The Ebb and Coming Tide

I found Rome, as a city, somewhat disappointing--even the Sistene Chapel was something of a let-down after being ushered and corraled through the infernally long and cramped corridor which seemed to have something to do with the Vatican's ventilation system. Nonetheless, I was feeling good, and even religious for a few days. I had been reading Ugo Foscolo's The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, which was, by and large, pretty boring, but contained enough redeeming gems, like "Everywhere I look I see nothing but infinity absorbing me like an atom". And I felt this, and I started seeing this city filled with people as a mindscape where I was continually encountering myself or god or life itself, it is difficult to say exactly what was surrounding me and what was within me, but I was living in a more or less constant state of grace for those days. I visited many many monuments, but found myself more affected by the masses of people and scenes like a nun shopping for bras at a fleamarket stand which stood out alone on the street, than the monuments themselves. And how odd it seemed to me, a nun shopping for a bra, given that you can't walk into a church with exposed shoulders or knees, how repressed are breasts and markets within the papal policy while still playing such important roles as Mary is everywhere with the baby Jesus and the church has been a money-machine for centuries. And if two people started fucking in the middle of the church, would it tempt people to sway form thinking of God, or could it sanctify humanity? A boy with a broken keyboard slung around his neck walked from traincar to traincar, asking for money as the keyboard played "Ode to Joy" on demo mode. And I thought, what does he do when he isn't here? And, why the keyboard? Was it an insincere assertion of alliance with the goodness of song and energy or an attempt to create a more pathetic sight or the dumb habit of assuming the music can be exchanged as a goodwill good for alms? I cut the line to San Pietro's Basilica to see how I'd feel about it--no need to do it again; and in any case, waiting in a line can be seized upon as an opportunity to do any number of things--a free time of sorts.

I find myself walking into any bookstore I see and browsing the books greedily, wanting to read them all, to write them all. I met a guy in my hostel named Simon who was reading Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, and immediately became anxious of finding someone closer to realizing my ideal self than I have come, but got over it quickly. All the same, allies or enemies, to build or to lay siege--these are the basic thoughts upon encountering someone with some sort of potential value to me. As I said, more or less constant state of grace. The next day I was back to god and found it most difficult to see it in deceitful or sad things, whereas understanding that which was manifest before me and within me as life itself, the world, or myself, was much easier, though it wants a degree of detachment when it doesn't come on its own. In the pregancy of things, I saw the deceit of shadows and staircases; I saw the greif of clothes waiting to be sold and clothes that had been sold; I saw the joy of these as well, and the greed, and the dying. There were men selling flowers in the Piazza del Popolo, and I found a bouquet hidden by a statue and was tempted to steal it and give it away, flower by flower, to people so that they could give a flower to someone--to give the gift of giving. I though better of it, though, and let the men sell their flowers, not wanting to take bread from their mouths, and I didn't buy any flowers because I was attempting to live off of 7 euros per day and would have put me out of at least two days of food.

My last night in Rome was not to be my last night in Rome. My farm wasn't contacting me back, and I was getting nervous about where I was to stay. I began contacting other farms, but none needed me for at least another week, if at all. Finally, I got an e-mail back from Stefania, the owner of the farm where I had originally planned on working. The buses to the town closest to her farm were not running for the day, and so I waited it out in Rome.

I arrived at the farm and it turned out to be a beautiful agritourism. That night I thought I had a revelation in my dreams about ideas and spacetime, but quickly lost it in waking, and there was something about Hansel and Gretel and the concepts of German and American overlapping, and then there was a cat somewhere in it, which made me a bit wary because before leaving, James had told me he had a dream where an evil cat came to him and told him he was going to "get your friend Jake when he least suspects it". A mosquito bit my upper lip and I looked like a fool for a few days, which I found alternately amusing and embarassing.

Ideas were flowing, but soon I became inattentive to conversation, less interested in the world around me, even when we went to buy a peacock. For however much I disparage habit and will continue to do so, I recognise that I need it to a certain degree, though I wish I didn't. I felt myself losing sensitivity, maybe from the energies spent by the constant movement since Elba. I began getting frustrated with myself for this ebb, and began stretching and playing with my mind as I had on Elba, trying to snap out of whatever funk I though I was entering. The beginning of the olive harvest didn't help my situation, as I was too tired to think; I had lots of complaints. All of a sudden, or so it seemed, I finished a song I had begun on Elba. And the next day I wrote a poem. The influx of idea energy was revitalizing, and they made the days labor easier to pull through until I understood how to pace the work and became habituated to the fact of it. Things are on the up and up now. I'm satisfied with the poem, though, paradoxically, as I grow more perceptive, I find it more difficult to tell good from bad--I see more variables, more logics, and lose the desire to follow any single guiding line--or to blow things into grand proportion, I lose sight of any one hegemonic ideology.

