Torcello, Isle of Refuge
Manor, F.S.
"Torcello, Isle of Refuge" there was never a "Golden Age" of television--certainly not of television news. In Network, for one example, Chayefsky feeds the myth that once there was a Camelot of small-screen excellence,...
...This, then, is the difference between our millennium and that of Torcello...
...Goddammit...
...Perhaps there are no parallels in history and Jacob Burckhardt was right when he taught that we study history not to be shrewder for the next time, but to be wise forever...
...You know it, I know it...
...The huge rings of stone that answer the double purpose of stanchions and brackets made Ruskin think of an Alpine refuge from a storm, rather than of the cathedral of a populous city...
...The windows are covered with substantial Venetian shutters (scuri) which revolve on massive stone hinges opening outward onto the street...
...And they die...
...Nobody around here watches television...
...the lament from the multitude of its people, seeking, like Israel of old, a refuge from the sword in the paths of the sea...
...Can you imagine...
...And the people of Altinum again had to take to their boats and sail for Torcello to put the lagoon between them and the barbarian fury...
...Our despair has become cynical, finding its expression not in cathedrals but in collages of repulsive ugliness parading as art...
...Ignore all this idle talk about a decline in the number of sets in use...
...Fourteen centuries ago the barbarians swept across the barriers left undefended by the demoralized Romans...
...So what if their reviews are damning...
...Television has always been and remains an entertainment, not an information, form...
...We, too, doubt whether there will be a New Year's Day of 2000, but no longer find consolation in a faith of hope...
...We will...
...One can still notice the haste with which the cathedral was built, a haste that expressed the terror of men "persecuted but not forsaken, cast down but not destroyed" (Ruskin again...
...As the people of Torcello awaited the New Year of 1000 that they did not expect to see, they confidently looked forward to a new world "where the wicked cease from troubling, and the weary are at rest...
...And today...
...And we do...
...orcello indeed was the mother of Venice...
...A series of mosaic pictures explains in straightforward terms what will happen when the trumpet sounds...
...But the empire decayed and civilized life was destroyed by the barbarians who had been poised beyond the Alps awaiting their chance, as today the Soviet armies are poised beyond the Oder...
...The 30-minute show on Joe McCarthy, yes...
...This is as close to Herman Kahn as one can expect it to be over the span of a thousand years...
...at the end of this particular strip other angels with their trumpets call up the drowned from the deep—an important hope for a seafaring people...
...Even National Review concedes the point...
...and also that opener in "Hunger in America," which won him an Emmy: The scene focused on an infant who, we were told, had died of malnutrition...
...how to cross a sea, even the narrow confines of a lagoon...
...Roone...
...Nothing wrong with that, but let's not let the Chayefsky-Schorr crowd kid us: From Ed Murrow to Howard Cosell there is a direct, undeviating line of medialogical descent...
...And again 16 The American Spectator March 1978 one thinks of Ruskin: "Mother and daughter, you behold them both in their widowhood—Torcello, and Venice...
...Kahn, are definite and detailed...
...Yet Venice, depicted by Tiepolo in 1750 as a worn-out courtesan, her hand on a .mangy lion—once the proud emblem of Venetian power—still delights...
...But the Madonna continued to gaze at me with her tear-stained face, and that look of boundless compassion has always remained with me, a look expressive at once of the deep sorrow and the sacred courage of men...
...Down came the Langobards, the most cruel of Italy's invaders, putting to fire and sword all in their path...
...In the Year of Our Ford was an outrageous pun, but it made its point...
...No human voices are heard of a winter afternoon...
...So the old church was rebuilt in great haste around 950, part Byzantine, part Gothic...
...The Huns and other Mongol invaders are seen as being cast into hellfire together with haughty kings and arrogant princes...
...Thus wrote Ruskin in his The Stones of Venice, first published in 1853...
...only the sound of the Adriatic, lapping monotonously at the shores of honeysuckle and briar, disturbs the peace that the mist has rendered absolute...
...It was a vigorous mercantile center of 20,000 inhabitants when Venice still was a collection of refugee huts round the Rialto...
...In the annals of television reviewing, 98 percent of everything that has been written and said runs to excoriation, damnation, the sick heaves...
