Two obituaries
Mar. 2nd, 2005 04:22 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fpbThis horrible late winter has been devouring aged lives with the glee of a suicide bomber. The two losses I have suffered in the last two days are typical: the famous and the unknown, the familiar and the distant, all seem to be dying at once, as if God, having given us so much time with them, had grown impatient that we were paying so little attention to their wisdom, to their lives.
Last monday, my grandmother died; yesterday, our great national poet, Mario Luzi. Both are losses that are hard to explain to those who do not belong to our particular circle - my family; or the Italian nation. Not hard in every sense. Of course, anyone with a family can understand the basic fact - my mother's mother is dead; and anyone with a respect for his or her national culture would know what it means - our national poet has gone to join his equals, to the heaven of laurel and song. But this is only the universal share in the individual. It is this particular poet, this particular woman, who have died; and the void they leave behind is unlike any other void.
Mario Luzi, then. His peculiar greatness, like that of so many of the best poets, is practically impossible to describe to anyone who does not speak the language. His use of Italian had a spare beauty that rang like silver, an innate nobility and simplicity of expression that made every line pregnant and compelling. He was not only the last member of an ancient generation of writers who had produced much of the greatest writing of the century, but something like a living summation - both Italian patriot and devout Catholic, both modernist experimenter and national intellectual, willing and ready to use his position in the service of what he regarded as civic duty. His late nomination as Life Senator represents the belated recognition to a career that, as we see it, honours the nation and the culture to which he belonged. To the end of his life he was alert, intelligent, creative, and willing to step into the hot waters of political debate (whamming mr.Berlusconi for his unpleasant and bullying behaviour - what a surprise). May Father Dante receive him in the Heaven of poets.
My grandmother was physically a very small woman, of a generation that had to work hard with their own hands and then do it over again. Looking back, I regret not having spoken with her more often on her own terms. I always tended to feel that we did not have enough to say to each other, not so much because she was particularly ignorant, as because of the enormous difference that two or three generations had made between our basic attitudes and assumptions. My grandmother had been educated well enough according to what was regarded as necessary for a young woman of her class - the small landowner rather than the peasant class - in southern Italy in the early twentieth century. But the changes the country has suffered (and the fact that the family had shifted from the rural South to the metropolitan centre-north - meant that she and I simply did not have enough common ground for me to be at ease with her.
A major exception, when I returned to the Church, was the Catholic faith. She was a woman of deep faith. One might take this to be no more than the typical old woman's resort to piety in her declining days, but I say it was more than that. I have seen enough of the Catholic world to know bigotry, shallowness, and self-regard, when I see them; my grandmother's faith was genuine and intelligent. She could be extraordinarily eloquent about the comfort of Communion and prayer, and she never lost her hope. This, in itself, is a comforting thing to be remembering at her graveside; if she and I are right about the ultimate truths of life, there is a reward prepared for her now.
Good though this is to think on in the end, it also has something to with my greatest failing with respect to her. The Catholic faith was one place where we could meet on common ground; and it showed that there was no difficulty in communicating if only one found the right places. The idea should reallly have been to ask her, to listen to her, to be interested in her own life. I regret, now, never having done it enough, and, above all, never having taken a record of what she said when she did. I do recall her telling fascinating stories from her parents' time, tales of bandits such as Ninco Nanco, who have gone down in legend like Robin Hood, and days in which Carabinieri pursued them on horseback across a country barely less wild than John Wayne's West; wonderful stories, true "grandmother's tales", living memory of another world. And if I had kept a record of them, I would still be in touch with two centuries. When I was a child, it was not just a matter of the first and second world war: the personal memories of the Risorgimento, the wars of liberation, and the great upheavals that followed, still echoed in memory. One day our children will ask us about the Second World War, or man's landing on the moon, as I should have asked my grandmother, more often than I did, about bandits, immigration to America, Garibaldi, or the Great War.
My grandmother was born in 1911. Her husband, my late grandfather, was a small but stable landowner who had fought in the Great War, and their land was inland from the great military harbour of Taranto, in a village called Palagiano, where they were, I understand, something like the local squires. They ten children, of whom three died in childhood, and one suffered from a fall and became feeble-minded. My mother's family never gave up on anyone, and they looked after him as long as they could, later placing him in a peaceful house of care, where I too as a child visited him from time to time. He died a few years ago.
