I warn everyone, everyone I know, not to take the 64 bus or other tourist lines in Rome, or even the metro, if one can help it, because I have been ripped off so often by professional pick-pockets. Eight years ago I lost everything, every card, every scrap of cash, my driver’s license, my passport, simply because my hands were full of luggage and people were jostling up to me from behind, pushing me onto the train; I didn’t even feel the hand that reached in my pocket to steal the document pouch. Another time, after the first time, when I was duly guarded and attentive, I clutched my purse underneath a tote bag, braced my arm against both, squeezing my own elbow so no one could yank my purse off my shoulder, but, again, the bus was so crowded, I did not feel the person who took a razor and sliced open my purse and emptied its contents, did not even FEEL this happening, as I stood there savvy and secure. And I did not, a future time, feel the man or woman’s hand that reached into another jacket pocket to steal my cell phone. And I won’t even go into the time I lost all my clothes—this has happened twice—when I left rental cars parked where hotels told me to park them, and the windshields got bashed to smithereens.
More seasoned travelers sort of smirk at me as though they are immune, and I am simply vulnerable out of ignorance.
“Dear, dear,” they shake their heads, “surely you know better than to carry a passport in the city, know better than to cram all your resources into one pouch, one pocket.”
“Surely you know better than to keep the ringer of your phone turned on so that, when it rings, and you answer, a zillion watching eyes will see directly which pocket in your shirt or coat or pants is the cache of instant treasure.”
“Surely you know not to put the hotel parking pass in the rental car window. You are advertising: “Tourist here! Come rob me!”
The thing I do not say to these smug, un-violated travelers is that absolutely, they avete ragione, are right, so right, and I have been traveling in Italy since long before cell phones existed, since I was a teenager with an aluminum frame backpack with orange day-glow parachute silk flapping and Europe on $5 a Day in the side pocket along with my Earthshoes and bong. I should know better and do know better, but am no longer a tourist and seldom a traveler, there are simply some days I want to walk to the market with just my jacket on and my wallet in my pocket, walk as though I lived sleepily as I do in fact live in a forgotten paradise of goodwill among neighbors.
What a shame that the world is still trying to teach me the sad lesson that I don’t.
sabato 27 gennaio 2007
venerdì 26 gennaio 2007
Snow and Mimosa
They don’t even seem like flowers, more like the bright yellow pom-poms my mother used to sew along the hems of kitchen curtains in the 50s becoming 60s—yellow gingham ones perhaps, cheery, an emblem of a kind of chipper domesticity, the happy housewife in her bouffant going to town with the foot-pedal of her Singer sewing machine, whistling while she worked, tunes from the hit parade. Now the pom pom Mimosa is the symbol of Italian Woman’s Day, bold yellow on every “festa della donna” greeting card, twisted into tight cellophane bouquets and lavished on female frequenters of grocery stores and restaurants. You hold a Mimosa up under your chin the way I was taught as a child to hold a buttercup. The yellow glow the flower casts is indicative of something. Love, probably. I don’t remember.
Yesterday, taking the bus up Via Pellini, I thrilled at the sight of them: Mimosa trees in full bloom, the delicate branches literally bowing under the weight of a sudden explosion of puffy blooms, festooning in grape-like bunches, in ever-swelling tiers. Sogno d’oro/dreams of gold, Italians say for “sweet dreams” and I found myself thinking that I was indeed walking through golden dreams as I beheld the strange marvel that surely had not existed the day before. I take this route to school every day yet only today had the trees caught sudden flame and it seemed a miracle until I recognized why it seemed a miracle. Festa della Donna is March 8th and it’s still only January.
It would have been one thing to accept the blooming as yet another sign of Global Warming, but the odd thing was: I’d just that morning gotten over my belief in Global Warming and my fear. It was gloriously cold, a true January, with leaden gray skies and the menacing kind of fog that doesn’t wisp around in a dreamy way but simply, stubbornly hangs a kind of dismal pall all over everything. There was also precipitation—I say precipitation, because rain, sleet, hail, snow all seemed present at once and independently, a hoary icey-ness covering the cobbles, making me slip. I’d gotten so used to the mild winter, I no longer even thought of hats and gloves. Scarves, yes, because scarves are to Italians in any kind of winter weather what billed caps are to American men in sunshine. Italians are careful with their necks and twirl miles and miles of hand woven Pashamina around their necks indoors and out to stave off mal di gola (sore throat) and raffreddore (cold) and one would look nude navigating the streets without a scarf so I comply with that accessory, but hadn’t thought of gloves or hat and wished I had thought, given the sudden wonder of frigid weather. My feet in their ordinary loafers were wet and numb, my hands raw, my cheeks burning, my knees shook, teeth clattered. I thought perhaps the buses would not run as I stood by my stop for what seemed like hours. And then out of the mist, there appeared the angel of deliverance—Daniela on the way to her cellulite massage, swooping me up to carry me to my train.
How on earth could the bitter cold, the rain/sleet/hail/snow arrive on the same day the Mimosa burst into bloom? This phenomenon seemed to defy all the theorists who think they know what’s happening in our universe and can project the end of the world. I smirked, beholding the burning bushes that line my road. What a vision they were—so vivid against the backdrop of distant snowy Appenines, the yellow fuzz balls bold, bright heralds of mysteries arcane.
Fellow passengers also took note of how strange it was: Mimosa in January. What then will we do in March come time for La Festa di Donna? There won’t be any flowers to go along with all the greeting cards and yellow Mimosa cakes. No lapel pom poms, no bouquets, no discovering the yellow glow under her chin.
I think I am perfectly satisfied to see the Mimosa bloom in January. Come March I’d like something lustier than pom poms to commemorate the women I adore. Roses are cliché. How about the hibiscus…nothing shy or coy, chipper or domestic about the hibiscus, wildly splaying its petals, open to anything. Yes, I nominate the hibiscus for the new symbol of Women’s Day. Do I hear a second?
Yesterday, taking the bus up Via Pellini, I thrilled at the sight of them: Mimosa trees in full bloom, the delicate branches literally bowing under the weight of a sudden explosion of puffy blooms, festooning in grape-like bunches, in ever-swelling tiers. Sogno d’oro/dreams of gold, Italians say for “sweet dreams” and I found myself thinking that I was indeed walking through golden dreams as I beheld the strange marvel that surely had not existed the day before. I take this route to school every day yet only today had the trees caught sudden flame and it seemed a miracle until I recognized why it seemed a miracle. Festa della Donna is March 8th and it’s still only January.
It would have been one thing to accept the blooming as yet another sign of Global Warming, but the odd thing was: I’d just that morning gotten over my belief in Global Warming and my fear. It was gloriously cold, a true January, with leaden gray skies and the menacing kind of fog that doesn’t wisp around in a dreamy way but simply, stubbornly hangs a kind of dismal pall all over everything. There was also precipitation—I say precipitation, because rain, sleet, hail, snow all seemed present at once and independently, a hoary icey-ness covering the cobbles, making me slip. I’d gotten so used to the mild winter, I no longer even thought of hats and gloves. Scarves, yes, because scarves are to Italians in any kind of winter weather what billed caps are to American men in sunshine. Italians are careful with their necks and twirl miles and miles of hand woven Pashamina around their necks indoors and out to stave off mal di gola (sore throat) and raffreddore (cold) and one would look nude navigating the streets without a scarf so I comply with that accessory, but hadn’t thought of gloves or hat and wished I had thought, given the sudden wonder of frigid weather. My feet in their ordinary loafers were wet and numb, my hands raw, my cheeks burning, my knees shook, teeth clattered. I thought perhaps the buses would not run as I stood by my stop for what seemed like hours. And then out of the mist, there appeared the angel of deliverance—Daniela on the way to her cellulite massage, swooping me up to carry me to my train.
How on earth could the bitter cold, the rain/sleet/hail/snow arrive on the same day the Mimosa burst into bloom? This phenomenon seemed to defy all the theorists who think they know what’s happening in our universe and can project the end of the world. I smirked, beholding the burning bushes that line my road. What a vision they were—so vivid against the backdrop of distant snowy Appenines, the yellow fuzz balls bold, bright heralds of mysteries arcane.
Fellow passengers also took note of how strange it was: Mimosa in January. What then will we do in March come time for La Festa di Donna? There won’t be any flowers to go along with all the greeting cards and yellow Mimosa cakes. No lapel pom poms, no bouquets, no discovering the yellow glow under her chin.
I think I am perfectly satisfied to see the Mimosa bloom in January. Come March I’d like something lustier than pom poms to commemorate the women I adore. Roses are cliché. How about the hibiscus…nothing shy or coy, chipper or domestic about the hibiscus, wildly splaying its petals, open to anything. Yes, I nominate the hibiscus for the new symbol of Women’s Day. Do I hear a second?
giovedì 25 gennaio 2007
Talking Heads
I have been trying to figure out what to do about my hair. For months—okay years!—I have simply let it grow. I do not dye or cut it. Most days I brush it and pull it back sloppily with a plastic claw; some days I actually braid it; other days, I must confess, I am a veritable Medusa, the way I let it twist and snarl and coil unattended down my back. Hair is a political statement and sometimes I consider that my hair is talking back to Daniela’s hair—which she submits to the parruchiere as often as three times a week for fine-tune trims and tints and teases. Her hair is never quite right: too orange, too red, too black, too square, too puffy, too in the face, too brushed back, too last year, too nineties, too old, too come una ragazza—young. My hair remains simply, blessedly, inarguably wrong.
I am not adverse to change, to upgrading my appearance and have been reading heads like a physiognomist as I encounter them on the bus, the train, per strada with hopes of discovering which if any Italian style would ever suit me. I am too fat and too long-faced for the fashionable shorn look I most admire—the scalp practically shaved with almost a tonsure of bang…big earrings, cherry-red framed glasses, lots of lipstick (you laugh to imagine me so!). Politically this look would work: androgynous, low-maintenance, even lower maintenance than the mess I now don’t maintain—easy to dress up or dress down, funky one minute suave the next, and I wouldn’t be able to hide behind hair like a human Cousin Itt, but would be right out there, exposed. Revelation is everything or almost everything. Vanity still has something to say, however, and I really don’t want to be exposed as a pin head.
My daughter recommended the Devil-Wears-Prada look of Meryl Streep. After all, that’s almost how old I am, even if I don’t want to admit it; grown-up women do and should look, well, grown up with the hair whisked up to one side and lacquered with spray, a precision cut—a place for every hair and every hair in its place (I laugh to imagine me so!), the kind of hairstyle that requires an entire make-over to complement it: the complete line of Loreal make-up and body unguents, Prada, Gucci everything—you won’t find Meryl hurtling through Umbria in a hoodie-sweat shirt and Tevas. But dai, Margaret…really, what are you thinking? Wasn’t the movie, in fact, a political indictment of the hair, the first purchase in a lifetime of conspicuous consumption, the selling of the soul, to…well, yes, the film is aptly named.
I believe I encountered an appropriate compromise on the bus this morning, one Margaret might even approve. I never saw her face, because she was standing in front of me and would not turn around, but she clearly could have stepped off 5th Avenue. She flaunted the full length mink many Italian women are known to parade around in—hers glistening golds, browns and oranges from neck almost to ankle, drapey, cape-like, at least 200 animals worth of fur. One could never guess the girth of the body under the tent, but presumably thin if the tiny booted feet—spike heels, spike toes—were any indication. The orange-y brown of the boots brought out highlights in the fur and also coordinated with the scarf the woman wore—shot through with gold thread, expertly knotted around her neck--definitely a put-together woman. But the hair—she hadn’t brushed it! She hadn’t run a comb through it a single time! It stood on end! Standing not far behind her for an entire giro of the city, I could even study the disarray: not even three inches long, and there were rats’ nests and funny parts forking every which way. If she had not been in the mink one might have taken her for someone recently released from a straight-jacket, someone who'd been thrashing around all night and now was too numbed-up on thorazine to even see what had become of her. For a moment, she seemed such a contradiction, but then I got it! It was high-fashion, high-maintenance bed head. She’d probably paid her parruchiere 100 euro to achieve that look.
And to think what I achieve at no cost on my own quite naturally.
I have a whole lot more listening to do before I come to any conclusions about hair and hairstyles. Until these dos start making sense, I'll let mine hang fire.
I am not adverse to change, to upgrading my appearance and have been reading heads like a physiognomist as I encounter them on the bus, the train, per strada with hopes of discovering which if any Italian style would ever suit me. I am too fat and too long-faced for the fashionable shorn look I most admire—the scalp practically shaved with almost a tonsure of bang…big earrings, cherry-red framed glasses, lots of lipstick (you laugh to imagine me so!). Politically this look would work: androgynous, low-maintenance, even lower maintenance than the mess I now don’t maintain—easy to dress up or dress down, funky one minute suave the next, and I wouldn’t be able to hide behind hair like a human Cousin Itt, but would be right out there, exposed. Revelation is everything or almost everything. Vanity still has something to say, however, and I really don’t want to be exposed as a pin head.
My daughter recommended the Devil-Wears-Prada look of Meryl Streep. After all, that’s almost how old I am, even if I don’t want to admit it; grown-up women do and should look, well, grown up with the hair whisked up to one side and lacquered with spray, a precision cut—a place for every hair and every hair in its place (I laugh to imagine me so!), the kind of hairstyle that requires an entire make-over to complement it: the complete line of Loreal make-up and body unguents, Prada, Gucci everything—you won’t find Meryl hurtling through Umbria in a hoodie-sweat shirt and Tevas. But dai, Margaret…really, what are you thinking? Wasn’t the movie, in fact, a political indictment of the hair, the first purchase in a lifetime of conspicuous consumption, the selling of the soul, to…well, yes, the film is aptly named.
I believe I encountered an appropriate compromise on the bus this morning, one Margaret might even approve. I never saw her face, because she was standing in front of me and would not turn around, but she clearly could have stepped off 5th Avenue. She flaunted the full length mink many Italian women are known to parade around in—hers glistening golds, browns and oranges from neck almost to ankle, drapey, cape-like, at least 200 animals worth of fur. One could never guess the girth of the body under the tent, but presumably thin if the tiny booted feet—spike heels, spike toes—were any indication. The orange-y brown of the boots brought out highlights in the fur and also coordinated with the scarf the woman wore—shot through with gold thread, expertly knotted around her neck--definitely a put-together woman. But the hair—she hadn’t brushed it! She hadn’t run a comb through it a single time! It stood on end! Standing not far behind her for an entire giro of the city, I could even study the disarray: not even three inches long, and there were rats’ nests and funny parts forking every which way. If she had not been in the mink one might have taken her for someone recently released from a straight-jacket, someone who'd been thrashing around all night and now was too numbed-up on thorazine to even see what had become of her. For a moment, she seemed such a contradiction, but then I got it! It was high-fashion, high-maintenance bed head. She’d probably paid her parruchiere 100 euro to achieve that look.
And to think what I achieve at no cost on my own quite naturally.
I have a whole lot more listening to do before I come to any conclusions about hair and hairstyles. Until these dos start making sense, I'll let mine hang fire.
mercoledì 24 gennaio 2007
Tyrannous Toilets
Mine has flipped its lid. For awhile things were precarious. The seat and the lid were attached to the bowl with two plastic hinge-things, one piece that slipped into another piece super-glued to the bowl-ledge, the entire mechanism too insubstantial for the heft of the seat and its lid together, not to mention the human weight that would compound it virtually every time it was used—as toilets often are. People would sit and find the seat slipping; the little plastic hinge would pop; the lid would clatter to the floor. Time and time again I’d try to fit it together again, not sure what kind of glue—if any—would hold the hinges in place. Finally one day the hinges popped and Desiree found one and chewed it into a little wad that looked like spit out Wriggley’s Spearmint. That was the day my toilet turned into the kind of toilet you see in public restrooms all over Italy—the kind you really don’t want to use, the kind that seem unsanitary even when completely sanitary, simply because they are naked, raw, exposed, and even obscene without the tidy modesty of seat and cover.
Though embarrassed to have such a toilet, I entertain myself watching visitors decide how they want to approach the problem of it. Certain friends consider it a sign: “Congratulations! You really are Italian now--you've got the toilet to prove it!” Others conscientiously make efforts to help me find a way to rig the seat to the bowl. Still others insist on delicately propping the seat on the bowl—for comfort I suppose, if not decency. I argue that people sit on bidets and they do not have seats, if people do indeed sit on bidets; most Americans I know use them to store extra toilet paper or towels or even bath soap and shampoo and rarely is use of them discussed. I argue it could be worse: just last week I had to face one of those miserable kinds with two foot-print looking things to stand on in order to squat over a hole in the ground.
I have shopped far and wide for replacement hinges and no one seems to carry them. I am told that the safest bet is to just buy the whole apparatus—seat and lid with all the little fixtures packed with them in the cellophane. Michelle and Lewis, with all their experience renovating a bed and breakfast, say they have seen countless people buying toilet covers at the suburban plumbing stores. The way it’s done is you get a big piece of newsprint and trace the shape of your toilet bowl. They are all different, one should know. Some are perfectly oval, some are more rotund, others have little dips and flourishes and of course the size differs. So, yes, I should get a sheet of newspaper and trace the shape and cut it out and take it to the nearest plumber.
The challenge reminded me, perversely, of cutting out face silhouettes in kindergarten, the kind mothers always cherish, the shadow of a child’s profile cast on the wall by a high intensity light and traced, little nose and even eye-lashes cut out and preserved on black construction paper. Tracing toilets is a little trickier because of the bowl-full of water and there being no real surface to trace against, but it can be done. I rather enjoyed getting on my hands and knees for arts and crafts and coming up with the pattern.
