J1 1X 9Q 1M YD

 

J1 1X 9Q 1M YD

Our Thrift Shop Find

It began casually enough in the community of tiny West Dover. We found West Dover sitting along meandering Route 100 in the Green Mountains of southern Vermont.  It’s a small village large enough to thrive on the snow business of the nearby Mount Snow Ski Resort and concerned enough to sustain the Twice Blessed thrift shop intent on repurposing the pre-owned offerings of others with earnings going to families in need.  It was the perfect place to explore that snowy afternoon beneath a concrete-colored sky.  Why not, especially when we’d been more or less rejected by the imposition of a 45-minute wait for chairs in the Valley View Saloon, farther down the road, hamstrung by Rona seating rules (Rona, how my daughter refers to Corona Virus).  We opted to rummage rather than wait.

Like any thrift shop worth its salt, its nooks and crannies were chock full of items.  Being ski country, you’d expect it might lean toward the trappings of winter sports and it did.  While there was a noticeable absence of skis, boots, and poles, there was no shortage of parkas, gloves, all kinds of hats, goggles, stretchy pants, and vests.  For extra warmth, I recall seeing fur coats.  To our surprise, one appeared to be raccoon.  Unfortunately, at that moment, I wasn’t into any of that, neither was Maria Elena.  We are far more the après-ski types these days. The last 

Our Before, During, and 
After Ski Mode

time I skied I recall how sore I was the next day from using muscles I’d neglected.  But if truth be told, forsaking the before and during phases as well puts us off skis entirely.  Wintertime spent invested in a book sequestered by a fire or swaddled in a blanket sipping an Irish mule (copper cup indeed but with Jameson Irish Whiskey replacing the vodka) is sporting enough.  The hardest part of realizing this vision is finding just the right book.

We had plenty of books once, before our house fire.  Fuel for thought became fuel for the fire.  Time and diligence have since seen them gradually replaced.  New bookcases are filling at a cost of $1 for hard bounds and $.50 for paperbacks thanks to occasional thrift shop visits.  Turns out it was there, in that little West Dover thrift shop, on a second-floor extension, around and past fashionable skiing accoutrements, that we stumbled upon a dead-end cubby where the work of hundreds of minds on a myriad of unrelated topics was stashed.  There were shelves full of books, some still jumbled in their drop-off cartons.  With no particular goal or title in mind, what an adventure, especially on a gloomy day, to scan the titles, flicking and skimming through pages and probing through yet unboxed volumes awaiting new readers.

It was Maria Elena who found it.  Her “Paul, you might enjoy this one” brought me to her side as she handed me “The Rule of Four.”  I don’t read the New York Times so its bestseller lists are not familiar to me on a regular basis.  Other than the occasional crawler splayed-out across the top of a book’s jacket proclaiming it a New York Times Best Seller or the product of a former best-selling author, I wouldn’t know.  Only later did I learn that Rule of Four had earned literary distinction when it occupied the New York Times’ coveted best-of-the-best list where it remained for six months.  This particular dust cover was absent any moniker of notoriety, yet the tale spun on the flyleaf, with talk of convoluted codes and complex ciphers, treachery, ivy league and medieval murders, along with Renaissance princely secrets was tickler enough. 

When I was still in my single-digit years, I recall racing around on my trike on a speedway extending from the front door on through the living and dining rooms into the kitchen and back round

Saturday Adventures with Winky Dink

again.  On those Saturday mornings, Winky Dink and You would be on TV.  To help Winky out, you needed to buy a plastic “Magic Window” TV screen overlay and some magic crayons.  Little Paolo substituted sheets of wax paper, some tape, and his Crayola crayons.  I recall drawing a ladder to get the little guy out of a pit once.  At other times, I’d use my work-around screen to connect the dots to reveal a coded message.  Clearly, long before PlayStation, we were interactive.  Neither were we unfamiliar with codes.  During those years I also had a Secret Squadron Decoder Badge to help TV Captain Midnight with his adventures after a hot cup of Ovaltine of course, the show’s sponsor.  There I go again, rambling in free association mode.  The mention of Renaissance Italy alone had hooked me, but the added intrigue of codes put me over the top.  The Book of Four was definitely my kind of story.  Needless to say, with no thought of skiing in mind, I bought it praying we might get snowed-in for a while.  With travel to Italy still a distant dream let’s hope for only a little longer, I was up for an intellectual, who-done-it journey with Italian roots.  Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.  I would discover that what Maria Elena had handed me, short of a ticket to Italia, was essentially a first-person narrative fiction revolving around a historic Italian book.  It offered a brief sojourn allowing us to tarry a little longer, biding our time until handed real tickets.

