Applying to graduate schools. It wouldn’t feel right to blog now even if I did have the time for it. It would feel like skipping some of the most important chapters in a book. So until I have the time to tell you,however briefly, how my way of looking at things has changed, you must be patient and read other people’s blogs.
Not that I notice a tremendous deprivation on your parts, but still.
All right, I don’t have time to blog about Italy at the moment, but to reassure you that I am still alive, I will post a dream which I had over Christmas Break of my sophomore year.
The dream was very odd and very structured, (comparatively speaking I mean, for a dream). It began, I think, with the Brocketts and ourselves at the house of a Filipino family. It was getting later and later, everyone had already left but the couple who owned the house, and Hayden, and I. The couple were offering us shrimp with various sauces; it was very good. But the night gets darker and darker, and we are still a long way from home, which we have to return to sometime that night. Hayden and I appear to be playing some kind of game of chicken, seeing which will leave first. I forger why the stakes were so high.
And I never got to find out. The next segment promptly arrived in the form of my grandmother’s house, which at the same time was also a palace on the water. It was under some sort of attack, or at least a hostile ship had boarded it.
The attacker was the princess, a young woman with dark curly hair and rounded, highly colored features. She wore an odd sort of clothing, like a cross between a pirate and an assassin.
In the palace, the queen, a proud and stately old woman, with grey hair and a crown, paced the floor back and forth. It was she, for some reason, that was the main target of the princess-attacker. She was her mother. The princess came up the stairs and confronted her. If only I could remember what was said in that interview! But I remember that it ended with the threat withdrawn, and the princess, humbled, withdrawing her fleet, and the queen, still old and stately, watching from her battlement.
Then the third segment arrived. We were still in our grandparents’ house, but it was no longer a palace, and set in its usual North Carolina woods. Marriage had been outlawed, and the Johnnies who wished to be married were hiding there for the purpose of having the cermony performed.
I can’t quite remember who was marrying on this particular occasion - I believe it was Cassie and Adam.* I was helping Grandmom- a great seamstress - make wedding gowns, with the result that I was acting a sort of dressmakers’ dummy. I was wearing the actual gown, while all Cassie was wearing of her costume was the little white hat which the veil attatched to.
We saw Adam coming through the woods, all dressed up in an elaborate white suit, and we all rushed out to greet him. But then I bethought myself that I had best get out of the wedding dress before anybody got confused. I wanted to be with all the wedding guests, but I didn’t dare be mistaken, in that clothing. I ran upstairs to change.
Then the fourth segment began. I was a different character, a girl, somewhat younger than I am, in my room back in the days before I moved out and my sister moved in. I was talking to a friend - I *think* it might have started out as Ivy, but it certainly didn’t stay that way.
We had become suspicious of my mother - an attractive woman with dark, curly hair - my friend had made a devastating discovery. My mother was a demon, bent on some sort of plot. Was it to destroy the world? I don’t rmember what, but it was something terrible, and it was something urgent. We had to discuss what we had to do, and we had to get away and do it quickly. My friend had started to explain, but I hushed her (although it might have been a him by this point).
"Walls have ears!" hissed I, for my mother lived directly above me, and if she were a demon, who knew that she might not be even now listening to us? Afterwards I thought about this, and as my friend was trying to figure out where we could go, I repeated to myself, "Ears have walls," which seemed to me moderately profound.
We eventually decided to leave the house, on the pretext of going to the theater. But as we were explaining this to my mother, my friend made another discovery. There was some sort of code involving the letters B, R, and A, whose solution came to 8:23. At that time, explained my friend, my mother the demon would gain her full powers and her plan be implemented. I suddenly recognised some sort of jesting refence my mother had made to it in a comment about bras, and suddenly several things aobut her behavior became to clear to me. I stared at her in horror, because she looked so much like she usually did, a normal, pretty, older woman.
