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.