walkingtalkingwriting

On the subject of the 'city' (mmj)

Ooorrrr, Location, Location, Location; Tell us, Oh 'city vagabonds', The time here is always now, but, tell us, Tell us do, what city is that then.

We (ak and mmj) vagabonds have never spelled out a city, one city, this one or that one before all others, ça, the one city to which we both belong. If you explore 'About' us here, you will find a picture of us standing in front of the Blue Mosque in Istanbul which we visited in 2005, Is that the one, No, we travelled there, stayed a week, and then we travelled on.

Then, in 2008/2009 ak went to Rome and spent the best part of a year there, while mmj was regularly in London over the same period doing his medical studies in Palliative Care, Are they the ones, Rome and/or London, No again. In between times, there have been other great cities in which we have walked, mmj in Berlin and Madurai for instance, and especially in London where for ak, if you go back a few years the city was home, but these days he lives out west on the edge of Dartmoor.

And there are great cities we are on our way to, I am heading for Buenos Aires for sure during the times I am singing tango, but it is not like 'Tango In Her Eyes', Joli, who has been offering a "Survival Guide to Buenos Aires and Other Random Thoughts" these last four years while she has actually been living in that great city.

Still, imminent and emergent, all of these cities as well as many other great cities not so far mentioned, are the ones which, one way or another, we are travelling to or from, or strolling in, walking, talking about, and writing:

- IN Conversation

- ON the STREET

- OUT in the WILDERNESS

- OVER and BEYOND

It occurs to me, for the purposes of 'Field Note' accuracy and definition here, it might be very helpful to our readers, and the links it might help to create between us, if we name the city we are in when we write (or nearly so, or once were, or on our way to, or intend to be again):

This weekend I was in Barcelona, thanks to Dorchester Tango walkingtalking... , dancing a little, but mostly listening to los exilos, Sandra Rehder and elrevere.

mmj

Flushing out (mmj)

Aaand - Maxim, what about him.

Maxim heads off for two nearly back-to-back (creative) writing weeks on Monday. His fantasy had been that, having stepped off the Pall Care academic merry-go-round in September, with 'all that freedom' in the last two months he would have 20,000 words of his best seller book under his belt by now, and be up and roaring and ready to go for the next 20,000. The reality was he slipped into abjection [ref: J Kristeva. Powers of Horror, An essay in abjection, tr L Roudiez. 1982, Columbia U Press... essential reading,  absolutely essential] having lost the ability to write one word. One thing was the need to stroll [ref: W Benjamin, tr H Eiland, K McLaughlin. Das Passagenwerk (the arcades project). 2002, Harvard U P - (almost at random) P555: ' Baudelaire in his review of Madame Bovary: "Realism-a repulsive insult flung in the face of every analytic writer, a vague and elastic word which for the ordinary man signifies not a new means of creation, but a minute description of trivial details." Baudelaire, L'Art Romantique, p413], another thing was a deep longing to hear the voices of other languages in his ears [ref: The Dialogic Imagination, four essays by M M Bakhtin, ed M Holquist, tr C Emerson, M Holquist. 1981, U of Texas P] and other reading (currently Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, bueno, bueno, bueno).

In other words… grace for our needs, grace for our needs, while, my beloved began her fourth year of pschoanalytic training in London, ak was finding his feet again in the Dartmoor wilderness , and I began learning another tango song which I am due to perform (scary but so good) in two weeks, Chiquilin de Bachin (listen to the Roberto Goyeneche version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCT5FYVIbu0 on U Tube, bueno, bueno, bueno) ... grace for our needs, the gift of space.

Here is the working title for my book, Life Before. Life before death you might imagine it means, and I did and for quite some time, in a 'depressed dissident' sort of state of mind thinking of all the things I had learned about this year that need to change about End of Life care and so on, We know them all, don’t we, We do, We do. Then I recently began to see the meaning as being life before birth, an umbilical or ur-meaning, or both meanings in fact but, muchas importantes, in that order, decreation before creation. So Life Before... it is, Es, ça, sa, one way or another, the mix of friendship and aloneness, flushing out our conversations into the light of day.

 

mmj

Part of the work . . . (ak)

How easy it can be to pick up a book, to respond to the demand of read-me, except, of course, there are there are many which are not easy. They demand work and I have to work hard at them, and they can be not easy in as many ways as there are books to be read. Let's not mention the vast numbers of books piling up, calling to me to jump in, read me, such riches await you.

Currently there are half a dozen with varied bits of paper acting as bookmarks with which I am engaged:

Roberto Bolano 2666

Rainer Maria Rilke Duino Elegies

Gaston Bachelard The Poetics of Space

Slavoj Zizek How to Read Lacan

Jorie Graham Sea Change

Martin Heidegger Basic Writings

Ummm, one novel, two poetry, two philosophy, and Zizek . . . the overlap between psychoanalytic and philosophy, perhaps – but actually Bachelard operates in the same overlap though very differently.

Intelligence rests on the making of connections, capacity as to memory, capacity as to absorbtion, speed, a certain openness, an absence of sleepiness, recognition of shape, the organisation of data and brightness. Brightness is a beautiful quality.

