Docs and musings

The Roanoke Times occasionally runs short vignettes from readers under the heading “Cornershot.” I had a couple of these published that I’m saving here. Condensation is something you learn from doing a lot of longer writing.

Tranquil Moments Along the Blue Ridge Parkway
Dec. 21, 2019

By some stroke of luck, one of our sons has bought a farm on the Blue Ridge Parkway across from an overlook that faces the North Carolina Piedmont. We have been visiting every week this fall, staying in a little house temporarily without water or bathroom, like in the old days.

The Blue Ridge Parkway’s purpose is not transportation but to reveal the “charm and interest of the native American countryside,” wrote Stanley Abbott, the parkway’s resident architect who got it started in the 1930s. Its native-stonework bridges and hemlock and rhododendron passageways make it the loveliest highway east of the Mississippi.

One morning, the tranquil light that fills the house while we have coffee suddenly went dark, then came back. We thought the power had blinked. After a minute, it happened again. Then we realized — a lonely car on the parkway had blocked the rising sun for an instant. Then another.

There was something miraculous about that alignment. The sun comes rolling in from the Outer Banks to the Blue Ridge Mountains, and winks at us in our little parkway house. Outside, I see the shadows of the parkway’s infrequent cars floating across the opposite ridge of cow pastures, the natural boundary of Virginia’s ancient valleys. For a moment, we’re smack on the American hinge.

The Tattoo Taboo
May 20, 2017

Whatever happened to the tattoo taboo?

Remember when only men who had spent hard time in prison or in the lower ranks of the military had tattoos? It was a class thing.

Now it’s an identity thing. Identity is a deep mystery, down there with the secrets of self and soul. Recently have we come to realize its force. Gender identity can’t be hidden away anymore. Our political identity has become more important than rational argument, and persuasion almost impossible against the power of identity.

I have ancestors who took genteel pride in a family crest from Scotland, with a lion rampant bearing a dagger and the Cumming motto: Courage.

They wouldn’t have besmirched the family honor with a tattoo (although an uncle overly enthusiastic about FDR’s National Recovery Administration had the blue eagle and “NRA — We do our part” tattooed on a forearm, just before the NRA was abolished as unconstitutional).

But I wonder what Major Cumming would’ve thought of our second son coming home as a Marine with a tattoo on his chest — of the Cumming heraldic crest. His older brother followed suit.

Even the flagrantly rich are tattooed now. Why else would L’Orléal Paris offer something called Infallible Total Cover, Nude Beige 303?

The thing about America that struck Gutzon Borglum was bigness. His parents had emigrated from little Denmark to the Wild West. So when their son John Gutzon de la Mothe Borglum was born in Bear Lake, Idaho, in 1867, the little guy awoke under big skies in big empty lands. When he was seven, the Borglums moved to Nebraska, which was like Idaho that way.

It wasn’t just the land and sky, but something about the size of men’s character that seemed almost comically huge. It made America’s story like a big children’s book with full-page illustrations. Europe was always having little wars you had to act out with lots of little metal soldiers, and maybe a painted little Napoleon. America had just one great big war. It was full of giants like Lincoln, Grant, Lee, and Stonewall Jackson. It was a made-in-America war, and one that made America, the only American war that seemed to matter. True, America had been born in earlier wars. But even in those wars, all that you could imagine was the bigness of men like Washington and Jefferson, or that big painting by Benjamin West called “The Death of General Wolfe.”

Gurtzon Borglum studied painting, seriously, which meant moving to Europe. He studied art in Paris in the early 1890s, had paintings and sculptures shown in the best salons, then moved to London for success in royal circles. He absorbed the Arts and Crafts idea, the British movement that insisted that beauty is never produced by a machine but is almost always present in anything produced by hand in the traditional cottage ways.

He moved to New York, where he made the first piece of sculpture bought by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and sculpted the twelve apostles for the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. “But he soon turned toward what his wife, Elizabeth Janes Putnam, a scholar in cuneiform and other Middle Eastern scripts, described as ‘the emotional value of volume,’” says his biography in the Encyclopedia Britannica. “Reviving the ancient Egyptian practice of carving gargantuan statues of political figures in natural formations of rock, he executed from a six-ton block of marble a colossal head of President Abraham Lincoln that was placed in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C.”

