The poetic art

There's always a gap, always a space, always an opening for us, for the reader. There has to be: art suggests; it doesn't preach. Even if the poet wants to change the world, flat straightforwardness is the enemy. "Tell all the truth," Dickinson so famously wrote, "but tell it at a slant." Art requires very little really, but if a poem is to be artful it has to leave openings for reader-participants because we're part of it. 

Case in point, “Clear and Sunny,” a little poem by my friend, Dave Schelhaas, in a new collection of poetry titled Final Exam: Poems About Teaching, collected and edited by J. Barry Koops, a treasure, by the way, for an ex-teacher.

I heard it again this morning
the music of the playground.

Because I know the writer, who lives a hop, step, and a jump from a school playground, I'm two lines into the poem, and I see him. If "writing is seeing," then he's got me already because I can see him and I can hear "the music of the playground" from his own front walk.

Worried that I would not hear it,
I had listened as soon as I left the house,
and there it was,
softened by all the green leaves in the tall trees,
rich like thick jam on buttered bread,
more beautiful than church bells:
the shouts and laughter of schoolchildren.

"Green leaves," "thick jam," "church bells"--all embellishment. He's scoring "the music of the playground," or recording it for us to hear. He's playing the music, or singing it, so the notes rise mellifluously from the printed page. Great music. Kids.

But the line, "Worried that I would not hear it,/I had listened as soon as I left the house" introduces some conflict, some darkness, the heft of his worry that's satisfied in a moment by "the shouts and laughter of school children."

I'm in. I know the poet. I'm quite sure I know his sadness, his worry--I know the darkness he knows. I get it.

The last three lines nail it, describing the outpouring of his relief at hearing all that music a half a block away--

bubbling through air waves still trembling
with the terrible news of
yesterday.

Whatever happened "yesterday" is the horror, the darkness, an enemy. And because I know the poet, without a bit of doubt I tell myself I know the darkness. The poem was written in the last couple of years when that very school suffered horrific trauma when one of its teachers was sexually abusing his students. 

Here's how this reader's mind put the story together: Dave walked out his back door one fair morning, filled with the darkness generated by what had happened at the school down the block, the school his grandchildren attend. Then, unmistakably, he heard, "the music of the playground," and in it the sheer beauty of innocence drawing back the veil of tears, kids having fun.

I thought I had it down, this poem written by a friend.

But then--and only then--I spotted the subtitle: "September 12" and realized "Clear and Sunny" wasn't a poem about the monster of sexual abuse, but the horror of Twin Towers buckling into a cloud of poison dust by kamikaze assassins.  

I'd been thinking that, because I know the poet, the heart of the poem was obvious. I was wrong. It's not about the school, it's about 9/11, and the relief those children's playground voices sang the morning after, on September 12. 

Now let's just say the poem didn't use the subtitle, deleted it in a final edit before he finished. If you read the poem without its datedness (or my personal associations), then the poem is both less specifically constructed (taking some solace in life after 9/11) and more universal in its reach (about how we take solace--period--in the darkness all around us). 

Because I know the poet, I was ready almost instantaneously to fill that open space I'm offered as a reader. The poem made immediate sense. Then I saw the subtitle, and realized I was wrong--way wrong.  

But the gap, the space, the blank the reader has to fill, would have been even wider, its impact more well, global, because less immediate. The poem would be more "universal," to grab a literary weapon from the arsenal, had the poet not specifically dated the poem via its subtitle. 

Would it be a better poem? Depends on who you ask. There's no accounting for taste. It would be less specific and more vague. Merit might be an interesting topic for English majors--should the poet have deleted the subtitle? Talk among yourselves.

Everything I've just written, however, in the long post about a short poem attests to the joy, the human joy, of poetry and art itself. Even though writing "September 11: Clear and Sunny" didn't earn my friend a dime, I'm sure he wasn't looking to be salaried. He just wanted us all to hear the music rising from the playground on a morning he couldn't help but feel that grief and anger left the world without any harmony.

That's the music he heard and the song he wanted to sing for us and with us.

Italy xv--The Immaculate Conception

When it came time to play them, we couldn't help wonder what the Catholics were thinking when they named the school "Immaculate Conception." Weird. If you're a sixth grade boy just about everything has something to do with sex. That Catholic school's weird name, whatever it meant, was about something good Christian boys had no business thinking about out loud, and the kids from that school plastered it on their uniforms? Seriously?