In the yoga class this morning there was the intense concentration of moving into and out of the breath. The breath being the initiator, the guiding spirit (prana) of the movement. The mind ever present (some hope!) as awareness.

Yesterday in the art class playing (working hard) with space, shape and colour. How to make connections which look right and make sense.

Confronting (ak)

My front, her front – confronting: facing, mutual facing – close up close-up. energy pours in, more energy pours in, reserves are put on full alert, sirens wail, Calvary (even the cavalry) looms, angels are calculating the odds.

Death throws the doors wide open – and the windows – sucked in, blown out – walls demolished. A glimpse of glory and devastation is provided free of charge.

But what if a programmatic response is offered: this is the process of dying (and we can make it easier) - there are these clearly marked stages. Or for those left behind: the stages of bereavement. Evidence based rationality.

Hey, hey!! I'm trying to say something here. Can you listen? Can you negotiate between the non-rational and the rational? Have you been lost in the wilderness and found your way out (sort of)? Not quite the same but still breathing.

In what place does the negotiating take place? Perhaps religion is a (denied) sort of madness and where does the theologian speak from? Inside or outside? Do we pretend it's rational?

Silence (mmj)

Ssshh... And what kind of silence is that, self-imposed, or the sort that comes from outside, Shut up or else?

It has been more than six weeks since those exams, and there was an email this week from the department apologising for the delay in sending out the results, and now, he explained, with the postal strike.

The fruits of our labours, while other voices are clamouring, Have you written any poems recently, Not since the one in July, What do you think about the translation of the chapter on Nibbana, What is there to say, what can I possibly say.

And the attention of the gentle Professor, her eloquent smile, Are you upset or something, A narrative begun with the title Life Before.

In November mmj is attending two Arvon writing weeks.

mmj

Breaking Cover (ak)

What is important and what is distraction? And how to tell the difference? And furthermore, how can something seem so right and then come to be proved wrong? The view changes; sometimes simply with the passage of time – no that can't be true: there must be an intervening event not simply the passage of time. I'm caught up, caught in the net of my present view; unless you help me, unless you tell me about your view, use words that I can make use of. But they might bounce off the taut screen of my view. I might say, oh, you would say that, wouldn't you.

Truth will out. 

NIgh on a year ago the change of view, the revolution of view, looks like an explosion. It knocked me down, left me shaken, left me with a choice: get the hell out of it or soldier on. I was persuaded to soldier on. Nonetheless, the explosion was real (a real metaphor!), the view that had taken me to Rome destroyed, but it took me to time realise it; anything like full acceptance only coming through when I began to create a new view.

View can be determined by many factors, wishful thinking amongst them. Explosions of reality, pushing aggressively into our minds are ferociously difficult to adjust to, we resist resentfully – why won't reality accord, conform to our wishes!

Truth will out

truth will break from cover

run into the open to reveal herself

she's probably laughing

– at my expense, I think

but her laughter is infectious

so I'm laughing too

eventually.

Not so much is the glass half-full or half-empty, rather the joy of the full emptiness (ak)

I wonder if there are two sorts of emptiness – empty emptiness and full emptiness. Such wonderfully crazy language. An emptiness in which God is and an emptiness in which God isn't.

I found refuge in the Mass when I needed refuge because the Mass is ritualised mourning, instituted (?) with the aim of never moving beyond memorial and mourning. As such Christianity can never fully participate in the sheer adventurousness of life and perhaps has no desire to do so with its sights set on the world beyond this one. For Christianity the journey (at times) appears to be one of plodding sorrowfully along with Christ on his way to Calvary, with Christ dying on the cross, and rising with Christ beyond this world to the next. Not rebirth into life here but rather elevated to an unimaginable realm of God.

Is it possible that secularisation is more in tune with God's plan? We have to grow up, to live and bear the weight and the lightness of our possibilities. To shift and play in the spaces that are given (and some we steal, or at least borrow), chasing the adventure, hiding, seeking succour.

I'm being taught by my children now; a new generation is coming into its power, and, I ask, have I got anything to offer in the future. Returning to study, integrating what I might have been in the past, the storm and ship wreck, working it into a shape with or against the grain of what is granted.

Let's hope that thread doesn't break (ak)

Lying awake at 3 a.m. and kept awake by having to think my way through circuitous byways; puzzling over connections and disconnections. What would be thought and perhaps said (and to whom) in the way of self-showing, what some call sharing (thank you for sharing that with us). Show and tell time. Keeping safe and trying to follow Ariadne's thread back home having killed the monster. Labyrinth and mind constructed for my own comfort and survival with half-an-eye on the rules of conduct and conflict.

 Can Odysseus ever reach home, or has he not gone too far? Perhaps the darkness of home is the home no longer existing. Can I make the bricks and mortar that I live in a home for myself? Or only go through the motions? The nature of love and creativity and the art of the possible and who came out of the labyrinth, Theseus the hero or Theseus the monster?

Why am I surprised to find cold water a shock when I jump in? (ak)

What was it about the classes at the Beda that made me jump back like a scalded cat. I could have screamed in rage and frustration, insult and betrayal.

