Conquering the Known World by Dash-8

What image does the name "Alexander the Great Airport of Macedonia" conjure up? For me, it is a lofty marble hall with brightly painted columns and at the end a gilded throne, occupied by a tall, imposing man in a white toga, who booms "Take the next flight to Outer Mongolia, and from there proceed to conquer the known world!"

In reality, Alexander the Great Airport of (Greek) Macedonia is down the end of a farm track off a minor road in the countryside somewhere not very well signposted between Xanthi and Kavala. The only thing that towers over it is the distant mountain range that divides Greece from Bulgaria. Yet the Greeks have a flair for giving one-horse places desperately imposing names, such as the villages of Megalopolis and Marathon, and the towns of Drama and Olympia.

Our arrival on a sunny Wednesday afternoon in June did not disturb the airport dog, which continued to slumber at the terminal entrance. In fact, even the arrival of our aircraft did not cause it to do more than raise a sleepy eyelid, snuffle briefly and replace its jowls onto its folded paws. Inside the terminal, we learned that we could check in at desk no. 1 and then pass through security and depart from gate no. 1. Gates 2 and 3 had a forlorn air of abandonment. After the departure of the solitary afternoon flight to Athens, the airport was due to close until the following morning. Meanwhile, the car hire official had dutifully trouped in to reclaim our vehicle, and he rapidly disappeared into the undergrowth.

Our aircraft was one of Olympic Air's Dash-8 turboprops, which relieved me, as the only other plane in the vicinity was a pensionable Boeing 727 that looked somewhat derelict. I suppose all Boeing 727s are by definition pensionable, but a fair number of them are still lumbering around the skies of the developing world--or falling out of them, as they have an appalling safety record.

Athens was reached without incident, possibly because the other passengers were Greek Orthodox and elaborately crossed themselves as we took off. More memorable was the flight out, from Athens to Thessaloniki (accent on the 'iki', please). Cyprus Airways carried me there and felt it necessary to include in the safety briefing the fact that "the Turks invaded Cyprus in 1973". Perhaps it was intended to hasten one's departure in the event of an on-board emergency--fear and loathing of the Turks, and all that. I wondered if there were any Turkish Cypriots aboard, and whether they would be unloaded without a parachute as soon as we reached our cruising altitude. But it all seemed good humoured enough. I was relieved that Olympic Air did not tell me that the pesky ex-Yugoslavs had no right to call their homeland Macedonia. But then, Alexander's empire fell apart quite quickly, and all the air travel in the world would not put it back together again.

In Memory of Eric Ernest Alexander, 21 October 1923 — 7 June 2011

[funeral oration] There is much to celebrate in the life of Eric Alexander. How shall we recall him? A man of absolute integrity, an idealist, a shrewd interpreter of politics, a loving husband, a conscientious father, a likeable person with a boyish sense of humour, popular with his colleagues and friends. There are so many good things to say about him.

One day not long ago, before strokes impaired his ability to speak, he paused and suddenly looked pensive. "I've had a long life," he said musingly, "such a long time, and yet it all feels like yesterday." His eyes, milky blue-grey with age and infirmity, clouded over as he looked back across eight and a half momentous decades.

The deprivation and hardship of his early life stimulated him to look for a path to a better world, which he found in the writings of Marx, Engels and Lenin. His vision was of a world ruled by humane principles, not cruelty, greed and arrogance, in which there would be shared abundance, and crime and social deviance could be dealt with perfectly adequately by giving the culprits a fatherly talking to (he explained his political beliefs to me when I was just about old enough to understand them).

I remember striding across the Derbyshire Pennines with him on a warm, hazy summer's day as he sang "There's a place, Comrade, for you, in the ranks of the working man."

I also remember visits from Bob Wotton, a fellow socialist and his friend for life. They would sit together in the living room, puffing away at their pipes until the air was blue with smoke, wearing portentous expressions and discussing the last crisis of Capitalism. "They're not going to get out of this one easily," one would say, and the other would nod sagely. He realised, however, that it would be a very long last crisis, and he never expected to live to see the dawn of that promised new era.

As my mother said, the world has never needed idealists as much as it does now, in this trough of history in which we live.

