Where Angels No Longer Tread

-->

They look like ordinary students, the dozen or so sitting around the table in my Grand Tour seminar: a couple of freshly shorn boys, the rest girls with hair spritzing out of cloth-covered rubber bands carefully twisted around buns intended to appear careless. They drink coffee-machine cappuccinos and eat Snickers candy bars and bring their notebooks to class and open them and even write in them and look back at me when I look at them and appear interested, are even bright seeming, not merely seeming, are bright, attentive, conscientious, courteous. I am the kind of teacher who believes in the evolution of mankind and so therefore believe that every future generation one-ups the generation that floundered before it.  I scoff at colleagues who lament the collapse of civilization and human intelligence and what’s gone wrong with the youth of today and instead trust youth implicitly, stare into especially the things I don’t get with hopes that more scrutiny will teach me a thing or two about why they are being shaped the way that they are shaped toward the inscrutable future that is shaping them. But yesterday I taught Forster’s Where Angels Fear to Tread and must confess that these torchbearers of tomorrow threw me for a loop.

For those who do not know Forster’s story, it concerns a confrontation of Italian values with British values over who gets to raise the baby of a British woman who dies in childbirth after foolishly running after and marrying a much younger Italian farmhand.  The boy-widower, Gino, is deeply devoted to his baby-son and will raise him on sunshine and fruits picked fresh from the garden—a simple, charmed, life in nature, his upbringing uncomplicated by ambition and pretention and the need to be anyone other than who he is.  But the menacing family of the dead mother, not even her family, but her first dead husband’s family, has decided that they must rescue the baby from a life among barbarians and send him to Eton to have a proper education and place in civilization.  The family descends on Gino.  Fights ensue and escalate until the baby is killed in a carriage wreck. As in his more popular A Room with a View, Forster glorified Italy as a “return to Arcadia”—and was certainly rallying for the tragically misunderstood Gino, who represents Rousseau’s “natural man”—honest, simple, capable of love, real feeling and passion. Meanwhile the wooden Brits are utter hypocrites, whose only motives in wanting this unknown child is to save face and reinforce obsolete values that keep them alienated from themselves.

When I teach this novel, I usually get a passionate debate, a neat fifty-fifty maybe, those who sympathize with Gino and get Forester’s call for a simpler more honest life; those who intelligently see through Forester’s personal prejudice and consider that he is creating a false polemic:  the natural simple, the civilized hypocrite. Maybe education is not a bad idea for the baby.  But even that latter group is moved by the observation of the mediating Caroline on page 95 when she looks at the infant sleeping on his dirty rug and recognizes that they are fighting for an idea rather than a child, that they are disregarding that this infant has its own soul and destiny, feelings, autonomy, an intricate unfolding of moment to moment life and the best one can offer the unfolding of another is “a kiss and a prayer.” 

So, what’d you think? I toss out to my pert group, pens poised, ready.  Wasn’t this a compelling read? Weren’t you just anguished for the fate of this child from page one?

“It was dramatic” someone offered.

“It was good,” another. No one seemed truly excited about the book, truly impassioned by Forster’s call to simplicity.

I read out a few key passages hoping to stir a little more discussion: Don’t you all know a Harriet—someone who over-educates herself to appear self-important, but the education does not serve life?”  They nodded. Yes, they’d known Harriets. So?

I pulled the trump passage, the baby on the dirty rug. This reverence for the mysterious being-ness of another.  Had they heard of the Procrustean Bed, the myth of Procrustes…a variation of the square peg in the round hole motif?  The British educational system as a Procrustean Bed, the child’s arms and legs cut off to fit an existing form? Had there been moments in their lives when they’d encountered Procrustean Beds…things that just didn’t fit, that rubbed against them and thus inspired them to fight for a larger reality?

One student offered that she’d wanted to be an art major, but her father had told her she would never make a living doing art and should get an MBA.

Perfect! I responded.  And how did you deal with this?

“Well, of course my father knows best. Plus he’s funding my education. I’m a business major.”

Two or three piped up in defense of their classmates that they all knew they would have to “pay their dues”, work at something they might not enjoy for several years--anything, really--and then retire at 50 to live the dream.

What dream? I wanted them to name.

They stared at me.

Not one of you wants to live on a commune?  Not one of you wants a sustainable garden? Not one of you has some burning passion you want to devote your life to…that goes against the grain of the existing culture? Or what your parents want you to do?

"I'm in Italy because my mother loved her study abroad experience. I don't see anything wrong with allowing parents to guide us. They have experience. They know better. Rebellion never works. It's just rebellion."

 They squirm a little.  They look out the corners of their eyes at each other. They are silent.

More out of politeness than passion, one of the shorn-headed boys offers:  “I’ve thought it would be nice to live an agrarian life. Maybe an organic farm. I play music. I do art.  I mean I can see why a gay writer like Forster would think rural life good for the soul, and why he would fantasize about a hot Italian man working in the field with muscles rippling. But I want a wife and kids and enough money to support them.”

Whose to say you can’t support your wife and kids on the commune?

“Oh, that’s right” (he’s growing a little sarcastic). “I’m going to meet my wife at Woodstock. The commune’s going to be HER idea.” His classmates laugh.

Another polite student comes to my rescue: “Well, I guess it’s a matter of deciding what we really mean by 'needs'.  What are real needs? What are culturally induced needs?"

