Wednesday, July 21, 2010

Soffro anche spesso

“Being a part of something special makes you special, right?”

Those words, uttered by Rachel Berry in the first episode of Glee, are remarkable.  I remember watching the trailer for the series on YouTube last spring and instantly falling in love, mostly because of how moving I thought that line was.  The show, with its cast of mildly misfit highschoolers, is all about that kind of desperate enthusiasm that teenagers ooze.  But as we age, we somehow never completely get over that need to feel special.

It’s maybe just that the things that make us special change a bit.  I had that thought in the shower before bed last night, while I was humming Radiohead’s biggest hit, “Creep.”  Now, lest you think I have some affinity with the angsty grunge-rock lyrics (how 90s!), you should know that I think of that song in Italian (which is maybe worse).  But a cover of “Creep” was a huge hit while I was there last fall.  You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing it playing on the radio, sung in appropriately grungy style by Vasco Rossi—a sort of Italian cross between John Mellencamp and Leonard Cohen in both vocal stylings and political activism.

Now you know that I hate my “when I was in Italy” stories, but this little episode actually gave me some insight into why people love to travel and why I still tell these damned stories all the time.  The song, in English, is of course about a guy who doesn’t feel he deserves to be with a girl who’s “so f***ing special.”  The Italian is a cleaner version about a guy who doesn’t want to leave a girl; he’s going to stay “ad ogni costo” (at any cost—the title of the song).  The Italian girl in question isn’t quite as perfect as Radiohead’s “angel.”  She has “eyes that are never honest,” but she’s apparently still special enough that you wouldn’t want to leave here.  Rossi makes that very clear in a kind of brilliant reworking of the Radiohead version.  The last line of the verse in English (with the infamous epithet) is

I wish I was special
You're so fuckin' special

The Italian version goes for a rhyme instead

Tanto รจ lo stesso
Soffro anche spesso

[Much is the same / I also often suffer]

The second line rolls around in the mouth (and sounds) almost the same as the English version.  The s-f-n-sp chain of consonant sounds is identical.  It’s hard not to imagine that Rossi started with this line and built the rest of the song around that.

Now this is much to say that a song I heard in Italy was about wanting to be a part of something special.  But that makes me think that one of the reasons that people love to travel so much is to capture some of that feeling that Rachel Berry gets from being in Glee club.  It’s also maybe one of the reasons we (I) reminisce so much about our travels.  We loved that sense of being special.  Of being a stranger in a far land.  Of being a part of something bigger than ourselves.

So maybe I shouldn’t be so hard on people who have the bug for travelling.  My last post was perhaps too critical.  After all, we all want to have those radically transformative experiences.  They are the stuff of dreams, and of course, poetry.

Dante was a guy who met a pretty special girl at the age of nine.  It was that experience that inspired him to write La vita nuova, one of the most important works in literature.  It has a lot of wonderful poetry, but its most iconic passage is perhaps the first sentence, which is in prose. 

In quella parte del libro de la mia memoria dinanzi a la quale poco si potrebbe leggere, si trova una rubrica la quale dice: Incipit vita nova.

[In that part of the book of my memory before which there is little that can be read, there is a heading which reads: here begins a new life.]

Just down the street from my apartment in Naples was the Piazza Dante, a lively and unsurprisingly run-down eighteenth-century square with a beckoning statue of Dante in the middle (above).  I’d sometimes perch myself at his feet in the afternoon and wonder when I could mark a new heading in the book of my memory.  Naples wasn’t that for me.  But I did feel pretty special to be there. 

Tuesday, July 13, 2010

“I Don’t Care for Roving”

In life you occasionally come across someone who suggests travel is a necessary component of your education.  This person is usually someone who backpacked through Europe on a summer holiday, or more recently braved South America, in order to “find themselves.”  They’ll regale you with stories of a restaurant found on a narrow street, a kiss stolen from an exotic stranger, and the myriad of ways in which life is so different from the way it is here in Canada.

I used to hate coming across these people.  That was until I inadvertently became one.  Last year I had the opportunity to “live abroad” (I’m vomiting as I right that).  I now find myself peppering my conversations with useless facts about life in Italy as though my few months there impressed upon me a certain knowledge of the place, its people, and its character.  But no sooner do the words “when I was in Italy” leave my lips and I feel something in my soul turn sideways.  Am I that douchebag?

Despite my newfound “cultural capital” I feel really no different then when I left.  I may be marginally more engaging at poncy academic events, but I found no insight about the ways of the world or who I was. 

I was perhaps predisposed to feeling this way because I could never understand how seeing more of the world could make one any wiser than one who stayed put.  I would always cite Emily Dickinson as my example.  The woman barely left Amherst, and never left her house for the last twenty years of her life.  And yet her poetry displays the most brilliant insight about life.  Joy, sorrow, the natural world—no better travelled writer has written anything superior about these topics.

So while writers have been arguing for decades about the reason of her seclusion (Did she nurse a broken heart? Was she the victim of family cruelty?) I preferred to think of Dickinson as a brilliant recluse, who had all that one needed to know about life there in her home and in her orchard.

But last month Lyndall Gordon, Professor at Oxford and noted literary biographer, has suggested a new reason for Dickinson’s hermetic life: epilepsy.  Lives Like Loaded Guns details the relationship between Dickinson, her sister-in-law, Susan, and her editor, Mabel Loomis Todd (who was also the mistress of her brother).  Susan attempted to get Dickinson’s poems published.  But the Amherst homebody couldn’t convince New York publishers to do so.  Todd—worldly, and well-travelled—took to editing the poems herself and made Dickinson the household name she is today.  Score one for the peripatetic set?

Maybe not.  Emily may not have got around very much, but it is because of her poetry that she’s famous.  Perhaps the fact that she never travelled and wrote about the life around her made her poems that much more universal.  Todd just gave her some good PR.  It’s just too bad that Dickinson may not have been able to travel, even if she wanted to.

For those of us who have the option, however, travel doesn’t necessarily bring the delights that it promises.  I was thinking a lot about that while I was away and listening to Miranda Lambert’s album Revolution which came out just as I was leaving last September.  A recurring theme on the album is a sense of home.  The first verse of “Makin’ Plans,” for example, makes the case that travelling can change a person.

If I ever left this town
I’d never settle down
I’d just be wandering around
If I ever left this town

If I wasn’t by your side
I’d never be satisfied
Nothin’ would feel just right
If I wasn’t by your side

It’s a bit desperate, maybe.  Should one not travel out of fear?

One of the most emotional tracks on the album, “The House That Built Me,” presents the flip side of the coin.  While the house/life metaphor can be a bit shopworn, this song is so touching it works beautifully.  The singer returns to her childhood home because

I thought if I could touch this place or feel it
This brokenness inside me might start healing
Out here it’s like I’m someone else
I thought that maybe I could find myself
If I could just come in I swear I’ll leave
Won’t take nothing but a memory
From the house that built me

No wonder that it’s become the surprise hit of the album.  Who can’t relate to wanting to go back home?  Maybe Emily Dickinson.  But if she did venture out her front door, she might be disappointed by what she found.  “I don’t care for roving” she wrote her mentor Thomas Higginson in 1870.  Thank goodness.  Neither do I.