The expected and the unexpected

Essay-satire

The expected and the unexpected

I’ts strange how we remember people- women by their smiles, men by their mannerisms, rich men by their possessions, politicians by their wiliness, underlings by their effort, and so on. They’re just split-screen mental snap-shots and could serve as our epitaphs because it’s, as if we are, each of us, branded by this impressionistic iron like so many cattle in the stream of life. We are represented by a single characteristic, a symbol, a hieroglyphic, a stroke or two of mental caricature and what is more – all others subliminally agree that the cat fits the mat. This “impression” says more about each of us than finger-prints, it predicts who we will become as much as who we are. It makes little prophets of all of us as we decide, so very ruthlessly, about the outer limits of potential and possibility, about truth and lies in the lives of people we gaze out at.

The big historical picture also swirls and eddies in unexpected ways and throws up its own meanings. Meanings we meekly accept and hold as obvious even though we realise it wasn’t always so clear and least of all to the incumbent. For example- fat people never saw themselves as fat in a mirror-mirror-on-the-wall type of illusion-making, murderers saw themselves as social reformers, the magnum opus was rubbish but the T shirt slogan was emblazoned on a million shirts as pure genius, people were only cruel to be kind, every accident of birth was actually intended…

Take these two Italian gentlemen. Giacomo Casanova (1725-1798) and Nicolo Machiavelli (1469-1527) are two Italians that we’ve all heard of, thanks to a celebrated book they each wrote and left behind to posterity. Casanova is the great Italian lover from the 18th century whom we all know because of the publicity given to his memoirs called “History of My Life” first published in complete form as late as the 1960’s. If that doesn’t ring a bell you might remember the film the celebrated Fellini made on him where a lot of name actors cavorted naked in the name of art.

Machiavelli too is familiar and depending on whether you lean politically right or left he was either a “pragmatic strategist” or a “cunning, unscrupulous…” well, Machiavellian sort of bloke. And this reputation too hinges on a slim book he penned and let slip called “The Prince.”

But in both cases posterity used its own unexpected judgement on their lives as it is wont to do. Casanova, who was quite a bundle of sticks- soldier, spy, diplomat, writer, adventurer, traveller, gambler and yes, lover- might have been surprised to find his name practically synonymous with “Romeo” or “Don Juan” at the top of the Western romantic tradition. Not bad to be at the top of anything right? But Casanova probably did realise the potency of his strongest suit at a subliminal level as two events clearly show. Casanova met Mozart in 1787 at Prague and gave him some authoritative advice to help shape the character of Don Giovanni in the composer’s famous opera. Mozart respected Casanova’s insights for his chameleon-like ability to become what each of his lovers wanted. So Casanova did the lover of the ages bit it in his own right and also via Mozart’s Don Giovanni. It’s insight plus genius compounded - I mean, some people have all the luck. Every time they perform the opera, that’s Casanova coming to life under a pseudonym!

The subliminal was acting again when Casanova wrote his memoirs over the last five years of his life ostensibly “to keep from going mad or dying of grief.” What a sense of high drama when what he probably meant was that he was sick of being in exile, old, toothless and terribly bored. But here too, his instinct did not fail him and cannily, he stopped his reminiscing around 1744 because that’s when the lover in him folded his tent. He must have sensed that the other aspects of Casanova would not have interested any outside of those who study 18th century Italian history.

And Machiavelli, who was a big-wheel diplomat in high Florentine circles during the Renaissance, expressed his ideas sumptuously in his Discourses upon the First Ten Books of Livy. But, like the erstwhile modern-day Don of gangster fiction, Mario Puzo, who amazingly thought his own “Godfather” was “trash” written for a quick buck, Machiavelli too is remembered today for the clear little book he knocked-off to curry favour with the immensely powerful Caesar Borgia. In fact, “The Prince” is the only work of Machiavelli that is ever read!

Human nature, of course, puts its own spin on this game between the expected and the unexpected. It is something to do with the attraction of opposites- beauty and the beast, success and failure, love and hate, happiness and sorrow, interesting and boring, the long and the short of it all. Perhaps one defines the other and each would lose meaning on its own. Comedian George Burns said if he was married to Marilyn Monroe he would end up being unfaithful with some ugly girl! Well this may be Burns being comic but it wouldn’t be funny if it didn’t sound authentic. I take comfort however in thinking of the men that MM did marry, and none of them, from all accounts, committed that particular sacrilege. The promiscuity was left to the goddess herself but whoever said goddesses have to conform to the ways of mortals.

( 925 words)

By Ghatotkach
26 May 2005