He had a natural affinity for the Russian soul, with its weighty sense of the past, its love of deep, sonorous melodies. He never went to the Soviet Union and was somewhat disconcerted by the impressions that I brought back when I finally visited it. But his beliefs survived the upheavals of 1989, for he was more a man of principle than of ideology. He was always a clever analyst of current affairs, adept at drawing the inner truth out of the distortions and obfuscation that the mass media feed to a hapless public every day.

Sadly, his academic qualifications amounted to a school certificate and a meagre two 'O'-levels acquired in later life. There was never a clearer case of educational deprivation. He was a man with a love of physics and cosmology. He was perfectly capable of getting his mind, untrained though it was, around the complexities of matter in the Universe. Indeed, he had the mental discipline and the imagination to be able to set his sights well beyond the solar system and gain his inspiration from discoveries in outer space.

He was a convinced atheist, who would not allow that people make God in their own image. Instead, he believed in humanism, the power of the human spirit to make a better world. If individual people were bad, violent or greedy, he attributed it to their social environment, not their genes or any other inexorable factor. If we all made a concerted effort to improve the social environment, he felt, then greed and badness would disappear. Thus he had an essential faith in humanity. He also practised what he believed in, and in his last years would stop on his daily walk to exchange a few kind words with the down-and-outs in the shelters on the seaside front. During the Gulf Wars he marched down to the town centre with his placards and demonstrated, alone and unthanked, against the iniquity of human lives wantonly sacrificed to ensure the continuity of oil supplies to rich countries. No one could call him a cynic. In fact, he was very much the model citizen, a man with a conscience whose integrity made him a shining example in this age of feckless amnesia.

I have a small but sharp photographic print of my father taken in 1944. He wears a neat, starched naval rating's uniform. He stands upright, pipe in hand, a stern but relaxed expression on his suntanned face. Very handsome he looks. In the foreground are the ornate cast-iron railings of a balcony, in the background, the slopes of Mount Vesuvius. I sometimes tell acquaintances from Naples that he was imprisoned in that formidable pile of masonry that stands on the waterfront at Santa Lucia, Castel dell'Ovo. The impression of heroic resistance to persecution is somewhat dispelled when I add that he was put there, "in the cooler", by the Military Police for drunk and disorderly conduct. But after all, it was wartime and he was only 19 years old. The only other occasion I can remember when he overdid the drink was 40 years later at his retirement party--not a bad record of sobriety, one must admit. On that occasion, he staggered out of the taxi that brought him home and couldn't find the front door of the house. It had been snowing, and next morning his footprints were in circles all over the front garden.

Much more characteristic was his rumbustious sense of humour and his love of puns. This must have been a devastating weapon in the Italian peninsular campaign. It accompanied him right into old age. Many of his friends and acquaintances remembered that high-pitched cackling laugh--for he was always the first to appreciate his own jokes--usually emitted while the listener was still wincing at the excruciating play on words that it followed. He was the very embodiment of that excellent British propensity not to take oneself too seriously. Young and old people alike appreciated his infectious humour and his enthusiasm for life and good conversation. On a deeper level, he believed wholeheartedly in the healing power of humour.

He took his photography very seriously. At family gatherings he would line everyone up and stand out front fiddling for ages with his camera (usually of Soviet make, and quite unreliable), studying the shot from all angles and gesticulating with his lightmeter. As a result we have albums and albums of pictures of groups of family members looking fed up and at a loose end! But we all took it in good humour, of course.

Many memories come crowding back as I think of him. When I was a child he made all of my bedroom furniture and many of my first toys. They were robust, well-designed pieces of woodwork, fit for a lifetime. He made them in his green garden shed, which always smelled of the Erinmore Mixture that he put in his pipe. When his hammer hit his thumb, or the tenon saw grazed his fingers, his language was remarkably moderate, especially by modern standards. Later, his second vocation as an amateur car mechanic surprised us all, but he was amazingly good at it and enjoyed what he was doing. Paradoxically, although he was slightly clumsy in manual work, he was a light fingered and gifted musician with a superb ear for music. He derived deep pleasure from the very finest classical music, which he listened to with infectious gusto, perhaps hopping from foot to foot and conducting the family stereo, which he made himself from a remarkably complicated electronics kit.

When I was quite small, he made me a sled. One Saturday on a snowy winter afternoon, we took it to the nearest slope but we soon ended up in a ditch full of muddy water. He took it in his stride rather more than I did!

