R.I.P.

 

R.I.P. Rose Severini, my Aunt Rose.  This is her wedding day, when she married my uncle Carl Severini in 1954.  

A Severini Saga

I haven't been posting so often on this blog recently, partly because I've been engaged in another project: researching and writing a narrative of my extended family, from what origins I could find to my memories of the 1950s.

I expected this to be of interest only to my family, including (I hope) its younger members when they get older and curious.  Like a lot of my retirement projects, it's been something I've pursued off and on, over decades. It's been fascinating for many reasons, and often frustrating, especially because I never asked a lot of these questions of those who could have answered while they were alive.  My grandmother Severini was the exception--she shared her stories in conversations in the 1970s and 80s.  And I did talk to my Aunt Toni in the 90s about her memories and her life.

  Fortunately, an uncle on each side of the family was able to help with their recollections and confirmations as I worked on this for the past few months.  But it is a sobering lesson in how we change over time, and how self-absorbed we tend to be for much of our lives, while the people who can tell us so much about the past that is the ground of our own being, fade away unasked.

I mention all this here because I did not do the standard sort of family history.  I included the contexts of place and the times.  So there may be some common ground of interest, particularly in what turns out to be a history of the first half of the 20th century that surrounds one family.  

So if you are interested, here it is: the blog I created to tell A Severini Saga, which I hope will be extended by information and memories from other members of my family, particular for the years after 1960.  (If for some reason the link doesn't work, the blog address is: severinisaga.blogspot.com.)

Coming of Age

 It will not be enough

 to recall stills from along the way

 to glimpse from its hill

 the long-gone night pasture

 the light on the river

 but not the river

 the sunbeam on the scuffed stairs

 in the soundless house

 but not where it was going

 the eyes of a dog 

watching from beside me

 a face in shadow

 silent as an old photograph

 our meeting our first night

 and waking at home together

 again

 I was there

 these same hands and these eyes as they were

 when they wondered where it was going

 where it had gone

 it will not be enough

 it will be enough 

 --W.S. Merwin

Photo: Flora Severini at the 1939 New York World's Fair.  Happy birthday.

A Face

A Face

 It’s just by chance, who you are,

 but given myself

 I take care of this being.

 Nobody else will remember

 its hunger, cold, loneliness: 

I will be reminded, and care. 

 This face, like an old watch,

 I carry wherever I go.

 Grandmothers, grandfathers, you pictures,

 you should forgive my regret:

 my wanting another. I carry it

 as you did. It belongs

 somewhere, and I am taking it there.

 On corners I let the wind

 have all the world, and I turn

 as a ship accepts the waves

 but is itself and has a voyage

 built into it, stubbornly. 

 The choice of being who you are

 is offered us, or being nothing.

 The mask of myself is an old gift

 nobody else took. So I brought it here. 

-- William Stafford

Illustration: Self-Portrait by Gino Severini

In Memory

     Flora Severini Kowinski   Sept. 13, 1920--March 22, 1974

In Memoriam

Very early this morning--at 2:20 a.m.--marks the 45th anniversary of my mother's death.   Flora Severini Kowinski bore three children, my sisters and me, and lived to know one grandchild.  Eventually there were three grandchildren, all girls.  Now there are five great-grandchildren, all boys but one.

Despite the technical difficulties in rescuing this old print, this is the best photo I ever took (you need to click on it to get the entire photo.)  That's my mother, my sister Kathy and grandfather facing the camera, with my sister Debbie facing them.  I took this squeezing between the sink and the table in my grandparents' tiny kitchen, out of which came so many wonderful meals.  I caught a moment in their card game--such spontaneous moments weren't often considered appropriate for photos back then.

At this time of year I often wish we'd had more time, especially in the middle and later years of my life when I had enough perspective to hear about her life.  But the opening lines of the second Merwin poem I posted had special and specific meaning for me as this anniversary arrives:

  All day the stars watch from long ago
my mother said I am going now
when you are alone you will be all right
whether or not you know you will know

Without Certificate

“Isn’t there something slightly disappointing about our need to equip all artists with a certificate of darkness?”

