Rome Travelogue

Jordan Castro visits Italy for a book discussion, and has a troubling encounter in a church...

Dec 09, 2024

Mary said unto them: Ask me not concerning this mystery. If I should begin to tell you, fire will issue forth out of my mouth and consume all the world. - The Apocryphal Gospel of Bartholomew

Oct 23

I’m in Rome for one week, for two Cluny Institute events. The first, which Luke organized, is a private discussion of Sir Francis Bacon’s 17th century utopian text New Atlantis; the second, the next night, is a literary reading at a bilingual bookstore.

Haven’t slept in 36 hours.

Oct 24

On Vicolo di Montevecchio, the buildings stick out of the ground like teeth or graves. Rain cuts against my window. It’s gray outside, and dark in my apartment; when I exit, the door opens out into an even darker hall, which leads to a balcony overlooking what I initially think is a roofed lobby, but is actually a triangular courtyard which opens up to the sky, and rain falls here too, into plant holders with no plants, just dirt and scraggly stems. I turn back down the hall and descend the stone steps. The automatic light doesn’t turn on as I feel my way down—8am; 2am where my wife Nicolette is—alone, to drink the canned Starbucks drink I bought the night before, and smoke a cigarette.

Outside, the cramped buildings and roads feel oppressive; they rise and unfurl mysteriously; the sky leaks into my head; a hunched man passes carrying a rainbow umbrella.

The rainbow umbrella is there—the raw materials are in front of me and on some level I perceive them—but my cognition unifies the object in my mind: umbrella—handle—hunchback—don’t make eye contact—rainbow—street. Time collapses into the rainbow umbrella, which stretches into the past and future and lands in my head, full of sludgy thoughts that I haphazardly consider turning into insights for the book discussion in three days.

Curling around a corner, vaguely preparing for my event—and understanding in some abstract way that I’m in Rome and shouldn’t spend all my time indoors—I look up at some buildings and try to consciously experience history. Science was an anti-intellectual response to rationality, I think, lazily recalling a line from Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World, which I scroll-read on the plane, to prepare for the discussion: Modern science was not concerned with lofty idealized reflections, or the rigid, looped reason of the Scholastic philosophers, but could be summed up in a sentence William James wrote in a letter to his brother Henry James: “I have to forge every sentence in the teeth of irreducible and stubborn facts.”

I look up and try to feel history. I try to feel history through irreducible and stubborn facts. Old building; wet cobblestone… I think about the “hard problem” of consciousness; Francis Bacon’s inductive method—which I learned more about from talking to the voice option on ChatGPT in my car a week ago—doesn’t adequately deal with the difficulty of subjective experience…

I retreat to my apartment. I turn the lock. I go inside.

The sun comes out and I am a person again. Open windows. Open blinds. I am worming up from somewhere inside of my body and toward my face. Pushups. Emails. My apartment has a library with a rolling ladder, spiral staircase, a giant hinged window that opens to a free-standing porcelain bath, visible from the living room. Missing N. Drink water. Stretch.

Walking down crowded streets in the sun. And it’s pretty!

Listening to Sabrina Carpenter…

Sun punctuates the space between the buildings. Little rivulets like silvery thoughts running through cracked cobblestone. I text Walt, in Vienna, some Trakl…

More pious, you know the meaning of the dark years,
Coolness and autumn in lonely rooms;
And shining steps ring out in holy blueness.

…At lunch with Claire and Rome, Rome throws her pasta onto the ground but sucks on lime wedges. Tomorrow is her birthday; Rome is turning one in Rome. Luke—the founder of Cluny, and Rome’s dad—is at an A.I. conference at the Vatican. Initially, Luke had asked the organizers if I could attend, but they wouldn’t let me, and now I’m grateful for being spared the certain torture, and for Claire inviting me to lunch. Without N’s eyes to see through, my life tends to become small—I tell Claire that I want to try to stay out of the apartment for a little.

There is scaffolding on the Fountain of the Four Rivers. There is scaffolding on the Church of Sant’Agnese in Agone. There is scaffolding on the Palazzo Pamphili. There is scaffolding on the Fontana del Moro. There is scaffolding on the Fountain of Neptune. The “jubilee” is coming up, which happens every twenty-five years and brings in tens of thousands of tourists. The theme this year is “hope.”