**There was a strange interlude here. I lost the thread of the dream, and was running down in a department store of stories trying to find it. If you have ever been to the Home Depot (a hardware store) it was like that, except underwater. I ran, underwater, down these endless aisles, looking into each one. Stories- dreams, were playing out in each. I saw Loki and Thor in one, and Posiedon in another, then, at the very end of the row of aisles, the dream I had been in. I rushed to it.
My mother walked into the kitchen and sat down at the end of the table. (Our table is long and oval, and the end of it faces a shelf on which is a large clock)
We were still telling her about this plan to go to the theater, when suddenly my friend, (who was now definitely a boy) looked at the clock (it was six forty) and gestured to me. I understood that we were to make an attack upon her then, and I leaped forward and locked my elbow around her neck, while my friend began to strike her on the head with a radio antenna. She looked at us in puzzlement, particularly at me, and asked me what I was doing.
I suddenly realized that at a particular time which must be very close, my friend’s radio antenna would turn into a rapier, and he would be able to kill her. At the same time, just seeing my mother sitting there looking surprised and rather hurt, it suddenly struck me what a horrible thing I was doing. I left off choking her, and began to try to beat off the blows of the radio antenna. But at the point the clock turned to six forty-two, and the antenna turned to a rapier, and my friend slid it right between my fingers into my mother’s side. She turned around and looked at me - I was sobbing by this point - and she looked incredibly betrayed.
Then the dream switched back to that store beneath the sea. I was walking with my family - my real family - and we were looking at stained glass.
Mom (and this was my real mother) was pushing Sarah in a stroller. She admired a stained glass lamp which had been made of agate slices. "Ah, you should come back with me to Annapolis," I said. "They sell ones there that are far more beautifully made than this one - this one is thrown together wtihout artistic skill, and looks cheap and gaudy. But you would love the ones they make in Annapolis."
But then I remembered the dream, and I thought that I had to get back to it. I set off running in that strange dim store underwater, until I came back to the places where each aisle was a dream. I saw men working at a forge, I saw plants growing in pots, and ran past the same stories from mythology, but when I came to the end, there was nothing but an empty grotto where my dream had been.
*Footnote: That is, Tillman-Young, a freshman our year, who left.
But it wasn’t an austere, overwhelming beauty of the sort that knock you down and then walks on you and crushes your ribs. It was quite human, it even made me laugh in some places. The walls of the left-side chapel and the front by the altar were all covered with frescos, top to near-bottom. They looked (and this was the first thing that delighted me, after a human fashion) exactly like mediaeval manuscript scene illuminations, down to the patterns of shading on the sleeves. The scenes were clearly sequential, illustrating some story step by step - some of the panels were nearly identical, except for some significant change happening in the center. It was almost like a great comic-book, panel by panel on the wall of the cathedral, wanting only dialogue bubbles.
And the Signorelli Chapel! This was a last-judgement scene (a topic of which I have always been fond in frescos; I wanted to paint one on the family staircase but reluctantly decided against it). But had I really been able to do a chapel, I would want to have done one like this. These were paintings after my own heart - brilliant, colorful, narrative, detailed, and incredibly eccentric. The panels ’round the bottom of the walls (at face-level, that is) illustrated various of the worthies who had talked of heaven and hell. Their portraits were surrounded by a gold background on which were painted grotesques, which also looked disconcertingly like those one sees adorning the pages of books. It was a book-church, altogether.
But about the portraits - there was one of Dante, looking from on book to another with a pen in his hand, one of Virgil looking worn and haggard, casting his eyes upward toward the scenes of destruction, and so forth. But in one of the panels, the philosopher Empedocles had twisted around, right out of his frame, and with his back to the chapel itself, was goggling at the scenes of the apocalypse above him.
It was a strange and wonderful combination of Roman influences (the scenes around the base and most of the grotesque were simply downright pagan!), Etruscan influences (the demons in Hell were lifted almost horn-for-horn from the Etruscan deities of the underworld, particularly the blue-fleshed Xaru), medieaval and Renaissance.
