Giovanni Muro (K2)- 2nd July, 1982 – Geoff in Venice….“the nothing new"

“The day before a journey, rrrrrrrrrring… I don’t need such a shrill reminder!” Alvaro De Campos / Fernando Pessoa Giovanni Muro (1948-2009), was an Italian expressionist artist, operating on the fringes of the last glimmers of the Povera Arte and Minimalist movements. Jangled and jarred, having had neither his usual easeful night rhythm nor his reassuring morning routine to fall back on, Giovanni was now early for his train. He had woken naturally, but ,in the same way that “death by natural causes”, while giving a generalised sense of a life having ended in settled circumstances , might also encompass, say, an angry man’s sudden and fatal heart-attack on a street corner, the word “naturally” in this context ,although it might have served in a nurse’s case-note as an accurate description of how Giovanni had woken up, in truth did not do justice to his start to the day. What was “natural” was that Giovanni had not been broken out of his slumber by the clamour of his clock’s alarm, which had been set to go off some 70 minutes later; but other than that his rising had been far from luxuriant and gentle, having been brought about by the last of a succession of combined muscular and nervous convulsions that had intermittently woken him up throughout the night, as he had slept fitfully, anxiously anticipating the unusually early time when he needed to get up. Not that it was still dark or dawn, but there had been only one early morning train that would, if it ran as expected , get him from Termini St Lucia to his destination in good time and the anxiety of missing it had been enough to deprive Giovanni of the deep, immersive night’s sleep that he had so wanted. Despite the hour there was already real heat in the sun’s rays , that raked across the City at a low angle, casting long shadows and negating the purpose of the numerous cafés’ awnings , that otherwise sheltered the early morning customers nursing their pastries and coffee. Giovanni had crossed ponte degli scalzi toward Chiesa Santa Maria (the elaborate ,late baroque façade of which gave little or no clue to the damage that had been caused to the church’s roof and decorated ceiling by an Austrian artillery bombardment on 24th October 1915 during the First World War), before turning left toward the railway station , where he sat down on a bench under a tree to the north east corner of the entrance. Pollen, fine seeds and dust drifted in the warming morning air, seeking a mulch to make their own. Birds were singing in the dense canopy overhead while across the concourse a black dog chased a pigeon, but it’s heart wasn’t in it. The concourse was teeming, a sight that always brought the late works of Umberto Boccioni to Giovanni’s mind. Despite Boccioni having , rather adolescently, put his name to a manifesto called “Against past- loving Venice” (a decision that was particularly remarkable given the cloying paintings that he had made when visiting Venice some three years earlier), Giovanni had always had something of a soft spot for Boccioni as an artist , perhaps in part because sometimes Giovanni felt that he had once borne a physical resemblance to him. Thinking back now to Santa Maria and the bomb-damaged Tiepolo ceiling, it wasn’t clear to Giovanni what Boccioni (who , in that over-heated diatribe, distributed by him and his fellow “epatiers” in St Mark’s Square in 1910, when the campanile was still being painstakingly rebuilt in front of them, had called for the “abolition of the falling curves of Venice’s old architecture” and the filling up of the canals with the rubble of the “collapsing, leprous” palazzos) , would have made of the subsequent destructive Austrian bombardments of Venice in the year before he was killed , but he imagined that Boccioni might well have shared his enthusiasm for the low-slung , clean-white, modernist brutalism of the Santa Lucia railway terminal, that often had the word “fascistic” connected with it even though it’s construction had only been completed in the 1950’s to a design by Paulo Perilli . However Giovanni was absolutely sure that , at least during that short phase of Boccioni’s relatively brief life when his vitality seemed universal, this rather confused, ill-formed but gifted man would have been enthralled by the everyday spectacle of the immense human crowds that passed by, entered and left the station, especially at this time of the day. Giovanni was of the view that, like Boccioni’s contemporary Modigliani and his successor, Giacometti, Boccioni’s paintings , particularly the late paintings of urban crowds and incidents, that had been animated by an energy from a source shared with Marinetti’s futurist manifesto , gained additional depth when placed in the context of his sculptural works, in Boccioni’s case especially the fluid dynamism of the work known as Unique Forms of Continuity in Space. It was that sculpture in