But we played 'em, weird name or not. As far as I remember, no teacher or coach from our school ever said much about the name. "Okay, guys, tomorrow we'll line up against "Immaculate Conception.'" I don't think we giggled. It's just that when you thought about it a little--well, you know: it was something like foreskins and circumcision and all of that biblical embarrassing stuff. When you're twelve, it's just weird that you'd say those words out loud.


When you leave the Raphael Rooms of the Vatican Museums, massive frescos that fill every square centimeter of your consciousness, you follow the flow into another space so laden with life-sized art you don't know where to look first because you're sure you'll miss something. And you will. 

Anyway, there she was, the Mary, mother of Jesus, Virgin Mary, in a bigger-than-life statue and surrounded by massive frescoes featuring dozens, even hundreds of human figures, some with addresses in this world, some, clearly, very much at home in the next.

It's the Room of the Immaculate Conception, and while I'd long ago come to understand the phrase in a 7th grade-boy way, I never took the time to think much, really, about the adoration of Mary, except in a very Protestant way as silly. In this immense room, everything was the Immaculate Conception, not the divine act itself (although a score of artists have taken a shot at that), but the act's honored and historic place in Roman Catholic dogma and culture. 

In the huge wall behind the statue features two worlds. The world below is Rome--the Vatican, Pope and Cardinals all aligned for the celebration of the formal acceptance of the Doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. The world above features heaven (far left) and that other brimstone place (far right, where the sinners are, at this moment, falling from grace). Fig-leafed Adam and Eve are on the cloud, upper right, Adam seemingly protecting his shy and probably guilty mate. 

But at the heart of the Heaven is the Trinity. There's a dove (the Holy Spirit) above Mary's head (she's in blue, traditionally), and she stands (while Christ and the Father sit) just a bit lower in foreground. Telling placements.

For centuries, the Roman Catholic church had accepted the belief that Mary was not only a virgin, but also, alone of all mankind, sinless. Not until 1854 did her divinity become defined as Catholic dogma, an act signed into canon law by Pope Pius IX. That moment is prominently featured in the center of the fresco, the Pope standing before his throne, surrounded by Cardinals, all of which makes this particular room, the Room of the Immaculate Conception, of far more recent vintage (1860s) than the Rafael Rooms next door (300 years older). Seems the paint is still wet. 

Rome didn't make me any more Roman Catholic than I ever was, but for two weeks 

I was most definitely more of a disciple of that whole world than I'd ever been. Somehow the visual grace, art that attracts millions annually, helped me understand far more than I ever had about the historic church, even has me smiling in a whole new way at those grade school kids with that weird name printed on their basketball uniforms. 

It really, really was a big deal. That big, in fact. 

Italy xiv--The Unrighteous Martyr

By all accounts, the man had to have been that most difficult of combinations: someone who simply could not abide authority, nor those who wielded it. It's one thing, after all, to question ideas; it's another to poke a sharp stick in the eye of those who determine it is.

If Giordana Bruno had the wherewithal to assess himself on the basis of the age in which he lived, he might have said something to the effect of "I am a child of my day, a child of the Renaissance," because in the best Renaissance tradition, he questioned everything. To those who knew him, who listened to his ideas, or read his work, Bruno was a free-thinker. Back then, the church chose not to suffer those who, as they say, thought out of the box.

And so they hung him, upside-down and naked, his tongue fastened down tight, and then burned him at the stake, all of it very public, of course, as much out of principle as politics, because the church didn't need ideas. As one historian put it, Bruno's thought "challenges the developments of the Reformation, calls into question the truth-value of the whole of Christianity, and claims that Christ perpetrated a deceit on mankind. . ." That's for starters.

That fine statue up top, in a central market square of Rome, memorializes his life at the very spot where he met his ignominious death. There may be others, but in the Eternal City, where once upon a time (and maybe yet today) the church reigned in every possible avenue, the monument to Bruno memorializes those who insist boldly on, as the Bible itself says, kicking against the pricks. 

For Rome, the statue is almost "contemporary," raised and dedicated in 1889. Shoot, look closely and I bet you can still see the sweat stains from the workmen who put it there. In Rome, 1889 is yesterday.

For the record, the city put the monument up and thereby honored him. The Vatican, 289 years after his death strenuously opposed it. Call it town/gown.

His trial lasted seven years. It's a wonder it took that long because Bruno was not one to check his free-thinking at the door, nor fall in line for anyone or anything--church or state. To speak bluntly, for the powerful all over Europe (the man spent considerable time in France and even in Calvin's Geneva), Bruno became, wherever he went, an awful pain in the ass.

