Home

Deep full moon night, after a full day with a friend of 45 years flown in from Germany, talking also “masks” in family lives… war-prison sonewhere in Siberia after Wehrmacht defeat at Kurland,… a deadly plane crash in 60’s racist American South,… near faces hiding secrets of love and misers…
Topped with ice creams near the Tiber at midnight.

Why was Gibbons surprised?

Again, it is fortunate that I am renting an isolated studio, isolated from neighboring apartments and buildings, as I woke myself up this morning around 4:30 am yelling out quite loudly: “Help!, Help!, Help!”. I was walking in my dream a street at night and a car drove up with four or five men in it with nothing better to do than make problems for me. In fact they were going to attack me…I listened to hear sounds of any fellow residents… but the studio is isolated and Rome is not without louds voices and even yellings at night (by the sounds: tourists having fun).

And when I read in “American Novelists in Italy” that “at least one hundred professional American writers traveled to that country [Italy]. and subsequently published works concerning it,…” well, it allows me to relax rather fully since a study of reactions and relations to Rome would take not months, but years, indeed it is essentially impossible… probably insufficiently useful… So relax end enjoy what I will. And this does not even consider those of interest from Britain, France, Germany, Russia…

Plan to go see the spectacle at/of the Holy Stairs (Scala Santa [sic]) this morning (Luther), and the church of Saint Augustine sometime today (Augustine).

He or she who would have the deepest insights into “Rome” would in part depend on their worldview.

When in reality is Man not talking to itself?

Even if the icons and paintings of ideas, beliefs are illusions, they are greater than perhaps nearly all who come through here. I might tend with Dostoyevski to believe the simplest, humblest is nearest to Truth here. Certainly not a lonely, needy “Steppenwolf”.

Peter and Paul, sacrificed and thereby sanctified here in Rome we’re not enough, they must bring stairs, part of the bed on which they imagine Jesus lay…

Can such personal thoughts, critiques, showings,.. not be sacrilege in a place like this?

A depth, a level, a reality of conversation with Life and Hstory and Tradition and “Reality”? belongs to such a room as this. Such Conversation as almost never occurs in normal daily human life and society.

Is Hermann Hesse’s “Steppenwolf” any more or less fiction than the writings of the four gospels? Seriously.

To amble around even a basilica, as a tourist is one lived reality, but that of a serious seeker?

Goethe, and for that matter, Emerson, essentially rejected “the fall”. And indeed may ask what, among even miserable little human beings can be so ultimate, as to require such a drama of salvation?

Essentially, these are internal notes recorded in this chapel. Where I have been at least half an hour alone completely. Rhea and Rome.

I believe it is a real human, personal, accomplishment, and achievement, even a realization, to self recognize one’s relation to the verticality of ideas of life and world present in the churches of Rome. as embodied in this chapel, where I have been able to quietly reflect and think. Certainly my deepest day so far in Rome. And can it be surpassed. I doubt that many of the scores and scores of visitors from many countries came to such a clear, conscious personal position, but then many did not approach here with decades of studying religion and philosophy.

Two others entered. Now I leave.

An American on the 87 bus speaks in full voice in the silent crowd led bus, of what he knows only in part. Eg the stone, whatever it is called, with three languages “Hebrew and two others… egypttologisrs” and so on.

No matter who or what, I consider tattoo people to be barbarians. Perhaps they are proud of it.

Oh, the psychic irreconcilable? Disjunction of life inside the church and on the streets?

Those found guilty of seditious conspiracy are also responsible for their stupidity.

Of the hundred or so people at the conversation about translation at the American Academy of Rome, I just felt no strong, compulsion or need to speak to any of the people, however intelligent and pleasant they appeared. so some Prosecco and hors d’oeuvres, and I walked out to watch the sunset and the moonrise.

Waiting for a German visitor to arrive from Munich in two hours, rather than walk around Saint Peter’s and God, I decided to go onto the streets where the sinners are.

Near 10 pm: A couple walked by with their young child, perhaps three years old… Seeing two big white dogs (with their owner sitting near me smoking a cigar) the father kept repeating a sound which I assume was “dog”, but which was completely unfamiliar to me.

Learning via email from an Italian scholar of a book on Nietzsche and Rome, rather Italy, I located it here (via Urbis) in this research library, and a kind librarian woman let me just sit and read it. Legally or not — successfully discretely or not — I read then photoed the chapter on FN and Rome, plus intro. I was facing needing a photo, letter of recommendation, et al just to get in…

Meeting a professional photographer from Venice — Felix — I show him after our talk and before he leaves, some of my best photos. I hope I didn’t bore him those 5 minutes, but I have rarely such chances. He said to visit: Matera.

