Erneruerbare Energien wachsen weltweit deutlich schneller als von vielen erwartet. Ein neuer Bericht der Internatiionale Energiebehörde IEA stellt fest, dass die Erzeugungskapazität inzwischen bei 340 Gigawatt liegt. 2022 wurden 1.600Millionen Dollar in Erneuerbare investiert. Der Marktanteil von Elektroautos stieg auf 15%. berichte von anderen Institutionen bestätigen diese Trends. https://taz.de/Klimaneutralitaet-2050-technisch-moeglich/!5948817/

IEA-Bericht: https://www.iea.org/reports/tracking-clean-energy-progress-2023

Bericht des Rocky Montains Institute zur Energiewende: https://rmi.org/insight/x-change-electricity/

Studie des World Resources Institute zu den 8 Ländern mit dem schnellsten Wachstum von Erneuerbaren: https://www.wri.org/insights/countries-scaling-renewable-energy-fastest

My reflections here build on Lino Pertile’s 2010 essay, ‘L’inferno, il lager, la poesia’. Pertile notes the profound correspondence between the opening poem of the book (OC I, 139) and this chapter. He points out how the main theme of Levi’s book, the dehumanising experience in the Lager, based on the annihilation of people’s identity, is expressed in the poem and resurfaces explicitly again in the chapter dedicated to Dante’s Ulysses. The key term revealing the correspondence of themes and intentions is ‘Considerate [consider]’, used twice in Levi’s poem (‘Consider if this is a man | … | Consider if this is a woman’) and rooted in the memory of Dante’s famous tercet where Ulysses addresses his crew as they sail towards the horizon of their last journey beyond the pillars of Hercules: ‘Considerate la vostra semenza: | fatti non foste a viver come bruti, | ma per seguir virtute e canoscenza’ (Inf. 26, 118-20 and OC I, 228).

There are many other correspondences between the chapter of Ulysses and the opening poem, besides the ‘Considerate’, and that they are profound and filtered through the theme of memory, an eminently Dantean theme: the urgency to fix in the memory itself what is or will be necessary to tell, or the urgency to express and recount what is deposited in memory. Indeed, for Levi, the memory of each individual person contains that person’s humanity.

Memory is immediately activated as Primo and Jean exit the underground gas tank (‘He [Jean] climbed out and I followed him, blinking in the brightness of the day. It was warm [tiepido] outside; the sun drew a faint smell of paint and tar from the greasy earth that made me think of [mi ricordava] a summer beach of my childhood'). Temporarily escaping hell by means of a ladder (a sort of Dantesque ‘natural burella’), it is the tiepido sun and a characteristic smell that evoke the childhood memory and that at the same time the reader cannot avoid connecting to the tiepide case of the initial poem (‘You who live safe | in your heated houses [tiepide case]’ [my emphasis]). It is then around the memory ‘of our homes, of Strasbourg and Turin, of the books we had read, of what we had studied, of our mothers’ that another theme in the chapter coalesces, the theme of friendship (‘He and I had been friends for a week’), a theme that had already emerged in a more general connotation in the opening poem (‘visi amici’). Warmth, friendship (visi amici…Jean), the kitchens as destination for Primo and Jean’s walk (the walk from the tank with the empty pot is ‘the ever welcomed opportunity of getting near the kitchens’, not for that hot food [cibo caldo] evoked in the poem, but for the soup of the camp, an alienating incarnation of Dantesque ‘pane altrui’ whose various names are dissonant). During the respite of the one hour walk from the tank to the kitchens, the intermittent memory of Dante’s canto emerges as if from an underground consciousness, the memory of Inferno as a partial and imperfect mirror of the human condition in the Lager, Ulysses as poetic memory, a sudden epiphany of a semenza, a seed, of humanity that the Lager is made to suppress, and Primo’s wondering in the face of this sudden internal revelation of still possessing an intact humanity. Primo’s memory of his home resurfaces as if springing from the memory of Dante’s text: the ‘montagna bruna’ of Purgatory is reflected in the memory of ‘my mountains, which would appear in the evening dusk [nel bruno della sera] when I returned from Milan to Turin!' But the real, familiar landscape is too heartbreaking a memory of ‘sweet things cruelly distant’, one of those hurtful thoughts, ‘things one thinks but does not say’. There is an epiphanic memory then, the poetic memory that surfaces during the walk and that reveals to Primo that he still is a man, a memory to which he clings despite the sense of his own audacity (‘us two, who dare to talk about these things with the soup poles on our shoulders’); there is also a more intimate memory, equally pulsating with life and humanity - but dangerous, because it makes Primo vulnerable to despair, threatening his own survival in the camp.

