tre Cime.

Trailhead below Lago di Landro. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

We attain a certain elevation.

Exploring an unimproved jeep trail (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The trail threatens to get severe (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

The view improves

This could go on indefinitely.

We found a natural limit to our perambulations, defined by the time needed drive to Belluno and the belief that we would want to look at Belluno when we got there. That is how we came to stand on the doorstep of Tre Cime, vow to return, and then drive away — southward through the famous resort of Cortina D’Ampezzo and the hill towns below Cortina, the road gripping the edge of one precipice after another and the hill towns gripping the road, each decaying town strung out onto its own promontory, natural fortresses most peculiar in the waning light.

Fortifications were already not scarce on our route. South European history has some resemblance to a Hobbesian war of all against all, and our route across Austria had already brought us past ancient stone forts, medieval castles, defensive Renaissance towers, walled villages, and finally World War One cement blockhouses. The road down into Italy revealed the same tendency to fortify, only more so.

Modern Belluno was a pleasant-seeming but unprepossessing stringbean-shaped town along the Piave River. Ancient Belluno, where we stayed, was built onto a promontory over the river and still retained some of its medieval and Renaissance fortifications.

Belluno: A Fortified Basilica. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

We looked with interest at the medieval and post-medieval overbuild on Belluno, knowing that below are ruins dating to Etruscan times and even earlier.

Belluno’s Old Gate. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Belluno’s Downtown Gate. (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Belluno at Twilight (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

We See Our First Venetian Lion (Photo by Alex Mawyer.)

Former Palazzo in Good Company

We were now in the former domains of the Most Serene Republic, Venice, whose power once stretched up into the Alps. We had a pleasant dinner without a tourist in sight, excepting ourselves of course, went back to the hotel replenished, and slept very well.

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Woodman, Spare That Tree

12/1/2016

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I've never found it difficult to write. I could quote Oscar Wilde about "taking a comma out" but, well, a brief glance at the highlights on this page is sure to amuse you:

http://quoteinvestigator.com/2015/10/25/comma/

I stayed up most of the night quite frequently for several decades, and I was busy writing, but that was as much coincidence as cause and effect. For a score or more of years, I only wrote when I couldn't stir up a card game or a board game.

Three or four descriptive paragraphs or a dialogue string seems to me to be a sitting’s worth of work. This gets you within sight of 365 pages a year if actually held to. And yet this is a trivial amount, the size of an email, just an effusion. Ten paragraphs a sitting can be heavy work, but the serious dilettante should reach that pace now and then. And that pace is enough. Writing the words down, or inscription itself, is not the most important part of the craft or practice of writing. If an expression or supposed expression resists itself or seems to need an application of force to put down, then the expression is being assembled wrong and the units need to be looked at again.

Design and material are inseparable. Material defines the range of possible designs, and the purpose of the design is to master and represent the material. If equipoise between material and design is achieved or approached, the execution cannot help being “good.” This is obvious enough in pottery or glassblowing or painting.

The weird, webby quality of language, grammar and words generally helps us forget that writing is also a tactile art. Drawing is a tactile art, and sketching, and calligraphy. Handwriting is not usually called an art but from its first stirrings clutching cigar-sized First Grade pencils, it’s self-evidently a tactile expression. Even when subordinated to the idea, and to the thralls of language and grammar, and in the modern era where the electronic keyboard is king, writing is still a tactile expression. It’s not just a form of reading, or the reverse of the reading process. Writing is an inscriptive act. Its link to ideation is not exact.

Sometime in the early 1960s my mother Hazel decided to go back to work, and invested in a Sears portable typewriter and a typing manual to brush up on her pre-marriage typing skills. My brother Alan and I were still in elementary school, I think. When Hazel went back to work I co-opted the Sears typewriter (but not the manual) and fooled around with it for the next few years typing various things. I didn’t use it for homework—I didn’t want to panic my teachers. I mainly enjoyed playing with this small, comprehensible machine, and working the machinery. Soon I began to get to a decent 5-finger typist stage. However, the 1960 Sears portable was a very basic machine with a beige-colored shield, stiff keys and a very flat click. It was a sad enough little device. The one in the picture here might as well be the same machine.

http://typewriterdatabase.com/

Something told me I could do better. In the summer before the tenth grade, I saw a lightly used Baby Hermes 3000 portable in the window of Charlottesville Business Machines on West Main Street, at that time the town’s main purveyor of typewriters. The color scheme was aquamarine with white keys. The baby Hermes is usually seafoam and mint. I’ve never seen another one in the blue-white variant. But that’s quite irrelevant. At the time, I neither knew nor cared about equipment brands. I believed without judgment that this was probably the finest piece of writing equipment for sale in Charlottesville at the moment, when I saw it in the window.

Unfortunately my paper route career had just ended and I momentarily had no source of money. But it turned out to be ridiculously easy to get a job at Standard Drug on Main Street as a floor mopper, though God knows I despised the very idea. I knew mopping the drug store would be bad, damn bad; mercifully I did not know how bad. My job was literally to wheel a bucket of gray water around and mop the floor, clean up spills, scrub the word “f*ck” off the walls next to the unguarded back entrance to Water Street, and even clean up the vomit in the event somebody’s diseased kid puked on the floor.

You would think that would never happen. Why would kids puke? But the truth, as the years have confirmed, is that kids puke more than you’d think. I found myself mopping up puke in Standard’s Drug. I’m still a little resentful about it fifty years later. But I had a motive.

