In the morning when I open the window there’s whistling, church bells, the wasp of a scooter, restaurants setting up for lunch, and the repetitive “Buon giorno!” big and round and full of owls, of vowels.
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The mosaics in the Villa Giulia employ such small pieces of fractured tile that they almost seem to be oil paintings … almost. If you stand back twenty feet or more, they are oil paintings. As you step closer, the cracked assemblage reveals itself. Fish lurch, Gorgons tremble, a squid twitches.
I imagine that if you hold a microscope up to an oil painting, it too is a kind of mosaic?
~
Our apartment comes with a stove-top percolator and a pound of ground coffee. Also, some other, less important things.
There’s a window in the kitchen that looks down onto a courtyard, and an orange tree on the balcony below. Our first fight is about whether the tree is real or not. This fight, like most things here, will both end in ruins and never seem to end.
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The word paragone means “comparison.” During the Italian Renaissance it referred to the debate for superiority among the art forms: that is, painting, sculpture and architecture. Mosaic never really had a chance, and might not have even been in the race.
Beginning in the 3rd century B.C. mosaics were used in the Roman Empire for floor and wall decorations. The mosaic as fine art continued well after the fall of Rome, when Byzantine artists used them to portray the story of Christianity.
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I dreamt last night I was a fountain in the Tivoli gardens. Fast streams of forceful water poured from my breasts, my ass, my vagina. I reached to try to stop the flow, but my stone hands were fixed to my sides. The water poured and poured, and I could do nothing to stop it.
The best dream I’ve ever had.
~
When you look close enough, there’s nothing that isn’t a cracked assemblage.
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The sound of cicadas is deafening here. Here in Rome where the plane trees lift up only to hang down, far over the levee walls of the Tiber.
Plato suggests that cicadas were men who became so engaged in singing that they neglected to eat or drink. Their bodies wasted away. What was left … what is left is this endless song, seeming to ring out of thin air.
The Greek poet Xenophon perhaps understood them better than Plato. He knew, at least, that it is only the male cicada that sings, attempting to call a mate, and so quipped, “blessed are the cicadas for they have silent wives.”
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Psychological studies have proven that the brain will make up a coherent story instantly from seemingly disparate information. This is why haiku is compelling. And, too, why fragments are engaging.
Why would anyone long to be understood? No one’s interested in what they understand.
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A fragment defies the mind’s impulse to make things whole. Defies it, and entices it.
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“The video camera was zippered into a bag, still on, and it recorded only blackness and a few points of light shining through the canvas.” – Eula Biss.
For some reason I think of cicadas like this, somewhere out of sight. Something like voices singing in another room.
~
Something, perhaps, like Frost’s “abstract vitality of speech.” “The best place to get the abstract sound of sense is from voices behind a door that cuts them off.”
Actually, the best place is along the Tiber, the voices of cicadas behind an antiquity that cuts them off.
I’m pretty sure Frost didn’t mean “cuts them off.” He meant “muffles them,” makes music of voices. What is cut off from the language is referential meaning. What remains is its music … its music and its tone.
~
Gordon Lish claims that all a writer needs is one strong sentence. If you can pull that off, and you’re able to hear the nuances of that sentence, then the next sentence will spring from the music of those original sounds.
A kind of variation on a theme. You can write a whole book this way, seeming to ring out of thin air.
~
While photographing the bottle caps, cigarette butts, and broken glass stuck in the cobblestones, he says, “I think you could beachcomb in the streets here.”
The cobblestones seem somehow to whisper. How could they not? Why wouldn’t they have as much or more to say as the cicadas singing or swallows, the plane tree boughs scritching along the levee walls and seagull laugh.
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Mosaic shares an Indo-European root with Muse, museum and music; and more broadly with muster, summon, premonition, and monster.
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At the Porta Portese flea market, I’m strolling along, eyeing the crappy antiques when a vendor calls out, “Hello Madame Looking!”
“Buon giorno, Senore Vendendo.”
The man is Pakistani. He doesn’t laugh. I buy two shirts from him. One that says (on the back): “Never let me go.” And another: “This girl likes patches.”
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The cobblestones are mostly made of porphyry. They are the tesserae of the mosaic that is the city, spotted here and there with ruins and churches, that filthy gash of a river worming through its core.
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Tessara is derived from Gk, meaning “four.” To tessellate is to form into a mosaic pattern.
I might say Rome but what I mean is more.
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“What makes life life and not a simple story? Jagged bits moving never still, all along the wall.” – Anne Carson.