Yesterday, I discovered that Gutzon Borglum lived in 1924 and ‘25 in a beautiful house about a mile from where my wife and I just moved east of Atlanta. In the DeKalb History Center, which occupies the old stone courthouse in the Square in Decatur, Georgia, I saw an exhibit about the town where he lived, Avondale Estates. This was built as a kind of theme-park proto-suburb, a completely Tudor village modeled on Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon. (Another bit of history: The first Waffle House was there, now a Waffle House museum. Another bit of history: its ordinance prohibiting yard signs kept it the most white community around Atlanta, since “For Sale” signs were illegal.) The exhibit displayed an article about Gutzon Borglum from the Atlanta Constitution of September 26, 1915.

The article describes Borglum visiting the area several times and getting excited about his plans to carve figures of up to 50 feet height into Stone Mountain, about nine miles northeast of here. He said his colossus would “stand alone in memorial and monumental work in the world.” He had been invited by the United Daughters of the Confederacy and owners of Stone Mountain, newly collaborating as the Stone Mountain Confederate Memorial association.

When I read this 1915 article on the wall of the Avondale Estates exhibit, I had just finished reading an opinion column in the New York Times that morning about this period, when President Woodrow Wilson was officially segregating the U.S. government and his administration was naming military bases after Confederate generals. Wilson, a religious Southerner who was president of Princeton University, fastened the myth of a “Lost Cause” of honorable Southern warriors into federal policy. “Why America Joined the Cult of the Confederacy,” the column in the Times, points out that this was also a time of community-wide spectacle lynching to terrorize Blacks throughout the Deep South.

The article in The Atlanta Constitution doesn’t say anything about race. It’s all about “patriotic women,” honor, nobility and “the heroism of the confederate cause.” And it seems that Gutzon Borglum, the Danish-American from out West, was fully taken in by this perspective. He even joined the Klan. To him, the Civil War was America’s Iliad, a heroic tragedy (having nothing to do with emancipation) worthy of grandiose art. The article quotes at length something he had written in an art magazine about memorializing Lincoln, which was underway in the construction of the Lincoln Memorial.

Borglum didn’t design the statue of a sitting Abraham Lincoln (which was made of Georgia marble), or its giant temple. But he described what they should express. “A simple, honest, sincere, inspired, true creature that knew the straight road and went right through and brushed the unimportant aside. You will pick the particular giants who built this country – Hamilton, Washington, Jefferson, Franklin. Those men will have an honorable place in that monument, and out of that group, going way back into the early eighteen hundreds, will arise this boy. We will assemble Grant, Sherman, Sheridan, Seward, Stanton, and you will see him associated with them down through the friezes that will ornament this temple whenever it is built. . . .On the other side of the monument you will see struggling honestly pushing forward the southern cause, Lee, Stuart, Johnson, and then you will see them all united and the whole thing will close.”

This was how the Civil War looked to a certain artistic mind, as it looked at the time to an overwhelmingly white population outside the South, eager for healing, reunion and progress without having to face the meaning of the Great Migration out of the South. Borglum wasn’t deterred, if he even knew about it, by the “impressive services” held that Thanksgiving of 1915 atop Stone Mountain by a “new” secret organization calling itself the Knights of the Ku Klux Klan (according to another Atlanta Constitution article on the wall of exhibit on Avondale Estates).

Borglum moved to Avondale Estates in 1924 to begin overseeing the carving of Confederate leaders on horseback, embossed on the side of the great granite outcropping. They remain there today. But the sculptor got only as far as the head of Robert E. Lee in 1925. That’s when Gutzon Borglum had a falling out with the United Daughters of the Confederacy and left. The split was said to be about money. I do wonder, though, if it was really about vision.The next sculptor re-designed the plan at a smaller scale, and blasted away Borglum’s head of Lee.

Borglum found another monumental project after that. He moved to South Dakota and created Mount Rushmore.

