The most astonishing of all landing sites

The most astonishing of all landing sites: two texts on Venice
Four years before he died Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) published an impressive essay entitled Watermark (1992). This essay can be typified as an autobiographic, poetical and philosophic discourse. It describes the city of Venice where every winter the Russian poet had been withdrawing to for several weeks since the beginning of the seventies. His fascination for the Italian city is related to recognition. On his very first visit to the city the poet, born in St Petersburg on the Baltic Sea, scents ‘the smell of freezing seaweed’ and he is ‘smitten by a feeling of utter happiness’ that at the same time evokes ‘hidden dramas and incongruities’. (8/9) This jolt of recognition makes Brodsky aware that attachment is beyond the confines of life’s memories and ‘beyond one’s genetic makeup’.
In the discourse, filling some hundred pages, Brodsky outlines a number of the circumstances of the seventeen winters he stayed in Venice and tries to fathom the city’s charm. He finds the water city enhances the powers of perception. Many of Brodsky’s statements made from the I-perspective concern visual notions. The ‘eye precedes one’s pen’. Various thoughts and metaphors converge to nominate this preoccupation with the eye in the city. The thoughts about identity and ‘selflessness’, imperative to the writing of poetry, are interwoven with the fact that one finds many mirrors in Venice: ‘hotel room mirrors’ (20), mirrors in rooms in a palazzo merging into one elongated ‘enfilade’. The rooms spill over and the enfilade looks ‘like a vicious, viscous infinity’. Naturally the reflection of the water that is ubiquitous and presents ‘an image of time’ is also related to this effect. Many motifs in this compact, poetical essay are worth examining– the labyrinth, the winter light, the perspectives offered by the urban space when one passes through it --, and are linked to what the poet states about the act of perceiving.
‘The eye is the most autonomous of our organs’ Brodsky writes by the end of his discourse in a complex passage, because ‘the objects of its attention are inevitably situated on the outside’ (78). The eye never sees itself, except in a mirror. Under all circumstances it keeps registering reality because ‘the environment is hostile’. In reaction to this hostility the eye is looking for safety and therefore for beauty. Brodsky is rather cryptic when he puts these thoughts into words: ‘Because beauty is where the eye rests. Aesthetic sense is the twin of one’s instinct for self-preservation and is more reliable than ethics. Aesthetics’ main tool, the eye, is absolutely autonomous’. (80). Further on Brodsky describes the autonomy of the eye in yet another way: ‘For the eye identifies itself not with the body it belongs to but with the object of its attention. And to the eye, for purely optical reasons, departure is not the body leaving the city but the city abandoning the pupil.’ (81)
These are interesting passages that demand commenting and thinking along with the author. But first I want to call on another man of letters who also reflects on viewing in Venice: the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom.

From Nooteboom’s Venetian vignettes, a short travel account published in 1998, one might draw an intertextual line to Brodsky’s text published six years before. While Nooteboom (1933) does not explicitly refer to Watermark, it is interesting that echoes of Brodsky’s text sound in his text.
Nooteboom also describes the city on a winter day and refers to beholding time in Venice: ‘the eyes see what the no longer existing eyes of millions of others have seen, and actually here this is not tragic, because while one is watching they continue talking, one is continuously accompanied by the living and the dead’ (42). To the Dutch author as well the city appears to be a labyrinth, where at certain moments the bells are chiming everywhere, where the wanderer loses his way, gets lost, and then suddenly realizes ‘this is what it is about, only now one sees things one would otherwise never have seen. (45)
In the midst of his discourse Nooteboom relates how he, after roaming the Academia (the art museum, O.H.) for an entire day, saw images all around the city that were fraught with meaning. Figures are coming to life and - more important still in this context– they are watching the onlooker while he is observing them: ‘gods of the sea, putti, popes, sultans, condotierri, admirals, all wanting to draw your attention. They rush along the ceilings, they look at you with their painted, woven, pencil-drawn, sculpted eyes. Sometimes one sees one and the same saint more than once in a day, in a gothic, Byzantine, baroque or classical disguise, because myths are powerful and their heroes adjust, renaissance or rococo, they do not care, as long as one is watching, as long as their essence remains intact. (48)
The culmination of perception in Nooteboom’s travel account is when he is watching a painting by Vittore Carpaccio depicting the philosopher St Augustine of Hippo. Augustine finds himself in his writing chamber and he is painted ‘on the most mysterious moment of all, the moment of the inspiration’. The painting would seem to show events that will occur some time afterwards: ‘when Carpaccio has left, he dips his pen into the ink of the squid and he writes the sentence that has been preserved in every library around the world in one of his books’. (52). The imagination of the beholder is set off while he is looking at the painting. He sees things that are not there on the canvas.