Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 9

Harley Price

Italian Drivers…

Tailgating with Sprezzatura…

Hitting the Wall: H at the Crossroads…

Travel as Going around in Circles…

As a Recipe for Melancholy…

Asking Directions and Local Ignorance…

Having located our rental car, loaded the luggage, and programmed Mrs. Garmin with the address of our apartment, we finally left the dust and debris of Linate’s construction behind, and set out on the short trip to Milan. As we merged into highway traffic, it occurred to me that our Fiat “Panda” was once again rather inauspiciously named for a conveyance that would have to keep up with the carnivorous Ferraris and Alfa Romeos piloted by the testosterone-crazed Italian youths who prowled the Autostrada. To my surprise, however, it had just enough power to hold its own for a few seconds in the passing lane, before yet another would-be Mario Andretti appeared out of nowhere and attached himself amorously to my rear bumper.

Despite their reputation for insanity, by the way, Italian drivers are remarkably safe and competent. Unlike North Americans, they understand the meaning of “passing” (in the phrase “passing lane”); they keep up with traffic—disparity of velocity, in obedience to absurdly low speed limits, being the principal cause of accidents in North America–; and though tailgating is both a sport and a religious obligation in Italy, Italians tailgate with that insouciant confidence and skill to which Castiglione in The Courtier gave the untranslatable name of sprezzatura. (On a ride into downtown from Rome’s airport a couple of years ago, the distance between the front bumper of my taxi and the rear bumper of the car ahead–between three and four feet–never varied, despite speeds in excess of one hundred and twenty kilometers per hour, and frequent stops. A long catena of vehicles sped down the road in this fashion for miles, as if linked together like the cars of a train. Google can only dream of such precision.)

 

At Italian speeds, we traversed the ten kilometers from the airport to Milan’s outskirts in no time. It took us another twenty minutes or so to reach the periphery of Milan’s centro istorico; but there we hit a wall. Not the medieval fortress walls of the Lombard dukedom, but a wall of construction that encircled them and was hardly less impregnable.

Hercules could at least rely on his own moral compass when he came to his famous “crossroads”. But with a concrete barrier preventing my forward progress, and no idea where I was–the dark shadow of the miracle of GPS is that, without a physical map in hand, one is always effectively lost–, I had to make a choice. I chose left, and proceeded as slowly as the tailgaters would allow while Mrs. Garmin “recalculated” (as she would have to do so often in the coming weeks). I continued to obey la donna Garmin in good faith and confidence as she led us through a maze of streets, commanding me to “turn left in 500 metres”, “take the second exit at the next roundabout”, and so on. But after twenty minutes of this, another concrete barrier lay athwart our path. This time, I elected to go ad dextram, but a second “recalculated” voyage of discovery left the Panda facing what I thought was a third construction barrier. (In fact, being the sharp-eyed observer that I am, I soon realized that Mrs. Garmin had merely returned me, twice, to the same place. We had been going around in circles, literally, for the past forty-five minutes).

Having endured the curry-and-cologne ambiance of Jet Airways; the video-game-addicted delinquent kicking the back of my seat; the touch-and-go race to our connecting flight in Brussels; the oleaginous larceny of the Europcar ragazza; the Sisyphean ramps of the garage at Linate, climbed and re-climbed in search of our rental car; and sleep-deprivation now into its second day; and with La Scala, the Galleria, the Ambrosian Library, Leonardo’s Last Supper, and the other glories of Milan lying across a Hesiodic chasm of construction, as near but as inaccessible as the fruit that lay just beyond the grasp of Tantalus; I came to the inevitable conclusion that travel is nothing more than the illusion of going somewhere, beneath whose pleasant integument is concealed the futile reality of merely going around in circles.

Shakespeare’s Jaques said it best in As You Like It, when he observed that it is easier to suck melancholy out of travel than any other vocation or pastime:

I have neither the scholar’s melancholy, which is emulation; nor the musician’s, which is fantastical; nor the courtier’s, which is proud; nor the soldier’s, which is ambitious; nor the lawyer’s, which is politic; nor the lady’s, which is nice; nor the lover’s, which is all these: but it is a melancholy of mine own, compounded of many simples, extracted from many objects, and indeed the sundry contemplation of my travels, in which my often rumination wraps me in a most humorous sadness.

Rosalind. A traveler! By my faith, you have great reason to be sad. I fear you have sold your own lands to see other men’s. Then to have seen much and to have nothing is to have rich eyes and poor hands.

Jaques. Yes, I have gained my experience.

Rosalind. And your experience makes you sad. I had rather have a fool to make me merry than experience to make me sad—and to travel for it too.

Surely I had gained enough “experience” in the brief time since leaving Toronto to justify a Jaquean case of melancholy. Staring at the construction barrier for the third time merely confirmed my original intuition that the gods did not want me to visit Northern Italy, as Juno did not want Aeneas to reach Latium, and Poseidon did not want Odysseus to reach Ithaca.

 

Having probed the limits of Mrs. G’s computer intelligence, I pulled over while Mrs. P went into a bar across the street to ask for help. While, admittedly, I suffer from the proverbial male horror of getting lost, combined with the stereotypically male aversion to asking for directions, it is not, I insist, merely a matter of masculine pride. In my sad experience, when one becomes lost, the perfect recipe for getting desperately, hopelessly lost is to ask a local inhabitant for directions. If your local is familiar with whatever landmark you are looking for, he will assume that everyone in the world must be as familiar with it as he, and his directions will be correspondingly indefinite: “Keep going for a few traffic lights and you’ll see it on the left. You can’t miss it”. (Ah, but you can, and certainly, will. The “few” traffic lights might turn into a dozen, and “on the left” might mean in a strip mall a block in from the road.)

There is another species of locals, moreover, who are cognizant of nothing in their environment (however proximate) that doesn’t lie directly on their route to work, market, or home. It is too often true that those who have lived longest in any given city, town, or village will know the least about its amenities–as I learned, for instance, when, after two weeks of exploring Rome, I was giving travel advice to those who were born there, but had never heard of the Palazzo Massimo or Santa Maria Maggiore, though they had walked passed these celebrated monuments practically every day of their lives.

