The Things We Carry

I will be packing up my books again, which is the bulk of my material possessions, so I mention them as a part for the whole, the synecdoche of my worldly existence. So, I will be packing up the books for a move across town.

It reminds me of the move that we made in Italy, but for all intents and purposes, it was a move I made across Italy. It was a huge transition from the limelight of being a visiting Joycean under the auspices of the esteemed Madame of Joycean Studies, Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli, a woman whom I hold in the highest regards and with whom I was humbled to be able teach with at L’Università di Bologna, to the study abroad program in Castiglione Fiorentino, where the now deceased Paolo Barucchieri led Italart, a consortium of universities established to explore and convey the Beauty and Art that Italy has to offer. It was a change. A transition.

We were living in Piazza Aldrovandi, in the best part of Bologna, in a fourth-story apartment overlooking the reddish, clay-tiled rooftops of a city that is forever deeply rooted in my heart and soul. A town I would move back to in a heartbeat, given the chance. It is a town with a Soul, deeply embedded in culture, cuisine, literature, philosophy, pride, and family. It, like Antwerp, Santa Fe, Austin, and Madurai, is a city different. It lives.

I was sad to leave Bologna, but equally excited to move to the hilltop town of CF, an original Etruscan settlement with equally rooted history and a highlight of a piazza designed by Vasari himself apparently, so this was no move downwards, but sideways, as is my current one, and ones I have engineered in the past. I live where I live, so it is paramount to me where I live, I love.

I loved Bologna and I loved Castiglione Fiorentino. I guess you could say that I am romanced by cities (though nature—Maine Coast, New Mexican back roads, American West, the Dolimites—move me just as much). I love a sense of place, a sense of Space.

When moving, my ex-wife was settled in Rome for the month for research purposes, so it was up to me to make the move from Bologna to CF, which was the norm. Being on the 4^th floor, with no lift/elevator, and about forty trips up and down to load the Furgone by myself, with the notion that it was parked illegally and I had to keep moving it to keep it “legal,” which in Italy is a loose term.

But, in addition to scaling Le Scale multiple times in the matter of an hour or two, meanwhile abating the howls and concerns of our two cats I had locked in the bathroom, soon, said two felines and myself were on the road in a rented furgone and on the way to a new chapter in my life, one that was both definitive in many positive and negative ways alike. It was the balance of the life we live.

Driving across Italy, with now two semi-docile cats and the feeling of change in the air, it was a bit daunting to drive into a very small, secluded, hill-top Tuscan hamlet to a dead-end street in which the van I had rented only fit with bring the mirrors in and a wing a prayer. I had only been in a tighter squeeze in Limone, Italy with a rental car in which literally I had about a ½ inch on each side of the car not to repeat a Chevy Chase “European Vacation” moment. That is not an exaggeration. It may have been a ¼ of an inch…

But, I and the kitties made the journey through beautiful back roads of Emilia Romagna and Tuscany, pulled into town with an entourage of village rugrats in train behind us, waiting to see if lo straniero could pull it off.  I did, and did not displace a single flowerpot of the flowerpot-lined lane.

I have moved quite a bit in my life, and even when married, I usually managed the majority of the move. I have packed boxes, lugged them and furniture up and down many stairs, hired many vans, and have seen my life parceled into boxes, enough to know that it is not the material, but the things we carry with us, to paraphrase Tim O’Brien, which make us who we are.

My life is changing, as it did there in Italy, from Emilia Romagna to Tuscany, but, when we remember the core of who we are, change is irrelevant.

Isola dei Santi e dei Savi

Joyce became known, for amongst other things, being a perennial exile from his home country of Ireland, an island that served as his greatest nemesis and mentor at the the same time. He could not have been who he was if it were not for Ireland, but because of Ireland, he felt that he could not be what he was meant to be. He was at an impasse and decided to leave his home country, and except for very brief returns early on, he never returned, though he also claimed to have "never left" the Emerald Isle.

One of the places that was a second home for Joyce, was Italy, though a very different Italy than most imagine, thinking usually of being pampered under a Tuscan sun or on Vespa-riddled Roman holidays.

Joyce was in Rome for a spell, working as a bank teller, and had a miserable time, never cottoning to the Roman way, leaving with a very bad taste in his mouth for Rome and Romans. It, unlike Paris and Zürich, would never really become his home.

However, the Austro-Hungarian bastion of Trieste would be where the young artist forged in the smithy of his soul his Irish story, and would remain an inextricable part of Joyce, leading him to name both of his children with Italian names, Giorgio and Lucia, and with whom he communicated in Italian for much of their lives, even when in Paris and environs.

