Travelogue 1251 – 30 June
After the Heat

You brace for the heat, but you don’t prepare for its departure, for the fatigue afterward, for the nervous conditions.

Today, I’m making a stop reluctantly at the Albert Heijn for groceries, and I’m stopping reluctantly because I’m tired, stopping reluctantly because the most convenient Albert Heijn is closed while the city administers one of its mysterious excavations under the pavements in front.

During the heat wave, visits to the Albert Heijn were highlights of the long days because of the airco. Now it feels like being cast as a victim in a zombie movie or, more terrifying, being stranded at Donald Trump’s great fair in Washington DC.

I’m already suffering a spell of jitters, sweating under the green lighting and casting nervous glances down the airless aisles that suggest in their weird abundance the end of the world, when a muffled siren is sounded through the store’s broadcast system, and then an announcement that is indecipherable, but delivered in that cadence in which all emergency messages are enunciated. Not one of the sparse selection of customers or employees takes notice. I pause with dread. What is happening? Is this a rare symptom of tinnitus in times of disorientation, when delicate nerves are most sensitive to the uncanny?

The message stops, and I tentatively pick up with my shopping again. The siren returns, haunting me, and only me, as I stop and start, gingerly threading my way among the aisles, feeling like a fugitive. I can make out bits of the message now, asking us all to exit the building in an orderly fashion. No one responds, and I think I understand why, as the unsettling recording begins again. It’s a malfunction of the system. But how is it that everyone knows? I conclude my shopping, and I rush toward the exit, never able to quiet the dread. I’m out the first door, but the building could still dissolve around me in the mall foyer, right where the bins outside the drugstore are stacked with maxi-pads being sold at discount. I carry on, I cover the final distance, and I am outside by the bike racks.

Last night, Little Ren was in tears. Brazil and Japan were battling each other to a standstill on the pitch in Houston. Menna told the girls about her family’s long love affair with the Brazilian team. Ren responded, not entirely in a contrarian spirit, since for a few years already she has cultivated a fascination with Far Eastern cultures, that she was rooting for Japan. Josie quickly reassured her mother that she was for Brazil. I said I was for Japan, as I think I would have been anyway. So the family playfully cheered in even division for their teams. We would have been better served going to bed on time. In the 96th minute, Martinelli sent that beautiful strike into the net, and the game was suddenly decided. We were stunned, and then Ren was lost in grief. Eventually, we were all mourning, not only because Ren’s tears were so unrestrained but because the Japanese players and fans both were so quietly, endearingly, nobly sad, so much the picture of those who should have won, and because the heat had made us all debile and vulnerable. We consoled each other as we made our way upstairs to bed, being sure to open the balcony door a crack to allow in the fresh night air.

Travelogue 1250 – 27 June
The Heat

I awake with a headache, as though with a hangover, even though I didn’t drink. My skin is sticky. My arms and legs are spotted with red marks of irritation. My arms are fairly glowing with accumulated UV. 

The little fan nearby emits a persistent hum. It has done so all night. Over all else is a blanket of summer torpor.

When I rise, I move slowly. The muscles engage only reluctantly. The first thing I do is open the front door. The morning air rushes in, a fresh breeze. It feels like I can breathe. The next thing to do is attend to the ants. Once or twice every summer, they mount a concerted campaign to overrun us. They sense an opening in these temperatures, when the human will is weakened. I sweep them out to the pavement outside, where they scramble in circles, stunned by the reversal.

The world outside would be as silent as the rooms inside, abandoned by consciousness, if it weren’t for the neighbours across the compound who have been celebrating something all night. When they talk, they shout. They seem unaware of the peace and stillness gathered about them, sealing them into a dream-like globe of fever.

The flag of Curaçao has been draped here and there around the neighbourhood. This is debris from celebrations, hung over balconies, waving from cars, a kind of signature, though the team never did win a game in the World Cup. This was their first appearance.