The problem, alas, is that the kinds of stores that sell such seats are way out on the periphery. I’m sure I could figure out what bus will take me there, once I have a full day and the time. Still, I find myself resisting this particular journey, and think I may just wait for Michelle and Lewis to return from Australia so they can take me in their car. I don’t know why I balk before the image of me and Desiree on the bus: she under my left arm, the toilet seat under my right arm, the bus trip, the walk through il centro home. Toilets should not be a source of embarrassment. After all, everyone has them; everyone needs them; they are common place, a fact of life. Maybe my inertia is not simply embarrassment, but the recognition that buying another may be entirely futile. Surely the new will have the self-same plastic hinges. Surely I have the same frustrations to look forward to—a Sisyphean task of keeping the lid in place. I try to rethink what is happening in the situation: the toilet is reinventing itself beneath our very derrieres! Why resist…why fight the inevitable? We must choose our battles, afterall.
Though embarrassed to have such a toilet, I entertain myself watching visitors decide how they want to approach the problem of it. Certain friends consider it a sign: “Congratulations! You really are Italian now--you've got the toilet to prove it!” Others conscientiously make efforts to help me find a way to rig the seat to the bowl. Still others insist on delicately propping the seat on the bowl—for comfort I suppose, if not decency. I argue that people sit on bidets and they do not have seats, if people do indeed sit on bidets; most Americans I know use them to store extra toilet paper or towels or even bath soap and shampoo and rarely is use of them discussed. I argue it could be worse: just last week I had to face one of those miserable kinds with two foot-print looking things to stand on in order to squat over a hole in the ground.
I have shopped far and wide for replacement hinges and no one seems to carry them. I am told that the safest bet is to just buy the whole apparatus—seat and lid with all the little fixtures packed with them in the cellophane. Michelle and Lewis, with all their experience renovating a bed and breakfast, say they have seen countless people buying toilet covers at the suburban plumbing stores. The way it’s done is you get a big piece of newsprint and trace the shape of your toilet bowl. They are all different, one should know. Some are perfectly oval, some are more rotund, others have little dips and flourishes and of course the size differs. So, yes, I should get a sheet of newspaper and trace the shape and cut it out and take it to the nearest plumber.
The challenge reminded me, perversely, of cutting out face silhouettes in kindergarten, the kind mothers always cherish, the shadow of a child’s profile cast on the wall by a high intensity light and traced, little nose and even eye-lashes cut out and preserved on black construction paper. Tracing toilets is a little trickier because of the bowl-full of water and there being no real surface to trace against, but it can be done. I rather enjoyed getting on my hands and knees for arts and crafts and coming up with the pattern.
The problem, alas, is that the kinds of stores that sell such seats are way out on the periphery. I’m sure I could figure out what bus will take me there, once I have a full day and the time. Still, I find myself resisting this particular journey, and think I may just wait for Michelle and Lewis to return from Australia so they can take me in their car. I don’t know why I balk before the image of me and Desiree on the bus: she under my left arm, the toilet seat under my right arm, the bus trip, the walk through il centro home. Toilets should not be a source of embarrassment. After all, everyone has them; everyone needs them; they are common place, a fact of life. Maybe my inertia is not simply embarrassment, but the recognition that buying another may be entirely futile. Surely the new will have the self-same plastic hinges. Surely I have the same frustrations to look forward to—a Sisyphean task of keeping the lid in place. I try to rethink what is happening in the situation: the toilet is reinventing itself beneath our very derrieres! Why resist…why fight the inevitable? We must choose our battles, afterall.
martedì 23 gennaio 2007
Camomilla Cure-all
I wish my body recognized the magic Italians attribute to te camomilla.. . I should be able to sip the elixir and find instant relief for jangled nerves, depression, sleeplessness, indigestion, nausea, menstrual cramps, malaria, fever, dehydration (of course!), sluggish-liver, petulant gall bladder, colic, cystitis, kidney stones, hay fever, hiccups, vomiting, spastic pain, arthritis, asthma. I should be able to wash my hair with it and discover brighter highlights, find relief from dandruff. I should be able to wash my face with it and cure eczema, acne, quotidian pimples, actual wounds. I should be able to put the used tea bags over my eye-sockets and soak out all possible puffiness. The mighty Italian mosquito or zinzara should be no threat to me—if I bathe in the stuff.
Just look on the open shelves in my narrow but well-equipped kitchen. I have every one of the Twinnings varieties, Chamomile with Spearmint, Chamomile with Lime Flower, Chamomile with Vanilla, Chamomile with Spiced Apple, Organic Chamomile, just plain Chamomile. I have Italian varieties, both Pompadore and Sogno D’oro…with its steam misty cup and soothing crescent moon. Celestial Seasonings Varieties, to include “Wellness Tea” that combines chamomile with zinc and Echinacea to ensure a quick fix. I have a zip-lock baggie filled with dried Chamomile flowers—and it is not that my fetish is reserved for only varieties of Chamomile. English Breakfast, Earl Gray, all the Republic of Tea green tea varieties, Japanese plum blossom, the new African reds. For years I’ve been sure if I could just knock the coffee habit (I can’t!) and drink only teas I’d be offering my innards a soothing inner-bath and immunity from all plagues. Not that I am in anyway a hypochondriac or prone to plagues or other illnesses. But we all have our inglorious moments and our sudden desperate need for cure-alls.
Imagine the time I was in Venice for Carnevale, taking a bus because I’d found a deal, a bus of unknown student strangers ready for a wild and rollicking good time. Just as we are approaching Mestre, the wintry, watery city, the telltale eyeless white masks and plumes and harlequins and period costumes of yards and yards of gathered silk…it comes over me, a puking disease, that had not even announced itself with a foreboding headache or achey-ness. This is no mild bout of nausea but a full-fledged scourge—intent on disgusting all who travel with me, rendering companionship and joy in the bacchanalian rites we are about to explore—utterly impossible. “What you need is un po’ di camomilla,” the chaperon-esque mother-figure accompanying us insists, urging the bus to stop, so serene in her confidence she will inscribe on my soul forever my faith in un ‘po di camomilla. Had the tea no viable ingredients, the placebo effect would certainly have been enough that day, so intent was my mind on overcoming matter— to drink to the dregs and find myself instantly transformed into a masked dancer with a powdered wig.
Today has, alas, been a chamomile day—a day of staring into the steaming brew while willing it to do its magic as dog companion and I loll around under the ink-stained comforter hearing the terrace doors blow open in the storm but finding no strength to get up and close them. Such deluge and flying branches I have not seen in some time and it’s strangely satisfying to watch now that I am sitting upright against the pillows able to lift my head enough to see. For half the day I was visited by phantoms of delirium as I tried not to succumb to the waves that were rushing over me and trying to cast me to a place that does indeed seem a place (illness does have its fascinations). I did not cross over. I summoned all the strength I had to tiptoe to the kitchen and light the gas under the kettle.
I am still here. I am still writing. Sometimes that seems magic enough.
When is Carnevale this year anyway? Isn't it about that time?
Just look on the open shelves in my narrow but well-equipped kitchen. I have every one of the Twinnings varieties, Chamomile with Spearmint, Chamomile with Lime Flower, Chamomile with Vanilla, Chamomile with Spiced Apple, Organic Chamomile, just plain Chamomile. I have Italian varieties, both Pompadore and Sogno D’oro…with its steam misty cup and soothing crescent moon. Celestial Seasonings Varieties, to include “Wellness Tea” that combines chamomile with zinc and Echinacea to ensure a quick fix. I have a zip-lock baggie filled with dried Chamomile flowers—and it is not that my fetish is reserved for only varieties of Chamomile. English Breakfast, Earl Gray, all the Republic of Tea green tea varieties, Japanese plum blossom, the new African reds. For years I’ve been sure if I could just knock the coffee habit (I can’t!) and drink only teas I’d be offering my innards a soothing inner-bath and immunity from all plagues. Not that I am in anyway a hypochondriac or prone to plagues or other illnesses. But we all have our inglorious moments and our sudden desperate need for cure-alls.
Imagine the time I was in Venice for Carnevale, taking a bus because I’d found a deal, a bus of unknown student strangers ready for a wild and rollicking good time. Just as we are approaching Mestre, the wintry, watery city, the telltale eyeless white masks and plumes and harlequins and period costumes of yards and yards of gathered silk…it comes over me, a puking disease, that had not even announced itself with a foreboding headache or achey-ness. This is no mild bout of nausea but a full-fledged scourge—intent on disgusting all who travel with me, rendering companionship and joy in the bacchanalian rites we are about to explore—utterly impossible. “What you need is un po’ di camomilla,” the chaperon-esque mother-figure accompanying us insists, urging the bus to stop, so serene in her confidence she will inscribe on my soul forever my faith in un ‘po di camomilla. Had the tea no viable ingredients, the placebo effect would certainly have been enough that day, so intent was my mind on overcoming matter— to drink to the dregs and find myself instantly transformed into a masked dancer with a powdered wig.
Today has, alas, been a chamomile day—a day of staring into the steaming brew while willing it to do its magic as dog companion and I loll around under the ink-stained comforter hearing the terrace doors blow open in the storm but finding no strength to get up and close them. Such deluge and flying branches I have not seen in some time and it’s strangely satisfying to watch now that I am sitting upright against the pillows able to lift my head enough to see. For half the day I was visited by phantoms of delirium as I tried not to succumb to the waves that were rushing over me and trying to cast me to a place that does indeed seem a place (illness does have its fascinations). I did not cross over. I summoned all the strength I had to tiptoe to the kitchen and light the gas under the kettle.
I am still here. I am still writing. Sometimes that seems magic enough.
When is Carnevale this year anyway? Isn't it about that time?
lunedì 22 gennaio 2007
St. Francis of Monteluco
The St. Francis I fell in love with was designed by Franco Zeffirelli to win adolescent hearts. As depicted in his 1972 “Brother Sun, Sister Moon” Francis was a dead-ringer replica of the Romeo of Zefferelli’s 1969 “Romeo and Juliet”—the one responsible for the classic love song still piped into our hearts insidiously as elevator music: “A Time for Us”—boyish, a bowl-cut Beatle’s hairstyle, huge ga-ga eyes drinking in a lover’s gaze. Zefferelli’s Francis would discover there was no “Time for Us” as he gazed so wantonly into his flower-child sister’s eyes, the Donovan soundtrack expressing in words what he and Clare refrained from saying to each other as poppies and sunflowers and knee-deep wild grasses swayed in gentle breezes on the Umbrian hillsides where the would-be lovers frolicked and, yes, made flower-chain necklaces and hair-wreathes. How giddy they were! How in love! How tragic that poor Clair would shave her endless “Herbal Essence” locks to follow him into celibacy. How tragic that they let God get in the way of their loving each other. The couple remained inscribed on our hearts like figures on Keats’ Grecian Urn, poised eternally for that lusty kiss we would internalize and live out even compulsively with our more available lovers. Poor Clare (no wonder the order found in her name would be the “Poor Clares”).
I can’t believe that the real Francis would have in anyway been considered a heart-throb. I went to his church in Monteluco yesterday and took a hard look at the cells he is said to have prayed in. He and his brothers must have been the size of gnomes to fit through the teeny, squat doors leading into the closets in which they sequestered themselves. Either that or they took the biblical insistence “straight is the gate and narrow the way” quite literally, forcing themselves physically through key holes, starving themselves, sleeping on splintery planks of wood with rocks as pillows. Even in 1220 they wore the Franciscan robes, hair shirts really with ropes knotted three times to represent and perhaps invoke the trinity. I doubt they ever bathed (or go skinny-dipping as they are often depicted doing by Zefferilli). They suffered ketosis breath from starvation (and they did starve! When Francis’ body was exhumed in 18…examiners could tell he had starved to death because of the way his knuckle-bones were knit together), not to mention, regarding Francis, the crazed fits of temper that would have him run naked in public places and destroy his father’s merchandise and business. Where Francis fails as a lover, he certainly fit the cult ideal of a 60s radical, pooh-poohing the establishment, striking out barefoot with a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal this Book.” Who needed money, who need worry about money, when one could live like the lilies of the field off charity and divine helium?
It surprises me to this day that so many women of my generation still have crushes on St. Francis. They can’t identify with Lucy plucking her eyes out or Catherine cutting off her breasts, but Francis—he’s still the boy-wonder of hagiography. “Live Simply so Others can Simply Live,” perennially he returns to us, but always air-brushed, the stigmata no longer oozing, his Zeferelli smile still intact. But it seems that even as the soul’s lover he is not truly loving in a direct hands-on way, but is always up to strange antics in the name of love, crawling on his battered knees across the eaves to chase a bird into flight, while we stand back in distant wonder—beholding God’s fool.
Adjacent to the Chiesa di San Francesco on the peak of Monteluco is the Sacro Bosco or Sacred Grove with yet another secluded grotto where Francis is said to have prayed. The thousand year-old oaks have living presence, like old souls materializing, holding a stern and mossy vigil. One feels the otherworldliness of the Grove, the enormous branches of the ancient trees sealing us in somehow, containing us, scrappy light on the forest floor flickering with mysteries. One feels even St. Francis’ presence—solitary, somehow fugitive as he seeks a sulky shelter away from us all.
I can’t believe that the real Francis would have in anyway been considered a heart-throb. I went to his church in Monteluco yesterday and took a hard look at the cells he is said to have prayed in. He and his brothers must have been the size of gnomes to fit through the teeny, squat doors leading into the closets in which they sequestered themselves. Either that or they took the biblical insistence “straight is the gate and narrow the way” quite literally, forcing themselves physically through key holes, starving themselves, sleeping on splintery planks of wood with rocks as pillows. Even in 1220 they wore the Franciscan robes, hair shirts really with ropes knotted three times to represent and perhaps invoke the trinity. I doubt they ever bathed (or go skinny-dipping as they are often depicted doing by Zefferilli). They suffered ketosis breath from starvation (and they did starve! When Francis’ body was exhumed in 18…examiners could tell he had starved to death because of the way his knuckle-bones were knit together), not to mention, regarding Francis, the crazed fits of temper that would have him run naked in public places and destroy his father’s merchandise and business. Where Francis fails as a lover, he certainly fit the cult ideal of a 60s radical, pooh-poohing the establishment, striking out barefoot with a copy of Abbie Hoffman’s “Steal this Book.” Who needed money, who need worry about money, when one could live like the lilies of the field off charity and divine helium?
It surprises me to this day that so many women of my generation still have crushes on St. Francis. They can’t identify with Lucy plucking her eyes out or Catherine cutting off her breasts, but Francis—he’s still the boy-wonder of hagiography. “Live Simply so Others can Simply Live,” perennially he returns to us, but always air-brushed, the stigmata no longer oozing, his Zeferelli smile still intact. But it seems that even as the soul’s lover he is not truly loving in a direct hands-on way, but is always up to strange antics in the name of love, crawling on his battered knees across the eaves to chase a bird into flight, while we stand back in distant wonder—beholding God’s fool.
Adjacent to the Chiesa di San Francesco on the peak of Monteluco is the Sacro Bosco or Sacred Grove with yet another secluded grotto where Francis is said to have prayed. The thousand year-old oaks have living presence, like old souls materializing, holding a stern and mossy vigil. One feels the otherworldliness of the Grove, the enormous branches of the ancient trees sealing us in somehow, containing us, scrappy light on the forest floor flickering with mysteries. One feels even St. Francis’ presence—solitary, somehow fugitive as he seeks a sulky shelter away from us all.
In the early 1970's, Donovan agreed to write and record songs for the English version of Franco Zeffirelli's Brother Sun, Sister Moon (1972). While the film included Donovan's recordings of the songs, the accompanying soundtrack included none of Donovan's original recordings. The absence of these recordings prompted many of Donovan's fans to request an official release of the songs. In order to satisfy demand, Donovan embarked on acquiring the rights to the original recordings. Due to the nature of the original contract and complex publishing rights issues, it became evident to Donovan that releasing the original "Brother Sun Sister Moon" recordings would be extremely difficult. In the absence of this release, Donovan decided to record new versions of the original songs and release it exclusively through the iTunes Music Store. For the new recordings, Donovan opted not to recreate the lush orchestration and choir vocals of the original recordings. Instead, he plays guitar and sings solo, in a style reminiscent of his Sutras album. [edit] Track listing All tracks by Donovan Leitch. "The Little Church" – 3:26 "The Lovely Day" – 2:20 "Lullaby" – 2:31 "Brother Sun, Sister Moon" – 2:02 "A Soldier's Dream" – 3:03 "Shape in the Sky" – 2:35 "Gentle Heart" – 3:52 "The Year Is Awakening" – 3:15 "Island of Circles" – 2:56 "The Lovely Day (Instrumental)" – 2:16
sabato 20 gennaio 2007
Deruta Detour
My pattern is called “Grottesche”—on each cup the monster-dragons face each other, blowing orange plumes of stylized fire. First thing in the morning, as I hold my cup of coffee to warm my hands, I stare rather absently at my breakfast companions. These creatures are almost indiscernible among the colorful arabesques—unless one looks at them the way one learned to look at line-drawings in Children’s Highlife, where one found--tangled in tree-branches, lost in vines—the sudden shape of a lion. I bought four Deruta cups in the pattern when I first came to Spoleto, because I needed cups and everything else one generally needs to set up a home and a life. I would buy the cups, because coffee and tea are crucial, and then advance to dinner plates and pasta bowls, soup tureens and platters. Like a bride choosing a china pattern, envisioning the dreamy day when the place setting would be complete, I imagined my cups were the beginning of something—the start of a real home in my marriage to myself.
