Roman Other Worlds

(Bruno, Trier poems below)

In 1974 I hitch-hiked with a friend from England through the then Yugoslavia and down the Greek islands via Mycenae and by ferry to Italy. We were over 24 hours by the side of the road in Naples but eventually an American woman with her three beautiful daughters picked us up in VW van, they were devout Christians following in St Paul’s footsteps. Penniless, we slept out in a wet and dangerous park, lived in squares of pizza but visited the Sistine Chapel and Mussolini’s EUR and I got to see some de Chiricos.

In 1958 a young Australian architecture student arrived in Rome and visited the vegetable market called Campo de’ Fiori, the “Field of Flowers” – the opulence of his writing takes off:

“Bunches of thyme, branches of rosemary, parsley, bundled-up masses of basil filling the air with their perfume. Here, a mountain of sweet peppers: scarlet, orange, yellow, even black. There, a crate filled with the swollen purple truncheons of eggplants. Next to that, a parade of tomatoes, fairly bursting with ripeness—the red egg-shaped San Marzanos for sauce, the broad-girthed slicing tomatoes, the ribbed ones for salads, the green baby ones. Even the potato, a dull-looking growth as a rule, took on a sort of tuberous grandeur in this Mediterranean light.
Then there became apparent something of a kind I had never seen at home in Australia. All this vegetable glory, this tide of many-colored life, this swelling and bursting and fullness, welled up around a lugubrious totem of Death…a vertical totem of bronze darkness and melancholic gravity in the middle of all that riot of colour, and it may take a moment or two to find his name on a plaque half hidden behind the sprays of flowers. It is Giordano Bruno, and even a tyro from Australia had heard of him.” (Robert Hughes, Rome: A Cultural, Visual, and Personal History, 2011).

Giordano Bruno

At that time natural science also developed in the midst of the general revolution and was itself thoroughly revolutionary; it had indeed to win in struggle its right of existence. . . . Calvin had Servetus burnt at the stake when the latter was on the point of discovering the circulation of the blood, and indeed he kept him roasting alive during two hours; for the Inquisition at least it sufficed to have Giordano Bruno simply burnt alive.

Frederick Engels [i]

They were men of vehement nature, of wild and restless character, of enthusiastic temperament, who could not attain to the calm of knowledge. . . . These remarkable individuals really resemble the upheavals, tremblings and eruptions of a volcano which has become worked up in its depths and has brought forward new developments, which as yet are wild and uncontrolled.
Hegel  [ii]

Colosseum, head of poet

Bruno’s earliest works were on mnemonics; he thought memory the key to understanding. He was one of the first to write scientific texts in the vernacular, a challenge to the Church, which decreed Latin to be the language of intellectual discourse (limiting the dissemination of ideas; Copernicus had only been published in Latin). He attacked superstition, an “ass” found everywhere, not only in the church but in courts of law and even in the universities. He wrote and published prodigiously, attacked Catholic and Protestant pedants, and anticipates Descartes by a generation: “Who so itcheth to Philosophy must set to work by putting all things to the doubt.” He argued for the existence of an infinite universe containing an infinite number of worlds similar to the Earth, rejecting the Copernican system, which posited a finite universe bounded by a clamped sphere of stars placed just beyond the solar system. He argued that the sun was not the centre of the universe, but just one star among many, and even speculated that the other worlds would be inhabited.

Bruno returned to Italy was arrested in the spring of 1592, cross-examined on his philosophical works and on January the following year handed over to the Inquisition in Rome under orders of Pope Clement VIII. Imprisoned for six years, he was continually interrogated by the Holy Office and convicted. He recanted, then renewed his “follies” and debated the theologians. Finally, the Inquisition charged Bruno with eight specific acts of heresy, which the church has not revealed to this day.

The discovery of fire was a gift

to fight the wild, its predatory animals

and frigid ice age, was a turning point.