In the stormy years that followed World War Two, my grandfather, wanting to move to Rome, was swindled out of his land, and his family had to struggle. One or two members came out permanently scarred. My mother, who is an enchanting woman to this day, was the rebel beauty of the flock - imagine an Italian movie queen and improve on it, and you will have my mother at sixteen - and married my father when not even a major, in the rebellious year 1962; which caused a rift which was never altogether healed. My father felt that my grandmother's family had wanted his marriage to fail; and he was right. My grandmother felt that my father was unsuited for marriage; and she was right. However, when the marriage was only two years old, my grandmother saved my sister's life. The baby would not eat and was growing dangerously thin, at the same time as my mother was hospitalized for peritonitis; her mother took my sister in (I was sent to my father's father) and by some sort of maternal witchcraft which my father never could fathom, managed to get the poor little baby to feed, put on weight, and blossom.
There is so much history which I shall never now get to know, or at least to hear from their lips. The two sides of my family have experienced the whole storm and stress of my country in the twentieth century. I have already been robbed of the memories of my father's father, with whom I spent quite a bit of my childhood; I wonder, now, who will get, for instance, my other grandfather's war medals, over which I used to daydream as a child.
I should have spent more time listening to my grandmother. I really should. I think there are a number of things I do not regret not having done, but spent more time with those dear to me is not one of them.
The tide of time bears us far from each other. Unless my grandmother and I meet in another life, in another world, I will not now be able to even apologize to her for my neglect. But I had a vision of her and my grandfather as a sort of trunk through which so much life of has passed. From my pretty half-Arab cousin Leila, who runs three restaurants in Rome, to me and my historical research, to another cousin who runs a gym, there is so much energy and so many different forms of achievement that begins ultimately with them, with the fraud they suffered when they lost their land; with the way they would not let themselves be defeated, but worked and built another prosperity for themselves and their children - a large, strong family, not a paradise of harmony, but united like a fist and always, when push came to shove, there for each other. When we leave this earth in our turn, may we look back and find half as fertile a field of our past work.
Last monday, my grandmother died; yesterday, our great national poet, Mario Luzi. Both are losses that are hard to explain to those who do not belong to our particular circle - my family; or the Italian nation. Not hard in every sense. Of course, anyone with a family can understand the basic fact - my mother's mother is dead; and anyone with a respect for his or her national culture would know what it means - our national poet has gone to join his equals, to the heaven of laurel and song. But this is only the universal share in the individual. It is this particular poet, this particular woman, who have died; and the void they leave behind is unlike any other void.
Mario Luzi, then. His peculiar greatness, like that of so many of the best poets, is practically impossible to describe to anyone who does not speak the language. His use of Italian had a spare beauty that rang like silver, an innate nobility and simplicity of expression that made every line pregnant and compelling. He was not only the last member of an ancient generation of writers who had produced much of the greatest writing of the century, but something like a living summation - both Italian patriot and devout Catholic, both modernist experimenter and national intellectual, willing and ready to use his position in the service of what he regarded as civic duty. His late nomination as Life Senator represents the belated recognition to a career that, as we see it, honours the nation and the culture to which he belonged. To the end of his life he was alert, intelligent, creative, and willing to step into the hot waters of political debate (whamming mr.Berlusconi for his unpleasant and bullying behaviour - what a surprise). May Father Dante receive him in the Heaven of poets.
My grandmother was physically a very small woman, of a generation that had to work hard with their own hands and then do it over again. Looking back, I regret not having spoken with her more often on her own terms. I always tended to feel that we did not have enough to say to each other, not so much because she was particularly ignorant, as because of the enormous difference that two or three generations had made between our basic attitudes and assumptions. My grandmother had been educated well enough according to what was regarded as necessary for a young woman of her class - the small landowner rather than the peasant class - in southern Italy in the early twentieth century. But the changes the country has suffered (and the fact that the family had shifted from the rural South to the metropolitan centre-north - meant that she and I simply did not have enough common ground for me to be at ease with her.