Julian Barnes

painting: Still Life Centrifugal Expansion of Colors (1916)  by Gino Severini

Anniversaries

Commemorating 100,000 Italian soldiers who died in a single place in the Great War one hundred years ago, Pope Francis said, "War is madness."  

Though he said international use of force is justified to counter ISIL's aggression, he also suggested that World War III has already begun, but piecemeal, in a collection of massacres, crimes and destruction.

He was speaking at the largest monument in Italy, at Redipuglia.  "Humanity needs to weep," he said, "and this is the time to weep."

The identities of 60,000 of the Italian dead at Redipuglia are unknown.  But Italian officials did find the military records for the grandfather of Pope Francis, who fought in some of the 12 battles in this place, and survived.  His family later emigrated to Argentina, which is where the current pope grew up.

My grandfather Ignazio Severini emigrated to America in 1920. He had been called up by the Italian army in the Great War, what we now call World War I. He never talked about it to me.  I don't know where he was posted, and my grandmother's few stories were not about battle. But she did say he was posted to the north, which Redipuglia is.  My aunt told me that he had been gassed, and suffered effects from it for years afterwards.

So it is possible that Ignazio Severini was there.  Today, the current Italian minister of Justice, Paola Severino was present at the ceremonies.

 Wherever Ignazio Severini had been, he survived. Perhaps, my grandmother believed, because he was a tailor, and the officers kept him safe so they would look good in their uniforms. War is madness. Still, he experienced poison gas, so maybe not so safe.

 But he was not among those 100,000. He came home, married my grandmother and fathered a daughter, Flora, my mother.  The anniversary of her birth is today.

40th

Today marks the 40th anniversary of my mother's death.  It's hard to believe it's been that long.

I'm posting two photos in commemoration.  One was probably taken in a New York City hotel in the late 40s or early 50s, her second time there (her first was for the World's Fair, probably in 1940) and the last time.

The other is my favorite.  It's in the tiny kitchen at my grandparents' house in Youngwood.  My mother, my sister Kathy and my grandfather are visible.  That's my sister Debbie's hair in the foreground.  They're reacting to something in their card game.  I had squeezed myself between Debbie and the kitchen sink to take the photo.  I thought I was pretty daring to take a candid "action" photo.  I salvaged this from the only print I had.  But that expression on my mother's face is familiar, characteristic.

She was 54 when she died of cancer.  She died on March 22 at 2:22 a.m.  I missed a lot of years with her, including the more recent years when I got more interested in who my parents were, how they experienced the events in their lives that became more real to me. And my late-found ability to appreciate them as people.  I missed her experience and support more than once.  Now that time is a daily mystery, it's hard to say more.

 

Our Year-End Newsletter

It’s the end of another dull and lurid year. Grandson Holden was kicked out of another prep school, while his aunt Emma divorced her fourth husband and ran off with the assistant producer of a reality show about producers of reality shows. Here at home, our town was declared pre-bankrupt and turned over to a state-appointed Manager who sold it to Google which digitized it, and so we now live in a replica that was manufactured in China—at least until somebody buys our 3-D printed house on EBay. On the bright side, we’d have a week to move, unless the buyer has Amazon Prime, in which case just overnight.

I was finally able to leave my job writing nasty comments to Internet articles about global warming and other “liberal conspiracies” for something I could believe in: correcting the appalling grammar and spelling in email spoofing.

We had a fascinating experience in local politics working on a campaign to outlaw assault weapons in our bathtub, but even though we lost that one, we are confident that our new project to combat global warming by getting everybody to wave recycled cardboard fans simultaneously will reach critical mass in the coming decade or two.

Culturally this year we attended a YouTube film festival via Skype—our favorite was the one about the new sport of texting while skydiving from drones—a real thrill ride! Although some of those space-walking cats were really cute!

Santa was good to me this year too, so consequently this letter was entirely written by my new robot!

Happy New Year from Our House to Yours!

painting: The Bear Dance at the Moulin Rouge by Gino Severini

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

“Without Imagination we should have no knowledge whatsoever, but we are scarcely ever conscious [of this.]”

