Provoked in Venice: The Rider Quintet, vol. 3

Without a Care in the World

WITHOUT A CARE IN THE WORLD Venice doesn't have a history; it is history. Who can keep track of the armies that have come and gone. If only Freud had lit upon Venice instead of Rome as a model of the mind we might all be saved. An increase of syllables will not increase the number of stars, or dustparticles, orpollen. Even I, who never liked Fellini'sfilms after he became a traitor to black and white adored Casanova—or was it Venice?— when Casanova sails across canals of garbage bags. You've neglected every opening to bring in Turner. I've nothing against him, and am not unmoved by the story of how as a young man he was strapped to the mast in a terrible storm. Then why thissilence. Constable—snatched my body. The deference pain insists on. No matter what—extremity is listed. You make it sound like a religious conversion. With Constable there's still the tension of the things themselves, the gnarled and knotty cottages and trees, the leaf swirl as the fisherman, man or boy, wades into the stream, casting, his line lost amidst the cloud flecks; the gentry stiff in civilized discourse beside the immaculate cathedral, and those who work the land, maintain the grounds, 160 laughing muddily on riverbanks where no one looking the other way can seethem. Constable tried to paint what he saw—but he was luckily overwhelmed by the pressureto express everything that was happening at once, how the landscape changed in the twinkling of an eye, and the challenge was then to render interruptions, like a child who at one moment sleeps beside you, compact, wrapped in a quilt, and the next moment stretches, spreads his limbs, and takes over every inch of sleeping surface. The fields remain, the locks and mills no longer used. Without a Care in the World: (after Constable's Hay-on-Wye) It is an end to walking on the fens on gray afternoons at first flowering, when a boy and his dog could stride the knee-high heather alone together harvesting the day because its dangers lay elsewhere, like the distances under new ownership, where a spire is granted no more height or clout than a windmill's one white, erect blade. Elsewhere the edge, shorn of cliff's cleavage, where land breaks off and sea takes over, a line so clear as to shear the sheer—the drop from land's end to beachhead where all is whirling intervals—skyey 161 clouds, skeletal logs, riverstream inland waterway angler's line lost in stalks (though he holds his rod like a bow), as light rives the cottage roof and the gnarled oak in the yard, the world given back to the world. 162 ...