The denizens of the bar belonged to the latter category of locals. And so we telephoned the owner of our apartment in the hope that he could be our Sibyl and guide us across the Acherusian moat of construction.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 8

Harley Price

Vicarious New-Car Ownership…

European Automotive Gimmickry…

Driving Your Mother-in-Law around Europe…

Getting behind the wheel of a car confers upon one an intoxicating sense of liberation after sequester in the fuselage of an airliner. Even in a sub-sub-compact, the legroom is better. There is also the illusion of being in control of one’s destiny (although that fades as soon as one has completed three panicky, which-exit-do-I-take?, revolutions in a European roundabout).

I’ve always enjoyed renting cars. Since I tend to keep my own for between fifteen and twenty years, renting gives me the exhilarating sensation of being a new-car owner (with the tranquilizing knowledge that, if it turns out to be a lemon, I can give it back). Rental cars are sometimes even new enough to retain that “new-car” smell (unless, of course, the previous renter has visited the Alps and is prone to car-sickness. But then, after a few cigars, I barely noticed.)

In the case of some cars I’ve rented (e.g., a 1969 Quatre Chevaux in Paris, a Soviet-era Zil limousine in Moscow in 2000, and a 2002 Miata), I sorely regretted having to give them back. The Fiat wasn’t one of them. In spite of its mawkish model name, our “Panda” (what tone-deaf genius comes up with modern car appellations?) was anything but cute. Like so many European models, its quirky angularity strikes the eye as a vestige from the Cubist era. And its interior is a triumph of plasticky cheapness last achieved by Japanese export manufacturers in the years immediately following World War II. Like many other European cars as well, the Panda tries to make up for its diminutive size and horsepower with an array of useless and imponderable technological gadgets.

 

My first encounter with this tendency occurred in 2004 at the Amsterdam airport, where I leased a “Clio” from Renault Eurodrive for a month. Because the Clio was nominally leased rather than rented, it was indeed “brand-new”—so new that when it was delivered to me straight from the dealership, the Renault salesman had no idea how to roll its electric windows down.

It may not seem so, but this was a desperate situation. It was hot and muggy (once again); early in the morning after another sleepless overnight flight; following nine hours in a smokeless fIying coffin, I desperately needed a cigar, which was permitted only with the windows open; and my ill-tempered octogenarian parents-in-law were sitting in the back seat, anxious to get to a hotel, where bathrooms are in predictable proximity.

Mrs. P’s parents had always enjoyed touring Europe, but were getting too old and frail to manage a trip on their own. So, in a gesture of filial gratitude combined with reckless charity, we offered to act as escorts and facilitate their return to a place in which they had formerly been very happy.

 

We eventually discovered the idiosyncratic location of the Clio’s window controls on p. 292 of the owner’s manual. In every car I have ever driven, they are located on the driver’s and passenger’s armrests. In the Clio, they were occulted under a hinged cover on the central console (like the red button for 007’s ejector seat, which, once the back-seat commentary had commenced in earnest, I began to wish the Clio had been equipped with).

While I was doing my best to negotiate the maze of highways between Amsterdam and Bruges without benefit of maps or GPS, my mother-in-law regularly emitted a high-pitched shriek every time another car came within twenty feet of us. (In her, I had my own living, breathing lane-guidance warning system, although rather too sensitively calibrated.) When she wasn’t emoting at the top of her lungs that she “didn’t want to die”, she was reminding me that she hadn’t “come to Europe to be on a boring superhighway”.

After three and a half hours of such back-seat abuse, I finally entered Bruges. A typical medieval European town, Bruges is a spider’s web of culs-de-sac and narrow, one-way streets, both sides of which are invariably lined with parked cars. After finally finding an opening in which to pull over (a long queue of Flemish motorists honking at me from behind), we asked Mrs. P’s parents to wait in the car while we searched on foot for a nearby hotel. They objected; we’re just going for a little walk, they assured us.

Bruges is a safe town, but naturally, with the luggage in the trunk, I was careful to lock the car and listen for the chirp from the key-fob. But something made me walk back to the Clio and check the doors. They were open. I pressed the padlock icon on the fob again, tried the driver’s door (spraining my middle finger in the process), walked away a second time, and returned to dispel any lingering doubts. The doors were unlocked! I performed this futile ballet three more times, before sinking to my knees in despair. How was I going to travel through Belgium and France (including Marseilles, metropolis of bandits) without being able to lock the Clio’s doors?

The answer was in the fine print on p. 383 of the manual this time. The Clio came equipped with a convenient little feature: a sensor in the key-fob that automatically unlocked the doors and rear hatch when the driver came within a ten-foot range of the vehicle. Now you’ll never again have to fumble for your keys while your hands are full of groceries, as the manual exulted in the Renault motoring company’s tradition of innovative genius. (Of course, it’s a useless gimmick, since you still have to open the unlocked doors with your grocery-laden hands. I did, however, employ it as a party trick on the Renault dealer when I returned the Clio, and thoroughly enjoyed his befuddled exasperation.)

Three hours after departing for their “little walk” my parents-in-law showed up back at the car, smiles on their faces, and incredulous that we had been anxiously hunting for them for the entire time—there was no hotel to be found in the area–throughout the city.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 7

Harley Price

Dismissive Vagueness and the “Hospitality” Industry…

Searching (literally) for the Right Car…

When I asked where I might collect our “brand-new” Fiat Panda, the Europcar ragazza told us to go to the company trailer in the parkade outside the terminal, whither she gestured with dismissive vagueness. Dismissive vagueness, as I have discovered over the course of years of travel, is a special qualification and talent of those who work in the hospitality industry, who are invariably the most inhospitable creatures amongst the plenitudinous ranks of the animal kingdom.

The last time I encountered our ragazza’s expression of contemptuous ennui, it was creeping over the face of a waiter in a restaurant in Arles, at the moment when Mrs. P asked if he would remove and replace the soupe de poisson he had just served us. (The soupe had no poisson in it that either of us could discover, was covered in a congealed varnish of cooking oil, and was garnished with croutons that the waiter had parsimoniously recycled from the un-bussed table of a previous party of diners.) To Mrs. P’s suggestion, le garcon replied that there was nothing wrong with the soupe (implying that we were gastronomic malcontents), and proclaimed, like Moses revealing the Law on Sinai, that in France, if you order it, you pay for it.