Central to his teaching was his embrace--with some peculiar refinements--of the cosmos of Copernicus, who argued that the sun, not the earth, was the center of the universe. Bruno may well have been the first to offer the idea that the stars were also separate suns, each having their own universe. 

To the church, that idea was far worse than scary. Bruno pushed it: it was altogether possible, if not probable, that there were other "earths," other beings, other animals. 

You can almost hear the crowd: "Lock him up. Lock him up."

The church is never so loveless as when it asserts dogma to destroy people. 

Last night we saw, once again, Arthur Miller's The Crucible, a tragedy of sorts that's set in 17th century New England, when righteous Calvinist thugs charged women with witchcraft when they refused to admit they'd compacted with the Devil. It's not sweet to watch or witness. 

Miller wrote the play as a response to the firebrand Joseph McCarthy, the senator from Wisconsin who flamed into prominence by claiming the U. S. State Department, if not the country itself, was being run by a red host of closet commies. 

But The Crucible is not just about 17th century New England, or cold-war America. The Crucible is about Giordana Bruno too, because it's about tolerance--and the striking lack of it.

Still today, 418 years after his death, people still leave tributes at the monument set where he died. In city that's full of martyrs, it's greatly comforting to witness that Bruno's story simply will not disappear. 

Italy xiii--A ministry of presence

The crowds in Rome are massive. In the Sistine Chapel, of all places, for the very first time in my life, I felt what the Dutch call benauwd, textbook claustrophobia, a drumbeat panic to get the heck out of the press of humanity--far too many people, far too close.

But then, the Vatican is one of the premiere tourist sites in the entire world. People come from every continent, some of them very "religiously." Heavy as the crowds are, one of the blessings they extend is the omnipresence of men and women, in their regalia, men and women traditionally called "the religious." When I was growing up, us Protestant kids--boys especially--got a ton of laughs about nuns. "Hey, who let the penguins out?" That kind of thing.

In 1996, Pope John Paul insisted that "The Church must always seek to make her presence visible in everyday life, especially in contemporary culture, which is often very secularized and yet sensitive to the language of signs." To that end, "the Church has a right to expect a significant contribution from consecrated persons, called as they are in every situation to bear clear witness that they belong to Christ." The change in language in his Vita consecrata loosened the rules: "the Church has a right to expect. . ." is a healthy shade less demanding than "must."

A woman I know out on the reservation, a "religious" who has been so for fifty years, met us in jeans and a fun-run t-shirt not long ago, and apologized for her outfit. I'm quite sure she didn't mean a veil. I think what she meant was she thought she should not have looked as if she was painting the bathroom. 

So veils and habits, for the most part, are rare in North America these days, despite the specifics John Paul II stipulated. There is, here at least, far more freedom and, as a consequence, on the streets, far fewer "penguins."

In Rome, not so. You can't miss them, and I loved noting their presence. In Rome, there are hundreds, maybe thousands of "religious," many, I'd guess, actual "pilgrims"; and most of those are dressed, well, more traditionally than their North American counterparts.

Their presence, all over, was a visual reminder of the the catholicity of the Roman Catholic Church, the stretch of its place and power throughout the world. Like the crowds in Rome, the Roman Catholic Church is immense.

I may well be seeing all this through guilt-ridden, rose-colored glasses. Perhaps, when it comes right down to it, there's little to separate these tourists, in their habits, from the ones in shorts and tank tops. Perhaps they just eat less expensively and go to bed earlier. Perhaps they pull on the habit unthinkingly because it's simply expected. Perhaps they too go home with postcards and museum books, maybe a new Christmas tree ornament and beautiful new scarf. Maybe they too make sure to return with their own bottle of good wine. 

Maybe they're no more special than anyone else in the huge crowds around the Vatican. Maybe they too struggle to know what to use to see oh, so much history, whether to use the close-up or the wide-angle lens. Maybe at the end of the day, they have sore feet and think lovingly about home just like everyone else. Maybe Rome is no more of a religious experience for them as it is for any of the others thousands on the subway.

But this old Protestant couldn't help seeing them in their differing habits and thinking of them--"red and yellow, black and white"--as a wonderful, observable presence in the Eternal City, their ministry just about exactly what Pope John Paul II meant it to be twenty-some  years ago, a blessed ministry of the presence of Christ.

Italy xii--San Miniator Church

"You really should see it," the guy said. "It's the most beautiful place in Florence, especially at sundown. It's way up there, but even the kids made the climb," he told us retirees. "You can do it." Maybe a wink.

He wasn't wrong. The Abbey of San Miniato al Monte offered a most grand panorama of all things Florentine.

