Phoenix Ark's Blog

Very good talk with a friend about writing, and disasters, on the eve of a New Year. About why the knowledge of real ‘failure’ is so important, but with life being so short, the only battle being the true fight back. ‘Mohamed Ali on the ropes’. Why should anyone, with their own woes, be interested in a writer’s woes though? Perhaps only to excoriate the publishers and editors, not to mention people you loved, who power-broke other people’s lives and work for their own gain, or security, yet who could not for a moment take a true life risk, write a novel, or do the work that might change, inspire or help lives. It really is writ so large in America, at times, that arrogance that also leads to paranoia and human damage. That’s not to say other countries are so much better, but some writers have called it Ego Consciousness, that has no historical imagination, or true sense conception of the real, internal human journeys, the deep links between us all, and so is lost in conceptions of rights and power alone that blind everyone in the end. Maybe they should spend more time in Rome. Perhaps this little Phoenix Ark adventure itself though is an effort itself to believe in something again. We live so much in tribes, in boxes, in the arrogance of vast markets, and the surface hypocrisies that makes the political fronts sometimes so atrocious. At New year though, as the time counters fall around the globe, on a single, spinning planet, taking many of us through exactly the same temporal space, maybe we will start to wake up a little. As for hurling a stone at the un-hearing Goliath of Abrams, wanting to smack it straight into some cultural forehead, only a book could to that. Have a great New Year’s Eve, and here we’ll try to follow the path of the heart, like Carlos Casteneda. DCD

Just met Julius Caesar in an ice cream shop next to the Trevi Fountain! Thin, grey haired and with his plastic guide card, Gulio Cesar swore his name was real and told us, in the days before the swarming tourists, he had once guided Anthony Quin and Hedi Lamar around Rome. Rome is swarming with Romans and tourists today – around the Trevi, down the streets, towards the forum, and beside the band stand for a free concert tonight by Claudio Berzonni. We got away and were almost the last into the Van Goch exhibition at the back of Victor Emmanuel’s monument. The explications are rather repetitive, but it was fantastic to see his evolution, out of his Dutch paintings and the influence of the Barbison school, into that full explosion of semi-mad colour. It showed his influences, putting Pisarro, Gaugin and others among his work, but the space is rather odd. Still, for an artist struggling for a unique, eternal style, yet with some contemporary meaning, it was great to see and see it so well attended too.

Despite all those sad Abrams memories, a very Happy New Year to everyone!

Dominic Sands should have come along yesterday, up to the Palazzo Barberini. His novel Ice employs the family as a backdrop to a Renaissance love story and thriller. The family were of Tuscan origin and of course Maffeo Barberini became Pope Urban VIII, one of the most nepotistic Popes on record, and one who’s ‘reign’ saw an explosion of artistic patronage in Rome, in the 17th Century. By the end of it, after the wars of Castro, when the Barberini had been driven from Italy, and into exile in France, by the Farnese and the Pamphili alliance, Urban had tripled the Papal Debt. Maffeo Barberini had appointed two nephews as cardinals, and another as Gonfalonier of Rome and head of the Papal armies. One cardinal was notorious for his mistresses, revealed in an anonymous pamphlet circulating in Rome, that listed papal and priestly scandals, another was head of the Inquisition, that put Galileo on trial and then kept him under house arrest for daring to look through a telescope properly and assert the earth travels around the sun.

The palace and art collection inside are wonderful. Not too crowded, easy to navigate and containing gems like El Greco’s elongated paintings of Christ, he had an eye problem, Holbein’s famous portrait of a gross looking Henry VIII, and an array of beautiful ceilings, crowned with the three bees that adorned the Barberini crest. A gem for me though is the statue of a veiled woman that is so brilliantly done the fabric and her body beneath seem to come alive. Then, when the gifts on show at only 5 Euro seem to be over, you walk into a room that explodes above you. The ceiling there contains the full power, splendour and beauty of the time. Religious figures wrestle with classical gods, nymphs sport with gryphons and lions, colours burst from the plaster. It is so gorgeous you could lie for hours on the little bench looking up into the imagined skies and wonder if Galileo had not got it wrong, though of course he hadn’t. For all the cliche’s one carries though of what Popes or Priests or Artists might represent it is good to know then that although the Papacy put Galileo on trial for heresy, he was not condemned to death as he might have been. One of the only three cardinals to abstain in the vote against him was a future incumbent of that palace, none other than Francesco Barberini, the Head of the Roman Inquisition. But then they were friends at university!

Well, the antidote to any excess of Anglo-Roman romanticism is reading John Cheaver – Falconer – in Rome. No sentimentality there, in a tale of prison, American convicts and drug addiction. Unlike the friend who said, when I got here, ‘first you’ll fall in love with Rome, then it will break your heart.” Too late,” I joked.

