Amalfi, the Mediterranean and Ferrante
This summer I have been yearning for the Mediterranean - those cool breezes, clear blue waters that envelope you during a swim and soothe the soul. I believe this longing is due to where I am now - the humid, hot steamy subtropics during summer at its peak and the nearly unbearably hot months of July and August. Most of the time I love this climate but lately it's been too hot for my fiery pitta nature. Hence my desire for the opposite - a cool, calming blue, but still with sun drenched skies. I have such fond memories of my Mediterranean summers of the past. Thanks to the heavens and universe for such lovely friends who invited me to travel with them and stay in their abodes - in Ibiza, Formentera, Amalfi, Capri, Lake Como and elsewhere. Ah those years when I was gallivanting around during summer holiday travels. Sometimes, many of us have that trouble of wanting to be where we are not - and oh have I always been guilty of that. My challenge is to be present where I am and enjoy it, which is possible and I do succeed in that, at times. But no one is perfect. I can still dream of certain enchanting places where I've had the best times and literally felt the high - they remain in my memories; no wonder I long to return. Because some places do that to you - they entrance you and make you think that, perhaps, you could live that way forever...
Somehow my nature is to always find the spiritual in places...and Elena Ferrante's writing strikes such a deep cord in me that I had to weave it in here. Surely so many of you seekers and like minded souls will find similar resonance. Italy will do that to you, possibly because it is more of a "feminine" country, like France. It celebrates and displays its feminine nature with nothing to hide.
What strikes me about Ferrante's writing is how I identify - she writes about Naples in another era, yet I grew up in an old culture with interdependence of the characters. I first went to Naples when I was young and touring Italy with a roommate from study abroad and we traveled down to stay with her relatives in Siciliy. I will never forget the mafia men with whom we basically hitchhiked - we thought we were invincible at that stage of youth; my friend especially so. They had their last two fingers cut off - I knew what that meant. They had guns tucked in their waistline - this wasn't that different from where I grew up, was it? The families watch over you and cluck over you like hens; they fill you with food and constantly worry that you aren't eating enough. If only those fiery and loving people of those eras and regions had known of another kind of nourishment that didn't include violence - physical, emotional, you name it. Ferrante writes that escape is impossible from the people who have been truly impressive in our lives. I believe that - people and also places. Such close bonds may also be a blessing and curse. That is my truth. Yet my nature as a wanderer has led me to explore the world and find marvelous places like I share here. They say that you can never go back home again. I believed that but I was tied to my land, like Ferrante. Since then I have learned that you can never forget your roots but you don't have to go back home. I spread my wings at a young age and flew away. A writer like Ferrante is bound with the painful memories and energy that intertwines with her surroundings; same with me - I can visit her part of the world and admire its beauty without the same weight in my heart that turns on the faucet in my eyes when I revisit my own origins, yet I can appreciate her tender descriptions because I recognize the sentiment. Wasn't it Hemingway who said, write hard about what hurts.
Ferrante reminds us that the idea that every "I" is largely made of others is and was her reality - the dead were brought into quarrels on a daily basis. How many of us from old cultures don't even bat an eye at that. Because we were raised in a family where the characters were from a place that seems like one hundred years ago - another place, another time, another era. We grew up less isolated and were more exposed to the world, just like Ferrante's characters escape their old world, or at least some do - but we know what it's like to pass between the two. In Frantumaglia she writes that "to the writer, no person is every definitively relegated to silence, even if ew long ago broke off relations with that person - out of anger, by chance, or because the person died. I can't even think without the voices of others, much less write...And I'm talking about the past, about what we generally call tradition; I'm talking about all those others who were in the world and who have acted or who now act through us. Our entire body, like it or not, enacts a stunning resurrection of the dead just as we advance toward our own death. We are, as you say, interconnected. And we should teach ourselves to look deeply at this interconnection - I call it a tangle, or rather, frantumaglia - to give ourselves adequate tools to describe it." Oh how her words pour right into me and evoke images of aunts and cousins and relatives, all their memorable phrases with a vocabulary from another era as well, like museum relics of sorts. Images of beauty and of horror. The good, the bad, the ugly as they say - all part of me. All part of us. Like Ferrante, I'm drawn to images of crisis; she writes that she is drawn to seals that are broken. That happens when you grow up in such an environement, full of characters around, full of actions that the psychologists say were overstimulating your fight or flight mechanism, overstimulating your nervous system, pumping out the cortisol...but maybe that enhanced your spectrum - many writers and artists are capable of seeing the very worst yet also the most beautiful wherever it may be, as it is to be found everywhere. For all the cortisol, maybe all the highs of the serotonin and dopamine and endorphins imprinted these types of beautiful places and experiences in the body's cells.
Ferrante continues that she is comforted by stories that emerge through horror to a turning point, stories in which someone is redeemed as confirmation that peace and happiness are possible, or that one can return to a private or public Eden. I share her belief and similarly hid for a long time the fact or act of writing, especially from loved ones. It is frightening to expose oneself and others' disapproval, especially when you learned in your childhood that there could be violent repercussions from such. It takes years, perhaps lifetimes to break that. No wonder such children who grew into adults were capable of such imagination and creativity in their heads, their sensitivity made them see everything in detail in order to survive and be hyper vigilant to save themselves.
Her words are heartbreakingly beautiful when she describes why she writes; I am the sort that this always brings tears to my eyes because I know it as an unerring truth:
"Writing is an act of pride...I write to bear witness to the fact that I have lived and have sought a yardstick for myself and for others, since those others couldn't or didn't know how or didn't want to do it...The only possibility is to learn to put the "I" into perspective, to pour it into the work and then go away, to consider writing something that separates from us the moment it's complete: one of the many collateral effects of an active life."
So when I think of the beauty of the Mediterranean, I know there have been stories both comic and tragic, wars and battles have been fought amongst friends, families, peoples, nations. I felt this when I thought of Croatia's past. When I was driving through the streets of Naples with all the trash everywhere on the way back to the airport from the ferry after visiting Capri. I still long to be there - with its warm and caring people - similar and familiar yet different enough not to evoke sadness for me personally. I honor a place's and people's past and revere both it's tragedy and beauty. For me, the region is healing. Traveling and writing are also forms of healing. Ferret seems to have found her magic. I'm always pursuing mine.
