Vesuvius: A Prologue
Disaster, this time, is a lava-spewing mouth, but it easily could have been some shaggy giant stirring in his chains or one of the Cyclopes pounding the anvil, assisting the blacksmith god with his blades. There’s surround-sound groaning as we enter the volcano through a veil of jet-emitted mist and begin bobbing along on a river of CGI lava, coasting toward what looks like a rocky throat complete with stalactite uvula. There’s a bellowing wheeze, a shudder, a moan, which must mean what is coming will be soon, although the Museo Archeologico Virtuale drags things out for a while, allowing Vesuvius to drone on in a baritone Italian about the Big Bang, the mystery of nature and the never-ending cosmos, all the shape-shifting work of our seas. “They call me monster, devil, destroyer,” he complains, a bit defensive about what he’s done, what he’s about to do, as if we weren’t the ones who were trying to understand by personifying Ruin yet again.
When it comes, as we know it will, a black cloud will engulf the earth carrying pumice and soil and flame-cracked stones. The cloud will be shaped like an umbrella pine and branch and fork and swell for miles and loom like a sky-born flood. Ash will bury the streets and homes and there will be a rain of cinders and slag, rages of sulfurous gas. The mountain will split and seem to sweat fire, and before the next pyroclastic surge, the sea will be sucked back for miles. Some, of course, will seek the aid of the gods, and still more, of course, will understand that all the gods departed long ago, and it will seem as if the sun was disappearing into earth or that the earth was hurling through sky into darkness that will be forever more.
When it comes, those who didn’t flee will die, and from the speakers there will be a thundering burst synched with a barrage of 3-D rocks and the theater’s floor will jolt and shake, just as it’s programmed to do.
When it comes, it will be in black and white and caused by Pontius Pilate’s arrival in town for a visit with his slave-trader friend. Faux-stones will fall, there will be choreographed wailing, and God, no longer able to stay His hand, will shatter and crumble the sets.
When it comes, or, in truth, a few hours before, the Dream Land crowd will drift away from “Midget City” and the 10¢-a-peep preemies napping in the new-fangled incubator in order to watch James Pain – self-proclaimed “Pyrotechnist to the Queen,” mastermind behind the Defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Flood of Galveston, the Bombardment of Alexandria – enact his Pompeii extravaganza. After the acrobats, swordfights, and sashaying girls, the eruption will shoot skyward and be reflected in Coney Island’s lagoon “every evening except Monday.” WEIRD PYROTECHNICAL EFFECTS! GORGEOUS SCENERY! NEVER TWICE ALIKE!
And, according to Edward Bulwer-Lytton of “a-dark-and-stormy-night” fame, no one will be able to navigate the thick-with-ash streets except for Nydia, the blind flower girl, who leads the novel’s protagonist through the city’s perpetual night and unerringly toward the sea. “Her blindness,” he writes, “rendered the scene familiar to her alone.”
But it is, of course, familiar to us, too, and we also can find our path with ease. How many times now have we heard the heaven-bound cries, heard a song in the phrase “pyroclastic surge,” seen this same kind of ash and flames?
We saw it, in fact, just a few weeks back at Time Elevator: Rome, presented this time in something called 5-D, which meant not much more than rigged theater fans gusting on cue, little spurts of water coinciding with river shots, and lurching and bucking through three-thousand years behind the safety bars of hydraulic seats. After bounding beyond the suckled She-Wolf’s woods, after tipping forward on each downward stroke of the daggers snuffing out Caesar, the fans whirred faster as we glided, motion-sick, with gratuitous veers, past toppling columns and jigsaw-ragged stacks of bricks, through Rome collapsing into the fires that Nero began in order to make room for his Domus Aurea, the short-lived many-mile estate where slaves once made his painted heavens revolve and guests were spritzed with perfume and rose petals fluttered down from the ceiling, which, legend has it, asphyxiated at least one gorging guest.
Even if Nero never actually fiddled while his city burned, it’s almost certain he declared the flames beautiful and, after taking in the panorama of ruin, sang some lines about the Fall of Troy, and, thus, according to Tacitus, found in that ancient calamity a correspondence to the present disaster.
House of the Tragic Poet: Pompeii
The audience, some guessed, looked so enthralled, the scene might depict Virgil reciting his lines about Aeneas in the Land of Shades where the dead travel over fields and the broad fields of air to meet the flesh-covered hero. Marcellus, the poet claimed, processed among them, too, making Octavia faint from grief upon hearing his name, then offer up coins for each line written in praise of her son.