The tree cut down to fuel flame

was a domicile and pasture/supermarket

for birds and insects, mammals and rodents.

Led from his cell in the early hours

of February 16, 1600,

to the Piazza dei Fiori n the Square of the Flowers

and hitched to the stake heaped

with kindling, Bruno pushed away

a crucifix a priest proffered.

So melodramatic, combustible,

everything – appearance, disappearance,

wonder, doubt, the obstinate dead,

wreaths, the muzzled dogs and uniforms,

the flux of an ordinary Wednesday,

the sky a big baby-eyed orifice.

Hair unravelled beneath his stubborn helmet

of bone, nails splintered, skin singed and shed,

lungs burnt, smoke gagged screams

everything – consciousness slammed shut

as eyeballs melted in their sockets

and his head burst into flames.

Fire is a curse, sworn flammable

the flames threw Bruno up

into the hospitable air

the bones are hard to follow

but the embers still warm

in an abundant darkness roving space.

The square is busy day and night,

the horse market has been replaced with vegetables

and the gallows by a statue of Bruno

There is a small ceremony each year on this anniversary

with wreaths laid and speeches made.

Was Bruno was executed because of his belief the earth

revolved around the sun, he appreciated Copernicus,

but never made any observations himself, and had a poor

understanding. Or the infinity of inhabited worlds? Or Pantheism? [iii]

From one world to the other, from the objects of one world to those of the other, no distance but an infinite of moments of separation.

Jacques Roubard[iv]

Außerordentlich: Trier diary

Smooth acceleration bridges the gorge, comfortably breaching                          Wednesday

fortifications French and Austrian engineers took turns to strengthen.               25.9.2007

Their theory tunnelled into practice, pushing us into a forest

where revelatory sunlight glimmers on countless small painted surfaces.

A wood pigeon races us to open pasture where grasses spill dew

and mist curdles in shallows that eddy round an occasional spire

that has attracted modest palaces with beds and a taste for sleep.

The heron perched on top of a tree over a fast flowing river is Brueghel’s,

but it’s tough to imagine armies fighting over this plain – Goths,

Romans, Napoleon’s, the thirty years war, allies and axis.

The sun folds behind cloud triggering a surprise flood of fog,

the whiteness turns dark and for a moment everything can be imagined.

Caverns gouge pale cliffs at Wasserbrillig, pleasure craft swim the confluence

where tufts of light levitate between the swans of Wasserbillig;

we read what we want to see. Across the border, every window in the station

is smashed, graffiti coats the walls. We all want a new world.

⊚

Ink caps push aside the hotel daises;    the steep view maps the city.

An empty hedgehog turns into crushed pine cone, through my shoes

moss lines the stone steps. Pellets of light and noise stop as we

reach the fountain, a buzzard bruises the silence then wheels away.

This may be a where of fairy stories. We fill our waterbottles from a spring

and take the path roses begin, skirting the road and Roman amphitheatre.

Black parasols on slender stems, tangible delicacies, cluster beneath pines,

the swaying tips almost touching. A youthful fox, redcurrant red, steps out

and strolls down the track ahead of us, then picking up our scent

bounds into the trees. The city toils unseen, spreading its wings,

pissing streams of lead, murmuring what might have been

without agriculture or Agricola. Not even sky is incorruptible now.

The Dom is dark, his disappointment; Charles orders lunch in the square

beside one of Constantine’s giant feet; ‘Lovely’ Charles says

grinning at the pretty waitress, ‘Außerordentlich’, then pulls out his other,

“I am a priester”. As the bells ring, I gesture not me.

Thursday

Getting back to sleep is unviable, thick cloud scumbles Markusberg

and Kockelsberg; south, dark forms in a series of recessions tilt

into the valley slipping cloud into the river. A photograph tethers a short

soldier in round glasses to the barracks/prison just above – Sartre saw all this.

Jean Paul’s theory of landscape defaulted to cafés; Balzar or de Flore?

