“Blue Venice”

Drowned Partisan. Canale di San Marco, Venice, Italy. Photo: Gavin Keeney.

“BLUE VENICE” is EXTRACT TWO — PART THREE: EPISODE SIX of tales told “out of school” and (intentionally) out of order: i.e., extracts from /S/4: Ego-histoire, an anti-memoir of a PhD project, written across the years 2021–2023, and ending with the (un)timely discovery of the mysterious phenomenon (agency) of THE EDITION OF ONE.

For a summary, plus DRAMATIS PERSONAE, see https://medium.com/@agencex/ego-histoire-85b118e1b986 …

EXTRACT TWO — PART THREE: EPISODE SIX

A one-month research sojourn in Venice, Italy, regarding the peregrinations of El Greco.

TWO MESSAGES

[Passage currently withheld]

March 8, 2023

[…]

THE DOOR

I arrived in Blue Venice in the late afternoon on March 10. In the evening, I went over from Isola di San Giorgio to Isola della Giudecca, crossing from one neighboring island to the next on the vaporetto, to buy provisions at a small market. I strolled around a bit, re-familiarizing myself with this neighborhood, an area with few tourist attractions, and then decided to have one glass of red Moretti beer (Birra Moretti La Rossa) to celebrate my arrival. Sitting outside, on the Canale della Giudecca, and watching Venice turn blue (as it almost always does at dusk), I was then drawn into a conversation with a group of locals about Venice and its recent attempts to make life affordable for its citizens. I mentioned the 45.00 EUR I had just paid for a three-day vaporetto pass. Locals pay roughly 300.00 EUR a year. Seems tourism is subsidizing making life affordable for locals. How ironic when it is tourism that is also driving them mad! I explained that I only needed to cross over from San Giorgio to Giudecca to shop and/or “take the view” — i.e., every once in a while (or, every few days, at best) … Otherwise I would be at the Cini Foundation library. Yet the necessity of the vaporetto to get from one island to the next (and they were only separated by the modest Canale di San Giorgio) required I buy a 45.00 EUR vaporetto (ACTV) pass every three days or learn how to “walk on water.” If I let the pass lapse, I would be stranded or have to risk the crossing without a pass.

Upon studying the various postings and advertisements on the platform at San Giorgio, while awaiting the Number 2 vaporetto to Giudecca, I had noted an option to download the “AVM Venezia Official App.” I had no idea if this would solve my initial problem of being stranded on San Giorgio, if and when my three-day pass(es) expired, but I resolved to give it a try. The possibility of being able to buy a pass from San Giorgio, via app, might alleviate one problem (how to do it from San Giorgio) while, no doubt, having no impact on price. The scenario reminded me of the dance I had performed in London, in September 2022, with the Oxford Tube and their app. Using that app required that I have cellphone service while out and about, to activate the booking just before boarding the bus to and from Oxford. In the case of Venice, I would not have cellphone access while out and about unless, as in London, I turned on the Verizon travel pass prior to exiting the Branca Residence. The travel pass gave me roaming privileges and cost 10.00 USD per day. I could turn it off and on as required, but adding it to the calculations of using the AVM app made little sense. It would only increase the overall cost, as it did with the London scenario.