Italian was part of Joyce, leading him to use his own Italianate name of Giacomo Joyce for the only "auto-biographical" work of sorts that shed some insight into the troubled soul of the artist as a young man.

When in Trieste, as a young man, working as an English-language teacher, Joyce gave lectures to a lifelong learning-type of seminar series, highlighting the political, religious, and literary history of Ireland that would both haunt him and be a perpetual fountain of inspiration for the rest of his life. Ireland, as Joyce called it for his Trieste audience, was the "Isola die Santi e dei Savi," (The Isle of Saints and Sages).

For me, what is interesting is the effect of exile, whether imposed externally or by choice, that it has on one's perception of a home country. For me, I have had a love-hate relationship with my own home country, at times never wanted to live there again, at other times realizing that for some things, America really is the greatest country on Earth. Strange how that push and pull can become so strong for some and not others.

One of the biggest reasons that I ended up in Italy, was in fact, James Joyce and the legacy he left there. I was invited by Rosa Maria Bollettieri Bosinelli at the time to be a visiting professor at the center for the Studi Interdisciplinari su Traduzione, Lingue e Cutlure. Many years ago Bernard Benstock donated an amazing library to the department there as a good friend of Rosa Maria, and since then, with her influence as well as the presence of Umberto Eco, also a prominent Joycean, Bologna and Forlì have been Italian strongholds of Joycean studies over the years.

While in Forlì, I did teach a class on the literature of exile to Italian students and then the following year I taught one to American students studying in Italy as an autobiographical "self-exile" examination. In both instances it was fascinating to see the Italians becoming more "Italian," while many of the Americans embraced Italy as a new home to a certain extent. However, when all was said and done, most people will revert to their home country, even if they have not been there. It is an amazing psychological pull that has caused much discomfort and troubled Souls over the millennia.

Like Joyce (and that is about as far as I can compare myself with him), I have found an interesting dilemma with living in various countries, at times regaling America, at times being repulsed by it. I went to a Fulbright reception here in Brussels on Bloomsday, which was indirectly and directly responsible for me being in yet another country as a result of Joyce, and it was interesting to hear about stories from foreigners who had gone to the States and those from the States being here in Belgium as a result of the Fulbright program, which stressed that intercultural ties were paramount to better understanding of cultures with the aid of so-called cultural ambassadors. Joyce was one such cultural ambassador as he delivered his lectures in Italian no less, (incidentally one of the reasons I began Italian, that is, to read his lectures in the original), and he painted a picture of Ireland that would be come the backdrop to all of his consequent works as an exiled Irishman.

Italy and Joyce and now Belgium and India have helped shaped and refine, sculpt and revise my visions of America and being American, so for this Joycean moment this year, I am reminded of what it means to be of and from a place, even when one is no longer there.

Oral Hygiene

One of the biggest surprises, and ultimately disappointing factors of teaching in Italy was the undue emphasis placed upon the oral component of the student's exam, and consequent passing or lack thereof.

What was most troubling, and it was rehearsed again while teaching in Belgium some years later, is that this aspect is so hard to criticize and therefor feels almost watertight, yet is so porous and disastrous to actually learning. But, as I learned myself, if you are going to teach in Europe, you better be prepared for the ritual of the orals.

Hmmm...it sounded kinky at best, perverted at worst. As an educational tool, this is one of the most controversial in my mind, but the Italian system is absolutely grounded upon it. The problem? They are all so well coached that they can make you believe that they actually are answering the question.

I taught in Forli for the most part, a sub-section of the University of Bologna, and every day that I would walk from the train station to the the campus building, I would pass several buildings from the Fascist era, and which were hardly veiled or re-configured because Forlì was a place where Mussolini was still highly revered with black t-shirt clad youths going to his grave every Sunday in the nearby cemetery to mourn Italy's loss. It goes on today.

So,  I would walk the mile or so from the train station and pass at least three of four major Fascist works of architecture and then go teach. The strange part of it is that the Oral, to me, at least, was the remnant of such times because you are encouraged to reproduce a coded (linguistically charged) message that is congruent with your comrades, in this case, your fellow students.

This, as an a American, was weird for me to say the least. In a very short time, I became both pariah and savior because of my approach to the orals. After the spiel that was delivered that every student had memorized, I then asked a different question to each student, in order to "go further" with the conversation. About a third just met me with a blank stare and left. Another third seemed offended that their perfectly rehearsed answer about Hemingway's time in Paris or Eliot's poetry was not acceptable to me for granting them the laurel wreaths of literature, and then there was the final third, of which was likewise broken down to thirds, more or less.