“Rome” itself(ves) is less to be studied than “Man”, men and women reacting to “Rome”. Four of course all comments throughout the centuries on Rome has been “man” attempting to understand, conceive and express in someway his experiences of Rome”.*

* This in part, in addition to the thoughts and observations of the last almost two weeks, by reading in Trevelyan’s Goethe and the Greeks, with Goethe reacting now to Sicily, Palermo. (p. 156)

I have also found citation to the letter extract in which Goethe accounts for his not accepting an invitation to go to Dalmatia and Greece with Prince Waldeck. It is difficult for me personally to understand – possibly rather “accept” – that Goethe declined this invitation.

I am still wondering what it means to “be in Rome”.Being here to me physically seems too little… The seagulls flying outside my seventh floor rented studio are in Rome in that sense. And yet what must one know, feel, experience, perhaps be, in order to say, one has been in Rome?

The visual “busyness” of the church is contradicted by its still forms and body which nonetheless dominate.

Felt guilty as a churchman walked by as I ,sitting alone in the church, searched the internet for an article on Nietzsche and Rome.

What Goethe sought was certainly not in this imperial skyward theo-anthropology. Rather than otherworldly doctrine, ritual, belief or Biblia, he sought in Nature, in Homer, in his Greek-laced Italy,…

Whereas Emerson would correct the Catholics, rituals, doctrines… by ennobling humans.

Both JvG and RWE essentially came to seek and find their own and Man’s Answers here on Earth amid men and women in time.

One such edifice as wherein I sit reveals the power of ruling belief.

A place of escape and consolation. Vertical escapes in the city.

After a semi-failed search for the building where Nietzsche stayed in Rome, but finding Jacob Burckhardt and Margaret Fuller’s places in the process, one glass of wine, and I am actually rather pleasurably lost in the back lanes of Rome.

Certainly there are myriad truths and insights that can be had about the various piles, periods, places of Rome. But is there one single “Truth” that can be found or concluded? That would also clearly depend on the “concluder”, intent and/or necessity, whether the conclusion was intellectual or experiential, academic or existential.

Many came to Rome for M/meaning, pilgrimage, education… And for examples, Goethe, Emerson, Margaret Fuller were changed by “Rome”, by Italy. Many for centuries came from Britain, France, Germany, Russia,…

In my case… I did not come from N/northern Europe, or from New England. I moved in despair from the, as I like to describe it, “unbearable lightness of being in California” to Russia… And being there as it was changed me in needed, appreciated ways. (A mysterious reality noticed, and even mentioned, by even otherwise imperceptive family and friends.) Though it was closer to psychic therapy than artistic or intellectual enlightenment. Nonetheless…

I myself needed Russia not California. And I came now to Rome in a mature age – ignoring the immature Southern boy who wandered ignorantly and haphazardly through five decades ago – and not in my 30s or so….

But the fact is most people I know are asleep – adream – and don’t know it. And many of the many taking The Canned Tour, and eating and partying at night, are in the sleep state. (In a way, as if their tour guides and itineraries were directing them through a world of dreams which are the sites of Rome.)

It is asleep, adream, unrealistic – surely since the accessibility of Rome to flying tourists in – to speak of “Ancient Rome”, “Renaissance Rome”, “Baroque, Rome”,”Romantic Rome”,… without adding Tourist Era Rome/Italy..,. Tourist Occupied…

I must recognize more clearly and accept less reluctantly that what I experience, what I “find” and conclude of and in Rome, are of me, not others.

Watching periodically CNN and MSNBC, i.e. news and mentality from America, I see that the mass goal of life is material wealth and comfort. Family is perhaps less a goal than a fact. Beyond material satisfaction and quantities, perhaps qualities of goods or objects. I see no higher aspirations generally.

Supporters of Donald Trump, especially now, reveal their intelligence.

Many, old medieval buildings and much earth was removed to reveal this structure.

A Southern Gentleman Steppenwolf walked the streets of Rome alone this evening. Trying to be relaxed and indifferent would help to make the evening less depressingly solitary. A regular semi-effective stance.

A photographer selling photos of Paris at his place before Shakespeare and Co. seemed to assume my self characterization artistic or pretentious. I told him, ‘no, it really is a description of me’.

50 to 100 yards off any major tourist path the population drops by 95+%.

If I recall correctly, it has been since the late 1700s that there was a distinction between tourist and traveler.

And do they not follow the set paths in their minds as well as by their feet?