The urgent need to remember Dante’s verses in this chapter develops the theme of memory, which has been central from the opening poem. In Levi’s poem, though, memory is perceived from a different angle: the readers (who live safe…) must honour that memory and transmit it as an imperative testimony of what happened in the concentration camp from generation to generation, testifying to the suffering of the man and the woman ‘considered’ in the poem. This is a memory to be carved in one’s heart, which must accompany those who receive it in every action and in every moment of each day like a prayer. Not coincidentally the poem follows the text of the most fundamental prayer of Judaism, the Shemà Israel, which is read twice a day, a memory to be passed on to one’s own children, a responsibility which is a sign of one’s humanity. The commandment to remember of the opening poem (‘I consign these words to you. | Carve them into your hearts') issues a potential curse to the reader, threatening the destruction of what most fundamentally characterises their humanity - home, health, children: ‘Or may your house fall down, | May illness make you helpless, | And your children turn their eyes from you’. Finally, Primo’s act of remembering during the walk to the kitchens is submerged by the Babelic soup (‘Kraut und Rüben…cavoli e rape…Choux et navets…Kàposzta és répak…Until the sea again closed – over us’) and yet the memory of it becomes part of his testimony in such a central chapter of the book written after surviving the Shoah. If the memory of Dante’s verses contributed to Primo’s faith in his own humanity and his psychological and physical survival in the camp, he then accomplishes the commandment of memory and his responsibility as a man through his own writing.

CS

Very often, when we think about ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we tend to recall only the most famous pages in which Levi tries to remember Dante’s canto. The depth and sense of urgency of the Ulyssean passages are so overwhelming and passionate that they may distract us from other elements in the chapter. However, if we go back to the text and read it closely, we cannot avoid noticing that, after a brief opening in which Levi introduces Pikolo and narrates how he came to be Pikolo’s ‘fortunate’ chaperone to collect the soup for the day, ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ also dwells quite significantly on a moment of domestic memories. While going to the kitchens, Levi writes: ‘Si vedevano i Carpazi coperti di neve. Respirai l’aria fresca, mi sentivo insolitamente leggero’. This is the first moment in the chapter in which Levi refers to the mountains as something that revitalises him and makes him feel fresh and light, both physically and mentally.

This moment foreshadows another, also in this chapter, when Levi goes back to his mountains, those close to Turin, and compares them to the mountain that the protagonist of Dante’s canto, Ulysses, encounters just before his shipwreck with his companions:

... Quando mi apparve una montagna, bruna

Per la distanza, e parvemi alta tanto

Che mai veduta non ne avevo alcuna.

Sì, sì, ‘alta tanto’, non ‘molto alta’, proposizione consecutiva. E le montagne, quando si vedono di lontano... le montagne... oh Pikolo, Pikolo, di’ qualcosa, parla, non lasciarmi pensare alle mie montagne, che comparivano nel bruno della sera quando tornavo in treno da Milano a Torino! Basta, bisogna proseguire, queste sono cose che si pensano ma non si dicono. Pikolo attende e mi guarda. Darei la zuppa di oggi per saper saldare ‘non ne avevo alcuna’ col finale.

The significance of the mountains in Levi’s narration is confirmed in this passage. For him, the mountains represent his experience of belonging, his youthful years, and his work as a chemist – the job he was doing when he commuted by train from Turin to Milan. At the same time, Levi’s own memories of the mountains intertwine and overlap with another mountain, Dante’s Mount Purgatory. Here, a deep and perhaps not fully conscious intertextual game starts to emerge and to characterise Levi’s writing. The lines that Levi does not remember are these (compare, on the Dante page):

Noi ci allegrammo, e tosto tornò in pianto,

ché de la nova terra un turbo nacque,

e percosse del legno il primo canto.

For Dante’s Ulysses, Mount Purgatory signifies the final moment of his adventure and his desire for knowledge. The marvel and enthusiasm that Ulysses and his company feel when they see the mountain is suddenly transformed into its contrary. From the mountain, a storm originates that will destroy the ship and swallow its crew: ‘Tre volte il fe’ girar con tutte l’acque, | Alla quarta levar la poppa in suso | E la prora ire in giù, come altrui piacque’. Dante’s Mount Purgatory, so majestic and spectacular, represents the end of any desire for knowledge that aims to find new answers to and interpretations of human existence in the world without God’s word.