When I was even smaller he took me for long bicycle rides through the Hertfordshire countryside. I sat on a small saddle fixed to the crossbar of his bike. We shared a love of nature that reached its acme in the annual summer holiday trek to the mountains of the Peak District or Snowdonia. Although essentially a city man (he was, after all, a quintessential Londoner), he was spiritually refreshed by close contact with the beauties of nature. With a sunny day and a good panorama of hills and dales shimmering in the heat, he was at peace with himself and the world.

His other formative influence was the sea. Although he was only in the Navy for a few years, it left a permanent impression on him. He saw Canada and the Mediterranean--and the sinking of a U-boat. He experienced life in the crew, even the Italian crew when he was seconded to the convoys. Many years later he would sit in front of the 1953 film of Nicholas Monserrat's peerless book The Cruel Sea, a stern expression on his face, his alert eyes surveying an imaginary horizon for signs of enemy shipping. I never liked his suet dumplings, a relic of his turns of duty as ship's cook. But the impression of the old salt was reinforced by his lurching gait, which made him look as if he has spent his life on a heaving deck. In reality, this was the result of a simple physiological fact--one of his legs was slightly longer than the other. But once a sailor, always a sailor.

As the years wore on he gradually became imprisoned within himself. Macular degeneration curtailed his sight, deafness did for his hearing, and then strokes tragically rendered his conversation a travesty of the thoughts that he sought to express. This long decline was nature's greatest cruelty to a man who deserved nothing of the sort. He remained a good person, with a moderate, kindly nature, throughout.

When he spoke to my mother, there was always a special tenderness in his voice, and very touching it was. However, I do recall that when flowers were delivered to their house on the occasion of their golden wedding anniversary he relished in saying to the delivery man "the first fifty years are the worst!" Even such a loving husband can occasionally enjoy a gentle joke at the expense of his wife.

So now he is finally gone--tempus abire tibi est. But we will carry him with us in our own hearts for the rest of our days. And then there is the impression of his young grandson following him to a kite-flying expedition one afternoon. They were both--quite unconsciously--lurching slightly and flapping their fingers as they walked in that very characteristic way that was his. Now that in its way is a sort of immortality!

Kathmandu, November 2009

From Patna the aircraft makes a diagonal bee-line north-northwestwards to Kathmandu. This orientates for the runway scores of kilometres in advance of landing. With the Himalayas as a gorgeous backdrop it touches down and deposits its passengers in the terminal, a dull red-brick structure with low roofs and an air of neglect. Outside is the great, sprawling city, or rather the city that has become great and sprawling as a result of the fear and dispossession that have driven people from the hills and mountains into the metropolis. In such cities, airport terminals are transitional places, the point of entry but also a small means of acclimatising oneself to the sharp shock of contact with what lies outside.

Once through the doors of the customs exit, the city starts. It is a welter of small Suzukis, beaten-up buses, drivers touting for custom, and people emigrating who are towing in their wake vast boxes of possessions tied up with string and tape. A car ferries me into the city centre along dusty roads and dirt tracks lined with scenes of frenetic activity. On mounds of rubbish bullocks graze and tiny children search for cans and bottles to recycle. Women in saris trudge through the dust, trucks blast their horns; garishly adorned shops spill out their wares like shoe-boxes full of trinkets. The air is warm but not hot. The sun is veiled by scraps of cloud, but its rays are penetrating. The thin atmosphere hangs heavy with moisture and dust.

Kathmandu has many of the attributes of the typical Asian city. Advertising slogans in English and Nepali blaze and blink from tall buildings: "buy Elegant Whisky and impress your girlfriend", 'fashion parade', Savings Bank, Toyota, an endless series of gaudy commercial messages. The urban landscape is wildly variegated, the streets clogged with people, vehicles and motorcycles. It hums and buzzes with frenetic activity. The urban profile is copiously detailed: no two buildings match each other, indeed no two square metres are the same. It makes impossible demands on the western eye, trained as it is to appreciate spareness. What must it do to the emigres from the mountain hinterlands who have known nothing but the Spartan landscapes of the high peaks?

