Accademie

What in the world am I doing here? Walking home, after a film class which ended at six in the evening, darkness crowding all the corners of the room, I know for certain I am in no way, shape or form meant for the academic world. Our teacher walked in, her face in knots, wearing a small red backpack and wide-laced blue fishnets. I think she must live the most unusual life: whom does she love? And how? As time grows on her character grows more and more endearing to me, but I cannot help seeing her hiding from the world behind the veil of intellectualism. How easy to break things down until they are unrecognizable, what an agile, self-satisfying mode of defense.

I checked out a book on Jeanette Winterson yesterday, a collection of post-modernist essays regarding her style and literary choices. I began reading them, starting with an essay focusing on book I had read of hers (the first book of fiction I have loved since The Shell Collector freshman year, or maybe even Francesca Lia Block in high school). The criticism was gaudy, unnecessary. Completely unimportant. Trivial. Why undertake such a meaningless exercise? Why break apart something you love into something ugly, dissatisfying? To contain it, conquer it? The next question: was it ever really loved to begin with? A defense against loving! Anyhow, it was ugly and boring and, I feel, a total waste of time. Then, of course, for thinking such awful thoughts about someone’s hard work: that sort of essay is precisely what I am supposed to produce following my time at Pomona as a Media Studies major. Why did I choose such a major! It only exists because academics got bored with meaningful things and had to create new things to dissect! No one should be paying attention to the television anyway, yet now it is so invasive that it merits a field of academic study! Another, far more indulgent veil to hide behind!

I have never wanted to drop out of college completely so much as I do now. What is its worth? It is a simple exercise for those still left thinking honestly. Then I think forward to the future: if I cannot stand this and what it implies, meaninglessness, meniality, can I really be happily employed as an adult? I cannot imagine selling 40 hours of my time a week no matter what the pay; how deadening! Standing at a busy street corner in Florence, Italy, in near darkness, the rain illuminated by the headlights of passing cars, wet from the knees down, I can suddenly see no other option: it’s either suicide or poetry. Which is in a sense suicide, too.

I continue to think of my life in two parts, my life then and my life now: is studying abroad so divisive? I see certain things, small things: that was the coastline. My hair was so straight. How did I ever text message on that phone? I don’t think as if these are things to which I will be returning; why does it feel as though a certain kind of death has happened? Why is it impossible to return?

What is it about the rain here that makes everything inside simply better? Old songs come back to life, old memories, and little things like regular dinner reservations, getting dressed to head back outdoors. Doing readings, thinking about the future, everything becomes slightly, yet perceptibly, better.
Is it because it ceases to matter? Things getting done or not getting done: there’s plenty of time to do them in.

Understanding

So here’s this, then. Is the desire to write a curse? Also, tangential notes from my Lit Travels class:

Do we ever really enjoy the external world? Or is what we love the self, the results it produces? How much of an affect may the external world have on the memory-limited self, especially given our penchant for living the present within the frame, through the lenses of the past, experience, memory, names, places? How much of a product of circumstance of memory / past influenced by mindset as ordained by natural, scientific occurrences, synapsing nerves? Even given the memory, past guided present, we still experience, and in an infinitely intimate way.

There is so little choice involved for me in writing. Only now aware of it do I try to escape it but somehow that only pulls it closer, creates a more complicated dependent relationship. What is the point? Is it the need to be remembered, to leave something behind? To mark our temporal places? Make maps of our minds, what is it? How does it function for others? I suppose when I read truly beautiful pieces, they are awakening; the world becomes grand, possible, whole. I am reminded that I do not know, how little any of us truly know. That creates a dependence, too, on that writer, a thankfulness. Poetry is awakening in its way; it is an attempt to communicate the self, the world in such a way that it is understandable, the greatness or tragedy, any characteristic of it is wholly understandable. Because that is what we are scrambling for in the first place, isn’t it? To be understood? To know enough to understand?

Written on the Body

Sometimes I feel as though there is a hierarchy of ideals, beginning with spirituality, and followed by English or art, maybe mathematics… but always spirituality first. I think I am losing some of the drive to realize the highest truth. I have been slipping back for a long time: first back into the sweet solstice of writing, now to the joy of temporal things, temporal relationships. To the point it even feels silly to be spending time writing this, spending time doing any of the things I’ve done in the past six months. The only thing which still seems right is the yoga. I have stopped reading the Bhagavad Gita at breakfast, and I have taken this as a sign of my decline.
I am making better and faster friends than before. Going out, not being ridiculous, having some sort of faithfulness to self or ego, not compromising more than necessary: this has been beneficial.
I wonder if some things stay with you, written in you, which no matter how long they are absent, are bound to return.

I had pancakes for dinner at an American diner tucked away behind the Duomo somewhere – probably couldn’t get back by myself if I tried. But I almost cired looking at the menu, all the English, the American things: pancakes, French toast, classic egg breakfasts. A fluent English speaking waiter who didn’t give us bad looks for ordering in English. How I miss using English effectively, for more than just communicating with friends. I had no idea I felt that way, but what a relief I felt there, surrounded by my home, my language, my things. How strangely safe.

Cinque Terre was of course wonderful. We found so many people from Syracuse there, or people from California studying in Milan – as the guys behind me at the bar said, there were more American girls there than there were in America. But Monterosso was beautiful, and there is no one I would have rather spent that time with than Kristen, Tina and Amanda.

