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.