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.