Norden und Süden

 

Michael Kunze am 10. März 2010

 

 

This image of the candle burning from both ends is very strong and a terrifying symbol of what can not be possible.

It is amazing therefore, that she had such a long lasting and significant career, as if the god Apollo himself had been holding this candle into the night, and it is ashaming that she has been forgotten so much. So much that I have to thank Michael Kunze for presenting us this outstanding poet - forgotten at least in Europe where we are so ignorant for what concerns american culture, ignorant to the point that we are proud of our ignorance. And it is very significant that a man like Rudolf Borchardt kept Edna St. Vincent Millay in so high esteem.

Why - and since when - is great art in northern countries so often bound to suffering? Remember Pasternak's statement we read the 20th of february ("What makes us ill"), remember Dylan Thomas. Dylan Thomas once came to Florence reading his poems in the coffee bar "Le Giubbe Rosse" and staying as a guest for some time in a villa in the Chianti. He was always drunk with bottles of Chianti wine lying under his bed. It is nearly impossible to meet a drunk person in Italy even during parties! The serene, banal "normality" of a poet like Mario Luzi is quite uncommon in northern countries, and it is quite normal in the south even if they are "poetes maudits" like the homosexual communist Pasolini who had an atrocious end as well, but never has made excessive use of drugs and whose life and work cannot so easily be catalogized as burned out, since he always has been part of a dense social tissue of cultural collaboration with large sectors of the mainstream, even with popular comedians like Totò, who in Italy is what Charly Chaplin is in America and what Karl Valentin tried to be in Germany. Figures like Charlie Parker are as Edna St. Vincent Millay representing artists of the north, were it has become - at some point of the 19. century, dangerous to obey to an inner voice of truth calling from deep within us. The Bohème has been romanticized as a comunity similar to the Goliards of the Middle Age. But they were simply the first example of great artists that in the age of industrialisation had the destiny to live for years in precarious conditions and often even to remain in such conditions.

Let us make some reflection too on the Grand Tour and on the destiny of persons like Friedrich Alfred Krupp on one hand and of Nicholas Rodney Drake (Nick Drake) on the other hand.

There is a water metaphor which comes to my mind in front of Edna's fire metaphor. Pasternak once has incouraged us incouraging himself with the words "Life is overflowing the edging of any receptical."