One third was offended and pissed off and threatened me with going to the "higher powers" to make sure there were no deviations from the norm.

Another third was intrigued, but sadly, soon enough exposed themselves to know so very little beyond their rehearsed answers that it was painful to give them lower marks, though I did, to merely say, thanks for playing the game.

The final third, which can always be rarefied into another tri-fold division ad infinitum, were the kids that realized, okay, I passed by the simpleton American that I can memorize, but then they were intrigued and we actually had a good conversation about the works, or about their own station in life, or whatnot. As I say, fractally speaking, we can always take it a further step, to break it down one more level. The coast of Britain shall never be measured if you take each stone and pebble and grain of sand, one by one, but you will get a good approximation. For me, taking those kids to a level beyond mere regurgitation was the key.

I Miss the Details

I miss Italy.

I have a rather stock answer to the question of "What did you love about Italy the most?"

My answer, "The details."

This was before living in India, where details are likewise what I miss most, but with Italy, it was the first time that I had been exposed to such minutiae of detail. It rocked my world, to be crude.

I miss the details of everyday life being important.

Now, is Italy the only place on the planet where this is possible, being some pseudo-Hegelian dreamland of hyper-Self-consciousness? No. I am not so naive, nor romantic, (though I am both), as to think that Italy and Italians have cornered the market on details and the appreciation of the finer things in life, but it is impossible to deny there.

On a daily basis, I would find myself wondering and wandering through virtual and literal labyrinths of details, details, details that if noticed, would enhance my daily walk through life exponentially. A turn of the phrase, or the turn of the Jamesian screw of finding the patterns in the carpet, the carvings of the wooden molding, the door handle, the figure of a plaster-caste Madonna peering out the window over an abandoned piazza in Todi, or a Turkish figure on Bologna's piazza San Stefano who looks suspiciously like my Yoga guru, Bekir, there is always something in Italy that grabs the attention, stimulates the imagination, and makes one realize how important an attention to details can be.

Do I miss the details?

No, not necessarily, but it is the awareness of them that I miss. This, again, is not to say that Italians stroll arm in arm through the day pointing out the details of everything around them, yet, at some level they do, or at least, their culture lends itself to that. Like India, there is a difference of Time and Space in Italy that forces one to stop, take notice, and to observe. You can react, or you can enjoy.

For me, Italy was a perennial celebration of the details in life. Living in northern Europe now, however, I find that people have no patience for the detail. As in America, (again, a gross generalization, and there is much about America I respect, miss, and appreciate, though patience is not one of them), here, one needs to have something yesterday. But, the appreciation of the process, the bringing about and the becoming is no longer, if it ever was.

Life is a process.

Life is details.

I miss that on a cultural level.

What is the Here and Now if we are steeped in the Elsewhere and Next?

I praise and curse Italy for this. Ignorance is sometimes bliss, but it is also hollow, and hollow men are already dead.

Non lo so...

Forza

I recently heard that Paolo Barucchieri passed away, so I would like to take this moment to pay my respects and gratitude.

Paolo began what would become Italart, the consortium of American universities, including The University of Texas at Austin, and which would be a temporary home and in situ living campus for thousands of students for nearly 40 years.

Paolo had a passion for Art, for the History of Art, for the production of Art, for the appreciation of Art, for the Beauty of Art. Paolo was already part of a dying breed of amateurs, those who Love merely for the sake of loving, and not gaining, and with his passing, that breed loses a true adherent to Beauty and Art.

Italart eventually found its resting place in the old girls' school of Santa Chiara in a small hillside Tuscan town of Castiglion Fiorentino, which is where I had the great fortune to be a recipient of the vision that Paolo had of establishing a study-abroad campus whose sole function it was to inspire, to challenge, to fascinate, and to bring a sense of Art to the lives of the students and faculty who took part in Italart.

Although Paolo was already becoming the wizened wizard behind the scenes at Italart when we were there, he and his family were the backbone and Soul of the organization. I remember fondly the times spent with him and Sharon, Garnette, Gianfranco, Marco, Debbie, Antonella, and the many people who made up the extended family of Italart.

Paolo was not shy about his ideological view towards Art and its ability to transcend and to lift one's Soul above and beyond the physical world of mundane life. An artist himself, he truly believed in the magical power of Art and the mystery of its creation and the power of its Beauty. He strove to instill that wonder in his students and fellow colleagues, even at the expense of alienating them, should they have more pragmatic or materialist views. He held his ground, if not stubbornly at times, then with Passion.