The pretty student type in white stockings busking to street music and waltzing with her umbrella last night, in the dark, had a touch of heart-break. Like Rome’s poorer beggars, who supplicate on hands and knees on the freezing pavements, as if bowing to the full weight of Roman belief or power.
But the little concert of jazz and opera in the Palazzo Corsino, in Trastevere, had a more democratic air. Free and open to the public, Italians with bawling babies were suddenly sitting under the jewelled ceilings, surrounded by astounding art, listening to music, as if at home with the Corsini.

The National Gallery should try it, because it gave a freedom of access and a new dimension to looking at all those paintings. Ever the metaphor of light and seeing shines out of the story of the Christ child among the art, of course, and in real life Italians are refreshingly defiant at letting their bambini chortle and try to steal the lime light themselves. Refreshing until it interrupts the artists, despite the stern looks of the wandering curatrix who told me not to lean on a marble side table. The music was quite good, the idea better. It let you wander off to look at all those painted myths and Roman faces, donning the changing fashions of the ages, trying to defeat the march of time. I’m afraid the thought popped into my head that swiping just one picture under my coat would launch Phoenix Ark Press in a moment.

Back in the antechamber, where the audience were spilling over, my host was ready to leave, as he introduced me to a Curator and Chilean poet friend, called Antonio. Antonio introduced us to a Roman tram later, sweeping us back over the Tiber, but he didn’t think the singing very good, and a drink a better idea. ‘And this,” he said with a grin, “it makes me think of committing a crime.” Someone once said all good art is a kind of crime, but careful artists, we might all end up in Falconer! DCD

Twenty five is terribly young to die, but having done so much, so soon. You forget how important your formative influences are, and I was always rather obsessed with John Keats. He died of TB, after critical attacks on his poem Endymion, in the little house just right of the Spanish Steps, now the Keats-Shelley museum. Babington’s Tea Rooms, the windows groaning with New York style cupcakes, is opposite, though it is closed until January 2nd. Keats of course, apart from his ‘Negative Capability’, that imaginative entering into things and subjects, like those ‘beaded bubbles winking at the brim’, bursting across the lines of Ode to a Nightingale, believed in the ‘vale of soul-making’. An attempt at human spirit, without a formal God, like Coleridge’s attempt to create his own unique symbols, beyond established myth, with poems like The Ancient Mariner and Kublai Khan. But it was Shelley, whose heart would not burn, on the shores of his own drowning, when Byron stood by the fire, unknowing perhaps that the heart is the hardest organ to burn, who wrote Keat’s eulogy in the triumphant Adonais:

He has outsoared the shadow of our night,
Envy, and calumny, and hate, and pain,
And that unrest which men miscall delight
Can touch him not, and torture not again.
From the contagion of the world’s slow stain
He is secure and now can never morn,
A heart grown cold, a head grown grey in vain.
And when the spirit’s self has ceased to burn
With sparkless ashes load an unlamented urn.

But for Roman travellers another verse springs up too, with all the devastating melancholy of the English Romantics, leading the way perhaps to Keat’s grave in the Protestant cemetary, where they disrespected his request for his tombstone to carry only the words ‘here lies one whose name was writ in water’:

Go thou to Rome, – at once the Paradise,
The grave, the city, and the wilderness;
And where its wrecks like shattered mountains rise,
And flowering weeds, and fragrant copses dress
The bones of Desolation`s nakedness,
Pass, till the Spirit of the spot shall lead
Thy footsteps to a slope of green access
Where, like an infant`s smile, over the dead
A light of laughing flowers along the grass is spread.

If travel writing was important anymore, I’d want to write about Italian keys and Italian locks, how complicated they are, or their tiny lifts, with those swing-in doors, installed in very old buildings. But maybe I should stick to the sunlight and the weather. After torrential rain, pounding the jumbled cobbles, the instant salesman swapped their street hawking umbrellas for sunglasses along the swirling brown Tiber, this Sunday. A river both low and remarkably unused. It’s only ten minutes walk from the Spanish Steps, and the traffic on the river consisted of Rome’s persistent seagulls, battling the current, as they try to push upstream, a murky brown stream that sweeps back, but is side tracked by the eye line into a pedestrian artery, running straight to St Peters. There I saw that great canopy over the central altar, like a Roman Emperor’s litter, and then, in the square, a man in a window, with a red banner below him – the Pope, Benedict XVI. He was blessing the crowd in several languages, to sudden applause, or tourists chatting, and smoking cigarettes, like the fake Roman Soldiers that line the forum. This Sunday it was the feast of the Sacred Family, and seeing a Pope in a window does give it all a human scale. St Peters is of course impressive, but it is really in the neighbouring Castelo St Angelo where you should start a trip to Rome.

