Unspent Lives

I consciously pause at my framed old maps of the Italian peninsula on the wall of the living room. They are so fixed in my periphery as I walk by them many times a day I no longer really see them; there they hang- just decor. But now I stop, anticipating my trip. I found them 15 years ago in a dusty used book store 'Calico Cat,' in Downtown Ventura across from the office. They are hand colored pages from a long defunct French atlas. I am sure there were other fascinating atlas pages filled with nations long lost in the vault of time: what of Abyssinia, Wallachia, Baluchistan and Pomerania? History and geography have wrestled for millenia in this epileptic dance of absorption and division. Lines of borders would advance and rebound violently like a plucked string. Map colors would seem to splatter, mix and overwhelm in pained movement absent of choreography. Placenames would be ground through the seive of the conquering language. All save one would find this confounding: the nebbish atlas maker appears to have enjoyed great job security.

When I chose the framing, I had selected voluptuous gilded wood befitting the thick-with-history 150 year old maps. These golden frames verge on the gaudy, but little else in the room is nearly as ornate. They also echo the curvaceous lines of the boot of Italy- the high-heeled boot, enticing with a hint of danger.

I especially like the map of the Italy during the height of the Roman Empire, second century A.D . I like to speak the Latin place names and by that sound transform the name from that long dead language through two millennia of the italian vulgar: Mediolanum to Milano, Bononia to Bologna, Neapolis to Napoli, Florentia to Firenze. Language, like all else, evolves; it seems strange that even the very names of our homes, our 'tribes', our culture can change given time.

I leaf through a small, hardcover book comprising small reproductions of the drawings of Antonio Sant'Elia. I first encountered his work 25 years ago when we studied the italian Futurist movement, a group dedicated to the forsaking of the degenerate historical past in favor of a machined future embracing technology. He is best known as the author of the 'Futurist Manifesto', but what caught me were his robust, confident drawings. He saw a bold, uncompromising future with strong, assured forms, heroic scales and self-aggrandizing monumentality. His vision was an unyielding expectation of the future of architecture based on man as a technological, evolving being and not as a romantic, frolicking twit.

But he never lived to realize his visions nor see how prophetic he was. He died fighting in the Great War at the age of 28.

I am reminded of the work of one of my favorite artists, Franz Marc. Vivid colors and a structuralist approach to describing the natural world. Killed in 1916, the same year as Sant'Elia. At age 36.

So removed from them, I cannot grieve their loss, but I wonder, of course, what great work was never created, what unique vision was so untimely snuffed out, what might millions have shared in such genius potential.

So, with what little we have of the likes of Sant'Elia and Marc; we can only enjoy their stunted ouevres and wonder, "What if...".

And in the same thought we can lament that epileptic dance of absorption and division, that violence of our natures that moves lines, changes colors and butchers placenames.

And damn the atlas makers.