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Rome

POETRY

MEDITATIONS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments3 min read1.1K views

‘The Third Man…a revelation…’

Martin Scorsese, THE INDEPENDENT, 2015

 

There is no mention in Graham Greene’s novella

The Third Man, or in his screenplay, or even

the shooting script, of Café Marc Aurel –

to which, in the movie, Joseph Cotten

aka Holly Martins, writer of Westerns,

has lured his friend Orson Welles aka

Harry Lime, racketeer, only to be

thwarted by Allida Valli aka

Anna Schimdt, actress at the Josefstadt

Theater, and Harry Lime’s faithful lover.

 

***

 

On a rainy day trip to old Vienna,

knowing the Café did not exist

and never did, we were determined

to see the extant Weiner Riesenrad,

from whose brief circular zenith Orson Welles

meditated on the human condition,

democracy, and Swiss-made cuckoo clocks.

 

So who better to ask for directions

among the shopping crowds on Kaernterstrasse

than two young men in smart-casual attire

manning a stall promoting the Marcus

Aurelius Foundation, whose mission is

‘to support young people to live a life of

clarity and purpose’ through Stoicism.

Where else than the city of Freud and Mahler

to learn how to live with the fear of death!

 

***

 

Marcus Aurelius – sixteenth Emperor

of Rome and last of the Pax Romana –

is most famous now for his Meditations,

a collection of his stoical

aphorisms, two of which are as follows:

‘We love ourselves more than other people,

yet care more about their opinion

than our own…’ – and ‘If it is not right do not

do it; if it is not true do not say it…’

 

The Emperor while campaigning against

the Germanic Tribes died, allegedly,

in Vindobona, present day Vienna.

Some say he had just inscribed

the following: ‘Act as if every

action is the last action of your life’.

 

***

 

The Café’s name is secure in black and white

celluloid above a shop front

in a partially bombed square

just round the corner from Marc-Aurel-Strasse:

the interior lit from a distance

to look like a café – though the action

was filmed at Elstree Studios, Borehamwood,

London. The film unit on the spot

must have decided the place needed a name

so perhaps Greene, the ever ironic

Balliol history graduate, suggested

Marcus Aurelius – and Carol Reed,

the director, chose the shortened version

to fit. Did Greene mention that the emperor

most probably died somewhere else,

namely Sirmium, one of the oldest

cities in Europe, and birthplace of ten

Roman emperors, now present day

Sremska Mitrovica in Serbia?

Both Harry and Marcus elusive in death?

 

***

 

The Emperor was cremated and deified.

In Rome’s Piazza Colonna – off

the Via Del Corso, where the Jews

were paraded and mocked each Mardi Gras –

is a column commemorating

the Emperor’s victories in battle

(though not, of course, his Meditations),

probably begun in his lifetime.

When Christianity prevailed his statue

topping it was replaced by one of St Paul

aka Saul of Tarsus, Anatolia –

now present day Turkey – the city

where Mark Antony first met Cleopatra.

 

***

 

In the movie, whose constant backdrop

are the literal ruins of bombed Vienna,

with the four Occupying Powers – Britain,

France, Russia, and the USA – playing

a key role in the story as both

dei and diaboli ex machina,

nobody ever asks where the Jews have gone.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

CONVERT OR DIE

David Selzer By David Selzer2 Comments1 min read677 views

In a large chamber behind the colossal

Doric colonnades four columns deep –

Bernini’s ‘maternal arms of mother church’ –

that enclose both sides of St Peter’s Square

is an exhibition: How Christ Was Brought

To The New World. There are extensive maps

and long lists of dates, the occasional

Christian martyr’s cross or chasuble,

and illustrations of happy converts,

but not a hint of the laying waste

to inconvenient cultures, the blood

and lamentation, the casuistry,

the theft, and servitude.

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

GUESTS OF LIFE

David Selzer By David Selzer5 Comments2 min read760 views

‘We are the guests of life.’ Martin Heidegger

 ‘In ancient Greek the word for ‘guest’ is the same as the word for ‘foreigner’: xenos. And if you were to ask me to define our tragic condition, it’s that the word ‘xenophobia’ survives, and is commonly used, everyone understands it; but the word ‘xenophilia’ has disappeared…’ George Steiner

 

For Cicero books were the ‘soul of the house’.

The Ancient Romans knew a thing or two

about staying safe in uncivil times.

Nevertheless on his way to sail abroad

the lawyer, statesman, writer, orator

polymath was assassinated

by Roman soldiers obeying the orders

of a vindictive kleptocracy. His head

and his hands were nailed up in The Forum.

Each autumn an affliction of starlings

would swoop above Rome like a chattering net.

Now in the abandoned Coliseum

there are only cats, and the shadows of cats.

 

I watch a neighbour’s cat  – obviously

well fed at home, sleek, sharp-eyed – practising

its instinctive hunting skills in our garden.

Its belly to the ground, it pads forward,

inch by silent inch, then leaps on its prey –

a peacock butterfly opening its wings.

Shocked I almost cry out – but what should

cats know about the absence of butterflies,

or butterflies about the instincts of cats?

But we do – who will risk death to nurse strangers,

and who will slaughter others in a moment.