And yes, it woke me up.

Woke me up, challenged me to reconnect with the project that has always burned within me, yet has been semi-dormant these last years; overshadowed by bereavement, by parenting, by wanting to move on from my work as a psychotherapist but not seeming to find a way forward . . . except the doors of the Church were open. Open all the way to Rome!

For refuge, I had entered the doors of the Church and I had left my critical faculties outside. You don't care when you need refuge. The near unchanging rhythms of the Church was what made sense. Made sense until in the seminary classes I was forced into thinking.

Help! A monarchical system? Celibacy? Infantile psychology? Very limited dialogue?

What do I value? What do I commit to? Wake up fast! And back and back until I hit a world that makes sense. Where I started from forty odd years ago. Marx and Freud amongst others. Check the maps. Start from where you are. What else can you do!

Little minds, big minds (ak)

There's the brain-ache of attempting to force thought into existence, into a form recognisable in language (or image, or music, or dance). I was tempted to put the word 'new' before thought, but I fear that 'new' can be something of a weasel word, perverting, distorting, distracting. After all it might be just as valuable to rediscover an old thought. At the same time we (humans) do need to find (new?) solutions, to give birth to those thoughts that move us towards the paradigm shifts that will enable us to, for example, remake our world in conformity to evolving ecological concerns; to manage a better balance between egalitarianism and individual freedom.

There is the push in me to think, to grapple, to struggle . . . but then a doubting thought intervenes: well, what difference will my little bit of thought make? Why not leave it up to them? The big guns, those gifted with great minds.

"Travelling Conversations" mmj

 

Jacqueline wrote to me yesterday, asking how I was because she hadn't seen anything written by me on the blog since June.  I replied saying I was fine, it was simply I have been busy this summer with my studies for a Diploma of Palliative Care at King's College, London.  Somehow there was no space for anything else.

 

So I find a double cause of celebration today, both the main part of my studies are over, and now I know we have our “ silent witnesses” who, like Jacqueline, follow our progress on the blog.  Perhaps there is a multitude of them.  We are encouraged.

 

I'm glad to be back here on this blog, where we find two writers, ak and mmj, in one place. Being two in one place, it helps us to measure words. We have to give space to each other’s writing, or put another way we are continually measuring equidistance.

 

I think the quality of equidistance has been absent in our lives as we have struggled with the separate projects which we had both taken on in the last year; ak going to Rome and meeting the ‘big mind’ of the Catholic Church; myself joining an academic department at King's College and meeting the ‘big mind’ of scientific medicine.  Our two experiences have obviously been very different, but one thing we have shared in common is perhaps this absence of equidistance, as both these ‘big minds’ have pressed our noses hard up against the glass behind which wisdom is expected to reveal herself.

 

So I'm glad to be back here on this blog today, where we consciously and robustly measure equidistance.

 

There's something else we share here, which was also denied us in the last year of our experiments as trainee priest and trainee academic, and that is the experience of emergence.  On the one hand, Revelation according to the ‘big mind’ of the Catholic Church, can anything emerge after His revelation some two millennia ago? On the other hand, Revelation according to the ‘big mind’ of scientific medicine, can anything emerge after the closure assumptions of the ‘classic experimental’ method? Both ‘big minds’, I think, say, No.

 

For both ak and myself however, there is always the possibility of emergence, what is revealed in the equidistant space of our meetings here. We deeply don't know how these “travelling conversations” are going to turn out in our writing, but in a gentle way I think both of us believe in emergence; the possibility that, as conditions ripen, some of the fruits that are revealed will be totally different to the strata of the original causes, which set us on our respective paths last year, and, equally, which began these first “travelling conversations” on this blog three years ago.

 

 

mmj

Adjustments (ak)

It became clear yesterday that I had to readjust my position in relation to you. A step back and a shuffle to the left and then I was able to look at you once more, perhaps even to see you. Bad news travels fast and no news is the best news there is. Your decisions reach me as shocks – little shocks mostly – reading 3.5 on the Richter scale. These shifts, these openings and closings, marking tiny movements in your survival strategies, details arising from seismic sunderings, decisions that swim up like primitive monsters from the deep places, and might explode in the changing pressures of our current preoccupations.

And we talked of our desires, our dreams.

You said you were already living your dream . . . a dart that I twisted to avoid, dug into my ground, found I was balanced on an edge . . . but talking can be like that – never knowing where I left the cliff edge of trauma lying about in wait for a careless moment.

From shuffling to sauntering (ak)

Two figures – they could be out of Beckett – shuffle on to the stage. One represents darkness, stupidity, density; the other I think of as "occasional sparks of brilliance." Bereavement rendered me stupid. I couldn't think. The trauma of it seemed to break my connection to my previous life, as though the event had brought my own 'old life' to an end but at the same time I had to continue going through the motions of a life.

