atdtda: 31 - pg 868

Sat Apr 26 16:23:42 CDT 2008

Bekah,

  great stuff.....
  (except that paper on England being modeled on Venice I distrust----'cause the writer
  says things like Aristotle is unreadable, then EVIL!!!....sorry, loses all credibility for me.

  Historical Venice seems to be a kind of root state for the deceptive world of spying....????

  Why does some of the doges cruelty and death remind me of the play within CoL49????
  am I falling into 'too much connection" like a paranoid reader?

  I think that paragraph involving penance is crucial to many, manyt meanings and I am puzzling over how to read it......(I think the penance/karma part is straightforward but what does the context in which that is embedded, and gives it some of its meaning mean?

  MK

Bekah <Bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
  Page 868   

  .4  Alexandrian cigarettes  
  a Sherlock Holmes favorite -  see "The Adventure of the Golden Pince Nez"  

  .5 - 7  " 'That he should have pursued his schemes from Venice,' the Prince said, 'this clouded realm of pedestrian mazes and municipal stillness, suggests an allegiance to forces already long in motion...."    

  The history may only be that of  the old Austrian/French/Italian/Ottoman conflicts in the area  (from the 7th century Avars).  

  Or the forces could be much older,  is Thiegn  is allied to evil?  The doges of Venice were so unprincipled and devious as to be considered evil by some in England (with cause): 

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge_of_Venice

  and

    "The best way to understand the evil of Venice is to look at the great poets' portrayal of the unbelievable duplicity that Venice represented: portrayals by Marlowe in The Jew of Malta, and by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice and especially in Othello, the Moor of Venice. The quintessential Venetian is Iago. Yet the most brilliant portrait of Venetian method was done by Friedrich Schiller in his The Ghostseer."    http://members.tripod.com/american_almanac/takeover.htm
  see also:   http://members.tripod.com/american_almanac/venphau1.htm

  .7 - .8    "But that is only the mask he has chosen. "
  Mask that Thiegn has chosen?   To be devious?  To be aligned with the byzantine and convoluted schemes of Venician history?  
  What's underneath the mask?  Anything?

  .8 - .10   "Other nations, Americans notoriously, style themselves "republican" and think they understand republics, but what was fashioned here over corroded centuries of doges' cruelty lies forever beyond their understanding."

  The wickedness of the doges affected the "Republic" of Venice.  The Doges were far more evil than Americans can imagine.   They, 120 of them,  ruled Venice for 1000  years.  
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doges_of_Venice
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doge%27s_Palace

  .11 - .14       "Each Doge in his turn became more and more a sacrificial animal, his own freedoms taken, his life brought under an impossibly stringent code of conduct, taking comfort, while he wore the corno, in a resentful brutality, waiting each day for the fateful escort of thugs, the sealed gondola, the final bridge. "

    Corno -  the little pointed hat:   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Bellini.doge.600pix.jpg

  The freedom of the doges  (like leaving the palace) was quite limited by law coming from a growing group of "republican" elders.   The doges were elected but totally governed by the aristocratic noble-types.  

  "... final bridge..."    The Bridge of Sighs?   Stretches between the  http://www.uk-images.com/html/bridge_of_sighs.html
  but I don't think any of the doges met their death walking across it - it was for ruffians.   The doges probably met their untimely deaths in other ways.  
  http://www.oldandsold.com/articles03/venice7.shtml
  http://europeforvisitors.com/venice/articles/bridge_of_sighs.htm

  And there are lots and lots of bridges, real and metaphorical,  in AtD.  

  .15  " His best hope, pathetically slender, might be for some remote monastery and a decline into ever-deeper penitence."
  Doge of Venice - Pietro I Orseolo (976 - 978) resigned to become a Camaldolese hermit in Abbey of Sant Miguel de Cuxa in the Pyrenees
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Doges_of_Venice
   -   Take a look at the way some of the early doges died!  

  .17 "The Doges are gone, the curse remains.  Some today, often in positions to do great harm, will never come to understand  how "power" - lo stato - could have been an expression of communal will,  invisibly exercised in the dark that surrounds each soul, in which penance must be a necessary term.  Unless one has performed in his life penance equal to what he has exacted from others, there is an imbalance in Nature. ' "  

  "lo stato"  the state

  Buddhist connection:  In this passage the we might see the Buddhist connection in terms of balancing life penance to great harm - karma. 

  "I was speaking of Venetian history.  Today ... "

  .26 - .29   "Today suppose there were a foreign Crown Prince, for example, who passionately hated Italy, who upon succession to the throne of his empire would, certain as the sunrise, go to war with Italy to take back territory he believes to be his family's..."

  The Archduke Ferdinand was in line to be crowned Emperor.  He had plans to  

    Austria's Franz Joseph was crowned emperor in 1848 and took up arms against the rebellious Hungarians as well as the Italians (Sardinia because of Lombardy-Venizia) later that year.   He brought Venitia back into the "family" estate but wasn't so lucky with Hungary.   Venezia was a part of Austria until 1866 when Sardinia took over. 

  There were so many factions in the Empire, particularly that southern area,  that truly,  there was no one to be trusted except those with a "passion"  as the Prince and Cyprian note.  

  Bekah

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