I wrote a little bit about my sabbatical in Rome, 2000. Your Tango published the article in April 2023. (Marie Claire reposted the article in Russian.) The Eden Magazine, Beverly Hills, CA, February issue, published my article on why I chose to keep my baby at 20. The digital magazine is free by subscription, and the print issues for purchase found under "archives."
Please write to me with any questions, especially if you're driven by a dream you'd like to share.
Peace & Love, Jo
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CHALK PORTRAIT OF CARAVAGGIO by Ottavio Leoni, 1621
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Italian Baroque master, painted boldly across his 38 years, introducing art lovers to chiaroscuro.
Michelangelo Merisi spent part of his childhood in Caravaggio, in the northern ItalyProvince of Bergamo, just east of Milan. Having arrived in Rome he became known as Caravaggio, or one who hails from Caravaggio. A contemporary in the first published account of his life called him "Amerigo;" Roman court documents list "Merisio." Countless transmutations of his name exist alongside fifteen recorded surnames, but the painter himself signed his work "Marisi."
A man that dressed more than not completely in black, carried a black cloak, and traveled with a black poodle.
" . . . using as he did the noblest cloths and velvets to adorn himself, but then once he'd put on an outfit, he never left it off again until it'd fallen off him in tatters...." (Robb)
"This painter is a young bloke about twenty or twenty five years old, with a little black beard. He's stocky with heavy eyebrows and dark eyes. He goes around dressed in black, a bit untidy, and wears black stockings that are a bit torn. He wears his thick hair long in front". ( description given by a barber 1597)—Robb.
With a dark complexion, dark eyes and black hair, he lwas considered an expert swordsman, seldom seen without one.
". . . when he's worked a fortnight he goes out for a couple of months with his rapier at his side and a servant behind him, moving from one tennis court to another and always looking for fights or arguments, so he's impossible to get on —Robb
Hot-tempered, the firebrand's leit-motifs were Respect & Loyalty.
"Caravaggio was overly passionate and a bit wild. He sometimes looked to get his own neck broken or put someone else's life at risk. Quarrelsome men hung out with him..." (written by an enemy 1601)— Robb
Born 1571, he died a disputed and still researched death in 1610. As Peter Robb, whose biography, M The Man Who Became Caravaggio, states; Caravaggio did not die but rather went "missing'" and disappeared in an unknown location leaving no body to bury. Those who knew what had happened—had nothing to say.
Caravaggio was apprenticed on 6 April 1584, at the age of twelve, to Milanese painter Simone Peterzano. In 1583 the governor of Milan made a proclamation declaring that the "intolerable misery" of the city was due to an excess of "louts and vagabonds." A rough frontier, each man fended for himself and survived, or did not. After learning to paint in Milan, and to wield a sword and stand his own in brawls, Caravaggio went to Rome, arriving in 1592 or 1593.
Caravaggio was born seven years after Shakespeare, Marlowe, Galileo and Michelangelo, Monteverdi the creator of opera was four years his senior, and Montaigne was twenty-one years older. The Roman Catholic Church had instigated control seven years before Caravaggio's birth. One of the "first modern painters" was born within a lock-down on human expression. The inquisition made life so utterly intolerable that sociable Italians found themselves living lives directed at keeping to themselves. Original thinking was severely punished. Art existed within the confines of decorum and gravity; humor, nudity and the erotic were banned.
CHEATS, 1594, (Caravaggiio)
Caravaggio painted from life. His canvas shows no drawing set below; he never drew, he worked directly from the brush as he saw it. Vermeer is said to have done this as well. But then I am reminded of the documentary Tim's Vermeer(2013), directed by Teller of Penn & Teller fame, in which tech geek Tim Jenison creates his own camera obscura and over the course of a five year study creates a Vermeer copy good enough to fool experts, with zero previous painting experience. There is debate about the camera obscura's use by 17th c. painters, Vermeer and Caravaggio included. I doubt Caravaggio ever had the patience to dicker around with a fussy, exacting apparatus. A recorded account of his studio made by Guilio Mancini a 17th c. friend, art collector, art dealer, writer, atheist and physician stated; "characteristic of (Caravaggio's) school is lighting from one source only, beaming from above without reflection, as would occur in a room with the walls painted black." Mancini wrote one of the three early biographies on Caravaggio. And Mancini again who said that Caravaggio's "great understanding of art went with weird behavior."
