Cio che era pagano ora è l'emblema della cristianità

One man's rummage is another man's jewel. What seems flighty to some may be weighty and thoughtful to others. Brainy is in the eye of the beholder.

These are the tenets of a uniquely American understanding of culture. It is a democratic, pluralistic, utopian view. It is also extremely destructive. 

Or so is the opinion of Vengalu Ophir, dean of the French Institute of Higher Learning in Paris' affluent 6th arrondissement.

Portrait of Professor Vengalu Ophir, conté crayon on vellum, Currado Malaspina, 2010

 Ophir, now well into his eighties, has been for many years, a mentor to my good friend Currado Malaspina. He is universally esteemed as an uncompromising scholar whose principled approach to learning has served as a beacon to an entire generation of artists and academics.

His book on Marsilio Ficino Les âmes rationnelles repentir (Éditions Tacheur, 1979) remains to this day the most comprehensive and authoritative biography of the great early Renaissance humanist.

Ophir is known for his virulent disdain for almost everything American. From speed dating to fast food, reality television, paper cups, Halloween, the Huffington Post, baseball, Costco, frozen vegetables, the eminent professor finds it all extremely dégoutant. 

However there is one venerable exception.

Forty years ago, Currado Malaspina managed to persuade the notoriously inflexible pedant to accompany him to a concert by a famous American rock band. In addition to it being loud, the performance was incorrigibly vulger, yet the music was unexpectedly complex. 

And so to this day, The Mothers of Invention remain the anomalous aberration, the grudging exception for France's most petulant aesthete.

A NEVER-QUENCHING REQUIEM

It's already an acknowledged fact, one that has already entered into the ranks of rank platitudes, that the forces of technology and popular culture have wrung the resinous glow of language's lyric potential into a tripe-heap of transactional clichés.

Take for example the fetid phrase "bucket list," an image that sooner evokes the daily droppings of a dairy farm than the ominous epiphanies of near-death. My good friend Currado Malaspina, from the safety of his Rue Pinel atalier in the 13th arrondissment, has the proper perch upon which to comment on our pre-mortem follies. He has suggested a more poignant list, one with a pressing agenda of greater cosmological urgency.

Currado's Dream of Heaven

Currado has suggested that we begin to compile a "post-bucket" list, an afterlife agenda with plans that exceed the temporal trendiness of skydiving and cruises to Antarctica. He imagines a list of demands and complaints that one might present to a committee of deities. He dreams of meeting the expired artists of antiquity, the poets, dead and damned and luminaries like Napoleon, Tallyrand, Mendès France and Madame Curie. 

He wants to fly saddleless on Pegasus or on a sun-chariot á grande vitesse or even in the unlikely event that such creatures exist, on the fluffy white wings of beatified angels.  

As for his immediate present, while tranquil drafts of oxygen still flow frictionless through his nicotine-stained windpipe, Malaspina is happy to eat rich foods, make love, drink wine and pierce our fragile complaisance with works of art of celestial and blissful beauty.

Palimpseste Trente-Deux, Currado Malaspina, 2012