The reason for the celebration.

Join me at the British Academy for a celebration of Poland’s 1980 Nobel laureate in literature: “His Master’s Voice: Czesław Miłosz and his dialogue with British, Irish and American poetry.” The event, arranged in association with the Polish Cultural Institution, will take place on Thursday, 6 December, from 6 to 7.30 p.m. at The British Academy, 10-11 Carlton House Terrace, London, with a reception afterward.

I’ll be taking on the American Miłosz, and I’ll be joined by:

George Szirtes, the distinguished poet, translator, and broadcaster, whose New and Collected Poems (2009) was Independent Poetry Book of the Year.

Jerzy Jarniewicz, one of Poland’s most highly-regarded poets, translators, and literary scholars.

Michael Parker, whose books include  Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet (1993), Northern Irish Literature 1956-2006 (2007), and Irish Literature Since 1990 (2009).

Stephen Regan, author of two books on Philip Larkin and a forthcoming critical study of the sonnet from Shakespeare to Heaney. He is the editor of Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 in the Oxford World’s Classics series.

According to the Academy’s website, “At a juncture when the concept of ‘value’ is reckoned primarily in economic terms, it seems timely to consider how poetry promotes dialogue within and between cultures, and so promotes other, richer ways of seeing.”

The event is free, but registration is required – you can do that here.  It would be fun to see you!

My travels have slowed my progress into Proustitution – but I was arrested by this passage in Swann’s Way, in which Marcel Proust describes the plight of a pregnant servant girl, a verbal journey that takes him all the way to Giotto‘s frescoes in the Scrovegni Chapel of Padua.  While most who know the early 14th-century chapel, one of the masterpieces of Western art, comment on its famous Last Judgment, or the panels which narrate events in the lives of the Virgin Mary and Christ, Proust focuses on the comparatively insignificant panels on virtues and vices, which Giotto painted as if they were stone statues, a kind of ekphrasis.

Ekphrasis has its limits, however.  The passage was more insightful when I took the trouble looked up the image to compare it to Proust’s prose.  Here Proust describes the servant girl and the image of Charity:

What was more, she herself, poor girl, fattened by her pregnancy even in her face, even in her cheeks, which descended straight and square, rather resembled, in fact, those strong, mannish virgins, matrons really, in whom the virtues are personified in the Arena.  And I realize now that those Virtues and Vices of Padua resembled her in still another way. Just as the image of this girl was increased by the added symbol she carried before her belly without appearing to understand its meaning, without expressing in her face anything of its beauty and spirit, as a mere heavy burden, in the same way the powerful housewife who is represented at the Arena below the name “Caritas,” and a reproduction of whom hung on the wall of my schoolroom at Combray, embodies this virtue without seeming to suspect it, without any thought of charity seeming ever to have been capable of being expressed by her vulgar, energetic face.  Through a lovely invention of the painter, she is trampling on the treasures of the earth, but absolutely as if she were treading grapes to extract their juice or rather as she would have climbed on some sacks to raise herself up; and she holds her flaming heart out to God, or, to put it more exactly, “hands” it to him, as a cook hands a corkscrew through the vent of her cellar to someone who is asking her for it at the ground-floor window …

There must have been a good deal of reality in those Virtues and Vices of Padua, since they seemed to me as alive as the pregnant servant, and since she herself did not appear to me much less allegorical.  And perhaps this (at least apparent) nonparticipation of a personal soul in the virtue that is acting through her has also, beyond its aesthetic value, a reality that is, if not psychological, at least, as they say, physiognomical. When, later, I had occasion to meet, in the course of my life, in convents for instance, truly saintly embodiments of practical charity, they generally had the cheerful, positive, indifferent, and brusque air of a busy surgeon, the sort of face in which one can read no commiseration, no pity in the presence of human suffering, no fear of offending it, the sort which is the ungentle face, the antithetic and sublime face of true goodness.

Sounds rather like the way her friends have described Polish Holocaust heroine Irena Sendler to me.

Exploring a Cathar stronghold with a Bengali friend (Photo: My Droid)

“It is rating one’s conjectures at a very high price to roast a man alive on the strength of them,” wrote Michel de Montaigne, and the 16th Frenchman from Dordogne, in the foothills of the Pyrénées, knew what he was talking about.

This is “Pays Cathare,” as mentioned a few days ago, which is a source of local pride and defiance.

No fool.

So my Bengali friend took me to Villerouge Termenes, a castle and military stronghold that dates back to the 13th century, about a dozen kilometers or so from Lagrasse.  The castle has a grisly backstory:  Guillaume Bélibaste, said to be the last Cathar “parfait” in Languedoc, was burned at the stake here, in 1321. That terrifying death would have been the last gasp of Catharism in the Aude region; by the turn of the 14th century, the Church had successfully suppressed the quasi-gnostic heresy with hundreds of burnings and hangings.  A revival of the movement was largely beaten back by about 1310.