My hotel is a venerable guest house encapsulated in the heart of the old city, where the streets are hardly wide enough for a Suzuki taxi to pass a Honda motorbike without one knocking the other into some wayside shop. My room is Spartan but clean and it smells heavily of floor polish in a rather institutional way. The ceiling lights glow feebly and the plumbing unleashes a tintinnabulation that no amount of juggling with the taps can suppress. On the washstand there are tiny bars of black Indian soap that smell of carbolic acid.

I am in Thamel, the heart of old Kathmandu but a place that has sold out to international tourism. This is hippy-land, and the hippies are now sexagenarians who are nostalgically reliving their past. For most of them the intervening forty years have taught them nothing about aesthetics and their scruffiness is everywhere apparent. In a self-aggrandising little shop called the Pokhara Embroidery Company I buy a tee-shirt with the logo 'Hardrock Café Kathmandu'. I don't believe there is such a place, but in any case the Thamel quarter lives on its illusions.

Kathmandu city hall is an imposing white building in the Asian colonial style, the motifs part Doric and part reverse curve, thus giving a nod to both the Classical antiquity of Europe and the Mughal dynasties of old India. It is surrounded by a rising tide of modern commercial buildings and apartment blocks, all crammed in around the surviving vestiges of its ornamental park. The flower beds are awash in water, but the muddy yellow colour and powerful smell proclaim that it comes straight from the drains. Amid this miasma the plants are dying dramatically, a herbal version of Custer's Last Stand.

Inside there is dust and decay. The corridors are long and crammed with broken desks, chairs with red leatherette seats, faded notices in Nepali script. The offices are sparsely furnished and electrical wires loop from the ceilings. Girls in saris carry trays of teacups from one office to another. A workman gravely chips plaster off a wall. I sit in an empty office with a faded grey carpet and three broken down sofas. I discuss the city's seismic hazard with the five members of the local government who are responsible for emergency planning. In 1934 Kathmandu had a magnitude 8 earthquake, and this is expected to repeat itself after an interval of 70-80 years--in other words about now. In the 1930s it was a vasty different city, with huge open spaces and a population that was tiny by modern standards. It is now a vast, high-density collection of buildings waiting to collapse into the narrow streets and it is growing bigger by the day. My five colleagues have sophisticated plans, written by foreign consultants, but all they seem to have in the way of equipment is a megaphone with which they will try to direct the activities of 1.6 million citizens.

We walk back to Thamel through the city centre and the squares full of pagodas, temples and stupas. There in the midst is the city fire station. It has three relatively modern fire trucks and three that are museum pieces which would be roundly coveted by western collectors, were they for sale rather than still being used to fight fires.

I walk along the streets pick-up trucks overladen with Maoists pass noisily by with their occupants hanging over the sides and shouting noisy political protests. Going the other way is a wailing motorcade of government ministers, grim-faced bearded men in suits and sack-like Nepalese hats. Today it is safer to sit in a hotel bar and drink bottles of cold Everest beer.

The aircraft takes off from Tribhuwan International Airport and circles around to gain height. The sun glints off Anapurna, a magnificent spectacle. Asia is a continent of sharp contrasts and here is one of the sharpest: the serene, pristine beauty of one of the world's highest mountains in contrast with the grubby stain of human activity that spreads up the Kathmandu valley in a long heterogeneous carpet of urban development topped by a low-lying tobacco-yellow pall of pollution.

So many deep impressions to carry with me: the fierce territoriality of the monkeys on Swayambhunath Stupa hill; the deep red of the blood of animals butchered in the mud next to the heaps of rubbish; the grey skin of the street children who have never washed, and the thinness of their limbs.

The Large Sky

On certain days the sky is unbearably large.
Cloudlike ships of state cleave through the firmament,
Milk-white forms incise the crystal blue,
Swept clean by cold, persistent wind,
Purified by shafts of glinting platinum light,
Life on earth, purpose in heaven, luminous, numinous.
The enigma of why we are here,
Insignificant beneath this strident paean.

Elizabeth died on a day like this. Hearing the news
We stood by the window, looked into the puffy clouds
Conscious of each other, of larger realities,
Projecting ourselves into the endless, fathomless sky,
Holding hands and sliding through immense spaces,
Drawn along, torn and helpless as the wisps of vapour.