So I grudgingly counted down from paycheck #1 to paycheck #5, at which point I quit on the spot, turned in my mop bucket, and bought the Hermes in the window on the way home. I carried it home on foot. We seldom felt like spending a nickel on a bus ride. Indeed we walked everywhere we went; if we were in a hurry or needed to get completely across town, we just walked down the railroad tracks instead of the sidewalks.

I had no idea the baby Hermes was a famous typewriter. I never considered trying it out in the store to make sure the keys worked. At home, I was surprised to discover the keyboard was in French. I’d love to have a Hermes 3000 baby portable now, as an artifact. The keys were soft and silky, and the strike had a lovely feminine alto sound very pleasant to the ear. This typewriter received heavy use for years and eventually needed new springs. It could have been reconditioned into a state of perfection but the electric era had arrived.

http://genevatypewriters.blogspot.com/2011/01/typewriter-ephemera-hermes-3000.html

The next machine I used was Karen’s Smith-Corona, which was a good machine.

http://typewriterdatabase.com/

After wearing that one out, I had a year-long run-in with a manual Underwood. I am not sure now what that looked like—it may well have been an Underwood Champion as old as I was. I just don’t remember. It came from a yard sale. People would say, “Man, you type on that?” and I would vainly answer, “Yep, they grow ‘em tough back where I crawled out of the weeds from.”

Obviously at this point I had plunged deeply into the world of second-hand objects. Thereafter, my grad school career was probably literally saved by the lucky discovery of a used IBM Selectric for next to nothing at another yard sale.

A Selectric (later known as the Selectric 1 after the Selectric 2 was released). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Selectric_typewriter

Selectrics were workhorses and not very breakable or prone to wear. My first-model Selectric was my last typewriter and the one I used the longest. It was not lovely but I was grateful to this machine for ticking on and on without a hint of trouble. I used it until 1983, when I got a job with an office and an IBM Dedicated Word Processor, a station I could not have afforded at home.

IBM Dedicated Word Processor. Note “toaster” drive for big 5 ½ inch floppies.
“The Centre For Computing History” - http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/, CC BY 1.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=32890425

The early word processors were clearly not typewriters, and modern people may have trouble understanding how crisp the dividing line seemed to be. Word processors were much closer to computers, but we could not have known that, since the first Amiga and Commodore systems were still a year or two away. These IBM dedicated word processor systems cost over ten grand at the time, much of the expense being the monster printer (not pictured), which was the size of a washtub and probably gave off gamma rays, and had to have its type ball changed if you wanted to change the font.

Since then I have just typed on throw-away keyboards, which have much sameness. And yet even on keyboards and mice, inscription remains manual and is still a tactile act.

I feel I have a firm tactile grasp of what comes up from the keyboard when I practice writing, but little way of typing an explanation of it. It’s certainly not my intention to tell people things. I leave that to others. The bits of writtenness on my screen are artifacts of a given moment. The paragraphs or larger units are a sort of ornament. They are “a thing to look at.”

Such pieces of writing, or word accretions, are not viewed in a vacuum. They are viewed in the material world, possibly by people who are only reading something at that moment because they are sick in bed with the flu and feel terrible.

Or, for a happier image in the Christmas season, paragraphs are like the decorations one hangs on a tree or wreath of thought. The tree or wreath must be there and be fairly stable. Then the artiste can open his bins and baskets of ornaments and strands and work them all over the tree for the desired effect. The result is inevitably a Christmas tree, but hopefully readers trust that the undecorated space behind the words is not empty.

Niblets of typing actually do come from something; they are not ex nihilo. There is an old mnemonic I don’t literally believe in called the Memory Palace, a supposed system for retrieving memories by linking strings of associations together. The ability to regularize strings of associations for predictable results is, maybe, a short definition of what human language is. People, however, have mixed results with self-control, including the control of their memories. But the Memory Palace theory does have something to it; memory connects to the present mainly by strings of association. It is more tree-like than architectural, because it grows new linkages all the time. Ornaments made of words are an appeal to other peoples’ memories. Certainly an odd thing to appeal to, since I cannot see your memory.

My personal mnemonic is not a palace--not even a cottage; styling it a Memory Tree may even be too grandiose. I think I will call it a Memory Weed Lot, where opportunistic memories twine through each other toward the light, growing, dying and seeding season by season.

WOODMAN, spare that tree!
Touch not a single bough!
In youth it sheltered me,
And I’ll protect it now.
’T was my forefather’s hand
That placed it near his cot;
There, woodman, let it stand,
Thy axe shall harm it not.

George Pope Morris (October 10, 1802 – July 6, 1864) was an American editor, poet, and songwriter. (Wikipedia)

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My Newest Novel - "Exemptions"

11/17/2016

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I'm happy to say my longest-running writing project is finally published. When I started writing Exemptions, I was newly married and still a student, in my first university tour and mainly interested in studying comparative religion. That seems like a different world now, because it was a different world.

The stereotype of the 1960s is a sort of Hippie carnival, as seen in Mad Magazine, but in reality the lost-in-time Hippie moment was surprisingly normal, replete with oxford shoes and button-down shirts and people making no particular effort to look freaky. There were exceptions. They were not the style leaders or thought leaders of the future; they were just exceptions.

Meanwhile, in the place and time Exemptions is set, the Civil Rights Movement was still controversial and endangered, and Women’s Lib, as it was then called, was still in a larval stage and not quite out yet. In terms of real life the hippie kids had beliefs and expectations similar to those of their parents in most ways.
And yet something was happening -- though we still don’t know what it was. Electric media were certainly involved.