After a few years I found my way to the Mass of the Catholic Church. A place of respite, of refuge; it seemed to make sense, give a form to what could barely be put into words. One way of looking at it might be that the Church grew, expanded, developed following the traumatic loss of Jesus. Jesus, God incarnate, his only son, murdered by us, a sacrifice for us, lifted up to his father's side, and the promise to return to us. The Mass enters into and remembers the crime, the loss, the sacrifice, the rising . . . we too can rise from this . . . in death.

Does the Church merely wish to lock us into endless bereavement, the guilt of the survivor? I wish it were that simple. There is also talk of love and the freedom to be what we really are . . . but always in the light (yoke) of obedience to authority.

Yet to grow up is to assume that authority ourselves. It is stunning to bear in mind how recent it is that we've taken on the exploration of full democracy, the rights of and the respect for each individual life. And the argument is not finished; there are many among us whose instinct is to clamour for authority.

It appears self-evident to me that the Church should be on the side of democracy but its own psychological and organisational structures are monarchical and habitually non-trusting. A state which leaves it seeming to pull against us. Instead, what would it take for the Church to celebrate our long and problematic growing-up? Rather than (as it sometimes appears) enmeshing itself in a sulking ressentiment.

Don Cupitt, in his Jesus and Philosophy, marks the line of moral teachers from Jesus, through Blake and Dostoyevsky to Nietzsche. Those four have made and continue to make the wires hum. This reminds me of the impact they had on me: Jesus in my childhood/adolescence, the latter three in my late teens/early twenties as I pretended to saunter nonchalantly into adulthood during the late sixties/early seventies - informing my notions of morality.

What a lovely word - ressentiment (ak)

An evocation of younger years. I'm thinking of the task of protecting one's self-esteem from the knocks of misadventure and the drudgery of daily life in those years before one's life has really got going; discovering that one is nearer the bottom of the pile than the top; working out those strategies by which one might not only survive but relish the small victories, the grim satisfactions of clawing out a niche in the pellmell anarchy of social life. Three words: defensiveness; resistance; ressentiment. 

I'm not exactly in that ressentiment but there's a memory and a taste of it and suddenly (as it were) there's so much studying to do. Earlier in my life I was too busy being angry and following my own path; yes, studying, but through narrowed eyes - all that one is likely to do (at best?) is reinvent the wheel.

It is necessary to get up to speed before launching oneself (again) into the world. And what about joining the club – a place to think with others.

Always trying to find a place to stand (ak)

During yoga practice ( usually at the beginning) I endeavour to (re)find the way of standing in which I sense a verticality of muscular/skeletal connection. It comes when I've got my feet 'sorted out' – heel, outside edge and ball of foot in good contact with the ground. The result is a flow of connection from feet, up through legs, spine to crown of head. Shoulders relax; I'm alive and easy, light and balanced.

Like planets orbiting some sun, a variety of psychological/emotional aspects circle a me, an ego, some central identity: faith, critical thought, reason, 'I'm passionate about . . .', the unconscious, irony, humour, and all the rest. A spectrum of attractive/unattractive, another of comfortable/uncomfortable draw me this way and that.

I cannot live without faith.

I cannot live without reason.

Left and right. Nought and one. Being and not-being. Balance and off-balance. I believe and I doubt.

Me and other.

Rich Pickings (ak)

A line in Jorie Graham's poem Later in Life caught my attention: 'there is something I must tell you, you do not need existence, these words, praise be, they can for now be said.'

You do not need existence. I do not need existence. This is one of those underneath ideas, beneath the surface; ideas that make me wobble, crash to the floor. Back on the surface of things, there's a line of thought: consumerism has highlighted NEED. I need this, I need that. I need to live, I have a right to live. Consumerism segues into rights; we understand about life, about stuff through the distorting lens of consumerism and human rights.

To not need existence opens up life as outrageous, gratuitous, miraculous gift.

Yesterday the Guardian (guardian.co.uk)reported on the findings of research conducted by Nuffield Health under the heading 'No sex please, we're British and we're lazier than ever.'

We don't necessarily like the gift of life because it demands something (a lot) from us. On the other hand we are very addicted to life and don't like the idea of its removal.

What is Thought? (ak)

Sun after rain 

cycle, circle . . . enter the

how:

fall in love 

build your home 

have your children 

grow your vegetables 

laugh a lot 

go in peace.

p.s. you may need to adjust the specifics.

In-between places (ak)

Who's in, who's out? Who's listened to, who's not? Slightly different questions: where am I listened to? Who listens to me? I married (1968), a ritual to glue me in, to mark an achievement. Sixteen, seventeen years later I separated, divorced, freed of glue (sort of), thrown into limbo, the liminal, the in-between, another sort of ritual. It could be called the ritual of alienation. Seven years later I was bereaved when my partner died; a funereal ritual of abandonment – the two of us because I was alone with the loving duty to bring up our three year old daughter. 

Urban life (the one we all seem to have now even if we live in the country, though I suppose there must be a few of us still living a rural, peasant life in Western Europe) is necessarily one of alienation; is it I and Thou or Me and the Other? The politics of envy and consumerism; wars on the TV news; God's either disappeared or on some distant horizon or is on Big Brother. Terrorists have a go at waking us up but they're pretty scary, mad, bad; best left to the authorities to deal with.

