Seriously, who wouldn't like steak with coffee sauce? Especially when it has an egg on top? I'll tell you who couldn't resist it: Fernando Pessoa. The Brasileria, one of Pessoa's haunts, was a very lovely place to sit and write or simply watch the world go by.
OK, so I know I post too many pictures of the cabin, but, seriously, sometimes I'm just amazed that I live here. It's not perfect, certainly, and sometimes maddening (as I prepare to load all the trash into my car and head off to the dump), but it's a sweet life. Whenever Janet and I talk about moving to Portugal we also come back to the fact that it would be very hard to leave here.
I mentioned that when hadn't been in Evora very long before Janet began looking for property online. It's definitely a beautiful town - as I described, oddly both medieval and also hip - but I think what pushed JP over the edge was our walk through the Chapel of Bones. You would think that a room constructed out of human bones would be creepy - and I think Janet thought it would be before she walked in - but it actually ends up feeling exactly the opposite way. I suppose that it should feel like the Catacombs in Paris, but it doesn't at all, which may be because it's above ground and airy - and because it's attached to a beautiful cathedral - or maybe because the bones were volunteered and not simply moved out of perceived necessity. No matter the answer, visiting it actually felt completely life-affirming. And apparently we'll be visiting it a lot when we live in Evora.
A couple days ago I was talking about our visit to Madrid and the corresponding museum orgy. It was so lovely to get back to see them again, and I was reminded what a great museum the Thyssen is. While roaming around their modern art section I stumbled across a Tracey Emin neon light sculpture. I've made extensive use of her art, especially her neon light sculptures, over the years in various classes so it was more than a bit exciting see one in person.
To see all the things that happen to us as accidents or incidents from a novel, which we read not with our eyes but with life. Only with this attitude can we overcome the mischief of each day and the fickleness of events.
Fernando Pessoa. The Book of Disquiet, ch. 246
One of my favorite bar questions has always been: what filmmaker would you choose to direct your life story - or which author would write your life story? I suppose I wouldn't choose Pessoa because he'd never actually finish the job - and then they'd find all his Scudder-related pages in a big trunk decades later, and the papers would be in not logical order and others would have the power to organize them as they see fit. Of course, actually, that might be the best fit, all thins considered. Doubtless they would do a better job making sense of my life than I have. Now, the bigger question, at least as related to this passage, is how one should approach life. As Epictetus tells us, it's not the events that happen to you that matter, but instead your response to them.
One of the peculiarities of this past summer's trip to Portugal is the number of folks who thought we were a charming old married couple who had somehow kept the fires burning even after all these decades. I guess "all these decades" part of the equation makes sense. Maybe it would have made more sense if they knew that we'd only been married a year (and, in fact, celebrated our first anniversary on the trip). Yesterday we had dinner at Sarducci's and the waitress asked if we were on a date. I told her it was even worse: we're married.
To organize our life in such a way that it becomes a mystery to others, that those who are closest to us will only be closer to not knowing us. That is how I've shaped by life, almost without thinking about it, but I did it with so much instinctive art that even to myself I've become a not entirely clear and definitive individual.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 115
I used to joke that I could, almost innately, understand why everybody did everything, with one obvious and alarming exception: me. I don't know if that's changed much, and maybe I don't know why I've remained a mystery to myself because I've spent so much time and effort remaining a mystery to everyone else. Maybe I thought that it made me seem more interesting, more aloof and mysterious, or maybe I just found others far more interesting than myself, and thus investigating them always took precedent over exploring myself.
Here's another picture that has wafted in from the past. This is from my friend Kerry, who wasn't on this part of the China trip (that is, the far west) which means that I sent it to her fourteen years ago and now she's returned the favor. Here I am with the other professors on the Silk Road/Journey to the West faculty trip, in this case at Dunhuang. At the time I don't think I understand how much I was hanging by a thread emotionally (and obviously physically). In between leaving one woman and being dumped by another, I found myself being robbed of my past and my future. Obviously, I ended up in a very nice spot - and had many adventures along the way - but I think I was simply too destroyed to enjoy, appreciate, and learn from an amazing opportunity. Since that time I've taught several classes relating to Journey to the West and the Silk Road, but the classes would have been much richer if I had not been wavering so close to the edge then.
