Thinking with the Wind

Bridging cultural and natural approaches to the world can be a challenge. The interrelations are obvious, but connecting them in writing can sometimes feel arbitrary: from an ecological perspective, after all, everything is connected, so why one might start with one connection over another is as likely to be motivated by personal, rhetorical, or storytelling considerations as by scientific ones. I once heard a poet describing the nature of a fact as being something that was both true and of interest. The “of interest” part is by far the greater writing challenge.

Of the two books by Predrag Matvejević most important to my project — his Mediterranean: A Cultural Landscape (tr. Heim), which has given me my title (Sea of Intimacy), and his Druga Venecija, which I translated into English as The Other Venice (Reaktion Books, 2007) — the former is more securely a book about culture. Its many, fascinating details seem to float above the surface of the water and the land, often presuming a natural world but saying very little about nature. The latter, by contrast, while not expressly concerned with ecology or the environment per se, is ecologically more sensitive in myriad subtle ways throughout. Perhaps this is because it treats an environmentally precarious place or because it was written much later, towards the end of the twentieth century, in the midst of a heightened global awareness of environmental precarity in general. Whatever the reason, it provides a writing bridge of sorts that is helping me as I proceed.

Another bridge, recently discovered, is Trieste’s Museo della Bora, the brainchild of Rino Lombardi, who animates his offspring with energy enough for a half-dozen such enterprises. The museum itself is deceptively modest, akin to a tousled old bookshop of the sort one might find in a back alley of Prague or Ljubljana. Here lies another point of contrast with Trieste’s neighbor Venice — a comparative theme I refuse as yet to relinquish, despite the skepticism of my acquaintances in the two cities, Lombardi included, I suspect: one would not expect to find such an establishment in Venice, and one would not be successful if one tried to do so. Why not is a subject for another place.

The museum is a bit hard to characterize, but I’ll try. As all institutions are comprised by the people who devote their time and energy to them, even institutions of one, the Museo della Bora is, first, a place of welcome thanks to the atmosphere created by Lombardi. Its holdings resemble the Central European antiquarian establishment I noted above, or a cross between that and a one-room warehouse, and indeed, the museum is also called Magazzino (“warehouse”) della Bora. So in addition to the 1000+ shelved and stacked books, along with piles of postcards, newspapers, artistic works, and some 400 containers of wind from around the world (which Lombardi has dubbed “aeolic ambassadors”), the collection also features various and sundry objects thematically connected to the bora donated by people who have lived it their whole lives. It is, in this sense, also a warehouse filled with bora memorabilia.

The object of their memories is the bora itself, a katabatic (from the Greek, katabasis — think of Odysseus’s descent into the underworld) wind that can sweep down from the northeast with great force, enough to tip over a semi-rig (there’s a picture), or sit down upon (another pic), or break things, lots of things (present in abundance, as befitting a warehouse). The donations are testimonials of a sort, but also mementos, which means the stories behind them can often be quite touching. There is an old donated flatiron that was once placed by a solicitous mother in the school bag of her young daughter so she wouldn’t be carried away by the wind on her trek to class.

An iron of this type adorns the cover of the museum’s first published book (see the pic), an anthropological account of the bora and its role in Triestine life by Fabio Tufano. As the book had been released within days of my visit, and the author was in Trieste, Lombardi invited him to join me at the museum, and our conversation swept up from there.

Tufano’s account includes a chapter on the museum, where he notes, among other things, that it is not just a container for objects but an active part of the process of creating new meanings associated with the wind in the life of the city, an interface between the natural and the cultural world. This observation is borne out, of course, by the fact of his book’s existence, by my reading of the book (having seen in Il Piccolo that the launch was to be held at a local bookstore), by our meeting, at the museum itself, and… by this blog post. None of this would have come into the world without the museum’s active role.

One of the concepts that has turned out to be especially helpful to me in Tufano’s account is the notion of “thinking with the wind” (pensare-col-vento), a characteristic, or maybe a habit of mind or internalized bodily practice, of those who’ve been acclimatized to the bora. When I read this phrase, my first thought was that this is what sailors do. Old salts routinely “think with the wind”: it becomes a characteristic, a habit of mind, an internalized bodily practice. They “lean into the wind” (si appoggiano al vento, another concept noted by Tufano from the Triestine vocabulary), both literally and figuratively.

“Steer to the wind and the sails,” they will tell you, a phrase that has always sounded to me like that of the poet who says, “Write to the language.” Now there is a connection to explore, something not just true and of interest but also, perhaps, ripe for a meaningful journey.