The original title of the book, when I started it in 1972, was Fission. My drafts were labeled under that title throughout the 70s and into the 80s, when the manuscript was renamed Astral Bodies. The book has been as long as 350 pages and as short as 50; and the time I spent on it was just the luxury of selfishness and pleasure, and nothing to do with improvements or betterment.

Not a descriptive title, Astral Bodies had to be replaced. All three section titles, "Head Raid," "Werebabies of the Reich," and "Thermonuclear Xanadu," were considered as main titles. The family brain trust came up with the title Exemptions instead. This is partly a reference to the draft-exempted status of students, though the student draft deferment was soon to end.

Earlier versions of Exemptions were either more experimental or more overtly novelistic. Somewhere back in the lost drafts would be the first manuscript I ever submitted, and ten years later other versions were still being mailed away in manila envelopes, as the practice then was. In retrospect I was undeservedly fortunate to have these earlier versions politely ignored. They probably weren't really worse but I would have been deprived of the decades-long game of playing with this material. I hope readers will have fun with it too.

Exemptions

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Octoblog

10/23/2016

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Autumn in central Virginia; the first frost is probably a week or more off but the trees are already shedding their partly turned leaves. For many of the trees around here, leaves begin going limp in September and then drop off quietly and unostentatiously in October.

After several hot days, the wind turned Friday evening and cold air from West Virginia is flowing over us. A perfect day for working in the yard.

Side view of the main vegetable garden today, 65 degrees F

So that is what I did. I finished mowing the back yard and the garden, which is still supporting a lot of unfrozen hot peppers and a last few tomatoes.

Last year we ordered a packet containing 8 or 10 heirloom pepper seeds attributed to the Central African Republic. These produced two or three plants which eventually bore a total of a half-dozen one-inch peppers. I saved and dried the seeds from the half-dozen pepper fruits and planted them this spring. Almost every saved seed produced a plant this year, and these plants are producing far more African peppers than last year’s plants — industrial levels. They have been peppering since July. The picture below was taken in a chilly drizzle Friday.

I doubt the explanation for this year’s success was overnight natural selection. More likely, the key to success was more seeds, leading to a hundredfold improvement.

This African pepper is fairly hot but no more so than a cayenne. The yellow color is pleasant and artistic. A single pepper thinly sliced and de-seeded makes a good individual dose. There is a strong hard-to-name flavor other than heat, as found with habaneros, and all-in-all a great fresh hot pepper.

Central African heirloom hot pepper

We also planted two varieties of cayenne, one a fancy heirloom and one from the Milmont Garden Center in the Shenandoah Valley. Fresh cayenne is a gastronomical necessity and not a luxury.

Also essayed was a recherché New Mexico chili which has produced only a few fruits, but with intricate heat and flavor. This variety will have its seeds saved and next year we will see if more seeds are the answer to production again.

Two varieties of cayenne

As it happens, we've found this year that we have also raised a fine crop of snakes. The larger and more sporting varieties are correspondingly smarter and do not intend to be seen. Total copperhead sightings in the garden were one last year and none this year. The smaller house-and-garden snakes are regular discoveries and not really shy, and they seem to enjoy as many insects as they can lay their tongues on.
The snake in the photo, which short of better identification I have dubbed a hybrid tea snake, climbed a bean vine to get well up into gnat territory, for its favorite prey.

If your garden is not raising snakes, something is terribly wrong. Gardens attract the snake clan’s favorite food, bugs, in insane and incalculable non-Pythagorean numbers.

Unmortared or free-stone walls, good dirt, and no chemical pesticides are the first steps to cultivating snakes. Insect predation is certainly a literal purpose in the life of snakes, and snakes are worthy of their hire. If you don’t get snakes after a year or two, then it’s on the snakes to keep trying. Human existence is predicated on some other purpose anyway.

On a more authorial note, my novel in progress, formerly known as Astral Bodies, has, I think, reached its final title, which will be Exemptions. "Astral Bodies" was at least the third or fourth name of this novel, which I started in the 1970s, and never seemed quite satisfactory. Submitted to the Brains Trust for consideration, fresh potential titles included “Diffusion,” “Nuclear Diffusion,” “Thermonuclear Xanadu,” “Werebabies of the Reich,” “Head Raid,” “Misplaced Comas,” and “Student Exemption.” While not as obvious a title as "Thermonuclear Xanadu," which remains my personal favorite, Exemptions is appropriate enough and has a literary flavor. I think I'm going with it. Publication as an ebook on amazon.com is imminent.

Does everybody find titles this difficult? In my salvage bin there are pages from a manuscript I began in 1988 and worked on spasmodically for the next four years, which has never been called anything but “The Baltimore Dog Novel,” a frankly terrible title. TBDN (for short) once reached a length of 400+ pages, and I have yellowing typewritten pages to prove it. The total length of the surviving manuscript is closer to 100 pages, as scattered fragments.

Then there is my manuscript of "Geology Tours Unlimited," which is another appalling title. GTU was also once over 300 pages. The surviving elements are half that long. Hardly a tragedy. Shorter, less elegiac texts may well be preferred these days, and comparative brevity may be a wave of the future.

To my sensibility, such as it is, titles are more essential for short stories than for novels, often supplying the key to the lock. Novels may just require an identifier or mnemonic. Thomas Pynchon’s novels illustrate this perfectly. Gravity’s Rainbow is an ideal title for that book, an inspired title, but the book itself was unaffected by its name. Meanwhile V, Mason & Dixon, Vineland, and The Crying of Lot 49 are just good mnemonics. You have to call them something.

The real owner of the garden

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Long Time

8/29/2016

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It has been a long time since my last blog post.