With Poalo's death, the small community of Castiglion Fiorentino loses both a patriarch of the Humanities as well as a cherished son of its culture.

My condolences to the Barucchieri family and to the extended family of thousands of students and faculty who were touched by the indelible mark of Paolo's vision and dream of Italart.

Grazie Paolo, e forza...

The Tides of March

Rome is called the Eternal City.

It is quite a boast, and one whose claim can never be truly confirmed, nor refuted, for over Time, we shall all pass this way along a journey, but the journey, and Rome may continue forever.

While teaching for the in situ study-abroad program some years ago, Rome, naturally, was a port of call for the trip. Over the years, I have been to Rome several times, and each time have come to love it more, despite a less than savory first experience with it some 25 years ago. But, just as with all things in life, to determine something by a singularity is premature and incomplete. As Judy Collins said of the suicide death of her son, one should not be remembered for how he died, but for his life. My good friend brought to my attention a quote about the Greeks, saying,

Greeks didn’t have obituaries.

They asked one question-

Did he have passion?

This is a good summary, however urban legend it may sound, and does reflect a sentiment within ancient Greek philosophy that it was the Quality of life that was ultimately important. The Greeks, as we know from Thucydides, loved a good funeral oration, however, something that the Romans were not foolish enough to give up once they had conquered the Greek world.

Romans, however, certainly did have obituaries of sorts, and monuments, and lots of ritualized ways to remember the Dead.

A funny thing happened on the way through the Forum though, and funny in a peculiar way as I did not expect it. About a third of the way into the Forum, if you are entering from the Arch of Septimius Severus at the base of the Capitoline Hill, then you will find a memorial to Julius Caesar, which, to my surprise, is still decorated regularly. I was reminded of Caesar yesterday from the famous lines uttered by the Shakespearean Soothsayer to “beware the Ides of March.” And, it did remind me of walking through the forum and standing at the purported spot where Caesar was stabbed and killed by his fellow statesmen of Rome.

I will be very honest, it moved me.

I was further reminded of this today, during Belgium’s official National Day of Mourning for the bus accident victims from Sierre, Switzerland on the way home from a ski trip. The lines above are from “The Tragedy of Julius Caesar” and the nation I currently live in mourns a tragedy of another sort.

I remember really feeling the history of the forum and especially the events of the assassination of Caesar, who had been perceived as forgetting the Primary Dictum that Momento Mori,  “You are Mortal.” Caesar’s crime against humanity was that he began to think that he was no longer part of humanity, that perhaps, he was Immortal, and Divine. And, he was killed for that ambition. Though, in the words of Shakespeare’s Mark Antony, becoming one of the most famous utterances in the history of the English language as he bid his fellow countrymen to listen to his oration of the Death of the Man, Caesar:

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; 
I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. 
The evil that men do lives after them; 
The good is oft interred with their bones; 
So let it be with Caesar.

It is interesting that often it is the Evil that lives on, despite the balance of the Good, whereas both are ill-calculated, and ill-fated, for there is also a Sum.

Fickle are the Winds of Change and fickle are the Sea Changes of Time, and the memory of what men and women do can often determine, for better or for worse, the Tides of ones fortunes and failures. But, again, this can be myopic at best.

Spring has sprung here in Belgium, and with it, the promise of Life, even in the face of Death. From the Death of Caesar sprung what would become a very powerful reign of Octavius, ultimately Augustus, considered by many to be the one of the only true living paradigms of the elusive and ideological Platonic Philosopher King (though not nearly to the extent of Marcus Aurelius), thus securing the role of the Emperor for many centuries to come, perhaps mores so had Caesar not been murdered. Though that, is mere speculation, which leaves us nonce the richer.

Rome is the Eternal City in some respects, because the Past, Present, and Future all coming crashing together in the forum to some degree. It was hard not to feel the presence of Time flowing and ebbing through the ruins. But, ultimately, all does come to that, the ruins eroded by Time .

Today, and for quite some time now I suspect, people will be visiting the site of the crash, or visiting some physical marker in the towns from where the victims hailed, for we, as humans, seem to need a Place associated with an event, to be in situ of tragedy, when the answers seem so elusive and fleeting.

Beware the Ides of March, indeed, and hearken the portents and omens of living well, though, the Tides of Time will never cease, on into eternity. 

The Fire Sermon

Winter kept us warm...