Brava, Brava--I rally, too enthusiastic maybe. I am thrilled. I am excited.  This conversation is going somewhere after all. But at precisely the minute I believe I can steer the conversation back toward key passages in the novel, the electricity goes off and the room turns pitch dark.

It is raining heavily outside. Thunder, the incessant drone of downpour.  “This is awkward,” one of the kids calls out to me from the dark.  We wait for a moment in silence thinking there will be a reprieve, a sudden re-dawning of the lights. When no electricity seems forthcoming, I pull remembered contingencies from my hat:  Why did Lilia run off with Gino in the first place? What about British culture is Forster indicting here, or here or here?

Now I cannot even make out their faces.  The dark grows darker. The storm crashes on.

Please, please think about that baby on the dirty rug. That passage on page 95.  The kiss and a prayer, I say before dismissing them with a kiss and prayer.

This is the last month of the last semester that I will teach the Grand Tour seminar. I sit in the dark for a long while after my students have left considering the timing of my obsolescence and the inscrutable future that is beckoning them.

Invitation to a Canonization

Gianluca’s wife Nelda invited me to the canonization while she was sudsing up shampoo in my hair, getting it ready for Gianluca to cut.  “You like saints, don’t you?” she said casually. “Didn’t you once translate the life of a saint?”  Yes, I perked up, not knowing where she was headed with this.  I am sometimes a little nervous around Nelda because she hovers around that part of me that is tempted to convert to Catholicism. “Well, we’re canonizing one on Saturday. Four o’clock at the Duomo.  Why don’t you come?” I told her I would think about it. I am still thinking about it, even though it is now Sunday and Madre Maria Luisa Prosperi has crossed over from regular nun-mother to saint in a ceremony that was not graced by my humble presence.

I am a true believer of a kind, a true believer in dimensions of spirit I experience first hand and can identify bodily. It is hard for me to assure people like Nelda that one can be a believer without being Catholic, but I believe my belief is as strong as Nelda’s belief who has even seen the Virgin at Medjagorge. I love that she has seen the Virgin and even conceived a baby late in life she named Maria after the Virgin who granted her the miracle of conception. I have no doubt that something powerful happened to the entire family during their pilgrimage to Medjagorge: the 12 year old saw the Virgin, too, and before his contralto voice had even changed, began to passionately lead the recitation of the Rosary at San Loreto, that church named after the house where Mary and Joseph raised Jesus, the house that angels flew from Nazareth to Croatia to other places in Italy in times of strife before letting it come safely to rest in Loreto.  

I am also complicit in the family’s faith somehow. The elder son was a reluctant believer until the day he was praying to San Giuseppe for help with his homework and I came in for a haircut and announced that I was translating the life of San Giuseppe.  A kind of hush rained down on all of us gathered there in the beauty parlor, the kind of hush that is accompanied by a very fine shower of golden light. We all knew that San Giuseppe had stepped into the room. The praying son felt it. I felt it. We all felt it, a quickening, a change of light.  I told the story of how a Catholic college I know refused to elect San Giuseppe as patron saint of their chapel because he gives the wrong message.  San Giuseppe was known to be stupid. He could only hold one idea in his head at a time. He knew that in order to be a priest, he had to take tests and so, rather than study, he prayed to God for help on the test. Infallibly God divinely intervened to make sure that the only question that appeared on Giuseppe’s tests was the one that he knew how to answer. The best miracle of all was the one in which his examiners tested the first two boys in the group and assumed if they knew the answers everyone else in the group would know the answers, letting San Giuseppe completely off the hook. “San Giuseppe may be the patron saints of students, but studying may help you as much as prayer,” I told Nelda’s son, perhaps in a way that bothered Nelda.  Soon afterward the entire family took me on as their special conversion project. I love that a mere haircut has become a bimonthly spiritual adventure.

I ask Nelda why this Madre Maria Luisa Prosperi has been deemed worthy of sainthood.  What did she do? How do people decide this?  According to Nelda she cured a Trevi woman of terminal cancer.  I tell her I go to a woman in Torino, an Energy Healer, who zaps tumors all the time with loving, high-frequency energy and makes them disappear and she’s not in line for sainthood. The Catholic Church needs to get to speed with all these advances in Energy Healing.  Reiki, Theta Healing, The Reconnection, Quantum Entrainment, Matrix Energetics: People everywhere are zapping tumors these days and you don’t find them inviting ostentatious ceremony in overwrought Duomos. They go about the work, humbly, without much recognition, unless of course you are Eric Pearl or Vianna Stibal, but they’re different somehow. Their schtick is “anyone can do it”, while the schtick of the canonization is “only they can do it…and only the Church can recognize and name the miraculous.”I realize that I have launched a new battle in my personal Armageddon and the nuns are losing this one.  Oh, Sisters of Poverty!

Nelda’s eyes flinch a little but the sheen of belief glows stronger as she quietly, faithfully explains that this Trevi woman was cured 100 years after Maria Luisa’s death! The nuns at the convent of Santa Lucia prayed to Maria Luisa, asking her to cure the woman’s cancer and she did!  This was a true miracle. There's a difference.

I do not believe I am the devil’s advocate when I determine I must persist in this. I believe instead some other force is guiding me, maybe even the spirit of Maria Luisa: “How do you know that it was not the humble prayers of the nuns themselves in the convent that zapped the tumor. Who says that Maria Luisa alone had the power?  We are all endowed with the power to line-up our energies with the energies of Christ-Consciousness and convey healing. All of us.”