On the vaporetto, on the way back to San Giorgio, I noticed a monk. Another fellow traveler nodded in his direction. He seemed to know him. I said to this fellow traveler, “Franciscan, yes?” He said, correcting me, “Capuchin,” a subset of “Franciscan.” We both got off the vaporetto at San Giorgio. We continued our conversation. I told him I was staying at the Branca Residence for one month and studying Franciscanism. He told me he was living on a boat in the small marina at San Giorgio. He asked why I would study Franciscanism, and I explained that it was a unique movement in its time with great relevance for the problems that ail us today. He then said, “Isn’t it amazing that we remember and celebrate this one person [Francis of Assisi] while all the potentates of the time [princes, kings, popes] are more or less forgotten …” He then told me about a door that is left open Tuesday through Sunday (“every day except Monday”), at 7:00am. It is near Il Redentore, the great church built by Palladio on the Giudecca, ca. 1577, and actually “home address” for the Venetian Capuchins. The door is next to a pizza parlor. It only ever opens at 7:00am Tuesday through Sunday and is unmarked. If you enter that doorway, you will find a few people, including elderly nuns. It is a modest Mass, performed for whomever wishes to show up. This story came about because I had told him that I wanted to make contact with the Franciscans at Il Redentore … “Here” was the proverbial and real “door to walk through” (the presence of the irreal) … presented semi-accidentally (coincidentally) — or not.

[…]

The next morning, Saturday, March 11, at 10:00am, I went to San Giorgio café, the only “amenity” on the island of San Giorgio, for coffee. I was pleasantly surprised by the fact that they gave anyone staying at the Branca Center a 50% discount and waived the 3.00 EUR table fee. This would go a long way toward providing some respite from the impending nuisances associated with negotiating the high price of “moving about” in Venice. I could, if careful, minimize the impact. The kitchen in the “monastic cells” provided by the Branca Residence were quite simple. There was no stove or range. There was a small refrigerator, an English-style kettle for boiling water, and a small oven (resembling a microwave oven, but actually a small convection oven). While at San Giorgio café that morning, I had also detected the luminous presence of an Amex decal at the registers. Voila! Someone takes Amex in Venice. And how beautiful that it is “here,” a stone’s throw from my “cell” at the Branca Residence. The café faces the Canale di San Marco. The view to the Canale di San Marco includes the small marina where the mysterious gentleman from the previous night’s adventure has a mooring. I wondered if I would run into him again … Most likely, but also not necessarily. It seems he had “delivered” the message I needed and “that was that.” While at San Giorgio café I downloaded the AVM Venezia Official App from Google Play, using the public wi-fi provided by the café. I would investigate further the options for using this, when necessary. It was, at the least, parked on my phone awaiting creation of an account with ACTV.

[…]

I continued my experimentation, out of necessity, with what can only be called “financial agency,” which often involves guess work and jumping through flaming hoops. But, weirdly or not, it was also a great lesson in survival and it was becoming a passion — to survive. Such agency is not about money per se. It is about how what we call money many times merely maps other forms of agency embedded in “it,” but in excess of “it.” That includes, of course, the kindness of friends and, often enough, the kindness of strangers.

[…]

After downloading the ACTV app at San Giorgio café, I went back to Giudecca to shop for more provisions. I was also about to launch a test of various debit cards. I was preparing for Monday, when I would try to pay my Branca Residency bill of 871.25 EUR, which, at the exchange rate posted on the X-rates website I used to keep track of, and estimate, EUR, AUD, GBP, INR, and USD transactions, should equal roughly 950.56 USD. The problem was, of course, “which” exchange rate the interbank intermediary would use to “process” the charge. The Amex card and the Comerica card each had an available balance of 1,000.00 USD on them. One was a credit card and one was a debit card. My goal was to split the difference and put roughly half on each card. Putting all of it on either card would be risky. The ANZ, TD Bank, Chase, and PayPal cards all had fairly small balances as of the moment. They had been driven down to the manageable threshold prior to being maxed out or driven into the red.

