Monday, April 30, 2018

Travelogue 800 – April 30
A Sketch
Part Two


One side of the campo is set with ageing buildings that house the neighbourhood’s little bars. The other side is set with the medieval church. In between, the children run and yell. A few of the boys have gotten their hands on a baseball and glove. One boy is shouting out instructions to the mysterious game, running three bases in the wrong direction.

One of the boys belongs to a couple sitting at a nearby table. He’s younger than the others. He might be four or five. The father looks Japanese. He and his wife seem to trade off between English, Spanish and Italian. The boy is suddenly forlorn, standing alone in the square and crying. The father just smiles. I measure my own likely response – to run to the child – against his serenity, and I can’t say which is right. The boy makes his way slowly to the father, and the father picks him up.

Later I encounter the father inside the bar, waiting for his drinks. I tell him his boy is very cute. He smiles and thanks me, but doesn’t look me in the eye,

Past the father’s seat outside, I have a view of the right side of the campo. The closest building there is one of those square medieval towers I enjoy, raised in dark brick and set asymmetrically with small arched windows that might climb with an internal staircase. Set somewhat randomly in the wall is a white medallion depicting a Madonna with child.

Next to the tower is a humble bit of Renaissance architecture, rectangular windows set in regular order in a field of plaster once painted lime green. This building also has small white medallions, though these are placed with mathematical regularity and feature allegorical or purely decorative themes.

Turning one corner of the campo, we encounter the church opposite. And further along, after crossing an alleyway that enters the square, there is an unremarkable building, more modern, distinguished only by its maroon colouring, a building that reminds me for some reason of Rome, of the miles of apartment buildings in the southern stretches of the city.

The other side of the campo seems to be the upscale side. There is pretty bit of Perugian pink, with mullioned windows and lovely balcony. The building now houses a hotel. Next to it is something yellow that seems more seventeenth or eighteenth century, with inscriptions on tablets on the second floor, under modest curving gables. The first floor, with its balcony white French windows, seems to weigh heavily on the plain ground floor. The building sags on one side, as though weary.

This is Venice, city of campos. Only a few short blocks from crowds of tourists on the Riva degli Schiavona, we are enjoying a quiet Sunday afternoon. The tourists are taking in the dramatic view of the Palazzo Ducale, the Salute, and San Giorgio Maggiore, monuments on three spurs of land in the Venetian lagoon. Here, families are having drinks and chatting. There is no drama.

There are a few drops of rain, and the children run toward shelter. The owner of the café comes out and stands beside me to crank open the awning. I move a few inches for shelter, lazy enough to suffer some light rain rather than move. The rain doesn’t last long. But the spell is broken. The children have gone.

Sunday, April 29, 2018

Travelogue 799 – April 29
A Sketch
Part One


I’m composing a sketch, taking notes about the campo. Campo means field, and originally this town square was a field. The campo was one of the essential elements in the consolidation of this city in its early history. Every community needed a parish church. The church required a field, and the field a well. Communities thus established grew and met each other, merging into one city.

I’m spending a few hours of my last evening in the city at an outdoor table in this campo, drinking Campari spritzes and reading a lengthy history of the city. Across the campo is the founding church of the community, the church of San Giovanni Battista in Bragora. It’s a modest church, its facade a simple, three-part brick arch. The central section features a rose window of no dramatic beauty. No single feature of the old church is impressive, but the whole is beautiful. It could be the tone of the old brick. It could be the simple bell tower behind it. It’s hardly a tower. It’s more of a high wall with three open arches for the bells. It’s a modest church in a city of grandeur.

The church dates to when this little community was an island. All this part of the city was a broken set of marshes and islands. The island was settled. A church was built, a well sunk, a field cleared, and houses built for the new families. Everyone was a refugee of sorts, fleeing the waves of invasion that characterized the centuries following the collapse of the Roman Empire.

The building that houses my café faces the old church. It has a shabby air about it. It has felt the hand of Time. Above and behind us are pinkish walls of peeling paint and plaster and sad balconies, outlined by bell-shaped railings.

I share the few café tables with local families. They all have children. Some are crying in their carriages, Others are playing in the square. There are several dozen children out there, running after footballs and shouting. A few fathers and grandfathers play along, chasing the balls, kicking them, or blocking imaginary goals. It’s Sunday, and it feels like timeless tradition.