Wasps veer my way following a cursive script of scent and colour,

light oils the towering trees, bird calls stretch the canopy,

song travels meaning, being-for-itself breathy aliveliness.

A cormorant looks around then dives, a heron stares at downstream margins.

I shoot from beneath the Roman bridge, call out ‘Guten tag’ to a tramp whose                       

smoked his hair ginger. He replies cordially from behind a refracting wall

of empties, lying in a good position to study classic construction techniques.

Marx’s birthplace is bourgeois with ‘baroque charm’ and a courtyard;

about to open as a museum, the Nazis invaded and burnt the exhibits.

So what changes things? A poem for breath hardly heard? We walk back

from all the art and history: Constantine’s colossus, a replica carved by 3D modeling;

a stunning fresco of poets, cherubs and beautiful woman; and in the old prison,

Noah and his animals energetically carved into a Christian sarcophagus.

The rain eases on the climb. I take off my cap, steam rises a wayward halo

reminding me of horses, or rather a photograph Steiglitz once took in the snow.

Friday

This scene is accompanied by bird song. Recording, I zoom in picking off

spires of stone, rivulets of light through vineyards, ribs of the Imperial Baths

and the Virgin Mary overlooking the chasm, her light going out.

I think of Sarajevo – not when I was there – the time I wasn’t.

At ground level a beautiful red-veined aerodynamic wing has

successfully buried its sycamore seed head-first in the planet, a leaf hops

like a bird, a dishevelled breeze tickles the hairs on my legs. To be alert

is a start, but begin with ambition, conquer with careless work, wary of order.

⊚

The Roman couples are discreet in death; no holding hands, no acts of love

just eloquence in stone. I’m missing you. Can you make paint a picture of our

love? A unique evolution, ties of love with sex as duet and cadenza, your voice

from Sydney, so husky you almost growled. Can a memorial deliver that?

‘Each monument tells the story of war’, a voice says, ‘If you could show me

what the monument to the Iraq war will look like, I’ll tell you how the war will end.’

On the MilvianBridge, Constantine on horseback tramples Maxentius into the Tiber,

the flesh, the panic, the currents are all chiselled from liquid layers of rock.

Mussolini marched into Rome on the anniversary. A stand displays identity cards,

Jewish names wear Jewish faces ‘together in our common strangeness’.

A monitor shows a photograph of Klaus Barbie, Barbie fading in fading out

shuffled through a pack of other names and faces; we are animals.

I asked a guest at our hotel, an English vicar, why Trier was bombed,

waywardness he thought. A caption states 40% of this ancient city

was destroyed. An attendant explains it was full of German divisions.

War is evergreen, bound in luxury leather or in discount DVDs.

⊚

The Porta Nigra is solid, little wonder the huge structure

has survived, though Napoleon pared it back to Roman.

In the long storied halls carved stones are residue

from the church of St Simeon, a hermit among the ruins.

Climbing, you come face to face with walls formed

from giant blocks of sandstone that history stains black.

The rocks are held together by iron rods

but put in place by the strength of a slave’s muscle.

Ligaments of lift and lever trap laborious pain; who

among us could endure or brave an heroic fear of weakness?

Gravity has us in its grip; Constantine’s fist

the size of a man is broken at the wrist.

⊚

We have visited the three museums showing Constantine                        

and most of the churches, Charles is passionate for the stories

early Christians tell, like their brave refusal to sacrifice beasts.

As for the big C, as anarchy was resuming normal service

he became a role model, killing his wife, murdering rivals and their families,

founding New Rome (later named off him). He was, as Charles says,

a man of his times who crushed the Arian heresy (my very own)

and played it safe baptised on his death bed. Charles turns to me,

“What if Constantine has been a mistake?” His story of pastoral care,

parish politics, funerals and weddings is fidgeting. “What if

making Christianity a state religion has made it all pomp and circumstance?”

“I want a church of the people”, he says as we walk into a bar.