And the feet follow because the minds follow, yoga feet are more obvious

After the adult name md the building, the young girl asks which propaganda?

Clearly about 99.9% of the people who go up the Spanish Steps do not go into the poets’ house.

Must one be old to appreciate Rome?

What place may famous by writers and thinkers is not either or later, ruined by curious, wealthy, shallow, posers

The head waiter made a special effort to speak to me, as I left the categorical… Which I take, is a recognition of at least some intelligent serious face there I miss the tourists

I have some impulse to assist. Noblesse oblige? It manifest in my English language, lecture forum in Moscow, and just now helping a complete stranger sitting beside me on a bench in this park (Fonrana Carioli) to find a way to open his Heineken — on a pointed metal design on the fence railing around this park .

And yet I have a current state of being almost undermined by my aloneliness — near perpetual– not diminished by the lack of replies from two scholarly strangers I wrote hoping for talk. Yet that too, is a part of my “Rome”. Byronic? Goethe found artistic companionship, Luther, if only retrospectively, found disgust at what he saw around him. I will try to learn of Emerson’s experiences,… Twain? Sir Richard Burton?

Perhaps my insides are as noble and isolated, also ravaged and old, as many of the ruins I see.., and I came to Rome to view. As outside inside.

I intend to go to the Stanza della Segnatura again this evening, as I was told that there are far fewer people on Saturday nights, and this is the rare time of year when they are open until 10:30. Apparently, in spite of detailed studies that I wanted, many of the figures in both The Disputation* of the Holy Sacrament, and The School of Athens are uncertain and disputed.

*Even that “disputation” is a mistranslation, misconception. That it’s ideas are not in dispute.

If there are too many tourists in Rome, I also must endure being too alone. Perpetually. If Rome was fated to fall, I seem to be fated to bear myself, to suf-fer, alone.

Tired of hiding… But how inpolitic will that be?

The woman posing for the photographer, in obviously her wedding dress, seemed to imagine one needed appear thuggish in dispositions.

Or how few is this story a part of the Earth electromyography?

Is the painting the battle of Milvio bridge only for the popes. What kind of grand aesthetic entertainment? Or is there some ontology of accomplishment in this painting?

School of Athens is more important as a work of art then a painting a Philosophy. One might ask what degree it was intended for the future to see. like me and the other people in this less-crowded evening Room of the Segnatura.

This too, must be surpassed in understanding.

Sistine Chapel. Saturday evening. Ideas are higher than this highest art.

The incorporation of Imperial Belief

I stayed in the Sistine chapel until I need not return again

The Rome of the Romantics was excavated away.

No matter what adventures, magnitudes of hopes in imaginations, basically everything reduces down to the human. And humans can either strive or rest.

At Basilica of Saint John Lightroom

Longish conversation with the confessor priest about confession, Simms, exorcism, Reno in mortal sins, etc.

*con-fess, from Latin confess-, from com “together” + fateri “to admit,” akin to fari “speak,” from PIE root *bha-“to speak, tell, say.”

The organ music sounds like audio mud.

Imperial power plus externalized Spirit for children of spirit

Am I “in” Rome when I go to an old Roman Forum? When I view Renaissance art? When I go to the Vatican? When I eat at one of the 15,000+ pizzerias? When am I “in” Rome? Obviously, meaning more than physically.

Goethe was not interested in the Italians. I certainly learned more by so closely living with and observing for two decades the Russian. He missed very much.

I was able at Casa di Goethe — in useful and cordial conversation with Frau Dr. Claudia N. — to photograph with my iPhone — long-wanted articles and books on this question of Luther and Goethe and Rome. At my question, she recommended that I leave my Wikipedia page up.

In conversation with her, and her interests and parts of her life story that I heard, I realized in reflection the singularity of my interests in Luther, Goethe, why I am in Italy… And and while I might anticipate interest, curiosity, probably it would be rare to find real agreement and understanding.

A region’s people are endemically grown into its shared emotions, society, inner life. They belong to the region. One could say that the people are the region.

Tourist Swarms.

As I said to the man in the Anglo-American Bookshop, as I purchased a biography of Raphael: “eventually you realize you will die before you read all the books you want to read”.

My existential scholarship.

In California, I faced the unbearable lightness of being, here I meett, again, the incredible offensive being

What would my life be like if I dropped my inner and outer “home” mask?

Antipode to the street life of Rome, in atmosphere, and silence, and meaning.

What do I inwardly need to know… Think… Feel… The…? In order to actually “be in the Real me”?

The ceremony of one man. Externals of event based in “internal/eternal”?