No surprise, Caravaggio fell behind on rent and the landlord had a lawyer enter his apartment; they recorded a list of his possessions and in the list was a large mirror. This seemed to state that mirrors were still important to him in his work. Robb mentions his fascination with the affect of light on glass. Leonardo's praise for a flat mirror as an invaluable painter's tool was unerring;
"When you want to see if your painting corresponds overall to the thing painted from life, get a mirror and reflect the living thing in it, and compare the reflection with your painting... {and if you've done it right} your painting too will look like a natural thing seen in a big mirror."—Leonardo da Vinci
PILGRIM'S MADONNA, 1604, (Caravaggio)
Model Lena Antognetti had a complicated affair with Caravaggio that ended violently. Lena was a controversial model because of her notoriety as the consort of prominent clerics. Perhaps her two-year-old son was the child Christ model. A radical Pilgrim's Madonna on many levels. A contemporary rival artist Giovanni Baglione wrote of the painting:
". . . he did a Loreto Madonna painted from life with two pilgrims, the man with muddy feet and the woman in a dirty torn bonnet. Because he trivialized the attributes that a major painting ought to have, the lower classes made a huge fuss over it."
Caravaggio's common people pilgrims, or vagrants visiting with a Roman housewife/ Madonna—caused a sensation. Living people were not to be identifiable as Saints, and Lena was a familiar face.—Robb
Set against rigid and threatening constraints, Caravaggio resisted, and never painted archangels. His San Luigi paintings, Matthew Called, and Matthew Killed, jettisoned him into the international world of 1600, with what Robb calls "rock star fame." At thirty-years-old, Caravaggio was the universal idol of young painters in 17th c. Rome. And had something to say about anyone who tried to emulate his style.
" . . . the most famous painter in Italy—the biggest of the art superstars and hunted like a dog." 1609 (Robb)
" . . . there's a man called M who's doing wonderful things in Rome...he's already famous...he's got no respect for the work of any master, not that he openly praises his own... says everything's triviality and child's play, whatever it's of and whoever painted it, if it hasn't been done from life..." (Robb)
At the same time that his art was sought by collectors and modern thinking churches, the priests pushed it away. Caravaggio repeatedly made appearances in Roman courts. Rome in the 1600's was a city of 10,000 artists in a population of 100,000, mostly males... rowdy, overcharged, virile and ripe. In 1606, Caravaggio was involved in an ugly street fight near tennis courts and badly wounded on the head. His opponent, Tomassoni, bled to death. M fled, once again, his second exodus related to violence in Rome and this would be last time he saw the city.
" . . . one of those who push themselves forward boldly and fearlessly, and everywhere seek their advantage."
After the death of Tomassino, a bando capitale was imposed which meant that anyone in the Papal States was free to kill M with impunity. Caravaggio left for Naples where he painted furiously. In one Naples year, ten paintings are suspected to have been produced. From Naples he left for Malta. In Malta he worked his remaining charms, and over the course of a year, obtained knighthood, which would overturn the bando capitale. It would, as well, place him back in favorable stead with the church. Living alongside the Knights of Malta he won their approval, then brawled with a fellow knight shortly thereafter, forfeiting his knighthood. He didn't know how to tone it down.
Professor Maurizio Marini, an expert on Caravaggio, has his death occurring on Port Ercole, Tuscany after fleeing Naples wounded, whereby he contracted typhoid from his wound. After his death, Caravaggio groupees moved their easels to the northern reaches of Italy and into Spain where they continued the frontier into modern art.
