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September, Venice
Venice is so beautiful: the sea, the sky, the hues..! It is incredible,
unreal; it is as if they are not genuine, they are false, one is in a dream.
A gorgeously shaped girl is swimming nearby. It truly is incredible
to see this body so close at hand. It is not reality, it is a delusion, a vision,
a fantasy.
As though the phenomenon of reality must be ugly, vulgar,
common, ordinary, so that when one sees something extraordinary,
beyond reality, uncommon, it seems unreal, mythical...
To roam, to roam, to ascend mountains on foot, to descend into the
vales, to walk through fields, through forests, by the seashores, through
deserts, rocks, rivers, to rove and to ponder, to ponder the whole
universe, to ponder about the whole universe.
To ponder, to be nostalgic, to reminisce, to dream...to dream about
one's beloved woman but to avoid beautiful women. They are
tormentors, inflictors of suffering, inflamers and scorchers of perennial
desire. To rest by the spring, near the icy, clear, limpid spring, beneath mountain breezes, beneath the shadows of trees.
Venice - only in the world of the imagination can it be this
beautiful. Seemingly, what we see is not reality but a vision, a dream, a fairytale, a magic apparition, picture...a dream come true.
At the beach, at factories, at dancing halls, and everywhere, there
is music, jazzband, song, dance, and the meaning of all these
phenomena is the being, the soul - love. They are playing love, singing
love, dancing love, gasping love, love, love. And everywhere, in great
part, it is the youth that are the actors, the knights, the soldiers, the clerks,
the servants of love.
Love!
In the evenings the sea is peaceful; small, light waves tremble
upon the sea...
Ah, my dear Missak, you died so prematurely! You are no longer,
you have returned to earth, the eternal element. But your soul exists in
mine, your eyes look into my heart, your voice is in my soul.
The writer Angel, a Viennese, said:
What can one write about these days? On matters of love - no;
history - no; society - no...only the animals do I love - the horses, the cows, the donkeys and especially the dogs. All these are loftier than man! They are noble, orderly, good, though they donot articulate, do not comprehend language, they do sensevoice, movements, looks, kindness, whether they are loved ornot, and they behave lovingly toward their masters. The wildanimal, too, in the same way, understands petting, loves andbecomes sweet. Only when they get old, they become nervous,capricious, irritable, launenhaftig...
and he ran to give a horse a piece of sugar.
While Brosh1 said: It is my dream to own a cottage in Torcello, a small yard, a good library, a warm fireplace in the winter and, before anything, a dog, a dog for a companion, a friend to converse with.
I have become old now, my feelings toward life have changed and
I am indifferent toward women; I do not understand love and female
charm, beauty. But if, suddenly, I were twenty years of age and Shushik
were here on this moonlit night, at the beach...the world would be
different...
In Venice; am I living a dream or is it a fairytale? Am I living a
fairytale or am I in reality?
At the Lido, the night is altogether still; the buildings, the trees, the
lights reflect in slumbering waters. They are more beautiful, more
charming, more poetic than the real homes, the real objects whose
reflections they are.
The moon in the lake is poetry, while in the sky - reality, and less beautiful, less charming.
Over reality, which is our earth, the moon sorrowfully glows, slides
away like a dream.
An Italian's ear is bestowed with great talent to absorb and to
repeat every song, every sound.
Music, by means of voices, sounds, constructs palaces, gardens,
mountains. With its sound-colors, it paints forests, rivers, castles.
Venice is so beautiful, such unending, undepletable beauty that
each day, it seems one is seeing it anew, and it has so many layers,
opulent, luxurious wealth, that every day one finds something new. a
new palace, a portal, a statue, a column, a network of iron windows.
The silence of the blue seas at night, in the evening, in
peacefullness.
On moonlit nights, the blue song, the swash of the sea.
What a crystalline night this is! A crystal moon, a crystalline sky, sapphire, sapphrine...
The doves at St. Mark's follow their feeders with assuredness; they
perch upon their shoulders, their palms, and truly follow them without
shame of being materialistic; they chase after food, stroke the feeders.
Animals, on the whole, are not hypocritical.
