per i ragazzi italiani

Vi voglio bene, amici, e sempre non scrivo mai niente per gli miei amici italiani! Quindi, vorrei raccontarvi una storia. Questa storia mi e stata racontata da un uomo che si chiama Concertino, da Germania, e dove sei adesso, C, chi sa?  Ma ti ringrazio per questo, e per tutto il resto, fratello mio -

Allora, c'era un incendio, una notte, in un bosco del Sud America. Tutti gli animali stavanno corriendo per trovare un posto sicuro. Gli animali videro un colibri' volare dritto e veloce fuori dal bosco. Gli animali dissero, "Cazzo! Questo colibri' sta volando piu veloce di noi e adesso lui e salvo, mentre noi siamo ancora qua, nel bosco con quest'incendio!!!" Ma gli animali continuaronno a correre. Dopo tre minuti, il colibri' repasso' volando in la altra direzione. Gli animali dissero, "Cosa fa lui?!" Dopo altri tre minuti, il colibri' torno' volando di nuovo nel altra direzione! Gli animali eranno confusi!!! Finalmente loro arrivaronno al fiume. Loro dissero, "Siamo salvi!!! L'aqua ci puo proteggere - " Improvisamente, il colibri' arrivo' volando di retorno dal fiume. Nel suo becco, stava portando una goccia d'aqua, e stava volando verso l'incendio goccia dopo goccia.

E amici! La storia e' cosi'. Senza dubbio, anche una picola azione puo cambiare il mondo...

Non posso dimenticarvi, belle stelle, e adesso, quando preparo a tornare in America, vi ricordero' sempre, sempre, sicuramente, SEMPRE!!!!!

That's Saffron

Every day is like its own opera, slicky little mushroom tongues, and grease fingers, black water vertices, billy goat nut foraging, and I want to, I really want to commune more, but this is where we are, crumpled in the pocket like tissues, and I try and save these moments, to remember them all, for sharing, for YOU!!!  So let's go.

I am alone in a house on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea, a home colonized by 34 ROOMS.  I cannot believe it myself, it's just me and Sebastiano the farmer, who has, in a short time and to his credit, passed on a wealth of knowledge regarding the foraging of wild herbs, things I thought were weeds until we threw them in the pot this week.  The scope of his 7-roomed library is so astounding I am trying to ingest six books at the same time before I leave in a week.  I will admit that when I arrived I asked if I might sleep in a different room, every single night, in all seriousness, you know, just for fun, to which he muffle-throated a polite no.

The first day he drove me up to the hillside of a mountain, unloaded me and the dog, along with two baskets and a bucket, and said, "I'll be back in three hours."  So I wandered, collecting walnuts with ice pickle fingers, stopping for pauses of incredible wind and the tying of scarf tighter around head, when I found an abandoned stone house, the only things inside being two old mattresses and a picture of the Blessed Virgin.  It made me so content, finding this abandoned place, I stayed there for some time, slacking off, kicking dust and smelling things.  The next day, he left me in the woods again, this time on another piece of land to forage for mushrooms, or the wet leaf pockets hiding the little moon hats, but it was raining cats and the hillside was chocolate milk drizzle, and steep.  (I did think it a bit cruel of him to leave me in the roary rain like that...)  I had collected so many delicate fungi when, coming down the hill, I was spun onto my backside and slid all the way down, toppling the basket, over and over like a damn football, and me, following uncontrollably behind it, thrashing and smearing each one into the mud with my own rear end.  When I finally hit a soggy halt, I stood up and cursed that damn hill to high hell like my grandma taught me to do when you banged your knee - curse that chair!  I had to listen to The Magnetic Fields immediately following.

Later in the week, we started the mixing of a certain goo that we blessed onto the fields in little drops with our hands, like the Pope annointing an ocean of heads.  The stuff is pure hummus (the rich earth part of soil), and has to be prepared at just such a temperature, exact measurements into pure spring water, and must be dissolved by hand, creating a swirling water vortex, breaking it, then creating another vortex in the other direction, for an hour.  Looking into this black abyss water with my arm down the center, back and forth, over and over, a curious mind goes ducking under a big sky of pictures (life can feel so long sometimes!), memories I had completely forgotten about, holy little statues.  I have loved immensely.

