Home From Europe
Rodin Museum
Returned home from Europe. Thirty-three years old, past the time in your life when going abroad to Italy and France can transform you. Hope is that amid all the lavish ruins of an old world, some of the wise antiquity will transfer. It’s why I steal touches of buttery marble in the long, lazily monitored hallways. Busts of kings and mytho-virgins, incomplete moments in stories – I stroke the white, erotic surface hoping that some of the experience transfers into me. That I might gather through my fingertips something beautiful from Rodin.
That I might know Pan’s skin, St. Peter’s keys, or the tense of Herrod’s eyes.
Europe transferred to me the idea of intimacy as a way of life. People changing and cleaning in train stations, on trains, unaware of “normalcy”. It’s this pre-occupation that seizes me – that of decent, normal behavior. When the man in Florence bathed in the corner bank of sinks – when the girl on the bottom bunk changed clothes and cleaned herself as we passed north through France toward Paris, aware of being among strangers, I knew that it was something to write. These moments wouldn’t happen in America. They happen here. If a young girl were to change on an Amtrack, her couchette mates would indelibly phone the car attendant to complain.
It is just that – we believe in having values, but applying them lightly in situations when they are compromised.
If I had done this trip 10 years ago, I may have slept with an Italian girl. I might have gotten drunker, gone more raw – or even further, filling in the adventure missing from my life. Now as a married person, at war with the obscurity of my own veil, I arrived in a distant place and returned having seen what I am lacking today. A view on the place our human condition is vulnerable and allows itself to be seen.
Posted: October 10th, 2009 under Blog.