This minute, now, I must find the word or words through which alienation is diminished, limbo is narrowed, and life becomes, once gain, the same old miracle. And, amazingly (I remind myself), the Mass still has the power to reconnect me to you and You, and the hunger of purpose is a joy.

Bedfellows (ak)

Sexuality and vitality: to be alive, to be quick is to be sexual; to be tuned, in tune, in time, to neither be ahead nor behind, rather in the right place. The analogy here is the orchestra – keeping time in the eternity of the music. All my cells scraping away on their violins, singing, humming, gurgling.

At a certain point sexual loving becomes exclusive; the eye contact, the excitement, the longing, the touching – retiring to privacy - to enable a certain dirtiness, fecundity, wildness. An edgy sort of place where uncertainty can reign, potential unleashed, anxiety assuaged . . . and, I want to suggest, morality can be discerned, even established. Right in the core of dirtiness there is the centre of morality. They belong together providing we let them belong together.

A Guide of Sorts (ak)

What did reading Dostoevsky – late teens/early twenties – do to me? Do to my mind? He tunnelled into and through it, opening up new passages, vast chambers, narrow twisting, water-filled ways, turned darkness ever darker, exposing hidden machinery of perversity and complexity, opaqueness and mystery. Did he, I ask myself forty years or so on, set me off on my life's path? Not exactly a slap on the back and a 'good luck'. More like I blinked in bewildered astonishment, stumbled and took a step.

Was it an illusion, my discernment of that path? No, I don't think it was entirely but perhaps the question can be refined as to what sort of path I imagined it to be. Though whether we ever see our path ahead with any sort of reality is doubtful. I can see a faint but definite glow of glory in my image of the path. Is that glow the glow of anticipation, of hope – what I saw back then – or is it the superimposition of the lived experience of the path? Yes to both of those. The excitement of new life. The actual glory of sexual love, the glory of lighting upon new thoughts. 

Was I lucky? Yes.

Was there pain, suffering, difficulty? Yes.

Did I doubt? Yes.

And I continue.

Am I grateful? Yes.

O Yeah You Look Very Funny! (ak)

We are opaque to ourselves, a mystery. So we imitate others and make up stories in which we have a leading part, copying phrases we hear, using words that attract us: ohhh that sounds good. This keeps our spirits up when the nights are dark. Otherwise we might slip down, get dragged down by 'lost' souls. Don Quixote went off with Sancho Panza following his phantom, chivalrous, holy heroes, Arthur and Amadis. Sancho and everybody else thought he was mad but loved him anyway.

We imitate in admiration, following the faint trail made by those who go before us. A dead end is when we find ourselves in a situation in which we cannot admire others around and above (in a hierarchical sense) us. Then we are thrown back on our own opacity, tilting at windmills, waiting to hear the words that sing to us. 

Let me get on with the work; the work of words. Listening to others, finding arrangements of words that have the power to make sense, to give form and to lead me a step or two forward.

Where are you? 

I'm here! 

I can't see you . . . oh yes I can now. Can you see me? 

O yeah you look very funny.

The Next Task (ak)

The job is to merely to build a bridge. I can see two platforms (how long before other platforms emerge from the mist?); the first being psychoanalytic thought; the second Catholicism/Christianity. Slavoj Zizek seems to have done it though it’s hard for me to judge how good a bridge it is. 

Here's a start on the list: I need a better feel for Lacanian thought, to read more Zizek and others; to battle with the material; plenty of that sort of grappling with the stuff (you know how it is, when the mind twists and turns and tries to run but to no avail and then the poor old brain starts to melt), and, of course, attempts to write it out as well as thinking and talking whenever possible. 

You see, it didn't take long: a further platform occurs to me: my subjectivity.

To My Friend in Rome (mmj)

The Dioskouroi. Was it those dangerous twins

Who had come knocking at the door to warn you

To leave the building

At once, immediately

Before an earthquake struck?

 

It was also an earthquake, you see,

During the middle of that night while

We enjoyed the gifts

Of our wealthy host,

Which had made us become invisible.

 

Epiphanies are out of place these days

Even for a man studying metaphysics,

But I happen to know,

You once wrote a tale,

Which included a visitation by an angel,

 

And I have been struggling with invisibility too,

Trying to close that crack in the door again,

Since the news broke

Of her terrible illness,

Unable to find words to say to the two standing there.

 

So it is possible, one of us goes back afterwards

To identify the bodies of all the guests

Because he can recall

The order of us all sat

Around the table, to make us live again.

 

mmj

Letter from Rome (ak)

 

The semester draws towards an end and we are right in the middle of exams. I’m picturing these as little yappy dogs demanding my attention. ‘All right, all right, I’ll do a bit more study . . . later . . . tomorrow . . . just keep quiet would you.’

 

After weeks of blue skies and heat in May, June began with heavy rain. Today is dry, some high cloud, and cool; quite strange not to be uncomfortably hot, sitting still and sweating – though of course welcome to those of us more attuned to UK temperatures.