And he was right that a bunch of retirees could make it all the way up the hill. We did, although there was, at least for me, some question. Just simply to arrive was a religious experience, a pilgrimage in reverse, not a blessing but a test of faith. All those stairs reminded me of Luther, on his knees at Wittenburg, his cloak in shreds, right there determining the time had come for revolution.

By the time you walk through the door of your fifth or sixth Italian cathedral, on'es sheer astonishment is proportionally decreased. Even though guidebooks insist San Miniator Church is one of the most beautiful cathedrals in Florence, it's hard to go all agog when your lungs are prune-sized and you're sweating like a blacksmith on the Chisholm Trail.

Yes, The Abbey of San Miniato al Monte was gorgeous, unfailingly so.

But we'd come for Gregorian Chants promised by a tourist guide. We'd ascended all those stairs to hear the music sung here since the 1200. Yes, you read that number right. But nothing was happening really, and the time the chanting was supposed to begin passed without announcement. 

So we went downstairs to a chapel whose altar was strangely protected from the public by an iron gate. And there we waited. And waited. And waited--mostly, in silence. Here and there enough movement suggested that something-or-other was in the offing, so we waited longer, until  a monk or two finally appeared, recited the mass in Latin and sang, the real thing, the Gregorian chants sung here almost forever in The Abbey of San Miniato al Monte. 

For as long as we'd been in Italy, we'd lived in the chambers of the very heart of the Roman Catholic Church, its theology, traditions, and culture. It's difficult to explain exactly how it felt, right then, to witness the monks in a thousand year-old liturgy and listen to haunting melodies echo throughout the stone walls of the Abbey. 

James Joyce, the Irish novelist, had more than his share of problems with the church. For most of his life, he stayed away from the mass, from the nourishment of the host, of the body and blood of Christ. When his mother was dying, he went to her bedside; and she asked him if, for her sake alone, he could attend to the sacrament--for his dying mother's sake.

Joyce thought about what it was she wanted, about how his receiving the host would be a blessing to his mother. But he decided against it and told her he wouldn't because he couldn't, not because he wanted to hurt her, not that at all. He couldn't because he felt he would be profaning a ritual so sacred that his participation would do the sacrament disservice. 

And thus--or it so it's always seemed to me--James Joyce, in his refusal, may well have honored the sacrament more than many hundreds who participated that day without giving the bread and wine a second thought. 

I couldn't help thinking of James Joyce when we were up there at the top of the hill above Florence, in a darkened chapel where two monks did what has been done way up there in the Abbey for more than a thousand years, the sacrament Joyce honored, oddly enough, by his refusal to participate. 

That's the music I heard up there at the mountain top. That's who and what I thought of through the chanting. That's what I experienced at The Abbey of San Miniato al Monte. 

Honestly, when I left, I felt blessed. All those steps--they're much easier going down.

Italy xii--Sacred and Profane

The riddle it begs seems a no-brainer, or so I thought when I stumbled on this charmer at the end of a tour through the Borghese Gallery, one of Rome's most stunning museums. The title, the audio tour related, was The Sacred and the Profane; the artist was Titian; the story of the painting itself?--a wedding gift commissioned in 1514 by some nobleman. 

Okay, so it's one of those Renaissance paintings, mostly classical (but note the church in the background), but also one of those fascinating works of art that springs an allegory. One of the women represents "the sacred," and the other "the profane," or "the human."

Like I said, a no-brainer. One of these sister deities is quite unabashedly naked, just some lazy loincloth twisted about her privates. She's got to be "profane," right? The other, gorgeously dressed in what could possibly be some kind of bridal gown, is "sacred." There's sheer wantonness in all that flesh on the right, or so I thought, the old Calvinist. The woman on the left of whatever they're seated on is that model of womanhood from the book of Proverbs. I stood there and told myself that with just an hour-long tour of the Borghese, I'd become an art critic.

But the audio flashed "WRONG, WRONG, WRONG" to the obvious answer. It didn't really. I wasn't being quizzed. But the guide in the voice box made very clear that jumping to immediate conclusions underestimates the subtlety of the artist, as well as the thoughtful and even theological currents of his day. 

So there. 

Truth be known, the voice in my ear told me that what's obvious is waaaaay wrong. "The sacred" is naked as a jaybird, "the profane" is outfitted in that billowing gown, not because that billowing gown is the wardrobe of a harlot, but because Renaissance artists, with all the abandon of old died-in-the-wool Platonists, loved to worship "ideals." See, the naked woman on the right isn't nude, she's pure or ideal love. Go ahead and look--you'll not go blind.