John The Baptist (Youth With A Ram) 1602, (Caravaggio)
Caravaggio held John the Baptist as a favorite subject, painting at least eight related paintings. This one, a playful/ pagan John the Baptist, wasn't tolerated by the Counter-Reformation Church. The model is Cecco, Francesco Boneri, thought to be from the family of artisans working in Bergamo Province. Cecco was apprenticed to Caravaggio at twelve years of age; the same age that Caravaggio entered his apprenticeship. Cecco went on to become an admired painter in his own right, working in the late Caravaggio style. He would become the most important person in Caravaggio's life. (Robb)
" . . . feeling for the drama of the human presence." —Robb
"To me the term "good man'" means someone who knows how to do things well—that is knows how to do his art well—so in painting a good man knows how to paint well and imitate natural things well."
—Caravaggio
Further reading:
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I've just recently reread Elie Wiesel's Night and Aharon Apllefeld's To The Land Of The Cattails, prompted, I'm sad to say, by the unrelenting sense of dread and impending doom that I, like many others, I'm sure, feel these days.
Both books are wonderful in different and similar ways, and I whole heartedly recommend both to those readers who want to look a little bit through a Holocaust survivor's eyes and both remember and re-remember the horror and inhumanity that seems increasingly these days in danger of being forgotten. Both are slim volumes that pull no punches. Night follows a son and father as they catapult suddenly, before they know it almost, from happy family to ghetto to concentration camp. To The Land Of The Cattails moves far more slowly as it charts a mother and son on their inexorable, hypnotic in its pace, journey toward their own quicksand. Reading both, we readers, knowing of course what will happen, want to cry out, "Listen! Look out! Pay attention!"
Trump is not Hitler, to be sure, though he does scare me, and that some of his supporters are indeed nazis scares me even more. But what terrifies me and makes me lie awake sometimes at night is the quiet lining up of trusted friends and neighbors, ready, almost eager, it seems, to point a finger and simply turn away. This Jew, born in 1950, overreacts no doubt, but I still remember as a young boy not understanding any of it, anymore than I understand now. That the fingers point now at others only makes it worse. Have I not in my life stood up enough?
Probably not. Already, writing this, I have hesitated to be specific and have even excised a paragraph or two for fear of hurting or shaming a loved one or friend. The code words and phrases and the glibly alluded to conspiracies charge, and some groups are more or less targeted, but the machinations and economics of dismissal and hate are still much the same.
At a time when roughly one-quarter of Americans between the ages of eighteen and thirty-nine believe that the Holocaust is some sort of fabrication, these two small volumes call out to us to listen to the brooding silence building around us and cry out.
At a time when police execute no-knock warrants not knowing who is within, when we argue whether shooting someone in the back seven times is a "good shoot" or not, when kneeling... At a time when citizens in the streets, in places of worship, in supermarkets are literally getting out their guns, hear and speak up we must! These two books remind us what might happen if we do not.
—Jonathan Tabakin
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"My dad always told me you couldn't push a river, and I found the analogy worked just as well with people."—M Jackson
Dr. M Jackson is a geographer and glaciologist, National Geographic Society Explorer, TED Fellow, veteran three-time U.S. Fulbright Scholar-National Science Foundation Arctic research grants, and the author of numerous titles, including The Secret Lives of Glaciers.
There are five dominant glaciers surrounding Höfn, Iceland, where M lived. Höfn is reached across the farthest tip of a narrow stretch of land, placing glaciers right up front and in your face. Just the way the locals like it. When the aurora borealis lights up a glacier in the blue-black Icelandic night, Jackson tells us that it's a sight to see, "like a candle-lit chandelier."
"The glaciers they are just a part of who I am."
—Sveiin—Höfn resident
"I want to bring meaning to why a quiet Icelandic man would knock on my door and take me several hours to his favorite place on the south coast in freezing temperatures to explain to me what he was fighting for—what to him was at stake as we hurdle forward into an unknown warming future."
—M Jackson
Red-headed Icelanders dressed in red, ice caves, glaciers turn blue when it rains, sometimes gray, almost black, more purple-black, more blue paint and less white on a canvas, late evening coffee, oceanic moisture, pervasive fog, milky light, ice-water slurry, things change, grow and shrink, naked-ice, denial, F-road, glacier guides, glacier jeeps, chattering glacier, happy glacier, flirtatious glacier, musing glacier, angry glacier, hungry glacier, listening glacier, seeing glacier, leave-me-alone glacier., one earth, everything is connected... Personally, I have no trouble believing that a glacier is a sentient being. I name my favorite pieces of furniture, along with my oak and apple trees.