Nelda flushed a little and conceded that she didn’t know the details. I should go to the canonization and hear all the details and then I’d understand. It’s not the same, the powers a saint has and what the rest of us have. The Church has some way of knowing that it was Maria Luisa who cured that woman.

The hush and golden light that some days fill the beauty salon were sorely missing after my discussion with Nelda. There was a different charge in the air, static, dryer static, little shocks. She wrapped my hair in a turban of towel and led me toward Gianluca who was waiting for me scissors in hand.  What horror to confront myself in the three-way mirror, that unframed face, pale and flaccid, unadorned, mooning out of me too rawly.  Gianluca clip, clip, clipped at my wet tufts of hair and I imagined for a moment that I would not know myself when he was done, that the wetness would dry into a shape and style I would not recognize. No, not tonsured. Not cut short-enough for the wimple, but not right somehow. But, of course, in the end it would be just right, the hair cut he has always given me, the style, my face, the same, familiar, the way it’s supposed to be.

Death Rehearsal

When my mother was dying, I learned a lot about signs of departure. Hospice-nurse friends knew physiological signs could be deceiving, given their fickle ups and downs. I recall the time, weeks before her actual death, the breathing and heart-beat slowed so alarmingly that we called children home from school to hold the vigil around the death bed. There we were,  counting her last breaths, only for her to pop-up rigor-mortis style, eyes full of fire, to ask us what on earth we were staring at. But the day she was ready to relinquish her stuffed cat, the cat that I’d given her to replace her flesh-and-blood cat during a stint in the hospital,  we all knew she was ready and would slip through the veil.  “Here, take this,” she said to me one afternoon when I least expected it.  I looked at Rossie the nurse who looked back at me, eyes shining. I looked at the cat with its stitched blind eyes and well-handled mats of fake fur.  “This is it,” we all knew.  Her last thing.  Her letting go of her last thing.

My mother’s blind cat haunts me as I go around the house handling one bauble from my life after another, trying to decide what to give away, what to keep. I tell Julie on the telephone that this move is the ultimate Feng Shui, my giving away everything, but then think, no, death is the ultimate Feng Shui. This is just a rehearsal, a mini-death, a lesson in letting go that no doubt reaches deeper than any other letting go I’ve been called to do in my life; but it’s not the ultimate letting go, not yet, not this time (at least I hope), though I do wonder if there’s really a difference. I believe that death is just a matter of taking off the old coat of the body and stepping into an adjacent room. What I’m doing may be harder than actual death, because I still must drag along at least a few heavy things, which means I must circle-in-the-square them into two not very big suitcases. 

The new suitcase helps, my new vessel, the new Merkaba of my worldly goods, my pyramid-tomb of tokens from this life that can accompany me into the Norway-hereafter. The pristine teal-ness of its interior exudes a kind of magnetism that sends off sparks should I offer it something not worthy of perpetuity. The white Keds. I love the white Keds. But the suitcase sputters and sparks, my hands flinch against what I call “dryer static”—those surprising little shocks that happen when you pull things out of the dryer (not that I have one), but here putting the wrong things into the suitcase creates the static, the little shocks.  “The new soul taking over your body does not wear white Keds,” the suitcase tells me. How does it know this? I sort of collapse. 

One by one, I must relinquish the things I’ve arranged around myself to offer myself some semblance of worldly permanence.  The Deruta china pattern I decided to invest in as I learned to marry myself—one cup, one plate at a time, hand designed by Helena, the colors I chose, the design she saw in me—yes, it goes.  The food dehydrator from my raw-vegan phase, the yogurt maker, the Wok, the collection of ceramic sautee and sauce pans—must go.  The carpets (puppy pee-stained, not worth keeping anyway)—straight to the dumpster. Table clothes, placemats, napkins, silverware, wine glasses—deep, narrow and fluted, can’t take them with me. I have a stereo and CD’s—music goes on iTunes, the stereo who knows.  Flat screen television and DVD player plus DVD’s, my entire Almodavar collection, complete seasons of “Six Feet Under”, and “House”—all available to the one willing to drive to Spoleto and haul them away for me. 

Books are hardest, of course.  For the moment, I’ve decided I am allowed to take enough books to fill the little suitcase. This is ridiculous, given my need for shoes, but there you have it—priorities.  Yet how do I truly know what few book-wrapped thoughts are worthy of staking my life on, when life itself is so unknown. I hold each book up to the open mouth of my suitcase, which turns into a kind Bocca della Verita'—a mouth of truth. According to the Roman legend of this mouth as oracle, you put your hand into it and make a statement.  If the statement is not true, the mouth bites your hand off. If it is true, you withdraw your hand and move forward in peace. Somehow my suitcase works contrarily to the prototype Bocca, only the books it eats will leave me intact, let me move on.

prototype Bocca della Verita'

What worries me is how easy it is to pack the non-essentials. Earrings, for instance, take up so little space that I suppose I can dump my whole collection in a side pocket and spare myself the sorting of lentils from the grain, but somehow to evade even that minute handling of detail promises disaster. This is psychometry after all, this scanning of everything with the palm’s dousing beam.  Who knows what power Grandma’s cameo earrings wield, having lived wired to her earlobes all those years, clandestine parasites of the energies surrounding her.  No, I must stand as vigilant as the grim watcher of a monitor at the airport security check; everything must pass through the scanner, the kirilean screen.