I knew the plates would be expensive, that’s why I’ve put them off, but I’d never dreamed how expensive or what process made them so until I visited Deruta yesterday to scope out a field trip for my students and perhaps finally pick up a dozen plates to bring home with me. To make a single Deruta plate takes three months’ effort by a staff of 42, each artist a graduate of the Deruta school, the average term of employment 50 years and sometimes as much as 70—an entire lifetime of perfecting the craft. At the factory one moves from the pits out back, where the clay—indigenous to the town of Deruta—is dug up, next to the refining room in which the clay is cleaned, then to the studio where the white coated artists are kneading out the slabs that will ultimately be put on the potters’ wheel and shaped. It dries for a dozen days and then is put on another wheel to be trimmed and smoothed with little blades held by expert hands, then dries for a month, I think I was told, before a first glazing and preparation for the artists who paint the designs much as Michaelangelo once painted frescoes on the Sistine Chapel, hand-drawing the design on wax paper, poking holes, dusting the plate or the urn or the candelabra with charcoal in order to transfer paper design onto clay and thereafter paint with fine brushes the trademark Deruta colors, originally green and brown, but after the introduction of cobalt from Africa in 1300, an entire palette of vivaciousness. The kilns run at 1200 degrees centigrade, the clay objects baking for 16 hours; once out, the flaws are touched up and other layers of glaze are applied. The entire process for a single plate! For a single cup! Each is handled so expertly, so lovingly (not one of the employees I met seemed bored—no radio buzzed to pass the time)! “This is what I want to do with my life,” I said to one of them. “But, ah,” I was reminded by my guide, "it takes a lifetime to perfect such a skill, plus you must first be born with the talent.” The 128 euro price for a signed dinner plate seemed a pittance given the level of care it took to create it.
Ubaldo Grazia, my guide, was also the proprietor of the business and factory, his family having manufactured Majolica ceramics for 500 years, one of only 15 companies in the world that has been in perpetual operation for so long, his company number 13 on the list. He pointed to a picture of his grandfather at 20, painting an urn the way I had just seen a woman in another room painting an urn of similar design—he might have been one of them, still alive—only the bulb-struck, posed look of a subject staring out of daguerratype hinted at the young man’s generation. “Here is a plate he painted at 13,” Ubaldo held up for me to see, one in the popular style of classical ladies--flowing locks and a winsome face dead center. I learned about pigment, about lusterware (not really gold!) about seasons of color and design. Fragments from decimated pottery were arranged like dead butterflies on specimen boards to illustrate the varieties along a time line.
At this point we were in the owner’s office-museum and he had pulled out a ledger dating back to 1926 so I could sign my name among the illustrious visitors. 80 years of yellow pages, leather-bound and only maybe a quarter-way filled. He pointed out the names of all of the American ambassadors, of Gucci and Tiffany presidents. Williams-Sanoma keeps his business thriving with a specialized line. Mel Gibson had commissioned huge contemporary panels of the stations of the cross. Another artist had made a Majolica sun dial representing the vicissitudes of the business…on the pedestal “Giu” for when the market was going down and “Su” for when it would be on the upswing again. I signed my name in green ink, trying to recall why I was here, who I was, what to say in the space for a comment. I felt immortalized.
Ubaldo sponsors a contest annually to invite artists to submit fresh designs and spend a season at the factory producing fresh lines of ceramics. From the Umbrian landscapes, painted with Japanese delicacy, to the outlandish Scandanavian splashes of primary color-wildness, I saw Deruta possibilities that challenged everything I thought I knew about my style. My “grottesche” monster dragons have been commonplace—conventional!—since the Renaissance. Wouldn’t I prefer something with a little more pizzazz…say a field of Spoletina poppies or farfalle—wild, flapping butterflies? Perhaps I would like to commission the factory to come up with a design plumbed from the depths of my own imagination! Ubaldo’s artists could achieve anything.
I did stop by the showroom and did pick out a new and wilder china pattern, though it saddens me to think I may never be able to afford it. Isn’t it a shame that single women can’t throw showers when they marry themselves and set up housekeeping? I am reconciled, though, to not owning my heart’s desire. I’d surely drop a plate and break it and feel the weight of 500 years of artistry crumble in my conscience along with the money-in-coins jingling to the tiles. My coffee cup cost only 12 euro at the boutique right here in Spoleto and I own a wealth of four. Conventional or no, this morning my fire-breathing monsters seemed oh-so precious to me, a veritable bestiary traveling through time from the Renaissance to find me and awaken me so I could convey to you the wonder.
I knew the plates would be expensive, that’s why I’ve put them off, but I’d never dreamed how expensive or what process made them so until I visited Deruta yesterday to scope out a field trip for my students and perhaps finally pick up a dozen plates to bring home with me. To make a single Deruta plate takes three months’ effort by a staff of 42, each artist a graduate of the Deruta school, the average term of employment 50 years and sometimes as much as 70—an entire lifetime of perfecting the craft. At the factory one moves from the pits out back, where the clay—indigenous to the town of Deruta—is dug up, next to the refining room in which the clay is cleaned, then to the studio where the white coated artists are kneading out the slabs that will ultimately be put on the potters’ wheel and shaped. It dries for a dozen days and then is put on another wheel to be trimmed and smoothed with little blades held by expert hands, then dries for a month, I think I was told, before a first glazing and preparation for the artists who paint the designs much as Michaelangelo once painted frescoes on the Sistine Chapel, hand-drawing the design on wax paper, poking holes, dusting the plate or the urn or the candelabra with charcoal in order to transfer paper design onto clay and thereafter paint with fine brushes the trademark Deruta colors, originally green and brown, but after the introduction of cobalt from Africa in 1300, an entire palette of vivaciousness. The kilns run at 1200 degrees centigrade, the clay objects baking for 16 hours; once out, the flaws are touched up and other layers of glaze are applied. The entire process for a single plate! For a single cup! Each is handled so expertly, so lovingly (not one of the employees I met seemed bored—no radio buzzed to pass the time)! “This is what I want to do with my life,” I said to one of them. “But, ah,” I was reminded by my guide, "it takes a lifetime to perfect such a skill, plus you must first be born with the talent.” The 128 euro price for a signed dinner plate seemed a pittance given the level of care it took to create it.
Ubaldo Grazia, my guide, was also the proprietor of the business and factory, his family having manufactured Majolica ceramics for 500 years, one of only 15 companies in the world that has been in perpetual operation for so long, his company number 13 on the list. He pointed to a picture of his grandfather at 20, painting an urn the way I had just seen a woman in another room painting an urn of similar design—he might have been one of them, still alive—only the bulb-struck, posed look of a subject staring out of daguerratype hinted at the young man’s generation. “Here is a plate he painted at 13,” Ubaldo held up for me to see, one in the popular style of classical ladies--flowing locks and a winsome face dead center. I learned about pigment, about lusterware (not really gold!) about seasons of color and design. Fragments from decimated pottery were arranged like dead butterflies on specimen boards to illustrate the varieties along a time line.
At this point we were in the owner’s office-museum and he had pulled out a ledger dating back to 1926 so I could sign my name among the illustrious visitors. 80 years of yellow pages, leather-bound and only maybe a quarter-way filled. He pointed out the names of all of the American ambassadors, of Gucci and Tiffany presidents. Williams-Sanoma keeps his business thriving with a specialized line. Mel Gibson had commissioned huge contemporary panels of the stations of the cross. Another artist had made a Majolica sun dial representing the vicissitudes of the business…on the pedestal “Giu” for when the market was going down and “Su” for when it would be on the upswing again. I signed my name in green ink, trying to recall why I was here, who I was, what to say in the space for a comment. I felt immortalized.
Ubaldo sponsors a contest annually to invite artists to submit fresh designs and spend a season at the factory producing fresh lines of ceramics. From the Umbrian landscapes, painted with Japanese delicacy, to the outlandish Scandanavian splashes of primary color-wildness, I saw Deruta possibilities that challenged everything I thought I knew about my style. My “grottesche” monster dragons have been commonplace—conventional!—since the Renaissance. Wouldn’t I prefer something with a little more pizzazz…say a field of Spoletina poppies or farfalle—wild, flapping butterflies? Perhaps I would like to commission the factory to come up with a design plumbed from the depths of my own imagination! Ubaldo’s artists could achieve anything.
I did stop by the showroom and did pick out a new and wilder china pattern, though it saddens me to think I may never be able to afford it. Isn’t it a shame that single women can’t throw showers when they marry themselves and set up housekeeping? I am reconciled, though, to not owning my heart’s desire. I’d surely drop a plate and break it and feel the weight of 500 years of artistry crumble in my conscience along with the money-in-coins jingling to the tiles. My coffee cup cost only 12 euro at the boutique right here in Spoleto and I own a wealth of four. Conventional or no, this morning my fire-breathing monsters seemed oh-so precious to me, a veritable bestiary traveling through time from the Renaissance to find me and awaken me so I could convey to you the wonder.
Journey to the End of the World
I was waiting for the bus at the bottom of the hill in the sudden dark after a warm day when a voice I didn’t recognize reached me and asked, “Been to Piandellenoce lately?” I couldn’t imagine that anyone in this town besides Daniela, Bente, Michelle and Lewis had any knowledge at all about my forays into the wild Umbrian hills toward Piandellenoce—plane of the nuts—so I felt a bit accosted and spied upon. Turned out it was the boyish bus driver who’d talked my ear off under the “don’t talk to the driver while the bus is in marcia” sign hanging just above the driver’s seat the last trip I’d made when I’d had such a hard time finding any bus at all and had wound up alone with just this boy-driver who had explained to me that we were making the route backwards; the red house would not be last stop before Montemartano, but first stop after Montemartano. Now we stood poised under the Calder Sculpture waiting for the E bus and his evening duty driving the E bus and me in it up the hill—if the E bus ever happened to arrive.
All weekend it has been in the mid-sixties to low-seventies, weather completely unseasonable for January when the mountains should be capped with snow and our breath visible as we speak beneath the newly lit streetlamps. This is the second January I have spent in Spoleto when Spring has seemed to hurdle over all obstacles to arrive prematurely, even impossibly, a déjà vu that prepares me for the turn in my conversation with the young bus-driver: how scary it is— warm weather in January, surely evidence of global warming and the coming end of the world. Now that the sun has gone down, it’s not really warm, there’s a damp chill; I’m wearing only a fleece, and don’t need more, and it’s dampness more than cold that makes us hold ourselves tight to ward off shivers as though our bodies had already gotten the message that Spring had come and were resisting even the slightest dip in temperature. The air smells like Spring air, like fecundity, like germinating nubs of plant-life poking white-green from moist peat, from forking branches of branches. A colleague at school who worries about the end of the world has indeed verified that there has not been a winter so warm in Umbria in 156 years. Global warming, you betcha! Had Al Gore produced his film on the subject before the last election, guaranteed he’d be president today.
I am relieved when the bus comes and I can point to the “don’t talk to the driver when the bus is in marcia” sign as an excuse to take a seat toward the back of the bus by a woman I don’t realize is drunk, drunker than I’ve ever known anyone to be and don’t know her to be until she hands me her shopping bag and stands up only to realize that she can’t stand up. She hangs from the pole, stiffens her knees to hold herself up right, then her eyes close and she passes out for a moment while standing, jerking awake before she falls, murmuring words I don’t understand, smiling in some kind of communion with herself, closing her eyes, passing out again, jerking awake, again and again. There’s a well-coiffed older woman sitting across the aisle from me politely, her gloved hands crossed daintily in her lap. She refuses to look at either me or the drunk lady and I think it strange that we do not look at each other to acknowledge—with pity surely, with concern—what is happening right before our eyes, what we are living in this moment together as the weary, creaky-feeling bus makes its sudden twisty-turns up the hill. There’s something about night travel that’s so intimate: the insides of the bus lit up so fluorescently, all of us contained so tightly within, and so at the mercy of the driver and flukes of circumstance. For a funny, fluttery moment I want desperately to make eye-contact with someone—the lovely old lady sitting there so prim with pursed lips, the drunk woman whose head is lolling and eyes are closed, though she’s still smiling in her bemused way as though privy to something the rest of us can’t know, my friend the bus-driver whose forehead is visible in the rear-view mirror, but not his eyes where I can catch them, and find in them some reassurance of something small talk about the weather can no longer provide.
This is the way the world ends...
"...not with a bang but a whimper..." T. S. Eliot
An Inconvenient Truth
Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced. If that sounds like a recipe for serious gloom and doom -- think again. From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In this eye-opening and poignant portrait of Gore and his "traveling global warming show," Gore also proves himself to be one of the most misunderstood characters in modern American public life. Here he is seen as never before in the media - funny, engaging, open and downright on fire about getting the surprisingly stirring truth about what he calls our "planetary emergency" out to ordinary citizens before it's too late. With 2005, the worst storm season ever experienced in America just behind us, it seems we may be reaching a tipping point - and Gore pulls no punches in explaining the dire situation. Interspersed with the bracing facts and future predictions is the story of Gore's personal journey: from an idealistic college student who first saw a massive environmental crisis looming; to a young Senator facing a harrowing family tragedy that altered his perspective, to the man who almost became President but instead returned to the most important cause of his life - convinced that there is still time to make a difference.
All weekend it has been in the mid-sixties to low-seventies, weather completely unseasonable for January when the mountains should be capped with snow and our breath visible as we speak beneath the newly lit streetlamps. This is the second January I have spent in Spoleto when Spring has seemed to hurdle over all obstacles to arrive prematurely, even impossibly, a déjà vu that prepares me for the turn in my conversation with the young bus-driver: how scary it is— warm weather in January, surely evidence of global warming and the coming end of the world. Now that the sun has gone down, it’s not really warm, there’s a damp chill; I’m wearing only a fleece, and don’t need more, and it’s dampness more than cold that makes us hold ourselves tight to ward off shivers as though our bodies had already gotten the message that Spring had come and were resisting even the slightest dip in temperature. The air smells like Spring air, like fecundity, like germinating nubs of plant-life poking white-green from moist peat, from forking branches of branches. A colleague at school who worries about the end of the world has indeed verified that there has not been a winter so warm in Umbria in 156 years. Global warming, you betcha! Had Al Gore produced his film on the subject before the last election, guaranteed he’d be president today.
I am relieved when the bus comes and I can point to the “don’t talk to the driver when the bus is in marcia” sign as an excuse to take a seat toward the back of the bus by a woman I don’t realize is drunk, drunker than I’ve ever known anyone to be and don’t know her to be until she hands me her shopping bag and stands up only to realize that she can’t stand up. She hangs from the pole, stiffens her knees to hold herself up right, then her eyes close and she passes out for a moment while standing, jerking awake before she falls, murmuring words I don’t understand, smiling in some kind of communion with herself, closing her eyes, passing out again, jerking awake, again and again. There’s a well-coiffed older woman sitting across the aisle from me politely, her gloved hands crossed daintily in her lap. She refuses to look at either me or the drunk lady and I think it strange that we do not look at each other to acknowledge—with pity surely, with concern—what is happening right before our eyes, what we are living in this moment together as the weary, creaky-feeling bus makes its sudden twisty-turns up the hill. There’s something about night travel that’s so intimate: the insides of the bus lit up so fluorescently, all of us contained so tightly within, and so at the mercy of the driver and flukes of circumstance. For a funny, fluttery moment I want desperately to make eye-contact with someone—the lovely old lady sitting there so prim with pursed lips, the drunk woman whose head is lolling and eyes are closed, though she’s still smiling in her bemused way as though privy to something the rest of us can’t know, my friend the bus-driver whose forehead is visible in the rear-view mirror, but not his eyes where I can catch them, and find in them some reassurance of something small talk about the weather can no longer provide.
This is the way the world ends...
"...not with a bang but a whimper..." T. S. Eliot
An Inconvenient Truth
Humanity is sitting on a ticking time bomb. If the vast majority of the world's scientists are right, we have just ten years to avert a major catastrophe that could send our entire planet into a tail-spin of epic destruction involving extreme weather, floods, droughts, epidemics and killer heat waves beyond anything we have ever experienced. If that sounds like a recipe for serious gloom and doom -- think again. From director Davis Guggenheim comes the Sundance Film Festival hit, AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH, which offers a passionate and inspirational look at one man's fervent crusade to halt global warming's deadly progress in its tracks by exposing the myths and misconceptions that surround it. That man is former Vice President Al Gore, who, in the wake of defeat in the 2000 election, re-set the course of his life to focus on a last-ditch, all-out effort to help save the planet from irrevocable change. In this eye-opening and poignant portrait of Gore and his "traveling global warming show," Gore also proves himself to be one of the most misunderstood characters in modern American public life. Here he is seen as never before in the media - funny, engaging, open and downright on fire about getting the surprisingly stirring truth about what he calls our "planetary emergency" out to ordinary citizens before it's too late. With 2005, the worst storm season ever experienced in America just behind us, it seems we may be reaching a tipping point - and Gore pulls no punches in explaining the dire situation. Interspersed with the bracing facts and future predictions is the story of Gore's personal journey: from an idealistic college student who first saw a massive environmental crisis looming; to a young Senator facing a harrowing family tragedy that altered his perspective, to the man who almost became President but instead returned to the most important cause of his life - convinced that there is still time to make a difference.
venerdì 19 gennaio 2007
La Nebbia
My last address in Perugia was a narrow cobbled street called Via Nebbiosa or Foggy Street. It seemed an ideal street for me and Desiree to live on as it did not face a road with cars that could possibly run over her, but instead turned inward toward a courtyard though did not look directly onto the courtyard, but was rather to the side, under a little archway that served as a kind of tunnel leading into the courtyard that had a kitschy feel to it because a junk-collector had decorated it by hanging a dead bicycle from one stone wall, and an old rug with a Greek key from another, plus he’d set out big pots full of plants and had hung at least a dozen wind chimes that made a melodious racket night and day. My little street was only a few doors long and was aptly named because fog would get trapped under the archway and fill up the courtyard so that on most fall mornings I would open the door and feel mist rush in to envelope me and it did indeed seem to have a living presence that could possibly inspire horror films like “The Fog,” only my version would not be a horror film but more tender-hearted romantic. The presence I attributed to it was nurturing and consoling: clouds falling from heaven to earth just to wrap me in their splendors, cotton batting of comfort, or protective shield like the kind in MacBeth when men move through fog mistaken as trees, or cloud as magic carpet floating down to offer a ride or the mystic puzzle posed by Shelley in Mt. Blanc on the sublime, the whiteness calling forth from deeper depths projections of who we are.