I find that it takes a certain amount of interest in some given thing to write even one paragraph about it. Lapses in writing are not necessarily a sign of disinterest, however. Experience itself can take up all the time that might have been spent writing. But when you can garden, why use gardening time to write? The experience of heat and bugs, blood and sweat, the sight of the endless battles between various forms of life slugging it out in, on, and above the soil, the stupendous importance of vagrant thunderstorms, can easily overwhelm the urge to punctuate.

Natural Garden Still Life

At the end of my last blog post my son Alex and I were headed for the Belgian border and the Waterloo battlefield. I would have written, in a Waterloo post, how frighteningly small we found the Waterloo battlefield. The armies there were not small but the space they fought across was compact and petite, even by Virginia Civil War standards. Those huge armies must have carpeted the ground in such a confined space.

Waterloo Battlefield from the Lion’s Mound

The Lion’s Mound, Roughly the Same Size as the Great Pyramid of Giza, Now Covers the Exact Spot from which Wellington Watched the Battle of Waterloo

But that’s quite enough for now about the extinction of all of Napoleon’s hopes. A year has passed since we saw Waterloo.

This summer I visited family and friends in Honolulu, and spent a week in South Kona as well. There could be no better company on earth. We stayed in an airbnb house steeply pitched over a black pebble beach, looking west.

Black Pebble Beach

Life since I got back home to Central Virginia has mostly been about weeds, gardening, and light sculpture.

Light Sculpture with Rocks

Light Sculpture with Found Objects

In May, before I went to Hawaii, I finished a second edition of The Southern Skylark, first published in 2013. This month I swapped out the first edition on Kindle Publishing for my new second edition. (I'll be setting up a CreateSpace paper version on amazon.com soon.) The book is a couple of pages longer now. I don’t delude myself that anyone else could tell the difference between the two editions but there is one fairly fundamental point. There is a reason why Augustus Hingely believes his lecture on “The Lives of the Poets” is important enough to cross the Atlantic for—Shelley’s “A Defence of Poetry.”

Sometimes we take things for granted—"A Defence of Poetry" is a fervid and rambling document, a stream of thought, which resembles in some ways a psychedelic re-rendering of the Declaration of Independence. In the course of his human events Shelley wanted to disband the European past as he understood it, and to this end he held a number of truths to be self-evident, which did not stop him from stating some of these truths specifically anyway.

Percy Bysshe Shelley (Wikipedia)

Shelley was Jeffersonian to start with, but he took Jeffersoniansm much farther. For instance, Shelley’s essay states as a self-evident truth the complete equality of women and men. It’s a very early example of this idea, in British essays anyway. Actually I suppose this idea was always common among a certain class of women and even among some men, and may rate as one of the very oldest ideas in the history of the human mind. But socially, in Shelley’s time the self-evident truth of sexual equality was regarded as a peculiar secret. There even existed a vast shaggy edifice of religious, legal, societal and folkloric custom relegating women to second-class prerogatives in most spheres of life. How quaint everyone must have been in the old days.

Shelley proposed cultural revolution—including sexual revolution—and exalted liberty in the abstract as the highest motive imaginable. In some ways "A Defence of Poetry" is, or was meant to be, a watershed document not unlike the Declaration of Independence, proclaiming freedom of thought and expression, social liberty and equality, in almost hallucinogenic terms. It was radical then and it is really just as radical now.

A Head of His Time

Sadly, Shelley did not live to publish this essay. As with most of his writing, possession of the rights to publish reverted to Shelley’s father rather than Shelley’s wife. The elder Shelley felt deeply moved to suppress it, and "A Defence of Poetry" was not finally published until after he died.

Mary Shelley (Wikipedia)

Thus, at the time in which The Southern Skylark is set "A Defence of Poetry" was only known to a circle of Romantics in a growing aesthetic movement. Hingely has merely undertaken to lecture on this unpublished work and on the life of Shelley and others. It seemed to me this needed a cleaner exposition; hence my second edition.

The Southern Skylark

It’s strange to reflect that I started writing The Southern Skylark in 1976. It has gone through dozens of drafts. I wrote it for my own pleasure. Over the years I've rewritten and re-edited it times beyond recounting, before finally committing to publication. The book has a serious core, but its humor still tickles me.

I'm going to be completing another book in the category of “endless fun” soon. Its working title has been “Astral Bodies” since 1973 but I don’t think that will be its final title. It feels like I have rewritten "Astral Bodies" 24 or 30 times anyway, if not more, and it is still such a hoot to me that I have no actual motive to ever finish it. But I have been selfish enough, I guess. "Astral Bodies" is a memoir of 1969-1973, telling the tale of some freakish years. It is full of selfish people.

Of course not all selfishness is bad. Enlightened selfishness or self-centering is a worthy goal of consciousness. “Know thyself,” a maxim said to have been inscribed above the forecourt at the Temple of Delphi, has been attributed to at least 7 ancient Greek sages, according to Wikipedia. And it is likely a much older thought than that. Some have suspected that the more one knows about oneself, the less self remains—and that if we came to truly know ourselves, the process would turn us into someone other than we were—we would then be someone else. This has always sounded like tremendous fun to me, but it may be that some of us have less to lose than others by indulging in such exercises.

That is partly what the temporarily-named "Astral Bodies" appears to be to be about. In the original draft of 1973, I selected the 1969 to 1973 time frame because that was when the story was. Over the years since, the period from 1969-1971 has revealed itself to have been practically a generational spacetime discontinuity, almost a fairytale “before and after which” moment such as would not recur again in American culture until 2001, complete with terrible tragedies and senseless acts but also with considerably more hope and optimism than many folks like to allow themselves to feel in 2016.