Here I stand in the dumping grounds of my lost life, seeing truly a landscape of obsolescence, of broken dolls and tea-cups half buried in the compost of other disintegrating things, and think:  Mission almost accomplished, this mission of non-attachment to anyone or anything. But then, as always happens when one thinks one has arrived, the body playing possum springs to life.  “Are you still looking for work?” a man’s voice reaches me via telephone, a man I do not know who seems oddly familiar with me. “Would you be willing to move to Torino?”  Certain choices do not require one to risk one’s hand in the Bocca della Verita.  Torino? Anna Bossi lives in Torino, not that this man who is calling me even knows Anna, or a thing about my work with her or my plight to fly back and forth to Torino when so often there is no money to do so.  Suddenly my material life experiences a kind of rapture:  the Deruta pattern, the feather bed I’ve slept under all these years, the TV I bought just recently when Italy went digital, at least three cartons of books, my teal suitcases and five dogs spontaneously leap into the back of the Green Suburu I find myself driving up the A-1 toward Torino.

Who’d have thought my Merkaba would morph into a green Suburu?

"I'm not surprised," grins the Magus Anna Bossi. 

Lost in Daylight Saving's Time

 I do not own a clock to turn back or forward. I do own watches but unwound ones, hiding in drawers. Who needs clocks or watches with Smartphones always handy, and computers also always keeping time? When time changes, I don’t even have to know about it.  My computer makes adjustments for me while I sleep; my iPhone likewise.  I don’t even have to know what hour I’ve lost or gained when Daylight Savings does its tricks. I can go about my daily toil completely innocent.

It’s raining hard today so light did not allude to change, no displaced sun betrayed that noon had moved. My stomach growled too early, but I blamed fickle appetite and rain and mood. 

I’m sure the dogs knew more than I did, but I was otherwise engaged and did not listen.  Feed me, walk me, feed me, walk me, yapping canine dances stir me when they stir me and I feed and walk them off the clock. 

 I must admit I wondered why my U.S. friends woke up so early on a Sunday—all their little green video-camera lights announcing availability to chat. “You’re up early,” I even told my daughter in Atlanta as we were g-chatting. But what is “early” in a timeless time of displaced hours? She had no way of knowing I was lost.

Paula called from Germany, but we did not mention time. My sister called from Norway and did mention time but not the change. “It’s 1:20," she even announced to me proclaiming she was hungry and had to go. I’d eaten long before an early lunch or late breakfast—and acknowledged even then about how weird time felt. I blamed it on Sunday and the collapse of routine. Time on Sunday is always weird, necessarily.   

The Greeks distinguish the difference between Chronos Time and Chairos Time.  Chronos is the time one measures and Chairos measureless.  It’s been said (I don’t recall by whom) that the more one lives in Chairos Time, the less one ages. I like that thought! Sundays are meant to be spent in Chairos Time, so maybe that’s why Daylight’s Savings Time always happens on a Sunday. The fickle hour can rise or fall and we won’t notice much.

The other night, driving in the rain back from Fano with my friends, Vania played a similar trick on me with week days.  She claimed it is important to know the day of one’s birth.  If born on a Monday, Monday becomes one’s Sunday. If born—as I was—on a Wednesday, then Wednesday becomes one’s Sunday. Every day of the week is ruled by a different planet and brings a different energy. The Biblical imperative that one rest on the 7^th day should be coordinated with the day of the week on which one was born. If my Wednesday is my Sunday, then my Sunday is my…(this is too much for me, I swear!)…Thursday—Thor’s Day, bringing aggressive Norse energy.  Sunday should not, therefore, be my day of rest. "And on the 7th Day She Rested," should be Wednesday. The Italian calendar may help me out a little. Sunday is not the first day of the week, but the last, so what does that mean about my Wednesday and my Thursday?  This has something to do with Day Light’s Savings Time, but I don't know what.

Obviously, the fact that I am writing about all this means that I am onto something. The girl I tutor in English—Erla—spilled the beans. She came at three o’clock rather than four, admitting she did not trust me to know what time it was.  I was fixing a late lunch, which soon became early dinner, after she’d come and gone, almost breaking my spell of  timelessness. “Oh that’s why everything is weird,” I remarked to her, but as most people know, things are always weird to me.

Knowing about this fickle hour is no help in placing me in time, and maybe that’s why we do it—manipulate the light this way--to stay un-time-bound. I suppose there was no way of doing it in the days of sundials—the shadow fell where it fell and was somehow true.  Clock hands must have invited manipulation—the mechanism runs down, the battery dies, resetting requires always a certain approximation. Digital time is preparing us for some new orientation. Time after time.  Moments that last a second or forever depending on how you feel. It is half past five in the afternoon as I write this, and already nightfall. If I shut down the computer, let my iPhone die and fall asleep now, surely some Rip Van Winkle day the dogs will wake me and I will carry on with whatever’s left here for me to do.