The characters in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina are not allegories or didactic figures that project the dogmas of Tolstoy’s Christian thought (as he does in The Kingdom of God is Within You). They are fully formed human beings, living in their place and time on stage where Tolstoy creates them. Their background gives them life, not an excuse, each having a moral place in the aristocratic social order of Russia in the 1860s. None is without sin, but one who seems to come close to Tolstoy’s Christian ideal is a minor character called Mademoiselle Varenka.

Varenka shows up at a summer spa with her invalid guardian, Madame Stahl. She appears serenely content taking care of Madame Stahl and other invalids who need her help around the spa. Her physical presence – “handsome rather than plain, in spite of the sickly hue of her face. She would have been a good figure, too, if it had not been for her extreme thinness and the size of her head, which was too large for her medium height” – was a fascinating attraction to “Kitty” Shtcherbatsky.

Kitty was in torment, having squandered her moment of high vitality, beauty and potential by rejecting the marriage proposal of the idealist Konstantin (Levin) Dmitrievitch Koznishev in expectation of a better proposal from the dashing military officer Vronsky. Kitty loved both, but in different ways that she failed to understand in the bloom of her innocence. Her rejection of Levin, and Vronsky’s rejection of Kitty (though nothing was said by either, Vronsky fell hopelessly in love with married Anna Karenina at that fateful ball in Moscow) left Kitty both empty (thinking of Levin) and humiliated (thinking of Vronsky). She fell sick, and so was at the spa, where Varenka’s appearance seemed to offer an answer to Kitty’s emptiness and humiliation. Kitty was obsessively attracted to Varenka.

As many Christians today might recognize, Varenka was in the perfect position to take Kitty’s desire to know Varenka’s secret as an opportunity to “share the Gospel.” Varenka related to everyone with friendly ease, showing her social polish, musical skill and education with Kitty’s circle but also responding gracefully to any duties or demands from the hideous invalids. The watering-spot scene conjures Jesus’s miracle on the Sabbath at the pool in Bethesda in John 5, where the invalid was unable to reach the pool whenever the water was troubled. (I have seen similar watering spots in Rockbridge Baths and Hot Springs, the Virginia equivalent in the 1870s of that Russian scene).

But Varenka doesn’t preach. She doesn’t seem to be burdened with some gospel obligation, other than her duties as an adopted orphan of the sickly Madame Stahl. With amazing intuition, Varenka tells Kitty not to be ashamed of her experience with men in her earlier days, because all of that is unimportant. Kitty wonders then, well, what IS important? She asks in passionate silence with her eyes: “What is it, what is this of such importance that gives you such tranquility? You know, tell me!” Varenka doesn’t say, as if she can’t hear the question and maybe has no answer, but goes on doing her duty with “the calm and dignity so much to be envied.”

Out on the red-tiled terrace off the top floor of our Collegio Internazionale, there are many miracles. In one direction, the pride of Urbino – a bell tower that can surprise with alleluias through the old brick alleyways, and behind that, the glory of the Duomo. In the other direction, nature’s plotted palette of slant fields, flowers and row trees, backed by the two mountains framing Furlo Gorge.

But these are nothing compared to the miracle of the swifts.

They dart overhead in the bluest of skies, clearing it of invisible bugs as if to make that sky more perfect than human imagination could make it. When it’s cleared by the swifts, God brings on the pinks and reds of sunset.

I have been out on the empty terrace at dawn, pretending I know yoga but really just there to watch for the swifts. There are a lot more of them at dusk, when the ieiMedia faculty family gathers, furnishing the terrace with chairs, tables and a feast of local foods and wine.

The swifts seem to strafe and dive-bomb us like Spitfires. They are swifter than the eye, or our cameras, can follow.

I’ve read that swifts may be the fastest creatures on earth, built for speed and surprise. The Romans named them “no legs,” because they never saw them land, though we know they rest in vertical surfaces inside towers and chimneys. They are elegantly designed for speed, in points like a stellar polyhedron. The wings taper to dagger points, the small head a mere bump, the tail a tapered point until it divides like a clothes pin to make a quick turn. The quick turns outsmart – out-dart – the bugs (except those lucky enough to enter through our wide-open bedroom window). A small squadron of swifts whooshes over our heads, and we instinctively and pointlessly duck, then laugh.