“He was the last in a long line of those fervent believers, of those Cathars, who now go by the name of the Perfect ones,” says the rather tendentious sign outside the castle.  “Yes, Bélibaste was the last Perfect Cathar, and he wasn’t cut out for this overwhelming role.  A peasant, that’s what he was…” says the sign (ellipsis and all).

The ellipses continue in another sign: “…A peasant who tended the family’s flocks, a family of heretics, that’s to say people who mistrusted everything at the end of the 13th century. The Catholic church reigned. The Inquisition burned anything suspect. The last heretics were hounded beasts. Which is undoubtedly why Guilhem, around 1305, ended up killing a man…”

Huh?  A quick recourse to Wikipedia:  Bélibaste was the son of a rich farmer. For reasons apparently unknown, he killed a shepherd and was forced to flee his native Cubières.  He then became a shepherd himself, and then a Cathar preacher and parfait.  More signs:

“A Perfect one, Philippe d’Alairac, visited the Bélibaste family in secret of course … and said to Guilhem, ‘You can escape and drag a useful life behind with you, or you can follow me, and come to Rabastens.’ And Bélibaste chose, he left with Philippe, and there in his home, Philippe d’Alairac talked to Guilhem the shepherd.  He initiated him, he made him a perfect one.”

“Fermé.” Castles in these parts don’t keep to regular hours. (Photo: My Droid)

The Cathars were non-violent, and perhaps among the West’s first vegetarian and pacifist movements.  In the usual gnostic fashion, they were, on the whole, somewhat against sex, believing that the world of the flesh was intrinsically evil and stemmed from an evil demi-urge. Undoubtedly, if this were better known, it would put off a lot of those modernday romantics who get misty-eyed about gnosticism.

The Cathars were also against marriage vows, which put them in something of a bind.  So what little is known about Bélibaste concerns a rather tangled and deceitful incident, involving Pierre Maury. His own backstory from Wikipedia:

In Catalonia he came in contact with the small group of Cathar exiles led by the parfait Guillaume Bélibaste. Over the next several years Maury traveled through Catalonia and the eastern Pyrénées. As a skilled shepherd, his services were in demand and he could find work throughout the region. Maury became comparatively wealthy for a peasant due to his skill, hard work, and ability to find the best paying employers. Despite his many travels he frequently met up with Bélibaste, who pressured the nomadic shepherd to settle down. At one point, Belibaste prevailed on him to marry Raymonde Piquier, a blacksmith’s daughter, who was Belibaste’s lover and pregnant with his child. Pierre agreed and the pair were married. But the marriage lasted only a few days. Bélibaste then told Maury to have it annulled. Months later Raymonde gave birth to a child. Most of Maury’s friends were convinced that the parfait had used Pierre to cover the breaking of his own vow of chastity. Maury however, continued to trust the parfait.

As the signs at the castle tell us, spies were everywhere.  Eventually Bélibaste was betrayed by the spy Arnaud Sicre, an agent of the Inquisition.  Maury was imprisoned in 1324, and then disappears from history.  I wonder what became of the blacksmith’s daughter, and her baby.

Wine, books, philosophy, conviviality … and a very good vieux prune and eau de vie.

When I told friends in Paris I was going to Lagrasse, no one had even heard of it.  “Grasse?” they kept asking in puzzlement.  “Non, Lagrasse,” I kept insisting. They didn’t quite believe me.

Chez moi … at least for a day or two

Yet this little village in Languedoc-Roussillon is a gem is rated as one of “Les Plus Beaux Villages de France.” Nestled in the foothills of the Pyrénées, it hosts a twice-a-year literary festival, Banquet des Livres and also hosts a very active philosophy society.  As Libération puts it: “Au cœur des Corbières, le village de Lagrasse mêle le goût du vin à celui de la parole, la philosophie à la littérature, l’exigence à la convivialité.”

Charlemagne okayed it.

I went on a walking tour along the narrow medieval streets with a friend I hadn’t seen in 35 years – the way-back days in Pokhara and Kathmandu.  The village of about 500 is easily walkable.  A few minutes walk away from his home, where I’m a guest for a few days, is the abbey built in the time of Charlemagne, and the 1303 Pont-Vieux à Lagrasse on the river l’Orbieu.

We are in the very south of France, close to the Spanish border.  Lots of signs say that this is “Pays Cathars” – an odd thing to brag about, since the Cathars were slaughtered mercilessly in these parts.  For me, it was a bit like seeing advertisements directing drivers to the locales of concentration camps.

