Doorways

The great 13th century poet, Rumi, was born in Afghanistan, which at that time was part of the Persian empire. Rumi has long been a talisman poet for me, but it is only recently that I learned that the word dervish literally translates as doorway.


My favorite book of Rumi's poetry is a slim paperback of his Quatrains as translated by Coleman Barks. Coleman visited the MacDowell Colony many years ago when I worked there, and I love having a volume inscribed by the man who has spent his life studying Sufism and translating Rumi.

Language is so fascinating, and translation is truly an act of intimacy. Scholarship is coupled with reverence, but the actual choosing of the right word to convey a particular meaning is itself a moment of poetry. I imagine a word humming when the right companion in another language is chosen, vibrating on the page.

Here is one of my favorite of the Quatrains, something I recite to myself sometimes when I can't get to sleep:

Some nights stay up till dawn,
as the moon sometimes does for the sun.
Be a full bucket pulled up the dark way
of a well, then lifted into light.
-- Rumi

Inauguration Day!

Today we celebrate the inauguration of President Barack Obama; what a day in history! Here is a link to the Bee's Wing Farm blog for more thoughts on this transition in leadership and the hope we are feeling at this dawning of a new age. Patriotism, imagine that!

Yes Is this Present Sun

As the inauguration approaches, the word 'YES' is like a drum beat keeping rhythm. I am filled with hope and possibility, not only for our world and country but on a personal level as well. Just now, at this moment in history, even amongst all the difficulties, we have so much to celebrate. Yes We Did. Here's to a new administration and being part of the change, however that may manifest.

After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
–– Wallace Stevens

Artifacts

Like an archaeologist who specializes in a particular region of the world, I seem to dig up similar artifacts over and again. There’s something soothing about familiar territory. I’m not so afraid anymore that I might drop or chip something, and these days I catalogue what fragments come my way with a kind of professional ease. Sometimes I think there will be a major find – an outstanding piece somehow missed by earlier excavations – but I’m beginning to think that any keys to civilization (my survival, that is) are already with me and it’s only a matter of illuminating the collection a little differently. It’s turning out that the science of digging up the objects is not what’s most important to me anymore; it’s about the interpretation. The art of display. That’s what I’m seeking here, a way to look at my finds objectively, to see the fragments as a collection.

Backstreets of Florence

Here is a favorite map, the one I used to navigate my way around Firenze when I was lucky enough to live there on and off over the course of a year and a half so long ago. I loved finding a little circle around Via D. Anguillara, where I shared an apartment just off of Piazza Santa Croce with a woman named Anna from Puglia.

Anna had a tiny red Fiat converted for hand controls to accommodate leg issues. She wore a cumbersome brace and preferred not to drive when possible. What fun I had buzzing around Florence in that car when we'd go out in the evening to meet friends. The steering wheel was the size of a dinner plate with extra rings around it for brakes and acceleration.

There was quite a community of Southern Italians and Siciliani in Florence, and they generously enveloped me into their lives for the time I was there. The old north/south tensions were alive and well then and I imagine there is still a lot of that snobbery and racism even now. It was particularly alarming to see how African Americans were treated in Italy. How could such loving people be so prejudiced over the color of skin?

I loved the apartment on Via D. Anguillara. I would sit and write at the kitchen table hour after hour and then go out and walk the city when construction workers came to work on the outside of the apartment. The building was under renovation, and the fascade was draped in heavy netting over the staging so that bits of plaster wouldn't fall on pedestrians below. It was like being inside a giant screened tent.

Piazza Santa Croce was just a stone's throw away and a perfect destination in the evening for people-watching. Grandfathers would bring children by the hand for games of soccer and feeding the pigeons while old women gathered to sit and talk about their days. At the end of the day the Piazza gave up its tourists and turned into a neighborhood meeting place.

Anna worked at the Uffizi and I was able to get in free through the staff entrance. I got to know some of the other guards as well, and this is how I came to find myself on behind-the-scenes tours not only of the Uffizi but the Palazzo Vecchio nearby. The network of old hallways and passageways was amazing, and I loved sneaking through these secret places.

More Collage

I thought I'd include a couple of Italy-inspired collage pieces to accompany the blog on Venice below. The collage to the right is titled "Comfort" and the other is "Layered Escape." Both make me want to go curl up somewhere warm on this snowy afternoon.