Humanity has lived hundreds of thousands of years, perhaps a
million years, and has kept on dying, but it has not achieved an instinct
for death, a sense of reconciliation with death. Do they not say that by living, by living and experiencing, the animal develops a sense, a gift, a mechanism, an instrument, a feeling, a talent, but the more it lives the more afraid of death it becomes...and considers death an unnatural phenomenon with which it cannot be reconciled, and it protests always and always. The will, the desire for life, for living, is the essence of human, animal and plant life. Once they are born, they want to live forever and not die. And the spirit, despite the tide against it, struggles for life. The greater part of the tree has died but one branch is still flowering, putting out new snoots, it wants to live.
Man involuntarily falls into sentimentalism. On my way to St. Mark's, I saw a dead pigeon in the hands of a policeman who was taking it away from the vibrant square where its companions were flying aloft, while it - dead, was to fly no longer, no longer was it to savor the blue of the sky and that of the sea...About that time I saw Countess Marozzini.
She was passing through an archway: aged, bent over, homely, wrinkled. I had seen her passing through the same spot in 1901. She was
buoyant then, fluttering, joyous, gay, winged, beautiful, enjoying
everyone's admiration. All consuming time! You have so many ways of
wearing out, aging, killing the hardest matter; granite, for example, which through cold, heat, air, wind, rain, you chip, plane, corrode, destroy and triturate, reduce to nothing much less people...
One of the contemporary, Italian, comic actors whose mere
appearance on stage in the past was enough to trigger a storm of
laughter, now, having aged, has withdrawn, and near Naples has built a
villa where he lives tranquilly. On the face of one of the walls he has
written: Now it is my turn to laugh.
To visit Venice again was a remote dream.
From dream (Venice), it became transformed into reality (Milano).
At the Cafe Florian yesterday evening, an old woman, an
aristocrat - deteriorated, stooping, shrunk - sat with her grand- child - a
robust, slender, beautiful, youthful girl. At one time the grandmother was
like her, and some time later, she, too, will be like her grandmother - a
ruin, a wreck. Everything is a question of time; yesterday, today and
tomorrow; yesterday it was I, today - you, tomorrow - he...
The cedar of Lebanon in the garden of St. Lazar monastery was
planted approximately in the eighteen sixties by Father Eduard
Hyurmyuz.2
The hill near San Zenon,3 used to belong to the Germanic Ezzelini
princes of the 12th-13th centuries - aweful, terrible tyrants.
Subsequently, the people rebelled and in the prince's presence cut
down his wife and children. They put a bridle in his mouth, drove him
with a whip, and killed him. Then they destroyed the castle, the
foundations of which still remain, and on a section of it, they built a
church. An imperious looking tower is extant upon which is inscribed:
The peoples' rage filled with suffering over twenty years, slaughtered the tyrant in his den along with his progeny (annihilated the seed), putting on notice anyone who wants to be like the tyrant with as much retaliation.
A statue. The calf is sucking milk, its mother is licking the calf. A
moving and domestic sight.
A statue. The escape to Egypt of Jesus and Joseph. They are
resting under a tree, they are sleeping. Joseph is awake and is guarding
them. The donkey, too, is sleeping with its back resting against them,
sleeping like a human with a wise face. The donkey has been depicted
with human wisdom, smart, alert, as though a human were sleeping.
The Almighty's touch is upon it.
I have seen a cluster of statues depicting the holy family's escape
to Egypt. They are traveling through the desert, at night, but the infant
Jesus is surrounded by light. From afar, from the crest of a rock, a
reverential lion is watching piously, with timidity and with respect.
Italy. There is so much of the arts! Thousands of palaces,
churches, paintings, statues, portraits...wonders. Marble, colors of
porphyry, granite and a variety of stones, multicolored marbles and who
knows how many types of fine stones...
So beautiful is Codoro, the golden house; the floor of the hall is multicolored marble mosaic. What a ceiling, what columns, paintings,
statues! The Pieta in clay is magnificent, natural, moving; it's as if it is our
Misak, wounded, dead, fallen upon mother's knees...
The sea, the salt and moisture are chipping, eating away uncompromisingly at the structures of Venice, at the marble and at the
granite. Nothing can withstand the stubborn routine of the elements.
The church of the Ezzelini's on the hill of San Zenon is rustic
in style. Naturally, this style will affect, influence the villagers more, just as
our style, our song - over us. Nationhood, nationality resides in style, art,
song. |