Toward a Primer in Anti-Genetics

One morning I am going to wake up and find that none of my dogs have ears. Finimondo has inherited Zio Zuzu’s habit of ear-chewing.  He is trying to chew off Fenomeno’s ear as we speak. I hear the rubbery gnawing that sounds exactly like that sound I used to get in my ear back in the days I used to chew on Barbie legs. It amazes me that Fenomeno puts up with this, amazes me that the only consequences of this zealous mastication is a slobbery shriveling up of one soggy ear that I trust will dry and un-shrivel as the day goes on. But Finimondo is so aggressive and heedless in his ear chewing, I really do sometimes fear the worst. When Zuzu feasts on Desiree’s ears (and for some reason he only wants his mother’s), he’s certainly more delicate, more of an ear-connoisseur who licks and savors as he nibbles; plus Desiree’s sheer pleasure is undeniable, the way she leans into him, flops on her back, surrenders with eye-rolling, sighs and smiles.  Fenomeno does not resist or complain, but he looks at me with wide curious eyes as though wondering: Is this supposed to be happening? Are you sure I’m okay? I think he’s okay, but wonder if the ear-eating gene has gone amok.

One of the great joys of having several generations of dogs is this minute observation of the trickling down of traits, for better and sometimes for worse. Serious dog breeders study pedigrees and like to believe they are masters of eugenics, capable of creating a super-race of animal, desired qualities obviously prevailing over the undesired.  In dachshund-breeding, such breeders want a certain head, a certain back, a certain girth of thorax, a certain curve of muzzle, dip of tail, a certain coat.  But the interesting thing about conformity breeding is not so much the welcome beauty of the features that conform, as rather the mystery of the parts that don’t.  Daniela can go to an international dog show with 600 dachshunds on the bill and know which dogs derive from her dogs because of a quirk in the tail.  This quirk is, as far as I know, a neutral trait—neither sought nor avoided—but it mysteriously prevails, much to Daniela’s delight because it’s an inevitable and foolproof sign of the perpetuity of her original animal—a drip in the gene-pool 20 generations ago that keeps radiating outward inexplicably. 

 Great, great Grandmother Sottosopra, Great Grandmother Usquetandem, Grandmother Zizannia, Great Aunt Tarontola

At present, my personal family of dogs includes three generations, though counting Daniela’s dogs (above and below), we have incarnate, six generations, plus her memory of the fourteen other generations that flit around in heavenly ethers. Of course we celebrate the features that culminated in Zizannia and Sesamo earning their world championships. But it’s the bizarre that hooks our hearts and makes each dog special.  

Father Apritesesamo

Finimondo has inherited the stunning head, back, coat, buttocks, tail, overriding beauty of his best-in-breed father, but to my secret joy, his forelegs are pigeon-toed and so he can’t compete.  The vet has put him on a regime I can’t always follow:  let him go hungry, get skinny, take weight off those legs and maybe they will straighten; don’t walk him on asphalt, on a leash, but let him run free in a grassy field, and maybe those legs will straighten. He’s too beautiful to be pigeon-toed, but to me his pigeon-toes make sense. He’s mine. I’m a pigeon-toed kind of breeder.  I live for the quirky. I wouldn’t feel like myself if my dogs weren’t quirky. And how the sweet inward turning gait of my little ear-chewing Finimondo endears him to me! Thank you, thank you God, Life, heaven, the gene-pool—whatever forces came up with Finimondo’s pigeon-toes.  I’m off the hook as far as dog shows and future litters-of-champions are concerned. I’m free to let him be and love him in his weirdness.

There’s an ancient man who does a single giro of the Rocca on a three-legged cane every morning who will not believe that Fenomeno is not Zizannia, simply because Fenomeno barks exactly in the tones of his grandmother, and barks insistently, uncontrollably, in a way that made the city issue a kind of order that Daniela never walk her dogs before 8 o’clock. Of course, Zizannia’s barking would be the last trait any of us would have wanted to perpetuate, but what joy it brings me, amid frustration, this imprint of Zizannia, this trait in her that, in my experience, most defined her as Zizannia (a name that means “bearded mischief”) echoing through to me in this owl-featured pup with the fuzzy, funny-colored fur and delicate bone-structure of Evangelina bundled in the sweetness and cuddliness of Desiree.

 Mother Evangelina and Zio (uncle) ZuZu

I find great-grandmother Usquetandem’s too close-together eyes in Fenomeno’s gaze and remember Daniela saying once: “It’s those eyes, her eyes, that make her my favorite.”  Finimondo’s chocolate color—the brown-rather-than-black nose—come from Desiree surely and Desiree’s father, Ugo; the blue-green eyes, from somewhere else that possibly Daniela can recall. Fenomeno has vestiges of father Sesamo, but nothing concrete, more a ghostly halo around each feature—the muzzle black like Sesamo’s and curved in a certain way, but not exactly Sesamo’s way. He looks a little more like his grandfather Catullus, the Hungarian pup I chose as father for Zuzu and Evangelina in defiance of Daniela and the serious breeders—a long story, not worth relating here, but I mention it to suggest that somewhere in Hungary there exists a strain of other mysteries that may be showing up in the here and now, perhaps in the blueness of Finimondo’s eyes, perhaps in the ear-chewing.

 Desiree with her father, Ugo 

(he has the right sized head, but I think Desiree's small head is cuter!)

Oh Desiree, of the stunted muzzle, oh Zuzu of the too-soft hair, oh birth-traumatized Evangelina who goes for the guzzler of anyone who interferes with her attachment to my heart-chakra, oh Finimondo of the rabbit-hind legs who leaps on beds, chairs and tables impossibly, oh phenomenal Fenomeno, the leg-heister, the hard to train: you were each made to order to meet my heart’s and life’s purest need—I have no doubt of that.  But how oh how can anyone codify a breeding agenda that will prepare for the likes of any of you?  Impossible.