The Caravaggios have been replaced by posters of the Caravaggios. A metallic labyrinth rises high around me in the near-dark; people pray in the pews.

Rome, on Claire’s shoulders, points around at the skulls and Baroque sculptures in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi and says “Boo.”

Catherine texts me that I need to make sure the barber is 60+ years old, otherwise they’ll give me a “fade.” I imagine meeting Bishop Barron with a “fade.” I text Walt about the “fade” dilemma, and make a joke about getting a line shaved through my eyebrow; he reminds me that he used to have a line through his eyebrow…

When I arrive, the shop is empty, and an elderly man, maybe 5’5”, opens the door in a red suit.

We keep repeating “normale” to each other, then suddenly he starts mumbling “Morti Americani, morti Americani,” making the scissor-cutting motion with his hand that’s not holding the scissors. I look up how to say “good” in Italian on my phone and say “bene.” I keep saying “mm, mm, bene,” and smiling—then he walks away.

While he’s gone, I Google “morti Americani Italian to English.”

“Morti Americani” means “American deaths”...

Laying on the couch with laptop propped on legs, scroll-reading The Rosicrucian Enlightenment by Francis Yates, starting to feel a little “zany”—the creeping sense that I am entering “schizo” territory—and I understand why “respectable” people don’t go down this rabbit hole. I take some notes…

Oct 25

Woke feeling like I’d been hit by a train; stumble around; drink a Starbucks canned coffee then sit down at a cafe and drink a Cappuccino—walk back to Airbnb—briefly worried I might faint…

At the apartment, I look over my Whitehead notes to try to memorize some quotes.

“The function of reason is to promote the art of life”
the art of life = to live, to live satisfactorily, to live better
“Philosophy builds cathedrals before the builder moves a stone, and destroys them before the elements have worn down their arches.”

Walk to Chiostro del Bramante. Garish neon sign in entrance hall:

BE AFRAID OF
THE ENORMITY OF
THE POSSIBLE.

In a room with bright pink and orange and blue and green walls with yellow flowers and white angels painted on them, I drink a latte and read that Bacon’s Advancement of Learning and the first part of Don Quixote were both published in 1605. There are resonances, I think, between the Baconian project and the novel: just as Bacon’s scientific method begins with concrete particulars and infers general principles from there, writing a novel also begins with concrete particulars and allows general principles to emerge. Just as Bacon’s thought progresses past the closed system of Scholastic logic, the novel progresses past the closed form of the poem and the epic. Modern science, like the novel, engages with the open-endedness of things, and deals with the world in a state of becoming, as opposed to dealing with totalizing coherence and unity; both share an ongoing commitment to discovery, and a fundamental kind of openness…

Openness leaves room for the unexpected—for grace. It’s the same, I think, as interacting with a person. One may have abstract ideas about people as such, or a specific type of person, but once you’re interacting with an actual individual person you have to engage with the real person in front of you, to let their personhood unfold freely, without cramming them into an abstraction and killing all possibility for surprise… Whatever broader problems might arise from this concrete-particular-orientation toward the world, or whatever technical problems exist in it from the start, it’s a necessary corrective for stifling, stagnant closed-loopedness...

Ideologically-imposed abstractions—in science, literature, or life—kill unexpectedness… Becoming… The life of life….

Oct 26

Coordinating with event planner and photographer and Luke. Coordinating with Walt and Honor, who are reading at the bookstore with me, and planning to arrive at my apartment while I’m at the first event… Some chaos related to my keys.

We meet at the gate outside the Swiss Guards’ Barracks then enter the courtyard, and Andreas takes us to a room and shows us paintings by a Swiss Guard who learned how to paint while holed up there during war, then across the courtyard again into basement full of weapons and armor—six-pound helmets that caused guards to pass out, engraved with saints and crosses (there was a scandal when they made the new, much lighter helmets with 3D printing); medieval spiked bats and rods, seven-feet tall, with triangle-shaped blades that “killed people instantly”; mannequins in striped outfits that balloon down the arms and get tight at the wrists; crossbows and swords; dozens of guns. He shows us the “flame swords,” which the Swiss Guards beheaded people with hundreds of years ago. The flame swords have bulbous edges, and look like clouds.