One tends to forget about the glories of fog in the heat of summer, so when I moved to Spoleto in May I had no idea what foggy feasts awaited my terrace life at the foot of Monteluco where the fog settles sometimes for days and days at a time without lifting or burning off in sun. I can always find the Chiesa di San Rocco, its cupola and cruciform stony shape always visible to the right of my panorama, at night especially, bathed as it is in the orange-ish light of street lamps. I step outside and the dampness appeals to me, like stepping in a cool-ish steam bath, the pores of my skin grateful, my human edges softening—fog has a taste, has a smell, earthy and refreshing, like Ferretti mineral water, the kind too strong in mineral tastes for some tongues, but delectable for mine. I am like a child licking a snowball, sipping at the gift of warmer, cozier fog and there are days I think my progression through foggy places is significant, an aspect of who I am and the way I think, a mirror of the expansion of my inner world.
It occurs to me that my love of fog is yet another advantage of not owning a car. I do understand why people who drive through mountains live in terror of it and personify fog as a devouring beast, looming at the next wend in the road, its ghostly mouth wide open and ready to swallow the anxious driver whole. I forget about such dangers, until Daniela balks at a proposition for night-time adventure on the basis that no one in their right mind drives after dark in fog. Am I pazza? What am I thinking? Do I intend to kill us both? It is startling for me to even consider the limitations of not being able to maneuver through the night, but I attribute this misfortune less to fog than to the absurdity of owning a car when one could be hurtling through the glory of night- whiteness in a train with no worries, no constraints at all.
One tends to forget about the glories of fog in the heat of summer, so when I moved to Spoleto in May I had no idea what foggy feasts awaited my terrace life at the foot of Monteluco where the fog settles sometimes for days and days at a time without lifting or burning off in sun. I can always find the Chiesa di San Rocco, its cupola and cruciform stony shape always visible to the right of my panorama, at night especially, bathed as it is in the orange-ish light of street lamps. I step outside and the dampness appeals to me, like stepping in a cool-ish steam bath, the pores of my skin grateful, my human edges softening—fog has a taste, has a smell, earthy and refreshing, like Ferretti mineral water, the kind too strong in mineral tastes for some tongues, but delectable for mine. I am like a child licking a snowball, sipping at the gift of warmer, cozier fog and there are days I think my progression through foggy places is significant, an aspect of who I am and the way I think, a mirror of the expansion of my inner world.
It occurs to me that my love of fog is yet another advantage of not owning a car. I do understand why people who drive through mountains live in terror of it and personify fog as a devouring beast, looming at the next wend in the road, its ghostly mouth wide open and ready to swallow the anxious driver whole. I forget about such dangers, until Daniela balks at a proposition for night-time adventure on the basis that no one in their right mind drives after dark in fog. Am I pazza? What am I thinking? Do I intend to kill us both? It is startling for me to even consider the limitations of not being able to maneuver through the night, but I attribute this misfortune less to fog than to the absurdity of owning a car when one could be hurtling through the glory of night- whiteness in a train with no worries, no constraints at all.
giovedì 18 gennaio 2007
Night Station
I couldn’t tell what time it was because the station clocks do not work. Used to be the two on either side of the underpass heading toward the various tracks were set for different times, both wrong. Now the clocks have been yanked out of the plaster altogether and when one looks to see how much time one has to waste before the train arrives one finds only two crumbly, taped-up holes in the wall and is therefore left to one’s own devices. My train leaves at 8:21 and the bar and giornalaio both close at 8:00. When the bar is closed I choose the Sala Attesa or waiting room with its frescoed ceiling, partly because I love to study the two art-deco mermaid-angels, women with wings and fins, who seem to swirl around some kind of coat-of-arms I can’t identify, all swooshy in embellishments of blue, gold, lavender in intricate patterns that really don’t make sense but enchant me all the same.
When I stepped into the Sala Attesa last night there was a live naked lady dancing on one of the carved benches, dancing as though this is what one does when waiting for trains. She seemed Calypso, maybe, astonishingly beautiful, her black skin gleaming in the flickery lights behind shades, a happier woman I have never seen, surely a little drunk because she raised a paper cup at me when she saw me coming in and sang out “Cin Cin” in greeting, toasting me, as though I were welcome to the party that was now happening full blast. “Cin Cin” a man curled up in the corner not too far from where I stood also raised a cup to me, he obviously drunk, nearly passed out even, his cup sloshing a little as he pushed it toward me, his eyes not even opening. The dancing woman’s feet made a drum-like sound as she moved up and down the bench, Tom-tom, tom-tom.
A younger man in an oversized dirty coat sat on the bench across from the dancing woman and now and then would stand up and grab her wrist and try to pull her down toward him or reach up and squeeze an ample swaying breast and she seemed to love his attention even when she’d swat his hands away. Indeed, why would a woman dance naked in public if she did not want attention? What astonished me was how no one seemed to mind her nakedness, not the older man snoring obscenely on another of the benches, not yet another man reading a pink Corriere dello Sport on yet another bench, certainly not oblivious, but certainly not annoyed, not even me, though I certainly felt disoriented and not quite sure how I should behave. It surprised me that no authorities had urged her to stop, but then I began to wonder—who were the authorities? I’d once had a wallet and passport pick-pocketed in this station and, even with a police office right by the tracks, nobody seemed to know what to do about my crisis and I wondered would anyone know what to do about a dancing naked lady if anything in fact needed to be done.
At one point the young man started reaching for places that made even the woman dancing claim she was embarrassed. “Mi Vergogna,” she’d protest, whining a little, laughing a lot, as she’d topple in response to his insistent caterwauling while the half-conscious bum in the corner kept calling out to us “Cin Cin” and I made up my mind that I’d rather sit out on the marble bench alongside binario due in the rain than watch live sex acts in the waiting room of the train station.
It wasn’t too cold out, but was indeed wet, la nebbia or fog extraordinarly dense as it is this time of year in the valleys of hill towns when often one can travel miles and miles by train and see nothing but the white of what seems cotton batting tinged orange by the artificial lights that blink on at nightfall. Even on the tracks outside the station the fog was dense enough that I could hardly see who was sitting on the bench adjacent to mine, but if I looked across the track to the glass window in the door of the Sala Attesa I could see the warm light from inside and the happy face of the dancing lady appearing again and again as she moved up and down the bench inside, nearer and then farther away. She seemed to know I saw her. She seemed to look back.
When I got home, I was overcome with a need to dance naked, though I was grateful there was no one around to see what’s become of my body in recent years, not that I really did dance or even strut around naked, cold as it was, tired as I was, by the time I finally got home. Still, something like a dancer had come alive in me and I found myself inexplicably happy despite having had the worst of possible days as though the woman’s lack of inhibition were my own and I was now free to do anything at all with my life my heart bid me to do.
When I stepped into the Sala Attesa last night there was a live naked lady dancing on one of the carved benches, dancing as though this is what one does when waiting for trains. She seemed Calypso, maybe, astonishingly beautiful, her black skin gleaming in the flickery lights behind shades, a happier woman I have never seen, surely a little drunk because she raised a paper cup at me when she saw me coming in and sang out “Cin Cin” in greeting, toasting me, as though I were welcome to the party that was now happening full blast. “Cin Cin” a man curled up in the corner not too far from where I stood also raised a cup to me, he obviously drunk, nearly passed out even, his cup sloshing a little as he pushed it toward me, his eyes not even opening. The dancing woman’s feet made a drum-like sound as she moved up and down the bench, Tom-tom, tom-tom.
A younger man in an oversized dirty coat sat on the bench across from the dancing woman and now and then would stand up and grab her wrist and try to pull her down toward him or reach up and squeeze an ample swaying breast and she seemed to love his attention even when she’d swat his hands away. Indeed, why would a woman dance naked in public if she did not want attention? What astonished me was how no one seemed to mind her nakedness, not the older man snoring obscenely on another of the benches, not yet another man reading a pink Corriere dello Sport on yet another bench, certainly not oblivious, but certainly not annoyed, not even me, though I certainly felt disoriented and not quite sure how I should behave. It surprised me that no authorities had urged her to stop, but then I began to wonder—who were the authorities? I’d once had a wallet and passport pick-pocketed in this station and, even with a police office right by the tracks, nobody seemed to know what to do about my crisis and I wondered would anyone know what to do about a dancing naked lady if anything in fact needed to be done.
At one point the young man started reaching for places that made even the woman dancing claim she was embarrassed. “Mi Vergogna,” she’d protest, whining a little, laughing a lot, as she’d topple in response to his insistent caterwauling while the half-conscious bum in the corner kept calling out to us “Cin Cin” and I made up my mind that I’d rather sit out on the marble bench alongside binario due in the rain than watch live sex acts in the waiting room of the train station.
It wasn’t too cold out, but was indeed wet, la nebbia or fog extraordinarly dense as it is this time of year in the valleys of hill towns when often one can travel miles and miles by train and see nothing but the white of what seems cotton batting tinged orange by the artificial lights that blink on at nightfall. Even on the tracks outside the station the fog was dense enough that I could hardly see who was sitting on the bench adjacent to mine, but if I looked across the track to the glass window in the door of the Sala Attesa I could see the warm light from inside and the happy face of the dancing lady appearing again and again as she moved up and down the bench inside, nearer and then farther away. She seemed to know I saw her. She seemed to look back.
When I got home, I was overcome with a need to dance naked, though I was grateful there was no one around to see what’s become of my body in recent years, not that I really did dance or even strut around naked, cold as it was, tired as I was, by the time I finally got home. Still, something like a dancer had come alive in me and I found myself inexplicably happy despite having had the worst of possible days as though the woman’s lack of inhibition were my own and I was now free to do anything at all with my life my heart bid me to do.
mercoledì 17 gennaio 2007
A Sudden Boon
I wasn't sure I wanted to sit across from him. I had the dog in my arms plus the other things I carry and he was balancing a plastic plate on his knee, cluttered with broken ends of pizza crust slimy with greasy looking tomato sauce-- gross to me but delectable, I was sure, to Desiree whose nostrils were already twitching, her whole body alert to pounce or at least beg in her ear-piercing whiney way. The man himself I couldn't figure out. Ethnic, perhaps Middleeastern, crumpled, incapacitated in some indiscernible way, the air of a drooling derelict about him and of one who had taken up residence on the bus simply because he had nothing better to do all day than ride up and down the hill. That the only seat available on the bus was the seat I didn't want across from his seemed a kind of rebuke, a kind of dare.
I needed to sit because I was overburdened--with the dog, as I've said, and her cage and my computer heavy on my shoulder in its messenger bag also bursting with books and another tote bag with the thermos of soup I bring so I don't eat pizza the way the man now sitting across from me was still eating his pizza, swirling the crusts around in the ooze of orange grease staining the textured plastic of his plate and his fingertips which he would lick ever-delicately after popping the last bit of crust in his mouth. Desiree watched without whining and the man watched Desiree as though deciding mouthful after mouthful that he would not feed her anything. When there was no more crust to chew, he reached deep into his deep-pocketed parka and produced a liter of beer, Moretti beer, the man in the Fedora on the beer lable winking at me in a way that made me thirsty for beer though I never drink it. I imagined the man would ask me for a bottle-opener since he didn't seem to have one and I started taking inventory--had I brought my Swiss Army Knife? Could it be in my bag? Mind-reading the man waved the bottle at me as though to assure me he didn't need it, then feebly brushed the bottle neck against the arm-rest of the seat as though doing so would open it--pitifully, I thought; tragically, I thought. His face was so deadpan, so inscrutible, I could not even guess what was happening inside of him. Frustration? Disappointment? Helplessness? Determination? Boh! But before a second attempt, he turned his face to consider the window-sill, and then, looking first at me with raised brow, again made his feeble effort to dislodge the cap by brushing it against the windowsill. This time the cap popped, miraculously, the beer foamed triumphantly over the bottle-mouth, down the bottle-neck as the man's eyes seized mine--"Ta Da!"--and we both giggled--the delight was something, the communion, too, as though this moment of industry had been arrived at together, creating for us both fresh standards of the possible.
I needed to sit because I was overburdened--with the dog, as I've said, and her cage and my computer heavy on my shoulder in its messenger bag also bursting with books and another tote bag with the thermos of soup I bring so I don't eat pizza the way the man now sitting across from me was still eating his pizza, swirling the crusts around in the ooze of orange grease staining the textured plastic of his plate and his fingertips which he would lick ever-delicately after popping the last bit of crust in his mouth. Desiree watched without whining and the man watched Desiree as though deciding mouthful after mouthful that he would not feed her anything. When there was no more crust to chew, he reached deep into his deep-pocketed parka and produced a liter of beer, Moretti beer, the man in the Fedora on the beer lable winking at me in a way that made me thirsty for beer though I never drink it. I imagined the man would ask me for a bottle-opener since he didn't seem to have one and I started taking inventory--had I brought my Swiss Army Knife? Could it be in my bag? Mind-reading the man waved the bottle at me as though to assure me he didn't need it, then feebly brushed the bottle neck against the arm-rest of the seat as though doing so would open it--pitifully, I thought; tragically, I thought. His face was so deadpan, so inscrutible, I could not even guess what was happening inside of him. Frustration? Disappointment? Helplessness? Determination? Boh! But before a second attempt, he turned his face to consider the window-sill, and then, looking first at me with raised brow, again made his feeble effort to dislodge the cap by brushing it against the windowsill. This time the cap popped, miraculously, the beer foamed triumphantly over the bottle-mouth, down the bottle-neck as the man's eyes seized mine--"Ta Da!"--and we both giggled--the delight was something, the communion, too, as though this moment of industry had been arrived at together, creating for us both fresh standards of the possible.
martedì 16 gennaio 2007
Trusting their Guts
I have taken it upon myself to learn all I can about the lost art of haruspicy. It seems the practice the Romans most coveted from the Etruscan culture they destroyed. The emperor Claudius himself was a great believer, writing 20 some volumes on the art and establishing a college for training future haruspicers. The esteemed Universita’ degli Studi di Perugia was founded in the 13th century in part to establish a body of scholars and a methodology with which to investigate how precisely haruspicy—and other divinatory arts—worked. Indeed they must have worked. We are talking two millennia between the Etruscan practice and the founding of the university in Perugia (and that's without dipping back into the Babylonians). I just can’t quite imagine people going to the trouble to wade through a bloody jumble of sheep’s innards if they weren’t getting something out of it. In Piacenza there still exists a bronze model of a sheep’s liver used by the Etruscans as a map for reading a liver much as one might read a palm. This was serious religion—reading sheep’s entrails. The early Christian Church even secretly sanctioned the reading of guts to protect Rome from the Goths. Apparently the practice was not quite as powerful in the hands of Christians because Rome fell anyway. Still it is a lost art we may all do well to reconsider.
It is timely and fortuitous that my recent study of the Etruscans has led me directly to an entire body of literature on the ancient practice of gut-reading. I was feeling somewhat bereft of my morning horoscope after having made a conscious decision to overcome my habitual reading of the daily scope that appears automatically on my home-page. I am by nature credulous so that even when I tell myself I don’t believe what the horoscope is portending, I will nevertheless find myself throughout the day interpreting what’s happening to me through the lens of that small window of text imprinted on my dull pre-coffee morning imagination. January 12th, for instance, was proclaimed by my horoscope to be the most promising day for love in my entire 2007 outlook. Things had been looking rather dim for me on January 11th so this news revived my hopes. When I did not even hear one word from my beloved during the entire day, I found myself crashing into a kind of despair. Did that mean I was out of luck in the romance department until 2008? Of course not! It meant horoscopes are hokey, baloney, a whole lot of hoo-ey. Prophecy is always self-fulfilling or not. Why on earth was I making myself vulnerable and gullible? It was time again to consciously recommit to the eternal now and leave the past and the future to work themselves out as they will.
No sooner do I make my resolution than I pick up a copy of a magazine at the train station. It’s a lovely, somewhat serious revista called Focus Storia—a richly illustrated every-other monthly that focuses on specific themes in history, this issue devoted to everyday life in the Renaissance, replete with a detailed diagram of Bruneleschi’s Dome. My eyes were tired after a long day’s work and I wanted primarily pictures. But what should I flip to right away, but an article entitled (here I translate): From Babylonia to the Zulu—all the strange methods men have used to predict the future. I am not sure I can fit them all on a sidebar to this article, but I will certainly try. What is it with us—needing to know ahead of time what’s going to happen?