Desiree with her grandson, Finimondo

Mother and Sons

Fenomeno, Evangelina, Finimondo

Wimple-winked

I must face the Sisters of Poverty today and do not want to face the Sisters of Poverty, though don’t know precisely why I am avoiding them.

They came to me on a wave of light the self-same afternoon that Michael Grosso wrote me that it was time for us to begin work on a book about Padre Pio.   Both emails arrived in my Inbox at more or less the same minute:  the email from Michael Grosso; the email from the Fondazione Voce di Padre Pio, or Foundation for the Voice of Padre Pio. I felt chills. I felt the calling.  How amazing that “the voice of Padre Pio” should arrive as an echo of Michael Grosso’s own voice suggesting we write about Padre Pio.  The Fondazione was writing to ask would I be willing to translate three books for the Foundation. I assumed they meant books by or about Padre Pio.  YES OF COURSE, I wrote back, so blasted by light that I was beside myself, quite literally, my energy body standing somewhere outside the one that touches ground in the earthly dimension. How amazing is this: Michael wanting to write about Padre Pio and needing me to translate Padre Pio while the Foundation for Padre Pio was writing in the same instant to provide the opportunity! I believed this is what was happening, but it was not what was happening. I was hoodwinked!  I agreed to translate the three books, but when they arrived in the mail a few days later, instead of finding Padre Pio in glowing raiment there at my threshold, I discovered a gaggle of nuns, the oppressed Sisters of Poverty, choking in their wimples.  

“Of course you must face the Sisters of Poverty,” Anna Bossi even chuckled when I described my most recent crisis. “Don’t you see the beautiful irony?  Don’t you see what this means? You need to heal your money issues, all the dualism you carry around money, all that bullshit about rich men not getting into the kingdom of heaven, the camel through the eye of the needle, the opposition of God and Mammon. You need to heal all that and what better way than for the Sisters of Poverty to rescue you from Poverty? Irony is one way we reconcile dualities. I absolutely love it that you are now depending on the Sisters of Poverty for your livelihood.”

I argued that I did not believe in the Rule, in the way the Sisters had to kneel before a Mother Superior and kiss the ground and say Ave Marias to even beg for a Kotex. I had that very morning translated the words:  “A sister must not own even a straight pin.”  A straight pin!! I balked before that line and gave up the ghost. How could I in good conscience perpetuate that kind of mentality by rendering the Italian into English so the Rule could reach India, Africa, the U.S. and all the other countries this kind of oppression was trying to reach. I refused. Yes, there were certain things about the “spirituality and carisms” of this order of nuns that made sense. I could read through the lines to a kind of truth, but the words themselves were coercive and violent and I did not want to translate them.

“That voice you hear between the lines,” Anna Bossi interrupted my bullheaded tirade. “I think that voice is St. Francis. Channel his voice. Don’t translate the words.  You must understand better what a vow of poverty is. It’s not supposed to be about deprivation. It’s supposed to be about abundance and God providing everything one needs. It’s about our not needing to cling or hoard or covet or own, but about trusting Providence. Somewhere along the way, this truth got skewed. It’s your job—via St. Francis—to set the sisters straight. I’m counting on you to do this.”

The first crisis in facing the sisters was my fear of channeling St. Francis. Right! Like I can do that!  Like I can channel first of all, and channel Him most of all. Who am I kidding?  And of course writing what I’d rather read instead of what is there violates some kind of Hippocratic oath of translating. It was tantamount to hoodwinking my hoodwinkers:  their entrusting me to write one thing while I snuck in another text.  At the same time, certainly Anna was right about all of it:  irony healing duality; our needing to correct scarcity beliefs and return the world to abundance-thinking; hearing a voice that I really should learn to listen better to and trust . But still:  facing the books, I felt mostly bungled. 

I re-started with the biography of the Founder, because lives are simply lives and are conveyed through narrative instead of Rules.  Of course the things that most interested me about this life were missing:  the crises alluded to and not described.  But it was do-able and for awhile the work went on in a pedestrian, non-supernatural way.

Then one day I found myself translating the chapter on the Risorgimento and the Fall of the Kingdom of Naples, which Fall had something to do with the rise of the order of nuns my Founder founded in a small province near Naples. As I was translating the very paragraph about the Kingdom of Naples and its ruling family, the Pignatelli, Daniela sent me a text message that she was bringing Giulia Pignatelli by the house to see our puppies.  Giulia is also known as “La Principessa” because she is a bona fide princess of the defunct line of Pignatelli royalty who once reigned over Naples. I like Giulia well enough, though I have problems with the way people bow and scrape before her, especially the way Daniela bows and scrapes before her, and calls her “La Principessa” as though she prevailed over something Real. I also have problems with Daniela deferring to her in judgments that Daniela herself was quite competent to make on her own before she fell under the fantasy-princess’s royal spell.  Giulia, a dachshund breeder, was coming to judge the value of our six-week old puppies.  I bristled before this.  But must confess that I was instantly awed and a bit delighted by the irony that I was writing about the fall of her kingdom just as she was crossing my humble threshold for the very first time.  ("Yes this all makes sense, Cinzia", Anna Bossi would later remark to me, rather amazed that I had mustered a bona fide princess to go along with the Sisters of poverty to heal my money-split).