The 20th century had to end before I finally realized that in "Astral Bodies" I was once again writing a historical novel—even if I had to wait for history to catch up. Remembering those lost times from an almost laughable distance, I find myself thinking it would not be a bad thing if the people of the present could flush away their fears and recover some of the old sang froid that characterized those years.

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Nine Days in Belgium and France -- Part 8

4/10/2016

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This is Part 8 of my series of posts relating the visit my son Alex and I made this past summer to Belgium and Northern France. At the end of my last post we were heading back to le Village Gaulois for a good night's sleep after spending the day in the vicinity of Verdun.

Our plan for the next day was to explore the eastern end of the Argonne Forest battlefield. We would be following, by car, the route taken by Frank Wolinski, Karen’s maternal grandfather and Alex’s great-grandfather, who as a sergeant in Company C of the 47th Infantry Regiment went over the top in the first wave of the attack on the Argonne Forest on September 26, 1918.

Years ago, I wrote an essay on Frank Wolinski’s experiences in the Great War. Frank Wolinski participated in all three American campaigns, was decorated twice and promoted to platoon sergeant, and then took part in the occupation of Germany, returning home in the summer of 1919. My original essay was a response to a family request and too quick a job, but everyone was very kind and no one complained. The subject however is a good one, and since Alex and I were in France, here was a clear opportunity to visit some of the scenes and rewrite the essay.

For my newly published narrative on Frank Wolinski's experiences during the Great War, click here.

We did not visit the 47th Regiment’s training area near Calais, and we drove heedless past the scenes of the Aisne-Marne offensive. We did not investigate the area south of Verdun or the St. Mihiel Salient. We picked up Grandpa Wolinski’s tracks at the road junction between Marre and Esnes, a mile from Le Village de Gaulois, driving D38 to Esnes and turning north on D18 toward Malancourt, which quickly put us on Hill 304 where Frank Wolinski’s regiment spent the night of September 25, 1918, before the Argonne Forest attack.

Photo by Gary Mawyer

The Battle of the Argonne Forest lasted for over six weeks of continuous close combat on a 25-mile front, and ultimately involved close to a million U.S. soldiers, tens of thousands of French soldiers (mostly artillerists) and over half a million German soldiers. Tens of thousands of lives were lost and a couple of hundred thousand more lives ruined on the destroyed landscape of the Argonne, whose pre-war population had been completely displaced years before, and tens of thousands of German and French lives already lost in 1914, 1915, 1916 and 1917.

British and European histories regard the Battle of the Argonne Forest as one of several huge offensives in late 1918 that liberated German-occupied France, collectively destroyed the ability of the German Heer to defend the borders of Germany, and led to the Armistice on November 11, 1918 and the Treaty of Versailles the following year. In an exchange of letters with General John Pershing after the war, Marshal Ferdinand Foch suggested that all the offensives composed one continuous battle, which he suggested could be called the Battle of France. By another reckoning, British historians tended to consider the Second Battle of Cambrai in early October 1918 and the dissolution of parts of the German defense lines in northern France as the death-knell of the German position on the Western Front. Objectively it is reasonable to say the whole front was collapsing from the English Channel to the Alps, at a terrible cost to all sides.

Americans tended, for a time, to view the Battle of the Argonne Forest as the unique killing stroke that ended the war. It had been the largest battle in American history by far, and like other Great War battles seemed calculated to boggle the imagination and defy description. The scale of American losses was likewise staggering. From the U.S. perspective, the Battle of the Argonne Forest seemed truly singular. President Wilson’s triumphant imperial reception in Europe after the Armistice, when the heads of the victorious nations met to redraw the map of the world, strengthened the sense that the Argonne Forest was the climax of the War to End all Wars and a decisive battle that changed world history forever.

American travelers returned to Europe in droves in 1919 and 1920, and for a time the Argonne Forest battlefield was high on the tourist agenda. It was a famous place, and the huge American military cemetery next to Montfaucon was a pilgrimage site for countless mourners. The tourists and the mourners brought back lots of fresh unrusted debris which can be found in many a Great War militaria collection today. A number of monuments were commissioned, including the magnificent Art Deco eagle gates at the main American cemetery, and the American Memorial Tower on Montfaucon, mate to the Verdun lighthouse just out of sight in the distance beyond Le Morte Homme.

But before these monuments could be finished, the nation lost interest in the war. By the time the last U.S. occupation troops returned from the Rhineland in 1923, Wilson was gone and the parades were over. The country had already shrugged off Wilson’s League of Nations, the Fourteen Points, and Wilson’s definition of progress. The war had become, not exactly an embarrassment, but something no longer convenient to examine closely. Veterans’ relief organizations and the divisional associations petered out of existence, or turned into reunion clubs, and the Great War passed from historical climax to old news while the commemorative marbles were still being carved.

Nothing has occurred since to reverse the early wave of disinterest that pigeonholed the American phase of the Great War as a historical curiosity. The facts of the war had been a nasty shock to American idealism. The Allied diplomats were the first to turn their backs on Wilson at Versailles, rejecting the President’s plea that peace without justice would be no peace at all. Instead the Versailles Treaty became a poisonous brew, about vengeance on Germany more than anything else, though also ignoring the interests of some of the Allied nations as well, notably Japan, while fractionalizing Central Europe and the former Ottoman Empire, acts whose repercussions are very much with us today, and ignoring the claims of colonized and enslaved peoples everywhere. Then, after the world rejected the Fourteen Points, Wilson returned home to find the United States rejecting the League of Nations. Americans generally speaking now wanted to put the whole episode behind them.