 

Yesterday afternoon I popped out to the local supermarket, about a hundred metres away, to buy some milk and fruit. There was something odd as I walked in, people were standing around as if waiting for something. There was no activity at the tills apart from one woman who was slowly packing her shopping. The way into the aisles was obstructed by these sombre, unsure individuals. Power cut, came to mind, but there were lights on so that didn’t seem likely. And I continued to look around. Then I turned and a teenage boy, 16 or 17,was right by me – I could have reached out an arm and touched him – wearing a crash helmet with a scarf over his mouth and nose and . . . oh, he’s carrying a pistol in his hand and . . . oh, there’s another one and he’s got this rather evil looking knife . . . right! I think I know what’s going on here and I better stop looking around with such interest and make myself as invisible as possible.

Robbery, in fact armed robbery.

The knife boy was coming out of the office, presumably with money (my gaze was rather focused on the ten inch, sharply pointed blade of the knife he carried. The pistol boy was stamping about, being tough and making sure we were all suitably terrified. And then they were off. I hung around for about half a minute, one man was talking to the police on his mobile. I realised that there wouldn’t be any normal service for some time so I decided to manage without any milk and fruit for another day. One of those occasions when one’s senses are heightened, watching, intent on survival, fearing their unpredictability. Certainly something to talk about over supper and every now and again a fantasy pops into my mind, a brief movie showing me what else I might have done.

 

And today is a day of national celebration, a holiday, in Italy, 2 June – Festa della Republicca, to mark Italy’s transition to a republic in 1946. But here at the college it’s an exam day as usual so us first years are sweating over our metaphysics.

Know who your friends are... (mmj)

And all this time there was this vociferous debate and quite shocking seeming noise going on in mitteleuropa, all the way down to Trieste, Venice, and Dubrovnik, and out towards the Middle East, on the Grete Sea, AS Chaucer called it in the Canterbury Tales. In other words, it was a debate in locations out of earshot of England, and kept that way, filled as the misty isle always is with too much thought rushing around and blotting out all other sound.

 

A debate about Friendship, one which linked to some words written back at the end of the last war, on the "community of  those without community", as Georges Bataille had it. Along with something else besides, which I happened to recall re-reading Sebald's Austerlitz, 'I was always refining my defensive reactions, creating a kind of quarantine or immune system which, as I maintained my existence in a smaller and smaller space, protected me from anything that could be connected in any way, however distant, with my early past' ( Pp 198).

 

The recollection wasn't about the delegated power given by modernity to psychotherapy, WG-S's story, in the friendship he creates between the writer and the narrator, is an exercise in seeing through all of that. It was about the immune system. The way the life of the body relates to the life of the world, and the authentic ways we find to protect ourselves. From the threat of death from the community. Biopolitics. And back to Italy, and especially the writing by Roberto Esposito (Communitas, Immunitas, Bios). On Immunity. And Auto-immunity. And Quarantine as well.

 

In the community of those without the community. In friendship. Such as might be found among an 'anchoritic community' (Derrida, The Politics of Friendship). And mendicants. And vagabonds. And those on pilgrimage. And among some writers and artists. And among persons at the end of their lives, the dying, which of course, when we come to think of it, is us all sooner or later.

 

mmj

Is this a dream (ak)

To wake from one sort of dream into another; a sense of everything that had been solid was now demonstrating how easy it is to become fluid waves of energy. At three thirty this morning (Monday 6 April) the effects from an earthquake 70 miles north of Rome made themselves felt. For those few seconds – was it half a minute? – there was terror and a radical ignorance/indecisiveness. I could hear doors opening and closing, voices in the corridor but I stayed where I was, in bed, in the dark, waiting. At what point would I have made a late dash for the world outside? But if the building were to collapse, I was thinking, where would the best place to be? Was it safe anywhere? Though I wished for an immediate transfer to Totnes I also had to accept that it was an unlikely outcome. The weird movements of the building diminished, subsided and were no more. It was probably an hour or two before I returned to sleep. When I woke with the alarm I had such a struggle to persuade myself to get up that I forgot all about 'the dream' until a little later in the sacristy when somebody asked me, ' did you . . . ?' and then the news was being passed around, mostly in whispers because we're still in silent retreat mode, of an earthquake somewhere north of Rome and there were dead . . . Shock, gratitude, what can I do to help . . .

Letter From Rome

 

 

 

The essay that’s due tomorrow is finished except for a final brief read through before printing it out. I keep telling myself that a better plan would be to finish the first draft a week before the deadline so at least there’s a week for reflection and changes, but no, there are always other things to distract me sufficiently before getting down to it.

I’m sitting in the Giardino degli Aranci – a very appropriate name as the garden is full of orange trees – on the Aventine hill next to Santa Sabina church. Timothy Radcliffe, the Dominican, mentions Santa Sabina, in his recent book, Why go to Church? as his favourite church. He writes, ‘It was being built when St Augustine died, after the sack of Rome by the Vandals, and was finished in 432.’

