Chimera Against Medusa

 

I can't say what they had in mind with this clip. Frankly, it is not just silly, but also ugly. Yet, it does have a hint of a mythological flavor in this fight of weird creature. Strangely, both Chimera and her opponent, Medusa, have a hint of female breasts. Reproduced here just because this is a blog dedicated to the Chimera myth.

 

Long live the Rebels!

 

A wonderful poem by the Italian poet Abner Rossi, (1908 - 1987) that was perfectly translated by Google without the need of  retouches! Google for poetry, a weird concept. But it is the way things are, so, thanks Google! And this little poem helps us move away from the mephitic air of the so-called "debate" that is overwhelming us with hatred, terror, and lies. Art and poetry are not dead and they can still make us fly in the sky to breathe pure air. Above, Mark Chagall with a painting from 1918. (h/t Olga Milanese)

 

Long live the rebels.
Long and bright life to the rebels,
to the lunatic gods of nature,
to the uncontaminated dreams,
to the great loves that happened by chance
and that by chance do not find the end.
 
Long and radiant life for the rebels
to women and men without compromise,
to plants, to the earth, to fatigue,
to my animals, to all hopes,
to everything I see and like.
 
Long and bright life to the rebels,
to those who pursue a goal with passion,
to those who fight against selfishness,
to those who do not think they are special,
to those who reflect before speaking.
 
Long and bright life to the rebels,
to words that are mistreated
and to those who have been abandoned,
to the times, to the ways, to the conjugations,
to the many books that have been written
to those of yesterday, today, tomorrow.
 
Long and bright life to the rebels,
to those who feel outside the box,
to those who do not sell lies and emotions,
to those who try to live every day
without savings, without addictions.
 
Long and bright life for the rebels!
Sometimes they are strange characters,
but they are the ones who write history.
 
Abner Rossi

 

Lunga vita ai ribelli.

Lunga e radiosa vita ai ribelli,

ai lunatici dei della natura,

ai sogni non contaminati,

ai grandi amori capitati a caso

e che per caso non trovano la fine.

 

Lunga e radiosa vita ai ribelli

alle donne e agli uomini senza compromessi,

alle piante, alla terra, alla fatica,

ai miei animali, a tutte le speranze,

a tutto ciò che vedo e che mi piace.

 

Lunga e radiosa vita ai ribelli,

a chi persegue uno scopo con passione,

a chi si batte contro l’egoismo,

a chi non crede di essere speciale,

a chi riflette prima di parlare.

 

Lunga e radiosa vita ai ribelli,

alle parole che sono maltrattate

e a quelle che sono state abbandonate,

ai tempi, ai modi, alle coniugazioni,

ai tanti libri che sono stati scritti

a quelli di ieri, di oggi, di domani.

 

Lunga e radiosa vita ai ribelli,

a chi si sente fuori dagli schemi,

a chi non spaccia menzogne ed emozioni,

a chi prova a vivere ogni giorno

senza risparmio, senza assuefazioni.

 

Lunga e radiosa vita ai ribelli!

A volte sono strani personaggi,

ma sono loro che scrivono la storia."

 

Abner Rossi

 

Medusa's Revenge: not exactly a good idea

 

I don't know what's your impression of this piece of statuary by Luciano Garbati , recently installed across from New York courthouse. In a sense, times were ripe for something like that. Garbati was clearly trying to create a counter image to the Perseus one by Benvenuto Cellini, still standing in Florence.

Yet, I am not sure that the results are worth of praise. There is something wrong with the newer piece. For one thing, it lacks the plastic movement of Cellini's one. Somehow, Cellini embodied much more in his image than the simple action of butchery of beheading someone. Just think of the eerie fascination of Medusa's head, held by Perseus. Cellini's piece is the representation of a murder, sure, but there is much more to it: it is a whole mythological story compressed in a single piece. .

Instead, what Garbati's piece looks like is, indeed, a murder and little more. The figure is static, the man's head is meaningless, all what Medusa's expression conveys is a certain degree of anger. Justified, but, well, what's the sense of the whole piece? Personally, I am a big fan of the double X chromosome, but I don't think revenge is a virtue for anyone, not even for women.  