~
On the flight, a little girl cries in Italian about the pressure in her ears. In the central medallion, I eat the beef—horrible gas. Hot towels. Tiny toothbrushes. Behind me, old people snore. At the outermost border, a guilloche of clouds.
~
Illustrated in black tile, two armored fish one tessera away from touching lips.
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A mosaic in the Palazzo Massimo depicts a cat with pulsing eyes and arched back trying to catch a bird. Each hair on the cat’s tail, back, and scruffy head leaps out tense and articulate from the others. You can feel electricity running through it. The picture defies its stilted material.
The effect comes from opus vermiculatum, a mosaic technique used to highlight central figures. Working with square micro-tesserae and contrasting, in this case, the cat’s black hairs against a solid white background, the artist achieves a halo-effect around the cat.
Opus vermiculatum means, literally, “worm-like work.”
Worm-like work. I’d like to burrow inside you for the next thousand years.
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In the museum I overhear a professor say: “at home I see a few beautiful things; in Rome, if you make a frame with your fingers, and point it in any direction, you’ll find something beautiful inside it.”
He probably lives in Ohio.
~
The umbrella pine’s hands hold up the sky, while the cypress seem to shoot from the ground. Magpies terrorize a pigeon crippled by disease. The traffic cops wave their flattened caps at racing dogs.
… if you make a frame with your fingers.
~
The captain wears a brown Speedo, tattoos of boat propellers on his calves, ropes around his forearms like bracelets, red roses on his collarbones, and fish skeletons on his thighs.
He’s Tuscan. His English is good, despite asking if any of us want a “piece of kitchen” when he means “chicken.”
~
It’s morning here in Italy. I say Italy, but what I mean really is one rather neglected terrace, cracked-brick spotted in places with little or much pigeon shit. Looking out past the domes of various churches—Santa this or Santa that, each housing the rather dubious remains of some individual persecuted by the papacy in life, canonized by it in death—looking out past the trussed domes to the Umbrian countryside. Perugia maybe, or Narni—I should know but it really doesn’t matter. The cypress trees shoot up from the blond hayfield earth broken by red tile roofs, other churches, other trees. The Tiber drowsing by, dreaming I think—surely every river dreams of the sea.
I say Italy but this is what I mean: all that I can hold and then put here. A fraction really, of a song. A truncate vision of an illimitable thing. Still, it is Italy and I am in it. The sun fills the valley below and I sit high above it, in the shade of the hill, some oaks, on the terrace, cool and pleasant now but soon to be unbearably hot, the day already nearly ruined.
~
The real magic, of course, happens between the tiles, in that dark theatre.
“Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard are sweeter.” –Keats
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Stephen Mitchell’s translation of Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” has the memorable line: “to that dark center where procreation flared.”
C.F. MacIntyre’s translation is more, well, venereal: “into the bright groins where the genitals burn.”
Here are some more:
To that black hole where morning glory bloomed. To that secret place where happiness crawls. To that cool swamp from which lilies spring. To that dim lack where living begins. To that broken place from which morning rose. To that vacant loom where fabric wefts. To that hollow coup from which cities blaze.
You can write a whole book this way.
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St. Peter’s has, I think, the best bathrooms in Rome. Simple and dignified and flooded with light.
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All day the sun worked to shift the light in the city, every minute a new angle, so that when we returned later that day to the overlook it would seem new, and be new, and we could let our eyes down into it as if we never had before.
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In a letter to Shelley, Keats referred to himself as “the writer of Endymion whose mind is like a pack of scattered cards”
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Writing imitates other media that express things better. Please feel free to cut these out and arrange them pictorially
Elizabeth Cooperman is co-editor (with David Shields) of the anthology Life Is Short—Art is Shorter (Hawthorne Books, 2014). Her work has appeared in Writer's Chronicle, Seattle Review, 1913: A Journal of Forms, and other journals. She's attended the Ragdale Foundation Residency, as well as 360 Xochi Quetzal Residency Program in Chapala, Mexico as an artist-in-residence. Elizabeth is Art Director at PageBoy Magazine, and teaches sporadically as an adjunct professor in the University of Washington’s English Department.
Thomas Walton's anti-lyric lyric essay—The World Is All That Does Befall Us—will be out early next year from Ravenna Press. He is author of the micro-chapbook A Name Is Just A Mane (Rinky Dink, 2016). His work has appeared in ZYZZYVA, Delmar, Timberline Review, Rivet, The Chaos Journal, Queen Mob's Teahouse, Bombay Gin and other magazines. Some of his poems were anthologized in Make It True; Poetry from Cascadia (Leaf Press, 2015). He lives in Seattle WA where he edits PageBoy Magazine and raises blue ribbon dairy pigs.