Now here there are some effects that I should mention about Sebastiano.  He is owner of this land, plus many other pieces chunked over the world, South Africa, etc., the whole thing disgusts me to be honest, and there have been a few conversations where I have had to consciously bite my mouth for fear of ziplines that could have me kicked to the curb.  Sometimes, working for him is a little like swallowing this Chinese Medicine tea I was getting in New York when I was having kidney problems and dreaming too much at night and was prescribed a froth of tree barks, beetle nests, and seed pods.  The stuff looked like coffee, seemed delicious, but once settled on the mouth it was a hearty series of gags, every retching sip.  He is an elite hunter-gatherer with a sniffer like a Bassett, and scampering through woods behind him, trying to maintain pace with those rubber boots whisking ferns, I contemplate this tall-handsome-Clark-Kent who reminds me in moments of a Phillip Morris advertisement from the early 80's, smoldering cigarette and helmet hair, and I get the solemn sense he enjoys being boss, it brings a certain pleasure to give out orders, a sport, really, having someone take care of him.  Like a pup throwing his own tennis ball.  Some days I walk in the door so beat it feels like I am dragging myself behind me, and will be caught, mid-stair, "Rebecca, make us lunch, I have some emails to write."  Dinner, too.  Everyday.  When we finish a meal he gets up and leaves the dishes on the table and tells me to clean it all.  And this is the most disturbing thing I have strangely gotten used to here (the culture around domestic stuff is slightly different, dark ages).  If I were a man, I don't believe he would expect this cleany-washy-cooking when I come in from working in a field or on a mountain the whole day.  (And for doubters, it's not just foraging, it's a lot of muddy hauling, hiking, lifting, and building.)  It's not like the worker uprising on the last farm.  I'm really quite alone.  It's a little foreign to feel incapacitated in this way, and I really don't like it.

Luckily, there is a wonderful character around these parts I have taken to studying because he is fascinating.  If I didn't have to condense these little chapters for the purpose of painting a swift picture of it all here, I would write a book just on this man - Saverio.  I first encountered him while following Sebastiano on the tractor as I drove the Panda.  We had just gotten into the village when I saw a short, dark, and bearded elder man jump out in front of the tractor.  His black hat was sort of smashed and looked inside-out, jean jacket all wet, and he was clearly drunk.  At first, I thought he was a bum, but then I see him get Sebastiano to turn off the tractor and talk to him.  So I'm just waiting, running the motor, watching, and the guy starts to yell and curse, gesturing all the big Italian gestures, "Are you out of your mind?!"  "Do you take me for an idiot?!"  "I don't friggin' know!!"  Sebastiano is yelling, too, but it's so wimpy in comparison - this guy is honestly kicking his ass.  When they are finally done, Sebastiano tells me we are turning around to follow the guy.  As he's turning the tractor, the guy comes to the window of the Panda and drunkenly, flirtatiously, replete with eyelash, slurs:  Ciao.  Saverio.  As we exchange introductions, I am enthralled, secretly excited at this sousy mystery man with the power to turn us off course and slap Sebastiano with the kind of sense I wish I had the guts for.  We go back to the house, where, adjacent, there is a worksite on Sebastiano's land.  Saverio exits his rickshaw, jumps atop the roof of the remodel, and starts screaming at the top of his lungs, throwing things at the workers, mocking them grotesquely right up in their faces, grabbing little tools and seems to be attempting to shove them inside people's noses.  He's jumping up and down like a monkey now, a monkey with a bone in his hand, and his tennis shoes are making hell on the aluminum sheet of a stand-in roof, while Sebastiano tells me, Go...take a sack and find some corn or something, for the pigs, just fill it.  But the corn pile is right next to the tantrum zone, so I am now front-row-center, loving this whole thing, mainly because I'm the only non-male-non-Italian there, so there is a feeling of immunity somehow, "Whew, glad that ain't me..."  But just as I start having this gloaty little thought, who should he come for next??  That's right.  He looks me square through the eyeballs as I'm squatting on the ground trying to grab up the corn cobs, somewhat hurriedly now as I see him hop off the roof and head straight toward yonder me, still the lunatic rage, and I stand, perhaps instinctively from the desire to defend my nostrils.  Only when he gets to me, he stops, reaches out to touch my hair, all booze, and gruffly, tenderly, whispers, "Rebecca, sei arrabiatta?"  (Rebecca, are you angry?)  Me?!  No, I am not, I reply.  Are you?  He smiles and pats my face like Brando, "Parli bene Italiano."  (You speak good Italian.)  Then he cheats towards the audience a final tableau, walks to his rickshaw like an emperor... and blackout.

Incredible.