Questions, however, persisted. Why would the poet have such reddish skin? Wouldn’t Virgil, in the presence of Augustus and the emperor’s sister, in a moment ripe with elegiac loss, cinch up a drooping toga rather than allow his ass-crack to be so prominently displayed?
By the time new theories were set afloat, the poet in the fresco was not Virgil at all, but perhaps some now-forgotten conjurer of verse, trying his hand at lines, say, about the feast laid out for Agamemnon’s return, how the banquet hall’s indifferent flames gave an equal glint to the shriveled quince spilling from the roasted boar’s mouth as it did to the dagger tucked behind Clytemnestra’s back before it finds the hero’s neck while he lies thrashing in a net. Even so, some scholars insisted, one of the figures in the audience box was cloaked in a blue-green hue normally reserved for the gods, and no one, of course, could give credence to the thought of a god listening to yet more human words about yet more human loss.
These days, instead of a poet in that namesake fresco, the moment depicts the oracle proclaiming to Alcestis that her husband must die. It has been decreed. One of the gods, feeling snubbed, had heaped his wedding bed with poisonous vipers, and such acts, as we know, can’t simply be annulled. Now the best deal that another god could finagle – for that blue-haloed, bow-in-hand figure in the spectator’s box has become Apollo now – is to stave off any requisite dying until Admetus could find someone to take his place, and even that hard-earned arrangement came courtesy of the sun god tricking the Fates into guzzling too much wine, for how else, he reasoned, might mercy be obtained?
Consider the sea’s vast fields of foam and you’ll have some sense of the distance between listening to the meter of the words “There is nothing to be done” and hearing the phrase “There is nothing to be done” when the words mean nothing more than what they say. When each word is like a drop of blood speckling a handkerchief, studied in candlelight in a rented room, where John Keats, for the first time, understands the death warrant of his cough. Or perhaps it’s as wide as the distance between a myth about someone afforded the chance to barter with death and the bloated body of a man, not yet thirty years old, washed up onto an Italian shore, the flesh gone from his face and hands.
It’s unclear, after taking her husband’s place, how long Alcestis remained in the Underworld, but soon enough Hercules gripped Death in a headlock, then hauled Alcetis home to be reunited with a husband who had allowed her to die. Percy Shelley’s body – in accordance with the laws of quarantine – was buried on the beach in Viareggio while preparations for the funeral were made; it too was brought back, although despite the white markers jabbed into sand, the body was lost for a while and several men dug for more than an hour before at last a spade struck his skull.
In the painting that depicts Shelley’s cremation, the poet’s hands and face have been restored, and, not far from Lord Byron bowing his head and Mary gazing off into nothing on her knees, he lies on a martyr’s bed of sticks beneath a low-hanging ash-colored sky. On the day that Shelley’s body was actually burned, the sun beamed bright through cloudless blue and the corpse was placed in a sheet-iron furnace and by the time his bones had become embers and the metal had been lowered, hissing, into the sea, Byron, feeling the need for a dip, had paddled off into the surf. Mary, meanwhile, remained several towns away, forbidden, in accordance with Italian custom, to attend the funeral at all.
Enjambment, we say in poetry, meaning a striding over, a run-on line, a distance within a phrase.
Once, in Pompeii, only a few unexcavated, earth-covered blocks away from the spot where workers, six years later, would discover a home they would mistakenly name after a poet and find within it, among other things, saucepans, some rope, a few terra cotta frogs, and the skeleton of a man who had sought shelter behind his staircase, Percy Shelley wiped fig-ooze from his chin. And there, among ruins he declared were more perfect than he could have imagined, also picnicked on oranges and bread while soaking up the purple heaven of noon and trying to describe the multitudinous shafts of all those sun-gleaming columns.
Then again, perhaps “enjambment” doesn’t come close to evoking the vast space I mean.
In Rome, in the Protestant cemetery, just behind the towering slate-gray marble pyramid of Cestius, built in an act that might well be the opposite of having one’s name writ in water, you can find follow the “To Shelley” signs, then read the lines from The Tempest that his friend, without permission or additional consultation, paid to have chiseled on the grave:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Bones of coral, eyes of pearl, Ariel sings in that song as much about transformation caused by, yes, the movements of waves and tides, but also by our own desires, guesses, mistakes. How easy such work can be. A waterlogged corpse – because this is what we need – becomes a burnished, never-fading thing; someone learning that someone they love must die becomes someone listening to verse about a distant loss they’ve no doubt heard before. And a site of devastation becomes a spot for someone like me to parse through ruin, looking for things rich and strange.