Beauty will save the world

When Solzhenitzyn stepped on to the stage to accept his Nobel Prize for Literature in 1970 he quoted his literary master, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and said "Beauty will save the world". 

A big call. 

Solzhenitzyn says it took him many decades to come to see that Dostoyevsky had been right. Like Job in the night, Solzhenitzyn had tussled with this idea for half his life. The force of it, the transcendence of it, frightened him, he said. 

Could these two stern Russian novelists, one from each of the last two centuries, be right. Are they prophets for our age?  


I am a pushover for this idea. I instinctively think it is correct. The notion resonates deeply with me. But when I look at the world around me, and especially what passes for art, I wonder if there can be any modern meaning in the notion. Beauty has always ultimately been a religious idea. It is born of awe. Awe at God's creation, and man's capacity for love.

Turn to art today. You will sometimes find it reaching for beauty, but more often not. How can an art unmoored from its quest of grappling toward beauty really be art? Does art not have a sacred mission?


One of my favourite philosophers, Roger Scruton expresses it thus: 


"The sacred task of art, is to take that which is most difficult in the human condition, and to redeem it by making it beautiful". Scruton does not say art has no lighter form and guise, just that if we are to speak of the truly sacred role of art, we explore its redemptive purpose.  To Scruton, art's purpose is to "teach us how to feel" to give the growing mind a palette of feelings and responses, to help build moral imagination. It's a compelling vision. 

How could a poet not be gay in such a jocund company....

Jean Ryall 1909 in the Western Mail

As a child I remember my "Granny", Vivienne Kennedy nee Torr reciting great tracts of poetry: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Patterson, Barrett Browning. I figured it must run in the genes because I can still recite word perfect, several of William Wordsworth's oevre, poems and nursery rhymes we learnt in Italian. 

Anyway, we knew of Granny's facility for poetry and memory, and there had been a rumour in the family that she had won poetry competitions in her childhood in rural Western Australia. Little did we know the treasure trove we would discover 13 years after her death.

Beauty in rain and tears - Ruth Park passes

Ruth Park has passed away. 


She has left us some wonderful Australian literature Harp in the South, Poor Man's Orange, Missus and of course, the Muddle Headed Wombat. 


It was such life affirming literature to have been reading as a teenager. Dolour (Latin for pain), the heroine in the series emerged as a truly good human being, resilient, other-centred, loving and appreciating the true nature of real human experience and the beauty in rain and tears. 


From memory, many of my schoolmates were pretty non-plussed by this literature. It is slightly less grim than Angela's Ashes that we would all read decades later, but it captures the resilience on the one hand, but the harsh costs of lapses of judgement that we mere mortals suffer. Just how hard it is to keep going when it seems that the chips are so stacked against you yet, how very often, poor choices make a bad situation worse and cost you or your family's wellbeing. Standout themes were  the resilience and the goodness of the women. How sustaining the religious practice and symbols were. Another theme was the pain implicit in low social standing and the complex emotions, and behaviours this influences. The depth of the Australian culture's Irish inheritance, and how deeply it has shaped our broader national sensibility. 


The culture of Sydney in particular seems influenced by the Irish inheritance, with Melbourne having a number of other competing strands - Greek, Italian, Jewish, Goldfields Chinese.

Ó Cinnéide - "An idea lives on"

Medal given to me for my 40th by my mum 

My mum is a descendant of the Ó Cinnéide or in the anglicised version Kennedy*. 

Mum, and the rest of her family have always been so proud of their name and all things Kennedy. I was very touched when for my 40th birthday, my mother Elizabeth Kennedy, gave me one of her most precious possessions - the Kennedy medal my Dad bought her in Rome in 1978.

Of course I don't remember where I was when Kennedy was shot, I wasn't yet born, but growing up he certainly represented an ideal of leadership. The kind of leadership that uses words and ideas as its most powerful weapon.  Like the great prose of Churchill for the children of the 1940 and 50s,  our childhood was filled with the great sayings of Kennedy:

"Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country". Inauguration address, 1961. 

"Do not pray for easy lives, pray to be stronger men".  (Quoting Bishop Phillips Brooks)

"Geography has made us neighbours. History has made us friends. Economics has made us partners, and necessity has made us allies. Those whom God has so joined let no man put assunder". 


We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.    Rice University, 1962. 

The problems of the world cannot possibly be solved by skeptics or cynics whose horizons are limited by the obvious realities. We need men who can dream of things that never were and ask "why not?".    Speech delivered to the Dail (Parliament of Ireland) (28 June 1963)

"A man may die, nations may rise and fall, but an idea lives on."   New York, 1962. 

La Citta Nobile di Pietrasanta

If ever you are going to Italy, especially to Tuscany, make sure you wander off, what for Australian and British tourists is considered, "the beaten track" - Florence, Pisa, Siena, Venice and Rome. There are of course a myriad of little gems the cognoscenti enjoy the length and breadth of the boot but I want to offer one more - La Citta Nobile di Pietrasanta. It's in the province of Lucca, and you shouldn't miss Lucca either. 