Wilson’s defeat was a world tragedy then and remains a tragedy now. Some might say it is not too late—would still be surprisingly timely—to dig out the Fourteen Points and try all fourteen of them. Over a hundred thousand Americans died for that and lie in France today, dream unfulfilled. More than two hundred thousand were injured.

Nonetheless, there was something to the original public sense that the climactic battle of General Pershing’s American Expeditionary Force was historically singular and exceptional. A century later, the Argonne Forest is still the largest land battle in American history and may remain so forever. War itself is no longer done that way. The scale of its fury also remains unmatched; the Argonne Forest concentrated as many American casualties into six weeks as the Vietnam War did in ten years.

The road through Esnes is beautiful today, though deserted.

Leaving Esnes. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Esnes in 1918 (US Army Official Photograph, from Bach & Hall)

Hill 304 is still a mass of scars and trenches, though under pines now; heavy shelling in 1916 reduced its elevation by 10 meters. Not far from the French monument, Frank Wolinski would have watched the whirlwind bombardment before the September 26 attack.

Hill 304 Monument. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Old Trenches on the Summit of Hill 304 . Photo by Gary Mawyer.

It would be possible and in fact easy to walk the track of the 47th Regiment’s advance from Hill 304 to its terminus at Brieulles-sur-Meuse. A forest service jeep trail on Hill 304 connects with the secondary roads that meander toward Nantillois. We were driving, however, and D18 goes to Malancourt on the 79th (Cross of Lorraine) Division’s line of advance.

The map link on the Brieulles website, expanded and converted to satellite view, shows the terrain.
Malancourt has a remarkable memorial recording that in 1918 an American division was destroyed on the exact same spot a French regiment was destroyed in 1916—the spot in question being Montfaucon.

German Bunker Converted to a War Memorial . Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Memorial Plaque at Malancourt . Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Before going to the American Memorial at Montfaucon, we wanted to retrace Grandpa Wolinski’s route. D168 took us east across the grain of the 47th Regiment’s advance, where a ruined roadside crucifix provides a bit of a landmark. The roadcut may or may not correspond roughly to the first line of German defenses.

Roadside crucifix. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Hill 304 from the Crucifix; First German Line Somewhere in the Foreground. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Here are two brief videos I shot, the first one north of Hill 304 #1, and the second from Montfaucon.

D168 goes to Béthincourt at the foot of Le Mort Homme, in the center of the 80th (Blue Ridge) Division’s line of advance. However, just before one reaches Bethincourt there is an unpaved road to Cuisy, angling across the 4th Division sector perfectly.

Road to Cuisy. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Alex’s navigation skills put us across the main German forward defense line, the Volker Stellung, the focus of the American and French barrage on the night of September 25 and early hours of September 26. The dirt road is still cratered here and the chunks of old concrete give the location away.

Approaching Cuisy. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Since the trench system has been filled in and plowed over for a century, there was nothing to see but us. And apparently we were very interesting; the farmer at the top of the hill came out of his barn to see who could possibly be driving across his wheat fields in the middle of the morning in this absolutely deserted corner of France. We waved as we rattled by in a cloud of dust, but by the expression on his face he was too astonished to react. As the farm road wound back toward Cuisy, the American memorial at Montfaucon became visible.

Montfaucon tower –looking NNW just SE of Cuisy . Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Pavement resumes at Cuisy. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Cuisy during the battle, with supply train to Nantillois in background. (Official US Army Photo, from Bach & Hall).

Not far to Montfaucon. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The American monument. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Monument stairs. Photo by Alexander Mawyer.

Click here for a brief video I shot from the top of the American monument.

View toward the Meuse. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

In front of the memorial are the bunkers that destroyed the 79th Division.

Deadly bunkers. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Danger. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Behind the tower (see next three photos below) is a really fine ruined abbey, which had already been demolished repeatedly before the Jacobins finally finished it off at the end of the 18th century. Its bits and pieces go back to Charlemagne.

Photo by Gary Mawyer.

We of course were as happy as a pair of larks, since that is our natural state, but gloomier people might have found something to wonder about. The country south of Verdun seemed thinly populated to say the least, but from Le Morte Homme and Hill 304 across into the Argonne it was as if hardly anyone wanted to be there -- whether deserted or avoided or just out of the way. The little villages were populated but no one was stirring in them. There was no one at the monument. The roads were deserted. We had the terrain to ourselves. It was heavenly.

US Army topo, 1938.

We were navigating by an antique U.S. Army topo map, and I remember telling Alex we ought to expect Nantillois to have grown and ramified and to correspond poorly to our ancient map. Nantillois was spookily precise, however—rebuilt in situ where the original destroyed village had been, no larger and probably very little different.

Nantillois. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The road to Brieulles. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The road from Nantillois to Brieulles passes by the 4th Division commemorative obelisk. The division’s veterans’ association purchased a roadside plot for this memorial opposite the Bois de Brieulles.

4th Division Monument. Photo by Alexander Mawyer.

Bois de Ogons in the background. Photo by Alexander Mawyer.

Grandpa Wolinski's company, Company C, spent the better part of three weeks in the Bois de Brieulles, before ultimately capturing Brieulles itself, at which point the company and the 47th Regiment as a whole had taken so many casualties that the unit was pulled out of the line—the last regiment of the original first wave of the attack that was still in the field.