"but glaciers dear friend—ice is only another form of terrestial love."—John Muir
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"To the Great Spirit's day, to that day grown old and wise, I will make an offering."—Black Elk
Where can we look and not be reminded of our reach, our grab and take away, from those who took nothing. If ever there were a time for the "Daybreak Star"—"Behold the Star of Understanding." It is the moment at hand. I was always drawn to Native American lore and teachings, more so when I discovered my seventeenth century Montagnais ancestry from Quebec. The "Grandmother Land," Canada. The Montagnais wore wolves heads and skins on their heads that rolled down their backs.
"The beauty and strangeness of the earth."
"Every little thing is sent for something and in that thing there should be happiness and the power to make happy. Like the grasses showing their tender faces to each other."
His name was "Eagle Wing Stretches." Black Elk was born in 1863. The treaty the U.S. government made with the Lakota's stated: "it would be ours as long as grass should grow and water flow." We know what happened with that piece of forked-tongue truth.
"They had forgotten that the earth was their mother."
"Hey-a-a-hey!" "Hey-a-a-hey!" "Hey-a-a-hey!" "Hey-a-a-hey!"
Another favorite of mine, Jospeh Campbell, loved Black Elk. Black Elk was nine years old when the grandfathers gave him his prophetic vision. "I saw myself on the central mountain of the world." "The central mountain is everywhere." "But anywhere is the center of the world." Campbell called it the "axis—mundi—polestar." The vision was so profound that Black Elk mentioned it to no one. It scared him so. "The real was yonder and the darkened dream it was here." He was eleven years old in 1874, and seventeen when he shared his vision. He had seen a "map of the universe," a shield, and his mind recorded the minute detail. After he revealed his vision to the tribe they reenacted it as he directed. It brought him satisfaction to have tried to warn his people of the barbarism and waste that lay ahead.
"I am a Lakota of the Oglala band. My father's name was Black Elk, and his father before him bore the name, and the father of his father, so that I am the fourth to bear it. He was a medicine man and so were several of his brothers. Also, he and the Great Crazy Horse's father were cousins, having the same grandfather. My mother's name was White Cow Sees: her father was called Refuse-to-Go, and her mother, Plenty Eagle Feathers. I can remember my mother's mother and father. ... I was born in the Moon of the Popping Trees (December) on the Little Powder River in the Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed (1863), and I was three years old when my father's right leg was broken in the Battle of the Hundred Slain. From that wound he limped until the day he died, which was about the time when Big Foot's band was butchered on Wounded Knee (1890). He is buried here in these hills." —Black Elk
In 1886, when he was twenty three years old, Black Elk joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. He was curious. It played in Madison Square Garden. The hoop of his people was broken, maybe he could learn something from the Waschisus, that might save them. "All living in square gray houses..." He particularly liked meeting Queen Victoria who owned Grandmother's Land. He spent two winters in London, Paris, and Germany, fearing he might die there. Nearly three years in total.
"I am sixty-seven years old. All over the world I have seen all kinds of people; but today I have seen the best—looking people I know. If you belonged to me, I would not let them take you around in a show like this."—Queen Victoria
Go girl go, how I love the Queen Mum. Albert and John Brown loved her too.
Here is a list of the Lakota Moons, may they make you smile :
September: Moon When the Plums are Scarlet / Moon of the Black Calf / Moon When the Calves Grow Hair
October: Moon of the Changing Season
November: Moon of the Falling Leaves
December: Moon of the Popping Trees
January: Moon of Frost in the Teepee
February: Moon of the Dark Red Calves
March: Moon of the Snowblind
April: Moon of the Red Grass Appearing
May: Moon When the Ponies Shed
June: Moon of Making Fat (sun highest growing power and strongest)
July: Moon of Red Cherries
August: Moon When the Cherries Turn Black
Read Black Elk Speaks and think and wonder lost in his world, for it is our world, too.