Built on the tomb of the Emperor Hadrian, history and you rise through the literal layers of Roman time, up to the apartments of Pope Paul III, taken over by several other Papal incumbents. It isn’t as impressive or monumental as the works of the Baroque, but completely charming, and the delicacy of the frescoed ceilings, truly beginning the ‘Renaissance style’ and the recovery of Roman forms, is enchanting and totally human in scale. As intimate as the Papal bathrooms, or the tiny chapel. The colours and style are essentially Etruscan, reminding me of an Etruscan tomb I visited years ago, and it was the Etruscans who DH Lawrence so praised for their naturalness, vitality and life. There, Religious iconography meets a Classically Roman recovery of past lives, but great Angels in togas too, and on the terrace above you have the full sweep of Rome itself. It’s a little scandal the ‘authorities’ don’t make more of the map, pointing out the famous sights in front of you, but Romans are extremely blase about all their history. On your right, monolithic St Peter’s, built on the Trastevere, the ‘other side’ of the river, Rome’s rive gauche, runs in a straight line to the squat Pantheon, that original temple to the Dodecathon, the 12 Gods, that like the 12 hours of the day and night, dominated pagan faith. Inside, earlier in the day, the floor below the ever open ceiling was wet with rain and closed off by rope. Of course, the statues of Zeus, or the other exceedingly Human Gods, as fickle and dangerous as Man, have long been removed, in a building claimed as a church, but possibly built over a Mithraium, an underground cave to the mostly military cult of Mithras, the boy child born from a rock. Beyond that, the eye can just catch the walls of the Forum, among the jumble, but much in evidence is the fascistic monument to King Victor Emmanuel II. Then there are the palaces that housed the rival families who dominated the Renaissance and the Papacy – The Borhgese, a Roman equivalent of the French Bourgeouis, The Farnnese, The Medici, The Barberini and the Pamphili.

But back on the banks of the Tiber a great touristic passagio had started towards St Peters, among the ringing bells, the hawkers, and the street performers, motionless as statues, promising absolute stillness, until you drop a coin in their tin fountains. Rome currently swings between sharp cold, and the hope of very warm sunshine, but at Natale, despite any political shocks and private tragedies, the feel of the city is relaxed, informal and delightful. As for me, well, still no investment for Phoenix Ark Press, but a belief in the value of just writing, like a way of talking, without the prospect of money, or fame. A writer slightly lost, still hurt by his bizarre and inhuman American publishers, but alive and rather happy. Now trying to get to some Dragon! DCD

I offered up a little prayer to the literary Gods today for Michelangelo’s Mouse, in San Pietro in Vincola, St Peters in Chains, opposite the Colosseum. Then wandered past the Forum, dappled with spring-like sunshine, and found a lost hat in a bar near the Trevi. A good start, except to get back to hear the Chilean ambassador received a message saying ‘this is only the beginning’. Apparently a parcel bomb was defused in Greece too. Fear tactics, as ever, but at least the man hurt is doing well, and refused interviews to the press. DCD

Rome is the most astoundingly beautiful place. I had forgotten how small the ancient city seems, compared to that weighty legacy of Empire bestowed by time and a historical imagination, but there is a jewel-like perfection to its proportions. As for the city of art, I couldn’t stop grinning in front of Bernini’s Trevi Fountain, despite the priest who shooed out the toothless old beggar lady from his church doorstep, back into the pouring rain, and so close to Christmas time. No room at the inn in that church, then! But the view from the top of the Spanish Steps, near where we are staying, soars, and there seems a gentle and genuine warmth to Roman life, despite riots, student demos and Berlesconi. But then Rome really has seen everything, and perhaps little troubles her.

As I was troubled, when, after a lovely morning walk and some Christmas shopping in the Campo dei Fiori, my hostess got a call about the letter bomb sent to the Chilean embassy. It was addressed to her husband, my host, and thank God he didn’t open it. Things were winding down just before the Christmas break. Instead Cesar, a man who everyone liked and has done nobody any harm is now in hospital with two fingers missing, and possible damage to his sight. It is when it happens so close to home that you begin to really feel things about the cowardice of such actions, and their total pointlessness too. ‘Anarchists’ have claimed responsibility, for that and the parcel bomb at the Swiss Embassy. Basically, morons dreaming up world enemies, and turning to soft targets, where they have no thought for the lives of ordinary human beings at the end of their chains of madness. It has made this the most surreal Christmas I have ever had, but Rome’s elegance, life and beauty always returns. Off to walk to the river, and up to St Peters, then to try to write some Dragon in the Post, but so much to see rather pulls you away from the page! DCD