July 14 Got back to Rome today from Assisi. I love Termini Station. I love any big train station in any city - Gare du Nord, Union Station, Penn Station. A work of art in itself, a balletic, living one. Supernatural in that it is a place of arrivals and departures. And even the trains, new now, seemed old, if only because they know Rome, nosing through her outskirts, knowing, as if by instinct, how to reach her secret core. To save money I took the subway home. A different city, Rome not as it was or how tourists imagine it to be but Rome as it is now. A woman came begging through the cars, without so much as a coin in her cup to rattle people to attention, a baby asleep in her arms. Perhaps it’s too obvious a leap to make, but I saw, this morning, in the chapel in Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi, a beautiful Annunciation scene. Between the angel and Mary, a vase of white flowers, and, like one of the flowers rendered horizontally, the dove of the Holy Spirit, while Mary recoiled. Strange to liken them, but that famous photograph of Oswald taken just as he was being shot (shot twice — once by the gun, once by the camera). In depictions of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, Christ looks like he’s blasting him with lazars, like they’re characters in a video game. It hurts to be called. Forcibly impregnated, stigmatized (literally), knocked off a horse and blinded. It’s like God has to force His way in.
The Cerasi Chapel (July 14)
The Cerasi Chapel (July 14)
The Cerasi Chapel (July 14)
July 14 Got back to Rome today from Assisi. I love Termini Station. I love any big train station in any city - Gare du Nord, Union Station, Penn Station. A work of art in itself, a balletic, living one. Supernatural in that it is a place of arrivals and departures. And even the trains, new now, seemed old, if only because they know Rome, nosing through her outskirts, knowing, as if by instinct, how to reach her secret core. To save money I took the subway home. A different city, Rome not as it was or how tourists imagine it to be but Rome as it is now. A woman came begging through the cars, without so much as a coin in her cup to rattle people to attention, a baby asleep in her arms. Perhaps it’s too obvious a leap to make, but I saw, this morning, in the chapel in Basilica di Santa Maria degli Angeli in Assisi, a beautiful Annunciation scene. Between the angel and Mary, a vase of white flowers, and, like one of the flowers rendered horizontally, the dove of the Holy Spirit, while Mary recoiled. Strange to liken them, but that famous photograph of Oswald taken just as he was being shot (shot twice — once by the gun, once by the camera). In depictions of St. Francis receiving the stigmata, Christ looks like he’s blasting him with lazars, like they’re characters in a video game. It hurts to be called. Forcibly impregnated, stigmatized (literally), knocked off a horse and blinded. It’s like God has to force His way in.