In the dining hall there is a spread of pizzas, nuts, chips, beer, private label Swiss Guards wine, orange juice, and water, and Andy tells me and David that in 1989, he got a job selling jewelry in the middle of the mall outside of Philadelphia. He took a training course for the job, in Michigan, where he lived, then was sent to Pennsylvania, but he was only given 48 hours to make living arrangements after getting hired, so when he got to Pennsylvania, he had nowhere to stay, and he met an older woman who immediately took him in and made him baked goods.

I point at what I think is the most beautiful panel on the painted walls around us—a pastoral scene of a young boy with two baby goats and a ram—then excuse myself to go out into the courtyard, where I briefly pray.

Liz Lev, an art historian and one of the most renowned tour guides in Rome, hands out the pamphlets she made for a brief presentation about New Atlantis and the art at the Vatican, and begins her presentation, starting with the Hall of Maps…….

On the walk to the book discussion, up a narrow brick walkway on a hill next to the road, we reach a wide open area, and pass Saint Peter’s Basilica as the sun sets orange and almost hazy, like the beginning of a Miramax film—when I FaceTimed my dad earlier, he had said my surroundings looked like I was “in a Jason Bourne movie”—and Brett tells me about a documentary he made about UFOs: he understands why, when people look too closely at the subject, it makes them feel disturbed—government cover-ups, questions about unsettling multidimensional realities, encounters with difficult-to-explain phenomena. I tell him that, in Orthodoxy and the Religion of the Future, Fr. Seraphim Rose makes the case that the encounters with these beings are real—there are thousands of accounts of people encountering similar things—but it’s an interpretive problem, not a factual one…

We walk across a roof, which stretches straight then opens out, toward the room where the discussion will take place; two guys in collars lounge on recliners, reading; I look down at St. Peter’s Basilica now, down at the tops of buildings, hundreds of them like the inside of a mouth in a Bosch painting, some wide-faced creature, jaw unhinged.

After we get drinks and take our seats, Luke gives a brief introduction about Cluny—this event, our first, represents Cluny’s multidisciplinary efforts, and desire to be a nexus point for siloed disciplines, to lay the groundwork for a dynamic cultural exchange and renewal. He introduces Peter, who’s leading the discussion, then explains the proceedings for the evening.

Spread out on plush couches, arranged hexagonally across the well-lit room, we go around and introduce ourselves: a physicist, an art historian, an entrepreneur, an undergraduate, a cartoonist, a journalist, professors, a priest...

I’m drinking Coke Zero and have a Mango-flavored Lucy nicotine pouch in my lip. Behind the couches, the server fusses with some coffee, stacking lightly-clanging mugs—pedestrian familiar movements fuse with what is turning out to be an unexpectedly dark reading of the text—A priest busts into the room and yells “Hey!” then retreats…

[redacted]

In the apocryphal Gospel of Bartholomew, the apostles ask Mary to reveal the mystery of how she gave birth to Jesus. Then, “Mary said unto them: Ask me not concerning this mystery. If I should begin to tell you, fire will issue forth out of my mouth and consume all the world.” The apostles don’t accept her answer, and ask her again. Mary says no. They ask again. Mary says no. Eventually, the apostles wear her down and she gives them strange instructions: She tells Peter to sit at her right hand, and put his hand under her armpit; she tells Andrew to sit at her left hand and put his hand under her left armpit; she tells John to “hold together [her] bosom,” and Bartholomew to put his knee into her back, “lest when I begin to speak my bones be loosed from one another.”

Mary starts to tell the story, and soon fire begins to shoot from her mouth. Jesus appears and tells her, “Utter not this mystery, or this day my whole creation will come to an end.”

Later, when Bartholomew asks Jesus if they can tell everyone about the mysteries, Jesus says, “as many as can contain them shall have a part in them.” There is something about revelation, I say, that is dangerous.

The glass door swings open and a man rushes in, face red, black and red vestments flapping. It’s the final day of the “Synod on Synodality” in the Catholic church, and he is coming from the Vatican. “I’m Bishop Barron,” he says, “sit down, sit down.” The group remains standing, then sits after he sits.

