Monday, July 14, 2014

Day One, Tuesday, July 8th

Woke up with continuing toothache, and so we made a 3pm dental appointment from the list of English speaking dentists in Rome that we compiled on Sunday. With that to look forward to, we get out of the apartment around noon and walk out to Piazza Novona, where I see Bernini's "Fountain of the Four Rivers" sculpture for the first time. The Piazza and the fountain are impressive. The bright sun beats down on the stone tiles but it is not too hot… it's not humid-hot like the east coast of the U.S. It's more a bright sunny hot, in the mid 80's probably.

The dentist recommends a root canal over an extraction, since the former is less traumatic, and she's aiming to make less of a dent in our vacation plans. The only wrinkle is that one of my canals is calcified (whatever that means) and so I must come back the next day to have a different dentist have a go at clearing it out. Nice. Just what I wanted… a 24 hour turnaround on a dental appointment.

We leave the dentist and finally find a cafe, where Margaret has wine and I have a beer. I get a Le Chouffe… which is a nice Belgian ale we first encountered in Amsterdam in 2012, on a charmed street on a late night walk. Such are the memories that construct the meanings of things like beer. But on this afternoon, it mostly just tastes like a beer. Which is fine… but hardly magical. Not that beer should be magical. In fact, beer should just be beer. Magic is for card tricks and such.

We pick up another Le Chouffe and a beer called "Delerium", which according to the girl behind the counter, is the favorite beer of everyone. We take them to go with plastic cups and sit in Piazza Novona, watching the crowds of tourists, street vendors, and locals mix into a strange and meaningless stew.

The street vendors in Rome, as I am to find out, are a strange lot. They seem to be African peoples and Pakistani's. No doubt they are immigrants with low economic prospects or education… otherwise why are they selling absurd trinkets in public squares? On the one hand you can feel sorry for them for all the obvious, geo-political and personal reasons. On the other hand, they are completely annoying… and the trinkets that they peddle have NOTHING to do with Rome or for anyone's reasons for being there. Their trinkets consist in one of the following things. Either they shoot glow in the dark 6 inch rockets into the air with a rubber band, which then slowly descend to earth on a propellor… or they bounce glow in the dark balls on the pavement… or they throw glow in the dark gelatinous balls on the ground, which appear to be smashed thereby, but which then slowly reconstitute themselves back into a ball shape… or they flash laster pointers  at your feet. Like I said… these things have NOTHING to do with Rome past, present, or future. It is simply junk.

However, these desperate people would not waste their time unless there was a market for this so-called "junk"… which of course there is. If every 300th person buys something, then there is a market. And with hundreds of people streaming by all the time, there is always a buyer eventually… enough to make it worth the while of these vendors. But this brings up a few interesting thoughts. Firstly… isn't it messed-up that one person in 300 screws it up for everyone else? If that person could just resist buying a glow-in-the-dark six inch rocket, then the vendors would have to quit and go home.  It also brings up the familiar complaint that the American tourists ruin the environment by funding the tacky street vendor. The counter-argument is that the tourist does not create the market for tack-tourist-shit… it is actually the host-country that does so. When tourist dollars are floating around, there seems to be no stone unturned in the pursuit of even the tiniest bit of profit…. everything from fancy hotels and meals… to pricey museum tickets… down to the aforementioned street vendors… and even further down to the professional pan-handlers who sit in front of church doors looking like lepers from the 4th century B.C., looking up with stigmatized eyes while mumblings requests/invocations/curses on you lest you drop money in their cup. One of them did so while shuffling the menu on her ipod. No penny can fall to earth in the tourist universe without some local sweeping down to catch it. It's all so tacky…. all so unrelated to enlightened travel. I search my heart and mind for reasons and questions and answers… and I cast my whole self into contemplations of what Rome might mean… and then I have to deal with some Pakistani guys shining a laser pointer at my feet. I literally want to kill him with my bare hands and stuff him in a trash can. Now wouldn't that make for great sport in the Colosseum?