But after a spirited dinner party (with an excellent locally made vieux prune and eau de vie), my dinner companions explained to me that the Cathar movement symbolized local resistance, and is a sign of local pride.

Maybe.  I guess I can see it.

Simone Weil of course wrote a great deal about the Albigensian crusades that routed out the Cathar heresy.  I like this quote from her the best: “Official history is believing the murderers at their word.”

Mama’s boy.

When the legendary biographer Diane Middlebrook died of cancer in 2007, she left behind an unfinished manuscript about the Roman poet who had been her lifelong passion. Had death not halted her progress, Ovid: A Biography would almost certainly be in print by now.

In her last months, she tried to radically revamp her book into a study of Ovid’s early years, Young Ovid. Finally she had to abandon the project altogether, leaving as her completed legacy Anne Sexton: A Biography (1992), Suits Me: The Double Life of Billie Tipton (1999), and Her Husband: Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, A Marriage (2003).

Her executors, her daughter Leah Middlebrook and literary scholar Nancy K. Miller, are working to publish the completed sections of the book. The first of their efforts has been published in the current edition of Feminist Studies as “20 March, 43 BCE: Ovid is Born.”

Her work cut short.

The piece describes childbirth practices in ancient Rome as well as the role of Ovid’s family – particularly his mother – in his writing and his life.

“Was it in childhood that Ovid’s imagination was captivated by what went on among women sitting together over their spindles and their looms?” Middlebrook asks. “If Ovid’s poetry is original in its treatment of fathers, it is unique in ancient literature in its representation of the social world that women created for themselves within the household, a world largely concealed from the attention of men. Women of all ages and kinds appear and interact with one another in Ovid’s tales, enriching the world of the poem and broadening its emotional and social reach. If an unwelcome man should arrive on the scene, interrupting the women, this world would immediately fold itself up and away out of sight. A male child of less than 7 years, however, might have been a tolerated exception.”

Stanford colleague and friend Terry Castle said of the article (which can be ordered online here), “It’s a lovely memorial to Diane, but also a marvelously interesting essay on Ovid and the nature of childbirth in ancient Rome: a feminist topic if ever there were one.”

(By the by, I just discovered Diane Middlebrook’s 1998 lecture on Ovid online here.)

The superb Prélude de Paris playing for free in Colette Place. (Photo: C.L. Haven)

It’s hard to avoid cultural life in Paris – unless you put your mind to it.  And to my continual surprise, some people do precisely that.

As I was leaving my apartment today to say farewell to a few haunts in Paris, I heard a professional or quasi-professional choir on the streets below singing Christmas carols to an audience of passers-by.  By the time I got to Colette Place next to the Louvre, I ran into Prélude de Paris playing Vivaldi for whoever would like to listen.  (If you would like to listen to them, try here.)

Lonely guy.

Meanwhile, since Paris is the City of Love, I have to confess I fell hard while visiting the celebrated “Raphaël, les dernières années” at the Louvre, a historic collection exhibition in partnership with Prado (it continues till January 14). The Louvre itself lends itself to the sublime – and so does Jean-Baptiste, at right.  He was skilfully set in a small passageway of great paintings, all making the same gesture.  But he was … special.

Now here’s the thing:  I was all alone in my passion.  Everyone was swarming where they were told to swarm – the pack was thick around some of the bigger paintings, but Leonardo da Vinci‘s stunning work was all by its lonesome. It is believed to be Leonardo’s last painting, sometime between 1513-1516.

Different story a few floors above (no pun intended).  In deference to Zbigniew Herbert‘s poem, I dutifully made the trek, following the prominent signs, to the Mona Lisa.  I couldn’t get within 15 feet of it, the crowds waving cellphones at it, like masses of seaweed swaying on the ocean floor.

My friend Max Taylor said it’s the same old, same old:  “I will never forget the first time I saw this painting, in July 1976, about a month before I turned fifteen. The Mona Lisa was behind glass a few paintings away on the same wall and was attracting all the attention, while everyone was ignoring this mysterious and fascinating painting.”

My friend and artist Susan Williamson told me I better enjoy it while it lasts.  He will not always be “‘a light that shineth in the darkness.” Jean-Baptiste is about to vanish on me.  Apparently Leonardo, who was always experimenting with pigments, mixed resin tar tar in one of the layers of paint. Susan has tried it herself, and said it gives a beautiful, honey-colored glow to her painting … at first.  Then it keeps darkening and darkening over the years, to pitch black eventually.  It’s not a fixable problem, because the resin and paint and tar are all mixed up together.

Enjoy him while he lasts.  He’s worth it.  Only another century or so to go … then pffffftttt!