Travelogue 1152 – 19 November
Complicated Skies

Before six, a gentle rain is tapping at the window. It will be cold out. The season has turned. Yesterday was a day of complex skies. The clouds were everywhere. The sun never quite found its patch of blue because it sails so low now, but it shone through the vaporous masses and lit them with pretty pastels, linking sunrise to sunset in a way only winter can do.

Sinter Klaas is in Holland, and I’m happy to report that the girls still believe. Baby Jos complains that many of her classmates don’t. She chooses to, and I’m pleased. It’s such a sweet tradition, and I’m grateful to have one more run. Already the girls giggle at the silly romances of cartoon characters, and I cringe at the relentless approach of the great introversion called adolescence. I have enjoyed their childhood at least as much as they have.

The teenage years orient us toward humanity, toward each other, toward society. It becomes a mania that defies recovery. Most of us have marks from those years, as though we survived a pox. I have an impulse to protect my girls, a wish to protect the magical realism of kids’ days. Of course it’s futile. And I can’t say there is no beauty among the clouds. There fly there ideals and passions, insubstantial things that fuel hope and renewal among people. Those are desperately needed.

Travelogue 1151 – 16 November
Wonders

Groggy, I’m up before six. On a Saturday. I’m up hours before light on a weekend for a sport that I had never heard of before moving to Holland. Or if I had, it had made the kind of impression that my dreams made last night, leaving a kind of echo of something, a reverberation to be picked up later in another form.

It’s not enough that I’m up before light, I have to get gear ready and pack fruit for the whole team. I have to be sure the girls are dressed for their games. I have to travel with Baby Jos to the far reaches of the metropolitan area on a long tram line. We will ride all the way to the last stop. Beyond the club’s fields are only parklands and farmers’ fields.

There will be a clubhouse next to the hockey fields. I will mill around with parents, hoping for coffee, while our daughters warm up in the cold outside. Afterwards, we parents will stand in the wind together, shivering in our coats, while our teams of young girls clash on the field. Baby Jos has reached the age where games occupy the full field and one full hour. That’s a long time. There are no benches; we stand beside the field.

The clubhouse there is comfortable enough. It’s newer than our clubhouse in the city. But we have more fields. And just a week ago, the dome went up. Every winter, the clubs all play ‘zaal’ (hall) hockey indoors. The bigger clubs, like ours, erect temporary halls for the purpose, arching, white, balloon-like structures with a rectangular base fitting snugly onto one of the regular playing fields. Inside are half a dozen smaller fields with smooth flooring to make the indoor game fast.

That a building like that goes up in a few days still amazes me. Maybe it’s because I am reading a lot of medieval history lately. In a modern setting, sure, why not? There’s construction everywhere. But I can’t help imagining the wonder this place would excite among Charlemagne’s masons. That hockey zaal would instantly be the biggest single room in the county, aside, perhaps, from a few basilicas in the most important towns. The age of the cathedrals was still centuries away. They would marvel at the ceilings held high without pillars. The biggest shock would be that the room was for children’s games.

Travelogue 1150 – 6 November

Elections

I was home ill on America’s election day. It seemed only fitting. Much of the campaign season sounded like the rantings of a man with a life-threatening fever.

Somehow everyone managed to stay healthy through our trip to Venice. We wore no masks. We ate whatever we liked. I made a list of everything we tasted the first night in Venice, sitting outside at a table by a quiet canal: octopus and squid, shrimp, sardine, mussels, clams, sea bass, polenta, lasagna, and mascarpone cream. We were offered five courses, and we never hesitated. Sure, we were slow moving in the morning, but we soldiered on, stepping right out for caffè and brioches filled with marmellata to fortify our aching bellies. Then we started our tour with the Ca d’Oro and a traghetto ride across the Grand Canal to the Rialto Market.

The next day, we had an appointment in a church in Mestre, where we would attend the battesimo of a sweet little girl growing up in the Netherlands, far from the beautiful land where her father grew up.