Mata Hari: the spy who wasn't

More than a century after her execution, in 1917, Mata Hari remains the prototypical figure of female spy. An extreme case of “femme fatale”; she is seen as someone who not only seduced men for money, but also for the greater lust of having them killed by the thousands on the battlefield.

However, Mata Hari’s fame as a spy is usurped. Looking back at the acts of her trial, we can see the absurdity and the inconsistency of the accusations raised against her. There just was no way that she could have caused “the death of hundreds of thousands of French soldiers” as it was said. She was, rather, a scapegoat killed in order to distract the public in a moment when the war was going badly for France. Put simply: she was framed.

Still, even without the glamour and the adventure that go together with the career of a spy, Mata Hari remains a fascinating figure for us. In the present book, all the references to Mata Hari’s story, her trial, and her execution are factual. Born in a small Dutch village in 1876, in 1905 she came back to Europe from what was called at the time the “Dutch Indies”, after having divorced from her husband, a Dutch army officer. Her time in the Indies had been of just a few years, but it was enough for her to invent a kind of sensual “Oriental dances” that she presented for the first time in public in a private museum in Paris.

As a dancer, Mata Hari drew a lot of criticism at her times and it is likely that her dances were little more than strip teases with an Oriental flavor. Still, clearly she was doing something right and she became immensely popular. Her figure became also commonplace in the wave of erotic postcards which exploded in Europe at the beginning of the 20th century. As years went by, Mata Hari gradually gave up with stripping naked in public and she became a high level courtesan, seducing the rich and the famous. She seems to have been successful at that, too. During the war, she may have tried her hand at being also a secret agent, but she wasn’t very successful at that. At 41, she was arrested, jailed, and then shot by a firing squad on October 15th, 1917.

It may well be that Mata Hari’s Oriental stance was not just a veneer to ennoble a little her strip teases, but it may also be that she had seriously studied Buddhism and other oriental ways while in the Dutch Indies. Her behavior at her execution, her calm, her evident belief that death was simply a passage, show that her Buddhism was not just a pose but something that she had taken by heart.

With all her originality, however, surely Mata Hari was not an intellectual. Her achievements seem to be more the result of intuition than of reasoning. She had, no doubt, an incredible skill at fascinating men, but her ability to manage her life was less than satisfactory, to say the least. Her lifestyle was always beyond her means. This, and her clumsy defense at the trial give some weight to the claim of Emile Massard that she was not very intelligent (Later on, R. Warren Howe would define her “hare brained”).

But you don’t have to be a genius to have an impact on the world and there is no doubt that Mata Hari had one. She was a very unconventional figure and being so unconventional was, at her time as in ours, dangerous. The deadly mix of nationalism and propaganda that killed Mata Hari was to continue and to explode in later years with the 2nd world war and the holocaust, leading Europe into what were the largest exterminations of innocent people that history has (so far) recorded. Mata Hari was among the first to be engulfed by this wave of senseless killing. She was killed in cold blood by people who were, most likely, perfectly aware that she was innocent but who couldn’t resist the effect of propaganda that makes it impossible to face the onrush of lies that submerge one’s reason and one’s judgment.

That things went out of control with Mata Hari is shown also in the cruel and harsh way she was treated. The pictures that we have of her at the time of the trial show us a woman physically destroyed by months of life in jail (so much for Massard’s fancy stories about her “dancing” in prison, or even requesting a “milk bath”). Seeing these photos we may, in a way, understand how Mata Hari may have considered her execution as a true liberation.

Mata Hari received also the ultimate insult, that of being denied a decent burial, of having her dead body desecrated by dissecting it on a hospital table. She was denied the status of human being. Rather, she was treated as a sort of giant insect to be disposed of. The transformation of human beings into insects and their subsequent extermination is something that Kafka had already described in his prophetic story “the metamorphosis”. Kafka died in 1924, in later times the anthropologist Roy Rappaport defined as “diabolical lies” those lies that “tamper with the very fabric of reality”. Causing people to believe that “they” are less human than “us” is one of these diabolic lies.

It is a Lion! It is a Goat! It is a Snake! No! It is a Holobiont!

 

 

Maybe 25 years ago, my friend Susan came from California to visit me in Florence. She saw the statuary piece of the Chimera of Arezzo and asked me what that was supposed to mean. I said, "I don't know for sure, but I'll find out." 