Oranges like gleaming jewels amongst the dark foliage, oranges lying in the grass and beneath the trees there’s a group of eight or ten senior citizens from the US of A about to depart the garden on their (What are they called? They must have a name?) battery-driven modes of transport with two parallel wheels and a platform between the wheels on which the passenger/driver stands. There’s a vertical “broomstick” topped with a handlebar by which they steer, stop and start. The seniors all have identical blue crash helmets and are led by two young and rather glamorous Italians who walk fast to keep up with their speeding-off charges.

Looking out over the city I notice that I can almost take in (without moving head or eyes) the distance from the dome of St Peter’s to Il Vittoriano, the massive slab of white marble, topped with chariots and galloping horses. According to the Lonely Planet guide, it’s known locally as ‘the typewriter’ and if you picture one of those massive typewriters from the first half of the twentieth century then it’s a very accurate image. They are two massive edifices representing two sorts of power; the secular power of the new Italian nation facing the ancient holy power of the Vatican. It was to be sixty years of facing each other before an understanding was thrashed out between the Vatican and the fascist government.

I’m also watching the clouds building up and wondering when and how heavy the rain will be, and the answer turns out to be half an hour by which time I’ve walked on and into the maze of Trastevere where I duck into the Almost Corner Bookshop.  It’s a tiny, old-fashioned sort of bookshop from before the time of Waterstones; an English bookshop that’s been serving the needs of the English-reading population of Rome for the last seventeen years.

This letter started on Sunday and finished on Thursday! Now we have a break from classes; a week of retreat and then into Easter; one of those shifts in the heavens. There’s a Happy Easter to say, though it doesn’t quite get to the power of the event; the lightness in the phrase that rather suggests mixing up Easter bunnies and the Passion.

Letter from Rome (ak)

What is it that makes Rome Rome? History? The light? The piazzas? The churches? The people who live here? The tourists? Of course, all of these play their part in creating the fabric that is Rome. But when I was checking some facts in Georgina Masson’s The Companion Guide to Rome, published in 1965, my attention was drawn to what she wrote about the sound of church bells:

 

‘Although we are now, in summer, seeing this part of our itinerary in the early afternoon, during the rest of the year, or if we have time to return later, we should see it in the evening. This is the classic hour for a stroll on the Pincio, aptly described by Miss Thackeray in the last century as then appearing in a “fashionable halo of sunset and pink parasols”; when all the church bells are ringing for the Ave Maria. Incidentally for non-Roman Catholics, the frequent pealing of Roman church bells may require some explanation. Light sleepers may well be awakened by their ringing for early Masses at 7 a.m.; these continue at intervals through the morning till midday, when they ring again for the Angelus. Comparative silence then reigns among church bells–though monastery ones may toll in the interval–until evening and the Ave Maria; to be followed, one hour after darkness, by the last peals announcing the final service of Un’ Ora di Notte (the first hour of the night).’

 

I was certainly surprised to read this, for I have barely been aware of church bells since living in Rome these last months. Occasionally I’ve heard the bells of San Paolo opposite, but only when walking near the bell tower at the far end of the basilica from the college. It seems that at some point between 1965 and the present a decision was taken to limit the tolling of the bells. The noise that I’m aware of in Rome is from the variety of traffic: the growl and rumble of the buses, the steady hum or thrash of cars, the snarl of motorbikes, the screech of tyres and the not infrequent clunk of collisions.

 Yesterday afternoon, rather later than intended, I caught the metro to the Piazza del Popolo; a wonderful open space, centred by an obelisk, at the top of the Via del Corso. Originally developed, in 1538 (and redesigned in 1823), to provide a sense of grandeur to the entry into Rome through the nearby gates, the Porta del Popolo.

In the Piazza workmen were toiling to erect the scaffolding for what I took to be a pop/rock concert, but I continued up the steps on to the heights of the Pincio. From the terraced gardens at the top there is a wonderful sight of Roman rooftops and skyline; the domes of the bigger churches emerging in glory above the ochre jumble.

The gardens were alive with families strolling, many of the children in fancy dress, perhaps for carnivale, as Lent is approaching, teenagers mooching or skylarking about, carousels (though no pink parasols) and that golden late afternoon Roman light.

 I had planned to walk across the city to the Gianicolo terraces on the skyline opposite but time was against me, and so I restricted my afternoon’s stroll in the holiday atmosphere to following the edge the hill and down the Spanish steps, carried with the crowds down the Prada and Gucci infested Via dei Condotti – the Roman version of Bond Street. Twenty minutes or so later at the Piazza Farnese I had to wriggle my way through a dense crowd listening to speakers at a political rally backing proposals for the establishing of what we in the UK call, living wills, concerning any future medical treatment which we would rather not have ‘done’ to us. I was very impressed with the intense and serious concentration of the people listening. This was my first encounter with the ‘left wing’ in Italy. I would have stayed to listen myself if my Italian was up to the task.

Ensiao na Morte [1] (mmj)

Garbatella [2]. Bereavement.  And what is the language using us for [3]. For something, A letter of condolence, which of course I have never sent you, No, I don't think so, But definitely for something, I was writing after a visit to Rome, four days in which we had walked through parts of the centre of the city, its suburbs, and even beyond (and some walking is also a mistake) [4].

