My father taking myself and my baby son, Robin, named after
him, up the Aventine Hill in Rome to the Piazza Santa Maria del
Priorato of the Knights of Malta, designed by Giovanni
Battista Piranesi, and then later with the Dantista,
Professor Vincenzo Placella, and Eric McLuhan, son of Marshall, to
see huge St Peters through a mere keyhole, memories that I would
agan evoke when lecturing on Walter Savage Landor and my likewise
Warwick-born father, in a talk, 'Italy through Warwick Eyes', in
WSL's house in Warwick.
But during World War II, WWII, now morphing into WWIII, my
childhood nightmares had been of an armaments factory I had been
shown by my carpenter foster father who worked in it. Night after
night I would dream this dream in utter terror, of great machines
which would seek to draw me to them with magnetism to kill me, and
from which I would have to poise in total balance and equilibrium,
finally seeking instead to fly upwards, only they would elongate
and fly after me, forever seeking to destroy me in their clutches.
Sometimes the dream would then morph into wartime London, my real
father and I seeking to cross Thames' bridges, only to have them
be bombed. ♫'London
Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down, My Fair Lady!'
Our house on Strand-on-the-Green on the Thames had been so bombed
as they sought to destroy its nearby railroad bridge. My first
memory as a child is of lying in my cot and seeing the reflections
of the Thames on the ceiling above me and how lovely it was. All
Fibonacci curves in movement, fractalling like music. Later,
when we moved to 6 Rivermead Court, again on the Thames, we
would shelter in the Putney Bridge Undergound Station. And I would
cry out, like the Station Master, ♫'Putney
Bridge! Putney Bridge!' Since then so many houses of my memories
have been destroyed, bulldozed even, the houses I lived in, on
Strand-on-the-Green, in West Berkeley, in Quincy, in Boulder, and
my convent, my small cell in Baldslow, Sussex, that I so loved,
and where early one morning before my ringing the ♫Angelus
bell, I heard Christ's words, I ♫heard
them ♫said
orally, between waking and sleeping, in Matthew's dreadful Greek,
'Be not afraid!' 'Me phobeisthe!' ♫'μὴ φοβεῖσθε!'
Having
already, on pilgrimage, been on the Sea of Galilee, a Spanish
bishop ♫preaching
to his priests, our Italian priest shepherding us pilgrims. Real
mappable places, but hyperlinked to words in sacred books,
memories in mortal minds. and now in that cell intensely
studying the Hebrew and the Greek of the Bible, each morning
between 4.00 and 6.00 a.m.
Before I ever saw a Piranesi print I had read in school of De
Quincy in his Confessions of an Opium Eater telling of
Coleridge describing to him the series of prints Giovanni
Battista Piranesi had created in his Carceri, of the
vast prison architecture, in which Piranesi placed himself, as
does Dante in the Inferno, forever terrorized. So was I
in my dreams. Desperate to end the nightmare I vowed to open my
eyes and stop it. And one night I struggled to do so, leaden
arms and hands so slowly, flutteringly, being raised to eyes,
finally opening them. And there I was in the middle of the
night, so alone, lonely, but triumphant. I never dreamed the
dream again. It was like coming out of Plato's cave into light.
Then one day, in Berkeley, I saw a print of the Piranesi
frontispiece to his Carceri and went in and bought it,
though I was so poor and should not have. I first put it on the
ceiling above my bed. Then took it down. Too frighteningly real,
like my life. But I thought of producing Hamlet in front
of scrims of these engravings, and paralleled them to Dante's Inferno,
then in Florence went to a performance of ♫Beethoven's
Fidelio, so like the nightmare of my marriage to someone
insane, that made me feel like Shakespeare's Desdemona in Othello,
like his Hermione in Winter's Tale.
Later Julian Jaynes and I at Princeton would ♫talk
for many hours about his work in progress which became the
best-selling The Origin of Consciounsess in the Breakdown of
the Bicameral Mind. I would remind him of the pre-literate
children who are so convinced that there were monsters under the
bed. And I can remember mine who lurked between our four poster
bed I slept in that came from the castle of Anne Boleyn and the
wall in our medieval house in Sussex. Maurice Sendak so well
understood all that in Where the Wild Things Are.
To donate to the restoration by Roma of Florence's
formerly abandoned English Cemetery and to its Library
click on our Aureo Anello Associazione:'s
PayPal button: THANKYOU!
