Face Masks, the War, and the Virgin Mary of Prato

 

This image can be found in the Church of St. Joseph in the city of Prato, near Florence, Italy. It was made in 1909 by an unknown author. Clearly inspired by Byzantine images, it doesn't attain the hieratic beauty of the ancient icons of the Virgin Mary, but it has a certain power that can't be missed. Amazingly, it has a cult of followers who write their thoughts on a notepad provided by the church. 

I was discussing with a friend a few days ago about face masks. We were commenting on the stunt of an Italian journalist who had himself photographed while swimming in the sea, fully masked. My friend said something like, "what's the point of even mentioning the subject? There is no evidence in the scientific literature that face masks have any effect in stopping virus transmission. That clinches it." I wasn't convinced. It is because, even in this scorching summer in Florence, some people still insist on wearing face masks in public. Mainly, they are children and old people. Just a few, but they do not disappear -- stubbornly sticking to their idea of safety. 

There came to my mind an anecdote about Niels Bohr, the famous scientist. Someone asked him, "how come that a serious scientist as you are keeps a horseshoe nailed above the entrance door of your home? Don't you think you should reject these old superstitions?" Bohr is said to have answered, "They say that it brings good luck even to those who don't believe in it."

I think that people who wear masks while walking in the open reason very much in similar terms: "you never know, it might help." It is the same philosophy of the people who say a prayer while being shelled in war. Unlikely to help but, you know, it might. 

So, about things you never know whether they could work, let me tell you a little story about myself. This Summer, I was walking in a former industrial area of the city of Prato, now mainly residential. Prato is not part of the standard tourist tours of Tuscany, but it is a city full of surprises, with its traditions, its monuments, its political history of workers' rebellions. 

I walked past a church. It didn't impress me with its "rationalist" style architecture, it looked like an industrial building.  But something made me retrace my steps and go inside. There, I found the image of the Virgin Mary that you see at the beginning of this post. Maybe not a masterpiece (and you won't find reproduced in the Web, anywhere), but touching in many senses. The Byzantines had found a way to depict the Virgin Mary in a way that no one who is not blind can miss. 

So, there was this remarkable image, but even more remarkable was the presence of a notebook where people were writing their supplications to the Virgin Mary. Sometimes written in uncertain calligraphy, normally very simple in their requests for health and happiness. Here is an example:

Not easy to decipher, but the first note asks for happiness for someone named (maybe) "Aurora." The third one is a single line saying, "please, holy Mary, make all of us be well." How could you criticize that?

Now, there is an obvious theological problem, here. Let's assume that the Madonna has the ear of the Almighty (her son, although just one third of it, or something like that). Then, why should she do or not do something depending on whether someone marks something on a notepad in a Church? If she is a good lady, as she is supposed to be, why does she need to be prodded in this way to bring health and happiness to people?

These are theological mysteries beyond my capability of answering. I can just tell you that, today, I took a decision. I went back to that church, opened up that notebook, and I wrote down my own supplication. It went like this, "please, holy Mary, could you stop the war in Ukraine? I understand that it is not easy, but maybe you could do something about that. And, by the way, if you have some spare time, you could keep the members of my family healthy. But stopping the war is more important. Thank you!"

Do I think it could work? Of course not. But you never know: the Holy Mary, mother of God, the Παναγία Θεοτόκος, may do things we can't even imagine. Could that depend on something that someone writes on a notepad? Who knows? The ways of the universe are mysterious, and the powers above us, the 𒀭𒀀𒉣𒈾, annunaki, are even more mysterious. So be it. 

And that's why we shouldn't criticize too much those who wear a face mask while swimming in the sea in August. Faith moves so many things. With just one problem. Whereas praying the Holy Mary has no negative effects on the person who prays, a face mask worn for too long may give you plenty of health problems. And I don't think you need any special theological savvy to understand that you shouldn't ask the Virgin Mary to save you from the damage you do to yourself. 

