La Necessità di Raggiungere

Just as I was leaving for Ercolano today, I thought there was a special kind of quality around the light in the sky. Ominous I thought. As soon as that word crossed my mind I went through a funeral. Several rose petals were scattered on the floor.

As I got to the church on the main plaza of Pompey, I went into the Maddona of the Rosary shrine. I am by no means a religious person, but I found myself thanking the incredible amount of energy that brought me there to experience a certain sense of accomplishment after long hours of inner work. Some tears were shed.

Getting by train and foot to Ercolano is no easy task. If you ask me, I would do it all over again with a different perspective, but there is nothing like the freedom you experience when there is no bus or taxi waiting for you as you take pictures on the way.

I loved the smell of the laundry that was hung on the windows by the street, I evaded as much as I could, the trash that was on the way to the scavi, italian for excavation site. I thought Ercolano, was humble yet very honest. Going down that ramp, does take you deep inside the belly of an unexplored place, not only in time but in breadth.

I remembered Joan Didier's words:

At some point, in the interest of remembering what seemed most striking about what had happened, I considered adding those words, “the ordinary instant.” I saw immediately that there would be no need to add the word “ordinary,” because there would be no forgetting it: the word never left my mind. It was in fact the ordinary nature of everything preceding the event that prevented me from truly believing it had happened, absorbing it, incorporating it, getting past it. I recognize now that there was nothing unusual in this: confronted with sudden disaster we all focus on how unremarkable the circumstances were in which the unthinkable occurred, the clear blue sky from which the plane fell, the routine errand that ended on the shoulder with the car in flames, the swings where the children were playing as usual when the rattlesnake struck from the ivy.

What were these people doing before the volcano erupted? Had it been an ordinary morning preceding the blasts? Before the ashes covered the sky?

On my way back to the train station, I found a horse inside what seemed an improvised garage that had become a barn. A man yelled at me because I was taking a picture so I looked back. He wasn't mad. He opened the gate and let me pat him/her. I was in awe. 

Yet, if Ercolano was subtle and elegant, nothing could prepare me for Pompey's magnificence. It was by all means, regal in a sense I never experienced before. Maybe because it's overwhelming, the size, the grandeur, the details that get lost in the maze of a city.

It dawned on me, how we really are some sort of a ruin, life really passes you by and though some events might not wipe you off the face of the earth, it does take some stones off your structured nature. Then some inner quakes go by and plaster falls off your polished facade. There is so much beauty in the imperfect. There are treasures in loss and regeneration.

I felt like a mosaic. Piecing together many parts of my being. Including some parts of who I was at eighteen. I had forgotten about the cold floors in winter, about perfectly chiseled bearded men drinking espressos, about vaffanculo, about vespas and for a moment I thought I saw a younger version of myself in one, hugging a young carabinieri, waving back at me from a reconciliated past.