Fresh olive oil is toxic green as it is pressed and a little bitter. Go to The Euphemist if you want to read the little song or the poem. Go to www.mariadonata.it if you want to see the farm. Go to the stairs if you aren't being have.

Perhaps Nero Was On To Something

On the first part of my trainride to Verona, I thought I had found the solution to the problem of continuity I never fully addressed in my thesis. How does a person live if everything is in flux, discontinuous? Pattern recognition. The collagation of similarities gloss over the profound difference between moment and moment. As recognition requires a recognizer and recognized, it would seem as though there must be a stable subject to be formulating these similarities. This is not the case, however, as the subject is part and parcel of the pattern, subject and object are one, and this pattern recognition, this creation of the continuous, is the pattern's cognition, recognition, and re-recognitions of itself.

Also on this train, I saw beautiful landscapes, which appeared unreal, as if the window through which I saw was actually a movie screen. Perceived beauty can often provoke the collagation of disparate elements into scenes, which puts a thin film between subject and object. Aesthetic perception will do this, will create this distance. Beauty encourages aesthetic perception with the pleasure of its sight, but ugliness does this as well, evoking displeasure and asserting the pleasure of its "opposite"; habit, however, may creep over either and ensconse it in its invisibility.

In Verona, I was hosted by Anna, a girl I contacted through the couchsurfing collective. Anna is a loon, a little scary and rather dense. I ask her a basic question, and she responds to the question before, the question that leads up to it--I try again and get a confused elaboration on the first response. But this is okay, she is giving me a free bed on which to sleep, and a roof above it.

I felt as though I had walked into the city to find it in its pajamas.

I planned to go to Venice for at least one day, but was battling with an illness that had been with me since spending time with the 11 month old twins. I thought better of the trip, and stayed in Verona drinking juice and watching movies.

I left Verona with an incessant runny nose, and went to meet Jan and Ilse Strick, friends of the family, in Cremona. They had rented a room for themselves and one for me in an out of the way azienda agriturismo owned by a young man named Alessandro. Alessandro, somehow, took an intense liking to me almost immediately. It is strange, this lighting recognition is happening more frequently with me than ever. I wonder to what degree this has to do with my simply encountering more people, the attractiveness of this grand trip I tell people I am taking, from which they might infer traits in me which may or may not exist, but which also would take more time to realize in other circumstances, or perhaps I'm just a charismatic guy, though this I have always doubted. Jan and Ilse fed me with some of the best meals I have eaten in a very long time. At one point, we went out with some friends of Jan's and ate a lunch with white truffles generously sliced over both the antipasto and the primo piatto.

I then left for Pistoia, to stay with Andrea and Carlotta and their amazing kid, Lorenzo. I had met them at Orti di Mare and then again at the music festival with Vittorio. They remind me of my parents in a way, and so I felt very relaxed and happy to be staying with them. I walked around Pistoia, stopping in on any church with unlocked doors. I thought how stange it is that people moved their gods indoors, cleaving their love from nature and looking solely towards the man-made world, a world that still is not their own. The stained glass windows help translate the natural god into the human god, and the vaulted cielings replace the sky, asserting the relations with god as better when conducted on human territory (though still properly god's, but in which humans can share ownership). That is, unless the church was designed as an institution fabricated to socialize and make more manageable the populus, as results within most institutional settings. Ugo Foscolo writes, "...every individual is a born enemy of society, because society is of necessity hostile to individuals." The church steps, then, do their best to seperate the man-made house of god from the rest of the human world, giving it to the abstract and ideational. The fact of a church is unfortunate. I have been revelling in meeting the world as though god/life and I are addressing myself and I am addressing myself as them to them. This does not know the boundaries of church walls. To not be afraid of or for the world, because it is god, because it is the world.

Now I am in Rome, leaving tomorrow for my final farm in Italy--two weeks of olive picking. Rome itself is dirty and makes me want to drag sacks of garbage into the museums. They are protecting their culture from itself, and maybe they wouldn't have to if they let the city burn a while. Perhaps Nero was on to something. Or perhaps this would be a return to the Dark Ages, but haven't we arrived already?