OK, as promised, the top five meal that we had at the converted convent in Evora, the Convento do Espinheiro. It was such a quintessential European meal: a smaller portion and heavy on quality as compared to quantity (I'm talking to you, America). It was lamb loin, which I had never had. Oh my good God. It also featured migas, a very traditional southern Portuguese staple (you can find it in Spain as well). I tend to think of migas as something like goetta, that is, a way, initially, for poor folks to stretch the food. Migas is often made with stale bread, which is then jazzed up with garlic and olive oil - and then often pork meat drippings or asparagus or tomato or coriander. We had first had migas at our first meal after visiting the Chapel of Bones (when Janet started looking for property), and that's when we learned that it was a staple in the region. The chef threw a fried egg on top because, well, just because. Truthfully, as you might expect, the migas can be a bit bland, but in this case the au jus was extraordinary.
Or maybe not.
On this year's trip we included a side trip to Madrid, partially because Janet had never visited there before and partially to embark on a museum orgy. The drive from Evora to Madrid (and through the madness of Madrid traffic) was a bit of a challenge, made more so by the fact that it was 106 F. Still, it was so lovely to get back to the big three museums in Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, Muyseo Thyssen-Bornemisza, and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia. We almost didn't go to the Thyssen, at least until I told Janet to do a little more research; mainly, she was being sensitive to my limited mobility and thought that two long museums days in two days was already going to wear on me, let along throwing in another long museum walk for the second day. However, once she did some more research on the Thyssen it, thankfully, worked its way back into the itinerary. Even considering my pain I loved every minute of our museum tours (I had not visited them in a few years).
I had a couple quasi-religious experiences (and I'm not throwing the term around lightly). One related to El Greco, and I'll discuss that later. The other one related to sitting down in front of Rothko's Green on Maroon. Throughout the three museums I tended to move from bench to bench, then plopping down and resting for a few (sometimes more than a few) minutes. This limited the amount that I saw, although, to bear fair, I had visited all three museums a couple times previously (again, my life makes no sense), but it also forced me/allowed me/empowered me tp devote more time and attention to individual paintings. Late in the afternoon when we visited the Thyssen I collapsed down in front of Rothko's Green on Maroon and it all but swallowed me up. I snapped this picture and texted it to a couple friends, commenting that I think I saw God in the painting. Normally, in the past, my friends would have rightly assumed that I was being facetious - and they probably would have been right - but now, they would more naturally assume that I was making a sincere point as I struggled with my understanding of the divine - and in this case they would have been right as well; essentially, I'm not the man that I used to be. If, as we're taught in the Qur'an, God is as close as our jugular vein, then God can be found anywhere, even in a painting, and maybe especially in a painting.
Every trip has unexpected treasures and on this summer's trip to Portugal that would definitely be our time in Evora. It's not as if I didn't know that Evora would be cool, I just didn't predict how much we would love it. After touring the Chapel of Bones (a detailed post soon) we sat down at a café and Janet immediately started researching real estate. And that was even before we checked into the converted convent that we loved so much that we cut a day off our stay in Madrid so that we could come back and stay at the convent again. In a couple days I'll post a picture of the meal we had in the convent, which was definitely one of the five best meals I've ever had.
God created me to be a child and willed that I remain a child. But why did he let Life beat me up, take away my toys and leave me alone during playtime, my weak hands clutching at my blue, tear-stained smock? If I couldn't live without loving care, why was this thrown out with the rubbish? Ah, every time I see a child crying in the street, left there on his own, the jolting horror of my exhausted heart grieves me even more than the child's sadness. I grieve with every pore of my emotional life, and it is my hands that wring the corner of the child's smock, my mouth that is contorted by read tears, my weakness, my loneliness . . . And all the laughs from the adult life passing by are like the flames of match struck against the sensitive fabric of my heart.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 407
As I've discussed, I think I failed in my first attempt to read The Book of Disquiet. Essentially, I didn't understand what he was trying to do - and trying to say. There are definitely passages where Pessoa simply reads as merely mopey (a sort of pre-Goth Goth) but hang in there, because you eventually discover a remarkably tender and wounded heart, in addition to a profound commentator on the human condition. Maybe the passage above is somewhere in between. It clearly reveals his pain, but he can't help pointing out that when he sees the suffering child in the street "my exhausted heart grieves me even more than the child's sadness." The problem with the extreme interiorization of a writer/thinker like Pessoa is that sometimes you can't climb out of that interior. You're making contact with the rest of the world, but their suffering can serve mainly as a bridge to your own - as compared to your own suffering forming a bridge to the suffering of the world.
