The Shape of a Pocket

the marble becomes water.
    Nearly all the birds and fishes succeed, as also the oval heads. The penguins, the tortoises, the torsos, Leda, the smart women, fail. They remain containers. At the best like sea shells and at the worst, like custom-built motorbike petrol tanks.
    The notorious story of how in 1927 the US customs taxed one of Brancusi’s sculptures because they considered it, not a work of art, but an industrial utensil, is often retold as an example of bureaucratic philistinism. It seems to me that their colossal error was a little understandable, and not quite as stupid as is made out.
    I think the old man in his solitude sensed the problem of the containers. And if during his last twenty years he made almost nothing new, it was probably because he realised that he had found all he was likely to find. After all, there are not that many cores, and the infinite multiplicity of feathers, leaves, barks, skins is NOT what interested him.
    With one exception. The exception which is his most astonishing invention.
The Kiss.
He made the first one in 1907 and he went on making others till 1940. This is the most recurring theme in his
oeuvre
, a counterpart to the bird. All the
Kisses
are in rough stone. Not one is polished and not one is platonic.
    All the versions show an embracing couple carved out of a single block of stone which remains very rectangular, like a pillar. Their two eyes in profile form a single eye, their four lips a single mouth. A shallow line marks the frontier of their two skins pressed together. The outermost surface of the block stands in for their four encircling arms, which end in their poor open hands, pressing the other inwards, breast to breast.
    The stone now does not have to transcend its material nature. It remains earthbound, part of the same world as lichen and moss and feathers. And although these couples are recognisably by the same artist, they aspire to something very different from the rest of his work.
    In face of them one encounters what came, not before the Fall, but afterwards. The stocky lovers are on this side, on our side, in all our usual mess. They are not seeking perfection; they are simply longing to be a bit more complete. Time and again with the
Kisses
the old rascal instilled an ache into stone: the ache of a desire for a lost unity.
    Thank you again, Marisa, for your man and the lichen stuck on the coarse paper …

14
The River Po

    Michelangelo Antonioni comes from Ferrara – in the simple sense that he was born there, but also, in a more complex way, because the city or its spirit is invariably present in his work. (It seems to me that even his face and the way he is handsome is an expression of that city of Ariosto and the house of Este.)
    Today a strange city of small luxuries (small in dimension, jewel-like, reminiscent of the objects in the paintings of Cosimo Tura) and great sadness. A city where young women marry and become mothers and then the mothers are inexplicably transformed into stepmothers. A city where fathers unaccountably become strangers to their children. Where nothing, however familiar, is what it appears to be, and everything becomes slowly more and more distant.
    I have no right to say this, for I have never lived there, but every visit during forty years has confirmed this impression, and when I began reading the stories of Bassani, I came to the conclusion it was probably true. A city like a glass case whose panes are always misting up. Containing what? A secret. Maybe a necklace of secrets. Or maybe a weapon, if so, a cruel one.
    Whoever says Ferrara, says also the River Po. Other places are more intimate with the river – Cremona, Torino, the little town of Paesana near its source, but Ferrara is its monument, its mortuary headstone. After Ferrara the river begins to negotiate and finally join the
beyond.
This dimension of the beyond is marvellously held at the end of Antonioni’s first nine-minute documentary film,
Gente del Po
, made between 1943 and 1947.
    The plain of the Po has given northern Italy its wealth, but the river is unpredictable, always shifting, meandering, refusing norms. A sprawling story of regular repetitions and unpredictability. It silts up. It pushes the sea back! Its riverbed gets higher and higher – hence the everlasting danger of floods. On the surface she is still (the Po is a feminine river – perhaps the most feminine in the world: by contrast the Danube is male) but deeper down, there are