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Napoleon

ANGELS AND VANDALS

Everywhere in central Rome is sentient:

the Coliseum; St Peter’s Square;

the Spanish Steps; Castel Sant’ Angelo –

a towering, cylindrical building,

originally the Emperor Hadrian’s

mausoleum then a bolt hole for besieged

popes and, finally, for centuries,

a prison, and place of execution,

before becoming a museum.

 

We are approaching the castle this New Year’s Day

across the Ponte Sant Angelo, with its

ten sculptured, twice life-size, Baroque angels.

Beneath the Angel With The Crown Of Thorns

are three Roma children, a boy and two girls,

the latter dressed in long multi-coloured skirts,

their hair hidden by tightly wrapped scarves.

While the older girl begs,  the other two

are lighting some kindling they have brought.

 

The Castel Sant Angelo is the setting

for the final act of Puccini’s ‘Tosca’.

While Napoleon’s army is advancing –

so Rome will be sacked yet again –

Tosca, a famous soprano, stabs

the lecherous Scarpia, Chief of Police.

She thinks she has tricked him into saving

her lover – but the bullets the firing squad

discharges in the prison yard are real

and Cavaradossi, a painter, dies.

In her grief she sings, ‘O Scarpia,

avanti a dio!’, then runs up the steps

to the parapet – where we are standing –

and throws herself over the ramparts.

We can see the snow on the Apennines,

the Tiber flowing fast and olive below,

and, on the bridge, two armed policemen chasing

the children, whose small bonfire is blazing now.

 

 

REFLECTIONS ON BURLESQUE AND CALAMITY

‘Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.’

THE EIGHTEENTH BRUMAIRE OF LOUIS BONAPARTE, Karl Marx

‘If I cut my finger that’s tragedy. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.’

ALL ABOUT ME! Mel Brooks

 

Tragedy shows how, inadvertently,

we may destroy our own lives, as well

as those of others’, through some fatal flaw –

pride, insouciance, self-obsession, fear. Farce,

meanwhile, is the only art form that shows

how so-called inanimate objects,

things-in-themselves, shape human destiny.

 

Consider whether the dumb-show that follows,

set – in an earlier, apparently

less chaotic epoch – on the island

of Ireland, is drama or pantomime.

 

Two young lovers, having consulted

an appropriate almanac, choose

what is forecast to be a moonless night

to elope. Unfortunately two rungs

of the wooden ladder the young woman –

a Catholic –  has brought break and the man –

a young scion of the Protestant

Ascendancy – falls on top of her.

 

Meanwhile the moon appears, and distracts

an old woman passing by – a writer

of bucolic verses occasionally

published in The Lady but an admirer

of narrative verse.  She collides head first

with a lamp post (which the lamplighter

has forgotten to light), and so drops

the banana she has just finished eating,

a comparatively exotic fruit

for the time. The elderly father –

of the putative but prone bridegroom –

learned of the elopement (which is not

now happening the lovers having had,

as it were, almost literally, a falling out)

from an anonymous note at his club.

 

The cab he has taken stops in the street

near the Aberdeen granite gates of his house.

He pays, then runs, but does not see –

clouds having obscured the moon again –

the unconscious poet nor her discarded

banana skin, and, crying out, slips,

cracking open his congenitally

thin skull on the Yorkstone paving.

The old woman regains consciousness,

and, oblivious of the corpse, wanders home,

suffering from partial amnesia.

 

The police discover the young woman’s third

cousin was hanged as a Fenian.

She is arrested and questioned frequently.

She becomes a republican. The young man,

in due course, marries a scioness

of the Ascendancy. They return

from their honeymoon to discover

the house he inherited has been burnt down.

The published poet, reading an account

of some of the events in the Irish Times,

thinks briefly what a grand tale they would make.

 

You may well ask, Dear Reader, what has all this

to do with Hegel, Marx, Louis Bonaparte,

his uncle Napoleon, revolutions,

dialectical materialism,

Melvin Kaminsky aka Mel Brooks

of ‘The Producers’, ‘Young Frankenstein’,

‘Blazing Saddles’, and ‘The Elephant Man’?

In Ancient Greek Tragedy the actor

who played the protagonist, as well as

wearing a mask, wore buskins – thick-soled

laced boots – to give him height.

 

 

THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

1816 was the ‘year of no summer’.

Volcanic ash from the Dutch East Indies

darkened Europe’s skies. Mount Tambora,

amid the savannahs of Sumbawa,

had erupted the previous year.