particular, posthumously cast in bronze from Boccioni’s original work in plaster , rather than, say, the descriptions of Baudelaire or Eliot, that invariably came into Giovanni’s mind whenever he observed urgent, rushing crowds of purpose-driven pedestrians , for Boccioni’s maquette somehow preserved the responsibility of willed individuality even while acknowledging the conductive, flowing force of participating in an anonymised community. But not today. Today Giovanni’s mind was elsewhere. Partly Giovanni was attentive to the time, as he knew that he was capable, even having reached the station so early, of missing the train , the train that was to take him to a rendezvous with a book-dealer in Milan who had obtained an early copy of the just-published, two-volume edition in Portuguese of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronym, Bernardo Soares’ Livro do Desassossego ( or Book of Disquiet), that Giovanni wanted ,badly. Published in Lisbon by Attica some 47 years after Pessoa’s death, a death that had been due to complications related to his chronic alcoholism, this was for Giovanni a moment of extraordinary expectation. The initial reviews and assessments were universally favourable and he was desperate to own the work, even though he was not able to read Portuguese, as a way of being somehow connected to this moment, not least because for some months now he had been working on a project whereby he was trying to bring into being the photographs that Fernando Pessoa’s four great heteronyms (Alberto Caiero, Ricardo Reis , Alvaro De Campos and Bernardo Soares) , might have taken had they each had cameras and visited Venice. How , for example, would Soares have framed the crowd now passing in front of him or how could Giovanni help De Campos capture in a photographic print a moment that was akin to the “ horizontal wrinkle” in his late poem called “Oxfordshire”? : “I want the good, I want the bad, and in the end I want nothing. I toss in bed, uncomfortable on my right side, on my left side, And on my consciousness of existing. I’m universally uncomfortable, metaphysically uncomfortable, But what is worse is my headache. That’s more serious than the meaning of the universe. Once, while walking in the country around Oxford, I saw up ahead, beyond a bend in the road, A church steeple towering above the houses of a hamlet or village. The photographic image of that non event has remained with me Like a horizontal wrinkle marring a trouser’s crease. Today it seems relevant… From the road I associated that steeple with spirituality, The faith of all ages, and practical charity. When I arrived at the village, the steeple was a steeple And, what’s more, there it was. You can be happy in Australia, as long as you don’t go there.” Oxfordshire- Alvaro De Campos/ Fernando Pessoa, 4th June, 1931 But then the important thing was that these photographs, were they to come into existence, should not be merely illustrations of some arresting phrase or passage culled from one or other of the works of Pessoa’s heteronyms, but in some way a whole new method whereby these writers could express themselves, images that while capable of existing in proximity to their published words, should, in all probability, reveal further and hitherto unknown aspects of their maker’s character. But then (again(!) ), how would one know that the image (and its purported origination as being the work of one of these characters (maybe one of a small handful of slightly foxed and creased black and white prints to be discovered inside a book once owned by Pessoa, each with notes on the back?)), carried the heft of the authentic? Would it be better to accept that what he was attempting was something that, at best, would only be “true” to himself and would in all likelihood either perplex or offend everyone else, including those with more claim to an understanding of and affinity to Pessoa’s imaginative well spring? Would it be wiser to attempt instead a sort of correlative imagining, as the English photographer, Fay Godwin, had recently done, working in collaboration with the poet Ted Hughes in his and their work “The Remains of Elmet”, where the photographs had their own logic and aesthetic but also existed in a collaborative dialogue with Hughes’ poems ( and, crucially, vice versa). Maybe he should do these photographic works in abundant, saturated, vibrant colour film, to make it clear that there was a fictive distance, of time and technique, between the heteronyms themselves and the images, and that though there was a play of ideas and imagination there was not any intended subterfuge? Giovanni sensed he was being watched. …………………………………………… “No, I didn’t sleep, but I am better when I haven’t slept and can’t sleep. I am more truly myself in his random eternity, symbolic of the half-souled state in which I live deluding myself. Someone looks at me as if they knew me or thought they knew me. With painful eyes beneath sore eyelids