Purple Patch

''I feel very purple today'', a dejected artist's colourful statement noted by Vassili Kandinsky in Point, Line and Surface, a very musical approach to colours and painting.

I feel very purple today, I don't know whether to write a sequel to the grocer's gender reassignment scene in Germinal, or to write an outrageously gay-friendly comment on homo-eroticism in Don Quixote.

In the meantime, there are a few things to be said about the book I'm reading now: Carlo Levi's Essays on India, translated by A. Shugaar. You can always rely on Italians for turning everything into art. According to Carlo M. Cipolla's hilarious Allegro Ma Non Troppo, this is originally because British gentlemen who were not gentlemen did not pay their debts to the Genovese in the days of the Crusades. The Genovese turned to art, much more rewarding.

Of course Carlo Levi wrote about the world-famous Eboli. I just want to mention that in addition to being a painter, a writer, a sculptor, a doctor, a ''confinato'' - an exile sent to an Italian Coventry by Mussolini who himself got a grisly send-off - he was a left-wing activist of the sort that kept it real. They don't make them like that any more. He was Jewish, too. I'm just saying.

He never gave up the fight for the ''Contadini'', a word initially referring to farmers from the Mezzorgiorno, the forgotten South of Italy, by extension the silent majority living in rural deserts, healthcare deserts, transport deserts, food deserts even. People in work now make up three-quarters of Food Banks' clientele. By ''Farmers'', he meant not only farm workers, but also landowners, small and medium business-owners (very important to the very localised Italian economy), factory owners and their workers, professionals, the learned, ''real women'' (his own words), priests, in a word anybody from the productive masses who makes two blades of grass grow when there was just the one before. That's how Jonathan Swift defined added value in Gulliver's Travels. Contadini then, as opposed to ''Luigini'', the word an Ebolism referring to the local schoolteacher doubling as Podesta (Fascist mayor), an opportunist from the not-so-silent majority of (b)ureaucrats, profiteers, legalised spivs, elements formerly known as petty bourgeois, whose newer version may as well include Socialists, people who live off the Contadini and take everything they can from them. It's the same old story of the laborious masses kept alive to pay up and shut up as of yore, since then it can also be by order of the Party. Never forget you also hear Socialism in National Socialism. Ignazio Silone the Compassionate Socialist - it did exist once - sorted that petty lot out with maestria in Fontamara, depicting servile, sordid flunkeys who rape the country village of Fontamara on their masters' orders as ''sensali, di quelli che si vedono sui mercati, e anche lavapiatti delle taverne, e anche barbieri, cocchieri di case private, suonatori ambulanti''(…) ''genti senza famiglia, senza onore, senza fede, gente infida, poveri ma nemici dei poveri'', ''market street vendors such as those seen on markets, dish washers, barbers, coachmen in private houses, street musicians'' (…) ''people without family, without honour, without faith, unreliable people, poor but enemies of the poor''. Petty bourgeois has nothing to do with property or the thickness of a wallet, it has everything to do with an attitude, being mean to the vulnerable, obsequious to the rich and the powerful. Such people used to be known as sycophants in my ancient world. As they say in Levi's Book, Al Tirah, Do Not Fear.

I cannot resist the urge to walk in it once more, it brings good luck if it's the left foot, and to say that two former French presidents have illustrated my essay to perfection: one, left-wing, was known to privately call the poor ''les sans-dents'', the toothless, because they can't afford dental care, and the other one, right-wing, has recently publicly declared that ''people are monkeys'' (''les gens sont des singes''), and he went on practically uttering the n word to the general public's face. I wouldn't attempt a come-back on such a finely evolved platform, not even with Darwin as vice-p.

Political colourness

It is undoubtedly with the eye of a painter and the soul of a writer Carlo Levi saw India in the late fifties. With his usual sober magnificence, Henry James himself defined what a painter's eye can do for a narrative in the essay The Art of Fiction, ''the general and only one source of the success of a work of art [is] that of being illustrative''. Carlo Levi went for it. His India is very much as Carlo Levi wants to see it, but it is a work of art. He refers to Indians as ''aubergines''. the moon is ''a slice of melon'', the crowds are ''pre-Homeric'': great compliments from an Italian to whom vegetables of the Solanaceae species (''nightshades'') and Ancient times are sacred. His euphuistic enthusiasm for everything he sees reminds me of the excitable Italian importer of Scottish cloth when he dictates a letter to his cool English secretary (nonetheless fond of Shakespeare's Verona) in the film Tea with Mussolini: an anthology and a purple patch to all linguists. I found Levi's description of beggars pecking at rice like hens endearing, very cute and all too true at the same time, a very difficult literary feat to achieve.

The moon, ''a boat sailing peacefully in a vast sea'' made me hear Field's Nocturns. Levi pines after the same Xanadu as Samuel Coleridge, who with Wordsworth opened fire in 1798 with ''Lyrical Ballads'', starting the only one Revolution that matters, the Romantic one, the one that gave us the right to access our own feelings, and even to see them artistically, elaborately expressed. It had been a long way from Lascaux, from ice ages, from frozen.

It is not such a long way for Levi's style, although it may seem mythically Ancient and Oriental in its rich story-telling art. The ''modern'' audience may be more accustomed not only to political correctness glossing over colourful patches, but also to more acknowledged postcards from Diversity with only a small, pretty outlandish Stamp on it, collectible, priced, boxed. Political correctness is beginning to reek of censorship, of Moravia's conformism.

My palm goes to the ''Rainbow Market'' article on an all Asian Poets' gathering. A poet, a ''skinny beanpole'' (…) ''wrapped in a bulky overcoat like some Don Quixote in an antique suit of armour'' sings out a chant I believe to be a ghazal (www.poetryfoundation.org has quite a few in English), the ''fixed form of a vernacular language, unvarying and identical, just as the number of petals on the branch of a tree; and that in order to ensure this form, this vegetal geometry would endure over time, a collective involvement was required'' (…), a gathering ''to rediscover the age-old magic'', that of the vernacular, Levi writes. It reminded me of Guy Williams' act as the Zorro of rather ancient times, poet by day, gentle avenger by night, of Antoni Gaudi, of the mosaic art in mosques we never see much of on our screens. Whilst Carlo Levi's traveller's tale may come across as deliciously naive as Douanier Rousseau's paintings, his ideation of the Ancient origins of the world is not that far off the first orientalisation of Europe, when Christianity made its way out of the Levant with the psalms, the verses, the chanting, the robes, the ''pantry of the ancient heart'' (Uzbek poet) and ''the hissing of a serpent'' (Malay poet). The same could be said of Islam and Judaism; all the major religions of the world originated outside of Europe; the only ones we came up with, consumerism and Marxism didn't fare that well in time.

Only the fine flower of Lyly's florid asianism still flourishes.