Anyway, I stood corrected. And confused. Which is okay, I guess, because five hundred years (504 to be exact) which have passed since Titian, still a kid, painted this well-ordered collection of images for someone's wedding present, real art historians still go roundy roundy about who's what and why so.

And, you might ask (as I did), that little fat kid with his hand in the water?--who's that? and what is it they're sitting on anyway, a baptismal font? The cherub almost has to be Cupid; after all, this whole colorful project is about love. But what is it they're sitting on? It looks like a pretty standard sarcophagus. So death is in here too? And what's going on with the figures in the front--looks almost porn-y. 

Somehow--I don't know how--all of it took me back to Dante, who, when he was little older than that cherubic cupid, saw a sweet girl right there near the church he attended and was so blown away by her perfection that she remained, despite his marriage to a"real" woman, his perfectly human symbol of "the ideal," which is to say not just beauty, but the very essence of the divine (deliberately lower case, I would point out. If you're like me, you have some trouble with that jump, but Dante didn't.)

Look, if you get this painting, if you understand it from background to foreground, congratulations: you're the first. For 504 years, young Titian's intent in this stunning work has prompted endless debate between real, storied art historians. The Sacred and Profane offers an arrangement of symbols (trust me, there are many more than I've listed) that seem deliberately delivered confusingly on the canvas. 

What I know is this. All that fleshy stuff isn't porn-y. It's perfect. It's ideal. So there.

People in the know insist the riddle remains, after all these years: Sacred or Profane? Your answer to that question, I hate to say, is just as good as anyone else's. Or bad.

And thus the masterpiece, let me say, perhaps like love itself, remains a gorgeous mystery. 

Italy xi--Delight and Decadence

The monument to the doge Giovanni Pesaro, in this church, is a curiosity in the way of mortuary adornment. It is eighty feet high and is fronted like some fantastic pagan temple. Against it stand four colossal Nubians, as black as night, dressed in white marble garments. The black legs are bare, and through rents in sleeves and breeches, the skin, of shiny black marble, shows. The artist was as ingenious as his funeral designs were absurd. There are two bronze skeletons bearing scrolls, and two great dragons uphold the sarcophagus. On high, amid all this grotesqueness, sits the departed doge. 

So wrote Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad in 1869, after spending standing before a funeral pyre of a Venetian leader who may well have been granted more space in the Basilica dei Frairi than he deserved. This guy Pesaro gave a great speech, I guess, pumped spirit back into the troops for a war that had most of them dog-tired. Even though he served as doge, something akin to mayor, for only one year, he was granted a significant chunk of real estate on the Basilica's south aisle.

Old cynical Mark Twain was not amused ("the artist was as ingenious as his funeral designs were absurd"). I wish Rick Steves had quoted him, because, honestly, I didn't know what to think with the Giovanni Pesaro Monument when I stood there before it. I didn't know how to understand it, even how to tolerate it. The Pesaro Monument was like nothing else anywhere in the Italian cathedrals we visited. 

Ostentatious?--no kidding, but ostentation is an attribute of Italy's finest worship spaces. Overdone?--yes, but again, in Rome, overdone is a virtue. Obscene?--honestly, maybe?

But we're talking about art here, right? How dare an ugly American like myself question the aesthetic worth of Florentine antiquity? That's what I asked myself. Who am I to judge such expression?

The Doge, seated on his throne in the heart of things and body-guarded by a pair of B-grade dragons, seems ready to leap out, while a bevy of allegorical sculptures (this one--at left--Nobility, supposedly a characteristic of his eminence), pay homage in the foreground. 

But the real show-stopper are those "four colossal Nubians, as black as night," as Twain described them 150 years ago. They appear to be supporting the monstrosity, and between them on both sides, hover two skeletons. 

Seriously, the whole thing is hideous. And I'll admit it: it's much easier to use that word now, having read Mark Twain. When I stood there before the thing, I couldn't help thinking it was amazing, sort of shockingly amazing. The audio program playing in my ear didn't say a thing about slaves, and the museum store at the front of the Basilica offered only one shot of the four of them holding up all that marble extravagance, almost as if downplaying their existence.

But they're there. So, with Twain's brusque disdain, I feel far more free to say that, up close, those slaves, carrying the load of all of this, are, on the basis of our subjugation, even more forbidding--and the monument more vulgar. 

It seemed impossible that Pesaro, or whoever designed what's there, was not some 18th century Florentine abolitionist, suggesting--no, screaming out the hellish horrors of slavery.  Look at that face.