The modern authors toy with a 500-year old, extremely rare and mysterious Italian text entitled, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.  A mouthful indeed, much easier said when parsed and piecewise

A Later French Version of "The Book"
This one $3,025 Used

pronounced Hip-ne rot-toe m a-key ah Pa-la-fee-lee).  English makes it even easier where it is referred to as Poliphilo's Struggle for Love in a Dream.  This multilayered puzzle of a novel ping-ponging back and forth past to present, orbits around a work published in Venice in 1499.  No one is sure what its tangle of plots and characters is really about.  It is also dismissed as unreadable by today’s standards, even less likely in its day.  Today, as ever, it remains an erotic mystery of the Renaissance.  Who authored it, in fact, remains undecided to this day.  The current supposition, as the binding in the adjacent photo indicates, is that its creator was Francesco Colonna, thought to have been a wealthy medieval Roman.  We are introduced to the author’s identity through an acrostic code in the actual Renaissance document, where it is likewise adopted in the modern fiction.  Who he may have been then is somewhat beyond fiction.  The term acrostic was new to me, somewhat beyond Captain Midnight’s ability to explain to us “peanut gallery” types.  Acrostic codes usually hide in plain text, secreted as letters taken in some order from words in the text.  In this case, the first letters of the Renaissance tome’s 38 chapters, when strung together, reveal a Latin phrase which translated declares: “Brother Francesco Colonna loved Polia intensely.”  That just about settled it for some.  But leave it to historians who discovered there was another with that name at the time.  He happened to be a Dominican monk in Venice.  This coupled with the fact that the book was printed in Venice only muddled its resolution.  Because of the book’s pagan nature, however, failure to openly state its author may have been intentional due to the high probability of religious retribution.  This pagan complexion lowers any merit in the possibility that a religious hand was involved in its composition.  That and while the monk may have righty been referred to as “Brother” per the decoded clue, Rome’s blue-blooded Colonna had been a member of a fraternity of men known as the Roman Academy.  More a humanist movement, this academy had no campus.  It was instead a loose association of learned individuals committed to ancient Roman and Greek ideals, certified as pagan at the time.  Confidence in the belief that a monk of all people was the author is thus weakened for Poliphilo’s book of dreams wallows in pagan practices.  This unlikeliness and the fact that Academy members employed “Fra” or Brother as a common greeting among members, wins the day that author Colona lived by the gurgling Tiber.

Poliphilo’s dreams are of his beloved Polia and his journeys in search of her.  His dreams are layered reveries of dreams within dreams, a writing style unheard of at the time, going so far as to have

A Peek Inside Poliphilo's
Book of Dreams

sex with buildings (he apparently really loved architecture) which in at least one instance he relates how his, let’s say, ecstasy was in-kind shared by the building.  But in Francesco’s defense, dreams are confusing like that, aren’t they, not necessarily making sense which may help explain the garbled nature of the original manuscript.  A short Cliffsnote fashion take on it, drawn from a Glasgow University Library book review, summarizes the dream book as follows:

“As the work opens, the inconsolable Poliphilo is tormented by insomnia as he thinks of his unrequited love for Polia. At last, he falls asleep, and then seemingly wakes in a dark wood where his adventures begin. In a somewhat labyrinthine plot, he moves through many strange places encountering dragons, wolves, and maidens, against an ever changing backdrop of mysterious ruins, monuments, orchards, gardens and fountains. Eventually he meets a nymph who resembles Polia and with whom he falls in love. Following triumphal processions and further spectacles, the nymph reveals that she is in fact that Polia 'whom you love so well'. After a ceremony resembling marriage, they embark for Cythera in Cupid's boat. Polia then takes over the narrative, relating how Poliphilo fell in love with her when he first glimpsed her combing her hair at a window in Treviso. Not only does she reject his advances, but to fulfill a pledge in surviving the plague, she dedicates herself to a life of eternal chastity. Poliphilo visits her secretly at the temple of Diana, and when he falls into a deathlike swoon at her feet, she drags his body away and hides it. But Cupid appears to her in a vision and compels her to return and kiss Poliphilo back to life. Venus blesses their love, and the lovers are united at last.” 1

Francesco’s confusing magnum opus is complicated further by being written in multiple languages, including Greek, Latin, Italian, a sprinkling of private

Hypnerotomachia Poliphili Woodcut
- Sex with Swan -

invented words, Hebrew and Arabic in its illustrations, and a smattering of Egyptian hieroglyphics.  Taken together, this helps to explain why it was not fully translated until 1999 when the near impossible, first complete English edition appeared.  Complexity like this and its apparent meaninglessness certainly may have dimmed any chance of popularity both then and now, New York Times Best Sellers list or not.