The visit was fine, the puppies behaved well and were judged by Giulia to be fine; she even made the call that I should keep both of them and defended her position well before the dubious Daniela.  The magic happened at the end of the visit, precisely as Daniela and Giulia were saying their goodbyes. “Cinzia,” Giulia called out to me, stooping toward the floor to pick up something.  What she held between thumb and forefinger as she looked at me accusingly was a straight pin.  “Be careful.  A puppy could die if he swallowed one of these,” she proclaimed, dropping the pin in my palm.

Of course I heard the Sisters of Poverty crying out to me the line that had caught me up in the first of the books I’d begun translating:  "You may not own even a straight pin".   I had no idea what Giulia’s finding the Sisters of Poverty’s staight pin on the floor of my house had to do with healing my money split, but surely something.

 The gust of light that the Princess’s visit brought to me that afternoon helped me finish translating the biography.  Of course I had no idea what any of it meant, but the translating gained momentum as though the text before me would somehow reveal new clues to the mystery I was living.

At this point, I had not even spoken to a Sister of Poverty. All the transactions about the translation had happened through a boy-sounding man named Enrico who worked for the Fondazione Padre Pio.  I finished the biography and wondered how to get it to the sisters. Enrico gave me an email address for a Suor Elsa and I wrote her; within minutes of my writing her she called my cell phone.  She had a wee little Mickey-Mouse voice and I imagined her to be about three feet tall and tried to recall the origin of the cartoon image that arose in my mind of a nun who was all wimple and habit, no face.  She was all kindness and gratitude and told me to email the book to the order’s email address with her name in the subject space; she also wanted my bank information included in the email so she could pay me what I was counting on for my survival the rest of the summer.

I set out to work on the earlier book, the one that kept reminding me that a sister could not own even a straight pin.  My first excuse for not continuing with it was that I didn’t have a working printer and this interfered with my process:  translating quickly, printing and editing, then rewriting off the cleaned up hard-copy. The day I congratulated myself for coming up with this excuse, I received a Facebook message from Vimi Bauer who used to run a screenwriting workshop in Spoleto with her husband Irv. She was writing to tell me that they would not be returning to do the workshop again, so she had left their printer with Suor Chiara at the Istituto Bambin’ Gesu, the convent in which they had held their workshop. I knew the convent well and the sister who ran it because I’d participated several times in another workshop that had been held at the convent and had returned again and again for even month-long visits in the years leading up to my moving to Spoleto. The convent is just behind my house. I see Suor Chiara all the time. I had even seen Suor Chiara the day I went to Mass feeling called to Catholicism by all the hoodwinking Padre Pio coincidences.  I had even confessed to Suor Chiara that I was almost ready to convert. She had told me to come to Mass at the convent at 7:00 a.m. the following Thursday so she could introduce me to Father Edouardo.  I agreed to this, but didn’t wake up on time and so had spent a chunk of the summer avoiding her. Now the want of a printer and the gift of a printer were calling me to confront a Sister of Poverty who was ALL FACE and knew me all to well.  I resisted, I postponed, I felt pushed and bullheadedly resistant. But finally I sucked in my breath and went to get the printer from Suor Chiara who welcomed me as the proverbial lost sheep, listened to my story about the translation, the printer, and finally claimed that the hound of heaven was truly gaining on me.  Just you wait and see, she chuckled. One of these days you’re going to find yourself as wimpled as I am.

I felt chills as she said this to me, and showed her the goose-bumps on my arms.

That’s the Holy Spirit moving through you, Cinzia. “Dammi retta”—pay attention.

It’s called “psychomachia” what the Latin poet Prudentius called the “battle for man’s soul” –this deadlock I find myself in as I continue to resist the work before me.  I may have healed my money split, but as one of my friends recently pointed out to me,  now I am living my own personal Armageddon, nuns pulling me one way, channeling energy-healers the other.  “You know how to resolve dualities. Hold the tension of both poles,” the shaman Anna Bossi wrote before going off to meditate with Franciscan nuns in a convent in California. 

Today I pick up where I left off, wherever that was—the part about the straight pin, the phrase I dropped like a needle in a haystack and must now re-find and thread.

The Call to Santiago

I’m told you’ll know when it’s time to go to Santiago because you won’t be able to get away from the idea of going…it will assault you from all sides making it almost impossibile NOT to go. Pilgrimages work that way. We don’t choose to go; the pilgrimage chooses us and pesters us until we succumb. I do think that I am on the brink of succumbing to the call to Santiago.

My first call did not feel like a call at all, but more like an ordinary suggestion of a hiking possibility. I was hiking along the old Spoleto-Norcia train tracks with Adriana when she mentioned her ambition to hike the 800 kilometer trekking path that winds up in Santiago, Spain. She’d always wanted to do it, but time and circumstance had never conspired to open up the right window. It would take a month, at least, and she would have to abandon her work as a realtor for the entire month and so would have to have some kind of boon beforehand that would pay the bills during and beyond the excursion. But maybe somehow all the Intrek hikers could aim to go on a certain date and work toward going, save up for it. That's what we'd do, we both agreed, not really imagining that we could.