Brieulles. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Modern Brieulles is a dusty place probably twice the size of the severely damaged Brieulles of 1918. The Bois de Brieulles too is larger today than it appears to have been in 1918. The other dire names from the battle, the Bois de Ogons, the Foret de Fays and so on, are not found on today’s Google maps but these places are still there. We saw them dreaming in the sun. There are some unanswered questions that might take a few hours to settle—by all contemporary descriptions from 1918 the north edge of the Bois de Brieulles should have the town under observation, but the Army topo shows the end of a low ridge between the bulk of the wood and the town. The northern edge of the wood was certainly blasted away in the battle and the modern edge of the wood may not be in the same place.

We moderns civilians also tend to forget (if we ever knew) how infantry weapons and artillery actually work. There is a tendency to mentally condense the landscape to Hollywood proportions, but on the battlefield 500 yards is well within lethal range, and anything you can actually see is inherently far too close.

Town center. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

A critic might describe Brieulles as sleepy, but like everywhere else we went in France and Belgium the people we met were wonderful. We were at first assumed to be German (we were driving a Volkswagen) and were politely directed toward the German military cemetery, but when we explained that we were Yanks, we awakened the memory of Yanks having been there before, and we were redirected in the opposite direction toward the Meuse-Argonne American Cemetery. The surprise inspired by the discovery that we were American reminded us once more, as if we needed reminding, that while our fellow Americans may flock to places of cultural significance such as Paris, the French back country has no such cachet and the Great War has too slight a grip on the national consciousness to generate tourism.

Nowhere was this more painfully obvious than the American Cemetery. As at Ieper, as at the Somme and Verdun, here too the dead have been aesthetically collected from all over the neighborhood, rearranged, covered with fine white marble and rationalized back into some semblance of military order.

Monumental gates on D123. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Eagle. Photo by Alexander Mawyer.

The gardeners mowing the verge of the road stared at our vehicle as if we were apparitions driving through on a phantom coach. One gathers that visitors are rare enough.

It was a long way to Waterloo, so we drove on.

The Old Roman Road to Somewhere. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

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Nine Days in Belgium and France -- Part 7

1/1/2016

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This is part 7 of my series of posts relating the visit my son Alex and I made this past summer to Belgium and Northern France. At the end of my last post we were leaving Châlons and heading toward the village of Marre, 12 km from Verdun.

The sun went down as our GPS sought the location of Marre.

Moonrise Along the Road to Marre. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Marre is a cluster of 4 or 5 farmhouses. We had reservations at Le Village Gaulois, a strange idiosyncratic hotel somehow re-imagined from the Gallic dark ages. We were too late for dinner but we were welcomed as if we lived there. Le Village Gaulois radiated a rare sense of psychic self-sufficiency. We settled down on the terrace, procured ice, a corkscrew and eau gazeuse, blew out the candle, and reveled in the quiet starlight and the thunderous baying of a pair of 120-lb farm werewolves in the adjacent yard, who could plainly smell foreigners and wanted it known.

Le Village Gaulois: Five Stars in our book. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The Restaurant. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Since it still exists, Marre is not technically one of the many villages detruits, villages that were totally destroyed in the battles for Verdun and never rebuilt. The rebuilt Marre is roughly equidistant from the shattered ruins of the Fort de Marre to the southeast and Le Mort Homme to the northwest, the low hill that saw some of the bitterest fighting of the Great War. Marre is in the middle of the western end of the Verdun battlefield. Today it is a lovely and thinly-populated farm landscape. In September 1916 it was a landscape of ruins from which French artillery managed to defend the line of the Meuse River just to the north.

There had never been anything quite like the battle of Verdun. The ancient fortress of Verdun had been modernized over the last quarter of the 19th century to include a vast ring of underground concrete forts, marked on the map below as red pentagons. This massive feat of defensive engineering was designed to make Verdun unassailable. The fortifications, however, did not deter attack. The core battlefield at Verdun, an area of approximately 100 square miles, was quickly reduced to a landscape of overlapping shell craters. The overall battle area totals about 300 square miles, and includes many areas still infested today with unexploded shells and other ammunition, including poison gas shells. Verdun was its own planet. Western history might even be divisible into before Verdun and after, the way Americans see the Civil War. The scale of the disaster at Verdun was quickly obvious to the world at large and came to define the national nightmare of both France and Germany.

Verdun Map. (Wikipedia).

Our first stop on leaving Le Village Gaulois was the town of Verdun, with its medieval cathedral, which dominates the heights of the area and thus attracted a surfeit of shellfire in the Great War.

Photo by Alex Mawyer.

The rebuilt cathedral still bears the marks of artillery strikes inside and out.

Direct Hit inside the Cloister. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

We roamed the hill on foot, particularly enjoying the Tolkienesque victory monument.

Verdun Memorial Stairs. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

First we saw Fort Vaux. The Verdun forts seem large on top but they are vastly larger underground, like cement icebergs showing only a fraction of their bulk. The builders of the Verdun forts sank vast chthonic edifices many stories deep, from which underground tunnels radiated into the surrounding landscape to create an octopus-like array of turreted gun positions. It is more than slightly creepy, as if the builders already knew life in the open was going to be impossible in the coming war.

Above: Exterior of Fort Vaux Pretty Much Beat to Rubble. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Aerial view of Fort Vaux in November 1916 (Wikimedia).

Les Combattants Anciens and Their Environment - Then (Wikipedia).

Outside Fort Vaux in 1917 (Wikipedia).

Interior of Fort Vaux Today. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Vaux -- Exterior Observation Turret. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Vaux -- Machine Gun Position. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Bits Hither and Yon. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Tree and Bunker. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

We also visited Fort Douamont, the key position in Verdun’s ring of forts.

