Sicily 6/24/24
The Tyrrhenian Sea yesterday was the most beautiful sea I have ever seen. From up here in the mountains, it was an impossible color. I was reminded of a line from a poem written on the Baltic many years ago: I’ve spent many days now sitting on shore / And still have no name for this blue.
I think that we gravitate towards the ocean when something has gone wrong within us, or within our lives, the ocean being unconquerable by man and bearing the rhythm of the cosmos or of the wind. It is reassuring, listening to the beating heart of the world, as if you had laid your head on its chest.
Although today I have to fetch water and collect and cut wood and later on use a lot of it to cook, I’ve gotten dressed. My hair is braided, my linen shirt is tucked in with a leather belt, and my nails are trimmed and filed. The old women here wear a dress to sweep off their porches, and the old men wear button-downs and suspenders to tend to their olive trees in the morning.
As much as I enjoy being a woman in town, up in the village I enjoy being a person with work to do.
The younger generations, particularly the teens mimicking Americans (who know not what they do) are more casual, but generally people will be as proper as their surroundings. That many of the houses here are refurbished and inhabited in stages, leaving entire facades as bare terracotta block until they can get to stuccoing them, or with a crumbling stone hut attached to the side, has nothing to do with slovenliness. It is only that here the centuries are layered on top of one another, and there is no shame in using what you need, and leaving what you do not need in memorandum.
Quiet dignity, purposive action, dry air, salt water to bathe in, spring water to drink, green hills to walk, and a view of the horizon. I knew what it was I needed, when I was suffering in New York all fall and winter. There are no mistakes: when called, go.
In short, the antidotes to The City: its indignity (streets piled with garbage, rats crossing your path, schizophrenics and addicts on corners and subway cars), that action is dependent and mediated (having first to be transformed into money, ingoing and outgoing), that the heat is wet, that the Atlantic is salty but a dirty green and the state of the beach-goers reflective of hedonistic lives lived in theory, that the drinking water is poisoned, that there are flat, dirty parks that reek of marijuana instead of hills, and assuredly no view of any horizon, without or within.
What changes in an environment of the former, is a return to inwardly-held dignity, which is not easy. The longer one has been sapped of it, the more grotesque and misshapen the physical posture and the mental/emotional attitudes, and these take time to release, that is, if you can first overcome the distress of recognizing this at all.
I’m not sure if there’s anything worse for a human being than to be stripped of their dignity, or held a few rungs below it. It turns the heart bitter and gives the capacity to destroy.
My arch nemesis today is the cherry wood. It takes 200 strokes to get through a branch half the size of a piece of hazelnut which only takes 50 strokes to cut through. Why don’t I throw it back into the forest? Because I want to maintain my composure, develop patience and perseverance, in the face of a task that is harder than I want it to be. Furthermore, the same could be said about this entire endeavor, that humanity has already learned how to not do any of this, how to not cut wood at all to cook food. There are arguments on both sides, that working harder to get what you need keeps you fitter and healthier, makes it tremendously more difficult to indulge or squander, and yet, if the practical side of life is easier then you’re free to tend to higher undertakings. And yet, what have we learned about human nature in the age of the appliance? What have we learned about our self-conceits in the age of the app?
The world of today turns us against ourselves: that’s what we’ve learned. The world used to be against us, we used to have to fight it, but now we’ve taught it to coddle us, and by and large that’s to our detriment. There is an inward collapse.
I don’t say this to disparage anyone’s attempt to make a good life for themselves and their family in the world as it is given to them. I’m writing, rather, as someone who took the world personally and carried it on her shoulders, and it’s a relief to understand (through action, in Sicily), that it was the world all along.
I’ve discovered a correlation between the stove handle being too hot to touch and the damned beans finally coming to a boil. Two hours after I started the fire, I’m sitting down to eat them, Scicli beans with brown rice and celery root. The good news is that I really didn’t go through that much wood. Since I started sawing down bigger branches, even whole saplings, it burns much slower and I only have to feed the stove every 20 minutes or so. That said, it easily takes an entire sapling to cook a pot of beans (a dead sapling, dragged out of the forest).
The day is starting to cool down as people emerge for the evening. Everything closes and the streets are empty between 1 and 4 p.m. here, customary for hot countries. I just emerged from the dappled hazelnut grove with an armful of wood.