We walk a few blocks from Piazza Novona and emerge suddenly in from of the Pantheon… that well preserved Roman temple to all the pagan gods. The suddenness of it's appearance is surprising. But then again… everything your run into for the first time in Rome feels sudden. That is because the streets are so narrow and you can't see anything and everything is not that far away… and there are no signs… because the Romans don't seem to believe in signage. Why have signs when you know where everything is? Just like in Barcelona. And just like Barcelona, their are no streets signs, just plaques installed on the sides of buildings with the street name chiseled into it like a work of art. And then only one, as chiseled plaques are kind of expensive. And not always in the same spot, for whatever reason. And then the street name changes all the time, despite appearing to be the same continuous run of street surface. And so on. It all adds up to a level of confusion and disorientation that magnifies the effect of emerging from a six foot wide "street" into a vast public piazza and in front of a building of great historical significance. Such is the approach to the Pantheon.

Everything you might imagine about the Pantheon is true. From the outside its mass and magnitude speak to 2000 years of Imperial Roman presence. The pediment and it's inscription of "M-Agrippa" asserts the past into your exact moment of existence, causing a psychological double-take, as you try to reconcile presumptions of the ruined past with this un-ruined architectural fact. The pantheon is not a building… it is a "thing". A massive hulking shape of marble and stone and brick and concrete… of such unmovable stature that it seems rather to be sinking into the ground that sitting upon it. Probably this is due to the rest of the city being built "up" on slightly higher ground over the centuries. But the Pantheon is undeterred by the passage of time. It stubbornly digs itself into that spot where it's foundations were laid, no doubt on top of foundations prior to that which we know not of. And so this spot has existed in the minds of men stretching back thousands of years. But instead of this being a cliche of historical analysis, it is rather a disturbing reminder that we occupy such a small slice of that time past, and even less the time to come… where the Pantheon will live on while we pass away. And so this thing… this temple… shakes off our presumptions of quaint historical purpose… shakes them off with it's tail while staring us down. It presents, as it always has… a mute pediment… a row of columns.. and a huge dark opening into which any human must be drawn. And so we are drawn to it and into it, and in this there is no option.

The interior of the Pantheon presents first and foremost the interior of it's dome… so high and vast that the air inside produces an atmospheric perspective by which we sense the great distance it spans. The effect is momentarily dizzying, such as one feels when looking up at distant mountains. The oculus at the top reveals a round patch of perfect sky… whose light flows through the opening at a precise angle, and casts a spotlight on the floor based on the location of the sun at that moment. Huge crowds cover most of the floor, milling unconsciously about from one thing to the next. The walls are inset chapel niches, one of which holds Raphael's tomb… which oddly has been updated with a flashing light. Other niches contain medieval frescos, whilst the biggest niche (opposite the door) is the main altar. I should stop trying to describe that which has been described many times over, and better than here. I should conclude only that the interior is less meaningful than the exterior. The interior was converted from a pagan temple, to a christian church, and now to a tourist attraction for all time. The exterior has not changed… and in it's craggy, grand, colossal unchanging way… it carries that larger historical meaning. And while the tourists have take over the interior… the massive stone "thing" sits where it always has… under the hot sun on that exact spot for all time.

After finally leaving the Pantheon, we walk a block or so and find the Basilica Santa Maria Sopra Minerva. The word "sopra" means "over"… meaning that it was built "over" a previous temple dedicated to Minerva. It seems that Saint Mary trumps everything in Rome. Inside the basilica is a sculpture called "Christ Carrying the Cross", by Michelangelo. This is why we came here. But naturally, these grand churches are so much more than the things contained in them, and one is mesmerized by the monumental scale at which churches were architected back when people put their money where their mouth was. The church is a giant jewelry box… and while the objects in it might sparkle, it is the box itself that situates these treasures and provides a context for their existence.

This brings up a questions that stuck has stuck in my mind now for the past week… the question of how it is that (as they say) "architecture is the mother of the arts". On the one hand, a simple explanation is to recognize that the craftsmen who built such things long ago evolved into the more specialized painters and sculptors who ascended to the rarified status of "artist". Another way to consider the maternal nature of architecture is to recognize a simple fact with surprising implications… which is that all the art that get's made has to actually go somewhere… has to be housed in a building. Unless we nail our paintings to a tree, or put our sculptures in the woods… we actually have to find a place to put them. These places are the man-made buildings of all kind, i.e., architecture understood simply as buildings… architecture as any constructed space. Further, these spaces (being so built) cost money, and this money comes from economic activity generally… and that economic activity ties the building into social purpose. In the end, what the building does and represents is tied to these purposes. Therefore, whatever ends up decorating the walls and spaces of the building must necessarily be consistent with those social purposes. And so it is that architecture (the constructed space) has a determinate effect on what gets made for it…. and is therefore the mother of the arts.