My eyes ache as I recall the game last night – not Curaçao ‘s, – as though the TV’s light were too bright after a day of burning sun. The game had been a disappointment. I had hoped to watch Haaland, and he was kept on the bench, like a treasure, like a talisman.

Travelogue 1249 – 31 May

My Cell

Why shouldn’t I play the monk, don the white habit and the black cappa, be properly old, like a man who has worn his service like heavy shoes?

There was a cat yowling in the yard this morning. He caught me dozing over my reading. It was that hour before Lauds again, when I like most to read and contemplate. Even the hard tile under my knees isn’t enough to keep me awake some mornings. I glance at St Dominic in Fra Angelico’s fresco, offering his own penance to Jesus. Forgive me my sloth, I murmur. I murmur, and I startle myself with the sound of it. Mary will forgive me if I like the echo as much as the words.

I met Fra Angelico in passing on an earlier visit to Florence, a mild man, a cheerful man. I see why everyone is so fond of him. He had left for Rome before I came to live. The brothers speak of him like a saint, an artist who cried for Jesus as he painted his suffering.

The face of Dominic is so expressive. It whispers things to me.

Travelogue 1248 – 14 May

My Cell

Sometimes I return to the cell at San Marco, settled within its white walls, and I recollect the sounds there, the echoing halls, their hollowness a hint of God’s nature; the birds in spring, as the day breaks, as Lauds approach; the rustlings of being human.

Forty-four cells there, and endowed with a small fresco by Fra Angelico. I dream in the cell with the picture of St Dominic kneeling at the crucifixion with a scourge over his bare shoulder. They say this picture is Gozzoli’s, in fact. I don’t love it less for that.

My floor is red tile, less than two metres each direction. I have one window, small and arched, with a heavy wooden shutter that I swing shut in winter.

From the hallway, all sound is echoing. From outside, all is sharp. I am content to pray while the sounds find their place.

Travelogue 1247 – 19 April
La Beltà 

Per mirar Policleto a prova fiso
con gli altri ch’ebber fama di quell’arte
mill’anni, non vedrian la minor parte
de la beltà che m’ave il cor conquiso.

This is how Sonnet 77 of Petrarca’s “Canzoniere” begins. There doesn’t seem to be agreement on which of Petrarca’s sonnets in the “Canzoniere” was written first. But I will follow the lead of one scholar, who identifies this sonnet as the earliest.

Petrarca’s first compilation of his “rime sparse”, his stray poems, took place in 1336, and it included 23 of his own poems, and two by friends. What we now know as Sonnets 77 and 78 would seem to be the first recorded into that manuscript.

The music of this stanza already feels different to me than what we have seen before. It seems softer, more melodic. It flows more naturally. It’s more personal, I would say. Dante’s love is cosmic and symbolic. Amor himself must participate. The Sicilians were courtly; their love was mystical. Petrarca’s is human.

We still must start with a classical reference, of course, in this instance to the famous sculptor of Ancient Greece, Polyclitus. That visionary artist, along with all his peers, could have gazed a thousand years and never seen the smallest portion of the beauty that had conquered Petrarca’s heart. So says the first stanza.

But, fortunately, Petrarca’s friend, the painter Simone Martini, perhaps inspired by heaven, captured something of Laura’s true loveliness.

Ma certo il mio Simon fu in paradiso
(onde questa gentil donna si parte),
ivi la vide, et la ritrasse in carte
per far fede qua giu del suo bel viso.

Travelogue 1246 – 7 April

The Colonna Connection

The Colonna family played a role in Petrarca’s life. That started in Bologna, where young Giacomo Colonna was also studying. Years later, Giacomo became the Bishop of Lombez, a town in the southwest of France. He invited Petrarca to his new see, and they became close. When Petrarca returned to Avignon, he took up residence at the home of Giacomo’s brother, Cardinal Giovanni Colonna. He lived there for seven years. This branch of the Colonna family was very kind to Petrarca.