...There is no splendor here, there are no outside ornaments...
...We, the children of the twentieth century, know the depth of this anguish: the burning homes...
...Oh, I remember Murrow...
...Good old Buckleys...
...Yet the picture in the mind's eye of Torcello is painfully familiar, and one knows instinctively that we shall never be wise, let alone shrewd...
...On the opposite wall of the cathedral we can study futurology as practiced in the first millennium...
...men and women who don't know the wars are over...
...And because Roone Arledge is the best special-event impressario around, I am willing to wager that should the Second Coming be delayed until 1980 or 1981—long enough, that is, for the man to make his presence felt—ABC will be first among the Three Wise Networks to spread the news...
...How apt a name...
...the implacable advance of an enemy who knows no mercy...
...Sooner or later we must turn the set back on...
...The predictions, as are those of Dr...
...Today, Torcello is a deserted island...
...behind him a young lecher, with clearly dishonorable intentions, is approaching a beautiful female ready to respond to his advances, although both are in flames up to their waists...
...The Huns destroyed Altinum and left on their way to Rome, and the refugees who had escaped to Torcello soon began to drift back to rebuild their old homes...
...but on the line of the horizon, there were strange fires mixed with the light of sunset, and the lament of many human voices mixed with the fretting of the waves on their ridges of sand...
...No, they still don't like television, but they acknowledge its existence...
...They resurrected their city until it was the turn of the Langobards to sweep down, on Easter Sunday of 568, from Mt...
...He does this by reverential allusion to the sainted Edward R. Murrow...
...Manor Torcello, Isle of Refuge When winter fogs descend upon the Adriatic, the lagoon of Venice and its attractive islands disappear from view...
...Michael weighed their souls, inspired the Greek artists who left us this memorial of human spirit, forever soaring from the ashes of destruction to find beauty even in unspeakable tragedy...
...Not unlike the British who during the Second World War were saved from Hitler by the narrow Channel, the inhabitants of Altinum were spared by the waters of the lagoon...
...The American Spectator March 1978 1 7...
...Occasionally, the shutters of the cathedral, this place of refuge and consolation, flap in the wind, scaring seagulls and rooks that rise in a bedlam of cacophony, like angry spirits roused from the dim past...
...but who in fact was a victim of premature birth...
...In winter, this is a scene of soft melancholy, and as one discerns through the mist the red-brick campanile of Torcello, old, lonely, and abandoned, one thinks of a finger—the last finger to have remained in this empty world—pointed to the invisible skies, a gesture at once of anguish, supplication, and despair...
...There is majesty in the luminous spaciousness of the cathedral...
...McLuhan, in his coherent moments, is right (he may even be right in his incoherent moments, but I leave that to Ruth Carter Stapleton and others who listen in tongues...
...All that matters is that we watch it...
...It was a fairly funny bit, something about Averell Harriman traveling the globe as a western word-slinger, titled Have Gun, Will Cavil...
...the dead, mutilated and dishonored, lying amidst the rubble of the once familiar streets...
...And there is poignancy in the life-size mosaic image of the Madonna Theotoka, the Mother of God, her tears falling as her hands are raised to bless, a deep sadness in her eyes, firmly fixed upon the congregation below, expressing the endless sorrow of this world—as if she knew of all the disasters yet to befall mankind...
...In the days of Roman power Torcello was the fashionable watering place of Altinum, a thriving city situated on a branch of Via Emilia—one of the great consular highways that linked Rome with the outposts of the empire—a city with busy ports and a Roman garrison...
...But, of course, that's show biz, and Ed Murrow was show biz, from the theatrical arch of his brow to the miasma of cigarette smoke swirling around his head...
...Consider now that In the Season of Our Roone 14, which is to say, 1963, nearly a decadeand-a-half after the coaxial serpent was stretched coast-to-coast, Isent National Review an item based on television's seasonal programming...
...Torcello only evokes a feeling of melancholy, and perhaps a fear of the unknown future engendered by this encounter with the known past...
...The color of this melancholy world is a lurid, ashen grey—Ruskin' s description—and as one ploughs on a motorboat through the primeval seascape one feels strangely affected, as if one had reached a point at which the past and the future converge in kindred suffering...
