The Wind and the Source: In the Shadow of Mont Ventoux

2. Disappearance

The void attracts: it isolates our personality, it places us at the center of the universe. —Alberto Savinio, Dico a te, Clio In 1992, immediately after the publication in Paris of my Mirrors of Infinity: The French Formal Garden and 17th-Century Metaphysics, I was invited to appear on Alain Veinstein’s radio broadcast dedicated to recent publications, Du jour au lendemain. At the end of the interview , he posed a question—in the form of a play on words—intended to lead me into some revelations more intimate than those allowed in the mostly philosphical discussion that preceded. He asked, “Avezvous un jardin secret?” (Have you a secret garden?), that is, a hidden part of your life. Taking the question literally, I answered no. “Not even in childhood?,” he insisted. Giving in, I answered, “Have you seen Resnais’s film Mon oncle d’Amérique?” “Yes.” “Do you remember the last scene?” “Yes.” “There is a long shot of a desolate urban landscape in ruins. Then a medium shot of a wall covered with graffiti . Finally a closeup of that wall, revealing graffiti and lichen forming an abstract pattern. That’s my secret garden. That’s where I was born. The South Bronx.” 27 II Disappearance 28 FIGURE 9. The peaks of Mont Ventoux. 鵹鵺 or half a millenium after Petrarch wrote the letter commonly referred to as “The Ascent of Mont Ventoux”—which has long been deemed a classic text demarcating the origins of Renaissance humanism—not a word had been written about this mountain in poetry or literature, hardly a painting created depicting this most impressive of Provençal sites.1 What can explain these five hundred years of silence? How was the mountain transformed from forbidding to forbidden? I believe that it did not occur simply because Petrarch’s depiction of the Ventoux was so brilliant, unique, unsurpassable; nor because it was an unrepeatable origin of an incipient humanism; nor even because a certain anxiety of influence blocked such an enticing path for the renovation of our poetry, psychology, and philosophy. No, I believe that it was Petrarch’s disavowal, his abnegation of the Ventoux, his absolute insistence on the Ventoux’s disappearance, his veritable annihilation of the mountain, that for centuries hindered its representation. I believe that the shepherd’s words were premonitory. The centuries of silence were in imitation of disappearance, mimetic of nothingness. Or perhaps, to be more precise, I should speak of Mont Ventoux’s self-effacement, and suggest that it was the mountain itself that went into hiding. It should be noted that when Petrarch describes his nearly ecstatic vision of the landscape from the peak of Mont Ventoux, he speaks of what he sees in every direction except the north, the mythic bearing that symbolizes all that is bleak, wintery, desolate, pernicious. Indeed, the land of predilection for Petrarch was precisely what was visible to the south, east, and west: that is, the region approximately congruous with modern day Provence and Languedoc, the lands south of the Loire where traditionally the Provençal and Languedocian dialects are spoken.2 The north, that is, the other half of modern day France, was almost nonexistent for him. Petrarch took only one trip north in his life, a journey of which he never wrote, neither in his biographical works nor in his vast correspondence. In a letter to Neri Morandi, he explains: “I do not like those Caesars who come to us from the North: everything is icy in those climates; there, hearts are not warmed by that noble flame which causes the heart to rise and which I sense as the vital heat of the empire. It would be better for us if our emperors came from the land of the setting sun, or from the South. 29 Disappearance F Nothing is worse than the North.”3 Petrarch far preferred the sensual Mediterranean sensibility to that of the cerebral Hyperborean regions. From the point of view of Petrarch’s chosen home in Fontaine-de-Vaucluse, the Ventoux existed at the limits of his world. The question of limits and borders—cultural, natural, and supernatural—was crucial. In the transition from the symbolic art of the Middle Ages to the realism of the Renaissance, the first instances of precise realist representation took place in the margins of manuscripts, those empty places that permitted nonsymbolic decoration and precise depiction. Freedom of creativity existed...