The father of Giovanni and Giacomo was Stefano, a Senator of Rome. Stefano had a brother, Agapito. The children of these two brothers would form two major branches of the family. Stefano’s progeny led to the “Palestrina” branch. It was Agapito’s line that would produce many of the famous Colonna of the future, including Pope Martin V in the next century, and including Vittoria.

When we arrive at the fateful year of 1336, where I began a few weeks ago, we find Petrarca living in Avignon with the Cardinal and finally making a first compilation of the poems that would become the “Canzoniere”.

Giacomo had already returned to Rome a few years earlier, in order to defuse a crisis between his family and the Orsini family. This feud between families had defined much of the medieval history of the city of Rome. An attempted ambush of Giacomo’s father, Stefano, had turned badly for the Orsini, and their leader had been killed. Only Giacomo’s leadership in Rome and Giovanni’s relationship with the Pope in Avignon calmed the situation.

With Rome secured, Giacomo sent his invitation to Petrarca, “Come to Rome”. This was a dream come true for Petrarca. He rushed down, via boat out of Marseilles, and via Civitavecchia. For fear of Orsini partisans, he had to sit some weeks in Capranica, north of Rome, until Giacomo could come with troops to fetch him.

He found Rome glorious. He wrote to the Cardinal, “You may well be looking for an outpouring of eloquence now that I have arrived in Rome. Well, I have found a vast theme, which may serve perhaps for future writing ; but just now I dare not attempt anything, for I am overwhelmed by the miracle of the mighty things around me, and sink under the weight of astonishment.”

The theme was the life of Scipio Africanus, hero of the Second Punic War, and this theme would form the substance of his work, “Africa”, a long epic poem in Latin about the man and about the ancient republic. Though Petrarca never finished this poem, it became his most famous project, and it formed the basis for his claim to be named Poet Laureate five years later.

Travelogue 1245 – 1 April

Morality

Arthur Miller said once in an interview that what distinguished the great playwrights through time was a “fierce moral sensibility”. He said that that sensibility was “unquenchable”.

I find that interesting. It would imply that the not-so-great playwrights, like me, have at least the ambition of a “moral sensibility”. I would not have thought so.

In the 1990s, one could still speak of morality without blushing. Miller himself had survived one of the great moral reckonings of the American polity, the postwar Communist scare. While sorting the new world order – the one Trump is so busy disassembling, – some Americans had nothing better to do than inventing conspiracies involving Russian spies and saboteurs lurking around every corner.

Morality has lost some of its stature. It’s unfashionable. On the right, American primacy is amoral. America is good just because it’s America, a kind of circular, sola fide argument from modern nationalism. Connoisseurs on the left have found morality too distastefully bourgeois to entertain. Artists have used morality as a whipping boy for generations. At a time when dusty, old-time morality could come in handy, we struggle with it, like with a bulky sweater from the bottom of the drawer.

When I was young, I might have followed those trends. Morality was for simple minds. But life grinds slowly and patiently on, and the precious intellectual spaces we create end up under its wheel some time. Every choice becomes a moral one. To the extent that I am a philosopher at all, I realise that I am a moral philosopher. Metaphysics have come to bore me. The human project seems the valid one. And morality unfolds with increasing complexity. Aesthetics and rhetoric become moral sciences, our choices and our connections with others.

Doesn’t metaphysics follow moral thought, anyway? Physicists have established that observation shapes reality. And we have found ourselves stuck on the wave-vs-particle conundrum for a half-century or more: what is the nature of a photon or a subatomic unit? It seems it can be both, or either. If it’s a particle, it’s a thing; if it’s a wave, it’s an event.

For most of its history (the time we have been aware of it), the atom has been a thing. We are materialists, and I suppose it took a materialistic society to analyse things, to want to break them down into their composite parts. We discovered nothing moral down there, in the depths of the atomic and sub-atomic … until we discovered that things might be (quantum) events. In the shift, there is a challenge. Inside an event is an action, and inside action is a decision. Plato might disagree that there is no decision in things, but we have lost any sensitivity to that.

Is there a decision inside quantum events? Who knows, but there might be an opportunity in thinking so.