It was in the same spirit of hospitality and accommodation that we were dismissed from the Europcar office and sent outside to search for the car we had (over)paid for. The “parkade” was a vast four-storey above-ground garage approached by six different ramps. Having been given no instruction as to which was the magic ramp, we tried them one after another at random, dragging our luggage behind us in the heat of the noon-day sun, until, on the fifth Sisyphean ascent, we hit upon the level and sector occupied by the major car rental agencies. We immediately found Hertz, Avis, and Budget, whose agents instructed us that Europcar was in the far corner of the parkade. Thirty-five minutes after setting out from the terminal, we finally found the Europcar trailer and presented our paperwork to the attendant. Would he bring us our conveyance, we wondered; or would we be dispatched on another voyage of exploration through the rows upon rows of parked cars to find it ourselves?

Such naivete is the residuum of the eternal hopefulness with which travelers embark on every new trip. After narrow escapes from the murderous Cyclopes, Laestrygonians, Scylla, and Charybdis, Odysseus set out cheerfully to reconnoitre the dark hinterland of Circe’s Isle, his spirit of adventure wholly undiminished. But with Homer’s and a thousand other admonitory tales to guide him, the contemporary traveler has no excuse for optimism.

 

The Europcar attendant tossed me the keys with the wonted dismissiveness of his vocation, recited the license plate number of our car, and told me I could find it in the Europcar section, “six rows over and nine pillars down”. Leaving Mrs. P to guard the luggage, I set out on another fruitless quest. Naturally, the “Europcar section” was unmarked; and never having seen a Fiat Panda in my life, the normal process of elimination was unavailable to me. After ten minutes’ of scrutinizing dozens of license plates, I gave up, returned to the trailer, and commenced upon a long and impassioned speech about the minimal standards of “service”, and the Christian imperative of showing compassion to homeless wanderers. Shamed into human decency by the tears that were at that moment beginning to well up in Mrs. P’s eyes, the attendant agreed to fetch the car. I importuned him only one more time: to give me at least a cursory introduction to the Fiat Panda’s instrumentation which, in the fashion of most European automobiles, was opaque and idiosyncratic. Having memorized the iconography and location of the light switch, AC button, and electric window controls (all of which were secreted in the most illogical redoubts), I inserted Mrs. Garmin into her mount, pressed its suction cup onto the windscreen—which held only after several attempts–, programmed in the address of our apartment, and set out in a mood of utter defeat for the city of Da Vinci, Bramante, and St. Ambrose.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 6

Harley Price

Italian Sophistry…

Our Europcar Ragazza…

Credit Card Servitude…

I remain, like so many others, an unreserved Italophile. How could anyone not revere the nation that gave the world Pythagoras, Parmenides, Petrarch, Pico della Mirandola, Pietro Bembo, Palladio, Piero della Francesca, Perugino, Palestrina, pasta, pizza, prosciutto, prosecco, parmagiana di reggiano (and those are just the p’s), not to mention the three hour lunch, and the five-hour work day.

But Italy was also home to a number of the ancient Sophists, and thus her progeny have never ceased to be able to “make the worse seem the better case”. To deal with Italians, the muscles of eristic must be in perfect trim. Grasping the metamorphic sea-god Proteus is only slightly easier than pinning an Italian down to his word.

 

Our first experience of Milan was hardly propitious. Though already September, the temperature was in the mid-thirties and the humidity pushing ninety percent. After twelve hours of confinement, our clothes were already clinging to corporeal recesses that hadn’t been exposed to air, water, or soap for over a day. (One of the peak pleasures of European travel is the first shower after touch-down–assuming the water heater in one’s rented apartment is working).

Exacerbating the heat and humidity was the dust with which the atmosphere was choked from the construction around Milan’s Linate Airport. With its trailers and port-o-potties, the scene outside the terminal building resembled an Eritrean refugee camp more than the gateway to the fashion capital of the world. Things will improve (I reassured myself) once we get into the city itself.

Linate is at least a blessedly small facility, so that finding the car rental area (a dreaded ordeal of international air travel) was relatively easy. I booked (and paid for) our car well in advance on an omnibus website called Auto Europe. Auto Europe recommended itself for many reasons, besides the fact that their prices were considerably lower than those of other third-party car rental clearinghouses on the web, not to mention Hertz, Avis, Budget, and the other international chains. First, I was able to get in touch with their representative by that quaintly old-fashioned (and occasionally time-saving) device known as the telephone. Second, a living human being answered the phone—Auto Europe as of yet eschews the sadistic “voice menu” that has become the impregnable roadblock of modern communications—nor was I ever put on hold. Third, the young man at the end of the line was located in Maine (rather than Mumbai). And most miraculous of all, in addition to speaking standard English, he was knowledgeable, efficient, and polite. He reminded me of that wholly anachronistic, clean-cut species of college student one still occasionally encounters in small-town America.

I called Auto Europe four times before committing myself, in part for the exhilarating ease of the experience, but mainly to confirm (redundantly, as required by my congenital suspiciousness) that, indeed, the $900.00 for my thirty-one day car rental included (1) full insurance coverage (collision, third-party liability, and theft) with zero deductible; (2) all conceivable local taxes and bribes; and a guarantee of the model of car reserved. Finally, I was assured that Europcar (the local car rental company, whom I had never heard of) was indeed a well-established firm with operations all across the Continent.

 

I nonetheless entered the office of Europcar in Linate with a prescient sense of trepidation. Having looked cursorily at my paperwork–I came armed with the entire dossier of orders, confirmations, and receipts, including a long email catena–the ragazza behind the counter proceeded to improvise. The car that we had “requested” would not serve our needs. Looking at our luggage, she could see that it wouldn’t be big enough. Besides, they didn’t have a Fiat Panda on the lot, and it would take an hour to procure one. Why don’t we “upgrade” (at only a small increase in cost) to a larger vehicle?

Standing my ground, I managed to parry this first assault. (Miraculously, a Fiat Panda materialized within minutes; it was “brand new”, “not yet logged into the system”, which is why our ragazza wasn’t aware of it.)