But all clever small talk aside, things continue to flicker behind masks upon deeper currents.  I have been thinking a lot about ego these days.  I'm so sick of the thing that seems to reside where I least expect or want or even am conscious of.  I don't ever want to be 'clever', to be a clever person, and the ego seems to thrive within this coil.  Taking myself off the interweb seems to be the first step in getting closer to spiritual authenticity, to my own lifelong relation with creativity, for the things I map for future endeavor seem like they could happen so much quicker if I weren't wasting my energy in other directions.  I've removed myself from facebooking and myspacing and soon think I will shut down this blog as well.  The cost is too great, and only for me am I speaking, toward a loss of personal honesty.  I can thrive in (perhaps too many) moments on the imaginary plane of my own experience.  Whatever it's worth, this is the direction I am intent on.  We'll see where it takes me, this is all I can assert.

And it's already October.  And I'm going to be honest.  I haven't changed my clothes in, perhaps, weeks.  I brought two pair of socks with me and now wear them together daily, grabbed a sweater from the free box on the last farm, boots from a flea market, and of course the mud pants - this is the uni. The persimmons are jumping off, grape leaves getting browner, tomatoes hanging on for dear life, and all around us, fields and mountains turn greener, wetter, muddier.

This reminds me to tell you:  I bought a ticket to the United States of America.  I am comin' home for the holidays!  Come December, let's DANCE!!!  Maude has already snared me into some kind of San Franciscan Pier 70 dancing duet before I break off toward northern Cali and then Oregon, en route to the great Emerald megalopolis.

Until then, ragazzi, near and far, I send wishes on the wind for you and yours, that when we meet again all is right in the world as ever it was.  I love you around the moon and back.

Fire on Babylon

      

deliverance

she was talking to usand we stopped a whistle

as adriano, standin on imaginary 8th Street,...

blew smoke in Bari Centrale.

flooding the floor

E' cosi'

I could feel blood pumping through a mosquito welt below the middle knuckle of my left ring finger last night when I cracked the front pages of a new chronicle of sorts, and it reminded me that it's time to chew the fat a bit.  Whoo, where to start.  I guess at Renuka's place where I met Gabriela and Krishan and Francesco, my new clan of cousins.  We shared a room dancing with bugs and beetles, with a wood-burning stove, high up in a desert mountain white trullo cave, big old tree in the bathroom, and a trip to the toilet meant a squat into white rocks with a smart little hole at the bottom.  I ended up leaving early to hitch-hike up to Blera ourside Rome, middle of nowhere land, a rolling green pasture place, big oaks I think they were, rarely an olive in sight - THE CIR it was called.  And we took off all our clothes and walked barefoot in the forest for days and days and ate big heaping handfulls of nuts and grapes dripping with seed sacs, dirty as soot, bits of hay in our hair like little pups, and I remembered for the first time in years that big, big love that makes the world go round.  I had forgotten how to share so much.  I left there feeling like I had grown somehow younger.  Caught the train toward Napoli to then catch a bus to the mountains of Avellino, and came very near to being robbed by a group of 6 men - smartly saved by a new friend who caught what was happening just before it happened.  Back to city life.

To put plainly what happened in Avellino, there was a sort of worker uprising, me and 7 others, a strange abuse of time and expectation, I arrived and was made minion to a dirty confidence from the proprietress about the others because I was the only one who spoke Italian.  We were all unsure of what kind of sad pitting us against eachother was being plotted, but nevertheless I told her we had rights, we were there to work for her but also as volunteers of our own accord, and that if her treatment and mess couldn't be different I would be leaving in the morning.  "Come vuoi, come vuoi!"  So I did.  Me and the Norwegians and the Canadians, all of us setting off for a bus stop in the fog of dawn, uphill, not really knowing where we were going, just knowing we weren't staying there.  I called Francesco and Gabriela,  and oh, God, incredible love.  They cheered and said, "Come!  Come to Bari!!!  We wait for you here!" I was so, so excited I could hardly stand it.  They met me there, Franchy with his mustache and suspenders and Sicilian black hat, dapper and musical and so alight, Gabby with her slender, dark figure, yellow creamy eyes, shouting, "Rebel-Rebel!", and Adriano, too, curly-haired, a baby, a man who sings like Elton John at the piano, and we flew back to the house for what has now been the most gorgeous revival.  Franchy lives in a castle, and all of us, even him, don't know how he got it.  Enormous sweeping veranda, Patrizia was there waiting, we lit the candles, sang Magnetic Fields songs, broke the hammock from too much weight and poor Franchy got smacked in the head with a pole.  It's been music out the ears, making food, Der Amerikanisch Freund and recorded poetry listening parties, radio-era story-telling.  I have been here for days, eating it all up - and soon we start the hitch hike up to Firenze for the 3 day Festival della Creativita'.  I'm then passing to Salerno for more farm work.