But so are human beings. Always full of contradictions. Look at this face mask -- up to not long ago on sale on Amazon. Do you notice the contradiction?

 

A modern rendition of a Sumerian Myth. Enkidu defeated by Shamhat

 

Some myths, really, are universal (h/t Raul Ilargi)

One of Our Ancestors: Larthia Seianti

A realistic portrait of an Etruscan woman who lived maybe 2500 years ago. We can see her face, her eyes, her body: she looks like a robust woman, maybe a little overweight. She must have been in her forties when this image was sculpted, or maybe the sculptor chose to show her in that way. Because of that sarcophagus, we know her name: Larthia Seianti.

She is looking into a mirror while adjusting her hair. A natural gesture that makes her look like we might have met her, alive, just walking around. She lived and loved, she had her likes and dislikes, her habits, her preferences, her things that she carried around. Look at the details: the mirror, the embroidered belt, her armilla bracelets on her forearms, her elaborate earrings.

Larthia must have been a rich woman to afford that sarcophagus. It is hard to think that she could have imagined that her image would have been seen, reproduced, and discussed, more than two millennia after her last breath. Of her body, nothing is left but scattered all over. Yet, her legacy remains with us. She does look a lot like a friend of mine, living in Tuscany today. She and we are part of the same line of humans who lived and loved in Tuscany, the land of my ancestors.  

Finding God in a Bad Novel.

 

I don't know how many novels have been written from the time when they started being popular, about two centuries ago. An estimate that I found on the Web says that some 129 million books in total have been published. Of these, probably half are novels. So, about 60 million novels. You could read all of them in less than 200,000 years if you could read one every day. Maybe God can do this, maybe he has already done this, I wonder how he feels about this mass of stories that his human children have been producing.

Lacking god-like capacities, my exploration of the novel world is rather haphazard, and the cover you see at the beginning of this post is a book that I found a few days ago on top of a pile of waste. Acting on the idea that whatever happens has a reason to happen, I took it home. I cleaned the cover, stained by a mysterious goo. And I read it. 

I don't know if this book was a message from God. If it was, it is difficult for me to decipher. Honestly, this book is rather bad. Let me say it better: it is truly, truly bad. 

The book was a translation of a novel originally titled "Lying in Bed," written by M.J. Rose. She seems to be an extremely active novelist, with dozens of books listed in her website. This one is difficult to find in the site but, using a few tricks,  eventually it appears. Apparently, Ms. Rose is a little ashamed herself of having written it.

What to say about this novel? Well, for one thing, it illustrates how difficult it is to write a novel, even for a professional. It is supposed to be a kind of erotic literature but, frankly, it is not much more erotic than a frozen mackerel. 

The protagonist, Marlowe Wyatt, is said to be about 30 at the time of the story, but she behaves more or less like a 16-year-old girl. We know a lot of what she does, what she eats, where she lives (in New York), where she has lunch and dinners, and where she has cappuccino and pastry. But, as a character, Marlowe is simply flat. She never shows a spark of life. She is supposed to have been shocked for all her life because she made love to her stepbrother when she was very young. I suppose it can be a shocking experience but in the novel we don't really feel it is relevant. It happened ten years before, come on, girl, get over it, stop reminiscing and move on! Another demonstration that no author can write a good novel unless he/she cares for the characters they create. 

The other characters of the novel are rather flat, too. We know plenty of details about them, but nothing that gives us a hint of what makes them move. The whole novel is supposed to pivot around a situation not unlike what we sometimes call the "commedia italiana" a romantic misunderstanding that the protagonists unravel only at the end. 

Here, the protagonist is supposed to make a living by writing erotic letters for her customers. A bit unlikely as a job, but in a novel it may be fine. Then, the main twist of the novel is that Marlowe writes letters for her friend Vivienne. Then, a new customer comes, Gideon, who clearly has also an erotic interest in Marlowe. The twist is that Marlowe doesn't know that she was writing love letters for Gideon to give to Vivienne, and to Vivienne to give to Gideon, while at the same time she (Marlow) is being courted by Gideon. 