Elizabeth, beautiful with long black hair and brown eyes,
Luminary skin, graceful body, feminine voice;
The illness racked her, ravaged her body,
And finally, when she was yellow and wasted,
It claimed her, dust to dust. Monstrous affront,
Who were we to carry on living and stand there
Looking so ardently at the sky's brilliance,
Becoming every detail of that momentous day?

The Overloaded Ark

I had some spare time after I had finished work in Siracusa and so I decided to visit the Archaeological Museum. The historical centre of the city is one of the closest approximations to "a rose-red city, half as old as time". The archaeological remains of Magna Graecia appear suffused with the Mediterranean sun, especially the faces of the terracotta maidens, perpetually fresh and young.

The Museum was full of teenage girls in dark blue suits. Apparently, they had some custodial role, but what it was could only be guessed: a dozen of them patrolled the museum's corridors and I was the only visitor, hopelessly outnumbered. Made up like juvenile filmstars, very much in the Southern manner, they simpered at me and followed ma around with their eyes, wistfully. Romantic notions of a rich foreigner ready to bear the lucky winner away to a new life of luxury and experience--definitely not me!

Industry and commerce are at a low ebb, unemployment is rife, and so public institutions are stuffed with employees until they appear like an overloaded ark. Nowadays, the fashion is for temporary contracts and starvation wages--the precariato. The teenage employees of the museum were too young and inexperienced to have realised the irony of their situation, but that cannot be said for their older counterparts who have weathered the temporary contracts and achieved the miracle of being taken on as 'proper' employees, not mere "collaborators". Perpetual job security and unattractive salaries have left many of them with a "world-owes-me-a-living" mentality and a marked reluctance to change anything for the better, even human relations, or perhaps especially that. These are the people who turn their backs and pretend to be busy as soon as you walk into their office. A book that purported to explain Italian culture to foreigners stated that in every office in Italy there are six people. Five of them do absolutely nothing and the sixth does the work of all of them combined and is referred to by his compatriots as "il fanatico".

If there is not enough to do--and how could there be with so much overstaffing?--then shear boredom dictates that some form of work must be invented: self-justifying work, that creates its own raison d'etre. Recently, I did a day's teaching. A modest sum will be paid to me after a majority of my earnings have been taken away in tax and social security deductions. When preparation and travel time are included, the remuneration is far from generous. To obtain it, I had to fill in eight forms. On these, I stated my date and place of birth four times. I signed eight times. I wrote my address four times and I gave my taxpayer identification number four times. I wrote my bank details three times on one form alone. I filled in an extra form on a government web site, and, strictly following instructions, I repeated my bank account details three times on the same form. Given my qualifications, in terms of labour costs the whole exercise was worth something more than a third of my net earnings. I also had to purchase and affix an administrative stamp--the cherry on top of the bureaucratic cake.

A Tuscan who went to work in the USA once said to me, I think with some justification, that "in American one works well and lives badly; in Italy one lives well and works badly". A Swiss pathologist whom I met at a conference opined that Italy is the country where genius is closest to madness. "In Italy under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed--they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace and what did they produce...? The cuckoo clock." Orson Welles was wrong about the cuckoo clock, a German invention, but what sort of Renaissance would modern Italian bureaucracy produce?

Now it can be told

A quarter of a century has passed and at last the story can be told. As it is still "politically radioactive", and its half-life has definitely not passed, I have changed the names of the people, places and organisations. It is as well to do so, as some heavy accusations are involved. Naturally, the following account is absolute fantasy--of course it is! What else could it be?
In December 1982 several hundred hectares of land slid into the sea on the northern fringes of a city with a population of more than 100,000 inhabitants. It was Europe's largest urban landslide, and it left two people dead and thousands homeless. Almost 300 buildings were left completely unserviceable, including two large hospitals and a significant part of the local university. The main arterial road and railway lines were pushed into the sea.

I arrived in January 1983 and spent the next five years studying the landslide and its many physical, political and social ramifications.

