There is no rose

I finished The Name of the Rose and wanted to start over again. It has everything the soul could possibly want: northern Italy, fantastic monasteries, monastic murders, underground passages, fog, secret libraries, rafts of manuscripts, a riot of languages, codes, maps, labyrinths, herbalists, unicorns, hunchbacks, traps, fires, poisons, Gregorian chant, crypts, clues drawn from handwriting, ox’s hearts, midnight trysts, dreams, doodles, heresies, allusions, anachronisms, and fried cheese.

It is strange to admit how close my world is to the one in the book. When I moved here I pretended I was embarking on a monastic life, enfolded in the protective robe of the Church. I would dedicate my days to her service, walking the pretty halls of the church building and plying my trade in a humble office. I would do the closest available thing to illuminating manuscripts: edit the church’s newsletter and supply decorative graphics to promote her events. In fact, my newsletter archives would be a parochial equivalent of the chronicles of Bede.

It’s turned out to be a satisfactory life for me. I feel tolerated, even appreciated, at work and free to pursue my solitary interests at home. I understand that the romantic expectations I have described in the previous paragraph will raise many questions for some readers, like the opening of a novel that is certain to depict the starry-eyed main character’s fall from innocence. What about the nasty church politics that anyone working for the church must inevitably face?

First of all, I am not that starry-eyed. I would rather affirm what is good and leave the nasty fights to the people who care about that kind of thing. For now church politics is a responsibility I am grateful not to have to engage in. I have brushed against it from time to time and find that the battles in my denomination today are ludicrously similar to the politics described in Adso and William’s delightful conversation about heresy.

“The trouble is,” I said, “I can no longer distinguish the accidental difference among Waldensians, Catharists, the poor of Lyons, the Umiliati, the Beghards, Joachimites, Patrines, Apostles, Poor Lombards, Arnoldists, Williamites, Followers of the Free Spirit, and Lucierines. What am I to do?”

This book is both wonderful and vexing because I believe the author delights in confusion and complexity. Innocence, knowledge, faith, skepticism, love, lust, sensation, cogitation, laughter, devotion, experience, reason... Everything important is taken and turned around in the hand and deeply felt and playfully examined. Both the naive Adso and his rational master are innocent in different ways, and the ending of the story is... what can I say without giving it away... powerful.

Here is an example of the interactions between the two that fill the book with its special joy. Adso and William escape the labyrinth and see the stars at the end of one long night.

“How beautiful the world is, and how ugly labyrinths are,” I said, relieved.

“How beautiful the world would be if there were a procedure for moving through labyrinths,” my master replied.

Maybe it says something about me that I adored the book, despite or because of its stubborn refusal to assign a final meaning to anything.

For my Polish friend

A Polish immigrant went to the DMV to apply for a driver’s license. First, of course, she had to take an eyesight test. The optician showed her a card with the following letters:

C Z W I X N O S T A C Z

“Can you read this?” the optician asked.

“Read it?” the Polish girl replied. “I know the guy.”

The Pines of Rome

How often do people write music in honor of trees?

There is Handel’s famous, heart-swelling “Ombra mai fu”:

Ombra mai fu
di vegetabile,
cara ed amabile,
soave più.

Never was a plant’s shade more dear, pleasant, and sweet.

The emperor Xerxes is said to have written an ode to an Oriental plane tree (Platanus orientalis), and this aria is Handel’s dramatization of the act. Most of my life I had heard it in instrumental arrangements as the blandly-named “Largo,” and I was mightily pleased to learn a few years ago that this sublime music was a love song to a tree.

I have long dreamed of doing a series on this blog memorializing the most admirable trees of Dallas. One of the trees I would feature is pictured above, a venerable cedar held up by numerous braces, forming a dark, romantic vault above the walkway to the front door of its house.

Trees are marvelous. They tower over our measly dwellings and they outlive us, witnessing centuries of history. I have personally met the largest recorded Sitka spruce and Ponderosa pine. I think there are several other famed arboreal personages in my past, but my memory is bad and I have not been faithful to keep a list.

So you can imagine why, when I got a free ticket to I pini di Roma last week, my heart leapt. I think I must have heard it on the radio at one time, liked it, told myself to remember it, and forgotten it. I had some mysterious attachment to the piece that could not be completely explained by its woodsy subject matter.

In any case, it is possible that I exaggerated my anticipation of the event beyond reasonable hope. On websites I saw conjectures about which particular trees had inspired Ottorino Respighi, and pictures of the trees. My research convinced me that I would love it.

Respighi’s work is in four parts:

The Pines of the Villa Borghese
Pines near a Catacomb
The Pines of the Janiculum
The Pines of the Appian Way

They were accompanying the music with a light show in the symphony hall. The music at the beginning was circuslike, and the lights were gaudy and ridiculous. A man in the row behind us had an especially endearing chuckle that set us laughing even more. Eventually, though, you settle into the mood, even though no pine tree you’ve ever known has elicited such emotion. I was reminded of the promise of “18 minutes d’emotion totale” at the World War II memorial in Caen—another example of making a potentially serious subject into a spectacle.

The entire catacombs part was lit with red lights and flamelike shapes. There was no subtlety about it. I wondered what would have happened if they had lit it in a cool color from time to time. The plainsong melodies could easily have been peaceful and not hellish. At one point you hear a soft, beautiful melody, played perhaps by an English horn or an oboe? But it would have to be a marvelously sweet horn or oboe, and no one on stage is playing. You can’t find the soloist anywhere. Then you see him return to the stage—oh, a marvelously soft trumpet. I suppose hiding him underneath the stage is one way to muffle the sound. It was lovely.

The Pines of the Janiculum (a noted Roman hill, but not one of the official seven) was my favorite part, with lovely moments for the clarinet and the lesser woodwinds. The music and light show were more natural here, soft and peaceful and healing. There was even a recording of a nightingale singing. At this point I had some revelations about literary nightingales that hadn’t occurred to me before.

Finally came the Appian Way, with trumpets and trombones playing from the balconies above the orchestra, with wild splats of light and sparkling fireworks. I could detect nothing coniferous about this section. It made me smile, though, like an overeager little boy makes you smile. You just can’t help it. It was fun.

The wild spectacle went beyond what I was expecting. But I am still determined to like The Pines of Rome.