Under the Southern Cross (Hemp Jim)

Seaside promenade, Beyruth, April 2008

The notion of God, walking incognito among us. The immense freedom of being able to leave all behind, because you have started anew in another place. The contempt you can now show to the various Lorenzas and Cecilias and other emotional plagues of your past because you have now seen what real life tastes like, having gone through fire and steel under the Southern Cross.

That is how Jacopo Belbo's fantasy unfolded in Umberto Eco's Il pendolo di Foucault (edizioni Bompiani).

Jacopo Belbo, an editor in a publishing house is haunted by his sense of failure. He has made a commitment never to write, since his lack of inspiration and talent would be a betrayal to his morality-driven standards as an editor and an "intelligent spectator" of the written word.And, although his work has definitive impact on the books that are published, all credit and recognition go to the author, the book being the fruit of his creativity.

In the end, Belbo's resolution never to make an attempt at creativity is gradually eroded by the word processing capabilities of the personal computer in his office (remember, it is the 80s).


In one of these attempts (which although very short, are organized in separate word processor files) he reveals his self pity in the imaginary hero, who embodies Belbo's wish to detach himself and rise above the things that he perceives as the failures of his life:

The betrayals of his elusive object of desire, Lorenza Pellegrini ( Where were you last night, L ? )

and his thankless contribution to other people's creative triumphs.

Incidentally, through the story of Hemp Jim, I illustrate what I came to realize through my good friends: the way that adventuring and new experiences can put all the petty things that we conceive as emotional hells into proper perspective.

(Note: What follows is my translation of the Italian original. I do not reproduce Weaver's idea to translate the hero's name, Jim della Canapa - Cannabis Jim - as Seven Seas Jim, which may be less awkward, smarter and more elegant but less faithful as a translation. I choose the more streetwise Hemp Jim, despite the fact that Eco, in his Dire quasi la stessa cosa. Esperienze di traduzione remarks that it sounds rather bad. I have also omitted the part of Belbo's musings on the possible effects of an editor's advice on the final form of William Shakespeare's Hamlet)



FILENAME: Hemp Jim
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......

A novel about God in incognito. Useless, if the idea has come to me, then it must have already come to someone else as well.

Variation. You are an author, you don't know yet how important, the woman you love has betrayed you , life for you has no meaning anymore and one day, to put it out of your mind, you make a journey aboard the Titanic and you are shipwrecked in the seas of the South, you are rescued (sole survivor) by a pirogue of the natives and you spend long years forgotten by everybody, on an island inhabited solely by papuans, with girls that sing you songs of heated passions, their swaying breasts barely covered by garlands of pua flowers.

You start getting used to it, they call you Jim, as they do with all whites, one night a girl with amber skin enters your hut and tells you "Me yours, me with you". In the end you find it beautiful, the evenings, stretched out on the porch, gazing at the Southern Cross while she caresses your forehead.

You live by the cycle of daybreaks and eventides, and you do not know of anything else. One day, a motor boat with Dutchmen arrives, you learn that ten years have passed, you could leave with them, but you hesitate. You prefer to trade coconuts with provisions, you promise that you can take up the cannabis harvest, the natives work for you, you start sailing from islet to islet, you are now become Hemp Jim to everyone. A portuguese adventurer, ruined by alcohol, comes to work for you and finds deliverance from his passion. Everybody speaks of you in these Sunda seas, you give your counsel to the maharajah of Brunei regarding a campaign against the Dayaks of the river, you manage to get an old ramrod-loading cannon from the days of Tippo Sahib in working order, you train a squad of Malayans devoted to you, their teeth blackened by betel. In a skirmish by the Coral Reef, old Sampan, his teeth blackened by betel, shields you with his very body - I am glad to die for you, Hemp Jim. - Old man, old Sampan, my friend.

Now you are famous throughout the archipelago between Sumatra and Port-au-Prince. You deal with the English, at the harbourmaster's office in Darwin you are registered as Kurtz, and from now on you are Kurtz to everybody - Hemp Jim to the natives. But one evening, as the girl caresses you on the porch and the Southern Cross shines brighter than ever, oh so different from the Ursa, it becomes clear to you that you would like to go back. Just for a little while, to see what is left of you over there.

You take the motor boat and reach Manila, from there a propeller plane takes you to Bali. Then Samoa, the Admiralty Islands, Singapore, Tananarive, Timbuktu, Aleppo, Samarkand, Basra, Malta and you are home.

Eighteen years have passed, life has left its marks on you, your face tanned by the alizé winds, you are older, perhaps even more handsome.Upon your arrival you discover that the bookshops display all of your books, in new critical editions, your name on display on the pediment of the facade of your old school where you learned to read and write. You are the Great Lost Poet, the conscience of your generation. Romantic young girls commit suicide on your cenotaph.

And then, I encounter you, my love, with many wrinkles around the eyes, your face still beautiful, consumed by memories and tender remorse. I almost brush against you on the pavement, I am there, two steps away and you looked at me as you look at all people, as if you look for somebody else beyond their shadow.I could speak to you and erase time. But with what purpose? Do I not already have all that I ever wanted? I am God, with the same solitude, the same vainglory, the same despair of not being able to be one of my creations, like everybody else, those that dwell within my light while I live in the insufferable sparkling of my darkness.

.......

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For all those about to travel to distant lands and seek to change their lives, and to rise above it all.
For now, I have come to see the importance of such a decision.

.