The national scientific research council instituted a research programme with the objectives of finding out the exact causes of the landslide. It was co-ordinated by Don Giuliano, Professor of Geotechnical Engineering at the University of Terravecchia. In the South of the country civil engineering is one of the few professions to be constantly lucrative. To be a full professor of the subject is to be in an undeniable position of power with respect to the contracts for the planning, design and management of large projects. In fact, Don G. had cornered the market in this field. No professional geotechnical engineer or applied geologist in the southeast could work without Don G's tacit or explicit permission. There was an unwritten agreement that the bosses at the University of Terranova would have absolute control over the projects in the west. Terravecchia would control the east, and contracts relating to places in between would be shared between the two fiefdoms. At his own university, Don G. had his minions write his scientific articles for him. This was a no-risk strategy, as the authors were far too in awe of his power to confess publically. In fact, the only drawback was the occasionally at conferences a foreign academic would ask Don G. what he had meant in one of his articles and he couldn't remember having published it, or perhaps he had not even read it. In any event, an international society awarded him a gold medal in recognition of his "extraordinary scientific productivity". Indeed!

For Don G. and his followers, it was a major coup to be able to shift activities to a lucrative area further north, an achievement that had much to do with Don G's alliance with the Rector of the University of Miramare, who would later move down the coast to preside over a seat of higher learning closer to Terravecchia (where he would eventually be indicted for nepotism).

Given the scale of the emergency in Miramare, the national government invested significantly in the scientific effort to study the causes and mechanisms of the landslide. Although the sums were paltry by the standards of many Western countries, earth sciences in Italy had been starved of funds to the extent that the Miramare landslide project was a sudden, unexpected windfall that stimulated many researchers' appetites for funded work.

Of course, to preserve the existing power structures, the available funds had to be divided up between all parties, and universities, that exerted some influence in the area. The result was a free-for-all that led to a very heterogeneous scientific effort. When large landslides occur it is opportune to study the subsoil by sinking a number of borings. At Miramare more than 110 were drilled, but in a completely haphazard pattern that contributed very little to the general picture of the causes and mechanisms of the movement. One painful consequence of this was that when a meeting was held in the Great Hall of the University of Miramare's Rectorate to present the results of the scientific enquiry to the public, the researchers had no answers to the practical questions posed by the association of people made homeless by the landslide, such as could the damaged buildings be rehabilitated? and was it safe to rebuild in the area?

The Miramare landslide had been a political question for more than two centuries. It had inherited a heavy political baggage in terms of the decision to expand the city northwards into an area that had suffered major landsliding in the 1770s and 1920 (although not to the extent of the later disaster). From the morning after the 1982 landslide functionaries and politicians scrambled energetically to avoid the political responsibility or deflect it onto their colleagues, and any attempt to understand the aftermath has to take account of this tendency.

One of the aspects of the scientific enquiry that is most difficult to understand is its sheer amateurish irrationality. Nevertheless, if the framework of analysis is changed, it suddenly springs into focus and becomes eminently explainable. Let us see how and why.

Although the landslide was perforated like a sieve with boreholes, only one of them, located right in the middle, penetrated deeper than a few tens of metres. At 240 metres below the surface there appeared to be a hiatus in the continuity of the sediments that were being drilled through. It was taken to indicate the presence of a plane of movement that had caused the entire landslide to rotate in a deep axis with a perfect curvilinear movement. Justification for this model was taken from a case in Alaska, which, however, was much smaller, had occurred in very different sediments, and was caused directly by a major earthquake (the Miramare landslide may have had some long-term connection with earth tremors, as the area is seismically active, but no quakes occurred in December 1982 and the landslide was undoubtably caused by prolonged rainfall). The rotational movement hypothesis quickly assumed the status of orthodoxy and it made a rapid transition to "established fact" (Don G. vigorously promoted it), even though in mechanical terms it was ridiculously unsuited to the case at Miramare and there was plenty of evidence to support a flatter, shallower movement that was more a sort of conveyor belt than a rotating bowl.

For many years it was not clear to me why such an unsuitable model had been adhered to so enthusiastically. Indeed, a dozen years after the landslide, one of Don G's senior collaborators took me aside in the coffee room during a national conference and confidentially pulled some borehole logs out of his pocket: one seemed to point to the rotational model but the other 19 roundly disproved it.

Not that it was easy to acquire information. Don G. and his team did not want an independent expert buzzing around their investigations. This was made very clear to me when in 1986 I was invited to an international conference in Don G's home town and systematically prevented from speaking at it. In truth, I had prepared an utterly innocuous 12-minute talk on something quite unconnected with Miramare, but the organisers decided to be prudent: who knows what I might have revealed ad libitum?

