I fall a little bit in love, everywhere that I go, or “A, you ignorant slut!*”: dirty, orchaostral Roma, Part II 6/12 to 6/17

[note - title originally read 6/17 to 6/22, I corrected this to 6/12 to 6/17]

*credit to Saturday Night Live, USA TV show, for the modified quote

I fall a little bit in love, everywhere that I go. It has happened on this trip, on past trips, on trips to the grocery store, on trips down the hall from an office to a photocopy machine, probably even while I was tripping over my own feet (love has that catastrophic quality to it). I have loved so many people that I may be the Wilt Chamberlain of platonic love.

This certainly does not mean that I love people in a strictly platonic way. Oh, no, no, no. And I should not be embarrassed by what I feel, or by what I do, in any of its forms (with the one caveat that I wish to be compassionate and respectful, never careless or hurtful of others, as I love). I should not be embarrassed, apologetic, or defensive about this. It is good and natural to love.

Every positive human connection involves and exhibits love, and the nature of this love is not easily compartmentalized. One traditional Protestant Christian perspective asserts that there are three styles of love: Romantic/Erotic, Friendly, and Selfless/Spiritual. I don’t believe that I have ever seen this model, with its implication of neat divisions, in real life. It is more of a way that such people want life to be. My senses, my life story tell me that two or even all three often emerge in the chemical / alchemical / secular / spiritual chain reaction that occurs when any two people come together, and I prefer this messiness.

I think it is credible, albeit controversial, to suggest that friendship has a fundamentally romantic element, and also credible (and easier to accept) that there is an overlap between feelings of friendship and the desire to give, or in some way do good, for another. Finally, why wouldn’t the desire to give or somehow nurture a person’s soul at least occasionally involve a desire to nurture their body? Aren’t these combinations enriching? How do they spoil anything, except when we choose to feel that they spoil things out of our fussy desire to put everything in neat, lifeless categories?

In the course of my travels in Europe, I have felt some form of love for many people, and this has included feelings of friendship, a desire to lift up, and also physical attraction on several occasions. I’m sure I will continue to experience this. Again, it is basic chemistry - why wouldn’t dynamic particles in such complex creatures react to one another in complex ways? And my imagination takes me further, to wonder what sorts of new phenomena we might experience and witness if we were both freer and more generous with our love.

Ah, that reminds me to get back to Roma (eventually).

Express: to press out, to obtain by squeezing. With this word we refer to speech, to feelings, to the manifestation of some specific phenomenon (also, for some reason, we use it to connote speed, but I am not prepared to analyze that today). When we express, we take something from the secret or abstract place into the tangible, obvious, accessible place.

Strangely, I am reminded of a story from the Christian Bible, that of Moses in the wilderness with the Israelites. God commands him to speak to a rock so that water will come forth. Instead, Moses strikes the rock, and for this he is punished (with no chance of parole) to never enter the Promised Land.

Is it intentional or serendipitous that Moses is instructed to verbally express a request, in order to draw forth (express) vitality from a rock, and that he chooses instead to vent his frustration (a non-verbal expression, delivery of a slightly different message than God wished Moses to deliver), which nevertheless succeeds in pressuring the rock to give up its secret?

Okay, okay - now Roma. Blue-hot. Not quite white-hot. Drum-taut skies, scoured of clouds, quivering with brutal sunlight that glowers above a repeatedly shattered and reassembled landscape of life and history.

My Roma host told me one day that she is confused by Americans. She has had American friends who suddenly, and completely, changed personality (I assumed, although she did not explicitly say so, that this somehow damaged these relationships).

I struggled to talk with her about this. I felt uncomfortable when a truth that I had often considered privately, or with other Americans, was presented so plainly by someone on the “outside.” It is like knowing something about a family member, or even saying it to other family, for example, “Uncle So-and-so sure is a mean drunk,” but the information somehow becomes inert in this inner circle, part of the known landscape that the clan assimilates into its collective identity and quietly chooses to tolerate. Then one day a neighbor comes over with a broken nose and bloody lip and says, “something needs to be done about your Uncle So-and-so, because he sure is a mean drunk.” The truth has suddenly become too large to contain, and is no longer strictly within one’s control.

So it was with this conversation. As I attempted to respond, I lurched from metaphor to metaphor. It was as if I was testifying in a trial, unsure whether I was shedding light or trying to evade the question (and there was at least a little of looking for a way to express ideas across a language/culture gap). Americans are like shoppers, I said. We don’t really have history, and therefore we don’t have identity. We believe that we must choose and assemble who we are, and then we must defend this selection / accretion / purchase / construction.

My host responded simply and eloquently that to her, a lot of identity comes from family. Trying to define oneself is a waste of time, destructive even, a misuse of resources, for life and identity are all around us to encounter, experience, witness and participate in. I suggested that trying to define a self is like putting up walls around a person, and she agreed. We concluded together that this obsession with walls confines a person from others, ironically separates them from the life they are trying so hard to erect and protect.