We have had storm after storm. Today's version of snow didn't look like much, so I tried to get out to an appointment in Keene and only got the car stuck. All the more reason to just give in and spend a quiet afternoon in front of the fireplace.

Bella Venezia

A good friend, Rosemary, forwarded an article this morning from Slate, The Casanova Tour of Venice, about behind-the-scenes tours of the Doge's Palace (its pergola pictured above). What exquisite torture to think about Italy during yet another snowstorm here in New Hampshire.

Years ago while living in Florence I got to see parts of the Palazzo Vecchio and and the Uffizi that weren't open to the public; my roommate worked at the museum and was friends with other guards who were happy to sneak friends in through the back. More on Florence another time, however; this morning it is Venice calling.

It's been eight years since I last set eyes on the Adriatic; how can that be so? There was a time when I was sure I'd end up living in Italy. To the left is a picture of Sabina on one of Venice's islands in 2002, earnestly taking notes as always. I found those travel journal pages filed away with the photographs I just brought out to scan, and I think I'll take the opportunity to read them through later today.

On Christmas this last year, Jeff gave me a copy of Edith Wharton's Italian Villas and their Gardens with illustrations by Maxfield Parrish. She is a favorite author and I had visited The Mount, Edith Wharton's home in Lenox, MA, with Rosemary and Henry James a few months before (a piece on this at Cupcake Chronicles). This was a lovely present to receive.

Later that same day Rosemary gave me a copy of W. R. Thayer's, A Short History of Venice (1908), a lovely red-leather volume which has little color maps in addition to a very thorough history of this fascinating place. Tucked into the book was a second present, a New York Times 1906 review not only of this book but a piece on Edith Wharton titled "Ms. Wharton's Epics of the Incognita." Here she is quoted from that article about Venice:



"The foreround is the property of the guidebook and its product, the mechanical sightseer; the background that of the dawdler, the dreamer, and serious student of Italy."
-- Edith Wharton







Here is the quintessential tourist shot at Piazza San Marco. This trip was something of a gift, a free cruise of the Po River won through the fax machine while I was briefly working for a neighbor who runs a travel business. We only had to fly ourselves to Italy and amazingly we had frequent flier miles enough to do that. And it was Jeff's birthday as well.

A month earlier that summer I had traveled to Paris on the Fourth of July for the Henry James conference, meeting up with friends Henry and Robert James. All three of us flew in from different places and met up at Charles de Gaulle Airport for a great time in the City of Light. More on that another time, but this is to say that 2002 was a very good year. It's time for another like it in fact!

2002 was only my third trip to Venezia. I visited there twice while living in Florence years ago. The first time was in October and there was a full moon. I got in by train and took a nap then awoke in the evening to discover a torchlit festival on the Grand Canal. It was so beautiful and unreal in that way that only Venice can be. The next morning it was raining and I packed up and left as I wanted to seal that one evening in my mind forever. It's there.

Roughly translated, the festival was named "Save Venice's Fabrications" and it was spectacular. I've learned since that scientists have used waterline information from paintings by Caneletto as a guide for how much the city has sunk over time. It is one of the urgencies for traveling back there soon; will Venice be there?

My second time in Venice I was with a painter friend. We arrived by train and toured various churches to see works of art. But my favorite image from that visit was stumbling on a funeral. There was a black gondola covered with red flowers docked at a small chiesa. it was such a lovey, poignant image -- the boat balancing on the waves, sounds of music inside the chapel.


Jeff and I had a wonderful time trip; this was his first visit to Italy and Venice was just the beginning. We loved Ferrara, Parma and Verona, but the trip began at a dock in Venice. We were exploring from there and stumbled on a beautiful old park with an elaborate fountain covered with turtles and an abandoned Orangerie. What a gardener's fantasy to see that crumbling building and wonder what it would be like to care for the plants in such a sumptuous place. Imagine the villa that must have been nearby. Oh to be that gardener!

Here's to more on Venice and Italy in general. I started out to write about living in Florence, but that will have to wait for another time. And surely there will lots more on Wharton and her love of Italy, along with another favorite author E. M. Forster. I love to think of my grandmother being born in Florence in 1904 and those things about Italy that are essentially still the same more than a hundred years later.

