The Renaissance. I grew up pronouncing it Ren-uh-saance, light accents on first and last syllables. I hear more often the academic-sounding pronunciation, Ren-A-saance, long A, strong middle syllable accent, thrusting upward to a commanding view of surrounding language and letter-shapes. So much more intelligent-sounding than the "uh" of my learned (in the 1970s) pronunciation of Renaissance, which means rebirth. If you've been reborn who gives a fig about the proper pronunciation of Renaissance. It's enough that it happened.
Arts flourished in Italy. Politicians like Cosimo de Medici had his political job, which included being ruthless and the thinker-up of violent situations at times, but also he was a patron of the arts. This is my minuscule understanding of him.
Coincident temporally with Italy's somewhat bloody arrival of riches mixed with politics mixed with painters, sculptors, writers, and rediscovery of no longer lost knowledge, scrolls, papyri, Ancient Greece and Rome came alive for Spaniards, French, and Italians. Archimedes and his lever. Math. Were there plays preserved, like the other documents of the deep past going back some fifteen-hundred years, works of Sophocles and Euripedes? Did an Arab copyist make manuscripts of a lost Sophoclean comedy? Could the old writer smile?
The culture north of the Alps resisted takeover by the Roman Empire. No Romans in Pomerania. Germans later, yes. In Spain, a warmer place, Arabs preserved ancient knowledge. In Alexandria, Christians mobbed the library, the world's largest repository of manuscripts at that time. Most of Sophocles' plays were burned, including so-called Satyr plays he wrote, all lost forever. In my memory I hear a teacher saying that a book or two of Aristotle's went up in the flames. Around the time of that teacher, 1976 or so, I chose Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury for my book report in Reading Class, taught by Mr. Zagnut.
Part of what I wrote:
"Ray Bradbury's use of the salamander as an identification patch on the firemen's uniforms represents the salamander's supposed origins in fire. In the book, Mister Bradbury uses irony to great effect. For instance, the whole premise of firefighters devoting their time to burning books, magazines, thus knowledge, bringing us back to the Stone Age, when people communicated via cave art, resonates with a special meaning, in that firefighters are not, I repeat, not to burn books, that is, in our world, the same planet Ray Bradbury is from, yet, these firefighters, hero of the book Montag among them, destroy knowledge. They flame it thoroughly. Crisping pages of Balzac, Sophocles, Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew, you name it, every book is on the firefighters' kill list. Ironic that firefighters are burning books instead of putting out fires? Yes, I think so, this author writes sarcastically."
Of late I muse on the end of the world. Even if such would happen, say, in a year, would that prevent me from working on my writing, on my films? Do one more collage? I did many collages around the turn of this century. Collages led to film (YouTube Channel John Berner), for cinema is the assembling of fragments of images, just as is collage.
King Crimson's song "Epitaph" comes to mind. The last song on Side A of The Court of the Crimson King, has this line, "The fate of all mankind I fear is in the hands of fools."
The creation of an iron sky through multiple detonations of hydrogen bombs in North America, Europe, Russia, China, Taiwan, Australia, everywhere except maybe most of Antarctica, unless that's the last hideout of the morons who will have destroyed more than seven billion possibilities.
Vic Neptune
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