Between the café and the church lies the campo, laid with uneven grey flagstones, flagstones to judge by their state that must be generations old. In the square is the white cistern head, familiar to every campo in town. There is one tree with benches underneath. And a war memorial with a flag pole.

The campo is no longer named for the church, but for several patriots who died for Italy in the nineteenth century. In a concession to the city, so many times older than the modern state, the signpost painted onto one campo wall uses both old and new names.

The church is humble and doesn’t beg any recognition. Its self-effacing silence – underscored by the weeds growing from the high brickwork and by the chipped stone in the tower’s pediment – is appealing. It has a kind of early Christian sensibility. The ornament at the top of the central section could almost be a dove.

Monday, April 16, 2018

Travelogue 798 – April 16
The Butterfly with Feathers
Part Two


It’s mid-scene, and I’m exiting the stage. The lights go out, and I stumble. One actor is left onstage, and the scene is supposed to go on. The lights come back on as I reach the curtain. The actor picks up with his lines.

I only had ninety minutes to confer with the technician, to set lights and to run through light and sound cues. This is the reality in small-time theatre. There are going to be mistakes. And every one of our four performances is in a different venue, so this will happen every time but with different and unpredictable mistakes.

Offstage, Maria helps me with a costume change. ‘Backstage’ is simply the rest of the café. I’m changing pants, but no one is paying attention. Actors backstage pace and mumble like extras in ‘One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest’, too focused on their next entrance to notice what anyone else is doing. Maria very sweetly wipes my brow for me. I had forgotten how hot those stage lights are. Sweat has been trickling down to my collar.

During a short monologue, an audience member abruptly stands and rushes off stage. The way to the café – and the toilet - leads across stage. I stutter and hesitate. I drop a line. I recover, but the performance feels marred. An actor shouldn’t let anything get to him.

Performance time flies. The show is over before I’ve found the moment to place myself: this is the premiere of two new plays. It’s the culmination of months of work. There is too much to process, so much to do to make the simplest play start on time, that there is too little space for enjoyment. Performance is a pinpoint of time.

Maybe that’s why theatre people return again and again to the scene of something essentially insane, the enactment of absurd lyrics, jotted down like notes from dreams recorded in bars and Metro stations, each scene an orchestration of chaos. We return to try again to be present during these rare and fleeting experiences.

We blink, and the show is over. We pat each other on the backs. We leave the green room to join our audience in the café. I’m handed a glass of wine, and I’m grateful for the timely tether to earthly things. I’m not really an actor so these rituals are disorienting.

I’m still disoriented, days later. Opening night is a type of magical rite, and I’m recovering. How do the remaining performances go? Will it be more routine the second time, just taking care of business? Will I have a cooler head and be more present? Or will time still resolutely race, while I find different mistakes to make? After all the shows are done, will I have memories of stilled motion, images of heightened moments? Or will the experience resist and remain a blur?

I’m sitting quietly. Another type of performance begins in an hour. I have a class to teach. I’m watching the street outside. It’s a bright spring day, and I can see the delight on many faces.

Life is a set of projects. That’s how we moderns live. And each project has its key moment, the performance, the result. Conventional wisdom has it that life is about the long intervals in between performance points. That’s obvious. That’s comforting. But where’s our philosophy of performance? In a society driven to reality TV, extreme sports, and extreme politics, where’s our understanding of the moment when the stage lights are raised?

Saturday, April 14, 2018

Travelogue 797 – April 14
The Butterfly with Feathers
Part One


“Hope is the thing with feathers.” I used to share this poem when I taught developmental reading at the community college. It led to great exercises in the understanding of metaphors. That was a long time ago. Now, instead of teaching poetry, I’m writing an exam testing vocabulary for business English. Put this noun phrase in order: job and dull extremely an laborious.

I like how Dickinson’s poem manages to say something very simple about hope, the very simplest thing: how it endures. It’s simple but nonetheless mysterious. How does it endure? Strip the question down: does it? Its resilience is integral to the definition of hope. Or is it? Is hope just a feeling that comes and goes, like all emotions, fleeting, powerful and yet without substance?