I had in mind, as she spoke about the trek to Santiago, that it was the European equivalent to hiking the Appalachian trail: something that looms as the ultimate hiking adventure , one that the average weekend trekker often speaks of doing, but rarely does--yet the possibility comes to mind perennially to inspire and goad on: one never knows when quotidian walking might lead to one's true passion as adventure trekker. Perhaps we'd think about going to Santiago and instead wind up doing the Franciscan Peace Path. Now that was an idea--a trek near enough to home that we could certainly put it first on the Fall agenda.

But the week following my discussion with Adriana about the trek to Santiago, I found myself having dinner at Iolida and Paolo's with a woman named Giovanna whom Iolida introduced as “the woman who just got back from Santiago.” Iolida and Paolo are anti-church and not too enthused about any church-based traditions, so again the idea of Santiago was presented to me as just a hike, though I could tell by Giovanna’s irrepressible joy and eagerness to express the inexpressible that Santiago had been life-changing for her, but perhaps life-changing in the way the Appalachian trail can also be life changing by virtue of one's simply having had the stamina to accomplish it. Adriana was also present at the dinner with Giovanna and we both said in mysterious unison: “Oh, wow, we were just talking about hiking to Santiago...!” in response to which synchronicity, Giovanna's eyes went filmy with a kind of knowing. “Ah, you’ll go. You’ll see. Things will keep happening until you find yourself there.”

I had wanted to speak to Giovanna more about her experience but could tell that Paolo was wary of what might amount to religious zeal in Giovanna’s enthusiasm; the dinner conversation quickly changed to something else. I could not count on ever seeing Giovanna again as she was in town only briefly to visit her mother, Iolida and Paolo's next door neighbor. Because I dismissed the possibility of seeing Giovanna again along with dismissing the possibility of hiking 800 kilometers with three dogs and enough kibble in my backpack to last a month (2 enormous 6 kilogram sacks, I calculated) it seemed a small miracle to discover Giovanna a few afternoons later, in Perugia, waiting for the same train to Spoleto I was waiting for, standing by the binario alone with haloes flashing around her as though she were my own personal angel sent to urge me on. The clearing to sit together the hour duration of the trip was an obvious invitation to talk more about Santiago. There was nothing else we seemed to share; nothing else that came to mind.

For the journey one traditionally takes nothing but a walking stick and a conch shell tied around one's neck, the conch shell a kind of mess-kit to collect offerings of food and drink along the way. This is a “lilies of the field/take nothing for the journey” pilgrimage, the kind of initiation rite one finds in all religions--Native American medicine walk, let's say, though Christianity has its share. One entrusts oneself entirely to what happens; entrusts oneself to the breath of Spirit; entrusts oneself to God and enters a different state of consciousness in which everything is mytical. The people one meets are indeed angels, the serendipitous discoveries, the meals, the places to stay that arise as one wends one’s way along the path--all arrive precisely when you need to find them and are outright gifts. But ultimately the thing each pilgrim discovers and the transformation that happens between the first weary week and the final triumphant one are impossible to describe. I'd have to trust Giovanna on this--the trek was calling and I would find myself swept along by circumstance until indeed, even I would do it, though perhaps without dogs.

Friday Daniela and Zia Paola and I were doing our Giri della Rocca with all seven dogs when suddenly Paola was approached by a squat, friendly-looking man talking on a cell-phone. His face was a-dazzle with grins and glistening eyes. He waved at Paola to come talk to whomever he was talking to on the phone and we all stopped to eavesdrop on Paola's trilling and cooing while the man explained that his daughter was calling from the road to Santiago; she'd made it halfway. Some kind of aperture opened inside me as I watched Paola natter on--a rush of wonder as I thought about the likelihood of my walking along with Daniela and the dogs in Spoleto, and someone arriving with a cell-phone connection to Santiago: Talk about a call! A literal call from Santiago and here I was privy to it. Paola later explained that she had been the one to encourage the girl to make the pilgrimage. She'd been borderline anorexic after the break up with a boyfriend and clearly needed a change of scene, a change of heart. Paola's sister Carla, the doctor, had done the trek--the right way! With the walking stick, the conch around her neck. You could hear it in the girl's voice, Paola assured us all--she was in the presence of miracles, her spirit quickening, her heart alive. She had wanted to thank Paola for urging her to go and--how wondrous-- her father had run into Paola while talking to her on the phone. To think: the girl was calling from the road to Santiago!

That night I was again at Iolida and Paolo’s for dinner. I had ridden my bicycle from Spoleto to Campello, a feat that continues to amuse my friends--Cinzia "la Ciclista." Paolo remarked that in clearing out his office he’d found some maps of bike trails for me. He got up from the table to gather up the maps and brought back a bundle of them; I’m sure he had not studied them closely. I'm sure he was not aware that the map on the top of the stack was a map of bike routes to Santiago.

“You can bike your way to Santiago if you want to expedite the journey,” Zia Paola confirmed the next morning during giri, “but a pilgrimage is meant to be taken one step after another, by foot, with a walking stick and a conch around your neck."

I do want to believe I am heading to Santiago. I need to finish translating San Giuseppe first, need to save enough money to leave the dogs with Raffaela in Cannara. It's too hot to walk that far in August anyway. I keep thinking maybe October, but of course I have to teach or at least I think I have to teach--given school starts in September and doesn't end until December. But what do I know about the way miracles happen? If I'm supposed to go, I'll go. Giovanna assures me that, when its time, the way to go will arise and I will know.

Does anyone know where I can find a conch shell in land-locked Umbria?