The modern novel, the cast-off we left Dover with, is narrated by Tom Sullivan, one of the lead characters.  The setting is in New Jersey, on the campus of Princeton University, where a student is writing his senior thesis on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.  Its vagueness and innuendo, with here and there hints dropped like a Hansel and Gretel trail, make for fertile literary ground for The Book of Four authors.  They lead the reader on a scavenger hunt for clues from the Vatican Library on into the diary of a long-departed Genovese port-master.  Tom’s roommate has spent all four of his undergraduate years studying the Polihpili and is on the edge of solving the book's well-kept, 500-year-old mystery which has baffled scholars for centuries.  If we had never gone to Italy, I would have been hard-pressed to recognize the significance of the Italian word cornuta (cuckold).  It surfaces in a decoded narrative and marks a breakthrough in solving the mystery, at least the mystery its modern sleuths craft and solve in their novel.  Real or conjured, I’m still uncertain whether the ancient story, masquerading as a dream, does conceal the complexity of secrets our novelists present.  In fact, what the “rule of four” is I’ll leave for you to discover.  I deposited a coded hint earlier in the title (J1 1X 9Q 1M YD).  Absent my Captain Midnight decoder badge, wherever it may be, I’ve left a substitute decoder at the end of this story.  Go ahead, see how well you do decoding the title.

Early editions of Hypnerotomachia Poliphili are extremely rare and are marked by elegant woodcut illustrations.  Some of these illustrations are on the equivalent of a Playboy Vargas pin-up of that day, the type of artwork, with décolleté extremely pronounced.  It’s the kind WWII bombers had

A B-29 Gets its Gal .... Fig Leaf Equivalent Included

painted on their noses, all collarbones and cleavage, to remind all who with each mission negotiated with death, quite honestly, what they were fighting for, beyond mom and apple pie.  For some of the risqué depictions presented, I’d need the ancient equivalent to the blurring of images we often see on TV these days.  I’d best appropriate one, in fact maybe a few, from the art inquisitors, those snobby prudes who scoured museums and churches in cancel-culture mode centuries ago to conceal the “offending nature” of works of art, having decided for everyone that nudity was immoral.  Seemingly, Donatello’s and Michelangelo’s sculptures of David escaped.  The censorship nature of fig leaves comes to mind, a little piece of foliage that’s shielded nude images for centuries.  Surprisingly, no fig leaves seem to have appeared on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Throughout the modern novel, the recurring exhortation, “The strong take from the weak, the smart take from the strong” reverberates.  Its complement of characters typified by an oppressive professor to a weaker grad student, on to the ever powerless though intelligent protagonist undergraduate, bring this strong-weak theme home.  The Rule of Four characters, as they interact to unravel the secrets of the Italian text, also struggle with forces typical of the college experience.  I wondered which was paramount and gradually realized that Francesco’s unresolved reverie is our recycled book’s diversion.  In an underlayment to the story, they also decode themselves, growing to understand who they are and what they seek from life. 

A Lustful Satyr Comes Ah Callin'

They learn to accept, sometimes defeat, and oftentimes in a win-some, lose-some harmony, balance the forces they face.  Tom’s narration and personal thoughts eventually balance his internal conflict between the muscle we call the heart, in search of love and identity, with that of intelligence, call it the brain, with its obsessive focus to solve the mystery.  The combination, 500 years of “then” interleaved with an awakening from youth, makes the Dover book the best seller it is.  I doubt whether Francesco foresaw that a Princeton and Harvard grad would one day use his nonsensical dream story, confusing as it is, to capture the well-read imagination of a nation.  I wonder, might the Nostradamus side of Francesco have squirreled away the fact that this thrilling winner would explode on the literary world in 2005 as just another of his secreted messages?

     In contrast, a much earlier work, The Decameron (1353) is more the masterpiece of classical Italian prose.  It presents ten stories a day over a ten-day period told by ten women and men who flee to the countryside to escape the Black Death (bubonic plague pandemic) ravaging Florence.  That is definitely a lot of social distancing and certainly relevant to our current predicament when we, the social creatures we are, are presently restricted in our own social interactions because of a plague.  There is even reference to plague in Hypnerotomachia Poliphili when Polia’s pledge of chastity is made for surviving a pandemic.  Instead of telling stories, we have the luxury of reading books, as Maria Elena and I do, sometimes to one another to keep each other company, as we bide our time at a distance from real life.  Hopefully, these words on a book about a book helped fill the day, allowed us to travel once again if not to the bookstore then in our thoughts, lifted our spirits a smidgen, and fought off sadness by loosening the grip of loneliness. 

Paolo’s Tricycle Cypher:

Code:         9 H M I    1 P Q V   A K E 4   B  R U X   3 WJ C    5 N  F  O   L T 0 2   GDS 8   Y6 Z 7

Decoded:   A B 2 D   E F G H    I J K L    M N O P   Q R S T   U V W X   Y Z 1 C  3 4 5 6   7 8 9 0

 

From That Rogue Tourist

Paolo

1.      https://www.gla.ac.uk/myglasgow/library/files/special/exhibns/month/feb2004.html