Portrait of the Artist as a Selfless Intellect

D.T. Suzuki

Practitioners of Zen seek a diminution of ego. Buddha mind is expressive of an empathic relation to the universe, with the dissolution of self being the ultimate destination of the spiritual journey and ultimate compassion its end. Desire is the beginning of suffering say the high priests of this religion—with the extinction of human agency the mountain to climb. In the meanwhile there are a lot of skins of the onion to peel away. People who live on the sites of ancient civilizations are literally buried by history. "History is nightmare" says Stephen Daedalus. Maybe not for tourists to Rome. However it’s like starting to ascend the Everest of Impersonality with stones in your rucksack.

listen to Allen Ginsberg reading "Howl" (1975)

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Fighting Your Way Out of Paper Bag in Rome

Bacon, Freud and the School of London (Rome, 2019)

Rome is an excellent town in which to fight your way out of a paper bag. No matter that Rome, NY was not a town Sal Paradise passed through with his friends Carlo Marx and Dean Moriarity in On the Road. The Colosseum is a condemned Aqueduct Track (lest one not forget the true Parco degli acquedotti over which the Christ figure hung from a helicopter in La Dolce Vita). Remember the Etruscans came before the Romans and after Caesar and Augustus came Constantine and the Visigoths. Anyone returning to Rome is carrying a lot of baggage both physically and metaphysically. Back in 2019, there was an exhibit of work by Lucien Freud, Francis Bacon and a number of other British toughs at the Chiostro de Bramante near the Pantheon. It was a perfect stop for that pugnacious road show.

read "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Quo Vadis?

Society prize success. Gladiators like Kirk Douglas were stars who played winners. Dirty Harry, the master of the 44 magnum, got the bad guy. But what about all the weaklings, the deformed, the forgotten. What was the fate of the slow learner in Ancient Rome? Someone had to take last place in the games. You perhaps imagine Ancient Rome like today, a large groaning board, a feast filled with delights to satisfy the appetites of all the winners including nubile women and young boys. Of course Epicureans like Lucretius put a different spin on things, but De rerum natura was unlikely required reading in the Senate. Augustus was an unlikely adherent to the golden mean. But what about the last who are never first in the paradigm of human excellence. Christianity came with the advent of Constantine and along with him the 23d Psalm. "You prepare a table before me in the presence of mine enemies." What is your vade mecum?

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

and listen to "Twenty-Five Miles From Home" by Edwin Starr

Epiphanic

 

Materasso Alto 17

Epiphany is defined as a moment of sudden realization or revelation. In Italy, the gentile form of such illumination, La  Befana, is celebrated by literally closing everything down. The streets of Rome are empty.  La Befana would not be a good day to purchase a new mattress at the Roman franchise of Mattress Firm say Materassi Simmons (still you may find a sale here and there in the spirit of Lucretius De rerum natura whose Epicureanism preceded Christianity). If nothing else Rome’s archeology, as Freud pointed out, is a metaphor for the varying and sometimes conflicting aspects of the human mind (conscious versus substrata). Still in all, life does slow down in a way that’s rarely apparent on a pagan landscape like New York where the enchantments of paradise are nowhere to be found. La Befana actually originated during 13th century and ever since children have left their stockings out the night before so that the witch of ancient lore, who had encountered the Magi, could fill them with gifts originally meant for Jesus.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

Crowd Saucing

photograph by Hallie Cohen

Crowd sourcing is what people do when they use Go Fund Me.  Perhaps they need money for a film or theater project. Maybe they're just broke and need some dough. Crowd sourcing is what occurred on Rome's Gianicolo Hill, New Year's Eve. There fireworks were coming so fast and furiously you felt you were in a war zone minus the death. It was a mixture of Pamplona and Guernica with crowds surging both towards and away from the blasts. Anthony Bourdain left his imprint on Rome as does Stanley Tucci and both undoubtedly witnessed the kind of crowd saucing that occurred on New Year's, in Rome's restaurants. Wonderful sauce and spices flood the dishes in any Roman restaurant. Even if you don't drink, you're likely to get sauced--no matter what kind of restaurant you choose to attend. 

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

listen to James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti singing "It's a Man's World"

and listen to "I Love to Love (But My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)

and listen to "Band of Gold" by Freda Payne with Belinda Carlisle

Repulsion

How is it possible to climb out of one’s head  The modernized version of Descartes is “I think too much.” Is your world wall papered with the black hole of interiority? Has a stranger ever walked in on you while you were naked? It’s an embarrassment of riches for those who want to be spared their own astronomy. The files fill in from the dormant program called “reality.” Remember the scene in Polanski's Repulsion where the psychotic Catherine Deneuve envisions a crack in the wall which the film viewer never sees? Her break is a case of the blind leading the blind. Behind the monotony of every day life lurk the monsters that haunted The Overlook Hotel. 

read "An Incident of Defenestration" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and listen to "Bernadette" by The Four Tops

Did Innocent X Fail to Live Up to Their Name?

Spoiler Alert! At the end of Conclave, Cardinal Benitez, the dark horse who becomes the leading contender for the Papacy, reveals he has a uterus. It’s a brilliant touch in an otherwise prosaic, movie. Look at Velasquez’s "Portrait of Innocent X" next time you go to the Pamphilj. There's a reason why Innocent became the model for Francis Bacon’s "Screaming Popes". No Innocent was probably no more of a buggerer than any other pope. It’s that Innocent X was a girl. Role reversal was actually even more common in that era than it is now. In Elizabethan theater all the female parts were played by boys or eunuchs. Now of course many major male Shakespeare parts ate played by female actresses like Glenda Jackson. While a female Pope might be a stretch even in the current era of gender fluidity, there are rumors that Innocent May have gotten under the wire. But if he were a woman, there would have to be a major rewriting of that pope's cv.

read "Pet Buddha" by Francis Levy, Vol. 1 Brooklyn

and listen to "You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)" by Sylvester

The Lonely Crowd

Other orientedness was a popular subject in mid-20th century sociology. David Reisman's The Lonely Crowd and Erving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life are two noteworthy examples. Max Weber coined the term “disenchantment.” He would have shuddered at the discipline of socioometrics which is tailor-made to the kind of outcome studies favored by marketeers for whom focus groups are more telling than values.The tools of modern sociology like those of  behavioral psychology are geared to selling rather than understanding. If you travel to Rome and wander around grand old neighborhoods and even outliers like Rebebbia, the home of the prison and the last stop on the B line, you might or might not be thinking about Talcott Parsons another sociologist, but probably not. Instead thoughts of Lucretius’ great poem De Rerum Natura, On the Nature of Things along with Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve, who begins his  meditation on the poem by describing his mother's life-long fear of dying.

start your New Year by reading  "Died Young" by Francis Levy, The Brooklyn Rail

and listen to "I Love to Love (and My Baby Just Wants to Dance)" by Tina Charles (1975)