Obviously, this would be a good place to include a link to Young's I Am A Child.
It's funny, I hadn't thought about my first trip to China in a long time (it was fourteen years ago, and, well, a million things, both good and bad, have happened in my life since then). And then I bumped into my friend Kathy a couple weeks back and she sent me some pictures - and then my friend Kerry sent along some pictures - and suddenly I'm awash in China pictures. That said, the memories are not flowing as torrentially as the pictures are. Back in the day I used to travel with actual physical journals and I wonder if any of them from that trip are still buried in my desk? Despite the adventure of my first trip to China it was also a real low point in my life and maybe I don't want to read them. Still, I might do some digging.
Here's a picture from somewhere in western China, probably along the borders of the Taklamakan Desert. I was thinking that maybe it was the first time I ever rode a camel, but that was 2009 and I had travelled to Jordan for the first time five years earlier and I must have ridden one on my first trip to Petra. Since then I've ridden several camels. I'm sure this particular one enjoyed the ride more than most since I was about fifty pounds lighter in separation/divorce/misery diet mode.
Here's a silly picture from this summer's trip to Portugal and Spain. Janet and I were sitting out in front of the Brasileria, a cafe that was a personal favorite of Fernando Pessoa - and which was situated right outside our hotel in Lisbon. Janet was mugging with the Pessoa statue over her shoulder as we waited for yet another bottle of wine and yet another delicious plate of food. Sitting outside the cafe and writing was an absolute joy.
I ran into my friend Kathy Leo-Nyquist the other day and we were reminiscing about the time that we were part of a crew of Champlain professors who travelled to China. It was part of the infamous seven country/seven week trip that I made in 2009 when I was freshly separated and my sense of self-loathing was at its most intense (as you can see from my relatively skeletal body - I was in the middle of the breakup diet that far too many of us go on at one time or another); it helped that I actually had some place to sleep other than my office and something to eat other than ramen noodles. Unfortunately, on my last stop, Barcelona, my camera was swiped so most of the pictures - and memories - the trip were lost. Happily, Kathy sent me a bunch of pictures of the trip, the one below being one of them. We were all together for a week or so in Beijing before the rest of the professors took off for southern China on a faculty development tour and I went off to far western China alone on a different one.
It sometimes occurs to me, with sad delight, that if one day (in a future in which I won't belong) the sentences I write are read and admired, then at last I'll have my own kin, people who 'understand' me, my true family in which to be born and loved. But far from being born into it, I'll have already died long ago. I'll be understood only in effigy, when affection can no longer compensate for the indifference that was the dad man's lot in life.
Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet, ch. 191
Actually, beyond the number of depressing/distressing posts I've had lately, I don't necessarily consider this to a sad reflection on the part of Pessoa. Earlier today I was talking to Janet about my interest/fascination with learning Portuguese. I told her that I think it falls into three categories: 1) whether or not we end up moving to Portugal I could very well see us spending four or six weeks in the country every year, and I'd like to be able to fit in - and not simply be one of those American wankers who live, especially on the southern coast, who don't actually try and live in Portugal, 2) I'm at age where learning a foreign language is a really good way to keep your brain lubricated, and 3) it pains me that I've reached the age of sixty-three and I'm one of those Americans - and the very ones that I make fun of - for not speaking, or even trying to speak, a second language. Essentially, I'm embarrassed that I don't speak another language, and even if I speak a particularly ugly version of Portuguese I'm still going to try and speak Portuguese.
Finally, it gets at a bigger point: how have I reached this point and have not finished a couple books? I have publications, but they inevitably relate to teaching (which, obviously, is nothing to be ashamed of - and I'll doubtless finish my life being a better teacher than a scholar). Still, I have a doctorate and people with doctorates should be produced more tangible and useful scholarship, even if future generations don't pay much attention to it. However, if they do, that may be the family reunion I finally attend.
Better the flight of the bird that passes and leaves no trace
Than the passage of the animal, recorded in the ground.
The bird passes and is forgotten, which is how it should be,
The animal, no longer there and so of no further use,
Uselessly shows it was there.
Remembrance is a betrayal of Nature,
Because yesterday's Nature isn't Nature.
What was is nothing, and to remember is not to see.
Pass by bird, pass, and teach me to pass!
