Joseph Brodsky

Ah, the good old suggestive power of language! Ah, this legendary ability of words to imply more than reality can provide! Ah, the lock, stock, and barrel of the métier. Of course, the "Embankment of the Incurables" harks back to the plague, to the epidemics that used to sweep this city half clean century after century with a census taker's regularity. The name conjures the hopeless cases, not so much strolling along as scattered about on the flagstones, literally expiring, shrouded, waiting to be carted---or, rather, shipped away. Torches, fumes, gauze masks preventing inhalation, rustling of monks' frocks and habits, soaring black capes, candles. Gradually the funereal procession turns into a carnival, or indeed a promenade, where a mask would have to be worn, since in this city everybody knows everybody. Add to this, tubercular poets and composers; add to this, men of moronic convictions or aesthetes hopelessly enamored of this place---and the Embankment might earn its name, reality might catch up with language. And add to this that the interplay between plague and literature (poetry in particular, and Italian poetry especially) was quite intricate from the threshold. That Dante's descent into the netherworld owes as much to Homer's and Virgil's---episodic scenes, after all, in the Iliad and the Aeneid---as to Byzantine medieval literature about cholera, with its traditional conceit of premature burial and subsequent peregrination of the soul. Overzealous agents of the netherworld bustling around the cholera-stricken city would often zero in on a badly dehydrated body, put their lips to his nostrils, and suck away his life spirit, thereby proclaiming him dead and fit to be buried. Once underneath, the individual would pass through infinite halls and chambers, pleading that he has been consigned to the realm of the dead unjustly and seeking redress. Upon obtaining it---usually by facing a tribunal presided over by Hippocrates---he would return full of stories about those he had bumped into in the halls and chambers below: kings, queens, heroes, famous or infamous mortals of his time, repentant, resigned, defiant. Sounds familiar? Well, so much for the suggestive powers of the métier. One never knows what engenders what: an experience a language, or a language an experience. Both are capable of generating quite a lot. When one is badly sick, one imagines all sorts of consequences and developments which, for all we know, won't ever take place. Is this metaphoric thinking? The answer, I believe, is yes. Except that when one is sick, one hopes, even against hope, to get cured, the illness to stop. The end of an illness thus is the end of its metaphors. A metaphor---or, to put it more broadly, language itself---is by and large open-ended, it craves continuum: an afterlife, if you will. In other words (no pun intended), metaphor is incurable. Add then to all of this yourself, a carrier of this métier, or of this virus---in fact, of a couple of them, sharpening your teeth for a third---shuffling on a windy night along the Fondamenta, whose name proclaims your diagnosis regardless of the nature of your malady.