That involved much research, papers written, a blog created, and an entire book in Italian. And yet, I can tell you that I was yesterday night that understood what a Chimera really is. Just before falling asleep, I had this flash: here is it: A holobiont! (*) So obvious!

And that's no mere definition: it opens up a whole new layer of interpretation of the chimera as a horizontal contamination of memes. Memes do replicate horizontally, just like bacteria do. Truly mind-blowing, I am still shocked by what I was thinking yesterday night. 

There will be more on this, but for the moment I just wanted to mention this discovery to you. Life is beautiful when you can think of such things!

 

(*) you may not know what a holobiont is, but there is an entire blog of mine about that

The Destiny of Women Spies

 

Laura D'Oriano 1911-1943

 

On this blog, I discussed several times the case of Margaretha Zelle, AKA Mata Hari, executed in 1917 on the accusation of being a spy for the Germans. But, of course, there have been several cases of women accused of espionage and then executed. Some were real spies, others were victims of a new version of the "witch hunt" that had bloodied Europe during the 17th century. 

While Mata Hari was surely an innocent victim, the case of Laura D'Oriano is different and it seems clear that she was a real spy for the allies during WW2. But the reasons that led her into troubles were the same as those that doomed Mata Hari. According to Brian Sullivan, "there are three reason that lead people to become spies. The first, the rarest, is ideology. The second is money, the third is blackmail."

There is no doubt that neither Mata Hari nor Laura D'Oriano had any interest in the ideology of the conflicts they were witnessing. They were just swept away by a situation of personal problems, lack of money, and just the impossibility, at times, to resist to evil. 

Laura D'Oriano's story reads in many ways like that of Mata Hari. Both were cosmopolitan women who had lived in foreign countries and spoke several languages. Both were escaping from a marriage with an abusive husband, and both were trying to pursue an artistic career to make a living. Mata Hari was more successful and achieved world fame. Laura D'Oriano failed. She was, no doubt, a beautiful woman from the pictures we have of her. But that's not enough to guarantee a career of performer.

It seems that Laura D'Oriano had serious problems of money, she tried various odd jobs until she was was framed into a low-level espionage job for the Allies. She moved to Bordeaux, where she was supposed to provide information about the movements of the Italian submarines stationed there. That seems to have involved seducing some of the Italian officers manning the base. We will never know whether some of the Italian submarines were sunk as the result of the information she obtained. But that is the job of female spies operating as seductresses. 

That of the spy is a dangerous job, no matter what is your role. It is probably not glamorous at all and it doesn't even pay well. So, Laura D'Oriano was identified, arrested in Italy, and sentenced to death. She was shot in Rome on January 13, 1943. Curiously, in one last detail that made her similar to Mata Hari, she wanted to die looking at the firing squad.

https://www.robadadonne.it/galleria/chi-era-laura-doriano/ Roba da Donne

 

 

 

https://www.robadadonne.it/galleria/chi-era-laura-doriano/

Empathy and Epic Fiction: A reflection on the day of the Ashura of 2020

 The day of Ashura, 2020, inspired me these notes about empathy and epic fiction

 
Is it still possible to produce epic fiction in our world? It is extremely difficult in a world where everything seems to be tainted with decadence and decline, but there is a chance. And we saw truly epic moments in Russel Crowe's movie "The Water Deviner" (2014). 

Let me say first that whoever wrote the script for this movie should be cursed by the muse Calliope and receive at least a bad stomachache as punishment. Really, modern scripting is almost always bad, but this one is terrible. We see an improbable war-widow who looks like a movie star, completely out of place in a hotel in Istanbul. Flashbacks aplenty, and of the worse kind (against the basic rule of all fiction: never use flashbacks). An especially horrible scene is when the filmmaker insists for at least five minutes on showing us one of the three sons of the protagonist having to kill his wounded brother. I mean, what do you think you are allowed to do in order to try to extract a cheap tears from your viewers? Don't you have a drop of shame left in your nearly empty brain? And the script for the last 10 minutes of the film were handled by the same writer who writes the scripts for the Tom and Jerry cartoons.