But having survived this first skirmish, I knew that I was a long way from winning the war; and the Protean slipperiness of my opponent had already begun to sap my confidence. Trying to forestall any further surprises, I showed her a number of clauses (which I had underlined in red) in my sheaf of documents, and asked her to confirm that the car was (as it said in black and white) fully insured, and that there would be no other charges. She laughed. Insurance has be arranged and paid for at the site, she said with condescending deliberateness, in both English and Italian (as though I were incapable of understanding either language). And there are always local taxes. Now I’ll need your credit card to process your “request”.

When she printed the rental agreement and thrust it unceremoniously in my direction to sign, I noticed a charge of 677 Euros posted opposite my credit card number. Having returned to consciousness, I was assured that it was the “usual” security deposit. I doubted it; the figure was rather too specific. It could only have referred, I assumed, to those ubiquitous “local taxes” she had mentioned. When I left the Europcar office, I resigned myself to the probability that my $900.00 car rental would end up setting me back closer to $2000.00.

Naturally, I thought about telling our ragazza to find some other bleary-eyed traveler to gull. (A suggestion for a Europcar advertising slogan: Rent a car with us: we’ll take you for a ride.) But I had no reason to believe that I would ever get my nine hundred dollars back. In any case, I’d be left with having to find another rental car on the spot (and there’s nothing Italians are better at than sensing when a supplicant is negotiating under duress). So I capitulated, like a political prisoner who, after days of sleep deprivation, is willing to confess to anything.

The most depressing realization (which would turn out to be the lesson of the entire trip) was that all of my vigilant preparedness—the careful internet research, the multiple phone calls to Auto Europe, the amassing of the documentary evidence–was an onanistic waste. A traveler can be girded with the breastplate of righteousness, the helmet of salvation, and the sword of truth, but once his opponent has his credit card, he is confronting a nuclear power.

 

Before collecting our very expensive economy car, we decided to retire to the lounge to lick our wounds. This would be a good time for Mrs. P. to telephone Donato (our host in Milan), from whom we needed to procure the keys to his apartment. Mrs. P. had purchased a plan from our cell-phone provider in Toronto for the purpose of arranging such rendezvous. But she had forgotten to charge her phone. The call would have to be made on mine, and while dialing I mentally added the outrageous roaming fees I would have to pay to the ever-rising sum of costs we had so providently, but vainly, attempted to avoid. We had also (providently) purchased a European map program for “Mrs. Garmin” (our GPS device) before we left, and I thought that this might also be a good time to see if it worked. It didn’t. When I turned the unit on, the screen was blank. I later realized why: I was still inside the terminal building, where satellite reception is apparently impossible. But never mind. I had ample cause to be confirmed in my sense of touristic doom. I took out pencil and paper (a technology I could count on) and made a list of everything that might possibly go wrong before the end of the day. It was a long one, but not even the most prescient Cassandra is capable of foreseeing the horrors that a malevolent Fate has in store for her vacationing victims.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XVII

Harley Price

Anaximenes’ Air…

 Air, Wind, and Breath as Soul-substances and God-images…

 The World as a Divine Animal…

 Macrocosm and Microcosm, again…

The Divinity of Man…

     Cosmogony and cosmology continued to be the preoccupations of Anaximander’s pupil and fellow Milesian, Anaximenes (born c. 584 B.C.).  Like his master, Anaximenes is reported to have taught that the source and underlying nature of all things is one and infinite; but unlike Anaximander, for whom the infinite was none of the four elements (while encompassing them all), Anaximenes identified it with air.

Anaximenes’ air remained nonetheless an indeterminate substance–not unlike to apeiron—insofar as it was capable of being transformed into all the other elements in turn.  This occurred by a process that Anaximenes called “dilation and compression”.

When air is compressed it becomes colder, denser, and heavier, and so takes on the properties first of water and then of earth; when it is dilated, it becomes hotter, rarer, and lighter, and takes on those of fire.  In Anaximenes’ scheme, Anaximander’s opposites are thus engendered through the mechanism of thickening and thinning.

Once again, however, we may readily detect the afflatus of pre-rational, religious ideas and modes of thought in Anaximenes’ apparently mechanical explanation of things.  According to one doxographer, “Anaximenes says that air is a god”, while another fragment runs, “Just as our soul (being air) controls us, so breath and air encompass the whole world-order”.

 

Air, breath, and wind are primordial and ubiquitous God-images, since they were commonly held to constitute the essential substance of the Divine.  In ancient Hebrew, for instance, Yahweh is ruach, that is, “breath or wind”.  In Genesis, his Spirit is said to brood over the face of the waters at the beginning.  As we’ve already seen, this is a sexual image:  God fecundates those waters with the seed of his Spirit as the male inseminates the woman’s watery womb. 

But he does more than that, of course.  The English word “spirit” comes from the Latin verb spiro, spirare (to breathe), and indeed God creates the world in Genesis, as he creates Adam, by breathing his own enlivening soul into their otherwise inert and inanimate material bodies.

Throughout Greek thought, analogously, there persists the idea that the world itself is, as Plato called it, a Divine Animal, whose outer body is composed of those corporeal members that are discernible to the senses, and whose inner soul, which regulates the orderly movements and processes of the universe, is the invisible Soul of God.  God inspirits and governs the cosmos, as the human soul inspirits and governs the human body; and this becomes the function of Anaximenes’ supposedly de-mythologized and impersonal “air”.

As Anaximenes was well aware, whether in God or man, the soul had been universally and immemorially conceived as being made of an airy substance, identified with the breath.  Primitive peoples almost all believe that when a person dies, his soul escapes–is exhaled–in his final breath, and from this belief we get our expression, “he breathed his last”.

Homer accepted this assumption too, as we may infer from his description in the Iliad of Sarpedon, who is wounded, almost fatally, on the battlefield before Troy:

His soul left him, and mist covered his eyes.
But he recovered his breath, and the blast of the north wind,
Blowing, gave him life, though he was sorely spent in spirit.

It is the air, wind, or breath in us, then, which is soul.  And the airy breath in us animates our bodies, just as the air, according to Anaximenes, animates the body of the world.

 

Like the soul in man and God, Anaximenes naturally attributes to his archetypal air the quality of “intelligence”.  As the airy soul rationally directs and regulates the movements and processes of living creatures, so Anaximenes’ air regulates the life of the world-order, preserving within it that state of harmony and justice of which Anaximander had written.

