The Way to Loreto — A Very Brief Poetics of the Fathomless
History has often been described in terms of a cyclical movement, or as an ascending curve; in the past century it ended in catastrophe on several occasions. One of the first recorded characterisations of history dates back to the 5th century BC and comes from the pre-Socratic philosopher Anaxagoras, who envisaged it as a continuous wave of whirls that traverse the plane in a series of loops. Deep mapping, as I describe it in this text, cannot escape their pull. It gives chase and is swept away – to a place in which the very close and the very distant suddenly come face to face. Something that is at once instructive and painful. As painful as it can be when you realise that the past will not leave you be, falling into long outdated patterns. The International Artists’ Committee invited me to Wiesbaden last October to say something regarding the new political situation in Europe following the Russian attack on Ukraine. The stage was shared by artists and curators from Ukraine, Belarus, Czechia, Serbia, Poland and Germany. I wanted to talk about how our way of writing history has to change when a small piece of yesterday returns with each whirl. I made my first notes on this topic last summer in Olevano Romano, a small mountain village in Lazio, during a residence at the German Academy in Rome. Now war has returned: A post-Soviet prospect has opened up before us, yielding …
I.
The Lament of the Historiographer
I came to Olevano Romano to write a book
about the long twentieth century.
And now I live on a hill between Via XXIV Maggio and Via VI Giugno.
When I open the north-facing window in the morning,
the First World War is breaking out in Italy.
Three dreadnoughts are heading for the port of Ancona and shelling the city.
When I step onto the south-facing patio in the evening,
the German troops are withdrawing from Olevano.
Every day I walk twenty-nine years back and forth to drink my caffè at San Rocco.
On a clear day, if the sun is right behind the water,
the view stretches over the plains of the Sacco valley to the sea.
The Tyrrhenian coast before me,
the Adriatic Sea behind,
I tread the narrowest ridge of the Italian peninsula.
I can’t say I wasn’t warned.
II.
Historiographers are muleteers. If they had their way, they would drive history before them as they drive their mule. Straight forward. Without ever once turning their head aside either to the right hand or to the left. From Rome all the way to Loreto. Laying down an exact time of arrival in the Marches. But the thing is, morally speaking, impossible. For fortunately, mules can be stubborn animals, obstinate, as Laurence Sterne notes in his novel Tristram Shandy. Before the historiographer knows it, the mule has deviated from the path, stopped here, tramped there. Gone off to swill water, scuff straw, relieve itself. And the historiographer will be strung along. He will have views and prospects to himself perpetually soliciting his eye, which he can no more help standing still to look at than he can fly. And on these digressions and transgressions, the historiographer will make a discovery that will transform his work as chronicler of the king: He will discover the stuff that history is made of: he will moreover have various
Accounts to reconcile:
Anecdotes to pick up:
Inscriptions to make out:
Stories to weave in:
Traditions to sift:
Personages to call upon:
Panegyricks to paste up at this door;
He will untangle spaces, sift layers, uncover fissures, trace long lines. He will penetrate ever deeper into the local archives, acquire lists, collate new ones. Eddies throw up dust, make waves, muddy waters; they mobilise, illumine, suck you in; they generate force fields, turbulence, ground swell, static; they carry you off, along, away; they smother you. He will draw the librarian’s attention to gaps in the catalogue, he will get lost, bogged down, unsettled. When Deep Mapping the historian’s anxiety becomes palpable: Of having to surrender his serene, contemplative attitude, of having to break cover. Hitherto he knew no more than his little finger about Jack Hickathrift and Tom Thumb, and that didn’t know much either. Except that it was a little finger on a hand that was much too large.
III.
olevano romano
every evening in the sunless corner
upstairs and down
three grandmothers sit on the bench and greet me
buona sera, I say
a plastic bag in each hand
buona sera, say the swollen feet in their crocs
and anoint me with nods
one a short nod, the next two short nods,
the third short then long
to their left and right sit
the day, the month, the year
and turn the coins beneath their tongues
IV.
Towards the end of the 13th century, according to legend, the house in which the Virgin Mary was born was lifted into the air by angels and transported from Nazareth in Galilee to Loreto in the Italian Marches. There you can visit it to this day: A narrow room, nine point two five meters by four point one, with a height of five meters. With one tiny window. It is through this window that the archangel Gabriel once squeezed and announced to Mary that the Holy Ghost would come upon her and she would bear the Son of God. The rest of the story is well known and has since become the object of innumerable depictions right through the history of art. For more than seven hundred years pilgrims have now made their journey to the Santa Casa in Loreto. If, in fact, they ever reached their destination. There are good reasons to think they did not. The Loreto-Principle, for instance. Never heard of it? The Loreto-Principle states that it is impossible for a historiographer who sets out on a pilgrimage from Rome to Loreto to ever reach his destination. He will ineluctably get lost on the way. For soon he will no longer interest himself in his finds in the archives. Fortuitous finds, nameless narrators that pass on their stories by word of mouth. The muleteer will be engulfed so deeply in the material, under the records, files and documents, the genealogies, that he will, ultimately, forget why he set out from Rome in the first place. He will fall asleep every night beneath the tent of his reading lamp and ask for nothing more than not to be disturbed until further notice. And whilst his parents wait for him in Loreto with the dinner, he will request and comb through ever new scrolls, folders, folios. To sum up all; there are archives at every stage to be look’d into, and rolls, records, documents, and endless genealogies, which justice ever and anon calls him back to stay the reading of: – In short there is no end of it.
V.
Historiographers are muleteers. If they had their way, they would drive history before them on a leash. Straight forward. Without ever once turning their head aside either to the right hand or to the left. From Rome all the way to Loreto. Laying down an exact time of arrival in the Marches. But, fortunately, mules are stubborn animals. And sometimes, just sometimes, they find to their destination in the dust without anyone dragging at their reins.
/ / /
Santa Casa di Loreto