The coldest winter that I have spent somewhere was in Castiglione Fiorentino, by far. We were living in a second-story stone apartment that overlooked the Val di Chio, which meant that there was nothing between us and the cold winds whipping up and down the valley. Thanks to Francis Mays runaway hit and the consequent movie Under The Tuscan Sun, set in the neighboring town of Cortona, people have the gravely mistaken image that living in Tuscany means just that, under the sun. However, when winter comes calling in the Tuscan hillside, you better take note. It is cold, bitter cold.

The heating for the apartment was radiant, fueled by gas-filled bombale. These were heavy, heavy metal canisters about three and a half feet high, and weighed a small ton when empty, and slightly more than a small ton when full. There was a man in town who over the course of time became fondly known to me as the bombala man.

During the summer I had to pass his shop every day on my way to the pool at the bottom of the hill. Every day I said, “ciao” and every day he shrugged his shoulders and made a slight unintelligible grunt, and not a friendly one at that. This charade went on for quite some time. He was gruff, immensely pot-bellied, unkempt, usually wearing a “wife-beater” soiled t-shirt, his pants were always unzipped, and he had perhaps two or three remaining usable teeth, “usable” being generous by comparison.

As the summer eventually turned to fall, the weather soon began to turn towards the harbingers of winter as well, the autumn being surprisingly truncated. The Tuscan summer was over without a trace by late September. The evenings became cooler, all of the long overripe figs had all fallen as well as the leaves, and the fig-eating yellow jackets were zooming no more. Winter was indeed coming. The large orange muppet-like cat next door was getting fatter and fatter on the pasta that was put out for him, and the days began to shorten.

Then there was the bad weather as Papa Hemingway once wrote. And, in many ways also, it was a winter of our discontents.

I had only needed to get bombole a handful of times the entire duration of the fall, and I had always asked the people at the school to call someone to bring them. But, it was never the bombala man who delivered them. I didn’t really put two and two together until one day, my usual bombale supplier was not available, and it was getting cold, really cold, so I stood tall, and braved the cold and went to the bombala man. His shop was a menagerie of rusted out bicycles needing repair, piles of oily rags, lots of bombale and every kind of metallic knick-knack that you would imagine filling a small-town Italian repair shop, read junk.

I asked him then if he had bombale, and suddenly the universe that was his toothless mouth opened up in a broad smile and his bloodshot eyes widened with something akin to delight. In an effusive gush of Tuscan dialect, warped and garbled by the lack of teeth, he said something that I never understood, and never really understood him afterwards, but I realized that on that day, I had a new friend. It turned out that there was a rivalry with the other bombola supplier who had usurped the bombola man’s turf, specifically my landlord and all his properties. So, me breaking the ranks and coming over to his side of the line drawn in the sand was monumental. From that day on he became my supplier, perhaps partly out of my fear for slighting him, and partly sentimental for the bond we had forged on that cold, wintry day, as every time that I would pass his shop from then on, I would get an open-armed “CIAO, Professore!” from the bombola man.

However, getting the bombole was another feat altogether. Weighing as much as they did, and considering we lived up a steep flight of stairs and he was in no shape to climb them, even without the bombole on his shoulder, I soon became the porter as well. Problem was, the bombale did not last more than a couple days at this point in the winter because of the inefficiency of the heating system. More often than not, we were wrapped up in multiple layers with hats and gloves on, cracking the ice off of our two frozen cats’ whiskers every now and then, trying to not use up the gas too quickly. It was cold, bitter cold.

But, one of the highlights of this winter was something extremely unique and was one of the occasions in which the cold lost its steeled, bitter grip. It was the presepe vivente, or living nativity. The entire winding, steep hill-top Tuscan town of Castiglione Fiorentino is transformed into a living Biblical tableaux, with stages set up all around the town, complete with livestock in stables and Roman centurions galloping up and down the streets in full armor, tossing “Roman” coins to the children while all the residents of the town wander through the streets, going from station to station, enjoying winter refreshments along the way.

It was a spectacle without spectacle, which is what perhaps made it so fascinating. There were no streaming electric lights nor gaudy decorations, but rather a living, breathing metamorphosis of an entire community into a very magical event. It was not an event with a “destination,” but part of the enchantment was that is was just to wander through casually and to wonder at it all. People from all of the surrounding towns would come in and join with the living procession, relishing the spirit of community without a commercial element, without what has become Christmas for much of the world.

It was a warming feeling, which was good, for the bombale were proving to be a very unreliable source. It was memorable, perhaps more in its subtlety than extravagance. The winter did eventually subside, and spring did surprise us once again, and the memories of the bitter cold, as with all things, in Time, dissipated.