The Mont Ventoux

Welcoming
New Snippets VI –
The Mont Ventoux


(Picture: buchhaus.ch; Flurin Von Salis)

(Picture: Danile Clerc)

As Climbed by Fernando Pessoa (and others)

Poets and cylists, and odd pairing, one might think. Or what about poets, cyclists and authors of graphic novels/comics?
Because all of them have been concerned with Mont Ventoux. Have staged, have depicted various ascents of that symbolical mountain.

We might name poet Petrarca who made a beginning. In going up to Mont Ventoux, at least in his mind. And as every Petrarca reader does know, several voices in Petrarca debated about being on top of that mountain, and about looking at the world. Was one to turn to the marvels of world? Or was one to turn back to God? And the adventure of the modern man, at least as tradition has often seen it, took its symbolical, a symbolical beginning.

Centuries later poet Fernando Pessoa (who, as far as I would now, never climbed Mont Ventoux) invented his own reinventing as a poet. By multiplying his poetic voice into various voices (of invented characters). And if one would now be as bold as to imagine that this group of poets, this ›roped party‹, would climb Mont Ventoux, one might expect to hear the most diverse opinions about how and what one was supposed to do. In terms of seeing, looking. And as to turning to the marvels of the world (or future technologies), and perhaps also as to a turning back to God.

Since I am neither cyclist nor author of a graphic novel on Mont Ventoux (this latter honor goes to Swiss artist Flurin Von Salis with his above announced book) I have no idea what cyclists think about the adventure of looking. About the many voices of poets haunting Mont Ventoux. The history of cyclism might have its own traditions as to that mountain. But it also does seem to me that a cultural history of Mont Ventoux, encompassing the many views, the many ways of how to look at things, is perhaps due. A history that would take notice of people more inclined to turn to their inner self (debating, even fighting with their inner self), while others turn to God, and again others to nature (or to God in nature).

A mythic mountain indeed, Mont Ventoux (I have faint memories of its windy, of its bleak peak). But certainly some voices would now contradict, and certainly one or the other voice of Fernando Pessoa would have us look rather at technical innovation in cyclism instead.

MICROSTORY OF ART
ONLINE JOURNAL FOR ART, CONNOISSEURSHIP AND CULTURAL JOURNALISM
HOME

Top of the page

Microstory of Art Main Index

Dietrich Seybold Homepage

© DS