I’m writing this from Rome, though when it will see the light of day is another matter. No doubt I’ll be somewhere else then. Maybe America. (UPDATE: yes, America).
There’s something useful about travelling. My Latin, all but nonexistent, is better than my Italian. I don’t know Rome well. My Ancient history is better than my Renaissance history, but it’s still relatively woeful. So I’m wandering around here in a constant state of mild frustration. How did I end up so poorly educated?
Still, everywhere I look I see the familiar made strange. I’m in a parallel universe. The past breaks through in fissures and craters. What seems a scrubby park once hosted chariot races, and on the banks around where people now play with cameras and share bottles sat fans as avid as any soccer-mad modern European.
“Help me in the Circus on 8 November. Bind every limb, every sinew, the shoulders, the ankles and the elbows of Olympus, Olympianus, Scortius and Juvencus, the charioteers of the Red. Torment their minds, their intelligence and their senses so that they may not know what they are doing, and knock out their eyes so that they may not see where they are going—neither they nor the horses they are going to drive. (translated by H. A. Harris, Sport in Greece and Rome, 235-36)
http://www.vroma.org/~bmcmanus/circus.html
The sirens are shifted from the familiar American axis of wail to a crisp two tone melody that reminds me this is proper Europe and, briefly and idly, has me imagining deputized ice cream trucks. Waiters are reassuringly rude because real life is here, and I’m the fantasy, and an insubstantial dream at at that.
It seems to me that this estranged perspective is something I should try to achieve when I return to familiar streets and to my work in progress. I should look at the world around me, and the worlds I’m trying to conjure, and twist a little so that I see them from the outside, so that everything seems almost, but not quite, like itself, and reminiscent of something else entirely. If I can see the world that way, perhaps I can describe it too, and approach something more vivid and immediate.
