the cassandra pages

Rome Journal II: All the Gods

Trastevere

November 5, 2016

I've never been in a city where the light is softer or more beautiful than this one. The colors are married to the light and they play together all day long, regardless of whether the sky is bright or overcast or misty or raining hard, as it did today. And when the cobbled pavement is wet and shining, it's gorgeous, but you definitely have to watch your step.

The neighborhood where we're staying, Trastevere, is on the western bank of the Tiber, while the city's historical center was on the east, and its name literally means "across the river." But it is not a new suburb by any means: Trastevere was originally Etruscan, but by the time of the Republic (c. 509 BC) sailors and fishermen had begun to live there, along with Jewish and Syrian immigrants, and the Romans gradually built bridges to connect the west bank to the city. A logical place to construct early bridges was the Tiber Island, just a few minutes' walk from where we are living, in a modernized apartment in a house built around 1600 AD.

Our street is a tiny winding alley barely big enough for the little cars and motorcycles and scooters that do drive down it, but mostly it is a lane for local people walking to and from their houses. There is a famous bakery just a couple of doors away, Biscotti Innocenti, run by a woman who makes hundreds of kinds of delicious, intricate little cookies, and also the shop of someone who seems to restore or copy antique marblework; it hasn't been open yet but through the window I can see all sorts of plaster casts piled atop each other or leaning against the walls.

There are more places to eat nearby than anyone could visit in a lifetime, and the food has been uniformly fabulous. But I'm cooking too: tonight a shrimp risotto made with a bag of nano rice that cost less than 2 euros here and would go for $8 in Montreal. It's fairly quiet and we've slept a great deal, but the bells of nearby Santa Cecelia are ringing right now, at 9:00 pm, as they do to mark all the monastic hours. I haven't visited the patron saint of music yet, but I will, in spite of the gruesomeness of her martyrdom.

We needed a quiet evening tonight to digest our day. In the morning we had crossed the Tiber and walked up to the Largo de Torre Argentina, where an exposed excavation of five Roman temples now houses a colony of wild cats, and from there to Campo di Fiori to see the market and have lunch, a white foccaccia-style pizza stuffed with mozzarella and zucchini blossoms, at Forno, a famous bakery on the edge of the market square.

Campo di Fiori, "Field of Flowers"

From there we walked in the rain to Piazza Navona, looked at the Bernini Fountain of the Four Rivers along with hundreds of other tourists, and went on through the narrow streets to the Pantheon.

Piazza Navona

Heading back, we stopped at the ornately baroque Chiesa de Gesu, the mother church of the Jesuits, and then Piazza San Marco, where we both admitted that we were having a bit of a hard time as the sheer amount of wealth and power began to sink in: wealth that has been concentrated here in families and churches and government for more than two millennia, and shown off in triumphal arches, palaces, military monuments, self-aggrandizement.

"I think I've always identified a lot more with the people who had to deal with this," J. said.

Ponte Sisto, 1473

I've found myself thinking a lot about Empire and what it has meant all through history: the acquisition and concentration of wealth and power in the hands of a few elites, won through wars of one kind or another, on the backs of the expendable lives of the ordinary people. The artists we now revere were often practically slaves to the rulers and popes and rich aristocrats who were their patrons, and the hypocrisy between church teaching and the level of their decoration, not to mention the way the popes and cardinals lived, is astounding. We walked home quietly, hand in hand, in a light rain, both of us thinking about the upcoming elections and feeling disturbed: it just goes on and on, like the Tiber flowing under its bridges.

The one we crossed today was built in 62 BC, has survived intact, and been in continuous use ever since. How can you not be amazed by the fact that your feet are touching stones worn smooth for more than two thousand years?

And the Pantheon, that "pan-theon", a temple to all gods, whose dome is still the largest non-concrete-reinforced dome in the world, has also survived. Its huge columns were carved in Egypt and transported by wooden sledges from the quarry to the Nile, then down the river by barge during the spring floods, by boat across the Mediterranean to the Roman port of Ostia, then by barge up the Tiber and rolled or dragged to the building site. Marcus Agrippa had originally commissioned the temple during the reign of Augustus (27 BC to 14 AD); the Emperor Hadrian rebuilt and dedicated it in 126 AD. The temple has been in continuous use ever since, but became a Christian church in the 7th century, which may have saved it from the destruction visited upon many Roman buildings during the Middle Ages.

Here, for the first time, I began to try to get my head around what I was actually seeing. Although my own period of passionate study had been ancient Greece (archly, I had thought of the Romans as copyists, appropriators, imitators), I had also studied some Roman history and art, taken some Latin. The Pantheon had been begun during the reign of Augustus, at the time of Christ. Luke's Gospel, written somewhere around AD 80 or 90, contains the famous Christmas passage about Mary and Joseph having to travel to Bethlehem to register for a Roman census: "And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed." The light filtering through its oculus high above my head, I realized, may have shone on the person who issued that decree; his feet may have walked across this floor.

