The writer Ben Okri has talked at the Oxford Literary Festival before of reaching into a deep well when writing. There is bubbling beneath the surface of all great books and works of literature this capacity. We might call it a form of inspiration: something that is spirit coming in. Whatever this spirit is – the collective unconscious, the platonic world of forms, the mind of God or some other mystery – it was present before the eyes when watching and listening to Jonathan Keates at the 2023 Oxford Literary Festival.
Keates is well attested as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and with his arms and hands often actively reaching into the heavens – imploring, heaving and pulling out some picture and idea for us (his audience) to participate in, one felt that a true teacher was in the room. That picture, image and story was – writ large – the other great eternal city of Italy: Venice.
If dark times seem to pause our humanity, making us wonder if we are any good after all, this consummate work of art (Venice) may help us to rise again, marvelling at ourselves just a little. We human beings produced this gem, this masterpiece. Yet it rose through fire and brimstone. There are no holds barred, no sins or wrongs covered up. A ruthless Republic rises in the mind’s eye, a bane to rivals such as Constantinople, whose taken treasures still adorn the pinnacles of St Mark’s Cathedral. There are Doges Machiavellian and those who are not. Her merchants secret away the relics of St Mark from Muslim Alexandria. But does not a diamond form through the fiery energies that make coal? The perfections and imperfections of the human condition seem magnified and displayed in Venice – the soaring ambition, the subtle cloak of line and beauty, the organicism of what may be an organism herself.
