Making Meaning II: Italian Journeys
My real delight is in the fruit,
in figs, also pears, which must surely be choice in a place where even lemons
grow. –Goethe, Italian Journey
My formula for greatness in a
human being is amor fati: that one wants nothing to be different, not forward,
not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still
less conceal it—all idealism is mendacity in the face of what is necessary—but
love it.
—Friedrich Nietzsche, Ecce Homo
In Torino,
Italy, once called Augusta Taurinorum in honor of the bull sacred to Isis,
goddess of fertility, where Nietzsche went mad, embracing a beaten horse and
weeping, dancing naked in his room, and practicing Dionysian rites of
auto-eroticism; where, before his collapse, he enjoyed the air, the piazzas,
the cobblestones, and the gelato; where the ladies chose the sweetest grapes
for this reluctantly German philosopher, it is easy to feel the sensual, life-affirming,
Pagan roots of myth-making, to understand those humanistic allegories that sing
of life, love, pleasure, and appetite.
At the opera, I heard Tosca sing, “Vissi d’arte, vissi d’amore” (I lived
for art, I lived for love). I indulged in long wine-drenched lunches on
unseasonably-sunny piazzas, and gazed at gleaming artifacts from ancient times
in dark museums. There was a secret restaurant where a small fierce woman named
Brunilde roughly took my order, displayed magical cakes with her wide toothy
smile, briskly removed the empty plates that once held the most delicious food
I’d ever eaten, brought me a shot glass with grapes soaked in absinthe with
dessert if I pleased her by ordering it, but growled me out the door if I was
too full or too stupid to partake of her pride and joy. I was in residence at
the Fusion Art Gallery on Piazza Amedeo Peyron, presided over by the wise and
warm painter, Barbara Fragnogna, who told me about the market across the way
which sold beautiful mushrooms, wild strawberries, and bread sticks with huge,
juicy olives. When I wasn’t eating, or wandering in museums, I was building an
elaborate book which folds and unfolds, and is painted and glued and stitched,
and “gold-leafed” with foil wrappers from the many gianduji chocolates I
enjoyed. I threw off the layers of the Vermont winter to feel the wind and sun
on my body, and was reminded of how much our conclusions about what life means
are influenced by the relationship between our own physicality and the material
world which surrounds us.
Meaning is not something that we need to
artificially superimpose on the objects and events of the world through some
transcendental narrative or morality. It is not something we need to be taught
or coerced into seeing by external social construction or manipulative
indoctrination. If one is healthy, has an appetite, and senses for seeing,
hearing, tasting, and touching, beauty will be everywhere, as “the promise of
happiness” or, indeed, in the knowledge of happiness’s fleetingness or absence.
We are given the gift of colors and sounds, of textures and of
temperatures. And if all else fails,
this should be enough reason to be grateful for life. In addition to this
inherent meaning, this meaning without thought and evaluation, our intellectual
response to the physical facts of the world makes us dream, imagine, and invent
ever new celebrations and laments. These expressions will survive and
proliferate insofar as other humans resonate with them. And what resonates will be made manifest in
real made things, in built places, in enacted experiments. This is a discourse
and manifestation over millennia, from the ancient cave paintings to today:
humans trying to make sense of the terror and tenderness of the world. We do
not despair, we artists and “creative subjects”. Nor do we invent meanings that
attempt to twist the facts of nature: Gravity and Mortality are real. Instead, we work with what there is, and
endeavor to embrace it in all its fractured glory. Thus, also, the things that
we make with our hands, out of paper,
pigments, wax, string, fire, earth, water and air, will fade, crumble, dissolve
in good time. They are already fragile, already very imperfect, already mostly
forgotten. And yet, their fleeting
presence is of the utmost importance.
I am sitting
on a bench in a church entranceway. A gray, cool, dreamy late morning. Some
high school students, girls and boys, gather at the other end of the stone
courtyard, gossiping, talking, laughing. Old people, alone, walk in and out of
the church. It is a Monday, and most shops here are closed, their metal
gratings pulled down. Dirty pigeons coo. In the back streets, a gentle squalor;
clothing hanging from lines; abandoned bicycles resting against elaborate
gates. On the walls, scraps of political agitation, left and right, shreds of
old posters, graffiti scrawls. People talk, but I don’t understand. Markets
everywhere, with abundance: artichokes and more artichokes, wheels of cheese,
sausages, chickens, lamb shanks, lemons. People smoke and joke, are grim or
warm. On my walk here I passed a waitress carrying a tray of espresso down the
street from a café out of sight, and a silver piece of paper blew to the
ground. I picked it up and handed it to her. Grazie, Signora. An elegant lady
walks up the church steps now, in perfectly matching brown and gold, soft
brimmed hat with gold trim, a brown cane, brown coat with fur collar, a purse
of gold and brown plaid, little brown shoes, dark sunglasses. All her
belongings and all her faith perfectly intact from another era. Trucks rumble
by; otherwise it is quiet, peaceful. Balconies preserve foliage from the
summer, not quite dead, but not quite blooming, vines dangling; a single
bruised yellow rose lilts; while back in Vermont everything is covered in snow
and ice. This is a life. Anywhere is a life. How different, how similar is it
to and from mine, from or to yours? And how does it happen that it evolved to
be like this here and some other way somewhere else?
Fleeting presence...so masterfully written. Merci. and how is it that You are there, and I am here and the yellow bruised rose is perfect among the mendacity...
ReplyDeleteor anyone is anywhere- is it random? does it matter?