It seems to me as though the Church must place the most experienced priests and nuns in the churches most frequented by tourists; I imagine other minds less trained to meditate on the glories of the Lord would quickly lose sight of the divine as the simulacra spins so ferociously in front of them like a flaming wheel and lion's head. It makes sense that there are so many pedophiles in the priesthood, they are such sinners that in penance they have no choice but to become priests and say their Hail Marys until they can look at the choir boys without lust.

Careening from monument to monument, I was set upon by a Colombian man speaking to me in Spanish. He was looking for a friend or he was hitting on me, it was difficult to tell. We walked the whole day. I could have lost him in any crowded place, but I didn't want to be rid of his enough to do this, so I waited and told him I was going back to my hostel. He asked me to call him, I said I would, turned around, and left. What kept me from leaving him earlier? Some mix of compassion, cowardice, and stupidity. Probably also my stoic/masochistic desire to experience and understand that which repels as compelling, especially when it presents itself directly to me.

i avoid hostel life. dip my foot in to see if it is worth a swim. mostly it is not.

How I Am Becoming Verbose, or Less Reductive Reduction. I Have So Much To Say. I Have So Much To Say. I Have So Much To Say. I Have So Much To Say. I

The last days at Orti di Mare felt similar to my last days in Delaware; the ghostly detachment and neurotic restlessness were in my bloodstream, only not so strong as before. The grape harvest was exhausting, but luckily I had a few chatty companions--there was Chris, the newly arrived Scottish WOOFer who generously gave his ear to my rambles and declarations, and there was Olga, a Moldavian woman in town for the work, who took a shine to me and talked like the sweetest gossip you've known. The day was difficult largely because of my aching headache from a few small glasses of grappa (read: moonshine) the night before.

The day I took off, I grabbed a bottle of wine, ate my breakfast, said goodbye to Chris and Ambroggio (the only two awake at the time), and headed for the bus stop. And waited. And waited. For two hours. The bus hours had changed with weather, and the next bus wouldn't come for another 5 hours, which would put me in Florence at around 8 that night if I was moderately lucky. I pulled on my pack, headed to a large road, and stuck out my thumb. An hour or so had passed without a bite under the Tuscan sun. I was wondering when my beginner's luck would kick in, when a German couple stopped for me. They were headed to the wrong city, and I needed to get to Portoferraio for the ferry to the mainland. I stood with my thumb out for a while longer, waving at cars with a smile as they passed, because at least sometimes I could get a smile back. I sang to the empty road, too, hoping to bring the cars to me like the Grecian ships to the sirens, though this didn't work so well. And then another German couple stopped and brought me directly to the ferry, which departed only a few mintutes after I boarded it.

I watched Elba shrink in my field of vision and thought of the limits of my sight, and my thought, my body, as reminders of the terrifying largeness and wonder of things and potentials--indirect signs of the infinite all around me, including me.

I hit the streets of Florence after missing my bus by mistaking the arrival time for the departure time and catching a train to the central station, Santa Maria Novella. On the way to my hostel smack in the center of the city, I passed the Duomo, overrun by tourists and all, and stood for some while looking at it with teary eyes. So large. So thick with intention. So sincere. In short, it was an imposing beauty. I tried to read some of the architecture's dense text--noted the circles (heaven/nature) within other circles, father, son, and holy ghost, the 3 circles within a larger circle which is the whole damned family; the almond-shaped vulva of Mary, by which God gives birth to himself; the spirals towards the heavens in the vertical and circular time of Vico and the others living in Medieval Europe. What's more, some of these cathedrals contain decorations that were hidden upon their creation within the walls or columns of the church, for the eyes of God only forevermore. There was a point in front of the main doors where the central firgures of Mary and baby Jesus are looking and pointing down at you, saints and popes surveying the land in all directions, and you are dwarfed. How dangerous art can be.

The tourists seemed so ugly and unappreciative, which we are, but not only. I got to the hostel, sweating like a pig who has also climbed six flights of stairs with a pack one third its body weight. My bed had all the charm of a plastic bag, and the room had seven other occupants to whom I was forcefully indifferent, and happily so. I was in Florence. I went off in search of dinner, bouncing down the street with no weight on my back other than my shirt, walking around for a good long time and finally found a calzone for 3 euro. I squatted in front of the Duomo again and ate my calzone, thinking of Pound's banking conspiracies and Perec's commerce as culture as art. I walked more, not tired yet and wanting to more of the lay of the land, maybe find some cheap eats for the days following; and my eyes led my feet from restaurant to restaurant, consumed by the insatiable hunger of expected hunger. The streets at night are filled with Africans hocking sunglasses and purses. As the cops roll by, the Africans "hide" their wares, but there are no secrets, just farcical nicities and tenuous relationships. I commented to one of the vendors that they had a good system in place, he laughed.