Black Elk's vision, which I sketched in the front piece of my copy:
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Buckminster Fuller's "spaceship earth" is in trouble. To the man who worried, correctly so, about nuclear destruction, and unbridled consumption, it would come as no surprise to be a proponent of "thinking like a planet." Buckminster wanted us to play the World Game: to be honest about earth's plight or we are nothing at all. We all win. We all lose. He had invented the Dymaxion map made of icosahedrons that unfolded to lay flat. "See, we're one world island and one world ocean, not many." He asked in 1967: "Does the universe need us any more?" The World's Fair Expo '67 introduced me to "Bucky"and his life work. I didn't know then at nine years old that I loved him, or his message. "Tiny Houses." He lived in a geodesic dome styled tent on his land his adult life long, when not in hotels three hundred nights a year covering his lecture and consulting route.
David Wallace-Wells wants us to be worried too, that in 2017 Napa's air quality index hit 486, on a day when Delhi's air quality index reached 999. Or that due to California's wildfires, the air in and around San Francisco in 2017 was worse than the same day in Beijing. Bernie Sanders was asked at a town hall meeting held by CNN, what book he was reading, at the same time I held my copy of The Uninhabitable Earth in hand. "It was scary," he said, and shrugged. If Vermont is the state that posits politicians with radical ideas, we also harbor environmentalists with unstoppable voices. Bill McKibben writes: "The decisions we make in 2075 won't matter." On page 138, of 231, Wallace-Wells tells his listeners: "If you made it this far, you are a brave reader."
So, what to do about three month old baby chicks with 225 pieces of plastic consuming ten percent of their body mass? Equivalent to a human carrying twenty to thirty pounds of plastic. Global plastic production is expected to triple by 2050; there will be more plastic in the ocean than fish. 2018 was the summer that 99 guests in a Greece seaside resort were killed by the second-deadliest wildfire in the twenty-first century. Dozens died in each other's arms descending stairs to the Aegean sea. The world's poorest live in marshes, swamps, and flood plains, and at the same time, a Santa Barbara toddler was swept away by a mudslide and carried over a mountainside to the sea.
We have entered the Anthropcene: the end of nature, where four percent of mammals are wild. If you, like me, believe a "back-up ecosystem" exists for the wealthy only, and that the idea of "Transhumanism," or the futuristic ability to "upload your brain to the cloud," is not a feasible solution, let alone an acceptable one—then vote your consciousness, and commit to "thinking like a planet."
There is no time left for "possibly, perhaps, conceivablys." It's bigger than whether to carry a plastic bag home, or not, or to drive a Tesla.
Since 2006, one recent study of the annual bee death die-off, states that we have lost seventy-five percent of flying insects, taking us closer to a world without pollinators. Cheerios and Quaker Oats contain Roundup—despite the label "natural." If 4 degrees warming is reached, we may reduce grain yield by fifty percent.
"If we don't act quickly, and on a global scale, then the problem will literally become insoluble." —Bill McKibben
As a baby boomer, the cosmology of my day included Enrico Fermi's paradox: If the universe is so big, then why haven't we encountered any other intelligent life in it? Wallace-Wells asks if climate might be the reason. No other planet is as suited to produce life as we know it. Fermi's "the Great Silence" is called "the great filter" by the iconoclastic economist Robin Hanson. His theory states that the filtering occurs when whole civilizations are enclosed by global warming like bugs in a net. Paleontologist Peter Ward, among those responsible for discovering that the planet's mass extinctions were caused by greenhouse gas, told David: "The filtering we've had in the past has been in these mass extinctions." The present mass extinction has only just begun, sustained by the Anthropic Principle—"our grandly narcissistic view of the cosmos."