[redacted]

After the 2.5hr book discussion, Luke ends with a quote from Girard. “More than ever, I am convinced that history has a meaning, and that its meaning is terrifying.”

[redacted]

We walk in the dark night to the restaurant. Hummus with orange-marinated octopus and olive oil. Local pork roasted over coals. The sound of my chewing echoes in my eardrums; when I swallow, I notice little crunches reverberating around the table… Crispy pork rind…Pasta dish with cheese and bacon. Roasted lamb with rosemary potatoes. Particle physics, supersymmetry, dark matter, extra dimensions, quantum mechanics, politics—when people talk about AI, they sound like AI. On the walk back with Luke, the air is crisp, and the streets feel wider than before.

On the phone, N tells me about icon-painting—she’s painting Saint Anna and baby Mary—and about the barn dance she went to with Valeria. The woman who runs the BNB where she’s staying seemed “Lynchian,” another in a long string of strange encounters she’s had recently, in the wake of her parents’ house burning down, which, the weekend prior, included a woman running up to N and my brother outside of an alpaca farm, and telling them to turn their car off, because it made too much noise; she came to the farm because she had PTSD, she told them, and, not knowing anything about N’s parents’ situation, talked to them for an hour about how her whole family died in fires...

Later, while trying to sleep, Walt turns on the audiobook of Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams. Walt and Honor keep talking over the audiobook. I tell them to be quiet and Honor says “Jordan the type of guy to say ‘SHUT UPPPP GUYSSS’ at a sleepover.”

Oct 27

I lay on the ground at Almost Corner Bookstore, head on a dirty rolled-up rug, and fall asleep for a minute; it’s 6PM, the reading starts at 6:30PM. Jahan puts grapes and chips on the counter; I wander around with Honor and eat pizza, which they snip with scissors before giving to us; the bookstore gets packed. Honor reads some poems which she wrote with AI “when AI was still fun”...

Ugliness is a feeling so ripe
BMI 18 so hungry
So I bit the apple
It was bussin’
Now I’m nothing

Outside, I tell the Italian translator and Gabriel that I can’t hang, and me and Walt go back to the apartment to watch the Bills game and Trump’s speech at Madison Square Garden. Honor comes back with a furry cat figurine and presses a button and the cat starts making noises and dancing.

Oct 28

Gabriel says that in Britain, there is less of a distinction between literary works and popular books, because in Britain they don’t have a culture of literary magazines associated with University programs.

He’s writing a novel about a descent into occultism, Rosicrucianism—it’s 600 pages; he’s cutting it down.

Oct 29

I drop some bags off at Luke’s and walk thirty minutes to the skull church. I put on headphones for the audio tour, then remove them when the voice becomes upsettingly theatrical. I pass the museum, stopping to look at a Caravaggio painting, and enter the crypts, full of skulls and bones of monks, organized into artistic arrangements, stacked on top of each other, bone on bone.

One version of the story, a placard reads, is that some Capuchin monks took refuge in Rome in 1793, during the Reign of Terror in France, so that they wouldn’t be beheaded by the revolutionaries, and were confined to the crypts; someone got permission to arrange all the bones of the monks in the cemetery, so that he could rest among the dead. Another version is that a criminal was taken in by the monks, and created the skull art during his long period of atonement. The work, the placard says, is “a work of grotesque and hermetic genius,” “monk patience”—“a man of ardent faith almost joking with death and joyfully thinking of Resurrection.”

I’m the only person there alone, and the only male, the rest are pairs of women, dressed in black and gray, taking pictures and videos on their phones. Confronted with hundreds of bones, it’s difficult to feel a sense of spiritual significance; the bones seem fake, like Halloween decorations; music plays through speakers; the reality of death isn’t present—only the sense that these monks, or whoever made these crypts, could never have imagined that their bodies would be made into spectacles for people to photograph, crudely captured and flattened into an Instagram post.