The next day, I gave a half-eaten gelato to a man asking for money. He had come to me and I knew what he wanted when he stood in front of me and moved his hand out and began speaking. I said that I didn't understand, saying French or English? and this was perhaps a demand for further supplication. I gave him the cone of chocolate and strawberry gelato, my favorite part being the cone and gelato together in each bite. And I gave this to him after he balked a few times and then he asked for money again. I began habitually digging in my pockets for coins and accidentally pulled out a 2 euro piece. He saw it, I saw it, and I put it back. "Too much," he said--"Troppo," and I said yes, I only have 10 euro for each day. This to a man who may have a fifth of this to survive on, though I rather think he does well enough for himself with all the tourists around. I gave him 4 cents, the only other coins I had and he walks away, maybe muttering a vague "grazie." I feel cheated, angry, and then I think this must not have been generosity if I wanted something in return--I wanted to have him act as though I were a good person in exchange for my ice cream, and good will 4 cents of a euro. And giving my gelato, even, was a quirky manifestation of this--I didn't care whether or not I ate the rest of it, but I expected something in return for the gesture at the least. And was his action wrong? No. He asks and takes what is given; the interactions are that simple, "are you going to give?", it does not matter why, why should it? Actions are what create the social character, but these are opaque. The only reasons to give other than in exchange for some other thing, nebulous or immediately tangible, are the desire to give itself or indifference. I felt as though I was beginning to understand what my parents mean when they tell me my openness is wonderful, but to be aware that some people will try to take advantage of this, only it is not that I should be aware of being taken advantage of, but rather that I should be aware of why I am giving, what I expect in return, and the reality of this return. Karma or other religious figurations of debt and credit are cold comforts because of the dogmatic rule of them, though the release from immediacy is potent.

It is amazing how many people look at my notebook while I'm sitting and writing, as if they want to see what is important enough to record that they are not taking down themselves. And how many will look into your eyes without quickly averting their gaze, without passing it as a mere glance? I want to look at you, you are specific, and can I know you? You are surely a fount of interest, but can I see in this fascination something meaningful? The quickness of action, thought, and reaction is difficult to maintain, to smile or not to smile, to look away or fix the gaze.

I have the habit of seeing differences strongly--a woman is more a woman to me than a man is a man, a black person is more black than a white person white. I do not value these differences as less or worse than similarities, but I do see them more fixedly. This is how it has been, but I am feeling different, myself, and we are similar in being different. In this, I am not finding myself less fixed upon differences, but blurring the distinctions between differences and similarities, between my self and other selves in the mode of Rimbaud's "I is an other." There is something in this similarity in difference like the infinite in the limited, that which we cannot see being present in the horizon of all we do see--a wall, a face.

I wandered the labyrinthine streets without much trying to remember my way. The streets forgetting themselves behind me; and every return is thrown into a new light...

...Frescoes with center action, and secondary and tertiary action further from the physical center, but no wholly decentered scenes that I have come across so far. And the thought behind all of the characters' expressions, dress, orientation, action, is overwhelming--whole conceptions and schemes of the world and beyond on a square yard of canvas or building.

Calvino says, "the city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit the desire and be content...your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form [and you believe you enjoy it wholly when you are only its slave]." There is not enough time for desire to die. Instead of being ruled by this desire to rule and kill?, desire, I think I prefer "there is enough time" for desire to be desired, to feel and be felt. Still, there is not enough time to satisfy desire, and there never will be.

I got into contact with a family of Violin makers in Florence, the Vettori family. They took me in, fed me, gave me company, and housed me with such generosity that I could not imagine what I could give in return. I spent most of my time with Dario, who reminds me of James, a friend from Portland, in the way he laughs with his whole body, the little happy stubbornnesses, and the appearance, at times, of being at once completely entrenched and removed from social situations. These things endear him to me even more than his confounding generosity.

My last night at the hostel before ditching it for Dario's, I was talking with some boys and girls from America and some young women from New Zealand, finding myself very much apart. One boy began talking about terrorists and the so-called war on terror and his desire to "fight dirty" by killing indiscriminately. Nobody said anything. Was this happening? I began to respond and the room began emptying. The monologue had become a dialogue, and what is so boring and so sensitive as politics? It is understood as polite and couth to sweep the gorilla under the carpet and pretend it doesn't fart.