So Roma (see, this is about the city, too) is a city to experience, not to analyze, not to screw and glue and lock into place. It is dirty and chaotic - a great city that bursts boundaries of description - I walked the streets and my feet encountered tattered circulars, broken bottles, smears of animal excrement, defiant, crumbling walls that have stood (and decayed) for centuries, scaffolding that has obscured both monuments and modern edifices for weeks, or maybe years, tourists, citizens, three or four different types of civil authority (about some of whom there are apparently a large number of very funny jokes that are a bit hard to understand if you’re not Italian).

Roma is not a model, it is not simply an exhibit. It is not sealed in plastic and put on a shelf like so many of the sterile, watery experiences that commerce has choked and beaten out of modern life. It is performative. Melodramatic and also mundane - men dressed as Centurions hoping to grab a photo and some Euros, tour guides, store clerks, students, striking transit workers - people living life in all its different forms.

In the shadow of the Colosseum, people walk dogs and talk on cell phones. Buses rattle past the ancient Roman forum, and people focus more on what stop to get off at, or helping an elderly lady with a wheelchair to find a seat, than how they might subdue and wrestle the cultural surroundings back to the cave of their identity.

My host took me to several locations, and animated all of them with how they touch her personally, and how her life touches them. A revitalized park that was once dangerous for any sane person, where children now played. Piazza Navoni, where not just grand fountains and a church are on display, but also a historic rivalry between Bernini and Borromini. Campo de’Fiore, with a sobering and inspiring monument to Giordano Bruno - a scholar who asserted that the earth was not the center of the universe, and was burned to death as a heretic. She, and many other Romans, are proud of this man’s example, inspired by it. His courage was extraordinary. Do we have that courage today?

That evening I joined her at an art show, where I met some of her friends (many of whom can speak English, which only increased my shame and determination to learn Italian! I want to have proper conversations with Italians!) They all seemed so energetic, so expressive, so warm with one another.

Ah, the life I witness here! I pose it alongside the standard, sullen, expressionless self-made people I have witnessed so many countless times in my home country. So suspicious, hostile, protective of whatever is inside of those thick, defensive walls. Calculating exchange rates and relative values. We should expose our feelings to the elements, to the vitalizing (and yes, occasionally threatening) changes that may occur. We should raise our gates, lower our weights and measures, open our arms and live.

And so, in a very small, very humble way, I finally lived, inspired by the example of my host and her friends (and here I must also credit the inspiration I had already gathered from some other wonderful people I had met earlier in Italy and Spain!) How? By eating pizza. Is it dumb to be so excited about something so small? As my Roma host would later point out, absolutely not.

At some point during my stay there, I had confided to her that I get very angry sometimes when I see people enjoying something I feel I cannot. Something as simple as eating ice cream, or pizza. In my personal history, odds favored one of three responses to my expression:

1. She would commiserate in some inert way, expressing remorse and patting me on the shoulder.
2. She would offer platitudes I had heard a million times before and which I had tried unsuccessfully to apply.
3. She would pretend I didn’t say anything and hope I would take the hint and change the topic.

Instead, she suggested, and helped carry out, a plan - and provided a new way of looking at things. When you encounter a wall, she said, don’t focus on the place you can’t get through. Go and look for an opening. Follow life to the gaps. She then demonstrated this by taking me to a gelateria and helping me to obtain soy-free, dairy-free sorbet. That was the most delicious thing I had tasted in weeks. For homework, she suggested a gluten-free pizzeria to eat at and wished me luck.

At dinnertime, I discovered that this pizzeria was closed, but where my habits would have me immediately give up and conclude that life hated me (or that only I sink in water, or some similar, poisonous, self-abusing belief I have internalized and which I was tempted to surrender to), I remembered what she had said, and what she showed me, and I looked for the gap. I found another restaurant - La Mela d’Oro - and launched myself out into the warm, Roma night to hunt for fulfillment. I walked a couple of miles and felt my excitement and determination grow as the lively evening version of the city shook awake its sidewalk dinner crowds, laughter and growling motorbikes, streetlamps and floodlit piazzas. Finally I turned down an angled road with a splendid view of Basilica Papale di Santa Maria Maggiore, where the waiters happily assured me they could feed me, then served me a big, fat, gluten- and dairy-free pizza which I (with an almost indecent amount of enthusiasm) ate every bite of.

Later, when I happily told my host of my success and showed her a picture of my pizza, I apologized for how silly I must sound. No, she said: it is something you desired, and it is important for that to be fulfilled.

As readers may have noticed, I feel frustration about my body so acutely that a week or so ago I devoted an entire (multilayered) blog post to it. It does not escape my notice that on several occasions now, I have felt extraordinarily happy while sitting in a restaurant. It is a small sign to me that I can win at life sometimes, that I can have my needs and desires met, that I can live and enjoy, and not simply exist to execute duties and functions.

Thus love, which brought me to this small, enormous victory. Love, which I wish were dirtier, more careless with its rations. Unashamed love which is not just in every bright spot but surprises us in every dark corner of the world. Love that crosses lines, happily embarrasses itself, is both mundane and splendid.

The simple experience of eating pizza in Roma makes me want to give and receive love from everywhere, as much as I can, and I am sure that an austere, one-dimensional moment (just the mind, just the body, just lust or just friendship or just priestly benevolence) could not feed this desire.

I believe this is my first ever food picture