I try to adopt a reverent disposition, but the gates preventing me from getting close, the music, the headphones around my neck, all contribute to a sense of artifice that abstracts my immediate reality even as I perceive it. Eternity and history reach forward through time, but are tamped down due to technology. Even the tortured expression on one of the skulls only passively registers in me—I perceive it as “soyface”—and I mechanically take out my phone and take pictures and post…

Outside of the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria, sitting on the steps and texting friends, a small, bespeckled man with a belly taps my shoulder and asks me in broken English where I’m from. “Ohio,” I say. “Ohioooo,” he says, smiling and fidgeting. “I thought,” he says, “I thought—ehh—I thought.” He touches my hand, where I have a tattoo of an asterisk. “Egypt. Egypt?”

I look up at him.

“Did, ehh, did ehh you see the Bernini?” he continues.

“I did,” I say.

“Come,” he says, motioning toward the door.

“I already saw it,” I say.

“Come, come,” he says, eagerly, like an impatient child, and so I go.

He takes me to the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa and begins describing the scene, in language I can only understand with difficulty; something about the painted audiences on either side of the statue, a theater; something about “ecstasy” and Jesus.

The man motions for me to join him standing in a nave further away from the sculpture. He’s whispering, and keeps telling me to “come closer,” as he describes the ceiling fresco, which is obscured by scaffolding, until we’re standing with our bodies lightly touching and he’s whispering into my ear. I feel his breath on my cheek. Is he trying to steal my phone? I think. My wallet? I step away.

He takes me through a tight hall in the dark, behind the altar, looking back to make sure I’m close behind, and turns on the lights in a large, hidden room with massive paintings on each wall. He puts his finger to his lips, then whispers a mix of English and Italian. He scoots closer and I can feel his backside rubbing on my leg—is he going to rob me?—I turn my torso, mindful of my belongings, understanding nothing except “angel” and “Caravaggio” and “student” and “Michelangelo.” The man is panting, and he keeps turning to me and saying “You like?” as I look at the towering paintings and step away from him and say “Yes, bene.”

He beckons me toward a small staircase, maybe three stairs, and we crouch so as not to bump our heads. We turn around the corner and up another small step and we’re behind the altar. He tells me, I think, that we’re standing near a relic of some kind, and he’s whispering and pointing up toward a golden crown. When I look up, he’s saying “Jesus” through heavy breaths, and I notice that he’s rubbing on me again, shifting his hips back and forth; I have nowhere to move; the walls are too tight to turn and I can’t see behind me; I look up at the golden crown and he bends forward and touches a strip of gold—meant to simulate light bursting down—pressing into me; panting; I turn my hips so that he isn’t grazing my crotch—now he’s grazing my phone—and he keeps putting his finger to his lips, and suddenly I think I’m aware of what’s happening.

I gently push him forward, then back away. I crouch and hesitate, then turn and descend the stairs, down into the room with the paintings.

I stand at a distance from him; his eyebrows raised, forehead sweaty, pointing up at the painting which is triple his height. “Caravaggio,” he says again, pointing. “You like?”

He starts into more explanation, and as I take another look around he presses into me again and rubs. I’m frozen, completely unable to move or think clearly, and I turn my hips again; why am I standing here?; I map out the way we came and realize I’m not sure how we got there; there are three doors that lead out of the room; maybe he’s just standing so close because he has to whisper?; I step back and try to see if he’s swaying his hips when he’s not touching me; I point to the door and say “I have to go.” He says, “You like?” with a nervous, agitated expression. “I have to go,” I say again. He raises his eyebrows, and I wonder if he’s going to ask me for money, or somehow trap me in the room with giant paintings, but then he turns his back to me and silently leads me into the dark hall, then out into the church.

Oct 30

At the airport, looking out a large window at a cluster of trees which leads to the Tyrrhenian Sea, Luke tells me that we’re looking at the shore near where St. Augustine had his mystical experience, standing there with his mother. I stare at the path where the green trees part—the path stretches backward and forward in time—my head, I think, is the meeting place of time, which has entered different heads across space for millennia—St. Augustine’s head collapses into my head through the trees and the water and Luke—and I’m staring at a single cloud above the water with my arms folded, distantly considering the head that reached outside of time, in 387 AD, to briefly touch that “region of inexhaustible plenty”—that realm which infuses time with an eternal, churning character—one which can only be experienced in a particular personhood, and which can only be redeemed in history.

The airport is bustling around me. The cloud is still.