I wanted to think that some sculptor, some artist somewhere hated slavery--but didn't say it outright. I wanted to think that someone used the memorial to make a real political statement, other than the gratuitous puffery elsewhere on display on the doge's tomb. But that's doubtful. 

For the two weeks we spent in Italy, these were the only slaves, the only Black men ("Moors" the literature calls them) I laid eyes on, even though I'm sure, in 1668, men and women just like them literally broke their backs creating treasures in the Eternal City.

The Basilica dei Frairi, like any other mammoth Italian cathedral, leaves you breathless--or at least it did me, so much in awe, so emptied of self that my critical faculties, like my knapsack, stayed somewhere just outside the door. I looked up at the Pesaro Monument and simply assumed that somehow, despite something wincing inside me, I was seeing, well, art--astonishing art maybe, but art.

Two weeks later, I'm not so sure. What's there on the south wall of a beautiful cathedral in old Venice is, I'm ready to say, pretentious and tasteless.

Old cathedrals have always torn me up. One side of my head and heart can't help but question why the Reformers, my people, hated art with such a turpentine passion, why they stripped walls and windows, then toppled statues for good measure. Just look around.

But there's another voice in me too, one that says I'm still enough of a Calvinist to know very well why they scrubbed out the excess. 

Just look around.

Italy x--The Colliseum Cross

It's a bit of a strange juxtaposition--or at least I thought it so when we walked up--the cross standing here above the arena of the Colosseum. From my own middle-school church history class, the only crosses to exist in the place would have been real ones, not symbols but grotesque instruments of death used for 50,000+ screaming fans.

Our guide claimed this one was placed here in 2000 by Pope John Paul II on a Vatican-proclaimed Year of Jubilee, even though as early as the 19th century Pope Benedict XIV dedicated the place as a sacred sight to honor the memory of the Christian martyrs slain here by flames and crosses and wild animals. It stands here today, she said, because every year on Good Friday there's a processional led by the Vatican. 

While we stood right there, she told us Christians weren't persecuted for their faith. Nero could have cared less, she said, what a Christian believed. He needed a political scapegoat on whom to blame the problems of the state, and the most powerless segment of Roman society at that moment were the Christians. The whole bloody mess was just political. . .well, economic, just a matter of power--who had it and who didn't. She likely could guess her Americano customers fully believed downright nasty emperors like Nero hated Christians because they were Christians. Not so, she said, thereby herself bringing down ancient pillars of my own faith.

Nero was just another fat-handed politician, she said. That's the story, just like it always is.

She was sharp and witty and knowledgeable, brimming with personality, a Roman woman with two-tone hair cut sharply around her head--dark eyes, olive skin, just a bit on the other side of thirty maybe. Likeable, attractive, an apologist for her city and its long, long history.

If you were a woman, she told us, pointing upward, you could sit only in the upper deck, lest your comeliness steal away the attention of the real celebrities, the gladiators. I had no idea.

Note that cross on the far left.

For sheer entertainment, Christians played second-fiddle at best, a back-up for the real entertainment. First came the animals--a kind of hunting ritual right there in the Colosseum, greatly beloved; then the Christians were led in and totaled, a warm-up for the real show, the gladiators. 

And another thing, she said, the gladiators never fought to the death. No, no, no--good gladiators were hard to come by and far too expensive--there's training and feeding and keeping them in fighting shape. Just think of it--what rich Roman is going to risk his prize fighters's immediate demise? Think of the whole thing as pro wrestling, WWF 50 A.D., and just as phony. Gladiators were cheesecake champs. Look for them--heroes, celebrities--in the mosaics laid in floors of art museums, like this:

Those slaughtered here in the Coliseum, basically, were criminals, she told us. They weren't the Christians. That idea was pedaled for a long time, but sources say it was not true, she said.

That a Christian school teacher in the 1950s would assume the conflict was theological makes all kinds of sense. Back then huge crowds would gather for the annual celebration of the Luther's Wittenburg Door desecration, and, in some quarters at least, even in my family, the Pope was still thought to be the anti-Christ. If you don't believe it, just wait to see what happens in John F. Kennedy, a Catholic becomes President. 

Mr. LeFever, at Oostburg Christian, may well have believed what he'd been taught about Christian martyrs, and he likely enjoyed talking about martyrs to pre-adolescent boys whose fertile imaginations were fully capable of recreating the fiery deaths of suffering people praying to God for deliverance. That I thought what I did is understandable.