A kid on a motorbike with a sticker of the Italian flag on it brought to mind the force through which desire manifests itself in discourse--the discourses of cool, identity, exoticism (insofar as a sticker is an adornment), as well as others, I'm sure, give coordinates (vague enough), or rather loci, for where they can affirm and reassert themselves; that is, desire finds expression in these things which propagate further discourse and desire--and it is only through desire that discourse is propelled, both from within and from without.

The Florentines have curses for God, such as "Di'ane," which is a slur of "Dio" and "Cane," literally god-dog. Also there is the word questo for this, quello for that, and then there is the word codesto for this thing between us. Marvelous.

I walked around the outside of the Pitti Palace and the Uffizi Gallery, and remembered waiting for ages in that line to the Uffizi the first time I came to Italy with my family. It seemed as though everybody milling around just wanted to take a photo and leave--to "collect" the "experience", which taken in this light means less than shit. I imagine a renowned rock floating in space being visited by men in straw hats and hawaiian shirts and the American atomic family of the 50s in an old Chevy with fins on the back fenders and all; they travel miles, lightyears maybe, to see this rock which is so popular that at this point it is popular for being popular, regardless of its other qualities, even if it played an influential role in the way their people ordered their calendar or conceptions of beauty. A snapshot and they turn around and take off in the typical cloud of smoke towards home or the next spot to be recorded and verified. Recording in this case means buying and cataloging. I want to see how my writing is different from this, because I feel that it is. In writing my experience, recording it, it is incorporated further into myself in my expansion upon and evaluation of it. It becomes more by this kind of recording--a sort of interest on the moment. Usura (interest, as Pound refers to it in his cantos as he is working out his conceptions of banking, Medicis, art, and, conspiracy) is a retrograde entropy, whereby the world is becoming more than itself. But becoming more, or as entropy would claim, less, is impossible in the logic infinite infinities, differing differences.

I helped Dario with a speech he's going to give as an introduction to a conference or concert by Yo-yo Ma before taking off for Milan with an exquisite lunch he prepared for me just before we made a mad dash to the train station. Got to Milan and Monica picked me up at the station. There are waves of connection like we've known each other for years, and then waves of jarring alienation. Her father looks at her with such obvious pride, but she tells me this is too much to bear, too heavy to be the vessel for all of his joy--nobody wants to be loved that much. We get to her uncle's summer cabin in the mountains and you can hear the cows grazing, the sound of tubular bells as they move. Every thing in the mountains has a bell attached to it--cows, goats, dogs, churches. Monica had a guitar, which felt so good to get my hands on at first, and it gradually became more of an instrument in my hands, more of a vehicle than a toy, which made me more reticent to play in company.

At the top of every mountain was a cross, an attempt to anchor the heavens to the earth. I was seeing many signs, many omens--operating very much in the symbolic realm, which feels in tune and yet might be complete delusion. I don't think it was the altitide. Monica tells me about a man who is like a wall and a woman who is like a wall, and how they are like two walls facing, and I see the city filled with these stubborn lovers. She is blinded by her pain and says she hopes I will not encounter such pain. I do not want to believe that pain must be blinding.

We went to a museum and I acted the tourist, exhausting myself by not opening myself to the exchange of energies with the art. There were weapons decorated so that you can battle with Beauty on your side. We went to Milan's Duomo in all white stone and stained glass windows that were conceptually disjointed--one window was new and had the insignia of the bank that sponsored it at the bottom of the window, also in stained glass. There were local parishoners there, too, who lines up for the confessionals which were set up like bank tellers' booths. I asked why gargoyle and other monsters should adorn a house of God, but couldn't get an answer. Monica abhors the superficiality of Milan, but I tried to convince her that you can see depth in superficiality, and that depth itself is only a complex surface, but I don't know if it got through. We hiked up a mountain with her friend and her friend's twin girls in their stroller over Roman stone paths. It didn't seem like a brilliant idea to me at the time, either, but I was assured that it was much easier than carrying the kids, which later became evident as pattently wrong.

Vittorio picked me up from the town where we were hiking, and the two of us headed off to an Italian Folk music festival, which was not so impressive. I spent the entire night talking to two guys who had come in for the festival on a lark and didn't care too much for it either. The next day I caught the train for Verona and bumped into some people I had met at Orti di Mare. More on Verona soon...