Kant

painting by Gino Severini

As Jung Once Said...

"In the final analysis, we count for something only because of the essential we embody, and if we do not embody that, life is wasted.”

C.G.Jung

Memories, Dreams, Reflections

p 325

for a fuller context for this quote: Blue Voice.

painting: Le Printemps by Gino Severini 

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"Ethical axioms are found and tested not very differently from the axioms of science. Truth is what stands the test of experience."

--Albert Einstein
painting: "The Boulevard" by Gino Severini

The Dreaming Up Daily Quote

"The only thing required of artists is that they not be weak."

--Jacques Maritain, as recalled by his friend Gino Severini.

Collage by Gino Severini 1913.

Earthquake in Italy

The earthquake that devastated L'Aquila is very far away from where I am, and yet it is not. Not far from L'Aquilia (80 kilometers) in the Abruzzi region of Italy is Manoppello, where my mother was born, and her parents met and lived until coming to the U.S., and where I still have relatives, although I don't know any of them. I know that some of them still live in the house where my grandmother lived. Since early news reports said that other towns and villages were affected by the quake, I tried to find information on Manoppello. I found only one article, in Italian. I'm told I was bilingual for awhile--when I knew few words in English or Italian--but I can't really understand, or certainly read Italian. Yet after staring at the article for awhile, I did begin to understand enough: though the earthquake was felt there, there were no deaths and no significant damage. That of course is not true of L'Aquila, where hundreds have died and many buildings devastated.

That I would feel connected to this distant disaster in a place where I know no one is not entirely goofy. I saw another article somewhere about efforts in the U.S. to collect money for earthquake relief by Italian Americans--someone said that it doesn't matter how weak the ties now, how distant the American life is from the Italian or the immigrant experience, the bond is still there. These connections occur in time as well as place; from another time to this.

That I live in a very earthquake-prone area now that (like L'Aquila until this week) hasn't experienced a quake in long enough time to forget the danger in daily life, has something to do with the attention I'm paying. The experience of such a disaster lasts well beyond it in time, as evidenced in an oped piece in the New York Times by Stanislao Pugliese, about a far worse quake in another Abruzzi town in 1915, in which "3,500 of the town’s 5,000 residents had perished in a matter of 30 seconds." Among the dead was the mother of Italian novelist Ignazio Silone. This immense event changed him and all his fictions, Pugliese writes, which"bear the often subtle, sometimes vivid imprint of the catastrophe."

Such a disaster changes or reinforces ideas about fate. "In a twist of fate that surprised no one, the only house left undamaged was uninhabited." In the disaster and the aftermath, much is also revealed about human beings and their institutions:

“In an earthquake,” Silone wrote decades after his experience, “everyone dies: rich and poor, learned and illiterate, authorities and the people. An earthquake accomplishes what words and laws promise and never achieve: the equality of all. But it is an ephemeral equality, for when fear had died down, collective misfortune became the opportunity for even greater injustices.”

“Only loss is universal,” he once wrote, “and true cosmopolitanism in this world must be based on suffering.”

Many of our lives are not hit so hard, though at any moment they may be. But we who have been relatively fortunate are not absolved from empathy. It is our role to understand and to act.

A Futurist Helps the Future

Two paintings by Gino Severini,
sometime Futurist and favorite
uncle (sort of), recently sold at
auction for about $45 million,
much more than any of his previous
paintings and a lot more than he
ever got from his work in his lifetime.
(He died in 1966.) But the
proceeds of the sale are going to
Doctors Without Borders, which
is a courageous humanitarian
group that I've contributed some
meager pennies to. Particularly
apt considering that Gino's young son died
because he couldn't afford adequate medical care.

I can't find any good reproducible images
of these paintings, but here's a link
to an image of one of them--the painting that
sold for almost $30 million, "Danseuse (1915)".
Thanks to my sister Kathy for passing on the family
news.

by Gino Severini, circa 1908

Dancer (1913) by Gino Severini

Uncle Gino sings "Happy
Birthday": Gino Severini,
1950.

painting by Gino Severini.