I remember the end of a little poem by Robert Graves, “Flying Crooked.” It’s about the cabbage white butterfly, an obvious metaphor for those of us who feel a little like Robert Graves – fools whose “crooked flight” (through education, wilderness and life) brings us to miracles like Urbino. Compared to the amazing swifts, we’re all like that crooked-flying butterfly.

He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

I am Lazarus come from the dead to tell you all. No, that’s not what I meant at all.

Still positive from Covid today, staying positive in my room. But I’m more like those perplexed in the marketplace on the day of Pentecost. I watch TV police-dramas in which Italian is dubbed on American actors pretending to be actual Americans who murdered a lover, and I can’t really follow it. It’s not enough to know every other word. Questo I know. And something about sbaglio.

I look up the Italian for “wrong.” They don’t seem to have a word for wrong in the moral sense. It’s just “non” something, like niente di male (you haven’t done anything wrong). Dante’s Beatrice called sin mankind’s grande errore. Sbaglio means a mistake. Morally wrong is non giusto, not fair, unjust.

Right and wrong, in Italian roots, are about justice. In high school I learned to recite Cicero’s famous oration on the Cataline conspiracy. O tempora, o mores. I haven’t studied Cicero since then, but I believe that he and other Italian political philosophers (Livy, Machiavelli, Scorsese, Coppola) gave justice its architecture. Justice sits on Roman columns.

For something to be right, it needs to be fair. But life isn’t fair. Is it fair that I got Covid, even as I was doing everything right? Machiavelli had an answer for that, according to a great lecture I just watched on “The Prince” by a Cambridge historian. The unfairness of life was a fact called fortuna. To the classical Romans, the randomness of good luck and bad was almost a goddess, Fortuna. Machiavelli agreed.

But fortuna wasn’t fate. It could be coaxed and opposed, to some extent, by the other great force in human affairs that Machiavelli seized on, called virtù. There’s a whole history of philosophy behind that word, including Greek ethics, Roman “manliness” and the Christian cardinal virtues. But Machiavelli gave all that a Machiavellian twist. The ethical “virtù” of a good guy would be fine if people were good, he said. But they’re not. So an individual with virtù needed the good judgment to know when to be “just,” based on a provisional trust, when to have “courage” (a virtue, but one shared with an animal, the lion) and when to be “prudent” (like a fox, even with guile and deception). But what about Christian ethics, and Cicero? Machiavelli has a thin smile that says: Don’t be stupid.

But I keep going back to fortuna. I wonder if beneath this is something that theoretical science seems to have verified – randomness. At the subatomic level, as in the cosmos, there seems to exist a pure randomness. There’s a randomness, too, in the mutations that make life evolve, and triggered our daughter’s cancers. We create a surrogate for this randomness when we shuffle cards to play a game, but pure randomness is beyond simply not knowing the physical laws and conditions of something that seems random. In my humble opinion, it’s not even in God’s control, but it’s at the heart of Creation, beyond any laws. Then there are laws governing the order of things, and that’s at the other extreme of meaninglessness – because pure order admits of no freedom. Cell division and energy exchanges, animal behavior and optics, all following a solemn order.

And that leaves us humans. . .in the middle. In the muddle. Italy seems to be the perfect place to be there, whether sick or well, among friends and the beauty of a Renaissance city. I can sneak out onto a tiled terrace for warming sun, or to watch the swifts darting through the twilight and far below, little cars winding away on a curve that passes a little road called Niccolò Machiavelli.

I am in an unusual prison cell, isolated in Room 54 of the Collegio Internazionale, in Urbino, because I have Covid. The Italians require seven days of isolation from the time of my “extremely positive” test results yesterday afternoon. The pharmacist gave me the document for that (got my passport back, but forgot the 3 euros change for the 12-euro test. Brain fog.). I’ll need another test, with certified negative result, after seven full days. Seven is better than 40, which is the Italian word that gave us “quarantine,” from the old practice of having crews stay on board in anchorage in the days of plagues.