The scenes of heaven were even beautiful and captivating (something that painters, like writers, tend to fail at). I think - I could not be sure - that it was illustrating the lines of the Te Deum
"The glorious company of the Apostles praise thee.
The goodly fellowship of the Prophets praise thee.
The noble army of Martyrs praise thee"
The ceiling being vaulted, each of these groups was in a curving triangle. So much expression and joy on their faces!
I want to be in a goodly fellowship of Prophets!
We were ushered, politely but definitely, out of the museum at around one in the afternoon. Everything closes on Sundays here, apparently! But we had already seen most of their collection, thought I could have spent (and Cantachaya too; she was very knowledgeable about pottery and I was very grateful for her companionship) many more hours gazing at the pottery.
After an attempt to find some of the other people wandering about Orvieto, and a father’s-day call home on both our parts (and danged if my father wasn’t out bicycle riding!) we returned to the main square. I had a great longing to see the church, and as I bought tickets for the Signorelli Chapel, who should I run into but Basilitta. Apparently the rest of the dig was already inside the church. Felicitous circumstance!
I had been utterly and entirely wrong in my speculation that this might not have been a great church, when I had first seen it. The green and white pinstriped marble around the sides did take a bit of getting used to, but the facade was truly wonderful.
Another profligacy of images! That cathedral was an education in itself. If I could be a priest, or even a parishoner, that I might come to this church, day after day, absorbing by degrees that colossal weight of beauty until I might at last learn to see!
One ought to fall in love, abroad. I know I did. Several times, in fact! But the tales of my subsequent love-affairs will have to wait, because now I will tell you of how I fell in love with Attic figured ware.
"Baaaaah!" I hear you all saying. "Here we were thinking that Katherine had found herself a living and non-fictional human being, preferably some sexy Italian with a leather jacket and a Vespa, and here she is mooning over pottery."
Well, bah right back. Of course, I had seen some Greek vases before - mostly in pictures, and a few in American museum. But here, what profligacy of beauty! That is the satisfying thing about seeing pottery in reality - no picture ever can ever properly capture it since it is so solidly three-dimensional. And the good artists are the ones who know about space, whose figures fit so perfectly into their context that anywhere apart from it they look lifeless or distorted.
The decorative aspects charmed me as much as the figures. The beauty and the intricacy of those patterns! And the very shapes of the vessels, even the ones without decoration of any sort, were overwhelming in their beauty and their reality.*
I think that I ought to take up as many artistic or creative pusuits as possible, just to enable me to see more clearly. For without having been a potter, how much would I have seen of the shape of the pots? Without having been a wall painter, how much would I have seen of the beautiful colored walls from the Etruscan tomb? I am conscious now of these objects as created things, and through having some idea of what went on in their creation I see beauties about them that I would otherwise have been unconscious of.
I ought to take up architecture, if I’m going to be in love with construction and space.
*Footnote: You will notice I seem to be raving about the reality of things a good deal. Three-dimensionality will do that to you. And after Freshman year, one realizes that the highest praise for something is to call it real.
The next day we got up, an hour later than our accustomed time (sleeping in till seven thirty!) and took the vans out to Orvieto. I had seen so little of the city previously, but had loved so much the parts that I had seen, that I longed to return. Also, Orvieto had an internet cafe, which would be useful. I missed the web.
I fell in with Cantachaya, and we went together to go visit the archaeological museum.
but now I am hungry and unclothed. I need to dress so I can cook some lunch
As we came into the restaurant, I saw giant earthenware jars - not as big as dolia, but close - with flowers and blossing plants in them. A hummingbird, the first I had seen in Italy, went buzzing around them, dipping its long curved bill into the earth-colored flowers. They were red and orange too, like the pottery.
This area was famous for its truffles, and so I ordered for a first course "gnocchi alla tartufo". The restaurant was quite busy, but our whole party was seated outside in a partly-covered courtyard, so the noise wasn’t disturbing. Besides, we were so quickly making our own noise that aside from being English-speakers, we would have fit right. Dinner-table conversation in Italy always seems to be lively.
