Wednesday, August 22, 2007

Excitement (2)

11:53 pm
8-21
tuesday, day two

I have been excited, a spark of fire in this electrified fortress.
I have been excited, I have walked everywhere, quickly.
Rome has jumped at me, loomed at me. Roma has walked with me, steered past me. Romani have ignored me, and brought me into their world. I walked to them. I ran to them. I am very excited.

I was asked to be excited. They said, "You should be excited." Said like their parents must have, "You have no idea what you're going to see there; this will be the memory of a lifetime." I was not asked, I was told. So I found an answer to their question-telling, scrounged it up from an offspring culture ten thousand miles and two thousand years away. I decided: Rome will be overwhelming. Rome will be - I am afraid to go there. Rome will have so many layers of meaning in each footstep, so many people with significance in each piazza, so much time in one glimpse and I will not be able to take it all in.

I am here, I am in the city, and I confess I cannot take it all in. I saw the arch of titus today, and my mystification has reversed itself. I looked for meaning from across the Atlantic, from the new world, from a newly plowed and erected civilization still looking for meaning in itself. Here I looked for those storied layers of overwhelming meaning and I found one purpose; Power.
Right now, I want nothing more from this past that sadness. To think that such greatness was achieved, such a social system perfected and that the fuel of its leaders through their great reigns was a desire for Power. It was not a lust for power, nor an obsession. It was not a part of the system. Power was the purpose itself, what drove the (ever shifting) leading individuals and thus the empire.
And how many died a natural death? How many used that power to find respect for those who had less? It was their own purpose, and once fulfilled, the power was not to be shared, not to be lost, lest they lose themselves. Rather be slain by fellow leaders with a blade in thy throat. Rather slay thy friends, and, in the name of gods, in the name of God, in the name of the powerful self, live a single-meaning life. Is this the basis of western culture?

The Italians have not been at war for fifty years. There is nothing left to violate the beauty that colors this land. I like it this way. Ciao Romani.

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

jews in rome

i saw the arch of titus today.

Rome is very impressive, very intelligent, but entirely savage. the frequency with which a system like this appears on our planet, a system of militant hierarchy that, with cultural ignorance, dominates the surrounding world, amazes me. Saddens me.
But I have experienced this disheartening sadness as you have (as only the best of today's journalists can bring); the response that can lessen the sadness for future generations is not to close off from it, to hide in the darkness of its shadow, but to consciously create, provoke, a newer, peaceful world in the world around each of us, in the communities that we are all an integral part of.

it is savage of me to respond with pity and sadness only once i have seen the roman plight of the jews. but perhaps that experience will rather be a gateway for my jewish self to better understand the communities of the gentile world, a world that is not separate. The world is not separate.

With that, I am very excited for some day trips, go see the lands around Rome, the communities that Romans are neighboring parts of.

And it's great - The Italians are very good at making themselves understood, at least the friends I made buying food and walking by on the street and, well, the Italians. They could converse with a child. Remnants of an empire?

And also, very excited to try the Jewish restaurants, Da Giggetto serving carciofi alla giudea. Synagogue down the street. I really don't understand why it took the [eternal] Pope until the 1500's to put the jews in a ghetto. In the capital of Catholicism?