I imagined that haruspicy would be the safest of divinatory practices for me take up. After all, how likely am I to find a sheep to slaughter? I am squeamish. Even if I could find a sheep to slaughter, how likely would I be to slash it with a knife and run my hands through the bloody entrails? Surely I would balk and even gag—if not vomit—before arriving at any kind of prophecy about tomorrow. I considered my interest purely academic—after all the pursuit of divinatory knowledge is historically important, the reading of sheep guts especially so. I love reading about the rites and incantations, safe in the knowledge that I will not be the least inclined to fast for three days before taking my own sheep to slaughter.
But, alas, it must be destiny. I have discovered the art is still in practice though it has been updated for modern life! Now haruspicers read egg-yolks. I kid you not. I found a map. I found the rites. The prophets claim that reading egg-yolks is not as popular as reading sheep’s guts used to be; it’s hard to get as excited about cracking an egg as it once was for the tribe to ritually slaughter the sheep and then roast it over a pit for a feast. But egg yolks are no less viable as divinatory tools, are certainly handier and offer the same results.
As fate would have it, it’s Tuesday, a day I don’t take the train to Perugia, the day I also do my grocery shopping. I am out of eggs. I’ve a certain appetite for eggs. I don’t really believe in the reading of yolks and it's precisely because I don't believe that I have to experiment and see what kinds of outcomes result from my looking into them.
It is timely and fortuitous that my recent study of the Etruscans has led me directly to an entire body of literature on the ancient practice of gut-reading. I was feeling somewhat bereft of my morning horoscope after having made a conscious decision to overcome my habitual reading of the daily scope that appears automatically on my home-page. I am by nature credulous so that even when I tell myself I don’t believe what the horoscope is portending, I will nevertheless find myself throughout the day interpreting what’s happening to me through the lens of that small window of text imprinted on my dull pre-coffee morning imagination. January 12th, for instance, was proclaimed by my horoscope to be the most promising day for love in my entire 2007 outlook. Things had been looking rather dim for me on January 11th so this news revived my hopes. When I did not even hear one word from my beloved during the entire day, I found myself crashing into a kind of despair. Did that mean I was out of luck in the romance department until 2008? Of course not! It meant horoscopes are hokey, baloney, a whole lot of hoo-ey. Prophecy is always self-fulfilling or not. Why on earth was I making myself vulnerable and gullible? It was time again to consciously recommit to the eternal now and leave the past and the future to work themselves out as they will.
No sooner do I make my resolution than I pick up a copy of a magazine at the train station. It’s a lovely, somewhat serious revista called Focus Storia—a richly illustrated every-other monthly that focuses on specific themes in history, this issue devoted to everyday life in the Renaissance, replete with a detailed diagram of Bruneleschi’s Dome. My eyes were tired after a long day’s work and I wanted primarily pictures. But what should I flip to right away, but an article entitled (here I translate): From Babylonia to the Zulu—all the strange methods men have used to predict the future. I am not sure I can fit them all on a sidebar to this article, but I will certainly try. What is it with us—needing to know ahead of time what’s going to happen?
I imagined that haruspicy would be the safest of divinatory practices for me take up. After all, how likely am I to find a sheep to slaughter? I am squeamish. Even if I could find a sheep to slaughter, how likely would I be to slash it with a knife and run my hands through the bloody entrails? Surely I would balk and even gag—if not vomit—before arriving at any kind of prophecy about tomorrow. I considered my interest purely academic—after all the pursuit of divinatory knowledge is historically important, the reading of sheep guts especially so. I love reading about the rites and incantations, safe in the knowledge that I will not be the least inclined to fast for three days before taking my own sheep to slaughter.
But, alas, it must be destiny. I have discovered the art is still in practice though it has been updated for modern life! Now haruspicers read egg-yolks. I kid you not. I found a map. I found the rites. The prophets claim that reading egg-yolks is not as popular as reading sheep’s guts used to be; it’s hard to get as excited about cracking an egg as it once was for the tribe to ritually slaughter the sheep and then roast it over a pit for a feast. But egg yolks are no less viable as divinatory tools, are certainly handier and offer the same results.
As fate would have it, it’s Tuesday, a day I don’t take the train to Perugia, the day I also do my grocery shopping. I am out of eggs. I’ve a certain appetite for eggs. I don’t really believe in the reading of yolks and it's precisely because I don't believe that I have to experiment and see what kinds of outcomes result from my looking into them.
lunedì 15 gennaio 2007
Faces from a Tomb in Tarquinia
When my mother was dying she kept company with the Etruscans. We had moved her downstairs to the guestroom off the front hall where her bed faced a door that opened toward the winding staircase. Lying in bed she could see all the activity on the stairs through the transom, would watch all the comings and goings, and likewise we could peak in on her on our way down the stairs to see if she was still alive or had maybe turned into a corpse. She seemed atuned to our furtive glances as she always knew when to blink her eyes open and wave, “I’m still here!” When no one was moving up and down the stairs, she would commune with the Etruscans on the wall wrapping around the staircase, their faces in profile on a series of wood slabs representing the famous frescoes from the tomb of the Triclinium in Tarquinia. Dancers with lutes and lyres, twittering birds, cats seeking morsels, a joyous procession of the ancients sashayed continuously before her. Sometimes she would wiggle her fingers in a wave at the Etruscans, too, and giggle. I was never quite sure whether she was giggling at them or at herself.
My mother was thought to suffer a kind of dementia. What kind was never really clear even though doctors did MRIs of her brain and other tests that should have been able to detect such things. I thought she suffered from something willful—a stubborn determination not to cooperate with the world by engaging in its varieties of tedious discourse. How much more delightful to regress to some childlike realm of make-believe and whimsy. In a certain sense, I fully understood and was right there with her. It sometimes frightened me that I did understand and could see things through her eyes—what did such say about my own well-being? But certainly during her dying days, I was willing to go the distance, follow her feeble mind wherever it was willing to lead.
Once a week the staid Presbyterian preacher would come to call, usually after services on Sunday. He would stand politely at the foot of her bed in his preacher suit and collar, his back to the door and the transom, and ask her how she was doing and then perhaps say a prayer. One particular Sunday my mother seemed more inclined than usual to talk about her deathbed visions. She had been seeing ghost people and ghost dogs. I loved it! I would walk into the room and she would say, “Cindy, let me introduce you to Great Aunt Julia, the one I’ve told you about countless times, the one who died in the car-wreck at the intersection of Smith Avenue and Pinetree when I was in college? Well, that's her and, in her arms, that's her little dog, Sweetie.” The ghosts were so present to her, I could almost see them myself and hear the other side of my mother’s conversations with them and I’d begun to press the preacher about the spiritual basis of such visitations—they were universal, but what did the church have to say about them? He started to pontificate about the 23rd Psalm and the Valley of the Shadow of Death. “Yay, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death…” My mother was walking through the valley—that’s as far as he would take it. “But you don’t understand,” my mother tried to explain to him, nodding toward the transom he could not see. “I’m not going through your valley—I’m going with them!.” The preacher smiled the smile he reserved for the insane, but I got it! She meant the Etruscans. Somehow, lying there all those weeks, she’d converted to Etruscan, at least in so far as her beliefs about the afterlife were concerned.
I'm teaching the Etruscans this week--am off this morning to the well, this afternoon to the Archeological Museum. I've been reading Mary Johnstone's book on Perugia and it's People, fascinated by her whimsical approach to history. I love a historian whose favorite means of research is to stand by a sarcophagus and let it speak to her. I am going to let the Etruscans speak to me. Perhaps they will have news of my mother.
My mother was thought to suffer a kind of dementia. What kind was never really clear even though doctors did MRIs of her brain and other tests that should have been able to detect such things. I thought she suffered from something willful—a stubborn determination not to cooperate with the world by engaging in its varieties of tedious discourse. How much more delightful to regress to some childlike realm of make-believe and whimsy. In a certain sense, I fully understood and was right there with her. It sometimes frightened me that I did understand and could see things through her eyes—what did such say about my own well-being? But certainly during her dying days, I was willing to go the distance, follow her feeble mind wherever it was willing to lead.
Once a week the staid Presbyterian preacher would come to call, usually after services on Sunday. He would stand politely at the foot of her bed in his preacher suit and collar, his back to the door and the transom, and ask her how she was doing and then perhaps say a prayer. One particular Sunday my mother seemed more inclined than usual to talk about her deathbed visions. She had been seeing ghost people and ghost dogs. I loved it! I would walk into the room and she would say, “Cindy, let me introduce you to Great Aunt Julia, the one I’ve told you about countless times, the one who died in the car-wreck at the intersection of Smith Avenue and Pinetree when I was in college? Well, that's her and, in her arms, that's her little dog, Sweetie.” The ghosts were so present to her, I could almost see them myself and hear the other side of my mother’s conversations with them and I’d begun to press the preacher about the spiritual basis of such visitations—they were universal, but what did the church have to say about them? He started to pontificate about the 23rd Psalm and the Valley of the Shadow of Death. “Yay, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death…” My mother was walking through the valley—that’s as far as he would take it. “But you don’t understand,” my mother tried to explain to him, nodding toward the transom he could not see. “I’m not going through your valley—I’m going with them!.” The preacher smiled the smile he reserved for the insane, but I got it! She meant the Etruscans. Somehow, lying there all those weeks, she’d converted to Etruscan, at least in so far as her beliefs about the afterlife were concerned.
I'm teaching the Etruscans this week--am off this morning to the well, this afternoon to the Archeological Museum. I've been reading Mary Johnstone's book on Perugia and it's People, fascinated by her whimsical approach to history. I love a historian whose favorite means of research is to stand by a sarcophagus and let it speak to her. I am going to let the Etruscans speak to me. Perhaps they will have news of my mother.
domenica 14 gennaio 2007
Hearing the Bells
I’ve slept for months without setting an alarm clock. I wish I could likewise gather the courage to toss off my watch and send my cell phone careening out the suicide window of the aqueduct into the Tressino River Valley far, far down below. I’d like to learn to live by church bells, observe the hours, but not in the strictly religious sense once attributed to them. I don’t want, for instance, to freeze and recite the Angelus morning, noon and night, rote and verbatim. I do, however, want to stop, breathe deeply, listen to each peal or toll the way a Tibetan follows the vibration of a gong into the silence. Want to listen as though the dongs intoned were indeed, as the church intended them to be, the voice of God, calling the heart away from its worldly preoccupations into a moment of profound sentience. Like monks in a field who stop ploughing, or harvesting, or chatting, or doing anything at all, I simply want to believe there is a higher order to daily life than the drudgery we impose on it. I can stop when the bell tolls; it tolls for me!
One of the problems I have living by bells is that I still insist on their serving as clocks, find myself indeed stopping to listen to them, but falling straight-away into wondering what time it is, the wonder accompanied by inevitable twinges of anxiety when I realize I can’t keep count—the donging started before I consciously seized on it; who knows if it’s really ten; it could be eleven or maybe even twelve—the difference between ten, eleven and twelve hardly important on non-working days, the only days I’m likely to be listening out for them. Groping after coordinates becomes no more than a frantic exercise in staying world-bound, pinioned to time’s shadow rather than alive to an eternal now.
I know, I know—I am not utterly remiss in telling time by bells; after all, back when they were sanctioned by Pope Sabinian in 604 A.D. and instituted to keep the clockless punctual for Mass, they were indeed intended as a means of measuring worldly time. The use of bells specifically as a signal to pray or recite the Angelus was not prescribed until the Crusades and, for ages, one need only stop at noon. Many belfries delegate the Angelus to a separate bell with a distinctive tone for prayer-moments that parishioners come to recognize, though the tone-deaf or preoccupied might not discern. In Spoleto the Angelus is announced by a veritable orgasm of “change ringing” or endless clangings, mathematically calibrated to create a kind of tuneless song of transport. Morning, noon and twilight they sound out ecstasies of gratitude, praise, delight in being alive—and urge all listening to adjust their spirits likewise.
I had a transcendent experience with the Angelus yesterday as I found myself descending the Colle Ciciano where the road cuts right through Ponziano and San Salvatore. It was a day too glorious for January, warm and dazzlingly sunlit, and I’d taken Desiree for a long walk-run along the Giro dei Condotti that cuts across Monteluco midway up and weaves a few kilometers around the valley before descending steeply toward Spoleto basso. Dog and girl were living a kind of allegory of self-renewal, slipping from time to time on the gravel, bruising an elbow, rising stronger and more steadfast as we progressed through olive grove and sudden wonder of open field. I took a path I had never taken before—determined to be a little daring. I was not sure where precisely it would come out. How astonished I was to find myself face to face with San Salvatore and to be welcomed by its sudden explosion of noon-day bell-ringing. In the distance an answering campanello resounded in a lower octave. My body, already tingling with exertion of my walk, seemed to dissolve into the sudden bell-vibrations and I found myself weeping cathartically the way one does when one has had an encounter with Mystery—when the tears seem beyond self or time or personal history, but are instead a consequence of release from all that mires one in self, time, history.
Tourists and transplants tend to love the bells and associate them with the romance of hill towns. We grow disappointed when we become habituated to them, can’t hear them unless we’re listening out for them. It surprised me to read the other day about citizens in Sormano who once waged a war against a priest who rang the bells too vigorously. They’d faulted him with “noise pollution” and had won their case. The Bishop of Bergamo instituted new laws to suppress the ringing, dumb-down the volume, restrict the frequency, especially at night. I can’t imagine what was going on in the psyches of these people. I think we hear the bells when we hear the bells. When the music becomes an assault—well, I can’t say what’s going on. Thank God, I’ve never known such torture.
One of the problems I have living by bells is that I still insist on their serving as clocks, find myself indeed stopping to listen to them, but falling straight-away into wondering what time it is, the wonder accompanied by inevitable twinges of anxiety when I realize I can’t keep count—the donging started before I consciously seized on it; who knows if it’s really ten; it could be eleven or maybe even twelve—the difference between ten, eleven and twelve hardly important on non-working days, the only days I’m likely to be listening out for them. Groping after coordinates becomes no more than a frantic exercise in staying world-bound, pinioned to time’s shadow rather than alive to an eternal now.
I know, I know—I am not utterly remiss in telling time by bells; after all, back when they were sanctioned by Pope Sabinian in 604 A.D. and instituted to keep the clockless punctual for Mass, they were indeed intended as a means of measuring worldly time. The use of bells specifically as a signal to pray or recite the Angelus was not prescribed until the Crusades and, for ages, one need only stop at noon. Many belfries delegate the Angelus to a separate bell with a distinctive tone for prayer-moments that parishioners come to recognize, though the tone-deaf or preoccupied might not discern. In Spoleto the Angelus is announced by a veritable orgasm of “change ringing” or endless clangings, mathematically calibrated to create a kind of tuneless song of transport. Morning, noon and twilight they sound out ecstasies of gratitude, praise, delight in being alive—and urge all listening to adjust their spirits likewise.
I had a transcendent experience with the Angelus yesterday as I found myself descending the Colle Ciciano where the road cuts right through Ponziano and San Salvatore. It was a day too glorious for January, warm and dazzlingly sunlit, and I’d taken Desiree for a long walk-run along the Giro dei Condotti that cuts across Monteluco midway up and weaves a few kilometers around the valley before descending steeply toward Spoleto basso. Dog and girl were living a kind of allegory of self-renewal, slipping from time to time on the gravel, bruising an elbow, rising stronger and more steadfast as we progressed through olive grove and sudden wonder of open field. I took a path I had never taken before—determined to be a little daring. I was not sure where precisely it would come out. How astonished I was to find myself face to face with San Salvatore and to be welcomed by its sudden explosion of noon-day bell-ringing. In the distance an answering campanello resounded in a lower octave. My body, already tingling with exertion of my walk, seemed to dissolve into the sudden bell-vibrations and I found myself weeping cathartically the way one does when one has had an encounter with Mystery—when the tears seem beyond self or time or personal history, but are instead a consequence of release from all that mires one in self, time, history.
Tourists and transplants tend to love the bells and associate them with the romance of hill towns. We grow disappointed when we become habituated to them, can’t hear them unless we’re listening out for them. It surprised me to read the other day about citizens in Sormano who once waged a war against a priest who rang the bells too vigorously. They’d faulted him with “noise pollution” and had won their case. The Bishop of Bergamo instituted new laws to suppress the ringing, dumb-down the volume, restrict the frequency, especially at night. I can’t imagine what was going on in the psyches of these people. I think we hear the bells when we hear the bells. When the music becomes an assault—well, I can’t say what’s going on. Thank God, I’ve never known such torture.
sabato 13 gennaio 2007
Dante's Nose
I’ve been trying to write the story of Dante’s bones. When I visited his tomb in Ravenna several years ago, I became fascinated by the story of the Franciscans who had hid them for more than 300 years. Who were they? What greed or loyalty or enlightened passion prompted and sustained such subterfuge from good Catholics? Who specifically were the Florentine agents intent on stealing them? Who were the vestal virgins who kept silent watch, tending the mystery? Who finally uncovered them, under what circumstances, at what historically significant moment and what oh what had been the impact of discovery? Was Florence still after them? Did Florence still want them for the magnificent tomb at Santa Croce? Or had the Florentines given up, having arrived at an easy-enough peace over most tourists believing Dante’s bones are in Santa Croce anyway?