So June 1815 was unseasonably

wet, particularly in Belgium.


Escaped from Elba, Bonaparte had rallied

France, almost expunging Blucher’s Prussians

in Wallonia. At Waterloo,

on the morning of the 8th, Napoleon –

once begetter of Le Code Civil

Des Français before he crowned himself –

waited for the ground to dry in order

to deploy his cavalry to best effect.

However, Blucher’s remnants joined Wellington’s

‘scum of the earth’, and Boney rode from the field

in tears. His ‘critical error’ became

part of the military syllabus.


Add choice and pride to physics and chance

butterflies too can make a right mess of things.

FROM THE PERSPECTIVE OF HISTORY

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read516 views

My granddaughter and I paused before Turner’s

‘War: the Exile and the Rock Limpet’

in the collection of the artist’s work

at Tate Britain, Millbank, beside the Thames.

The exile is Napoleon Bonaparte

on St Helena. He stands – in signature

outfit including the hat – arms folded,

contemplating obscure life in a rock pool.

A guard, musket shouldered, stands some paces off.

The sun rises or sets on a swirling, volcanic coast.

‘Was Napoleon really that tall?’ she asked.

‘Good point,’ I said. ‘I too thought he was short.’

 

We left the Tate by the Manton entrance.

I pointed out the many shrapnel gouges

blitzed deep into the limestone facade

from discarded bombs meant for the docks downstream,

and told her how Rothenstein, the curator,

and his wife had slept for months on camp beds

to act as early air raid wardens.

 

Later I googled Rothenstein – no mention

of wife never mind kipping on a camp bed.

In fact he had arranged for works to be moved

to, for instance, Cumbria and the Marches

after the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact,

more than a week before war was declared.

I made a mental note to correct

the anecdote with my granddaughter –

and I realised suddenly that

Napoleon would have seemed very tall

from the perspective of a rock limpet.

INCONSEQUENTIAL

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read370 views

A long section of the grassy bank beside

the ornamental lake is roped-off –

a pair of Canada Geese is nesting,

the first in the history of the Park

with its long-serving Coots and Mallards.

We sit on a bench and contemplate the geese –

almost as big as Mute Swans; adept

colonisers, considered still, after

three hundred years, non-native; this chance pair

perhaps blown off course between raucous lagoons.

 

We are distracted by raised voices

from the opposite bank – three picnickers

on a rug in the April sunshine,

a young woman and perhaps her parents.

Between the murmur of the older woman’s

responses and the man’s rumblings, we hear

occasional words from the impassioned

young woman: ‘…moral compass…out of control…

no time limit…crimes against humanity…

Iraq…Afghanistan…Northern Ireland!!…’

 

At our feet an Ivy Bee – a much newer

immigrant than the geese, landing where Hitler

and Napoleon were expected,

and moving a little further north

year by year – is making a nest in the bank.

Finished it disappears into the earth,

leaving a perfectly circular mound

of grains of sandy soil – a solitary,

relentless labourer, a bee for our times.

 

 

 

 

 

 

HINDSIGHT

From Moscow to London, Stockholm to Venice

the world froze at 10, 12, 15 below

for three months. Wine froze in bottles, cows in byres,

and wolves came down to villages scavenging.

Tree trunks shattered. Church bells once rung fractured.

Travellers crossed the Baltic on horse-back,

skaters glided under the Rialto.

 

The War of Spanish Succession was paused

for more clement weather – and regiments

of Swedish soldiers died in Russian blizzards,

ceding victory in the Great Northern War

to Peter the Great almost by default.

(Both Napoleon and Hitler ignored

that hard lesson about Russian winters).

 

Climatologists cannot agree

on what caused the Great Frost: the prolonged absence

of sunspots, perhaps, or volcanic ash

from recent eruptions, Vesuvius,

Santorini. Trade stopped. Hundreds of thousands

perished in a flu pandemic, or starved

to death. Louis XIV ordered bread

be given to the poor. Even the Sun King,

at his new palace in Versailles, felt obliged

to try to save the lives of mere strangers.

 

***

 

In The Gulag Archipelago’s Preface

Solzhenitsyn quotes a peasant proverb:

‘Dwell on the past and you’ll lose an eye.

Forget the past and you’ll lose both eyes’.

 

He opens the Preface with an anecdote,

a story he encountered in a magazine.

Political prisoners, from one

of the many Kolyma labour camps

in the Siberian tundra, by chance

dug up a frozen subterranean stream,

with fish preserved in motion for tens

of millennia. The prisoners

broke the ice, ate the fish.