It could have been an interesting plot, but the reader (nor Marlowe) is never given a hint of this triangle until the very end of the story. When Marlowe discover the trick, she is upset, but Gideon just says he had dumped Vivienne earlier on, and Marlowe says, "oh, then it is fine" -- end of the novel. 

And so, what did God want to tell me by letting me find that novel? Well, the ways of the Lord are many, but maybe He 8or She) will be clearer with the next novel.  

The Three Body Problem: Science Fiction is Alive and Well in China

 

Is science fiction dead? Probably not but, in the West, it doesn't seem to be feeling so well. At least, we are not seeing much in terms of innovation in the Western narrative sphere, apart from a streak of "ecological science fiction" in the stile of the movie "Avatar" (2009)

Yet, different cultures may be able to revisit and revive the old the Sci-Fi themes. This is the case of Liu Cixin and his novel "The Three-Body Problem" (2008), a remarkably original reworking of some classic sci-fi themes mixed in an original and challenging way.

So, I endeavored to read Liu's novel. To be honest, I was immediately put off by the first scene, where he describes in graphic detail the killing of a young woman. My first impression was that if a writer needs this kind of cheap trick to attract the attention of the readers, then he must be a bad writer. 

But no, the novel is not cheap stuff, nor the work of a bad writer. It is a rich and complex story that mixes different themes and that manages to keep the reader's attention with the gradual discovery that there is "something" out there, another civilization existing on a different star, and not necessarily a friendly one. Another thing that puts me off in novels is the use of flashbacks -- Liu uses them a lot, but in such a masterful way that they do not disturb the narrative flow. 

Liu's novel is, in many ways, classic in style and conception. It is a modern example of "hard" science fiction. You can find its sources of inspiration, first of all, in Asimov's classic "Nightfall." (1941), one of the novels that defined a whole genre. Asimov's tells us of a system with six stars, more than Liu's three, but we have the same problem for the best minds of the inhabitants of one of the planets of the system: discovering Newton's gravitational law. And also surviving the vagaries of a chaotic system where the dance of the stars has unpredictable effects on the life on the planets. 

Another source of inspiration for Liu's novel is Fred Hoyle's "The Black Cloud" (1957). We have some similar tropes in the plot: the isolated observatory that discovers an alien entity, the direct communications between humans and aliens, the military reaction to the aliens, and other details. And, of course, there is more than a hint of Arthur C. Clarke's ideas in the novel. 

Yet, Liu's novel is not just a repetition of old themes. It is original in many aspects. One is its "political" aspect, with the plot influenced by the events of the Chinese cultural revolution, and also its mirroring the concept of a "clash of civilization" with the Trisolarians playing the role of an aggressive enemy. The plot also makes extensive use of the "gamification" concept. In our time, we tend to learn much using simulations that, in some cases, may take the form of games. In "The Three Body Problem" much of what we know of the Trisolarians comes in the form of a full-immersion game played by the protagonists. 

So, as I was saying, a rich and stimulating story in terms of themes: Liu Cixin is an engineer, and he knows his trade. As a hard piece of science fiction, this novel is truly a masterpiece. 

How is it in literary terms? Well, it has defects, and not just a few. The plot has holes that could let the whole fleet of Admiral Zheng pass through. For instance, when the scientist Ye Wenjie receives the first message from the aliens, she understands it immediately. We may imagine that it is written in her language: Mandarin Chinese. How can it be that the inhabitants of a faraway star system speak Chinese?