The whole argument–indeed, the whole argument of so much theology and philosophy–, is based on the analogy between the little world of man—the microcosm—and the greater world of the cosmos—the macrocosm.  And from Anaximenes himself we have one of the earliest statements of this perennial Western theme:

The living creature, he says, is a world in miniature.

I’ve already alluded to Greek medical theory, which is rooted in this analogy:  just as the elements earth, water, air, and fire, comprised of the opposites hot and cold, moist and dry, must observe their limits if the health of the cosmos is to be preserved, so the elements of the body—the four humours, which are comprised of the same four opposites—must coexist in balance lest the body succumb to disease.

But the most important, and characteristically Greek, deduction from the correspondence between macrocosm and microcosm is what it implies about the essential divinity of the human soul.  This is already the planted axiom in the following statements by one of Anaximenes’ later disciples, Diogenes of Apollonia:

It seems to me that that which has intelligence is what men call air, and that all men are steered by this, and that it has power over all things.  For this very thing seems to be a god and to reach everywhere and to dispose all things and to be in everything.  For it would not be possible, without intelligence, to be divided up so as to dispense measure in all things—winter and summer, night and day, rain and wind and fair weather.

Thus the Divine Intelligence that suffuses and is immanent in all things, that regulates and orders the seasons and the cosmos “in measure”, is also immanent in man, regulating and ordering in measure his life as it regulates and orders the life of the World-Animal

Man’s soul, then (as the later Platonists and Stoics would call it) is already conceived as a “seed” or “particle” of the Divine Reason, and so participating in the Divine, man is in essence a god.

But we’ll come back to these ideas later.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XVI

Harley Price

Anaximander and Moira…

     Even the gods are bound by the primordial law of justice which Anaximander projects upon the material world.  Homer himself acknowledges that its authority is older and its power greater than that of Zeus.

For though the gods are ageless and deathless, they are not eternal–they are in fact younger than the world, as the poets affirm–, nor are they omnipotent.  What limits their power above all is the prior and organizing principle of the cosmos, which Homer calls Moira.

     Homer’s conception of Moira (Destiny) is better known in later Greek myth as personified by  the Three Fates (another of those pre-Christian trinities):  Clotho, the Spinner, who spins the thread of Life; Lachesis, the Disposer of Lots, who assigns to each man his personal fate; and Atropos, She Who Would Not Be Denied, who carries the dreaded shears and cuts the thread at death.  But Moira, as an impersonal force or numen, is much older.

We encounter this cosmological Moira in the fifteenth Iliad, when Zeus awakens to find his Trojans hard pressed by the Achaeans, because they have been incited by Poseidon.  Zeus at once dispatches the messenger goddess Iris (she of the rainbow) to present Poseidon with the ultimatum to desist from any further involvement in the War, and retire contentedly to his kingdom in the sea.

To this Poseidon angrily replies:

No, no; good though he be, he spoke insolently,
If he would restrain me by force against my will,
When I am his peer in honor.  For we three are brothers,
Sons of Cronos whom Rhea bore:
Zeus and I, and Hades, lord of the world below.
All was divided in three; each received his share [moira] of honor.
I had the gray sea as my dwelling when we cast lots;
Hades, the shadowy world; Zeus the broad heavens
Among the upper air and clouds.  The earth
Is shared by all of us, along with high Olympus.
Wherefore I will not live by Zeus’ will;
Strong though he be, let him rest content with his share [moira].

Each of the three brothers, then, Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, enjoys his own equal share in the government of the universe, his own sphere of influence and department of nature (sky, sea, or earth) beyond which he must not go.  In Homer, this “ordinance” is fixed by the agreement of the gods, whereas, in Anaximander, the gods as individual personalities have nominally disappeared:  the opposites (in the form of the concrete and de-mythologized “elements” air, water, and earth (which the Olympian triad formerly personified) have now taken their place.

 

But in Anaximander’s cosmos no less than in Homer’s, the elements and contraries are bound within their provinces by a moral law.  And this is of enormous significance for the whole Hellenic temperament, as we have seen.  The fact that the existential boundaries (moirai) of the elemental contraries are also moral boundaries means that what is “beyond destiny” is at the same time “beyond right”, and any attempt by either man or god to go “beyond what is ordained” is immediately answered by the god Nemesis, or Retribution, the personified abstraction who swiftly restores the due and proper harmony and balance.

It is Moira, then, that is ultimately behind the rudimentary Greek notion that there is an enormous gulf between the human and the divine, and that unless mortals are content “to think mortal thoughts”, as we have seen, their illicit ambition will be visited by the gods with punishment.

But whatever its precise origins, Anaximander’s concept of natural justice as the maintenance of balance and harmony amongst the opposites–as a state of “order” and boundedness in which the elements remain within their proper provinces–, became, as we will see, a commonplace in later classical cosmogony and cosmology, and indeed, in the entire Western philosophical tradition.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XV

Harley Price

Anaximander’s Law of Compensation…

 And the Greek Medical Theory of the Humours…

 Compensation in the Health of the Body and the Succession of the Seasons…

Anaximander’s Natural Justice as a Projection of Human Morality…

Cosmic Injustice and Hybris… 

     But the world order, unlike to apeiron, is transitory and passes away, and how and why this happens is addressed by Anaximander in the single sentence from his book that has come down to us, as preserved by Simplicius:  a sentence that is certainly of profound significance for later Greek thought:

“Into those things from which existing things have their coming into being, their passing away, too, takes place, according to what must be; for they make reparation to one another for their injustice according to the ordinance of time”, as he puts it in somewhat poetical language.

It isn’t immediately obvious what “those things” are from which existing things arise.  The “Infinite Thing” as such can hardly be meant; the plural makes that plain enough.  On the other hand, Anaximander has already said that existing things arise not from the Infinite as such, but from those elements that are contained in it and separated out from it in the formation of the world.

These are the opposites, “the hot, the cold, the moist, the dry, and rest”.  It is the opposites, then, that “make reparation to one another for their injustice”; and the conception is one which is so ubiquitous in Greek thought as to be fundamental.