My original home is faraway, too, in many ways. It’s become a matter of language. “He speaks my language,” Trumpistas will say. “He says what I want to say.” If so, this is a code that I find indecipherable. On the surface, it’s a hotch-potch of insults and nonsense, belligerence and incoherent parables. But underneath, there must be a powerful code. So powerful it outweighs the speaker’s character, which the most debauched Roman emperor would have described as “filthy”. If it was a smell, it would be a penny lost in Vance’s sofa. If it were a clue in Pictionary, it would be a sketch of a soiled toilet brush.

I have read that this will be the criteria of our age, not credentials but authenticity. It’s a damning indictment of traditional politicians if the huckster rings to the ear as more authentic.

We have developed – maybe through film texts – a mythos that the criminal is, at the very least, sincere. According to this strange frame of reference, being openly evil spares the individual any need for artifice. Extending that logic, being good requires artifice. That’s how the average American feels. Civility is suspicious. Better to be evil than to be false. It’s a degrading ethos to live by – made more degrading by forcing others to live under the reign of criminals.

Travelogue 1149 – 1 November
Dark Edges

The darkness over the water is eloquent. It is not silent. The water laps there; the boats’ engines roar. The darkness does not speak, but it is expressive. In the distance, the city lights are chattering. The waters are watchful, and they keep their counsel.

The evening falls quickly over the lagoon. It is autumn, and the season’s night comes on early. We have travelled across the water to the island of Murano. We sat for snacks and drinks in a square there as the day drew to a close, the sky above the piazza changing colour, becoming violet and losing its light.

Afterward, we rode the water bus back to Venice in night. The lagoon was rung round with the yellow lights of towns and roads, but the blackness ate up all the space between. Lights were reflected upon the waves, then the darkness ate them again. Ahead, Venice was sparsely underlit, as though asleep already, brick towers over the jumble of rooftops, their white stone highlights, their history, obscured by the night.

There was life in the streets. It was early. But the crowds had dwindled. The people walking had purpose, as though, night drawing on, they must get home. Crossing bridges, we came upon darkness again. Canals that featured no access, where buildings walls dropped into the water, had no lighting. Shadows fell precipitously off the bridges. Above, there were ancient buildings we passed that had no lights in any windows. Many seemed abandoned above the ground-floor shops.

La Serenissima emerges from the shadows, the ancient city still there underneath the noise of the jaundiced lights of the modern.

Travelogue 1148 – 17 October
The Dark Ages

This is the season that I forget bike lights. Spring lights have been lost. The new ones I purchase, I forget at home because the routine is still new. I don’t attach lights to my bike because the frequent rains short them out. So I find myself out without lights in the dark. Everybody else has lights. I have to watch for police, who stop cyclists and fine them.

It’s more complicated because I have bikes in two locations. My life is west; my life is east. Home and work are on opposite sides of town. I stow a bike in a free garage at Kralingse Zoom Metro Station, dry and safe. My daily bike is sturdy and rusting and carries a heavy child seat on the back. Neither have a light.

The autumn dark creeps in, and, even home and dry and safe, the night seems to become deeper. The fall brought me a long series of nightmares a few nights ago. I had eaten late, and whatever was for dinner hadn’t agreed with me. The dreams were of the sort that repeated in sickening detail, branching endlessly. At some point, my dreaming mind began to believe in hell, the visions were so convincing and so persistent. I’m sure there was never another moment in my life I took the idea seriously. The idea of hell.

In one moment of isolation in dark semi-consciousness, I could be convinced that hell was as real as, say, Mar-a-Lago, and every bit as grotesque. It’s odd to think that such a bizarre concept could find an opportunity to become real. And, yes, I am speaking here about Mar-a-Lago.

It’s astonishing that one could be so easily convinced, even in a vulnerable moment of darkness and distress, that one could be damned. Not to claim that I’m no sinner, but, really, damned forever? Suffering pain forever? As it is, twenty minutes in a dentist’s chair is enough to push me to the edge of apathy or of swooning. What is eternity?

People believed in hell for centuries. When was the first time the concept of eternal punishment appeared in a human mind? One can just about imagine it. There was no moon to make shadows. There were no clouds to obscure the vastness of the night sky, the oppressing nullity enforced upon us by the Milky Way; no psychological safety nets in place: no science, no icons of the Virgin Mary, no karaoke. Add to that intestinal distress. I should think there were many opportunities for that in prehistory. The agonies would have been as relentless as the nights. The dreams engendered would have been tortuous. The notion of hell could have risen there as organically as salmonella.

