Lucio Piccolo (1901-1969)

Not far from Catania (see Saturday's post) is Messina, home of Lucio Piccolo, a cousin of another well-born Sicilian, Prince Lampedusa, whose The Leopard (1958) stands as one of the great novels of modern Italy. Piccolo wrote, too. Not novels but poems.

Here is "Mutable World" (translated by Sonia Raiziss and Alfredo de Palchi):

Mutable World

 

Mutable world of gusty

rays, hours without colour, or perennial

flux, the pomp

of clouds: an instant and look -- the changed

forms dazzle, millenniums sway.

            And the low door’s arch and the worn

sill of too many winters, are a fable in the abrupt

glory of the March sun.

 

Early Morning

The longest day of the year always begins in the morning, but it is sunset that gets the attention.

For those up early, who remember what early was like six months earlier, when the day is half done and you are still in darkness ...

I have heard it said that the longest day of the year is simply an average of the days clustered around it, the 21st being the day the people who decided these things (Druids?) agree on. Kinda like the"present", how it contains a little of the "past" and a little of the "future".

Boxed Pictures

Recently I was asked by an elderly neighbour to help organize a box of miscellaneous photographs. My job was to hold up a photograph and, once identified, place it in a pile based on its location. Once the pictures were gathered I would record what my neighbour had to say about each place and, "in your own voice, write something up."

I had my doubts whether my neighbour would recognize where these photographs were taken, but I was wrong. All were recognized, including one I was convinced was not Catania, Sicily (which I have visited), but West Vancouver, as taken from atop the sand cliffs at UBC, looking north.

The picture up top was taken in Catania, the picture below an aerial photo of West Vancouver taken about 10 miles east of UBC, looking west.

"professional senses"

You read enough of anything and you see patterns. Le Carré's protagonists are brilliant thinkers, but that doesn't free them of their anguish. Humiliations run the gamut, from the personal to the professional. 

My favourite LeCarré moments come when an agent goes on "operational alert." From there on in, everything is "Method". 

"... I was halfway when I realized I was being followed. I thought at first it might be Larry behind me, or Munslow, because my follower was so quiet that my awareness of him was communicated less by hearing than by my other professional senses: the prickle on your back; the reflection in the air before you, made by someone just behind you; the sense of presence each time you check a shop window and see nothing." (213)

Walnut

Why do I keep finding walnut shells in the garden? It's not me cracking shells back there. Are the crows doing this?

Then yesterday I was pulling out what looked like weeds, and one of them was rooted in a walnut shell. I was growing a walnut tree, until suddenly I wasn't.

A couple hours later I went back outside with a cup of coffee and the third issue of Rob Manery's some magazine. Both the weed and the shell were gone. Did a crow take it?

WWI Female Tank

As many of us climb out of our self-isolation trenches, I remain entrenched, happy for now in my chair when not standing, cooking or on my knees in the garden.

Because there is only so much reading and writing one can do, I purchased a model kit, a tube of glue, some paint and five brushes. 

The "Mark" series were a range of tanks invented by the British Army to break the stand-off known as trench warfare. Within the series there were "Male" tanks (outfitted with two rotating six-pound guns) and "Female" tanks (outfitted with four less flexible Vickers machine guns). Tanks armed with both six-pound guns and Vickers machine guns were known as "Hermaphrodites".

For my part, I will endeavour to assemble, paint and display a "Female".

Models of Learning

Saturday's post of the Handley Page model set off a yearning I get every ten years or so to return to my ten-year-old self and build a model. Thinking I might stop into a model shop and pick up the Handley Page kit was easier said than done, as the model, I was told, "is between production cycles, but feel free to look around while I check with our distributor."

So look around I did, awed to be in a room with so many models. But some of these models, my god! What's billed as "Afghan Single Storey House" is in fact a ruin authored by war. No matter which way you look at it.

And just so no one thinks it is the non-European Theatre where today's wars are taking place, here is a ruin of a postmodern Polish Bank building from -- which war?