Going back to Levi’s text, we find that, instead, in a kind of reverse overlapping between his image and that of Ulysses, the image of the mountain of Purgatory suggests to Levi a very different set of thoughts that, although seemingly and similarly overwhelming, opens up new interpretations: ‘altro ancora, qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto, nell’intuizione di un attimo, forse il perché del nostro destino, del nostro essere oggi qui’. For a moment, it is almost as if Levi, a new Dantean Ulysses in a new Inferno, stands in front of Mount Purgatory and forgets the terzine and the shipwreck. Maybe Levi cannot or does not want to remember those terzine because the mountain in Purgatory represents something very different for him than for Dante’s Ulysses. Levi’s view of the mountain does not lead to a moment of recognition of sin, as it does in Dante’s Ulysses. For him, the mountain, like his mountain range, is the gateway to knowledge, enrichment, and illumination and to a world that lies beyond the imposed limits of traditional, constricting, and distorted views and that awaits discovery (‘qualcosa di gigantesco che io stesso ho visto ora soltanto’). Something about and beyond the Lager.

To better understand how the mountains are central in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’, we have to remember that Levi’s view of the mountains strongly depends on his anti-Fascism, which he expressed particularly vigorously in two moments of his life: during his months in the Resistance, just before he was captured and sent to Fossoli, and, even more intensely, during the adventures of his youth, when he was a free young man who enjoyed climbing the mountains surrounding Turin. As Alberto Papuzzi has suggested, ‘le radici del suo rapporto con la montagna sono ben piantate in quella stagione più lontana: radici intellettuali di cittadino che cercava sulla montagna, nella montagna, suggestioni e risposte che non trovava nella vita, o meglio nell’atmosfera ispessita di quella vita torinese, senza passato e senza futuro’ (OC III, 426-27). Indeed, reports Papuzzi, Levi confirms that:

Avevo anche provato a quel tempo a scrivere un racconto di montagna […]. C’era tutta l’epica della montagna, e la metafisica dell’alpinismo. La montagna come chiave di tutto. Volevo rappresentare la sensazione che si prova quando si sale avendo di fronte la linea della montagna che chiude l’orizzonte: tu sali, non vedi che questa linea, non vedi altro, poi improvvisamente la valichi, ti trovi dall’altra parte, e in pochi secondi vedi un mondo nuovo, sei in un mondo nuovo. Ecco, avevo cercato di esprimere questo: il valico.

The heart of that epic story made its way into the chapter ‘Ferro’ in Il sistema periodico. The discovery of this (brave) new world, ‘mondo nuovo’, is an integral part and a direct achievement of Levi’s experience in the mountains. The mountains open a new understanding and a new perspective on the world.

Something that escapes common understanding is revealed through the experience of the mountains, both in Levi’s memories of his youth and in his literary recounting of Auschwitz. Reciting Dante in ‘Il canto di Ulisse’ is therefore not only an intertextual exercise for Levi. Only by inserting Levi’s literary references in the complexity of his own experience – before, during, and after Auschwitz – can we fully capture the depth of his reflections. Levi mentally and metaphorically brought to Auschwitz not only Dante but also his ‘metafisica dell’alpinismo’. Together, they contributed to his attempt to come to terms with that reality.

The ‘hole in the memory’ that swallows up Dante’s verses and prevents Levi from sharing them with Pikolo is reminiscent of both the underground tank described at the beginning of the chapter, and the vast crater that is Dante’s hell. Visually these ‘holes’, be they real or metaphorical, are the negative cast of the mountains mentioned later in the chapter: Levi’s beloved Alps, and Ulysses’ Mount Purgatory - these, instead, bearers of positive meanings, as they respectively represent home and human ambition. (Levi’s very last newspaper article was given the title ‘Il buco nero di Auschwitz’, OC II, 1662-65.)

EL

The ‘hole in the memory’ that swallows up Dante’s verses and prevents Levi from sharing them with Pikolo is reminiscent of both the underground tank described at the beginning of the chapter, and the vast crater that is Dante’s hell. Visually these ‘holes’, be they real or metaphorical, are the negative cast of the mountains mentioned later in the chapter: Levi’s beloved Alps, and Ulysses’ Mount Purgatory - these, instead, bearers of positive meanings, as they respectively represent home and human ambition. (Levi’s very last newspaper article was given the title ‘Il buco nero di Auschwitz’, OC II, 1662-65.)

EL

https://en.forum.saysomethingin.com/t/hills-and-mountains-in-welsh/36923

• twyn - hill(ock), mound, knoll, hummock, heap, peak, dune, molehill
• tyle - hill(ock) (with a suggestion of steepness)
• allt - hill(side), steep gradient, cliff, wooded slope
• bryn - hill, hillock, mountain
• gallt - slope, hill, cliff, rock, wooded hillside
• garth - mountain ridge, promontory hill, wooded slope
• rhiw - steep slope, hill(side) (more commonly used in the SW)
• bryncyn - hillock, knoll, tump, mound, heap
• poncen/ponc/poncyn - hillock, tump, knoll, rising ground (more commonly used in the N)
• trip - steep hill (relating to a road or path) (more commonly used in SE)
• banc - rising ground, hillock, ridge, slope
• moel - bare mountain, treeless hill, summit, rounded mountain
• mynydd - mountain, large hill
• ban (pl. bannau) - top, tip, summit, crest, peak, beacon, hill, mountain, bare hill

Perhaps its just that modern writers have been so long divorced from the ideas of classical rhetoric that they're making the process so much harder than it needs to be. Do writers know what they really need in the first place? Perhaps they've been putting the cart before the horse for too long.