Dante’s bones, like Santa Chiara’s hair, like pieces of the true cross—detritus in terms of their materiality, seemed absurdly value-less, and yet how these relics move through history and impinge on the imagination, rouse spirit, convince the credulous, dissuade the skeptic, resonate regardless—have power. Even among those who shrug and smirk, it seems the issues surrounding them cannot be ignored and I loved that idea, loved the symbolic value of the bones, loved how elusive they were.
Early in my search, I was led to Dorothy Sayers, to the introduction of her translation of the Inferno. She she does indeed tell the story of how Boccaccio told the story of the bones in his early and first biography of the poet. But Sayers is less interested in the bones per se than in a curious hidden parallel. She begins her account with the story of how Dante himself had hid the last thirteen cantos of the Paradisio behind a brick in his bedroom wall, presumably because he was “made uneasy by what his offspring might make of his last three heavens.” According to Boccaccio, those cantos were still immured at the time of Dante’s death, but in order to rescue the poem for history, Dante appeared to his son Giacopo in a dream and led him to excavate the final moldy pages. Sayers writes of the bones that “the adventure was repeated, many years later, with the author’s own body, which became, literally as one may say, a bone of contention between Ravenna and Florence.” She then goes on to tell of the box and how it was excavated during renovations of Bracciaforte Chapel, much to the wonder of everyone. The friars had heard rumor of a hidden treasure in their midst, but who would have guessed it was the missing Dante.
I loved the idea of these “parallel adventures,” though didn’t know quite how far I would go in believing them and surely did not think anything worthwhile could come out of pursuing them. Life is filled with so many echoing ironies, but what can one make of them? Better to stick with the concrete? But alas, I am helpless before such mysteries—compelled by them to read further and further. So here I was with Dorothy Sayers, reading more and more about her relationship to Dante, her conversion through him from writer of detective fiction to translator and Christian apologist. She spent the last years of her life translating the Comedy, but died before she could finish it. Died leaving behind—the self-same thirteen cantos-behind-the-wall that had so fascinated her when she wrote her introduction.
For nearly a decade my story has remained frozen at the precipice of Dorothy’s own “parallel adventure” into a realm no words, or even imaginings, can possibly reach. I’ve always assumed that if I set the story aside, some prompt from a colleague or nudge of serendipity would call it back, put a new spin on it, make it again compelling enough to pursue. And indeed, finally, that moment arose as I was checking my email yesterday and saw right there, on the Yahoo home page, my story of the bones amid an article of “breaking news”: A team of researchers had found Dante’s missing nose!
I am humbled as Dante has been humbled. I am a convert to the concrete, my own “parallel adventure” having arrived at a kind of resolution. Why lunge headlong into the gaping hole of specious inquiry when it is possible to reach out and touch something palpable as a nose? At long last I understand the value of the bones and how crucial the interests were of those who sought them. Never mind the particulars of how the experts constructed—with such conviction!—the shape of a nose from what must have been a gaping hole in Dante’s 700 year old skull. Never mind that the nose was constructed from a "bootleg model." I trust the news, the expertise of scientists and am credulous enough to believe I see the true reflection of the poet. I believe I see Dante. Now possibly the bones can be tucked back in their little scattola so they can rot in peace.
Dante’s bones, like Santa Chiara’s hair, like pieces of the true cross—detritus in terms of their materiality, seemed absurdly value-less, and yet how these relics move through history and impinge on the imagination, rouse spirit, convince the credulous, dissuade the skeptic, resonate regardless—have power. Even among those who shrug and smirk, it seems the issues surrounding them cannot be ignored and I loved that idea, loved the symbolic value of the bones, loved how elusive they were.
Early in my search, I was led to Dorothy Sayers, to the introduction of her translation of the Inferno. She she does indeed tell the story of how Boccaccio told the story of the bones in his early and first biography of the poet. But Sayers is less interested in the bones per se than in a curious hidden parallel. She begins her account with the story of how Dante himself had hid the last thirteen cantos of the Paradisio behind a brick in his bedroom wall, presumably because he was “made uneasy by what his offspring might make of his last three heavens.” According to Boccaccio, those cantos were still immured at the time of Dante’s death, but in order to rescue the poem for history, Dante appeared to his son Giacopo in a dream and led him to excavate the final moldy pages. Sayers writes of the bones that “the adventure was repeated, many years later, with the author’s own body, which became, literally as one may say, a bone of contention between Ravenna and Florence.” She then goes on to tell of the box and how it was excavated during renovations of Bracciaforte Chapel, much to the wonder of everyone. The friars had heard rumor of a hidden treasure in their midst, but who would have guessed it was the missing Dante.
I loved the idea of these “parallel adventures,” though didn’t know quite how far I would go in believing them and surely did not think anything worthwhile could come out of pursuing them. Life is filled with so many echoing ironies, but what can one make of them? Better to stick with the concrete? But alas, I am helpless before such mysteries—compelled by them to read further and further. So here I was with Dorothy Sayers, reading more and more about her relationship to Dante, her conversion through him from writer of detective fiction to translator and Christian apologist. She spent the last years of her life translating the Comedy, but died before she could finish it. Died leaving behind—the self-same thirteen cantos-behind-the-wall that had so fascinated her when she wrote her introduction.
For nearly a decade my story has remained frozen at the precipice of Dorothy’s own “parallel adventure” into a realm no words, or even imaginings, can possibly reach. I’ve always assumed that if I set the story aside, some prompt from a colleague or nudge of serendipity would call it back, put a new spin on it, make it again compelling enough to pursue. And indeed, finally, that moment arose as I was checking my email yesterday and saw right there, on the Yahoo home page, my story of the bones amid an article of “breaking news”: A team of researchers had found Dante’s missing nose!
I am humbled as Dante has been humbled. I am a convert to the concrete, my own “parallel adventure” having arrived at a kind of resolution. Why lunge headlong into the gaping hole of specious inquiry when it is possible to reach out and touch something palpable as a nose? At long last I understand the value of the bones and how crucial the interests were of those who sought them. Never mind the particulars of how the experts constructed—with such conviction!—the shape of a nose from what must have been a gaping hole in Dante’s 700 year old skull. Never mind that the nose was constructed from a "bootleg model." I trust the news, the expertise of scientists and am credulous enough to believe I see the true reflection of the poet. I believe I see Dante. Now possibly the bones can be tucked back in their little scattola so they can rot in peace.
venerdì 12 gennaio 2007
Hesse Holds Up!
I don’t remember as much as I should about my youthful meanderings through Hesse; remember only my basement bedroom in Naples and the way the French doors opened to the garden and the kind of yellow plums with three seeds Agnello the gardener would bring me while I so stubbornly stayed all day propped up on pillows in bed fulfilling my book-a-day commitment …never budging, not even for meals, not even when I knew I should turn out the light and go to sleep because the school bus would arrive—Lord, I don’t remember how early, but early, maybe six. I remember the compelling urgency to get to the end of the novel at least before daybreak and remember especially (besides Journey to the East!)Damian, because of the god Abraxas, the god of good and evil—a god I’d never heard about in Presbyterian Sunday School. I still see the “Damian” my imagination mustered, looking strangely like the boy in Viscounti’s Death in Venice which the high school Italian teacher made us endure every year--androgynous, mesmerizing, the projection of anima and animus both—in this allegory of individuation based on Hesse’s analysis by Jung. I remember certain other moments of the other novels, but find them mixed up shards of stain-glass window glass, and can’t recall what shard goes with what picture goes with what book. Thirty years it’s been since I’ve visited these novels…more than thirty years! But yesterday, in the course of two train journeys, a handful of fragments came together in a mind-blowing way as I found myself finding myself in Peter Camenzind.
As you may recall, I’d ordered this first of Hesse’s novels because I’d read that it traces his journeys through Umbria and explores his love of St. Francis. There has been some speculation between me and my friend Michelle about his having written this book at the Villa Pambuffetti in Montefalco. As mystic-fate would have it, I must take students on a field trip to Montefalco next Friday, but was hopeless about the book arriving ahead of time. Long before Christmas I’d ordered several books from Amazon.uk that still have not arrived. I ordered Peter Camenzind last week and got home late from work Wednesday night—and eccolo…only Peter Camenzind has been permitted to penetrate the forcefield that has inhibited the distribution of mail in Italy since early December.
The chills began with the back cover blurb: “Peter Camenzind…seems destined for an academic post, yet he does not choose this path, but instead seeks enlightenment and self-knowledge through travel [in Italy] and worldly pleasure. But this salvation proves hard to attain, and it is not until he returns to his home village to care for his dying father that he can find the path that leads back to himself.”
Chills, oh chills, the sense of having been cornered by God and hit over the head by this book, by something I did indeed need to figure out. Hadn’t I been feeling torturously guilty all day about abandoning my father-- after assuring my boss I would be in Italy forever to fulfill our high-faluting schemes—guilty for leaving him alone (but he's not that alone!) in his old age (but surely he's not dying!) in Georgia while I frolick. How odd, too, that the ordering and arrival of the book, complicit with my "partner in Hesse" Michelle, happened during the week of her own father's death and her return to her "home village" Perth, in Australia. The back blurb radiated through me like “strange news from another star”—a phrase I use so often and have used since time out of mind to describe synchronicity that is particularly jolting--having forgotten until this very train-ride that Hesse himself gave it to me all those thirty years ago; it’s the title of a collection of his short-stories.
From Peter Caminzend’s attitude toward poetry, toward writing and being a writer, to his social unease, and romantic destiny with unrequited love, to the call of St. Francis and Umbrian hills, to his almost pagan vision of nature as the language of god, to his longing to read endlessly, walk endlessly; to the acutely believable development of Peter’s relationship and love for the hunchback…and the three deathbed scenes in the novel, the sensation of life draining out of his mother’s hand, the child Agi’s death, that perfect Hospice moment of surprise when Boppi dies and, instead of grief, Peter feels surprising joy…has anyone ever confronted such moments so directly? So honestly? So sincerely? Ever? And how rare to pick up a slim little book and find it working on all one’s own personal conundrums: love gone wrong-wrong again, the mystic lure of Umbria, what to do with an aging father, how to follow the muse, how to trust the writing, how to love when one is not loved: the perfect guidebook for my moment.
Where I’m confounded is: How could I have identified so powerfully with the book at 15, when I had not yet held the hand of someone dying, had not yet reached that middle-aged moment when “one learns to regard life as a brief stretch of road”? Was I formed enough in my thinking to know his was the kind of writer and life and passion I was destined to live? I am convinced that my interest in St. Francis began with Peter Camenzind, even though, until today, I wouldn’t have given Hesse nor Peter credit for that interest or for my living specifically in Umbria, but now I wonder. It’s not a mere matter of Hesse having “shaped” me. In whatever beveled mirror the book was for me at the time, I must have found enough of myself already there for it to crystallize, become confirmed, validated…encouraged enough for me to find myself living the story I live today.
I must write at least two more blogs on Hesse in the course of the next week: One on his identification of unrequited Love with Clouds. And of course Friday I will be reporting on his Inn at Montefalco.
In the meanwhile, dear friends, listen carefully for your own star’s strange news and pass it on!.
As you may recall, I’d ordered this first of Hesse’s novels because I’d read that it traces his journeys through Umbria and explores his love of St. Francis. There has been some speculation between me and my friend Michelle about his having written this book at the Villa Pambuffetti in Montefalco. As mystic-fate would have it, I must take students on a field trip to Montefalco next Friday, but was hopeless about the book arriving ahead of time. Long before Christmas I’d ordered several books from Amazon.uk that still have not arrived. I ordered Peter Camenzind last week and got home late from work Wednesday night—and eccolo…only Peter Camenzind has been permitted to penetrate the forcefield that has inhibited the distribution of mail in Italy since early December.
The chills began with the back cover blurb: “Peter Camenzind…seems destined for an academic post, yet he does not choose this path, but instead seeks enlightenment and self-knowledge through travel [in Italy] and worldly pleasure. But this salvation proves hard to attain, and it is not until he returns to his home village to care for his dying father that he can find the path that leads back to himself.”
Chills, oh chills, the sense of having been cornered by God and hit over the head by this book, by something I did indeed need to figure out. Hadn’t I been feeling torturously guilty all day about abandoning my father-- after assuring my boss I would be in Italy forever to fulfill our high-faluting schemes—guilty for leaving him alone (but he's not that alone!) in his old age (but surely he's not dying!) in Georgia while I frolick. How odd, too, that the ordering and arrival of the book, complicit with my "partner in Hesse" Michelle, happened during the week of her own father's death and her return to her "home village" Perth, in Australia. The back blurb radiated through me like “strange news from another star”—a phrase I use so often and have used since time out of mind to describe synchronicity that is particularly jolting--having forgotten until this very train-ride that Hesse himself gave it to me all those thirty years ago; it’s the title of a collection of his short-stories.
From Peter Caminzend’s attitude toward poetry, toward writing and being a writer, to his social unease, and romantic destiny with unrequited love, to the call of St. Francis and Umbrian hills, to his almost pagan vision of nature as the language of god, to his longing to read endlessly, walk endlessly; to the acutely believable development of Peter’s relationship and love for the hunchback…and the three deathbed scenes in the novel, the sensation of life draining out of his mother’s hand, the child Agi’s death, that perfect Hospice moment of surprise when Boppi dies and, instead of grief, Peter feels surprising joy…has anyone ever confronted such moments so directly? So honestly? So sincerely? Ever? And how rare to pick up a slim little book and find it working on all one’s own personal conundrums: love gone wrong-wrong again, the mystic lure of Umbria, what to do with an aging father, how to follow the muse, how to trust the writing, how to love when one is not loved: the perfect guidebook for my moment.
Where I’m confounded is: How could I have identified so powerfully with the book at 15, when I had not yet held the hand of someone dying, had not yet reached that middle-aged moment when “one learns to regard life as a brief stretch of road”? Was I formed enough in my thinking to know his was the kind of writer and life and passion I was destined to live? I am convinced that my interest in St. Francis began with Peter Camenzind, even though, until today, I wouldn’t have given Hesse nor Peter credit for that interest or for my living specifically in Umbria, but now I wonder. It’s not a mere matter of Hesse having “shaped” me. In whatever beveled mirror the book was for me at the time, I must have found enough of myself already there for it to crystallize, become confirmed, validated…encouraged enough for me to find myself living the story I live today.
I must write at least two more blogs on Hesse in the course of the next week: One on his identification of unrequited Love with Clouds. And of course Friday I will be reporting on his Inn at Montefalco.
In the meanwhile, dear friends, listen carefully for your own star’s strange news and pass it on!.
martedì 9 gennaio 2007
Dov'e' la Biblioteca?
Ah, how I used to love to get lost in the stacks, especially in the maze of Johns Hopkins’ Milton Eisenhower library, which seemed to tunnel underground even though there were windows, simply because only one floor met the quad and the others were half underground, half facing out of a hill. To arrive at the stacks, one boarded a heaving elevator that went down, down, twenty leagues under the sea. This was back in the days when there were smoking rooms and one could maneuver endlessly up one aisle, down another aisle, through one floor to another, accumulating a great heft of books to nourish the mind while one destroyed one's body with whole packs of cigarettes, vending machine coffee and Zero bars. One could go to the library with only the vaguest notion of what one hoped to learn, say about Thomas Browne’s Quincunxal Garden…and then find oneself meandering down the ever-forking paths of Borges or Eco, one prick of curiosity, one nudge, one aha of sudden insight spurring serendipitous discovery after discovery. One might go to the library as Virginia Woolf describes doing so in Between the Acts, seeking out a cure for tooth-ache of the soul. I think those were the most magical adventures: Not knowing exactly why one had come to the library at all, blind and as helpless as a mole working its way through those tunnels, and then coming across the gift, the life-changing miracle…as though guiding angels had left the book and only book that could serve the existential crisis of the moment and make one human again…or perhaps even lift one out of the human morass long enough to flap wings with the very angel of deliverance who’d swept you up, up and away.
What a drear experience it was for me to spend the day in one of Perugia’s libraries yesterday given how I romanticize such experiences from my past. First of all, humans are not allowed in the stacks at all. One enters the library through a series of mechanical doors reminiscent of that sixties television show “Get Smart.” One door slides open, another slides closed behind. Next one meets a dour woman who a sits at a desk, a ledger open, awaiting your identification number, which she copies neatly in a little box while scrutinizing you between digits to make sure your face matches the “tesera” photo on your library I.D. card. In order to find a book, you must know what book you are looking for and, furthermore, most know how to set up a strand of inquiry in the digital catalogue. Oh sure, it is possible to browse as I did yesterday, as I sought out texts in English on certain aspects of Umbrian life for my students. Problem is: there’s no way to specify “English” in the search criteria. I typed “Umbria” in a subject box and came up with 3, 749 titles, most certainly—obviously—in Italian.
Computers are recalcitrant beasts, subject to bullying freezes and pouty displays of slow down-loading. I am sure I sat wall-eyed by mine, perusing the list for hours, before I came up with two titles to check out: Walter Pater’s Renaissance Art and a monograph by a former Universita’ per Stranieri student on Etruscan dance, never mind that neither title would be in any way pertinent to my course. At this point I merely wanted to hold a book in my hands, smell musty pages, have evidence that there were indeed books in this library.
