he winter light in this city! It has the extraordinary property ofenhancing your eye's power of resolution to the point of microscopic precision—the pupil, especially when it is of the gray or mustard-and-honey variety, humbles any Hasselblad lens and develops your subsequent memories to a National Geographic sharpness. The sky is brisk blue; the sun, escaping its golden likeness beneath the foot of San Giorgio, sashays over the countless fish scales of the lagunas lapping ripples; behind you, under the colonnades of the Palazzo Ducale, a bunch of stocky fellows in fur coats are revving up Eine Kleine Nachtmusik, just for you, slumped in your white chair and squinting at the pigeons' maddening gambits on thechessboard of a vast campo. The espresso at your cup's bottom is the one black dot in, you feel, a miles-long radius. Such are the noons here. In the morning this light breasts your windowpane and, having pried your eye open like a shell, runs ahead of you, strumming its lengthy rays—like a hot-footed schoolboy running his stick along the iron grate of a park or garden—along arcades, colonnades, redbrick chimneys, saints, and lions. "Depict! Depict!" it cries to you, either mistaking you for some Canaletto or Carpaccio or Guardi, or because it doesn't trust your retina's ability to retain what it makes available, not to mention your brain's capacity to absorb it. Perhaps the latter explains the former. Perhaps they are synonymous. Perhaps art is simply an organism's reaction against its retentive limitations. At any rate, you obey the command and grab your camera, supplementing both your brain cells and your pupil. Should this city ever be short of cash, it can go straight to Kodak for assistance—or else tax its products savagely .
By the same token, as long as this place exists , as long as winter light shines upon it, Kodak shares are the best investment.
t sunset all cities look wonderful, but some more so than others. Reliefs become suppler, columns more rotund, capitals curlier, cornices more resolute, spires starker, niches deeper, disciples more draped, angels airborne. In the streets it gets dark, but it is still daytime for the Fondamenta and that gigantic liquid mirror where motorboats, va- poretti, gondolas, dinghies, and barges "like scattered old shoes" zealously trample Baroque and Gothic faqades, not sparing your own or a passing cloud's reflection either. "Depict it," whispers the winter light, stopped flat by the brick wall of a hospital or arriving home at the paradise of San Zaccaria's jrontone after its long passage through the cosmos. And you sensethis light's fatigue as it rests in Zaccaria's marble shells for another hour or so, while the earth is turning its other cheek to the luminary. This is the winter light at its purest. It carries no warmth or energy, having shed them and left them behind somewhere in the universe, or in the nearby cumulus. Its particles' only ambition is to reach an object and make it, big or small, visible. It's a private light, the light of Giorgione or Bellini, not the light of Tiepolo or Tintoretto. And the city lingers in it, savoring its touch, the caress of the infinity whence it came. An object, after all, is what makes infinity private.
nd the object can be a little monster, with the head of a lion and the body ofa dolphin. The latter would coil, the former gnash its fangs. It could adorn an entrance or simply burst out of a wall without any apparent purpose, the absence of which would make it oddly recognizable. In a certain line of work, and at a certain age, nothing is more recognizable than a lack of purpose. The same goes for a fusion oftwo or more traits or properties, not to mention genders. On the whole, all these nightmarish creatures—dragons, gargoyles, basilisks, female-breasted sphinxes, winged lions, Cerberuses, Minotaurs, centaurs, chimeras—that come to us from mythology (which, by rights, should have the status of classical surrealism) are our self-portraits, in the sense that they denote the species' genetic memory of evolution. Small wonder that here, in this city sprung from water, they abound. Again, there is nothing Freudian to them, nothing sub- or unconscious. Given the nature of human reality, the interpretation of dreams is a tautology and at best could bejustified only by daylight's ratio to darkness. It's doubtful, though, that this democratic principle is operational in nature, where nothing enjoys a rna-jority. Not even water, though it reflects and refracts everything, including itself, alternating forms and substances, sometimes gently, sometimes monstrously. That's what accounts for the quality of winter light here; that's what explains its fondness for little monsters, as well as for cherubs. Presumably cherubs, too, are part of the species' evolution. Or else it is the other way around, for if one was to take their census in this city, they might outnumber the natives.
onsters, however, command more of one's attention. If only because this term has been hurled at one more frequently than the other; if only because in our parts one gains wings only in the air force. One's guilty conscience would be enough to identify oneself with any of these marble, bronze, or plaster concoctions—withthe dragon, to say the least, rather than with San Giorgio. In a line of work involving the dipping of a pen into an inkpot, one can identify with both. After all, there is no saint without a monster—not to mention the ink's octopal affinity. But even without reflecting upon or refracting this idea, it is clear that this is a city of fish, caught and swimming around alike. And seen by a fish—endowed, let's say, with a human eye, in order to avoid its own famous distortion—man would appear a monster indeed; not an octopus, perhaps, but surely a quadropus. Something, to say the least, far more complex than the fish itself. Small wonder, then, that sharks are after us so much. Should one ask a simple orata—not even a caught one, in a free state—what it thinks one looks like, it will reply, You are a monster. And the conviction in its voice will be oddly familiar, as though its eye is of the mustard- and-honey variety.