Day 26: Czeslaw Milosz, Lu Xun, Italo Calvino
I am starting off the new focus on CaLD writers with three writers from Poland, China and Italy. I am really looking forward to reading more international stuff.
Czeslaw Milosz - Envoy
It is your destiny so to move your wand,
To wake up storms, to run through the heart of storms,
To lay bare a monument like a nest in a thicket,
Though all you wanted was to pluck a few roses.
Last year I read Milosz's collection Rescue from 1945 and fell in love with it. The poems are both beautiful and harrowing, being written mostly during the Nazi occupation and destruction of Warsaw. Through the poems which span from 1936 to 1945, we see the sweet poet at the start of the book lose both hope and innocence as his city is destroyed and almost everyone he has ever known get killed. I don't know how Milosz manages to puncture the loss and despair with aesthetic beauty, but he does it again and again.
This poem is the shortest, but it feels like the thesis. I have read the collection a couple times now, so I thought I'd choose one as an excuse to recommend the book.
Penguin has reissued Rescue as part of their cheap white classic editions. I highly recommend buying this if you see it, even if you don't enjoy poetry so much. You might after reading Rescue.
Lu Xun - Diary of a Madman, and, The Comedy of The Ducks
Both these stories were headscratchers. I had to listen to a couple lectures on the first story to really understand it.
Diary of a Madman is a very important story in modern China, where Lu Xun more or less called for all readers to re-evaluate the dominant ideology of confucianism- one which encouraged the abuse of power between classes.
The story is really a classic Chicken Little (or conspiracy theorist) parable in which a schizophrenic madman discovers that his whole society is founded on cannibalism. No one will listen to him, and the ones who admit he is right tell him to keep quiet about it. Finally at the end, forced to keep the status quo, he prays that future children will wisen up.
I like how the story is experimental with its structure, and how it gradually changes our attitude towards the narrator. The parable itself is still very relevant and I am surprised this story is not a common reference among conspiracy theorists - probably due to the fact that the story is Chinese, relies on a reader having historical knowledge, and is not very accessible.
I didn't Madman was very entertaining, but I am glad I read it and I learned some things about the context of China before the cultural revolution.
A Comedy of Ducks was a more enjoyable story (though I use the term story loosely). It is more a humorous anecdote about Lu Xun's Japanese-Russian writer friend who came to stay, bought some tadpoles and then some ducklings. The ducklings ate all the tadpoles. Then the friend went away and Lu Xun was left with four adult ducks. Lu Xun wrote the tale as a farewell to his friend. The friend returned one month after he wrote it.
I find it a charming story, like listening to my grandma recount interesting events in her life. The events don't need to have an arc or twist or plot. I just like to inhabit my grandma's world from another time for a while.
By the time the ducks had shed their yellow down, Eroshenko began yearning for Mother, Russia and hurried on to Chita in Siberia.
By the time the frogs began their summer chorus, the ducklings were fully grown up - two white, two pie bald - and their chirps had deepened into quacks. Though the lotus pond was now far too small for them, luckily my brother's house was built on low-lying ground, and the courtyard flooded the moment the rains fell. And they spent the summer - splashing, bobbing, flapping, quacking - as happy as could be.
Italo Calvino - The Traveller on the Map
"In short, a geographical map, even though it is a static object, presupposes an idea of narrative; it is conceived on the basis of a journey; it is an Odyssey."
Calvino, the scholar of the imagination, talks about maps throughout history, specifically the more strange or interesting ones.
- An 18th century Japanese roll that measures 19 metres and represents the whole journey from Tokyo to Kyoto. There are no people in it, so the viewer travels it as the look.
- Vincenzo Coronelli who made over 500 maps and amused himself by inserting little people doing dumb stuff on the map, as well as jokes: "Here people say there is an island, but this is false, and I won't put one there." or "I found I had a space to fill so I inserted this caption."
- Opicino de Canistris, an outsider artist of the 14th century who copied out maps of the mediterranian in rotated and rearranged forms to fill with pictures and anecdotes of his life and sexual experiences.
- Similarly, the 17 century society of Precieuses, a group of 60 aristocratic women, drew psychogeographic maps, most notably the famous Map of Love.
- Four generations of the Cassini family completed a detailed map of France over 60 years that:
occupies a whole stand and overflows from the walls on to the floor. Every forest in France is drawn tree by tree, every church has its bell-tower, every village is drawn roof by roof, so that one has the dizzying feeling that beneath one’s eyes are all the trees and all the bell-towers and all the roofs of the Kingdom of France. And one cannot help remembering Borges’s story about the map of the Chinese Empire which coincided precisely with the physical extent of the Empire.
This essay has a lot of interesting artists, ideas and historical details. It is very useful for my art school mapping project, in which I am drawing an autobiographic map of the city of Perth, populated by incidences ans encounters. I wished I had found this essay when I started it, as I have populated mine with Where's Wally type detail. Calvino writes:
"Yet it is precisely these deserted, uninhabited maps that arouse in our imagination the desire to live inside them, to grow small enough to find one’s way amid the dense signs, to run through these maps, to lose oneself in them."
So What does a map filled with little people do differently? That is for me to figure out.