On my right, Schraffus was giving Amadtaed an Italian lesson. She would need to ask for a ticket on the Marsciano train, since the ticket office at the station was usually closed. Amadtaed was a strange girl - the most Johnny-like, I think, of all the students on the dig. She was tall and slender, like a jointed creation of folded paper and smooth white wood, with an odd combination of innocence and experience (she was a mother, but still in contact with her now-adopted child), and a sweet frankness in conversation.
On my left, Fero and Iohan were battling it out against Cantachaya (the lab assistant) about the role of the United States abroad. Rombulana sometimes joined in the fight in Cantachaya’s defense, but for the most part did not engage herself overmuch. It had been a while since I had heard a real battle of the opinions, rhetoric slammed against rhetoric with vigorous abandon. There’s something really enjoyable in that, as long as both parties know they’re just talking for the sake of winning, and yet I could not keep myself from looking at it as a discussion, stepping in only occasionally to try and clarify what the real point of disagreement was.
Such arguments are more often than not over words than over ideas. There are a few words that you can throw out in your speech, and watch your opponent spring at them and worry them like a dog with a bone, while the real point in lost altogether. This is what most of political discussion is. Also, I was surprised by the lack of courtesy in discussion. Half Cantachaya’s remarks were prefaced by "I’m sorry, but [X is a fact]". This would have really put my back up had I been the one arguing with her, but I wasn’t, and so instead I watched the battle intrigued and amused.
Our server was dreadfully confused, I think or possibly harried, because half of our dishes either arrived so late as to be in time with everyone else’s desserts, or were the wrong thing altogether. The food itself was very good indeed, but the service (though polite and helpful) was so abysmally topsy-turvy that all (particularly those who had gotten no food) were heard to complain.
The next day would be our first day off. On such occasions, we were encouraged to go off make a trip to some town or city. We would be brought to the train station (if we so pleased) the night before. There were two train stations - one in Orvieto, which was connected to the main line between Rome and Milan. The other was in Marsciano, the larger valley-town about twenty minutes away by car, and that connected to Assisi and Perugia.
About half of us wanted to go somewhere on the Marsciano line, and they were dropped off that evening at the train station. So many of us wanted to go to Orvieto the next day, though, that we all went out together to dinner at a Marsciano restaurant Signette recommended.
(Dinner was not served at the house the night before a day off)
One trench remains, another trench which never really picked up a successful nickname. This was Sikomtheo’s trench, the cistern. They were finding all sorts of interesting things - they had recently pulled out (with great effort and labor) a stone dubbed "The Butt Stone" because it had been so nice for sitting on while digging through the black dirt in the baking sun. It was clearly carved into a regular, curving, four-sided figure, and was probably an altar base.
His workers were Quintaed and Liminoss, the one a girl from the same school as Hachaya, who had been once before on the dig. The other was from the University of Florida (not to be confused with FSU!)
On the top of the hill, Iohan’s trench was working on clearing its sloping bedrock, which appeared to have been cut at a maybe 30-degree angle. A bath? It was still a mystery, as was the bit of wall they were trying to uncover. Iohan and his subordinates Schraffus, Basilitta, and Amadtaed were "Team Team", espousing "Team Team teamwork" and all being "Team Team teammates".
I thought this was very clever.
Basilitta (that is, Basilitta our trench supervisor, not Basilitta my roommate and Iohan’s worker who was a quiet, sleepy, docile girl) couldn’t really enter into the spirit of ridiculous names, and Theodonato, who apparently (horrors!) considered himself once a stand-up comic, did not help matters. Theodonato was the sort of boy who was always making remarks which he thought to be very funny, witty, in-jokes, and then staring at you with a "Get it?" sort of leer. I considered it almost unbelievable that such a creature could ever have lasted longer than one session as a stand-up comic, but obviously could not inquire in such terms. Our team came up with the pitiably lame appellations "Team Democracy" and "Team Delta Force" (neither of which made sense to me) but it was clear that our hearts weren’t in it.
