Thursday Words: Negative Space, Saying goodbye to Rome, Maybe, Maybe not....

 ..saying goodbye to Rome...

(Tom Wesselman)

(2015)

I should be too old for some things. Maybe a lot of things. Maybe I should feel certain aspects of life and living in a more mature manner as, say, wine after it's aged within an old oak barrel, its tannins once rough and vulgar becoming integrated into one harmony and song. Nah.  

   Maybe I've gone through one or two stages of... quiet, of sadness. Maybe more than two.  Given context...'twould be... to expect.

   They pass, even if you feel they won't - though it can take... a very long time -  and once again you-I become a bottle of wreckless, exhuberent, fermenting and fermented grapejuice: immature, too unruly, still hungry, still needing to disappear to see things more clearly, still overwhelmed in wonder (though now in a beat-up old body that despite all the accumulated injuries, good grief, still responds with even just a few weeks of intentional activity.) As days sweep in and away time steadies itself, some moments reach again through your skin but adding a feeling like flavor filled caresses (senses can mix.) It only depends on what who is doing the sensing of that embracing this you in spiced-scented joy.

   Others, other moments, can flow straight into your chest without resistence and slice your heart, maybe the whole of you, into unwhole chunks of somehow startled meat. It happens in a blink. Both kinds of moments leave you looking for, a bit desperately, movement - to not remain, that perception of ongoing being, held inside. Streets. The sky. Forms. Whiskey, maybe, in the absense of a good cup of coffee.  (Some old friends should kid me, recalling my 'intellectual life basically usually ends around your 26th birthday or so.' Ooops. (Only partial. If you look more carfully---- most, nearly all, ideas were- are already there, then. like.... the ingredients before prepping or plating.) Even those sorts of mistaken-esses I make at about the same clip as then - my ignorant foolishness, the forgetting that all of us are, every one, in one equivolcation or another. 

    So... time for my last usual walk to Sant'Eustachio - Marcello was there, a little good luck for my last time, a 'caffe con poco,' an espresso with only a little sugar. Over to the Pantheon - a place that inspires far too may rhetorical thoughts, midnight blue sky -  I hear a trumpet that's masterfully airing a version of a Morricone tune, then two guitars accompanying the horn. Perfect.   

   I turn left: an elegant palazzo always there, steady, a brilliantly tasteful italic use of negative space by the architect. Sometimes it's better to let space express itself. A few steps then to Corso, the main street. As I turn into it I realize that's what I was looking for - negative space outside myself, something real in a world more than I'm leaving... that I'm being thrown out from. It has to do with love and direction, of.... ways.

    ....but not anymore. Maybe something has changed, maybe the grape juice, so to speak, has mellowed or maybe has simply lost some-thing. I dont feel that same motivation as before to understand stuff,how stuff emerges, behavior, to model why we, say, love, where it comes from, how it develops, our history, riproduction, parasites, genetics, a look (face-tilt, posture, the tiny muscles tied to expression,) your eyes, what each communicates, feromes, dopamine, oxytocin, effects, LTP and certainly not my own... story. Or stories. Hungry, yes  it seems I am but...for something else: to find some place, wherever it may be, I might dive into and feel part of. The old cliche more true than any attempt at going more fundamental, let alone trying  to explain it with dumb, false, rationality: find where I belong.

   Soon I'll be leaving. For some reason maybe rather directly and obviously I have a desire to return to the city, NYC, even though I'm afraid it might have changed enough that I wont find it anymore, that recognizable New York feel but a sort of Sex in the City, Starbucks version. Anyway.

First I have to recreate the resources that my brother stole from me. After all... it really never has been that hard to do, once I get started. Which sometimes took... well, longer I suppose than it might. 

There. I've become old. Maybe, maybe not....   (PS, 2024: for any old freinds wondering...then on top came my uncles stealing of the small inheritence that I thought I would use to rebuild, then came the pandemic - during which my brother stole utterly every thing, even my old bicycles, even my father's ashes. Even Polo's lock of hair, the house and everything in it in addition to all the retirement money. Sigh. Here we go again...)