Rowing into the Postcard
Time: the mid-century triennium of my stressful emergence from
the spiritual comforts of the proletariat.
Place: the city of spires, too often qualified, with smug addiction
to irritating clichés, as dreaming, but equally perceptible as
accessories to cultural oppression.
Occasion: purchase, framing and frequent contemplation of a post
card reproduction of Raoul Dufy’s vision of San Giorgio
Maggiore, seen from across the Venetian harbour.
Dream: repeated, with no variation, of being silently conveyed in a
gondola (presumed) to the steps of the basilica, entering,
through the sketched and colour-washed evocation of the
façade’s Palladian serenity, into a succession of spaces lit
by tethered Chinese lanterns, and exiting, calmed and
refreshed, into tenebrous indefinitions.
Reality: half a century later, peaceful contemplation, from a hotel
window on the Riva, of the same aspect of San Giorgio
Maggiore, floating through the night in a subtle glow of
golden floodlights, and conclusion that the Chinese
lanterns must have betrayed a lack of cultural correctness.
Male, retired, born 1934