What one has to do to get a book is: write title and author and call number down on a pink form in triplicate, as well as your own I.D. number and some other codes I didn’t understand which the woman waiting at the desk had to write down for me while clenching her teeth and talking at me as fast as she could hoping that maybe she could discourage me from ever coming back. They were an interesting pair, the two women at the desk. The one filling in my missing codes, choking in a tight lime green turtle neck, her frizzy head of hair squeezing out of it, was all curt efficiency, spouting out rules to all patrons, pointing out forms and where to sit once the forms were filled out. Her pink-turtlenecked counterpart, who could have been a twin who'd straightened her hair simply to contrive a distinguishing characteristic, sat right beside her idly flipping through a ladies magazine. I had almost an hour to contemplate how these women had arrived at such agreement over the dubious distribution of their work load, because I had to sit in a little formica chair at least that long while some invisible soul retrieved my books.
The books did indeed arrive and the green-turtlenecked woman summoned me and explained that I could only check out the one that was published after 1951. The one on Etruscan dance she’d already checked out to me even though I hadn't had opportunity yet to decide whether or not I needed it. She was sending the Walter Pater up two floors to a woman who sat at the desk in front of the “reading room.” She pulled out a huge metal stamper that echoed loudly as she slammed the stamper down on each of the three tissue pages of the forms I’d filled out to request the books. For the Walter Pater, she ripped off a yellow page from the triplicate and told me I’d have to give it to the woman upstairs in exchange for the book and, when I gave the book back to her, she would then give me back the yellow slip…for me to keep in my files for the rest of my life to prove, should the book ever wind up missing, that I had not stolen it.
I went upstairs. I waited a half hour for Walter Pater to meet me there. The woman at the desk in front of the reading room called me even sweetly by my first name when it arrived. I signed the yellow slip and another ledger. The glass room where one can read reminds me of a room in the intensive care unit of a hospital. I spent about 30 seconds in there with Walter Pater, glancing at the table of contents, before I realized it was ridiculous I’d even checked him out: there was not one Umbrian artist listed.
“Sono veloce,” I’m fast, I told the woman when I exchanged the book for my yellow slip less than a minute after having gone through such hassle. “Va bene, Cinzia,” she intoned my name brightly as though we’d been working together all day and would be working together for years and years to come before I’d ever exhaust the possibilities she has in store for me.
What a drear experience it was for me to spend the day in one of Perugia’s libraries yesterday given how I romanticize such experiences from my past. First of all, humans are not allowed in the stacks at all. One enters the library through a series of mechanical doors reminiscent of that sixties television show “Get Smart.” One door slides open, another slides closed behind. Next one meets a dour woman who a sits at a desk, a ledger open, awaiting your identification number, which she copies neatly in a little box while scrutinizing you between digits to make sure your face matches the “tesera” photo on your library I.D. card. In order to find a book, you must know what book you are looking for and, furthermore, most know how to set up a strand of inquiry in the digital catalogue. Oh sure, it is possible to browse as I did yesterday, as I sought out texts in English on certain aspects of Umbrian life for my students. Problem is: there’s no way to specify “English” in the search criteria. I typed “Umbria” in a subject box and came up with 3, 749 titles, most certainly—obviously—in Italian.
Computers are recalcitrant beasts, subject to bullying freezes and pouty displays of slow down-loading. I am sure I sat wall-eyed by mine, perusing the list for hours, before I came up with two titles to check out: Walter Pater’s Renaissance Art and a monograph by a former Universita’ per Stranieri student on Etruscan dance, never mind that neither title would be in any way pertinent to my course. At this point I merely wanted to hold a book in my hands, smell musty pages, have evidence that there were indeed books in this library.
What one has to do to get a book is: write title and author and call number down on a pink form in triplicate, as well as your own I.D. number and some other codes I didn’t understand which the woman waiting at the desk had to write down for me while clenching her teeth and talking at me as fast as she could hoping that maybe she could discourage me from ever coming back. They were an interesting pair, the two women at the desk. The one filling in my missing codes, choking in a tight lime green turtle neck, her frizzy head of hair squeezing out of it, was all curt efficiency, spouting out rules to all patrons, pointing out forms and where to sit once the forms were filled out. Her pink-turtlenecked counterpart, who could have been a twin who'd straightened her hair simply to contrive a distinguishing characteristic, sat right beside her idly flipping through a ladies magazine. I had almost an hour to contemplate how these women had arrived at such agreement over the dubious distribution of their work load, because I had to sit in a little formica chair at least that long while some invisible soul retrieved my books.
The books did indeed arrive and the green-turtlenecked woman summoned me and explained that I could only check out the one that was published after 1951. The one on Etruscan dance she’d already checked out to me even though I hadn't had opportunity yet to decide whether or not I needed it. She was sending the Walter Pater up two floors to a woman who sat at the desk in front of the “reading room.” She pulled out a huge metal stamper that echoed loudly as she slammed the stamper down on each of the three tissue pages of the forms I’d filled out to request the books. For the Walter Pater, she ripped off a yellow page from the triplicate and told me I’d have to give it to the woman upstairs in exchange for the book and, when I gave the book back to her, she would then give me back the yellow slip…for me to keep in my files for the rest of my life to prove, should the book ever wind up missing, that I had not stolen it.
I went upstairs. I waited a half hour for Walter Pater to meet me there. The woman at the desk in front of the reading room called me even sweetly by my first name when it arrived. I signed the yellow slip and another ledger. The glass room where one can read reminds me of a room in the intensive care unit of a hospital. I spent about 30 seconds in there with Walter Pater, glancing at the table of contents, before I realized it was ridiculous I’d even checked him out: there was not one Umbrian artist listed.
“Sono veloce,” I’m fast, I told the woman when I exchanged the book for my yellow slip less than a minute after having gone through such hassle. “Va bene, Cinzia,” she intoned my name brightly as though we’d been working together all day and would be working together for years and years to come before I’d ever exhaust the possibilities she has in store for me.
Finding the Way Back
“Those who get lost on the way to school will never find their way through life.”
German Proverb
There was really only a block between my house and Cedar Lane Elementary School in Vienna, Virginia. It made sense that I should walk to school. There was even a crossing-guard with a cap and day-glo belt that cut diagonally across his torso to help me cross the street and a straight-forward expanse of sidewalk in countable “step on a crack break your mother’s back” perfect squares. Still I was drawn to the woods. Even in first grade I was drawn to the woods that seemed dense and immense behind the block of houses that faced away from them towards the civilized asphalt of street. Perhaps I had already stuck a big toe in those woods playing on a swing-set with Wanda and Brenda whose back yard brushed right up against them. I don’t know what kind of map I carried around in my head at six to believe that the woods were a short-cut. Did I have a capacity for birds’ eye views and geometry? Did I really believe that walking through them would get me where I needed to be? Or was I simply led by the call of the wild?
I soon discovered that the woods were an otherworld hushed up by the angels. The creek was on the wrong side of me somehow, the water gushing in the wrong direction, but the noise of that gushing sang out to me anyway, luring me deeper. I think I believed that if I kept walking I would eventually wind up at school. Cedar Lane waits for me, will always be waiting for me with its frightening bulk of red-brick and grill of windows sternly watching for me to arrive. I am no doubt too young to know geometry, too young to know that the path through the woods should be parallel to the sidewalks that run up either side of the block and therefore should take no longer or not much longer than sidewalks do, given creeks to cross and stumps to balance on one-footed. I do not know this and will soon discover that Time does not exist in these woods and the teacher can keep calling the roll over and over again and never get to “W” for “Watt”—my last name—and will never even miss me so I can keep kicking at pine straw and dead leaves believing that I am walking even when I am, happily, going nowhere at all.
First days of school always feel like that walk through the woods to me. I know there is a finite number of steps I should take between here and there, home and school, but I wake up not intent-enough on getting there, wake up ready for risky meandering.
German Proverb
There was really only a block between my house and Cedar Lane Elementary School in Vienna, Virginia. It made sense that I should walk to school. There was even a crossing-guard with a cap and day-glo belt that cut diagonally across his torso to help me cross the street and a straight-forward expanse of sidewalk in countable “step on a crack break your mother’s back” perfect squares. Still I was drawn to the woods. Even in first grade I was drawn to the woods that seemed dense and immense behind the block of houses that faced away from them towards the civilized asphalt of street. Perhaps I had already stuck a big toe in those woods playing on a swing-set with Wanda and Brenda whose back yard brushed right up against them. I don’t know what kind of map I carried around in my head at six to believe that the woods were a short-cut. Did I have a capacity for birds’ eye views and geometry? Did I really believe that walking through them would get me where I needed to be? Or was I simply led by the call of the wild?
I soon discovered that the woods were an otherworld hushed up by the angels. The creek was on the wrong side of me somehow, the water gushing in the wrong direction, but the noise of that gushing sang out to me anyway, luring me deeper. I think I believed that if I kept walking I would eventually wind up at school. Cedar Lane waits for me, will always be waiting for me with its frightening bulk of red-brick and grill of windows sternly watching for me to arrive. I am no doubt too young to know geometry, too young to know that the path through the woods should be parallel to the sidewalks that run up either side of the block and therefore should take no longer or not much longer than sidewalks do, given creeks to cross and stumps to balance on one-footed. I do not know this and will soon discover that Time does not exist in these woods and the teacher can keep calling the roll over and over again and never get to “W” for “Watt”—my last name—and will never even miss me so I can keep kicking at pine straw and dead leaves believing that I am walking even when I am, happily, going nowhere at all.
First days of school always feel like that walk through the woods to me. I know there is a finite number of steps I should take between here and there, home and school, but I wake up not intent-enough on getting there, wake up ready for risky meandering.
venerdì 5 gennaio 2007
The Hermit of Monteluco
Before I became acquainted with the hermit of Monteluco (known in these parts simply as “L’eremita”) I’d heard stories about her. Spoletini do not trust her. The religious bookstore in Spoleto basso will not carry her books. She is a “heretic.” She isn’t really a hermit because she has a car and actually drives into town now and then to buy things like toilet paper. Imagine! A hermit out shopping for toilet paper! No one really believes she stays up on top of the mountain during winter when snow would make it impossible for her to drive down. She is rather a theatrical figure, a poseur—not really a hermit at all, just a social outcast that had somehow hoodwinked the church into supporting her in an unorthodox fashion. At least people believe the church supports her. How else could she survive?
Daniela claimed she’d been to see L’eremita once years ago with her friend, Maria Sofia. Daniela wasn’t sure what she thought of her. She didn’t much believe that someone could sit alone on a mountain top and help other people and Daniela believed Christianity was about helping others, serving others; so yes, Daniela had doubts about the hermit. Plus the hermit does not like dogs and Daniela has four wire-haired dachshunds and had them with her, hiking through the mountain, when she and Sofia had first stopped by to see the woman. The hermit accused her of loving dogs too much and God not enough—of being an idolatrice, and that had rubbed Daniela the wrong way. On the other hand, Daniela had found her extraordinarily serene and so would not judge her. Perhaps she had found the path God intended for her, however suspicious it might seem to others.
I must confess I was dying to meet L’eremita and, early in our friendship, convinced Daniela to take me to see her. I was inclined to believe entirely in her calling and am solitary enough in my own inclinations—contemplative enough—that I’m always curious about what could happen if I pushed the inclination to its extreme. Here was a woman who had followed her star over the brink. Some mysterious crisis had happened between her and the church, one that both resulted in her ex-communication and status as “heretic” but had also, presumably, kept the church involved enough with her that they had supported her life on the mountain for nearly thirty years. I desperately wanted her story.
But getting the story is at least as difficult as driving to the hermitage. One certainly cannot walk there, up and across the mountain from Spoleto, or even from the parking area near Monteluco’s Sacred Grove (unless one can camp out somewhere for the return trip). And driving is a precarious enterprise of hair-pin turns, slippery gravel, no guard-rails, sudden chassis-banging dips and logs in the road. Even in Daniela’s rugged jeep we did not think we’d make it and she will never attempt the drive again. But how stunning the views from the cliff-edges one must traverse! One drives for maybe an hour believing it’s not possible to climb any higher or find vistas more encompassing. With each wend in the road one wonders more and more how anyone could live so remotely, lunatic or no, it would have to be a special calling, a special destiny, a marvelous intervention of circumstances to even arrive at the place on the geographical map, let alone at a state of mind that would enable one to hold fast to such aloneness.
At about the moment we were letting go of our own hopes of ever getting off the mountain (where would one turn around?), we arrived at a dead-end before a gate and spied the little stone house that belongs to the hermit. Indeed signs assure us we’ve landed in the right spot: Sacro Eremo (Sacred Hermitage), painted on a rock; a shrine by the gate with the words: Qui Dimorano Silenzio e Preghiera (Here dwell Silence and Prayer). The little stone house is perched truly on the edge of eternity, looking over vast, undulating distances of sky and green becoming purple Appenines.
Teresa Bertoncello (the hermit does have a name) built the hermitage herself, hand-picking each stone from the mountain. The house is completely solar powered, at least nine months of the year; the three winter months she lives by hearth and candle. It’s the kind of cottage one would imagine a crone to have, the shuttered windows and chimney, the herb garden and roses, slate paths that wind hither and yon among gnarled thick leaved plants we could not identify. The effect is something overgrown and root-bound suspended over an abyss. Someone gave her the land, a wealthy Spoletino. She has a benefactor. Who knows if it’s truly the church.
No one had mentioned anything about the hermit’s face—every inch of it burned and covered perhaps with skin-grafts that seemed more mask than skin; even her eyes seem to peer out of slits cut into a mask of satiny, patched-together crinoline. She has no lips whatsoever and the funny skin around her mouth is so tight that she seems a ventriloquist struggling to hide both her speech and the twitches of smiles she can never quite achieve. I’ve heard two different explanations for the fire that disfigured her: a bombola (gas stove canister) exploding; a car wreck. There are so many questions I would ask her, but one enters her presence and becomes stunned, still, sentient. Busy-mind, the hunger to rape and pillage for stories, dissipates.
What was most astonishing that first visit was how current she was with everything going on in the religious world-at-large. She’d read all she could of Elaine Pagels and the Gnostic gospels. She could speak cogently to all the hot-press controversies—the Da Vinci Code phenomenon, Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. Her heresy, she explained, was a result of her belief in reincarnation and the Holy Spirit actually being “Mother God”, Sophia. I thought: ah, a feminist, a woman who would be on the cutting edge of the liberal mainstream in the states. I had a sudden desire to introduce her to Cynthia Bourgeault, the Canadian, Episcopal Priest contemplative, who had been my spiritual director at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia; Cynthia a student of Thomas Merton. L’eremita, it turned out, is also a great believer in the teachings of Merton, contemplative prayer and in Lectio Divina. She was not, however, as liberal minded as she appeared. She believed homosexuals were “sub-zero” not even to be classed as human. She believed, also, to Daniela’s and my amusement if not shame, that our dogs were incarnations of condemned souls (we’d brought only two with us this time!)—which explained her mistrust and dislike of them, and perhaps also why Zizannia was inquieta in the hermit’s holy presence.
It wasn’t until the second visit that I earned enough of the hermit’s trust to be offered her writings to translate. The Hindu writer, Lakshmi Lal, was in Spoleto for the summer writing conference I’d, in the past, attended. My friend Anny introduced us and the three of us soon began dining regularly together and my earlier experience of the hermit came up. This time Daniela had no interest, so we hired a taxi (poor Salvatore—he had no idea what he and his Mercedes were in for!) and revisited, the three of us—me, Anny, Lakshmi. It was a beautiful, East meets West moment, with L’eremita actually bowing, with tears in her eyes to be graced with the holy presence of the Hindu writer-on-world religions. They discussed reincarnation especially, the difference between a Christ-centered approach to theories of reincarnation as opposed to Hindi. At this point L’eremita appointed me her official translator and offered me copies of all her works. What a monumental task I have before me, one I’m not sure I am prepared to undertake! But my art historian friend, Ann, who lives in Chapel Hill but spends her autumns doing research in Spoleto, assures me Teresa’s scholarship is sound: she knows her stuff.
“Scrivammi,” the hermit asked this last visit in July. Write me. I asked for her address. She looked at me a little smug. “L’eremita. Monteluco.”—easy.
Now and then I get a lift home up the hill from Salvatore-the-taxi-driver who drove Lakshmi, Anny and me up to see the hermit in July. He’s always got some new story he’s dredged up about why l’eremita must be a fraud. “No way she lives up there during the winter months. She couldn’t drive in the snow. She’d starve. She’d freeze.” I remind him that we did not see a car parked anywhere up there, did we? Can we imagine a woman that old, that feeble, driving those winding roads if he in his Mercedes and Daniela in her jeep had such difficulty? “Boh!” Salvatore scratches his bald head…and assures me he will get the real story for me one of these days.
I sit alone on my terrace every morning, staring at the cross atop Monteluco, imagining Teresa miles and miles across the valley living so happily in the ethers of her thought. “It’s a privilege to live alone with God, you know,” she’d proclaimed when Lakshmi asked her did she ever get lonely. “Not all are called to such intimacy or to such joy.”
Daniela claimed she’d been to see L’eremita once years ago with her friend, Maria Sofia. Daniela wasn’t sure what she thought of her. She didn’t much believe that someone could sit alone on a mountain top and help other people and Daniela believed Christianity was about helping others, serving others; so yes, Daniela had doubts about the hermit. Plus the hermit does not like dogs and Daniela has four wire-haired dachshunds and had them with her, hiking through the mountain, when she and Sofia had first stopped by to see the woman. The hermit accused her of loving dogs too much and God not enough—of being an idolatrice, and that had rubbed Daniela the wrong way. On the other hand, Daniela had found her extraordinarily serene and so would not judge her. Perhaps she had found the path God intended for her, however suspicious it might seem to others.