Critically, the pain somehow became wed to an idea: “I deserve this.”

In this sense, night contrasts nicely with hell. It is impersonal, and it descends without an eye for the state of my soul. The very colour of the sky changes, and we are spectators, the sinful and the pure. The blue vibrancy of the day congeals and darkens, is shot through with red, while shadows creep forward. It is quite a show. One sees it better without bike lights.

Travelogue 1147 – 7 October
The Donation of Pepin

Until 751 CE, Rome had more or less always been Roman. Rome had belonged to Rome. For a thousand years after its founding, it had been autonomous and the centre of the early Roman Kingdom, then the Roman Republic, and then the Empire. Since the late days of the Roman Empire and then under the Byzantines, who called themselves Romans, Rome had still been “Roman”. Suddenly, Rome being Roman was in question. The Lombards were at the gates; the Byzantines had been ejected from Italy.

In 754, the pope was in residence with the Frankish king. Pepin the Short was sending embassies to the stubborn king of the Lombards, who had conquered the Byzantine lands in Italy and was threatening Rome. Pepin was cajoling his own lords, convincing them that the pope’s interests were their own.

Finally, the Franks invaded in 755. They invaded again in 756. Apparently, one sound defeat each year was enough to convince Aistulf of the Lombards that the Franks were going to dictate their own terms. A treaty was signed in 756 that would become one of the foundational documents of the Middle Ages. It came to be known as the Donation of Pepin – a document that didn’t survive physically. The treaty awarded to the papacy the lands that were formally Byzantine in northern and central Italy. This was the beginning of the independent Papal States. Rome would be Roman again, this time until the nineteenth century.

Fascinating to me is the power of the Franks to make all this happen. There was no Caesar writing about the army’s crossing of the Alps. But we know that that was no mean feat; we learn that from classical authors before Pepin. The Frankish era is relatively silent; there are no epic poems or memoirs or verbose monuments. But clearly Francia was a martial power, restless and aggressive. Clearly, they had a reputation. They were intimidating. Aistulf did not need much convincing. And in another generation, Charles would simply put an end to the independent Lombard kingdom (taking the crown for himself). The Byzantines wanted to claim back the land that Pepin had rewon, but had no power to do it. They offered Pepin a fortune to return their lands, and he refused. That was that. The Franks were the new power in the West. And they would be the protector of the papacy.

Travelogue 1146 – 24 September
The House Guest

The story of the Bishops of Rome - the papacy - and the story of Northern Italy in general after the fall of the Western Roman Empire in the fifth century is bound up with the story of the Byzantine Empire and the Exarchate of Ravenna. For two centuries the exarchate stood against the Goths, first the Ostrogoths and then the Lombards. As long as the choice was between Byzantine and Gothic rule, many places were happy to be counted among the Byzantine camp, even as they effectively rebelled against Byzantine control, as the Bishops of Rome did. The petty infighting only weakened the Exarchate. In 751, the post-Roman order finally collapsed, as the Lombard king Aistulf overcame the Byzantines and ejected them from Italy. As Aistulf turned his eye on the Duchy of Rome, the new pope, Stephen II, chosen in 752, looked outside Italy for a balancing power. It’s worth noting that Stephen II was an Orsini. The Orsini were an aristocratic Roman family that would dominate Roman politics for a millennium. It seems no accident that, when Rome was being threatened, the Roman nobility stepped forward. Stephen II appealed to Pepin, the king of the Franks. It had only been a year since Stephen’s predecessor, Zachary, had approved Pepin’s appropriation of the Frankish throne.

What follows is fascinating. Stephen II asks Pepin for safe conduct into Francia. He becomes the first pope to ever cross the Alps. And for at least two years, he is a guest of the royal family while Pepin negotiates with Aistulf. He shows the Pope great honour and respect. When the Pope arrives, he receives him as a supplicant, and he leads his horse to the palace. The Pope returns the favour with many honours. He formally anoints Pepin king of the Franks, and he similarly anoints his two sons. He names all three “patricians of Rome”. These honorifics would become important in the future, when Charles became king, and when he and his descendants became emperors. Charles would have been just a boy when the pope was a house guest. Imagine the effect on him.