Watching Vesuvius, waiting for a sign. Seen from the rooftops and cliffs of the Amalfi coast, the most active volcano on the European mainland is suspiciously silent in silver light behind clouds. We’re in Sorrento for our granddaughter’s wedding, a momentous event for us. But every now and then, a space opens into the place itself, into its poppy-punctuated story of olive groves and the psychedelic zest of Sfusato d’Amalfi lemon orchards between sheer cliffs and the sea.
Watching a storm – during the wettest, weirdest May here for over 20 years – haul over the mountains as if in pursuit of some adversary, the focus switches to nearby lives and a random question: could some tiny ripple in the ecology of moments spark Vesuvius’ cataclysmic potential? For here are a few such unstill lives: a hornet, Vespa crabro, the predatory motor scooter of wasps, hunts through thistley plumes over a wall where gravity-defying Italian wall-lizards, Podarcis siculus, flick in and out of question marks.
The green colours here, perhaps something to do with the intensity of the yellow in lemons and the blue in the sky, are unexpectedly powerful. They flash through lush vegetation and are expressed in the back stripe of the lizards; the structural green of hurtling rose chafer beetles, Cetonia aurata; the fronds of maidenhair ferns, Adiantum capillus-veneris, in the thundering splash-zones of waterfalls; and the macabre alignments of body parts – fiddling legs, wings and heads – of grasshoppers dismembered in the air by bats looping their ultrasongs around lights to catch insects in flight.
In the morning, despite being decapitated for some hours, the grasshopper’s antennae are still moving. What chemical, auditory, psychic messages are they picking up? “This is truly a paradise,” wrote Mary Shelley in a letter 180 years ago, and I’m sure local people would agree with her if it wasn’t for all of us bloody tourists. We have become part of a community of life whose fertility comes from the volcano. “The myriad creatures in the world are born of something, and something from nothing,” wrote the Chinese philosopher Laozi in Tao Te Ching. So far, we only hear celebrations and thunder.
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