 

We encounter it, for instance, in Alcmaeon of Croton, who laid the foundations of Greek medical theory early in the 5th century B.C.:

Alcmaeon says [as recorded by Aetius, the 2nd century doxographer] that the essence of health lies in the “equality” of the powers—moist, dry, cold, hot, bitter, sweet, and the rest—whereas the cause of sickness is the “supremacy of one” among these.  For the rule of any one of them is a cause of destruction…while health is the proportionate mixture of the qualities.

Hippocrates in turn compares this balance or harmony of the opposites, which preserves the health of the body, to the orderly succession of the opposites in the seasonal year:

All of them [the opposites] are present in the body, but as the seasons revolve they become now greater now less, in turn…The year too has a share of all things—the hot, the cold, the dry, and the wet—for no one of the things which exist in the world-order would last for any length of time were it not for the balance preserved amongst them.

The opposites of which the body is composed—in later medical theory, the so-called four humours, which correspond to the four elements—are at enmity with each other, each attempting to drive out the other and establish sole supremacy.  The health of the body, on the other hand, consists in the maintenance of a balance of one opposite by the other.  It can be preserved, therefore, only if for every transgression, compensation or reparation is rendered, so that the balance is restored.

The same dynamic operates in the succession of the seasons.  In each season, one of each pair of opposites dominates:  spring is warm and moist; summer, warm and dry; autumn, cold and wet; winter, cold and dry.  Because the succession of the seasons is an orderly one, however, each of the opposites eventually makes reparation for the wrong it has done “according to the ordinance of time”.

 

Clearly, Anaximander’s “law of compensation”, his “poetic” description of nature in terms of “injustice and reparation”, is a projection of human morality on a supposedly inanimate and de-divinized world.  But then, the primordial data of religion inevitably survive and continue to influence the doctrines of the Greek philosophers, in spite of the assumption that they have moved beyond “irrational” mythological or theological categories of thought and supernatural explanations of things.  If Anaximander’s followers called his to apeiron “divine”, as Aristotle affirms, it was because the Greeks had from time immemorial ascribed to the Divine the same qualities of boundlessness, agelessness, eternity, and indestructibility.  In calling it by the impersonal term to apeiron, Anaximander has merely given the Godhead a new philosophical name.  Like the Godhead, the Infinite, he says, is the source and governor of the cosmos, which it “encompasses”, and whose operations it “steers” and regulates in justice and harmony.

Anaximander’s law of compensation is similarly rooted in a primitive ethos that survives from the psychological infancy of the species.  Even today, when we have a mild autumn, we expect instinctively that it will have to be paid for by a severe winter; we imagine, that is, that just as happiness is paid for by misfortune, so fine weather will be paid for by bad.

In this way, the laws of nature, to the mythic imagination, inevitably reflect those that operate in human affairs.  And Anaximander’s law of natural compensation seems to be just such a projection upon the inanimate elements of the cosmos of those moral laws that prevents human action from transgressing its proper bounds.

When a man exalts himself above his fellows, he is, like Herodotus’ Croesus, quickly brought low.  For the inquiring mind of the Greeks, there must, of course, be a reason for these inevitable reversals of fortune.  One commonly posited explanation was the jealousy of the gods.  Thus, in Herodotus once again, on the eve of his master’s ill-fated invasion of Greece, Xerxes’ adviser admonishes him:

You see, my lord, how god strikes with his thunderbolts those living creatures who are exalted above their fellows, and does not suffer them to vaunt themselves.  The small ones do not provoke his anger; it is always the highest buildings and the tallest trees on which his bolts fall.  For god delights in putting down all those who are exalted.

 

We can see how the idea of the jealousy of the gods is articulated with Anaximander’s theory according to which the aggrandizement of one of the opposites at the expense of the others demands reparation.  The gods alone enjoy perfect and indestructible power, ease, and happiness, and when a mortal aspires to such bliss, he is usurping divine prerogatives.  He is guilty, in Greek terms, of the sin of hybris:  of failing to “think only mortal thoughts”; of aspiring to rise above his proper station in the cosmic hierarchy.  And for this injustice he must inevitably be cast down, if the order and harmony of both human society and the cosmos itself are to be restored.

The Vocabulary of Myth, Part XIV

Harley Price

The Pre-Socratics…

Their Inspiration by Pre-Rational, Mythical Categories of Thought…

 Physis as a God-Image…

 The One and the Many…

Anaximander…

The Contraries and the Elements…

  Their Separation from To Apeiron…

     After Hesiod (c. 700), the principal preoccupation of the next several generations of Greek mythographers continued to be cosmogony and cosmology.  I refer, of course, to the Pre-Socratics (6th to 5th centuries B.C.), as they are called by the historians of Greek thought, who were the earliest “philosophers” in the Western tradition.

We must be careful, however, not to project our own modern definition of that hallowed term upon these seminal Greek thinkers.  For us, the word “philosopher” connotes someone who inquires dispassionately into the laws of the universe, obedient only to the dictates of reason and empirical truth, unharnessed from the ancestral burden of theological dogma or mythic fantasy.  Needless, to say, no such contemporary ideals troubled the Pre-Socratics (or any other pre-modern philosophers for that matter). Rather, the same pre-rational, mythological idioms and categories of thought as they had inherited from the poets and theologians of earlier generations inevitably recurred as the organizing archetypes of their investigations.

The earliest of the Pre-Socratics were called “physicists” by Aristotle, inviting us to identify them with modern scientists of the same name, and so adding to the confusion.  But Aristotle’s designation merely refers to the fact that they were dedicated to the discovery of the one primary substance or substrate—the Greek word is physis—out of which the observable multiplicity of the cosmos supposedly first arose and continues to inhere.

The conventional English translation of physis is “nature”, but for the Pre-Socratics the word meant something rather less abstract and (paradoxically) more exalted.  In its primary signification, the physis of the Pre-Socratics has about it the connotation of a living and growing thing; it is what Francis Cornford called a “Soul-Substance”:  the Soul Substance that animates the entire world.  That is to say that physis was little more than a non-theological or impersonal substitute for the word God, and thus hardly the descriptor of the de-deified and dis-inspirited machine that is the object of study for modern science.  The original and ongoing philosophical problem for the Pre-Socratics was that of the “One and the Many”, as it was called:  how the One Physis invisibly and immutably suffused—ensouled is really the right word here, since physis is merely another God-image–the multiplicity of individual mutable things, whence all existence is secretly and essentially unitary and unchanging; and how the Many–looking at the universal dynamic from the other side–expressed the hidden Unity out of which the One originally emanated or unfolded into diversity.  Unity and multiplicity are, as one would expect from a stage of consciousness as yet untroubled by the paradoxes of myth, both opposite and complementary modes or aspects of reality.