But the film has this redeeming feature: it is epic. Truly. It is because the theme is epic and we can't miss that point. "The Water Deviner" tells us of a father looking for the bodies of his dead sons. That's something that resonates with all of us. You can't forget the scene, in the Iliad, when King Priam goes to see Achilles, asking him to give back to him his dead son. And Achilles weeps together with the father of the man he killed. This is possibly the highest moment of poetry ever produced in human literature. And it is epic. 

What is epic, after all? It is conflict and a good cause. There is a hero who fights for a good cause. He may be defeated, it doesn't matter. Heroism is doing one's duty in difficult circumstances. Not by chance I am writing these note in the day of the Ashura of 2020, commemorating when the Imam Hoseyn (AS) fought and died at Karbala. He fought for justice and died for justice, that's the basis of all epic stories.

So, epic can appear everywhere, in different circumstances. Even in a decadent society that seems to be bent to destroying everything that's good and decent, like ours, occasionally epic resurfaces. Think of how Virgil resurrected the epic stories of the Iliad and the Odissey in his Aeneid. Like us, Virgil lived in an age of decadence, and his attempt to glorify the birth of the Roman Empire could have turned into the worst apologetic trash that the Empire was already producing at the time. And yet, Virgil turned his story into an epic masterpiece. This is because epic is always around us, it is up to us to recognize it. 

Back to The Water Deviner, despite all the narrative disasters that plague it, the epic vein never really disappears. It is deep, and it is made especially alive by the figure of Hassan Bey, the Turkish officer who is the co-protagonist (and perhaps the true protagonist) of the movie. It is in the gradual discovery by Joshua, the protagonist, of the soul of a nation: ordinary people, the Turkish soldiers defeated in the war, who feel that they have something to fight for: to defend their land. This is epic -- truly epic. 

Of course, I know that wars are bad. In this case, after the end of the 1st world war, a lot of horrible things happened and all the sides involved have their faults: Turks, Greek, British, all alike. It is part of the human destiny to be like this. But one day we'll transcend the need of the kind of epic that involves killing people. It will be a different, and higher, form of empathy that we will reach. But we won't get anywhere if we don't develop empathy even in the simplest forms. And we have to start from the level we are: the level of feeling something for our fellow human beings. Yes, like when we are told of a father who is looking for the bodies of his dead sons. It may be Priam in the Iliad, or Joshua in "The Water Deviner" -- it is the same thing. It is the magic of empathy that makes us be them, and takes us to their world and their feeling.

The words below are attributed to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and to have been addressed to the mothers of the Australian soldiers who died in Gallipoli during the WW1. It is not certain that Ataturk ever said these words, they may be fiction. But, then, so are the words that Achilles and Priam exchanged as told in the Iliad. And, I dare to say, that this piece of fiction by an anonymous writer of the 1930s is not inferior to the words told by Homer. Words are our link to the real world. Worlds make us see, dream, and feel. And words make us feel for something higher than ourselves -- this is empathy in its purest form. The epic in everyone of us.

Those heroes that shed their blood
And lost their lives…
You are now lying in the soil of a friendly Country.
Therefore rest in peace.
There is no difference between the Johnnies
And the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side
Here in this country of ours…
You, the mothers,
Who sent their sons from far away countries
Wipe away your tears,
Your sons are now lying in our bosom
And are in peace
After having lost their lives on this land
They have become our sons as well

_____________________________________________

There is a point that I hadn't noticed when I published this text and that came up in the discussion on Facebook. I wrote that in the Iliad, "Achille weeps together with the father of the man he had killed." Which is true, but note the subtlety, Achilles doesn't weep for Hector or Priam. He just notices the similarity of the destiny of his own father and his friend Patroclus. And he weeps for them only. It is a kind of empathy, but I'd say a notch lower than that of someone who really can put himself inside the person he faces. It seems to fit with Julian Jaynes interpretation of the mind of the people at the time of the Iliad: their level of empathy was not so high.

Priam finished. His words roused in Achilles
a desire to weep for his own father. Taking Priam’s hand,
he gently moved him back. So the two men there
both remembered warriors who’d been slaughtered.
Priam, lying at Achilles’ feet, wept aloud
for man-killing Hector, and Achilles also wept
for his own father and once more for Patroclus.
The sound of their lamenting filled the house.

h/t Maurizio Tron