If you leaf through the opening pages of the Guide to the Italy of Legend and Fantasy, where a series of charts illustrates the distribution of fantastic beings in the provinces of northern Italy, you will see that the province of Alessandria stands out thanks to its virginity. It has no witches, devils, fairies, sprites, mages, monsters, ghosts, caves, labyrinths, or buried treasure, saving its reputation thanks only to one "bizarre construction." You have to admit that's pretty slim pickings.
Distrust of mystery. Distrust of the noumenon. A city without ideals and without passions. In a period when nepotism is a virtue, Pius V, the Alessandria-born pope, drives his relations out of Rome and tells them to look out for themselves. Inhabited for centuries by a rich Jewish community, Alessandria can't even work up enough energy to become anti-Semitic, and ignores the injunction of the Inquisition. The Alessandrians have never worked up any enthusiasm for a heroic cause, not even one preaching the necessity of exterminating those who are different. Alessandria has never felt the need to impose a Verbum by force of arms; it has given us no linguistic models for radio announcers, it has created no miracles of art that could inspire subscriptions to save them, it has never had anything to teach other nations, it has nothing for its sons to be proud of, nothing it has ever bothered to be proud of itself.
But how proud people can feel, discovering themselves to be children of a city without bombast and without myths, without missions and without truths.
Understanding Fog
Alessandria is made up of great spaces. It is empty. And sleepy. But all of a sudden, on certain evenings in autumn or winter, when the city is submerged in fog, the voids vanish, and from the milky grayness, in the beams of headlights, corners, edges, unexpected facades, dark perspectives emerge from nothingness, in a new play of nuanced forms, and Alessandria becomes "beautiful." A city made to be seen in half-light, as you grope along, sticking to the walls. You must look for its identity not in sunshine but in haze. In the fog you walk slowly, you have to know the way if you don't want to get lost; but you always, somehow, arrive somewhere.
Fog is good and loyally rewards those who know it and love it. Walking in fog is better than walking in snow, tramping it down with hobnailed boots, because the fog comforts you not only from below but also from above, you don't soil it, you don't destroy it, it enfolds you affectionately and resumes its form after you have passed. It fills your lungs like a good tobacco; it has a strong and healthy aroma; it strokes your cheeks and slips between your lapels and your chin, tickling your neck, it allows you to glimpse from the distance ghosts that dissolve as you move closer, or it lets you suddenly discern in front of you forms, perhaps real, that dodge you and disappear into the emptiness. (Unfortunately, what you really need is a permanent war, with a blackout; it is only in such times that the fog is at its best, but you can't always have everything.) In the fog you are sheltered against the outside world, face to face with your inner self. Nebulat ergo cogito.
Luckily, when there is no fog on the Alessandrian plain, especially in the early morning, scarnebbia, as we say; it "unfogs." A kind of nebulous dew, instead of illuminating the fields, rises to confuse sky and earth, lightly moistening your face. Now—in contrast to the foggy days—visibility is excessive, but the landscape remains sufficiently monochrome; everything is washed in delicate hues of gray and nothing offends the eye. You have to go outside the city, along the secondary roads or, better, along the paths flanking a straight canal, on a bicycle, without a scarf, a newspaper stuffed under your jacket to protect your chest. On the fields of. Marengo, open to the moon and where, dark between the Bormida and the Tanaro, a forest stirs and lows, two battles were won long ago (1174 and 1800), the climate is invigorating.
San Baudolino
The patron saint of Alessandria is Baudolino ("O San Baudolino—from heaven protect—our diocese and its faithful elect"). This is his story, as told by Paulus Diaconus:
In Liutprand's times, in a place that was called Foro, near the Tanaro, there shone a man of wondrous sanctity, who with the help of Christ's grace worked many miracles, and he often predicted the future and spoke of distant things as if they were present. Once, when the king had come to hunt in the forest of Orba, it so happened that one of his men, having taken aim at a stag, with his arrow wounded the nephew of the same king, the little son of his sister, by the name of Anphuso. Seeing this Liutprand, who greatly loved the boy, began to weep over his misfortune and immediately sent one of his knights to the man of God, Baudolino, begging him to implore Christ to spare the life of the unhappy boy.
Here I will interrupt the quotation for a moment, to allow the reader to make his own predictions. What would a normal saint—not art Alessandrian, in other words—have done in this situation? Now we will resume the story, again giving Paulus the floor:
As the knight set off, the boy died. Whereupon the prophet, seeing the man arrive, spoke to him thus: "I know the reason why you have come, but what you ask is impossible, because the boy is already dead." On hearing these words, the king, distressed though he was at not having had his prayer answered, still openly recognizd that Baudolino, the man of the Lord, was gifted with the spirit of prophecy.
I would say that Liutprand behaves well and understands the lesson of a great saint. Which is that, in real life, you can't perform too many miracles. And the wise man is he who bears necessity in mind. Baudolino performs another miracle: convincing a credulous Langobard that miracles are rare merchandise.
1965–90
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1 T. A. Sebeok, "The Owls and Their Master," in Zoosebeotics (Bloomington, Ind.: Donald Duckworth, 1999).
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2 Lee Falk and Ray Moore, The Phantom and the Jungle Owls (Bandar City, 1936).
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3 "Text, Context, Co-Text and Cocotext," in Textuals (Texas University Press, 1978).
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4 Camille Paglia, "Love on the Chest of Drawers," Vanity Unfair 33 (1990).
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5 Erica Jong, "Dating a Text," Frequent Flyers 3 (1989).
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6 Erich Segal, "Historia Noctuae," Archiv für laternische allgemeine Kauz-wissenschaften xxxlv, 6 (1960).
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7 E. L. Doctorow, On Doctorowls (New York: Ragtime Press, 1977).
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8 Stanley Fish, Is There Any Class in This Text? (Freetext Press, 1991).
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9 "Invention of All Mothers," in Leviathans in Jurassic Park (London: Owlish Press, n.d ).
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10 Woody Allen, With Feathers (Manhattan: Getting Even Press, 1992).
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11 Leslie Fiedler, Sex and Owls on the Mississippi (New Orleans: Huckleberry, 1969).
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12 "Temps de la paillasse, temps de la commode," in Annales xxx, 1 (1960).
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13 In Edgar Allan Poe, sa vie et son oeuvre, the author raises the question of what would have happened in "The Raven" if, on the pallid bust of Pallas, three owls had lighted instead of a single raven. Professor Bonaparte subtly observes how difficult is to make one owl, let alone three, utter "Nevermore" correctly.
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14 Robert Scholes, Protocowls of Reading (Providence, R.I.: Brown University Press, 1987).
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15 For better comprehension I refer to the Urdu translation.
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16 "It is well known that some Lacanian secessionists insisted on putting elephants on the chest of drawers, bringing about the destruction of a valuable nineteenth-century credenza. This piece had formerly belonged to Little Hans, who, succumbing to the shock, died in a mental hospital in Vienn
a, in the delusion he was the Man of Wolves.
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17 "La parole dont je me leurre ne pourra que se taire dans l'éclatement de ce qu'elle cache. Et pourtant...." One hundred eighty minutes of silence followed while Dr. Lagache tried to extricate himself from a Borromeo knot, yelping constantly (cf. Julia Kristeva, "Chora-Chora!", in Tell Quayle, 5, 1980, from page 20 to 22).
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18 According to Richard Rorty (Philosophy and the Mirror on a Chest of Drawers, New York, Owlish Press, 1990) in the last phase of his thinking Lacan considered continuing the experimental placing of a pocket mirror on a cigar box, since in the bankruptcy of the Ecole Freudienne his chest of drawers had been confiscated.
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19 Jeffrey Nürnberg, Personal Communication (forthcoming).
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20 "Misunderstanding Kabbalah," in Journal of Aesthetics, 666, iii, nd. As a typical example of misunderstanding see Allen Ginsberg, Howl [sic], San Francisco, City Lights Books, 1956.
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21 Jacques Derrida, "Limited Ink" (unfinished paper).
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22 "Two Many Owls in Elm Street," in Gavagai, 5, 1981. In the same issue see also Hilary Putnam, "Owls in a vat," as well as Marvin Minsky, "A Society of Minks." For the whole debate see Daniel Dennett, Putnaming Owls, Kuhnisberg, Bestsellers Press, 1979.
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23 "Ambaraba in S5," in Splash! Journal of Rigid Designation, np., nd.
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24 "John Searle, "The Owl Is in the Bowl," in Cats & Mats, 2, 1987. Both Kripke and Searle had obviously been misled, perhaps by a defective critical edition. In fact they read como as Como (toponym) and inevitably their interpretation of the poem was contaminated. Obfuscated by the conviction that the owls were in Como, Kripke limited his research on the baptismal rite to the parish records of Como. This would explain his (wrong) conclusion that no Ambaraba Ciccì ever existed in Como—nothing excluding the possibility that he (or she) is alive and well in Mexico City.
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25 It is well known that Montague abandoned his fruitful research on the owls since he was later fascinated by speaking horses. Sec for instance (in Formal Philosophy, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, 1974: 242): "Jones seeks a horse such that it speaks and a horse such that it speaks is a(n) entity such that Jones finds it are in DSL1, but neither K1-entails the other in L1."
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Umberto Eco, How to Travel With a Salmon & Other Essays
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