Towers, Poets and Civilisations: an introduction by Shaun Reeder

  Babel, San Gimignano, Manhattan, Dubai, Tokyo, Shanghai...man has always built towers. Sometimes he has done so to laud himself, celebrate capital, either affront or worship God; sometimes he has built out of fear.
   The medieval town of San Gimignano, on the old pilgrim route through Italy and between Florence and Siena, once had to have its addiction to tower-building regulated by limiting the number of such structures to 72. Large towering structures are of course not confined to San Gimignano.
   W.B.Yeats, who bought and lived in a tower in Ireland, noticed a change in his perception of humankind and his relationship to it: he(or, the artist, he would have said) was able to be elevated above life whilst gaining a seemingly prophetic and visionary viewpoint..becoming a kind of quasi-spiritual "watchman" over human tides and trends of art, life, love and politics. I dimly remember he referred to the "blood and mire of human veins", though forgive me if I've misquoted him. As an aside, Joyce referred to this "higher" position of the artist as being in some way akin to Daedalus, soaring on wings fashioned by himself, flying past the "nets" and restraints of religion and politics, so that he becomes "arrested above desire and loathing", even "refined beyond existence."
Yeats seemed later of the opinion that whereas the literal "ivory tower" experience imbued a certain lofty objectivity, it was also a rarified, solitary experience that exacted a price of being hardened, remote and distant.
    As another aside, have you noticed how many great Irish writers grew to loathe Ireland, or at least what Ireland had become: "a priest-ridden nation", as Joyce would have it? Many, like Becket and Joyce, eschewed both the country and the language, so great was their need to distance themselves from it.

   Yeats, along with many writers of his age, sensed and experienced great changes within humanity: wars that outdid any previous wars in ferocity, the dark spectre of communism(though many embraced fascism until its true face was shown), immense leaps in technology, transport and communication.
   Eliot responded with a kind of sympathetic resonance, hearing the groans and reflecting them in his work by writing in a way that he described as "rhythmic grumblings". Yeats believed he saw the signs of universal cycles at work, the intimations of the ends of the age, the outworkings of humankind's destructive tendencies. He tried to speak of this using, say, the symbol of a falcon whirling ever faster away from the falconer, until the line broke: "things fall apart, the centre cannot hold..."
   He also explored the same idea in terms of a civilisation's end being like the fallling of a tower that had over-reached itself.
     Medieval Italian towers cost much money. Only the wealthy and powerful could afford to make such statements of such power and wealth..and as today, who likes to be overlooked? I have found that the people with the biggest and poshest houses are usually the ones who have a more refined and acute sense of threat at the peripheries of their properties.
   Building a tower also allowed one the illusion of escape. Given that medieval Italy was a veritable greenhouse for the Renaissance, it was also a world of internecine, competitive and fearful city states, most of whom became ensnared by the very false gods they feared: Post-plague soldiers of fortune, let loose with the dogs of the Hundred Years' war, were hired as mobile weapons of terror by cities wanting ascendancy over another. These bands of "free-lances", as these mobile sub-units were called, were an invaluable import of English(and wider European) ingenuity. Under savagely effective commanders like Knowles and Hawkwood, these big guns for hire were seen initially as a city state's saving grace...that is, until these armies exacted protection money: you pay us many florins and we promise not to torch your city. For a while.
   Florence was repeatedly harried, Siena disempowered...until Florence finally paid Hawkwood enough to work for the Florentines instead of the Pisans. And with supreme irony, even today one can see a sizeable memorial in Florence cathedral to a certain noble citizen-rescuer of the town, by the Italianised name of Giovanni d'Acuto...a.k.a. our very own and very English John Hawkwood.
 
   Building a tower, then, was not merely an expression of wealth, of power, of humankind being equal to or in the place of God. Not so much a place for a lofty and objectively reflective world-view, as something within which one could hide oneself and one's valuables, guarding one's earthly glory within something that you thought could never be toppled. One could not, of course, extend one's city outwards...that would be to build away from the flimsy protection of the city walls....the only way, quite literally, was up. You were not free...in fact, locked in a tower you were extremely unfree...but you could look out, far above the blood and mire of one's city, or above the and beyond the smoking fields of mercenary-torched stubble: and you could,  for a short while, grant yourself the illusion of freedom and power.

    Here's a poem I wrote waaaay back in 2001 when I first visited Italy and mused on such things.
The "Torre Pendente" is of course the tower of Pisa, which is temporarily arrested in freefall...and of course we imagine it always to be there, though it began to lean towards its destruction within a very short time of its initial build.
   I was very struck by the notion of falling towers as being signs of the ends of the age, or outworkings of human pride(pride coming before destruction, as the Bible says, and not merely a fall, as is often misquoted).
  When the attack on the World Trade Centre took place years later, it was as though this terrible event was the horrific externalisation of the looming awe I felt about seeing the towers of San Gimignano or Pisa.

   I've written the poem in the form of a sonnet...a Petrarchan sonnet, in fact, as Petrarch was a Florentine rejected by his own even as was Dante, yet who had many a good thing to say. Besides, I thought that if I constrained myself to a sonnet form, it would ennoble the content of the poem. It basically deals with towers and civilisations:

Torre Pendente

The best sacred mouths and lips millenial
At Pisa's tower smacked, with no loss of face;
Slid down, sucked slow silt from beneath her base:
By two hundred years they've delayed her fall.
Perfect in design...built on sand; falling
From the first moment bemused mason told,
"On such shifting ground, centre cannot hold,"
To prelate's purple-robed oversoaring
Pride, who replied, "Size of tower equates
With scale of power(and rivals have yet
Skyish battlements wherefrom falcon bates):
Make haste." Thus centuries' massed thunders split,
Stones crash and sprawl, leashes snap and let fly
Falcons against a mad and mangled sky.

  Here are some photographs. All are mine(that is, 3 of San Gimignano, 1 of Pisa) apart from the Manhattan one.