 

There is no one available now to wind

the parish church clock, whose bells chimed

the quarters and the hours through world wars,

whose hands moved implacably. I can glimpse

the steeple, as I walk the hundred paces

along our garden paths, over the lawns,

across the terraces – where my lovely ghosts

jostle at each turn. I think of house arrest,

self-exile – Ovid, Galileo, the Franks –

note the laburnum’s yellow ringlets

loud with bees, and the wisteria’s sweet

sensuous perfume, the blackbirds nesting

in the ivy, magpies in the snowy drifts

of the pear tree, and consider myself

blessed, if there were blessings to be doled,

having people to love who are living.

 

 

 

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David Selzer By David Selzer
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POETRY

APOCALYPSE

David Selzer By David Selzer0 Comments1 min read386 views

Via Del Corso, Rome, March 2020.

The boutiques had been closed by decree, even

Calvin Klein Underwear and Brooks Brothers.

The only pedestrians were the Pope,

in his white robes, and his bodyguard,

in bulging suits – on a pilgrimage

to the ancient church of San Marcello

set back from the street. Beneath a crucifix,

used to assuage a 15th century plague,

Pope Francis prayed to God to stop the virus.

 

The street, in Roman times, was Via Lata –

Broad Way – and ran through the Field of Mars

towards the Adriatic. At Mardi Gras,

in the Renaissance, the Ghetto was emptied

and the Jews paraded along the street

so that the Christians could mock and scorn.

 

Italy’s churches had been closed by decree –

except in the north where some were being used

as temporary morgues, from which corpses

were taken, for cremation, day and night,

by slow convoys of army lorries.

 

Like riderless horses around a race track,

history repeats and repeats, and God,

who was thought to be dead, may merely be deaf.

 

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POETRY

THE BRIDGE

David Selzer By David Selzer1 Comment1 min read679 views

Where the Menai Straits are at their narrowest,

between two bluffs, Thomas Telford chose to build

his one span suspension bridge, high enough

for tall ships to pass. The two towers,

exposed to the tides, were built of limestone blocks

from the Penmon quarries on the coast

north of here. Caernavon Castle had been built

from Penmon stone – and blocks were shipped to Dublin

to line the Liffey with wharfs and quays.

 

Telford, the ‘Colossus of Roads’, was reared

in penury – a stone mason by trade,

a self-taught engineer, begetter of

the A5 coaching road, erstwhile Watling Street;

the London-Holyhead trunk from Marble Arch

to Admiralty Arch by the Irish Sea.

 

Built a generation later, a mile south

and within sight, is Stephenson’s railway bridge.

Two British industrial colossi

so close in space and time! So much investment,

ingenuity, innovation, to keep

the Catholic colonies of Ireland,

those reserves of navvies and wheat, in thrall!

 

Between the bridges are The Swellies

around Fish Trap Island – Ynys Gorad Goch –

whirling at high tide, lake calm at low water.

The Druids, deemed Rome’s enemies, were hunted.

They crossed here in coracles, felt safe at last

on Ynys Môn, Mam Cymru.  They watched the soldiers

swim like dogs across the sacred waters.

Rome’s mercenaries ran them down like boar,

skewering them among the flowering gorse.

 

 

 

 

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POETRY

ICONS

David Selzer By David Selzer3 Comments2 min read700 views

From the restaurant terrace on the cliff top

at Agios Giorgios, Cape Drepanos,

we can see the small harbour below,

its sea wall curved like a scythe and, opposite,

the flat topped, steep sided, uninhabited

islet of Yeronisos, ‘Holy Island’ –

set today in that special, placid blue.

Folk tales have Greeks, after the fall of Troy

and exiled from home, land there and build

a temple to Apollo. Excavations

suggest the sanctuary was founded

by Cleopatra for Caesarion,

her son by Julius Caesar, the heir

she hoped, to Rome – Apollo being the god

of archery, knowledge, medicine, plague.

A few miles south on what, before the hotels

and villas came, was a deserted shore,

Colonel Grivas, Greek Cypriot ‘hero’

or ‘terrorist’, landed one November night

in ’54 to expel the British.

 

The restaurant is packed with middle class

local families in their Palm Sunday best.

After our mezze, fish fresh from the harbour,

we tourist St George’s church along the cliff –

a modern chapel-sized basilica

with its own square and drinking fountain.

We light a candle, as we always do,

more ‘good deed in a naughty world’ than faith.

A steady footfall of true believers

kisses the glass fronted icon of the saint.

A votive pink baby doll hangs from it.

Fifty yards inland, where there are ruins

of a Roman city, is a medieval shrine

to the saint – once a prayerful place for those,

Greek or Muslim, before Partition,

seeking love or strayed goats and donkeys.

 

On the fountain is a crude mosaic

of the Roman Soldier/Christian Martyr

slaying a dragon with its devil’s breath –

in Palestine, perhaps, or Syria.

Three leagues south is Aphrodite’s Rock

where the goddess was born among the spume.

Nowhere full of myth and history,

of irony and contradiction,

delineated by paint on wood

or finds in the earth or words in the air

is far from here over the bluest,

most changeable of seas.

 

 

 

 

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