Then, the characters of the story are mostly shallow -- not surprising: it is typical of hard science fiction. Ye Wenjie, the scientist, comes out as the most interesting character, someone driven by deep thoughts and a moral stance. The others, well, much less. A large part of the novel is seen through the eyes of Wang Miao, a nanotechnology specialist. He is as shallow as a character can be: he has no clear purpose in the novel except as a narrative focus. But, again, a hard science fiction novel is not supposed to tell us about the inner conflicts of its characters.

So, where is science fiction going? During the golden years of Western science fiction, there existed a parallel version in the Soviet Union: different in conception, but just as creative and interesting. Today, it doesn't seem that Russia or other former Soviet countries are active in science fiction. So, are scientific fantasies destined to be reborn in China? Maybe. For sure, the Chinese are exploring new ways in a field where the West doesn't seem to be able to innovate anymore. We can only say that literature is just like humankind. It keeps changing and evolving.

  

The Surrender of the Azovstal. Not exactly like the fall of Troy

In the Iliad, we read of how Achilles killed Hector, angered at seeing how the defeated Trojan warrior was wearing the armor he had taken from Achilles' friend, Patroclus. It is a recurring theme in ancient literature, we see it also in Virgil's Aeneid, when Aeneas, known for his piety, nevertheless does not spare the Latin warrior Turnus when he sees him wearing the armor taken from Aeneas' friend Pallas. 

In our times, it seems that things have become less dramatic. The surrender of the Ukrainian troops of the Azovstaal building in Mariupol was nothing like the sack of Troy. We saw the Ukrainian soldiers coming out of the bunker. Apart from those who were wounded, they looked in good health, a little shocked, but not afraid, and you could perceive their relief. They were supposed to fight to the death, but they had avoided that. 

On their side, the Russian soldiers were not exactly friendly, but they showed no anger toward the surrendering Ukrainians. They examined the prisoners' belonging, seeking for hidden weapons, but found none. The Ukrainians were carrying food, blankets, varied provisions, but they had given up with the idea of fighting. 

There was an interesting moment when the Russians made the prisoners show their tattoos that often included various Nazi symbols. You see here a Ukrainian soldier with the classic logo of the German Schutzstaffel (SS; stylized as ᛋᛋ). 

Now, consider that the Nazis had killed some 26 million Soviet citizens, most of them Russians, during WWII, and you can see that it could have been an "Achilles vs. Hector" moment. But nothing like that happened. As I said, the Russians were not friendly, but not especially hostile. Those prisoners who had Nazi tattoos were treated like all the others and allowed to take the bus that would take them to a detention camp, somewhere. 

Surely, the ability of Ukrainians and Russians to speak to each other helped make this encounter bloodless. But there is more to ask: the main question, I think, is how it was that these Ukrainian men decided (or accepted) to be tattooed in this way. For one thing, it was dangerous for them -- it was not at all obvious that the Russians would react the way they reacted. Secondly, you wonder how they could do that when they must have known what the German Nazis were planning for the Slavic population of Eastern Europe. The German "Ostplan" (plan for the East) saw most Slavs exterminated or simply pushed to the other side of the Urals to make space for the "Herrenvolk," the German lords. They would have ruled the fertile plains of Ukraine, using the surviving Slavs as peasants and servants. 

It is hard to say what went on in the heads of these men, whether they realized what exactly they had been doing. Surely, they are not the Trojans defeated by the Achaeans. More likely, they are just ordinary people who tried to make a little money by enlisting in the army of a bankrupted country, as Ukraine was up to a few years ago (it still is). Probably, a pre-condition for enlisting in the special troops was to show one's commitment by accepting to be tattooed in that way. Looking at these men marching as prisoners, the impression is that they are just people caught in something that they don't fully understand. We are all human, all the same, we struggle for things we don't fully understand. But, at some moment, there comes the time of peace.

The Empress and the General

Sometimes, you really need to take the long view, to detach yourself from the infinite noise that surrounds us. So, here is the story of how Galla Placidia regained the Imperial Throne of the West, with the help of the Alan general Aspar. Told by Aspar himself.

And here is the version in Italian.