But again, we can hardly exhaust the meaning and implication of this archetype here, which informs any number of fundamental structures and recurrent themes in philosophy and religion, from polytheism itself, in which the many gods express the essential unity of the Supreme God (To Theion [The Divine], as the Greeks called it); to the mystery of the Trinity (One God in Three Persons), to the ubiquitous doctrine of transmigration of souls, in which the one soul undergoes a series of incarnations, and so on.

 

Aristotle says that the founder of Greek philosophy was Thales, (born c. 636 B.C.), a citizen of Miletus, one of the Ionian Greek city states on the Asia Minor coast.  Thales, he reports, asserted that the unitary physis or primary stuff of the cosmos was water, which was then transmuted into the solids, liquids, and gases (that is, everything that exists in the visible world) by a process of evaporation, condensation, freezing, melting, and so on.  But this is the sum of what we know of Thales and his teachings, a legacy so meager, or in some cases, so obviously the stuff of legend, that the title of Greece’s first philosopher probably belongs, more properly, to Thales’ younger Milesian contemporary Anaximander.

Anaximander was born c. 612 B.C., and though, unlike Thales, he committed his thoughts to writing in a book, nothing of it, unfortunately, has survived.  From the 6th century A.D. doxographer Simplicius, we learn that Anaximander asserted that the source of all existing things is what he called to apeiron, i.e., the “boundless” or “infinite” or “limitless” thing, which is neither water nor any of the other elements, but something prior to and encompassing them all, and out of which the entire world-order came into being and into which it will return.

This “boundless” or “infinite” or “limitless” thing is, moreover, “eternal”or “ageless”.  It has “no beginning”, as Aristotle explains, “for if there were a beginning it would be limited”; and by the same token, it has no end:  it is “deathless and imperishable”.  Possessing these qualities, to apeiron was called “divine” by Anaximander’s disciples.

We infer, then, that by contrast to “the limitless”, the life of the world-order is limited at both ends:  it comes into existence and passes away.  But that out of which it arises and into which it passes away is without limit:  “ageless” and “imperishable”.  We may further infer from these adjectives that when Anaximander speaks of the source of existing things as “limitless”, he is thinking pre-eminently in temporal rather than spatial terms.

 

How, then, does the world-order come into being?  As reported by Aristotle, “The opposites, which are present in to apeiron, are separated out from it, Anaximander says”.  And from Simplicius we learn that “The opposites are the hot, the cold, the dry, the moist, and the rest”.

It is apparent, then, that Anaximander’s to apeiron corresponds in some way to that original state which Hesiod alludes to in the Theogony, in which Father Sky and Mother Earth were first bound up together in an indistinct unity, before they were separated by Chaos, and reunited to engender the world.  For Anaximander, the opposites are however no longer personified—no longer represented in the language of mythological poetry–, but are conceived as the inanimate and impersonal qualities of the hot and cold, wet and dry.

But since the Greeks as yet made no distinction between a thing and the qualities of a thing, Anaximander’s opposites are effectively indistinguishable from what later came to called the “elements”, i.e., earth, water, air, and fire, each of which was composed of a pair of the four contraries:  earth, cold and dry; water, cold and wet; air, hot and wet; fire, hot and dry.

Aristotle speaks of the contraries as “separated” out from the infinite, and in a sense this is true, but what is critical for the formation of the world-order is the separation of the elements from one another.  Earth, water, air, and fire emerge from a state of homogenous unity in to apeiron as distinct entities, much as in the Theogony the male and female contraries, Sky and Earth, emerge as distinct entities with the opening up of a “gap” (chaos) between them.

The world comes into being, then, when the elements are separated out of this primordial amorphous mass, and from each other, taking their proper place.  As Aristotle explains, Anaximander attributed this separating out to a mechanical process similar to that of a vortex or centrifuge within liquids, in which “like goes to like”, with the heaviest and densest components falling to the center of the vortex, while the lightest and rarest are flung to the outside.

Not coincidentally, this was how the elements were arranged in the existing world-order as the ancient Greeks conceived it:  that is, earth lay at the centre, water enveloping earth in a concentric sphere, air outside water, and outermost of all, the fiery circuit of the heavens.

Patronage, the Arts, and Cut-Throat Begging

Harley Price

Oh to have a munificent patron like Cosimo or Lorenzo de’ Medici in Florence, or Federico da Montfeltro in Urbino, who amassed great libraries for the use of such luminaries as Marsilio Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, Cristoforo Landino, and Pietro Bembo, while supporting them in the vita contemplativa, and underwriting the publication of their books. Take me back, take me back.

The question of patronage of another kind was raised at the end of a class on Ficino’s Commentary on Plato’s Symposium, when one of my students expressed her indignation at the steady reduction in Canada of government subsidies for “the arts”. I was tempted to thank her—though I was restrained by politeness—for relaying the good news. I exerted myself instead to relate her comment back to the general subject (the Renaissance) of the course. How was patronage of the arts in the Renaissance similar to, but different from, that of today’s democratic welfare state? Was the former not more private than public? And even if the Medici, Viscontis, Gonzagas, Sforzas, and Scaligers were mighty princes of their realms, didn’t their political power rather pale by comparison to that of the leaders of modern liberal democracies, whose “liberality” is a function of the coercive authority of their tax collectors.   (Not even France’s Sun King could dream of such sweeping jurisdiction as that possessed by modern elected governments at the command of armies of revenue agents empowered to confiscate half of every citizen’s wealth.)

The princely virtue of liberality is discussed in Catiglione’s Il Cortegiano, when the interlocutor Gasparo Pallavicino adduces the grand public works programs of Alexander the Great and Pope Julius II as noble examples. But Ottaviano Fregoso (Castiglione’s mouthpiece) demurs, arguing that the primary excellence and responsibility of the prince is to rule over a free people with justice and wisdom. The ideal prince, he says, should observe “a reasonable inequality in being generous, in rewarding, in distributing [largesse] according to the differences in merits”. Too often, princes “not only are not secret about it, but summon witnesses and almost make a public proclamation of their generosities”, and “there are many who rob in order to give away, and thus are generous with the property of others”. Evidently, Renaissance humanism had not yet evolved to the point of regarding meritless egalitarianism, or being conspicuously “magnificent” with other people’s money, as virtues.

