I’m sitting in a room that’s a ten-minute walk from where Raphael is buried in Rome, going through the last couple of shots I took from the exhibit of his life and work at the Met, writing these words while waiting for the sun to start setting, to get respite from the unbearable heat blazing across Europe. And I’m only just now noticing the subtitle the curators had chosen: “sublime poetry.”
Being in Italy during this heatwave has been an interesting twist to a challenge we’d already set ourselves. Italy is infamous for its inscrutable ways. But there’s graffiti in some of the alleyways in this neighborhood that says: “THINK POETIC,” and I’m starting to wonder if these words hold the secret to happiness here. Because in the trial and error of the past few days, I’ve found myself oddly unbothered, despite the many frustrations we’ve encountered (and I’ll say more about these later). It’s like I’m mentally aware of the annoyances, but, in a reversal of the psychosomatic hierarchy I’m more familiar with, I’m not deeply affected by them.
Believe me, this wasn’t the case upon arrival: a whole string of miscommunication and technical difficulties slapped the romanticism of our little Roman Holiday right off my face from the moment we stepped out of the airport. And yet, the longer we’re here, the more I feel this shift in how I experience that stress. Could it have something to do with being surrounded by so much beauty? Is the sublime poetry of this place enough to offset the administrative burden of making things happen and getting things done?
I’m not sure yet. Maybe thinking poetic has its limits as well. Maybe sunsets across the duomo can get stale after prolonged exposure, just like anything else. Or maybe Italy’s fabled inscrutability is more like a hieroglyph; it takes time to learn and decode. x
I use the word “challenge” loosely; this is, after all, just a vacation. But with the passing of milestones and our natural tendency (at least, according to one article I’ve read) to think in increments of 10, everything about this celebratory trip is heavy with the thick frosting of expectation; “you only turn 40 once,” I told a colleague who joked that she never gets to go on vacations as long as the one I’m taking. And with that comes some degree of pressure to do it right and be my best and have a blast, etc. etc.
And I’m definitely having a blast. And in the pile of loose rock and fragmented ore, I see crystals of my personality. I see growth. I see fissures. I see parts of me ground to dust. That’s a lot to carry around on holidays, but as Bjork puts it: we chisel quartz to reach love.
I had planned to get an aura photo done on my birthday, but the place we found online, and that was supposed to be on Canal Street, had mysteriously disappeared off the face of the earth. Luckily, we had already commissioned a doodle portrait by an artist with a booth outside of the Met. I feel like that captures my aura and this trip’s vibe very well. x
There was another exhibit at the Met I found interesting: ‘Orientalism, Between Fact and Fantasy.’ Coming from where I come from, raised on a media studies diet of Edward Said, Stuart Hall, and “Reel Bad Arabs,” and having the kind of anti-imperialist politics that I do, I’m sure to be a sucker for a title like that.
But being here in Rome, I find myself less interested in the politics or even the art on display, and more fascinated by the way this place brings out deeply Lebanese aspects of my personality, for better or for worse.
Like how I feel like I’m better at finding my way around Rome because I’m such a visual person and do better with landmarks than street names. Or how I’m also quicker to react to the slightest injustices here, when a push on the metro turns into a shove back.
Maybe it’s self-Orientalizing to draw these parallels, or maybe it’s permission to be myself in ways that I don’t really get to be in a city like Seattle. Maybe it’s both, somewhere between fact and fantasy. x