The Entrance to Fort Douamont. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Fort Douamont Before and After (Wikipedia).

Fort Douamont Under Attack (Wikipedia).

Subterranean Douamont is an eerie labyrinth of tunnels, machinery, and inexplicable pits several stories deep. It was in many respects an underground city, meant to be self-sufficient for months at a time in the event it was attacked.

Down another level. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Dropoff to Who Knows Where, Already Three Stories Underground. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Machinery for Driving the Giant 155 mm Gun Turret. Photo by Gary Mawyer

Streets of the Underground City. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Douamont Exterior. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

On top of the fort. Video by Gary Mawyer.

Sign Explaining Where Not to Walk. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Gun Turret Atop Douamont—One of the Many. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

This housing is scored with direct hits and even contains embedded shell fuses.

The Verdun park has lots of walking trails and back roads and on one of these we found the rear entrance to Fort Souville. After the fall of Forts Vaux and Douamont, Fort Souville and the Fleury ridgeline were for a time the center of the battle, the last obstacle for the German attack.

Rear Entrance to Fort Souville. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Today this leafy enclave is naturally air conditioned by the steady rush of cold air pouring out of the entrance tunnels.

The whole ridge is a tumbled mass of shell holes, trenches and ruins, among which we cautiously ambled for hundreds of yards.

Trench near Fort Souville. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

The attack on Fort Souville included shelling by a 15-inch naval gun mounted on a railway carriage. The pits blasted by this gun are still distinguishable from the smaller shell holes by their depth and size. Souville was brought under direct infantry attack but did not fall.

Landscape view drawn in 1916, not to scale, to show the Verdun area in relief. (Wikipedia.)

We also visited the Verdun Ossuary, a masterpiece of Art Deco architecture.

Interior of Ossuary. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

An ossuary is a place to store bones. This one has the bones of about a quarter of a million soldiers who died at Verdun, and is adjacent to a vast military cemetery for some tens of thousands of the identified French dead. There are plenty of other cemeteries, some vast, others small, at Verdun, but the ossuary is the gathering spot for the skeletons of the anonymous--be they German, French, Austrian, Moroccan, Senegalese, and others as well. The ossuary is lit with an uncanny red-orange light.

A Glimpse of the French Military Cemetery from the Ossuary Lighthouse. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

Beneath the side corridors of the ossuary are bays in which the bones gathered from the battlefield over the years are heaped. The remains can be viewed through heavy glass windows at ground level. Kneeling and peering in, one sees cairns of bones through each of the many windows. At the ends farthest from the lighthouse the bins are less full, awaiting further finds. There are still tens of thousands of soldiers missing.

The Verdun Ossuary is a natural continuum of the medieval cathedral. While medieval cathedrals display the relics of saints, at Verdun sainthood has been democratized to include everyone. Though mostly French and German, the ossuary draws on all of Europe and the European world empire. Verdun was arguably a violent denial of liberty and fraternity, but equality was finally achieved. There is no central altar, no priestly elite, no liturgy; all were crucified, each in his own way.

At night the Ossuary Lighthouse sweeps the battlefield with its crimson beams as if to summon the angry dead. We did not stay for dark. We returned to Le Village Gaulois for an absolutely astonishing meal.

The Dining Terrace. Photo by Alex Mawyer.

It was an opportunity to let our hair stop standing on end, and contemplate life.

Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Having dined and wined very satisfactorily, we headed off to the villages detruits of Cumières, in the lee of Le Mort Homme, and Forges, at the western hinge of the 1915 front. At Forges there is signage to help indicate where things were, but there's nothing there now except trees and undergrowth slowly breaking down the shell craters. We found a dirt forest service road up onto the Mort Homme ridge that gave us a sense of the area. This fairly straight road cut through miles of superimposed trench lines from different weeks or months of the battle, riven masses of old trench snaking off in all directions through the pine plantations. As recently as the 1960s nothing but the hardiest weeds could grow on this poisoned ridge, repeatedly saturated with every form of toxic gas and chemical explosive known to either side. The pines were the first successful plantings. Late in the day we reached Le Mort Homme.

"They did not pass." Photo by Alex Mawyer.

Photo by Gary Mawyer.

In countless assaults, the German army finally seized this ridge, from Forges to Le Mort Homme and Hill 304. In countless counterattacks the French seized it back, at which point the hill may very well have become the most bitterly contested piece of real estate in all of human history. The monument atop it is appropriately nightmarish. The hill itself is a maze of decaying trenches, roots and vines, undergrowth and shell holes, a landscape rearranged by man into an obstacle course, around which we stumbled cautiously until darkness approached.

Road from Le Mort Homme to Esnes. Photo by Gary Mawyer.

But it is hard to stay somber for too long in the supernatural beauty of rural France. It’s a lovely country, and we had an appointment with an ice bucket full of champagne and the hilarious farm werewolves back at Le Village Gaulois, who would once again render the night melodious while we quietly discussed deep matters in the starry darkness.

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Gary Dale Mawyer has been writing for over four decades, and to date has published four novels, Rockfish, The Southern Skylark, Exemptions, and The Adventures of Reese Macaque, P.I., as well as a biographical history, Sergeant Wolinski and the Great War, and a short story collection, Dark and Other Stories. Gary's writings draw on a wealth of history, lore and lived experience. He has a B.A. and an M.F.A. from the University of Virginia. Gary is a Central Virginia native with over 40 years of publishing and editing experience. His interests include American and Virginia history, military history, geology, hiking, travel, landscaping and gardening. He is the father of four grown children and has four grandchildren. He lives with his wife Karen and two cats in Albemarle County.

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