As I stood under the dome, looking at the Christian sculptures and paintings that now decorate it, and the empty niches above, where Roman gods probably once stood, I also felt wistful. Conquerors have always erased history by writing over it, but I would have liked to stand in the original temple in the presence of Athena and Zeus and Poseidon, gods who had felt alive to me since my childhood, already renamed Minerva and Jove and Neptune by the Romans. But all I saw of them remaining were fragments of some dolphins carved in travertine, high up on the very back of the building's exterior, and between them the raised fork of Neptune's trident.

The Cold, Cold North

Abandoned farm near Lake Champlain.

Fort Montgomery, on the western side of Lake Champlain near Rouse's Point, built at one of the northernmost strategic points of the American part of the lake, to protect against an attack from British Canada (1840s-1870s.)

Snow drifts, eastern side of Lake Champlain near Rouse's Point.

How Many Roads?

It's finally here! After three years of effort, I'm thrilled to announce that Jonathan's book of photographs of the turbulent years of the late 1960s and early 70s, How Many Roads? is finally launched. In addition to the book's 91 sepia-toned photographs, it contains an introduction by Teju Cole, essays by Steve Tozer, Hoyt Alverson, and myself, and a preface by Jonathan.

We've published it in both a paperback version and a limited-edition hardcover, with or without a signed photographic print. The books will be available for pre-order at special prices through the end of October. Paperbacks will ship soon, hardcovers at the end of the month. All the details are on the Phoenicia Publishing website.

We hope you'll take a look; this book would be a good gift for anyone who remembers or is curious about the 60s, or who'd like their children to know what it was like. (And, of course, it could be a great passive-aggressive gift for someone you know who voted for Nixon!)

This past Wednesday, we held a lancement (launch party) at our studio, which meant that we had to clean and reorganize it -- for the first time, really, since we moved in. So not only do we feel like we have a book we're proud of, but we've got a studio that feels almost new.

For my own part, I'm extremely happy this project is finally out in the world. The book's title, drawn from the Bob Dylan song, not only echoes one of the book's sub-themes -- what the interstates did to rural New England -- it also describes the circuitous path we've been on to this point! Jonathan and I have done so many publishing projects for clients and other people in the past that it makes me very happy to finally see some of his own work collected permanently in book form. It's part of his own photographic legacy, and it's also social documentation of an important period in American history that has a good deal to say to us today. Although these photos were taken before we met, our experiences of that time were similar. The process of revisiting this part of my own past has been both interesting and fruitful: I understand more about how I was shaped by these events, and also about the fateful turns our world has taken since then. Meanwhile, the accounts of the people and events of those years are already becoming simplified, distilled, and distorted -- or so it seems to me. Even recent history deserves a closer and more first-hand look than the textbooks are likely to give.

My Father's War

My father was a tank driver in WWII. He and his unit were part of the Normandy invasion, crossing the channel the day after D-Day, which is why I'm posting this today rather than yesterday. He went on to fight under Patton in the European theatre, including the Battle of the Bulge, and spent a long time in a hospital in Belgium for injuries suffered in a jeep accident. Obviously he survived and came home to marry my mother and become the father of a baby girl a few years later.

To this day, my dad won't talk about the war. He is a peace-loving, tender-hearted person who didn't even like to fish when I was growing up. He has never considered himself a hero. Earlier this year, he was invited to take part in an Honor Flight to Washington D.C. to see the various war memorials. It was an emotional day for him, mostly because he was surprised and moved by the outpouring of gratitude for his service by the people who attend and support these events for veterans, but it didn't seem to change his attitude at all. He went to war as a naive minister's kid from a small town in upstate New York and came home having seen things  -- from deaths of comrades at close hand to the liberation of a concentration camp -- that no one should ever have to experience. I don't want to put words in his mouth, but I think he would sum it up by saying "War is hell; we did what we had to do and I'm one of the lucky ones who came home."

Being sixty years old myself and seeing how -- no matter what the rhetoric -- no war is ever the one to end all others, I'verealized more and more that the story that becomes "history" is quite different from reality, and depends entirely on which side you are on. I mistrust any glorification of war; all you have to do is read Herodotus or Thucydides, or the Bible for that matter, to see how long that narrative has been embraced.

Is there such a thing as a just war? Watching the excellent BBC series "Foyle's War" last winter, which presents the war from the British perspective, made me ponder that question even more than before because it showed how much pacifism and conscientious objection actually existed, and also how much controversy there was about "appeasement" vs. fighting -- a story we don't hear much in the U.S.  From my own visits to Britain, it's been clear to me how much the American effort mattered then and still matters now. Europe under Hitler would have been a terrible thing, and who knows what would have happened in the Pacific, Africa, and elsewhere? What did happen - the dropping of the atomic bomb, the dividing of eastern and western Europe, the partitioning of the Middle East and the establishment of Israel, the Cold War, the legacy of Stalin and spread of communism, the rise of America as a superpower, and so many other post-war effects - have also had huge impacts not only on subsequent political history but millions and millions of individual lives, both for good and for ill. It's not simple.