Fernando Pessoa (as Alberto Caeiro)
Or, as Marcus Aurelius would remind us, soon you will have forgotten the world and the world will have forgotten you. Yeah, eventually I'll push through this mood, and I'm definitely wallowing in it too much as of late. The other day my wonderful friend MK sent me a note which read, "No matter what happens with your balance or your body or any of that shit, know that you are still the awesome funny, kind, thoughtful friend you've always been and none of this bullshit will change that. Love you." I told him that I couldn't accurately express how much I loved his note, and how much I clearly needed to hear what I didn't know I needed to hear.
From my village I see as much of the universe as can be seen from the earth,
And so my village is as large as any town,
For I am the size of what I see
And not the size of my height . . .
Fernando Pessoa (as Alberto Caeiro)
OK, so this is not actually drawn from Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet, but I'm still using the Disquiet tag. While Pessoa used over fifty heteronyms in his writing Alberto Caeiro was one of the holy trilogy along with Ricardo Reis and Alvaro de Campos. This is what led Richard Zenith, the most popular translator of Pessoa (I'm quoting from his A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe collection) to propose that the four important 20th century Portuguese poets were Fernando Pessoa. I guess this jumped out at me because, as one can tell from the desultory mood of a previous post, I'm struggling with a decreasing universe; essentially, if I'm the size of what I can see I'm clearly losing height. In her Persons & Portraits Cynthia Freeland discussed the four selves, with one of them being the Bodily Self, meaning that our manufactured selves are based on different experiential identities and one of them is our existence as physical beings. Yes, I know that if I'm forced to retire I could still devote myself to writing and, and least theoretically, still see a vast and fathomless universe, and thus I would be as tall as Hanuman as he jumped across the Indian Ocean to Lanka, but I'm having trouble getting to that point.
And after that depressing post, let me post something a little happier, Here's a picture of my dear friend Kevin entering Vermont's TASTee Grill, a place that he stumbled across. It's now become my go to place for early morning breakfasts on the nights I stay over in Burlington. Like a lot of places the guy who runs it is having trouble balancing the books and keeping wait staff, so sometimes he and I are the only people in the place.
The other day I was in the midst of yet another medical test, in this case a more sophisticated vascular test, which form a seemingly boundless tapestry over the last two and a half year. When I step back and think about all the doctors' visits and tests I've waded through it's rather daunting: seven MRIs, three EMGs, two epidurals, two vascular tests, a stress test, who knows how many x-rays, seemingly gallons of blood work, etc. (truthfully, I often forget how many tests or doctors - general practitioners, spine doctors, pain doctors, neurologists, neurosurgeons, orthopedic surgeons, etc. - I've seen). Anyway, I was on my back while three doctors ran a series of tests to measure my vascular capacity (I still don't have that results on that one) and I turned to one of the doctors and said: "You know, it's strange, but whenever I get a 'no' or a 'within normal limits' on a test it actually makes me sad, because I feel that it's just setting me up for a later far shittier yes on a test." He nodded as if her completely understood. I don't mean to sound too depressed or bitter, because in many ways I'm not, even when I'm practically climbing up the stairs while using my hands or resorting to using my cane all the time. And I do appreciate all the hard work from all of these health care professionals. They can't seem to figure out my deteriorating condition, but it doesn't mean that they aren't trying. I received a lovely, and a bit heartbreaking, not from my neurologist the other day apologizing for not being able to diagnose my condition. In a previous visit I had told him that I wasn't angry or frustrated as much as simply afraid. The trajectory of my declining health doesn't inspire a lot of confidence. In November 2021, on my trip to Jordan with my son, I managed to climb all the way up to the Monastery at Petra, which was probably a ten mile hike and climb; at the end I barely dragged myself out of the siq, but, by God, I made it. Fast forward a year to November 2022 when, on a student trip, I barely made the half-hour largely flat walk in and out to the Treasury - and by the March student trip I didn't even walk from the hotel to the entrance of the siq. On the flight back by legs essentially gave up the ghost and I had to be pushed through the Istanbul Airport in a wheelchair (and experience made even worse by the nice airport assistant driving the wheelchair like I was a child on an afternoon stroll to the park - thankfully only my friend Cyndi was there to see me cry in sadness and humiliation). Unless something magical shows up on the latest vascular test, which doubtless wouldn't be very promising news, obviously, the next step will be Dartmouth-Hitchcock or some teaching hospital in Boston, as I queue up for a far shittier yes.