Before She Wakes

Collage, 2008

Mud Woman

I made this collage quite a while ago and want to include it on this blog as it's a favorite. Mud Woman has been with me for a long time now. This piece came when I was doing meditation work and it all began with an image of a potter's wheel. The image in the background is a Korean goddess.

Documenti

Finding Sabina's old passport brought back a flood of great memories. I have always loved thumbing through those tiny pages and checking ports of entry and arrival and departure dates. There were some years when I always had my passport on me, just in case! I never wanted to miss a good travel opportunity.

There were other times when I was very careful never to let my passport out of my hands. I lived on the beach at Cannes in the summer of '79. Policeman rounded up backpackers' travel documents early in the mornings, and I always refused. As an American, I never had any trouble; I was definitely lucky, and perhaps the whole thing was just a formality anyway.

I visited Cannes twenty years later in 1999 and was so amused to see "no camping" signs along the beach. We lived there! Everything was so different; I couldn't believe how small the beach was. Were we really all camping there? The Mediterranean must have shifted that shoreline considerably over two decades, and of course the mind's eye shifts memories over time as well.

An old passport seemed like the perfect image to head up Mapping Sabina. The date of issue of this one is 1986. I was 23 years old, and now at 46 I am exactly twice that age. But it's really all a matter of perspective. A dear friend who shares not only my initials but my birthday is 94 and this year I am exactly half her age. We have an EP 927 Club. She is also a writer and loves travel.

I am fortunate to have a small archive of family travel documents, including the passports of both my grandmothers at different times in their lives. We also have Grand Tour travel albums from one of those grandmothers, and a nearly identical set which belonged to my husband's mother, Anny, who had a similar journey but in another era entirely.

My favorite is the passport for my mother's mother, taken as a young adult. Both my mother and her mother were named Thea. Thea de Forest Brush was an American citizen born in Florence, Italy, the youngest child of an American painter. At one time I longed for her to have been born an Italian so I could petition for an EU passport and working papers.

I did work when I lived in Italy, but it was under the table. Aptly, I sold tablecloths in the San Lorenzo market. After a long day what a job it was to roll that cart to storage for the night. I can still call up the memory of the clatter of all those carts at dawn and dusk.

During that time no one ever asked for my passport outside of the airport, but the license for that cart was a very important document and we had to show it all the time. Sadly, I don't have a copy of that, but it's pasted in my memory anyway, alongside the sound of those old wheels on the cobblestones.

Tower of the Winds

This ancient building captured my imagination more than twenty years ago when I stumbled across it in Athens. The octagonal shape is so compelling in itself, but this building also features a horologian, a device for telling time, a water clock and sundials as well as a wind vane. Each of the eight sides depicts the god for that wind direction.

Wind has always been a powerful influence in my life. In 1988 I traveled throughout Greece for nearly a month, my last extended solo trip before meeting my spouse-to-be later that same year. The Tower of the Winds greeted me at the very beginning of that journey which later took me to the island of Delos where I had a most amazing experience.

The boat out to this island sanctuary was half-full that day when I found myself buying a ferry boat ticket and heading out to see this place of mythological lore. When we landed at Delos, I decided to go backwards along the island path in order to see the monuments by myself. It was April, and the entire island was covered in wildflowers. Red poppies carpeted the crisp white landscape against the deep blue and green of the surrounding Aegean.

After walking through the Terrace of the Lions (pictured above, an old postcard I found in my grandmother's things) and along a pathway lined with other amazing ruins, I came to a place where only the bases of some statues remained. I climbed a pedestal and stood up with my arms lifted up the sky. All of a sudden, as if from nowhere, strong winds came up and washed over me. It may have only been a minute or so, but these winds held me in their bluster as though I was on the prow of a ship navigating a storm at sea.

Suddenly I found I was weeping. I had been grieving for my grandmother's death and so many other things. After a bit, though, the tears turned to laughter as I started to picture a boat-load of tourists coming from the other direction and catching me atop that pedestal. As I was laughing and crying all at once, the wind suddenly disappeared into a deep calm. I collected my things and climbed up a small mountain where I enjoyed a picnic and an astounding view.

Of late we have had incredible winds here in New England. I love the idea of blowing out the old and making way for a new year, and I now I want so much to return to Greece and see the Tower of the Winds and the island of Delos once again. My own internal measures for telling time and detecting direction are telling me this is the right thing to do. The winds are blowing toward Greece.