My father was born in Pietrasanta and in a fact he relishes, he was born on the day of the Feast of the Patron Saint of Pietrasanta - San Biagio and is named after him - (in English St Blaise) Feast Day 3 Febbraio. Dad always tells the story that there was no one there when his mum went in to labour with him as they were all in the centre of town for the festa.


The city is famous for being the centre for the artisans who work in marble. It was to Pietrasanta that Michelangelo went when he was choosing the marble for the statue of David and the Pieta' and his other masterpieces in the pietra santa - holy marble. Rodin, Henry Moore have all been frequent visitors. Today it is a real mecca for German tourists enjoying the beaches 2-3kms away in Marina di Pietrasanta and Forte dei Marmi, and American artists, but I never see Australians there.   


The hotel where Michelangelo stayed is now Bar Michelangelo and if you go there in the Italian summertime, you are bound to see another miraculous cultural spectacle - my mum Libby, sitting at a table in the piazza writing her 1000th postcard.


I've found a little video showing Pietrasanta and it's easy to find - on the Via Aurelia - the ancient route linking Rome to Gaul and its on the train line 30 mins from Pisa on the way to Genoa. So if you're doing Pisa and the Cinque Terre, or driving from Lucca have a wander and say hi to Libby! 

See VIDEO OF PIETRASANTA (and do forgive the inordinately daggy video commentator - he is trying)

The Big Italian Lunch, St Hilda's Church North Perth

To celebrate my 40th, we invited all our loved ones to a Big Italian lunch. It was a blessed day with countless children, wonderful food and all my Perth bound loved ones plus some above and beyond the call friends who flew in from Canberra and Melbourne. Little Harry Parker said grace, in italian and english, the food was wonderful and Richard and I gave speeches full of gratitude and love. A joyous day.

 

Hit, Myth and Memory

The Capitoline Wolf

Like Alice in Wonderland herself, I've just had a trip down a wormwhole of knowing, losing and finding. These little moments present themselves to each of us everyday, if you are present to the images and their resonance as they pass your gaze. In googling images to do a post on my favourite piece of scultpture in Perth, I lost my way, but I have returned from my travels with something new. Let me explain. 

I live but one hundred metres away from a symbol of many of the layers of my cultural heritage (on my father's side). In the entry of the WA Italian Club on Fitzgerald St, is a statue of the Capitoline Wolf. One of my new lifelong companions is a book called The History of Images and Ideas in Italian Art. (I definitely found a corner of myself when I first read this book in my New York (New Jersey actually) landlord's basement. Nancy, advertising gem of 80s Madison Avenue and Paul, sculptor and fine art teacher at the Stevens Institute of Technology, owned the beautiful ante bellum brownstone in Hoboken we lived in from 2002 - 2006. They were divine and were in loco parentis. I adored that basement and its many books, but I digress)

Roots and wings

Avigdor Arikha, Sunflowers, 2001.

Twenty years ago I read Gay Talese's book Sons of the Father's. It was  a lovely meditation on growing up in an Italian family in Ocean City, New Jersey after World War 2. I found it a fascinating counterpoint to my own experience of growing up around Italians in Australian a generation later. That book brought to my consciousness the differences in the US and Australian experience - Italians arrival from late 19th Century versus the principally  post-World War 2 phenomenon in Australia. My experience amongst norther Italians and specifically Tuscans versus the immigration from il soggiorno (the South) and also what it means for immigrant groups to arrive into a wealthy country and within a generation take part in cultural leadership. Talese is a great example of what becomes of bright children in a country that integrates immigrants and is rich and in a phase of cultural leadership. 

Memory or imagination: a medieval reflection

This is not the age of memory, this is the age of imagination. But it bears reflection that this has not always been the way of the world.


Picture this scene: St Thomas Aquinas, travelling by horse with two of his companions, both secretaries, by road between Rome and Paris. They travel about 10kms a day and then take two or three days at monasteries en route, basking in the hospitality of the fellow Dominicans.


During all of these rest stops, Aquinas stays in his cell and he works, composing. He can dictate whole passages of text and thought, on two and sometimes three different tracts, to two or three different secretaries, at the same time. All of this composition and thought he can contain in his one super-sized mind. Imagine having the mental faculty to compose three concurrent documents in your minds eye. How was this skill developed? 


Aquinas, like other medieval scholars, learned all the texts he thought worth reading by heart. And think of the loveliness of that phrase that has survived to our time "to learn by heart". That to know something so well, to incorporate it into your very being, you "learn it by heart". 

Mary Carruthers is a joy to listen to on this subject of memory. While visiting Australia I heard her speaking about the centrality of memory in medieval life. From her study The Book of Memory: