There’s an almost throwaway scene in Sensoi – set in Venice in 1866 during the Third Italian War of Independenceii – in which star La Contessa Serpieri pleads with her dignitaire husband to use his political leverage to save her noble cousin Marchese Ussoni from imprisonment and exile. (You see, the young Marchese had proposed a duel with an occupying Austrian Lieutenant, and rather than dignifying the proposal, the Bianchi just cuffed the prickly Serenissimi and sent him packing.) But scandal of yesteryear scandals, rather than bend over backwards to his younger wife’s pleas as the modern viewer might expect, the Count tells Countess to stop acting like a child sensu stricto.iii Even though he’s a somewhat spineless old man in other regards, Il Conte thinks absolutely nothing of telling petulant wife to shut the fuck up and never mention anything of the sort again… because the buck stops with him!
As you can tell, dear reader, mid-19th-century Italia was not a world with “no-fault divorce,” in which inherently unstrategic and sensation-seeking mothers wantonly wielded the state-sanctioned power to take their husband’s children away,iv never look back, and still cash his cheques. Oh no, this was not a world where the majority of women were cruelly coerced into crippling cat-lady-dom (irrespective of the marital arrangements with said house pets). No, Visconti paintsv us rather a world of timeless aesthetics, which is to say projected strength, very different from the docile, unipolar, spreadsheet-maxxed, “rules-based” order we’re currently in the process of relegating to the wastebin of history.vi
Perhaps Bitcoin even plays some small role in this restoration? It’s as promising as it is too soon to tell,vii and we’ll have to follow the ongoing saga of the “missing” coins,viii but one way or another, absurd legal soviet-isms always come full circle. Brokenness and exhaustion yield necessarily to spirituality, higher planes, and duty.ix So from this glasnost, another Golden Age is all but assured, until of course the pendulum swings back to “abundance” once more…
The only way out is through!x
- 1954 by Visconti. Starring Alida Valli, Farley Granger, Massimo Girotti. The peak Golden Age of Italian Cinema! ↩
- Ah, simpler (less Straussian) times were those when occupying forces wore explicit uniforms and you could pick them out of the crowd at the opera. Today, at least in the UK, they’re mostly guerilla rape gangs protected by WEF bureaucratic apparatus. For now…
- It’s been said before but it bears repeating: you can’t really use Latin too much today. “But Pete, muh English ohmigawrd”. Sorry Timmy, I wish I could, but it’s unfortunately the case that there’s no such thing as 100% accurate translation, in the same way and for the same reasons that Whitney Houston’s “I Will Always Love You” and Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” are both ostensibly about love but are still anything but replaceable like-for-like. Y’know? ↩
- I honestly never appreciated how devastating the current legal framework is for men until this past weekend when my adoring wife took our two angelic children to a friend’s lakefront property for a few beautiful days of boating and campfires, thus “relieving” me of my typically stringent weekend schedule with the family. Except I like my weekend routines? My weekdays are already so unstructured that I hardly need the break come Saturday, so sure enough I just about went off the deep end within just the first few hours alone – cycling aimlessly through the city’s enormous river valley network, getting properly sunburned, listening to Will Durant’s Fallen Leaves, contemplating history and life – to the point that I was as miserable as I’d been in years, no matter that I had “abundance” out the wazoo. Nope, I missed my gang! Thankfully, an olive branch was extended to put an end to my “ronery-maxxing” weekend and I joined the family for the second night at the lake, having just about the most contended sleep possible on a thin air mattress on the ground. Love-maxxing ftw!
Or to quote my friend Philosopher of the Oil Sands from his recent piece “Love, Jesus, Plato, and Hegel” :
Human love, on the other hand, resists being reduced to expedience. […] Love is a force that overcomes rational human law and custom, a force that defies distance and social stratum—one that can seldom fit any rational explanation. […] Love is the very thing which imbues an inchoate and chaotic world with lawful order, making gods and devils its playthings.
- And oh, how Visconti paints! Truly, command of light to make Caravaggio blush. The scenes in the booth at the opera were particularly poetic, and a keen reminder that art is forever upstream of science. How else to explain Her? ↩
- eg.
- This calls to mind the (possibly apocryphal) time that Zhou Enlai, first Premier of the People’s Republic of China, when asked in 1972 what he thought the significance of the French Revolution was, and replied “it’s too soon to tell.” ↩
- Read Dr. Pippa for more on the US Treasury “crypto sovereign wealth fund” saga. ↩
- To quote Marchese Ussoni from the film, as he addresses his cousin the Countess:
Non abbiamo più diritto a nulla, Livia, soltanto dei doveri.
We no longer have any rights, Livia, only duties. - Fear not! After all, fear only exists because multiverses cross-communicate all potentialities. So have no fear… you’ll survive in at least one world!