I feel myself look back at them; I don’t want to know about the world out there.” …………………………………………… Giovanni’s eye rested upon the figure of an angular, very tall, remarkably thin back-packer in his early twenties , who was making his way down the steps of the railway station, his head tilted in Giovanni’s direction , his eyes shielded from the still low-angled sun by a pair of fashionable shades, at once both at ease within the throng but also noticeably apart from it. What would Soares have made of him? What would he become ? What was this boy/man like as a child? If he were to write , would he hide behind a typewriter or would he expose his Self to the Graphologist’s art? And if he was to write and was asked to recite, would people say: “Really? Is that his voice? Is that what he himself hears when he writes? So disappointing …”. Who was he? Geoff Dyer, just turned 24, jobless, his head already filled with the enthusiasms that would pervade his future writing career, that would be more “ginseng than gonzo”, but in a good way , in that people would actually read his stuff and then deal it out at dinner tables rather than just name-check it in the way they would name-check , say, Hot Rats by Frank Zappa or Metal Machine Music by Lou Reed, had spotted a bench to his left ,shaded by some trees. It was unoccupied save for a man in his thirties dressed as if auditioning for the role of a bank clerk in a Buster Keaton movie. A non-speaking role. He had also noticed two girls standing together further towards the Grand Canal in cropped jeans and cheesecloth tops ,black leather jackets across their shoulders, over which their long, braided hair was splayed. Normally they would have become his immediate focus, but he was tired and hungry and he was still fugged from what he’d somewhat recklessly taken the night before as result of which he felt both sharp as a pin and slightly fuzzy, mainly at the edges, but also in the aptly named dead centre of his brain. He rather wanted that bench for, as he said to himself then and was to repeat some thirty years later , “ …all I want to do, the thing that I crave with every fibre of my being, is to shut my eyes and take a nap…”(Zona, 2012), even if on this occasion in so doing he would thereby miss the absolutely best opportunity to have satisfied his life’s “greatest regret” with those two women , for as he wrote, again in Zona: “ That’s one of life’s subtle lessons: you may never know when the opportunity to have the thing you most want will present itself- for the simple reason that, at that moment, it may not be the thing you most want”. Maybe if he hadn’t been with Kate in Sydenham four days earlier, before he’d left for Italy on the train , his priorities would have been different? And anyway, a lost opportunity was not the same as, say, a lost rucksack. It was that ontological grip that made Dyer so readable, if a bit dull. Geoff stared at the bloke on the bench, willing him to move with the same telekinetic authority and power that was so memorably displayed at the end of Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (a film that he’d now seen three times, most recently exactly 5 months earlier on 4th February 1982, when the reels of film had been reversed), when the character called Monkey , through a gauze of dandelion seeds and against a background chorus of trains and dogs, wills the glasses to move across the table. And lo, the bloke did move! Geoff permitted himself a thin smile. Where the fuck was Beethoven when you’d earned it? Giovanni jumped up off the bench, realising that his train was due and he was cutting it fine, and walked up the stairs to the station , where he disappeared from sight and, in one sense, existence. ………………………………………… “To depart! I’ll never return, I’ll never return because there is no return. The place one returns to is always different, The station one returns to is never the same. The people are different , the light is different, the philosophy is different. To depart! My God, to depart! I’m afraid of departing!…” ……………………………………… Dyer made his move before anyone else could lay claim to his precious bit of real estate and spread himself out. Later that day, indeed when night had fallen in Venice, after Giovanni had returned with his two-volume work and Geoff had got on a train to Florence in order to get some sleep, a truck driver in California called Larry Walters took to the air in a lawn chair suspended from 42 balloons, rising to 16000 feet and temporary fame, before returning safely to earth , only to kill himself some 11 years later. Giovanni heard about it when he switched on the radio the following morning. Geoff thought that it might make a good subject for a short piece that he could sell to one of the papers. “Everything we are seeing is an open-eye hallucination”. This board is dedicated to the memory of Larry Walters : 19.04.1949- 06.10.1993 and to Fernando Antonio Nogueira Pessoa : 13.06.1888-30.11.1935.