The notion of architecture can be extended to a more abstract level, which transcends buildings per se, and considers not simply the architecture of buildings, but the architecture of the man-made world. It is probably more correct to refer to this as the "systems" of the world… rather than the architecture. In which case, the "systems" of the world determine the art. When the systems of the world revolved around religious devotion and pious allegiance to the Catholic Church… the resulting religious art was determined. With the evolution of the modern world, the shift to secular and materialistic world-views produced secular systems, which led to secular art. In our own time, the systems of materialism, consumerism, and a virtual society alienated from much of what has been our history…. defines systems of living that lead to the strange artistic constructions we see today. Everything that gets made and bought and finds a home within the great systemic architecture of this society, is accounted for thoroughly. This strikes the artist hard, if they presume the power to author meanings themselves, and to put them into the world. If the world opens it's arms to your product, then it has already anticipated them… you are already in sync with it. One is free to embrace the known… but is one free to author themselves apart from such agreed upon meanings? I think not. The limit of human freedom is the limit on our individual self to define who and what we are apart from society. But we make these claims in a void, with only our own ears to keep us company. Everything embraced is enslaved thereby, and the only freedom is in an avant gard reaction.

We leave the Sopra Minerva and walk up to the Trevi Fountain. Naturally, the fountain is turned off and covered with scaffolding. Such has been our luck many times. First it was the Grand Canyon fogged in on the one day we had to visit it. Then it was the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which was closed for construction in 2012. It was also the Picasso Museum in Paris, closed for construction in 2010. And so it goes. And of course, there is New York City, 25% of which is scaffolded at any time. More mature types would immediately recognize this as simply bad luck and the inevitable upkeep required of ongoing civilization. But from my point of view, it just sucks. I can't take a long-view on culture when my vacation's two-week window of opportunity is compromised.

So then we walk up Via del Corso, the busy shopping street in Rome (or so they say). It is certainly busy, and the sidewalks are three feet wide maybe. And there are tourists coming at you shoulder-to-shoulder, causing you to step into the path of an oncoming scooter or mini-car. We head North to Piazza del Popolo, but we are intending to cut over at some point and walk up the Spanish steps, which we do. We stop to snap some pictures. Naturally, the boat-shaped fountain at the foot of the steps is turned off and scaffolded-up for construction. I wonder if they will carve my name on it's base so that future generations might understand that I sacrificed for the future of public art.

The Spanish Steps go up and up and up, and then you're on a road…. known either as Via Sistina (from the south), or if you head north to Piazza del Popolo (as we do) it is called Vialle della Tinita dei Monti. Like I was saying before, the streets change their names any time they encounter any kind of piazza, even if they continue straight through it. So we head north along this elevated road, which eventually descends to the Piazza del Popolo. Right away I'm thinking of the movie "Angels and Demons" (which I also thought of at the Piazza Novona)… but in the burning light of day, the piazza is less dramatic. Large… yes… but not dramatic. And also here there is a huge amount of scaffolding, as they are erecting a giant stage just off enter of the piazza, which is to host some kind of "Hard Rock" concert event. On Friday we would be at the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo (located on the piazza itself), and we would hear rock music sound-checks reverberating through the church. And so on.

We walk back south on Via del Corso looking for a place to eat. Unfortunately, the pain in my mouth (so effectively subdued by novocaine, is wearing off… and the searing pain of dental surgery is upon me. As we sit to eat, I am in so much pain that I simply announce that I must leave and immediately walk back to the apartment. Margaret stays behind to eat in peace, while I stagger home for 20 minutes of so while moaning and swerving back and forth. People look at me funny the whole way. A mouthful of Advil finally kicks in a little bit, and then I get home and pop a Tylenol with Codeine. Relief finally comes. Margaret returns eventually and asks how I'm doing. I'm ok for now… but tomorrow the dentist is going to dig in again… and that's not fair on your vacation.




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