The whole truth, I suppose, lies somewhere on a continuum between Mr. LeFever's seventh-grade church history version of what happened here in Nero's day and the more sophisticated version of our Roman guide, who reduced all that bloodshed to the quest for political power.

Truth lies, I suppose, somewhere in the middle. 

But I'm thankful for that cross, visible here as it is almost everywhere in the Colosseum's ruins. It stands, our guide told us, right there where that evil Nero himself used to sit. Imagine that--right there in the emperor's chair.

What better place might there be?  

Italy ix--A thousand years of devotion

It ranks--this one does--with the best shots I took in Italy, not because it's technically perfect  (it isn't) but because there's something transcendent in the image. I have no idea if the young couple making their way up toward the altar in Rome's Basilica di Santa Maria is devout. They may not even be Roman Catholic. By the numbers, if they're European, it's probable they aren't even believers. I'm not making any claims. But they look as if they are, don't they?

As they approach that altar and that giant Titian behind it--The Assumption of Mary, one of the Titian's earliest--they seem to be walking on air. In truth, it's a trick of light. The sun travels slowly through those old cathedrals, spotlights first this piece of art, then that. At this particular moment, it's pouring its radiance on the marble floor, a floor that doesn't appear to be there at all. That sweet and loving couple seems almost aloft, as if the space itself were holy. To some, of course, it is.

Another young man, this one alone, is gawking, as most everyone is in this incredible cathedral; and two young women seated in the chairs set out for those who wish to meditate and pray, look to be chatting. But their being seated where they are almost certainly suggests devotion. Maybe I'm dreaming. Maybe they're checking the times the subway leaves. Maybe they're reading Rick Steves.

I'm being cute. In truth, I really do love this shot, even though my Protestant heart doesn't share the adoration given to Mary, nor the determined faith that she, like Jesus her son, was simply removed from this vale of tears, bodily and boldly, by all the powers of heaven. The Assumption celebrates a determined doctrine of traditional Catholics, especially here in this particular Roman cathedral, a church specifically devoted to her.

And I like this shot too, although it lacks the firepower. It's the same cathedral, somewhere on the other side of the nave, and I took it because what here is marble, maybe the toughest of stones, Italian marble, and it's been here forever almost. The edges are worn and misshapen by the traffic of hundreds of thousands of penitents--and tourists today. But during the cathedral's first millennia, the feet on these stones belonged to the devout, here at the Basilica for adoration, to worship. For a thousand years people have stepped down right here at some inconspicuous space in this great cathedral, their hearts and souls open and, like most all of us, needy.

My guess is that the Floyd river out back of our place was here a millennia ago when people were using these steps. The Floyd is high right now, higher than it is normally at this time of year, but something of what it is likely ran somewhere approximate to where it flows along right now. Beneath the river bed, my neighbor claims there are stones, lots of them, some of them big as boxcar, erratics left here even long, long ago in the indomitable sweep of a glacier.

The thing is, real, live people were using these steps on this floor when the only human beings in our backyard were long lost ancestors of Dakotas and Yanktons and Omahas. The oldest white man's building anywhere near here isn't more than 150 years old, and a century is like yesterday in a cathedral like this.

So pardon my mysticism. That young couple walking up to the altar with their arms around each other seem walking on holy ground, because they are, borne aloft just a little on ancient marble made sacrament by a thousand years of devotion in this gorgeous ancient place.

Italy viii--Sublime to absurd

Magnificence abounds in old Italy, an ancient world so far beyond imagination that you don't really see it per se--you step through some huge, carved door and you're simply in it, inescapably. Magnificence is so abundant that you fall into silence. You have to remember to breathe.

You don't even half to go inside in some places to feel your lungs constrict. So much around you just takes your breath away.

It's good to be reminded that the Italian economy is a long ways from healthy, run as it is on a huge service industry--tourism. Even though hundreds of thousands of tourists line the streets in Rome any day of the year, tourism is just about all there is to Italy right now. As a result of their economic woes, Italians suffer from the same political tensions, the same splits as most of us in the West do. They too have their Trumps.

Establishment politics favor continued reliance on the European Union, while upstart nationalists rage about keeping Italy, Italy in the face of out-of-control immigration, especially from Muslim lands across the Mediterranean, as well as something akin to colonization--as nationalist leaders like to say--by its European neighbors, Germany especially. The Five-Star Movement has become immensely popular, even though as a political party it has been around for less than a decade. Five-Star rads are defiantly "Eurosceptic"--skeptical about the EU. Nationally, divisions are huge and conflicts rage. Thus, occasionally one sees new political slogans on ancient stone facades. 