...Aldous Huxley couldn't have done better...
...Murrow: the progenitor of Eric Sevareid, one-fourth newsman, three-fourths entertainer, all the sacred cow dung about his being a legend of electronic journalism notwithstanding...
...The monster has won...
...In Network, for one example, Chayefsky feeds the myth that once there was a Camelot of small-screen excellence, particularly in the news field...
...The flames rose from the ruins of Altinum...
...Fantastic mists drift over the vast expanse of sea that mirrors the gloomy skies, the lagoon and skies seeming an organic whole cocooned by the mist in a strange universe of their own...
...Would it speak to them as it speaks to us who knew Hitler...
...Yet their terror was joined with hope, a hope that finds its expression in the unusual luminosity of the cathedral—as if the people of Torcello no longer could suffer darkness—and in its lofty dimensions within which Torcello's inhabitants were to witness the greatest of all events: the end of the world...
...Or are there any others left: cultural samurai wandering the jungle islands of what they delude themselves to be pre-coaxial America...
...Excommunicants by personal choice, out of touch with their neighbors...
...Joe McCarthy couldn't have stated the defense much better...
...I recall sitting in the empty cathedral at the end of the war, myown personal grief ar the loss of my old world draining into the universal Weltschmerz, and as I looked up into those knowing mosaic eyes they seemed to come alive, their understanding reflecting my sorrow and that of the destroyed world around me...
...When the mist lifts, one can discern, far off, the lights of Venice, the sinking jewel that might not outlast our millennium...
...The cathedral rose then, but when the millennium approached and everybody knew the world would end on the stroke of midnight of December 31, 999, it was thought proper that there should be a dignified place in which these perennial refugees—there had been other invasions in the intervening centuries—could welcome the Messiah...
...The Torcello Madonna is the work of Greek artists, and indeed her features and her slender figure are Greek, but no portrait of the Virgin I saw in Greece is, in my eyes, as beautiful, or so sad...
...Once you have known the Huns, the Langobards, and the marauding Magyars, there is little left to imagination to frighten you...
...The hellfire is vividly represented by a red stream resembling a ribbon that descends out from the throne of Christ to envelop the sinners, a stylized Byzantine symbolism that contrasts with the stark naturalism of the Gothic cathedrals...
...Stuffy Buckleys...
...Do Messrs...
...Hell, however, did not seem to arouse much terror among the artists—they and their ancestors had seen worse...
...The panel of lechers seems almost comic: The old roue is depicted as sitting on the flames with an expression of serene detachment...
...Well, the editors sent it back...
...But with a nice note: "This may be funny," they assured me, "but we really can't tell...
...I thought of graven images and reflected, defiantly, that I was much older—of a lineage that had begun long before the Greeks...
...Warnke and Mondale ever visit Torcello...
...Roone and his fellow Roones will get those sets back in service, tuned in to Son of Roots, the David-Goliath rematch, a docudrama on the Resurrection (as a promo for the Second Coming), with one of Roone's prize performers interviewing Magdalene...
...All beside the point: The Roones couldn't care less whether we like television...
...The despair of the men who were building the cathedral—their ancient homes destroyed and their world about to end—a despair alleviated by the hope that they would be among the chosen when St...
...When Howard or Geraldo or Barbara is asking Magdalene what went through her mind that morning when she first noticed that the stone had moved, docudrama or not, we will be watching...
...Thirteen hundred years ago, the grey moorland looked as it does this day, and the purple mountain stood as radiantly in the deep distances of evening...
...But malnutrition was the story, and as CBS pointed out, the essential truth, apart from such minor factual discrepancies, is that there are infants suffering from malnutrition in this country...
...This indeed was the anguish of the people who built the campanile of Torcello, an island that had offered them refuge because the Huns first, and the Langobards later, did not know F.S...
...F.S...
...Matajur...
...Something...
...That's only a temporary aberration...
...They were the last holdouts...
...The wars are over...
...Strangely steatopygous angels, their heads turned back 180 degrees, are blowing trumpets to awaken beasts and bound mummies from the dead...
...Manor is senior editorial writer for the Winnipeg Free Press...
Vol. 11 • March 1978 • No. 5