For two field seasons I was the guest of the Mayor and City Council of Miramare. They provided accommodation while I conducted my research and in return I was asked to write confidential reports containing my evaluation of the developing situation regarding the landslide. Clearly the Mayor did not regard any local or national authority as sufficiently independent to give him an unbiased assessment taken from an impartial viewpoint. As Professor at a large American university I was the only foreigner to make my presence felt in scientific circles at Miramare at that time.

Eventually, a large geotechnical engineering report on the landslide was compiled. With all the tests, simulations and compendia of data, it filled a series of boxes that reached a metre and a half above the floor. I found it extremely disappointing. The data had been collected in such an unsystematic manner that it proved impossible to evaluate alternative models of the landslide mechanism beyond a few minor variations. The report struck me as shallow and inconclusive, but at the time it did not cross my mind that this might be a deliberate strategy. The report concluded that a substantial infill of rock and sediment on the downslope, seaward side of the movement would stabilise it and permit redevelopment of the slope. This struck me as ridiculous in mechanical terms, but I was unaware of the motives that led to such a conclusion.

My reports to the Mayor of Miramare were written with great care and attention. I stuck rigorously to general principles and observations, said nothing specific about any existing document or ongoing study and made sure that I separated the facts from my own opinions. In short I tried to keep out of the political minefield. While this strategy avoided any direct criticism of other people's work--which would have been dangerous under the circumstances--the sheer vagueness of my observations made them amenable to a wide variety of possible interpretations amid the political currents of the time.

One day in December 1988 the regional newspapers all carried the headline "U.S. expert throws out landslide plan". My reports had been stolen from a locked desk in the regional government headquarters and leaked to the press. There was an immediate political firestorm. It hinged on the question of whether it was a good idea to spend $40 million on the projected infill at the base of the landslide. Whether or not this would have done any good, the stated justification for it (i.e. stabilising the movement) was patently wrong. The regional government abandoned the plan and was forced to convene a high-level commission of enquiry. I later found that its first task was to enquire into me and my motives, but as I had received no payments from anyone in Italy there was nothing I could be indicted for. The commission ratified the decision to abandon the infill project.

Two decades later I found out that Don G. had planned the infill as a means of disposing of the waste from gypsum quarrying in his home region. Two groups of people would have enriched themselves on the basis of a gigantic and wasteful engineering project that would probably have caused more problems than it would have solved, and would have created some extremely dubious environmental modifications. The people of Miramare got out of that, although they had other concrete-steel-and-earth-moving projects of debatable utility foisted upon them. The geological fraternity in Italy closed ranks against me and I thus failed to get a chair at an Italian university. And Don G. suffered one of the very few setbacks that have interrupted his long and brilliant career.

In any account such as this the writer will add a measure of self justification. Judge for yourself, gentle reader, how close to reality this story is. I repeat that it is pure fantasy--of course!

San Casciano in Val di Pesa

Night
Go to the roof of the house and look at the sky,
Capacious, luminous, portentous,
The inside of a great, blue, steel bowl, mixing
Watercolour violet, indigo ink, tincture of cobalt,
OmarKhayyamesque in its glory.
The transparent walls contain us,
Far away from whatever lies beyond:
Infinite space, unimaginable vastness,
The great seas in which the imagination coasts,
Punctuated by stars, illuminated by moonbeams,
Edged by the hills and towers and roofs
Of the black landscape in which we live.
Indistinct are the wavering lines of lights
That zigzag up the hill to Fiesole, under
The black shroud of the northern mountains,
Candles held by an expectant throng,
Silent and waiting in the distance.

Day
The view is sharper in the pearly light of a winter's day.
Pervasive but restrained, it etches out the detail,
Transforms the landscape into green and grey,
Garnished with silver in the sprays of olive leaves
That grow in clumps among the fields; brown
In the serried ranks of vines, Spartan, pruned back,
They endure the winter cold to sprout again
In the warm weather, ridiculously green.
Church bells peal casually and the sound carries out
In endless permutations of clangs, percussive
It rolls around the hills and floods back to us,
On its back the devotions of centuries, for
The Convent bells of the Clarisse have pealed
For twenty-one generations, inexorably
Marking cycles of life and death, death and life.
This land resounds with patience and endurance,
The jugular surge of life, pain and pleasure mixed.

So, wondrously, does the mundane become the sacred.