I must confess I was dying to meet L’eremita and, early in our friendship, convinced Daniela to take me to see her. I was inclined to believe entirely in her calling and am solitary enough in my own inclinations—contemplative enough—that I’m always curious about what could happen if I pushed the inclination to its extreme. Here was a woman who had followed her star over the brink. Some mysterious crisis had happened between her and the church, one that both resulted in her ex-communication and status as “heretic” but had also, presumably, kept the church involved enough with her that they had supported her life on the mountain for nearly thirty years. I desperately wanted her story.
But getting the story is at least as difficult as driving to the hermitage. One certainly cannot walk there, up and across the mountain from Spoleto, or even from the parking area near Monteluco’s Sacred Grove (unless one can camp out somewhere for the return trip). And driving is a precarious enterprise of hair-pin turns, slippery gravel, no guard-rails, sudden chassis-banging dips and logs in the road. Even in Daniela’s rugged jeep we did not think we’d make it and she will never attempt the drive again. But how stunning the views from the cliff-edges one must traverse! One drives for maybe an hour believing it’s not possible to climb any higher or find vistas more encompassing. With each wend in the road one wonders more and more how anyone could live so remotely, lunatic or no, it would have to be a special calling, a special destiny, a marvelous intervention of circumstances to even arrive at the place on the geographical map, let alone at a state of mind that would enable one to hold fast to such aloneness.
At about the moment we were letting go of our own hopes of ever getting off the mountain (where would one turn around?), we arrived at a dead-end before a gate and spied the little stone house that belongs to the hermit. Indeed signs assure us we’ve landed in the right spot: Sacro Eremo (Sacred Hermitage), painted on a rock; a shrine by the gate with the words: Qui Dimorano Silenzio e Preghiera (Here dwell Silence and Prayer). The little stone house is perched truly on the edge of eternity, looking over vast, undulating distances of sky and green becoming purple Appenines.
Teresa Bertoncello (the hermit does have a name) built the hermitage herself, hand-picking each stone from the mountain. The house is completely solar powered, at least nine months of the year; the three winter months she lives by hearth and candle. It’s the kind of cottage one would imagine a crone to have, the shuttered windows and chimney, the herb garden and roses, slate paths that wind hither and yon among gnarled thick leaved plants we could not identify. The effect is something overgrown and root-bound suspended over an abyss. Someone gave her the land, a wealthy Spoletino. She has a benefactor. Who knows if it’s truly the church.
No one had mentioned anything about the hermit’s face—every inch of it burned and covered perhaps with skin-grafts that seemed more mask than skin; even her eyes seem to peer out of slits cut into a mask of satiny, patched-together crinoline. She has no lips whatsoever and the funny skin around her mouth is so tight that she seems a ventriloquist struggling to hide both her speech and the twitches of smiles she can never quite achieve. I’ve heard two different explanations for the fire that disfigured her: a bombola (gas stove canister) exploding; a car wreck. There are so many questions I would ask her, but one enters her presence and becomes stunned, still, sentient. Busy-mind, the hunger to rape and pillage for stories, dissipates.
What was most astonishing that first visit was how current she was with everything going on in the religious world-at-large. She’d read all she could of Elaine Pagels and the Gnostic gospels. She could speak cogently to all the hot-press controversies—the Da Vinci Code phenomenon, Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ. Her heresy, she explained, was a result of her belief in reincarnation and the Holy Spirit actually being “Mother God”, Sophia. I thought: ah, a feminist, a woman who would be on the cutting edge of the liberal mainstream in the states. I had a sudden desire to introduce her to Cynthia Bourgeault, the Canadian, Episcopal Priest contemplative, who had been my spiritual director at the Monastery of the Holy Spirit in Conyers, Georgia; Cynthia a student of Thomas Merton. L’eremita, it turned out, is also a great believer in the teachings of Merton, contemplative prayer and in Lectio Divina. She was not, however, as liberal minded as she appeared. She believed homosexuals were “sub-zero” not even to be classed as human. She believed, also, to Daniela’s and my amusement if not shame, that our dogs were incarnations of condemned souls (we’d brought only two with us this time!)—which explained her mistrust and dislike of them, and perhaps also why Zizannia was inquieta in the hermit’s holy presence.
It wasn’t until the second visit that I earned enough of the hermit’s trust to be offered her writings to translate. The Hindu writer, Lakshmi Lal, was in Spoleto for the summer writing conference I’d, in the past, attended. My friend Anny introduced us and the three of us soon began dining regularly together and my earlier experience of the hermit came up. This time Daniela had no interest, so we hired a taxi (poor Salvatore—he had no idea what he and his Mercedes were in for!) and revisited, the three of us—me, Anny, Lakshmi. It was a beautiful, East meets West moment, with L’eremita actually bowing, with tears in her eyes to be graced with the holy presence of the Hindu writer-on-world religions. They discussed reincarnation especially, the difference between a Christ-centered approach to theories of reincarnation as opposed to Hindi. At this point L’eremita appointed me her official translator and offered me copies of all her works. What a monumental task I have before me, one I’m not sure I am prepared to undertake! But my art historian friend, Ann, who lives in Chapel Hill but spends her autumns doing research in Spoleto, assures me Teresa’s scholarship is sound: she knows her stuff.
“Scrivammi,” the hermit asked this last visit in July. Write me. I asked for her address. She looked at me a little smug. “L’eremita. Monteluco.”—easy.
Now and then I get a lift home up the hill from Salvatore-the-taxi-driver who drove Lakshmi, Anny and me up to see the hermit in July. He’s always got some new story he’s dredged up about why l’eremita must be a fraud. “No way she lives up there during the winter months. She couldn’t drive in the snow. She’d starve. She’d freeze.” I remind him that we did not see a car parked anywhere up there, did we? Can we imagine a woman that old, that feeble, driving those winding roads if he in his Mercedes and Daniela in her jeep had such difficulty? “Boh!” Salvatore scratches his bald head…and assures me he will get the real story for me one of these days.
I sit alone on my terrace every morning, staring at the cross atop Monteluco, imagining Teresa miles and miles across the valley living so happily in the ethers of her thought. “It’s a privilege to live alone with God, you know,” she’d proclaimed when Lakshmi asked her did she ever get lonely. “Not all are called to such intimacy or to such joy.”
giovedì 4 gennaio 2007
Piandellenoce
No one knows the way to Piandellenoce. There’s no sign announcing one’s arrival. On asking where it is, one might hear “a kilometer due south of Milano” and think of the real Milano, the city of millions up in Lombardy, instead of the borgo in Umbria, population less than 50. Piandellenoce (translates “plain of the nuts”) consists of only four houses—population less than 10!-- one of them uninhabited because of damage from the 1997 earthquake. My friends Michelle and Lewis (fast becoming “Michaela and Luigi”) live in “la casa rossa,” the red house, on a bend in the ever-winding road. You can ask a bus driver to take you to Piandellenoce and he’ll look at you like you’re nuts. You can ask him to take you to “la casa rossa” and he can tell you everything you want to know, not only about “Michaela e Luigi,” but about the brother of their surveyor, the man who did their plumbing, the cousin of the aunt of the woman who used to live there.
First, of course, you’ve got to get on the bus. You have to know which bus--the one to Montemartano--because no one knows about Piandellenoce. But even after the pert woman in the tourist office has written down the three times a day the bus leaves from Piazza Vittorio, you have to be savvy in figuring out where the bus will stop. My son and I caught it a month ago in the very place the APT lady told me it would be parked waiting for us in front of the bar. Yesterday I thought I had it down and went to the bar, bought my ticket, and stood there for hours missing the first two of the three buses. I’d ask drivers of other buses did the Montemartano bus stop where I was standing and they’d nod vigorously and say, “si, si, fra dieci minuti.” I’d entrust myself to those ten minutes again and again until finally some dear soul pointed me way across the piazza, across even Piazza Garibaldi, to the unmarked spot where the Montemartano bus whizzes by, stopping only if a knowing soul is standing there flagging it down. I made the 1:50 bus in the nick of time only because another woman was standing there doing the flagging;I’d been expected for pranzo around noon
There are many Italians, for that matter many Americans, who believe Michelle and Lewis are nuts for what they’ve taken on: They are restoring, on their own, an 18-room house that dates back to 1604 and had not even been inhabited for thirty years. The first time they took me out to see it, they warned: “Brace yourself, muster all your imagination.” Imagination was not, however, initially required: the house is situated like Tara on an amazing ledge of land overlooking an endless valley. Standing under the chestnut tree in the garden, one can point out each of several hill towns: Spoleto, Campello, Trevi, Assisi. Shift one’s gaze to the foreground and there’s Montefalco and a castle former prime-minister Berlusconi almost bought. The mountain ranges, the variegated greens in the hills in front of them, the undulating velours and tree-brushy textures—it’s a land-of-counterpane marvel. One stands on the brink of eternity gazing over a sylvan fairytale world. And from the outside, the house seemed—even that first glance— formidable, the façade of a country estate, countless windows staring proudly; a huge, arched, wooden portone, the kind that requires clunky keys on a leaden ring, creeking invitingly. It’s only when I opened the door and the steps crumbled beneath my feet that I began to worry. Every room was a pile of dust and rubble. No ceilings, no floors—the barest bones of a stone house I’d ever chanced upon.
I began to worry all the more when they claimed they would start living in the house in November, once the weather got cold, as soon as they found someone to wire at least one room with electricity and someone else to figure out a way to bring in running water.
When my son and I went out to the house for pranzo in November, I must say I was astonished. They’d established a multi-purpose room, had built a wood floor, had set up a kitchen of a small refrigerator and two-eyed hotplate. There was a wood-stove burning toastily in a corner and fire-wood to serve eternity stacked against a wall in an outer-room. They’d furnished the room with found objects: a bench that a few pillows converted to a couch, a table Lewis had dismantled, rebuilt and Michelle had refinished. I was most fascinated by the port-a-potty full of chemicals that did unthinkable things with human waste. At this point, they had electricity, but still no water. “You’re living the life of the Box Car Children,” I exclaimed. I’ve had that fantasy, since I was six, of finding a box car in the woods, and a pink cracked cup in the dump, and living off found things, without money forever. Of course, the house was a good deal larger than a box car and had required and still requires more money than anyone cares to think about, but still it had that wondrously cozy feeling of simply having happened.
There was even more serendipity. Since May, Daniela and I had been spending a lot of time with an elderly, spry, witty, delightful Danish woman named Bente. Bente now lives in Spoleto, but I’d heard stories of her married years to a Spoletino on his family estate, way out in the country. I’d assumed that she’d moved to town after her husband's death, because the house and isolation and commute became too much for her. How odd to discover, when I was out to lunch with her shortly after the November visit to Piandellenoce, that her house had been the one (still is; she’s never sold it) right next door to Michelle and Lewis’, the one that had been nearly devastated by the earthquake, one of the four stone houses in that impossible-to-find paese on the road to Montemartano. Once the connection was made, Bente stirred up even more magic. We all dined out together several times, a “found family.” Reports came in from Michelle and Lewis about their adventures in the neighborhood and surrounding villages. They knew everyone; everyone knew them—they were harvesting olives, learning to cut stringhozzi; neighbors brought them eggs and traditional desserts. You’d think they had lived there for years, generations.
When I struck out on my hapless bus-adventure yesterday, it seemed years--rather than weeks--had passed since I'd last been there. Michelle reassured me that it didn’t matter at all my being so late: in the time it had taken me to get there, Lewis had built a thick door and mounted it on hinges in a stairwell. The evolution of the place was astonishing: The foyer was now a library, a wall of bookshelves filled with books. The room with the wood stove now had a fancy oven, a cushy couch, pictures on the walls, music. Up the crumbly stairs is a real working shower and toilet and lavatory. They even have a washing machine. The wood stove us still burning mightly. The house is warm, so warm, and Michelle had baked rye bread dense with seeds and made a stringhozzi that would be the envy of the most expert casalinga.
“Nobody can believe we are actually living here. They keep bringing us things, just so they can get a peak and make sure we’re not scruffling around in a chicken coop.”
They are living one room at a time, they say. One room at a time. At the rate they are going, their intended bed-and-breakfast will be operational by summer.
First, of course, you’ve got to get on the bus. You have to know which bus--the one to Montemartano--because no one knows about Piandellenoce. But even after the pert woman in the tourist office has written down the three times a day the bus leaves from Piazza Vittorio, you have to be savvy in figuring out where the bus will stop. My son and I caught it a month ago in the very place the APT lady told me it would be parked waiting for us in front of the bar. Yesterday I thought I had it down and went to the bar, bought my ticket, and stood there for hours missing the first two of the three buses. I’d ask drivers of other buses did the Montemartano bus stop where I was standing and they’d nod vigorously and say, “si, si, fra dieci minuti.” I’d entrust myself to those ten minutes again and again until finally some dear soul pointed me way across the piazza, across even Piazza Garibaldi, to the unmarked spot where the Montemartano bus whizzes by, stopping only if a knowing soul is standing there flagging it down. I made the 1:50 bus in the nick of time only because another woman was standing there doing the flagging;I’d been expected for pranzo around noon
There are many Italians, for that matter many Americans, who believe Michelle and Lewis are nuts for what they’ve taken on: They are restoring, on their own, an 18-room house that dates back to 1604 and had not even been inhabited for thirty years. The first time they took me out to see it, they warned: “Brace yourself, muster all your imagination.” Imagination was not, however, initially required: the house is situated like Tara on an amazing ledge of land overlooking an endless valley. Standing under the chestnut tree in the garden, one can point out each of several hill towns: Spoleto, Campello, Trevi, Assisi. Shift one’s gaze to the foreground and there’s Montefalco and a castle former prime-minister Berlusconi almost bought. The mountain ranges, the variegated greens in the hills in front of them, the undulating velours and tree-brushy textures—it’s a land-of-counterpane marvel. One stands on the brink of eternity gazing over a sylvan fairytale world. And from the outside, the house seemed—even that first glance— formidable, the façade of a country estate, countless windows staring proudly; a huge, arched, wooden portone, the kind that requires clunky keys on a leaden ring, creeking invitingly. It’s only when I opened the door and the steps crumbled beneath my feet that I began to worry. Every room was a pile of dust and rubble. No ceilings, no floors—the barest bones of a stone house I’d ever chanced upon.
I began to worry all the more when they claimed they would start living in the house in November, once the weather got cold, as soon as they found someone to wire at least one room with electricity and someone else to figure out a way to bring in running water.
When my son and I went out to the house for pranzo in November, I must say I was astonished. They’d established a multi-purpose room, had built a wood floor, had set up a kitchen of a small refrigerator and two-eyed hotplate. There was a wood-stove burning toastily in a corner and fire-wood to serve eternity stacked against a wall in an outer-room. They’d furnished the room with found objects: a bench that a few pillows converted to a couch, a table Lewis had dismantled, rebuilt and Michelle had refinished. I was most fascinated by the port-a-potty full of chemicals that did unthinkable things with human waste. At this point, they had electricity, but still no water. “You’re living the life of the Box Car Children,” I exclaimed. I’ve had that fantasy, since I was six, of finding a box car in the woods, and a pink cracked cup in the dump, and living off found things, without money forever. Of course, the house was a good deal larger than a box car and had required and still requires more money than anyone cares to think about, but still it had that wondrously cozy feeling of simply having happened.
There was even more serendipity. Since May, Daniela and I had been spending a lot of time with an elderly, spry, witty, delightful Danish woman named Bente. Bente now lives in Spoleto, but I’d heard stories of her married years to a Spoletino on his family estate, way out in the country. I’d assumed that she’d moved to town after her husband's death, because the house and isolation and commute became too much for her. How odd to discover, when I was out to lunch with her shortly after the November visit to Piandellenoce, that her house had been the one (still is; she’s never sold it) right next door to Michelle and Lewis’, the one that had been nearly devastated by the earthquake, one of the four stone houses in that impossible-to-find paese on the road to Montemartano. Once the connection was made, Bente stirred up even more magic. We all dined out together several times, a “found family.” Reports came in from Michelle and Lewis about their adventures in the neighborhood and surrounding villages. They knew everyone; everyone knew them—they were harvesting olives, learning to cut stringhozzi; neighbors brought them eggs and traditional desserts. You’d think they had lived there for years, generations.
When I struck out on my hapless bus-adventure yesterday, it seemed years--rather than weeks--had passed since I'd last been there. Michelle reassured me that it didn’t matter at all my being so late: in the time it had taken me to get there, Lewis had built a thick door and mounted it on hinges in a stairwell. The evolution of the place was astonishing: The foyer was now a library, a wall of bookshelves filled with books. The room with the wood stove now had a fancy oven, a cushy couch, pictures on the walls, music. Up the crumbly stairs is a real working shower and toilet and lavatory. They even have a washing machine. The wood stove us still burning mightly. The house is warm, so warm, and Michelle had baked rye bread dense with seeds and made a stringhozzi that would be the envy of the most expert casalinga.
“Nobody can believe we are actually living here. They keep bringing us things, just so they can get a peak and make sure we’re not scruffling around in a chicken coop.”
They are living one room at a time, they say. One room at a time. At the rate they are going, their intended bed-and-breakfast will be operational by summer.
Iscriviti a:
Post (Atom)