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The Capitoline Museum, 2000. Planet Earth had averted the Y2K collapse, humming merrily along, and the forum remained standing. La dolce vita: Verdi, Fellini, Ovid, and Caravaggio—what a world we inhabit. The first emperor to adhere to Christianity, Emperor Constantine was colossal in form to distance himself from the ordinary mortal, and link to the divine. He was also vibrantly colorful. We were sold a lie. In Ancient Greece, or Ancient Rome, some pigment remains and is easy to see, tucked between a strand of hair, or the folds of a wing, or robe, painted rich purples, blues, and pinks. The "Gods in Color" tour of 2003 continues today in 2020, and David Batchelor's Chromophobia, 2000, both righting the wrong that the Elgin Marbles fabricated, scrubbed until they were as white as pearls. And yet, the "polychromy" versus "monochrome myth" is not surrendered easily. Debate began as early as the 18th century. Auguste Rodin is said to have said, while slapping his chest, "I feel it here that they were never colored." When you think of white marble, see the gold leaf on naked limbs, copper on lips and nipples, and red pigment in the harlequin printed pants. In the Mediterranean, flesh appears as warm shades of olive, brown, and black, and white is not white, nor the sky blue.
How does Roma taste? Of lovers' stolen kisses, oranges, myrtle and rose. My poem titled "Without Doubt" is dedicated with love to my sabbatical in 2000 in Rome.
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Candida Höfer's Libraries, essay by Umberto Eco is a big book of beauty for a bibliophile. The essay by Umberto Eco places you squarely, or in Eco's case—diagonally, as in sideways rain—in the middle of a good read seated upon a cushion of thick mohair velvet in one of his two favorite libraries: the Sterling Library at Yale and the new library of the University of Toronto. So, go ahead, be my guest, pull up a companion chair and slide right into the silence of the imagination... dream about oversized stationary imprinted with the immaculate scrolls of an elegant cursive hand, perhaps the beginnings of a novel? Is it yours, or have you slipped between the pages of Umberto's next manuscripts—we know he's still writing.
"In other words, if the library is, as Borges put it, a model of the universe, we must try to transform it into a universe on a human scale, and, I would remind you, a human scale also means a light-hearted scale, with the chance of a coffee, even with the chance for two students to sit down on a couch of an afternoon and, if not to indulge in indecent behavior, at least enjoy the continuation of their flirtation in the library as they take down or replace some books of scientific interest from their shelves."—Umberto Eco
From Amsterdam to Rio de Janeiro, and all points in between, my favorite of Höfer's tour is Biblioteca Angelica Roma II. A three tiered architectural wedding cake of promise, hope, and longing, on the second and third level, the entrance door is hidden by the clever run of faux "books on shelves" adorned with the actual dust skirts that run the lengths of the room, lest the spines be weighted by time.
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#poutyfaces
1982 Vermont
A bit like an impressionistic painting... so the eighties appear to rise and shift before me. Motherhood before adulthood. We are the sum of our environment, endeavors, and education—life's lessons being the most important arbiter of a degree. The ordeal that I thought would be the ruin of me grew the roots of the oak I lean against now.
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Once again, society asks the children of the world to be "Super Heroes." Our mess is our shameful greedy mess. And it takes a sixteen-year-old from Sweden, of her own ambition, to spear-head the rallying cry to us mindless slumbering adults. Greta is right. Our house is on fire. And our headlines meander along ignoring the truth. We are on track for—no, we have already entered, the Sixth Extinction.
Love to Greta who won't take "no" for an answer. Courage to Greta whose fears match mine. Fortitude to Greta, the voice of the planet. Earth doesn't whisper it roars. Earth weeps under our onslaught. I hesitated before adding a filter on instagram to the image of her book jacket. But only for a nano-second. Then chose "Juno." Juno throws lightening bolts. From the peak of Olympus, Greta sees the urgency and means business—the business of change.
Trump today tweeted: "Greta must work on her anger management problem, then go to a good old fashioned movie with a friend! Chill Greta, Chill!" Our children are not super heroes, despite the media who promulgates that image. They are our gift and our future. Follow Greta to the streets, to voting booths, to the classroom, and then take in a movie.
Iceland's Okjokull glacier commemorated with a plaque. In 2014 the glacier was declared dead. In 2018, anthropologists Cymene Howe and Dominic Boyer filmed a documentary about its demise, Not Ok. Then suggested a commemorative plaque. The dedication was written by Andri Snær Magnason, At the bottom of "The Letter to the Future" is the global atmospheric carbon dioxide reading for that month: 415 ppm. Iceland, the land of storytellers, has a voice too.
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