So for me, it's a sober time, and I resist the tendency toward glorification and celebration. Of course I am very proud of my father but his own humility and reticence about WWII, and his increasingly dubious view of subsequent wars and political events, were the greater legacy he gave me. I've never been able to watch movies about the Normandy invasion, and looking at photographs like these always makes me cry. For me it's personal: someone I love was there, in that nightmare, in the waves and the blood and the noise. He lived to come home and make me and bring me up with a tender love that never contained violence, hate, or fear, while other young fathers and fathers-to-be, on all sides, not to mention mothers and children, have died and continue to die because of the ambitions and delusions of political and religious leaders who skillfully exploit a population's tribal instincts, fears, and hatreds, or coerce them by force and threat to gain power and wealth for a few. Once the megolomaniacs have gained power, the choices are extremely limited. That is how it was, and how it has always been; we seem unable to learn.

TBT

It's been fun riffling through old albums for amusing pictures to share on FB on TBT (Throwback Thursdays,) and I thought, why not re-post them over here? Making homemade pizza has been J.'s specialty for longer than I've known him, which is well more than three decades now -- we've got LOTS of pizza pictures. Here's one from our Vermont kitchen in 1986. We're stillusing that rolling pin and old banged up aluminum flour measure, as well as the cookie sheet I'm holding. I think both those pizza peels are history by now, though.

Black

The Slave Coast, watercolor, 7" x 10"

 

Roadworks slowed us. The iron-rich earth was a brilliant red.
The red was apt. On these lands people had warred and sold people to people.

 

On the long narrow track to the beach we passed a field of
decapitated palms, the stumps in serried ranks. A sadness fell.

 

To travel is to look and fail to understand what one is looking at.
We went to the Door of No Return.

--Teju Cole

 

I'm deeply moved by Teju Cole's unfolding series of tweets and photographs, in real time, of the journey he is taking today from Lagos to Ouidah along the Slave Coast.

More than anything I have read in this sad week, these restrained, short sentences, each word carefully chosen, speak powerfully to me about the origins of racism in America. Can we -- so many of us white and privileged -- stop and try to put ourselves in the place of our African brothers and sisters, sold into slavery, held in chains in coastal slave forts, and eventually packed into ships bound for the western hemisphere? Can we allow ourselves to consider our parallel but enormously different subsequent histories, as well as the many ways in which we continue to deny and turn away from the truths of persistent, endemic injustice and inequality?

 

The Shades of Cherry Valley

Wind-pollarded trees

Line the Cherry Valley ridge

Silent sentinels

Or splayed-fingered settlers

Frozen at the first war-whoop.*

 

Micro-thin shards of ice, piled by the waves on the shore of the lake.

I'm just back from a quick trip to central New York to celebrate my Dad's 88th birthday (he's doing great.) While there, I went for a ride with him in our newly-restored 1952 Willys jeep, he and I played a few games of ping-pong (he's as impossible to beat as ever) and later went with my father and his girlfriend to a show at the Arts Council in Norwich, NY:  "A Blue Suede Christmas" by Scot Bruce, a well-known Elvis impersonator who plays a lot at Disneyland. He was so much like Elvis it was quite disconcerting!

Natural music was of a different kind. There were thousands of Canada geese in the area, and on Saturday morning when I got up, there were huge flocks wheeling overhead, calling to each other in a wave of sound that was almost deafening. On the way home, we passed a field that was white with snow geese, with thousands more circling up from the field in a continual pattern that reminded me of an insect swarm, or the living balls made by small fish as they try to evade predators. It was the sort of sight we had hoped to see when we visited the snow goose migratory staging grounds at Cap Tourmente in Quebec, but that day we only saw a handful of them.

Central New York has always been fairly wild country, home to large herds of deer and other smaller animals, and a stopping point on the flyway for many migratory birds; it's one of the things I always liked about living there. Now it seems to be even more this way. We saw large flocks of turkeys as well as deer, and my cousin told me that she regularly sees and hears coyote. Dad saw a black bear last year, but bear and moose are only occasional visitors south of the Thruway and Adirondack Park, so far as I know. I'm curious about sightings of bobcat, fishers, and lynx - do any of my readers have any information on those species in that area?

 

*I can never drive past Cherry Valley without remembering the Cherry Valley massacre, which took place on November 11, 1778 -- a group of British and Loyalist soldiers, Seneca and Mohawk Indians attacked a fort and the village of Cherry Valley, and massacred 30 people, mostly women and children. It was one of the most horrific massacres of the entire Revolutionary War, and to some respect still haunts that part of central New York State.