The Arrogant Emu

We were driving up the highway back home, and when we stopped to get gas I pulled out my camera and took pictures, because, after all, gas stations in Italy are not the same as gas stations here, and driving on an Italian highway is as foreign and new and unusual an experience as seeing the Pantheon (if less transcendental, and making for less ecstatic rambling. Although I could try to ramble ecstatically about Italian highway-driving. Want me to try?)

I sat greedily watching out the window as we sped along north. If I had wings, this is where I would fly. I would fly from town to town and buy bread and cheese and oranges and then fly on again. I would fly up these rock-faces, and soar over these forests, and circle these hill-towns, I would nest in rocks or valleys, away from the cities where homelessness at night had meant fear. If I had wings, the world itself would be my home, and I would sleep where I chose; I would fly around the great dome in Florence, and perch there for the night. If it rained, I would sleep under a bridge, a bridge such as this-

Under a bridge, someone had scrawled in spray-paint "Te amo". "I love you too!" said I in return, quite earnestly and without thinking about it. And so I looked at it, and loved the writer because he had written it, until I reproved myself.

"How can you love someone you don’t know?" I demanded. "You do poorly enough with those you do! Would you love him if you did know him? Suppose him to be base and cruel and false, all the worst things, the most despicable things, suppose him to have done the things you would kill a man for doing. You do not know that he is not! How can you say you love him? And all those who did not scrawl out their declarations on public property, do you love them?"

But this did not have much effect on me. I loved the person, whoever he or she might have been, because they had connected themselves to me. No matter how inadvertent it may have been, I saw what they had written, and so I knew there was a person - good or bad, admirable or contemptible - on the other end of that communication. I loved them, not for writing, nor for character, but simply for existing, and they existed for me because of that scrawled highway message.

Nearly at the end of War and Peace. Although I eagerly press forward, I almost dread the time when it will be done, and my other life will have come to an end. Already thrown, body and soul, in over my head in a foreign country, I immersed myself in that book with an effortless depth that surprised even me. I was a part of their history; I also experienced their lives, bit by bit, and I loved them and hated them and knew them as dearly as I loved and hated and knew the non-fictional people that surrounded me.

It was not a book, it was a place. Now I was nearly at the end. Would it feel this way when I had to leave Italy and go home?

I must apologize for all these green interruptions, and still more for dragging so much time in between bits of the story that aren’t even necessarily all that exciting. But, as you can doubtless gather, I have been putting myself in some emotional distress - nothing you need be worried over, but still something that makes it difficult to throw myself back into recollection with the abandon necessary to writing a convincing memoir. Now, where were we? I had just eaten lunch in the park with the fountain, we were going up the hill, we were going into the archaeological museum… ah, yes….

I have mentioned, before, the effect that these ancient statues have on me. Here, in this museum was a wide, open-feeling room, with a large collection of Etruscan sarchophagi arranged around its edges. These usually have a stone portrait of the dead person, carved reclining on the top of the sarcophagus, leaning on one arm and facing outward. Stern, pot-bellied old men, kind women with maternal faces, haggard people, fleshy people, all with such liveliness in their faces and gestures as they lay reclining on their tombs! It was a symposium of the dead, the way they were gathered there.

That was the phrase that stuck with me, and the only one that really decribes it, as I call it back to mind now. The symposium of the dead.

The rest of the museum had a similarly impressive (and I do mean pressing-in, here) effect on me. Although I am fairly indifferent to ancient metal-work, Greek pottery and its enthusiastic Etruscan imitators exert a powerful hold on me. I walked rejoicing through the aisles and aisles of Greek pots in glass cases. Do you know how it is when you have just finished a really delightful story? You want to respond, somehow - to laugh and dance and throw things and shout and cry, you want to build temples or paint pictures or write stories or play music, and turn and say to the book "This is you! This is your strength in me!"

I have a new ambition. In the Renaissance, of course, the sculptors and painters looked at the ancients again, and said "Hey! We can do that too, in terms of aesthetic ideals, sort of!" I think that it is time that the potters looked at the ancients again. I think I will cause the too-long-delayed Renaissance of pottery. Not some postmodernist look-at-decayed-western-ideals sort of thing, I mean classical pottery like a classical education. For Greek pottery is like Greek philosophy - for all the silly convolutions made out of it in later days, it is itself remarkably real and fundamental, answering real purposes with harmony and beauty and humanity.

Pottery as an art is in a strange position now. It used to be so necessary! We have always needed Stuff To Hold Liquid. Yet now things to serve that purpose are now made faster more reliably by machine and in other materials altogether. Must pottery be a vanity-art? Must the beauty of depiction on gracefully-curved vessels be divorced entirely from use and need and real service?

Certainly, within any art it seems to be the things that are least needed for practical purposes that afford the most opportunity for beauty; most of these beautifully figured vases here would be ceremonial or decorative. (Here again the analogy with learning presses itself). But without that background of necessity, of a context in human life, does the art die? Do the art and the craft become separate, to the ultimate deterioration of both?

Not to say that pottery is a dead art! By no means! But I do not know how much it is a living art, nor how it as a living can compare to the way it once lived.

I really have chosen the path of needles over the path of pins.