I miss hope. It’s not the sprightly little bird it used to be. I can’t say why. Maybe hope requires wider horizons than I have at my age. Maybe hope, which ‘sweetest in the gale is heard’, doesn’t bother with the fortunate. I’ve been fortunate, and I knock on wood. Or is it just that the song of hope takes on a different tone in life’s long second half, something softer and more indirect?

What I seem to have replaced for hope is anxiety. I have written two plays and they debut this evening. Rather than anticipation or soaring expectations, I just feel a dull ache in the heart, something like disappointment. Hope encourages risk. But risk does nothing for hope. Hope looks only toward the future. Take enough risks in life, and you might learn to dread success. The let-down is the same whether in success or failure; the success just messes with your mind.

I’m nervous. I should never have agreed to act. I’m no actor. I had a fancy that I wanted the camaraderie that actors have. Admittedly, it’s been fun. But I would like to opt out of the performance, please.

It’s funny that I should wrestle with hope. I have founded several organizations with the name of Hope. Should I be an expert? Or, in this era of ‘campaigns’, isn’t it best to see the campaign manager as the one most driven by the puzzles inherent in the pursuit? I have needed to know that there was hope. Many good people have answered the call and taught me.

Still, I seek today’s rescue in my morning coffee. The spirit of the café reaches out to me. The barista shows me a photo of his colleagues meeting with the king. There’s a march outside, people and their noise-makers labouring for change. I am always learning. I am telling people’s stories.

Sunday, April 08, 2018

Travelogue 796 – April 8
The Course of Rivers


Was the church built to resemble a castle? Under the onion-like domes of its spire, the brick tower is square and fitted with lancet windows. Each corner on top has a small tower with triumphant little flags that shine golden in the intermittent sun.

I’m back in Overschie, the little town on the Schie that has been absorbed into Rotterdam. At the village’s centre is this fortress of a church that rises high above the rest as a landmark and a time-piece. I have a road race coming up in mid-May, so my training is allowing me to reach longer distances. Improved endurance opens horizons. I go farther, see more. I visit old friends like the Grote Kerk in Overschie. The church still stands at the sharp bend of the Schie, where the river jogs quickly east before continuing north toward Delft.

When I run north to see the old church, I run along the river and then down the quaint streets of Overschie’s small town centre. The church grounds force a curve in the road, like a boulder standing in a stream, before the road turns left as the town follows the river. But I turn into the cobbled lane that runs behind the church and, just for twenty metres or so, overlooks the river.

Soon I will have to say, ‘This is where the river used to be.’ Currently what you encounter when you jog along the cobblestone is the prospect of several kilometres of piles of displaced earth. It has been decided to redraw the map. This particular dog’s leg in the course of the Schie must have been a nuisance for barge pilots. Heading south, the river’s curve as it passed the church was relatively gentle. But thereafter boats were forced to negotiate a rather sharp turn to continue south, passing under a low old-style bridge, the control of which was housed in a small and quaint structure that was a contemporary of the seventeenth-century church. For all I know, this dog’s leg survives from the earliest days of the church. The map of the town certainly suggests so.

Running home, I follow the path along the other side of the river. There, I overlook the new river bed, being laboriously dug from the soil. The evidence of the dig is there, though I’ve never seen the equipment. The trench seems nearly complete, left silent amid great stands of raw dirt. A few metres of water stand at the bottom. A swan floats lazily there, preening itself, the one sign of peace. I can see the course of the trench as it aims directly for the old bridge. The barge pilots will be happy.

I marvel that the map can be changed so easily. I don’t know how long the river ran the way it did, but I’m guessing a good long while. In years to come, people will question the strange jog in the street map. They will see in the plan of the old town the vestiges of something gone. The piles of earth will probably be replaced in quick order by new types of construction, and in years to come there will be new homes. The church spire will stand over their yards.

This has always been the story of Holland, a steady re-shaping of the lands and waters. Everything we see has been moulded and cultivated, excavated and then sculpted. To some degree it’s the story of Europe. It takes centuries to execute this scale of architecture in town and country. America’s story is one of amazing, dizzying, frightening development, and yet Americans settlements still have their rough edges, and the wilderness makes its quiet incursions. This sort of detail in the milieu can have decisive effects on character.