What’s most unusual about this cell is its view out double windows that can be flung open. It’s a beautiful view.  The aged terracotta tiles slanting up on the building 10 feet away, across the narrow cobblestone street four floors down, is all I can see from my sickbed. But leaning out of the window, I can see a whole gorgeous world. In an instant, I fall in love with that world again. “There is no world without Verona’s walls,” Romeo says, and I see what he means. To the right, beyond more slanting roofs of fishscale tiles and TV antennae, I see the campanile bell tower and dome of the Duomo, Urbino’s cathedral. To the left, I see beyond more tile roofs the green landscape of cedar-fringed hills, terraced farmland with the yellow flowers called ginestra, and the beginning of the Apennine mountains. Looking up, the deep blue sky of an Adriatic morning. Down, the alley that is no longer boisterous with University of Urbino students yelling and singing their obscene graduation song, but at peace.

This peace floats up, like the breeze I see gently playing with the tablecloth hanging on the railing next to clothes on clotheslines. Italians know that sunlight is better than an energy-wasting dryer. The Italians will need to find more ways to reduce their dependence on Russian energy now. But it’s not politics that strikes me, looking out this window on the world. It’s sheer beauty.

In his novel “Lancelot,” not his best, Walker Percy has a character who narrates the entire book from a jail cell. The character is clearly crazy, but it’s in his sickness that he sees things more clearly. And he notices how the narrowness of his jail cell’s view of some tiny slice of New Orleans gives him the attention needed to really see. That’s what I feel looking out this window. Libby has moved to the room on the other side of one wall. She has brought me coffee.

If this is Covid for a 70-year-old man fully vaccinated with one booster, I pray for the protection needed by anyone who has not been vaccinated. I have the symptoms of a bad cold. But I know this highly contagious variant of Covid-19 (I’m sure I caught it from a 30-second conversation with three of our students at the open-night reception, one of whom tested positive two days later) can be deadly for the unvaccinated. It is wilding through the body, looking for weird ways to wreck havoc. Fortunately, I can tell, my immune system is there to stop it. And that’s why I feel rotten, but alive to this incredible window view.

URBINO, Italy – These American undergraduates are getting their orientation from Mirko Marinelli, a director of GEV, the outfit that runs their dormitory. It’s a remarkable building — palatial, literally: a 15^th century palace, the Palazzo Chiocci, which contemporary Italian designers and contractors recently spent two years reconstructing for visiting students.

The work of the designers ought to win a big award. It’s the perfect expression of the Italian respect for historical buildings (especially from the Renaissance; especially here in Urbino) and functional, energy-saving modern material living. The outside is preserved – old brick held together with iron bolts or new plaster and a four-panel double wood door. Inside, preserving the vaulted ceilings, the new floors are now close enough to bang your head if you’re not careful. Rooms in a maze are accented in smooth wood and elegant metal railings. There are recycle bins, exposed beams, and a bathroom for each bedroom, with bidet, two-level toilet flushing and a shower.

Mirko’s orientation seemed to express Italian values as well. These may seem, at first, disorienting. From the perspective of America’s politics today, they would be controversial. But they are, merely, mature. Italy went through its Fascism 80 years ago. This far from that, Italians seem freer, happier, humbler and more connected across generations than Americans today. In the post-WWII years, American school children were taught to appreciate the stability of the American two-party political system and its peaceful Presidential succession, compared to Italy’s multi-party system and its constant changing of governments. Now look. After the Jan. 6 insurrection and the party of “that’s your Reality, not mine,” Italy seems a better system.

Mirko advises:

• Respect the cleaning lady, Francesca. She will clean your floor and your toilet once a week, but you must keep your floor clear, and clean and change your own sheets.
• Only students registered with the police to be staying here, after turning over passports for 24 hours, may be in the building.

• Separate your waste into recycle bins for glass, aluminum, paper, plastic and cardboard. Failing to do this is illegal.

• If too many are using electricity or Wi-Fi at the same time, these might shut off.

• Don’t leave the door open, or a city cat might enter. (What happened to one cat after a month stuck inside is a story that gets a sympathetic reaction from the students.) Urbino pays a city worker to feed the city cats (who keep the rat and mice population down).

These kinds of rules, like the registration on gun ownership, might seem to restrict freedom. But they are really rules for living with maximum freedom in a world of limited resources and respectful relationships. The kind of world we want, isn’t it?