 

My student represents one of the many voices in a deafening chorus of complaints that is the music of liberalism. Every election cycle, teachers complain of larger class sizes and the cut-backs in education that have purportedly caused them; nurses and health-care workers complain that governments spend less and less on hospitals and so endanger the health of citizens; police unions accuse governments of risking public safety by “slashing” police budgets; transit workers moralize that governments are spending too little on public transit and thereby causing gridlock; public construction unions demand more money to “invest” in our crumbling infrastructure; poverty advocates indict governments of heartlessness in reducing their budgets for public housing, welfare, and the ever-proliferating multitude of social programs; the green energy lobby prophesies the death of planet earth because governments are reducing their subsidies to wind and solar power; hydro workers predict blackouts for the same reason; daycare workers depict an impending apocalypse of infants wandering the streets in diapers because budgets for public daycare have been “gutted”.

Of course, when you look at the numbers, none of this apocalyptic threnody is based in fact. Government budgets for these constituencies (and a burgeoning panoply of others) have increased consistently and ineluctably over the course of every decade since the New Deal.

 

Politics can now be defined as organized begging. In the democracies of the West, there is at least one, and usually more than one, political party whose entire mandate is to complain about soi-disant “shrinking budgets”. (In countries like Greece, Portugal, and Italy, these currently outnumber the individual citizens who are net producers of wealth.) Political parties now resemble industry consortiums, like the Association of Mattress Manufacturers of America, or the International Order of Pork Producers, except that they represent the competing groups of State supplicants.

In the case of the arts, liberals dare not even make a pretense of the vaunted principle of “fairness” as they define it (i.e., redistributing wealth from the rich to the poor). Peruse the typical audiences of State-supported symphonies, operas, theatres, museums, and so on, and you see overwhelmingly affluent white faces, whose tickets have been subsidized by the taxes paid by the middle class, not to mention the working and immigrant poor, who rarely choose, don’t have time for, or can’t afford, the luxury of “art”.

It ought at least momentarily to embarrass the enthusiasts of the munificent State that every interest group that has become dependent upon it clamours to be first and stay longest at the public trough, indicting itself of unreconstructed greed, which it seeks to satisfy in cut-throat, dog-eat-dog (aka “capitalistic”) competition with every other. Ultimately, our universal parasitism becomes a self-cannibalizing exercise, with everyone battening at the expense of everyone else.

Paradise, Purgatory, and Hell: A Dantesque Journey through Northern Italy, Part 5

Harley Price

Airport Insecurity…

“Music” and the “i” Generation…

It took a full half-hour for us to clear passport control in Brussels (about the time it takes illegals to slip across Western borders never to be heard from again). That left forty-five minutes for another one-kilometer dash across the terminal to the security checkpoint followed by a final push to the gate. What they don’t tell you when you purchase those cut-rate connecting flights to Europe is that for a reduced fare you get to enjoy being stripped and molested twice. One oughtn’t to complain about the security regime at airports, knowing that the alternative is being blown out of the air by a terrorist bomb (even if airline passengers face a greater risk of being blown out of the air by the Russian military). And then the fact that a terrorist can secrete (pun unintended) a bomb in his underwear merely demonstrates how futile our vigilance is against anyone determined and masochistic enough to commit suicide by so exquisitely painful a method. (One supposes that Muslims believe in the regeneration of the body in the afterworld, else all those comely virgins would be a waste on the underwear bomber.)

Besides the sheer annoyance of airport security, one should never underestimate the challenge of divesting oneself into those little plastic bins when, after seven hours in the air over the Atlantic, one is sleepless and in orthopedic distress. Extricating one’s shoulders from camera, passport, and computer bags (without getting their straps twisted together); removing coat, sports jacket, belt, and shoes; emptying pockets of bills, change, credit cards, keys, and lighter (oops!); liberating the laptop from its case; and doing it all while a hundred passengers are watching and waiting impatiently in the line behind, takes a degree of coordination and composure that would have taxed Houdini in his prime. Doing it all in reverse on the other side of the metal detector, with the same travelers glaring at you again as you try not to leave anything behind and fumble to get your clothes back on, is likewise no mean test. Over the years of traveling, Mrs. P. and I have left enough items of clothing (hats, scarves, gloves, ties) in the security bins to start a small haberdashery shop. For reasons of soi-disant security (compounded by senility), the guards at Heathrow already have a lifetime supply of my Zippos.

 

One final sprint brought us from security to our departure gate, where we arrived five minutes before take-off, and as the last passengers to board, were subjected to the scowls of another angry mob.

The connecting flight from Brussels to Milan was tolerable enough, save for a passenger across the aisle whose earphones overflowed with an incessant, high-pitched ch-chka-ch-chka-ch-chka. Polluting the atmosphere with the “music” from one’s earphones or car radio is now a form of self-assertion, scarcely more refined than the ritual in which animals lay claim to new territory by urinating around its perimeter. (But then animals don’t urinate into your ears.) In the age of My Computer, My Pictures, and My Music, my music is your music, whether you like it or not. And so one’s ears are inundated by these aural effluents everywhere in our technological age, when the ubiquity of i-Pods, i-Pads, i-Phones—the “i” being the subjective form of the possessive “my”–, and other mobile disturbers of the peace bespeaks our culture’s primordial fear of being alone with its thoughts (if it has any thoughts), and its consequently hopeless addiction to auditory and visual stimulation. If Islamists really wanted to terrorize the population of the West, their most effective tactic would be to disrupt the supply of these adult pacifiers.

Music that is offensive to captive listeners—and how could anything downloadable from i-Tunes not be offensive?–is a form of torture. It was most recently recognized as such in Guantanemo Bay, when President Obama ended it and other cruel interrogation practices on the high moral principle that anything that was instituted by the Bush Administration must be ipso facto wrong. So, Mr. President. You believe in regulation, don’t you? How about it?