 

It is dark, and in the silence,

And I have said before that metaphors are dangerous,

An axe-head is falling out of a clear blue sky.

 

Shattering glass, the sound,

That-is and that-is-not, Near to madness, as Aristotle said,

Of a vase which is already broken.

 

Kindness, kindness, blink and you might miss it,

There is the scorching heat when opposites are brought close,

Bathing in fire, and drinking together at an oasis of horror.

 

Chloë, In Memoriam. Garbatella, February 2009.

- - -

FOOTNOTES

[1]  Ensiao na Morte (Portuguese) might be translated into English as Deathness or Dying. That would be on the basis that Ensiao Sobre a Ceguira (the novel by José Saramaga, published 1995) is called Blindness in its English translation, and Ensiao sobre Lucidez (published 2007, in which the story of the first book is continued), is called Seeing. Ensiao for Saramago means a story in which people don't have names, only roles such as the minister of justice, the doctor's wife, the policeman, and so on. The punctuation is also stripped to the bare minimum, commas and full stops only. So the possibility exists for forms to interweave, essay and work of fiction, poem and piece of research.

[2]  The construction of La Garbatella district in Rome began in the 1920s on a hill close to the Via Ortense in the south of the city. Built for the migrant workers coming into the city, it was planned in blocks (lotto) along similar lines to the idea of the English garden city. Garbato means graceful or amiable with the ending suggestive of the feminine, and the buildings are beautiful, but the district has certainly not gone the way of Hampstead. Garbatella has kept its ‘outsider’ character, and sense of migrant worker roughness. Spray-can graffiti and anti-fascist slogans cover walls, football flags (AC Roma) hang from windows, gardens are overgrown, and many of the buildings are neglected, stucco falling off the walls and thick tufts of green grass filling the gutters so that the rain water floods down the walls to spoil the fine architectural features below.

[3]  W S Graham wrote a poem with this title (published in his Implements In Their Places collection, 1977). In fact, he wrote six poems in a series all beginning with the same line, ‘What is the language using us for?’. The title reminds us that even in our worst moments, in situations in which we have been completely abandoned, and all our attempts at communications have failed, lost for words, our poetic memory is intact and actively engaged using us for something.

[4]  In the beginning, and we don't have a clear methodology for walkingtalkingwriting or often know where we are heading, each district of the city we visit presents us with a series of overlapping perspectives. Perhaps we could be working inductively to join up the dots, creating Categories in what might be called ‘a hierarchy among equals’. An important class of Category are those which are a mistake, as when ‘and some walking is also a mistake’ (and talking, and writing). For instance, one day in Rome my enthusiasm got the better of me and we went badly wrong as I attempted to lead a walk … to the Etruscan necropolis at Cerveteri … that ended in a Total Garage in the countryside off the Via Aurelia looking into the disbelieving eyes of the petrol attendant.

mmj

Letter from Rome (ak)

 As I sit down to transfer these scribbled notes on to the computer I see the full moon hanging over the Basilica San Paolo. The sight makes me catch my breath, a tremor where the diaphragm connects at the front of the ribs, and there's a tiny blast off to another reality, a germ of potential . . . but meanwhile back on the ground:

There's a strange lull following the last exam yesterday morning. Eight exams, eight days: a few hours of concentrated revision, a twelve minute oral exam, then immediately cast out that one before further ferocious revision, and so on. Oral exams, apparently a Roman tradition; they are now beginning to have the quality of a dream one has woken up from. Earlier this afternoon I had walked out to the:

 

Via Appia Antica 15.15

It's interesting how one's knowledge of a locality builds over a few months. As a group we visited the Catacombes di San Callisto during those first days of our induction. Whilst a coach had taken us there, we walked back – at least some us did – and for me it was a complete maze of twists and turns that made no sense.

Recently I have begun to explore the adjacent (to the college) area of Garbatella: a bit shabby, traditional, artisanal, working class – a proper locality where it's easy to imagine people are really local – born, grew up, worked and died. Two bits of graffiti I took note of: the first, YOU ARE NOW ENTERING FREE GARBATELLA – in English, hints of the sixties, counter-cultural, political. The second was a memorial to Bobby Sands, the IRA hunger striker who died in '81 (if I remember rightly) in the Maze Prison.  Garbatella also has these wonderful oases of fading and beautiful housing, interesting and unique, mostly terracotta washed. There are narrow cobbled streets which cars keep out of apart from a few parked by people who live there, palm trees and those 'umbrella' pines. And, to keep to the thread of this narrative, a street name I noticed: Via della Sette Chiese.

Of course I eventually got round to looking it up on a map and discovered that this old and winding lane goes all the from the Basilica San Paolo out to the Catacombes di San Callisto (and other catacombes) and connects to the Via Appia Antica – a preserved stretch of old Roman road, complete with enormous cobblestones and history leaping out of the grass on either side. It's the place where people go for a stroll on Sunday afternoons.

And so here I am having an espresso and sitting out in the warm February sunshine and jotting these thoughts down before walking back.

Learning is all about joining the bits up! And whoever led the walk back in September did not follow the Via della Sette Chiese or only a couple of sections of it.