Immediately after arriving we found and rented a rather large apartment for $30 euro each, which we still can’t believe was so easy. Kristen Tina and I hiked the 2-3 mile trail between Monterosso and Vernazza in flip flops (enduring many rather condescending comments from passing English or English-speaking travelers) in good time, taking some delirious pictures along the way. In Vernazza we ate some much needed gelato before continuing on to Corniglia, a small middle town only accessible by long flights of stairs or by a bus which runs back and forth from the train station every half hour.
After returning back to our apartment and freshening up we headed out to the pier to drink a bottle of Cinque Terre white wine while watching the last of the sun retreat behind the cliffs to the west. Dinner was delicious; we all ordered things accented with pesto (a sauce originally created in the region) and we were certainly not disappointed.
We called a friend we knew to be staying at the island and met up with him and his friends at a bar. There we found (along with hundreds of other people we knew) Maggie Nick and Craig, to whom we spoke to for most of the remainder of the night. Around 2, deserted by everyone else and waiting for Nick and Craig to return from their room, Kristen and I sat on a door stoop as the bar closed down, pretending we spoke Chinese to deter the drunken advances of the emerging Italians: it worked brilliantly.
Today was spent mostly hung over, wandering all over Monterosso, sitting down in different places for forty five minute intervals. Not altogether regrettable, but I’m beginning to realize that, as much as I enjoy it, it is simply impossible to drink only wine all night and not suffer any consequences the next day. Che brutta!
Of course there is always more to say but I’m deliriously exhausted; there will be more later.

Italiano

Paola would have made a very good mother. She has the right face for it – does that make sense? Mothers need to have faces appropriate to child-rearing!

Italian is beginning to sound like a make-believe language, silly. I think it’s somehow the way I am translating the language, or maybe that I hear it all the time… I’m just beginning to think grammatical phrases like penso che and mi amo, things like that, sound childishly constructed, sound very elementary. I wonder which is traditionally more difficult to learn, English or Italian and other romance languages. Learning languages is certainly a fascinating practice; I wish I were more adept.

Every time I leave Florence, I am always amazed that “going home” for the time being means returning to Florence. I am vacationing, “getting away” from Florence. Who would want to do such a thing! But even now, I have that sort of vague sense of escape and wonder at the outside world; my homestay with Paola is truly becoming comfortable, a home, something normal to desire a breach from. At the same time, however, it has become a place I now desire to return when I am overwhelmed by people, my environment, the discomfort after a night wrangling with a poor mattress or pillow. It is certainly a home.

A Lot of Fucking Poetry

Okay, so upon further examination: I have written a lot of fucking poetry! I had no idea I had so massive a collection – sure some is really seriously not so good, but I had no idea I had ever written that much. I guess it does kinda pile up on you; I’ve saved even the bad ones in case there is something salvageable. A poetry packrat.

Still, what can you say? I was very young, or at least in hindsight I seem that way. Even last year, even six months. I remember sitting in that class and somehow, somewhere, feeling like I was onto something, feeling as though my work mattered collectively; as though that idea wasn’t only my own. How did I manifest that self-importance? I still like that I used to go to that class, that spring afternoon class, on left over Vicodin from a bad bout of strep throat. Now that I think about it, I think it was that which gave me that first sensation of peace, of the freedom from the anxiety. Strange to realize that now.

What was my intent when beginning that class? I remember walking into that room, seeing that tiny blonde woman sitting at the head of the table with a smoothie, and thinking I was really in for it, a whole semester with this total dimwit I was sure wrote some ridiculous poetry about silly Los Angeles type things. I don’t remember how I finally accepted her; she was funny, smart. I suppose that’s what surprised me more than anything.

I remember getting into the Advanced class thinking it was normal, that was what you did, the same with language, math, everything. Then hearing in class only three had been admitted out of the fifteen who applied, because the Professor had said, “only three were good enough.” Who knows the reason for that now. More likely than not the choice had little to do with us and our work and more with the English department, bureaucracy, and the Professor’s ever-present desire to cause a stir. I searched for the ever elusive, mysterious Professor everywhere, the bold hero whose values overrode the demands of collegiate bureaucracy (of which I had no intent or reason to oppose until I was drawn into the mystery). Then the anxiety which followed that summer, unable to write and damning myself for my lack of practice; by the time I returned to school I was a wreck, I was miserable. And walking to that class, dear God, catching two hopeful adds on the way, how that did little to abate my horror. And the room, that grandiose, English, dark wood room, the preposterous round table with the broad light fixture; too large, too serious, too perfect, and when he entered the room and gave us that first piercing glare over the bridge of his glasses clutching the Cantos and a small notebook, how perfectly, frightfully, everything I could have ever hoped for or imagined.

So much of this thing has been spent dwelling in the past, fishing it out and making sense of it and putting it back in again. I suppose it has to happen sometime, why not on idle Florentine afternoons and nights?

My English professor (who makes me wish with all my might that I had realized earlier how full English is) today said fall was here, that it was too bad it had come so early. How is it we know these things? I knew too that without a doubt we had begun the descent, that these most recent were no longer the simple summer thunderstorms. Something about them changed. And we knew.

I am beginning to understand what Matt has always said about headphones: they are a far more intimate way of experiencing sound. It swims in your head rather than around the room and filtering in. Very nice.