Graffitti in public toilets.

Occasionally, just occasionally, you'll see some homelessness, some vagrancy. 

Economic and political woes aside, Italy isn't much different from other Western democracies. But, as throughout Europe specifically, where two or three hundred thousand tourists mingle, there will be more than a few pickpockets. They're worse in Barcelona, some say, but there must be hundreds, even thousands in Italy.



At one stop, two girls--literally, girls, maybe 12 years old, probably less--crowded on to a subway beside us and a thousand others. It was madness. When the doors were finally closed, we became sardine subjects. They were children really, but one had already grabbed a bag from one of our party's purse when two Italian women howled and screamed and pointed at the perps, chewed them out as if the girls were their own daughters. 

In a moment, tiny as they were, the two perps were gone, that little bag one of them had swiped retrieved from the floor. 

It was a strangely wonderful moment. No one had lost anything, a blessing; and we'd been saved from Italians by Italians. It was the locals who screamed and, in all likelihood, cursed at the two little perps, made them disappear. In an odd way, we felt privileged to be under the wings of those women.

If one or more of us had been robbed in that subway, our entire sojourn would have been affected greatly. Instead, a couple of locals yelled and screamed and kept us safe.

My advice? Go ahead, love the place. Fall into sheer awe at St. Peters Square. Let the Coliseum and the cathedrals snatch your breath away. 

But no more. Keep your hand on your wallet.

Italy vii--Photobombed

This isn't my picture. I didn't take it--I picked it up from Pinterest. It's taken inside the incredible Gothic cathedral in Sienna, Tuscany. I didn't stand right there either. We didn't go inside. No matter. Look for yourself. The picture alone takes your breath away. What's in that old cathedral is really beyond imagining.

And here's the place from outside, the Siena Duomo, the Cathedral of Sienna, that great Gothic cathedral. This is not my picture either. I could have taken it, I mean I stood right there, but for some reason I didn't snap the shot. I picked this one up from Google. 

This church, like so many others, is, trust me, a magnificent, ancient structure whose sheer accomplishment is stunning. Three doorways of equal height stand at the front. If you follow those three huge doors up into that spectacular facade, you'll discover three triangular golden mosaics, the large one in the center obviously most celebrated. That one, the coronation of Mary, explains the dedication of the church--to the Mother of Jesus Christ. 

The left doorway's mosaic tells the story of the boy Jesus's first visit to the temple. Mary looks a bit saddened or shocked, as she must have been, and Joseph, head bowed, has taken with him a lamb for some symbolic reasons. Jesus takes the hand of the prelate and smiles back at his parents graciously. It's a leave-taking. 

We didn't spend much time at the Siena Duomo. We were, right then, listening to our phones, where Rick Steves described and explained the cathedral. We just kept on walking, and I don't remember regretting not entering either, not seeing inside. 

What kept us away almost had to have been a conspiracy of time and exhaustion. We needed to catch the bus back to Florence, and our Sienna visit wasn't the first day of the trip. We'd already been in some monstrously beautiful cathedrals. Besides, we were being thoughtfully and artfully lectured. 

And then there's this: even this level of magnificence is eventually wearying. 

Yesterday, I discovered one reason for such full-blown exhaustion when I was looking over my pictures of the Siena Duoma, thousands of miles removed. Here's that picture. It's the mosaic above the right-hand door.

I had the big lens on the camera, so I thought I should reach for something, and I did. If you look up at the cathedral's facade, above, you'll find this mosaic (set there only recently--1877, by the way) far above the right-hand door. It's the Holy Family (should that be upper case?) and an angel, who's looking up at Mary almost imploringly. If there is a biblical story, I'm not sure what it is exactly, but then no one is going to fight with the image.

But I got photobombed. Look up in the right-hand corner. Two dogs--greyhounds, weimaraners?--sit there, perfectly sideways, hundreds of feet up in the air, observing something, positioned in a way that makes it unlikely they're seeing what we're seeing from the front. What on earth are they doing there? Why would anyone make sure there are dogs far, far up on the facade? There must be a reason. Why? 

I took the picture--the last three, in fact. I saw this all through the lens of my camera, extended to all of its 300mm, and I never spotted those dogs. I didn't see them until yesterday. There's just too much.

Even if you know very little about art or history or religion, truth be told, you could spend six months' studying the Siena Duomo or a hundred other sites in old Italy. We didn't have six months to spend in Siena. Few tourists ever will. 

The magnificence just doesn't quit in old Italy, but eventually, sadly enough, we do.