Spoke with my mom last night and it's gotten really bad.  It seems she thinks I have an accent of some sort, which, I guess didn't surprise me because I can feel in my mouth that something funny is going on in there, and can't think of English words as clearly anymore.  Anyway, the bigger reality is: I am scared.  I bought my ticket back to the states.  I don't know what it means to come back to that place.  I feel so at home here and am frightened everything will just be the same like I never left; so then what does any of this mean - did it even happen?  I have been perfectly content to move about freely without anyone telling me where to be or what to do, and came to the realization that I have to do this all the time - that coming back to a place is really just a means to get me out of there again.  I don't think there is anything that makes me feel more sane.  I had forgotten so much about myself before I came here.  I found it again.  And I don't want to lose it.

This is all.  Talk soon.

etna and my room and my housey

gabriela



davide, (strapon that jammy pac, it's time to pay some dues.)

francesco

...and krishan!!

spells of things/you might do

I have to talk about something. It was an eclipse, or a lightbulb, this moment pushing off from Napoli, it was like cold and frozen peas to the temple, a lifting up out of gravity, the breath between two worlds like a salve to wounded knees.

It was dusk, a call to religion, men in workman's suits below while I with chin to elbows stood, casting down in fascination toward the ritual and playing upon of this send-off, the coming with the crank, heaving the dungeon's trap door up towards the hull, growling like the hum of mammoth wasps, then the pulling of the ropes, heavy horses, while adjoining the spectacle, an adjacent open-air factory, men in gators with muscles and grease, burning sparks from wet lips and shouting sideways off decks to dark-skinned frowns, when! sudden engines began their gurgle and spit, water frothing in concentric rings -- and I imagined here the tiny fish below and were they alright? -- We would begin to move, I was waiting for it, knowing where to look was almost an agony -- And then it happened, the first and softest thrust. It felt like a gentle misgiving of balance, or wind that one mistakes as the whisper of an earthquake. I cannot forget the smiles and yelling of the crewmen to comrades still on land, making hand signals until it became useless and they waved a final arm and turned. It must have been a child's lighthouse that passed us after we broke from the final bits of rock, so tiny and quiet, bright as heaven through it's mist of pink-carving. I crossed over the deck to the side where the moon swung off, nearly full above Vesuvius, when I was caught by a gulp in the throat, this cursed vantage ever toward the future, and while I write this I ask myself why are we always moving? They are all I really care about, I suppose, these moods that knock me over like a jar. I never know what to do afterward but to be quiet as a bird.

That night when I came out onto the deck at 2:00, it reminded me of stepping onto a stage, lights frightening the hairs on your head, skin tingling with a vibration, the audience absolute blackness beyond, like nothing, like dying, like facing the universe. There was a thin gray line between what was up and what was down. And I thought about the netherworld below, the whales and fishes and serpents and microbial fodder. I touched the railing, and leaned over. I wanted to jump, and it frightened me completely. It wasn't that I wanted to enjoy the consequence of what happens after one should jump off a boat into the night ocean, it was only that the imagination of jumping was so much bigger, I couldn't see the border between the two. I wanted to feel what it would feel like to be in the middle of all the blackness, and was it cold as everyone said?, and what would it feel like to be right on the gray line between worlds, and to watch the boat getting farther from me, the silence in acknowledging it was gone? I stepped away from the railing. I looked again toward the moon, this time higher and much further north. It was casting a spotlight out in the distance that gave the impression of a large ice-skating rink. I went and hid myself between two life-rafts to think. And then I fell asleep, bound for Sicilia.

for want of an inventing stick

i fell in love again with books. i was walking, i'd forgotten all about them, summoned like a fool. i found myself there for hours, forgot all about my plans, oscar wilde and my god, james joyce - i once tried to read ulysses and it defeated me like mustard - but there i was sea sick and tingling with finnegan's wake, it was too heavy to carry with me anyhow and I settled on dubliners, but have you ever read the picture of dorian gray? it has caught me on fire, i cannot put it aside for a moment. il piccolo principe. i have since learned the word for "to swallow" and also "to draw" (remember the elephant in the belly of the snake). just like playing guitar, only the books of children will do.

the beach was grand, we saw fish and medusa's all mauve and iridescent with stripes and floating feathers, and upon a great vista we closed a lock and threw the key into the ocean, an ode to friendships and passing flames. i left monticchiello with such sadness for misunderstandings, i miss it, but how i ache for october, for muddy fog, the salt of the sea has dried me like an apricot.

inside, a pearl of fear. resisting inevitabilities. bits of dirt are falling through fingers, there won't be longer much left. there/here, always a restlessness, i cannot run. sameness is a prison, can one not forever keep to the business of inventing things?

lo spettacolo

shadows and light!

underwater

La Terra, Il Farro, e il Teatro

Stooges and Foodges

Love Locks and Water