Rethinking one's writing process to start at the moment of reading and annotation is possibly a far better method for composition? Then instead of needing to do the work of coming up with an idea and then researching toward one's idea and then creating something de novo, one can delve into one's notes of things they know have previously been of interest to them. By already being of interest or answering questions they've previously asked themselves and had interest in pursuing, they might make the load of work more evenly spread across their lives rather than designing a massive mountain of a problem first and then attempting to scale it after the fact.

By building the mountain from the start, it then isn't a problem to be solved, just a vista from which to stand and survey the area.

David Berman) was in Purple Mountains and Silver Jews, both bands spearheaded by himself.

The song is Dial D For Devotion.

Mont Blanc is the highest mountain in the Swiss Alps, the highest in Europe west of Russia's Caucasus peaks, at about 15,000 feet. It is situated between the regions of Aosta Valley, Italy, and Haute-Savoie, France. It gave Percy Shelley the title of one of his most powerful poems.

The Salève is a mountain of the French Prealps. It is also called the "Balcony of Geneva."

La Valais is an extremely mountainous region that includes the highest mountains in Switzerland. The highest mountain ranges are the Pennine Alps, the Bernese Alps, and the Mont Blanc. The Pays de Vaud, on the other hand, is partly mountainous, though visually arresting, having summits of about 3,000 meters.

Aiguilles is French for "pinnacle of rock."

I still miss David Berman so very, very much, and I know I will continue to miss him for as long as I live.

The Polar Ural Mountains and subsequent Mandalada resistance is an accurate and true event in the history of the Nenet community. In 1943, Soviet authorities from the Arkhandel’skaia Oblast were on their way to collect herders for reprimanding herders who sought to oppose the policies of the Union. A skirmish broke out upon their arrival, albeit brief, and the eventual surrendering of the Nenets resulted in the arrest and deportation to political prisoner camps of 36 individuals. Only two would return to camp.

This historical event of cultural resistance would burn in the memories of Nenets for years to come, and recently became available to anthropologists and researchers through an oral history recounting by several primary sources to the event.

For a full reading of the events recounted, read the source below.

Laptander, Roza. “Processes of Remembering and Forgetting: Tundra Nenets’ Reminiscences of the 1943 Mandalada Rebellions.” Sibirica: Interdisciplinary Journal of Siberian Studies 13, no. 3 (Winter2014 2014): 22-44. Historical Abstracts with Full Text, EBSCOhost (accessed March 26, 2017).

The Porcupine caribou herd is one of the largest migratory barren-ground caribou herds found in North America. The range of the herd spans over 250,000 square kilometers in the northern tundra. In the spring, the herd migrates between Alaska and Yukon’s arctic coast. In the winter, the herd ventures into Yukon’s Ogilvie Mountains. Although the majority of the land in the range of the herd is undeveloped, there are certain key areas which have been industrialized. Oil and gas exploration in the Eagle Plains basin interrupts the winter range of the Porcupine caribou herd. Also affecting the herd’s winter range are the Dempster Highway and mineral exploration in the Peel River watershed. The Dempster Highway connects Inuvik to Dawson City (Porcupine Caribou Management Board).

Regarding population size of the Porcupine caribou herd, according to the Arctic journal, “migratory wild reindeer and caribou numbers have dropped by about one-third since populations peaked in the 1990s and early 2000s”. There are natural periods of abundance and scarcity among migratory tundra caribou herds. These increases and decreases in population size are likely results of “continental climate switches” (Gunn et al. 2009, iii). Since the first population survey in the early 1970s, the Porcupine Caribou Management Board has conducted a survey every two years and reports that the population size has fluctuated between 100,000 and 200,000 animals (Porcupine Caribou Management Board). A detailed graph estimating the size of the population of the Porcupine caribou herd is shown below.

For further information, please consider the following link to The Porcupine Caribou Management Board (PCMB) webpage: http://www.pcmb.ca/.

References

Gunn, Anne, Don Russell, Robert G. White, and Gary Kofinas. "Facing a Future of Change: Wild Migratory Caribou and Reindeer." Arctic 62, no. 3 (2009): Iii-Vi. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40513303.

Porcupine Caribou Management Board. "The Porcupine Caribou Management Board (PCMB)." Porcupine Caribou Management Board. Accessed March 08, 2017. http://www.pcmb.ca/.