A major exception, when I returned to the Church, was the Catholic faith. She was a woman of deep faith. One might take this to be no more than the typical old woman's resort to piety in her declining days, but I say it was more than that. I have seen enough of the Catholic world to know bigotry, shallowness, and self-regard, when I see them; my grandmother's faith was genuine and intelligent. She could be extraordinarily eloquent about the comfort of Communion and prayer, and she never lost her hope. This, in itself, is a comforting thing to be remembering at her graveside; if she and I are right about the ultimate truths of life, there is a reward prepared for her now.
Good though this is to think on in the end, it also has something to with my greatest failing with respect to her. The Catholic faith was one place where we could meet on common ground; and it showed that there was no difficulty in communicating if only one found the right places. The idea should reallly have been to ask her, to listen to her, to be interested in her own life. I regret, now, never having done it enough, and, above all, never having taken a record of what she said when she did. I do recall her telling fascinating stories from her parents' time, tales of bandits such as Ninco Nanco, who have gone down in legend like Robin Hood, and days in which Carabinieri pursued them on horseback across a country barely less wild than John Wayne's West; wonderful stories, true "grandmother's tales", living memory of another world. And if I had kept a record of them, I would still be in touch with two centuries. When I was a child, it was not just a matter of the first and second world war: the personal memories of the Risorgimento, the wars of liberation, and the great upheavals that followed, still echoed in memory. One day our children will ask us about the Second World War, or man's landing on the moon, as I should have asked my grandmother, more often than I did, about bandits, immigration to America, Garibaldi, or the Great War.
My grandmother was born in 1911. Her husband, my late grandfather, was a small but stable landowner who had fought in the Great War, and their land was inland from the great military harbour of Taranto, in a village called Palagiano, where they were, I understand, something like the local squires. They ten children, of whom three died in childhood, and one suffered from a fall and became feeble-minded. My mother's family never gave up on anyone, and they looked after him as long as they could, later placing him in a peaceful house of care, where I too as a child visited him from time to time. He died a few years ago.
In the stormy years that followed World War Two, my grandfather, wanting to move to Rome, was swindled out of his land, and his family had to struggle. One or two members came out permanently scarred. My mother, who is an enchanting woman to this day, was the rebel beauty of the flock - imagine an Italian movie queen and improve on it, and you will have my mother at sixteen - and married my father when not even a major, in the rebellious year 1962; which caused a rift which was never altogether healed. My father felt that my grandmother's family had wanted his marriage to fail; and he was right. My grandmother felt that my father was unsuited for marriage; and she was right. However, when the marriage was only two years old, my grandmother saved my sister's life. The baby would not eat and was growing dangerously thin, at the same time as my mother was hospitalized for peritonitis; her mother took my sister in (I was sent to my father's father) and by some sort of maternal witchcraft which my father never could fathom, managed to get the poor little baby to feed, put on weight, and blossom.
There is so much history which I shall never now get to know, or at least to hear from their lips. The two sides of my family have experienced the whole storm and stress of my country in the twentieth century. I have already been robbed of the memories of my father's father, with whom I spent quite a bit of my childhood; I wonder, now, who will get, for instance, my other grandfather's war medals, over which I used to daydream as a child.
I should have spent more time listening to my grandmother. I really should. I think there are a number of things I do not regret not having done, but spent more time with those dear to me is not one of them.
The tide of time bears us far from each other. Unless my grandmother and I meet in another life, in another world, I will not now be able to even apologize to her for my neglect. But I had a vision of her and my grandfather as a sort of trunk through which so much life of has passed. From my pretty half-Arab cousin Leila, who runs three restaurants in Rome, to me and my historical research, to another cousin who runs a gym, there is so much energy and so many different forms of achievement that begins ultimately with them, with the fraud they suffered when they lost their land; with the way they would not let themselves be defeated, but worked and built another prosperity for themselves and their children - a large, strong family, not a paradise of harmony, but united like a fist and always, when push came to shove, there for each other. When we leave this earth in our turn, may we look back and find half as fertile a field of our past work.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-03-02 08:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 03:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-03-03 04:39 pm (UTC)