Where Angels No Longer Tread

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

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

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

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

“It was dramatic” someone offered.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What dream? I wanted them to name.

They stared at me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invitation to a Canonization

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Death Rehearsal

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

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

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

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

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

prototype Bocca della Verita'

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

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

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

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