At a grocery store on the Giudecca owned by Prix Quality S.P.A., I wandered the aisles gathering up an armload of provisions. Whatever I could carry I would buy. This prevented me from going overboard. The purchase included: three small cans of tuna (3.29 EUR even though the shelf marker said .99 EUR); a package of biscotti integrali (100% farina integrale da filiera); another bottle of discounted orange-flavored kefir (.99 EUR); another package of discounted Norwegian salmon (4.69 EUR); and a small jar of raspberry preserves (2.09 EUR), which had apparently received the “Eccellenze di Prix” at some point since it was emblazoned on the label above an image of ripe red raspberries and white raspberry flowers. Ingredients of the raspberry preserves (jam) included: lamponi 70%; zucchero d’uva; gelificante pectina; succo di limone concentrato. “Energia” was “722 kj / 170 kcal.” It was made in some “zona industrial” in Novaledo (Trentino), a renowned agricultural district in the Bassa Valsugana valley in northern Italy. The coloratura of this purchase was impressive. And not so much for the origins of the products. God knows where the Nostromo brand tuna came from even if it was canned in Modena. And the Norwegian salmon was nominally a product of Lithuania, even if distributed by an Italian company in Ancona. It was nonetheless “allevato in Norvegia,” i.e., “farmed in Norway.” It also needed to be consumed by April 3, 2023. The real agency of the minor event of the shopping “spree” (totaling 13.25 EUR) was that all of these goods were being assembled to get me through the next few days as I awaited the bigger event of paying the Branca Residence 871.25 EUR. I put this purchase on my ANZ card. I was double-checking that it worked in Italy for small purchases via the “contactless” method.

I then headed back to San Giorgio, dropped the purchased goods at my monastic cell, checked email, and decided to go back to San Giorgio café for a glass of wine before they closed at 4:30pm. Relieving me of some of my anxiety, there was an email from “IM” welcoming me back to Venice. She also introduced the option of buying a Unica Pass for the vaporetto. The catch was that the initial cost of the card itself was around 100.00 EUR. But it was good for five years and you could reload it at the favorable rate of 1.50 EUR per trip. Additionally, as she explained, you could also opt for a “carnet of 10 tickets (14.00 euro)” … This seemed tenable, but only once I was out of the woods with the Branca payment and in the black again with expected payments from the writing workshop and whatever else might appear. I “banked” the option. But what was most extraordinary was her statement, “Let me know if you need cash until you sort out the misadventures…” Clearly human agency trumps financial agency. The gesture was profoundly welcome as I sorted out last questions about my stay in Blue Venice. It also made me a little more confident in having that late-afternoon glass of wine at San Giorgio café, where I would test the PayPal card.

The glass of wine turned into two, and I began transcribing notes that were in my head on to paper regarding the forthcoming study of El Greco. “IM” had triggered something by telling me that Lionello Puppi had also studied El Greco at the Cini Library. I decided he would be my spirit guide for the study. Perhaps now he would also send me telepathic messages from beyond the grave regarding how to proceed. I was now, after two earlier visits to the café, a “regular” … The waitresses greeted me upon arrival, and I was now subject to the “Cini discount.” I told them that I had just seen a tour group vanish into the Borges maze (labyrinth) and that no doubt they would get lost and then arrive at the café too late for refreshments. Therefore, I said (jokingly), “You’ll have to stay open late.” Upon arrival I had objected that the version of Venice that was across the Canale di San Marco had disappeared. A thick fog had settled in and the view of the city had totally vanished. I suggested someone had stolen the city and that we were now on our own. An island without a view.

After the first glass of wine, I was convinced that I could actually stay on San Giorgio and ignore the rest of the city. The fog confirmed this in a strange way. It was a prestigious evocation. I only needed to make sure I could get off the island in a pinch — or to shop for food. As if to confirm this intuition, “S”, the waitress I had mockingly complained to about the city disappearing, brought me a plate of Venetian finger food, on the house. I closed up my notes on El Greco, now being half-written by Puppi, and paid the bill with PayPal. With two cards confirmed as valid in Venice, and — more critically in terms of financial agency — two cards with future incoming transfers due in the next weeks, I sauntered out of the café and headed down the gravel path to the Branca Residence. Along the way I saw the tour group emerging from the Borges labyrinth. I asked the tour guide how long it took for a tour of the labyrinth. She said, “About 50 minutes.” The café had just closed, as I left. But I wondered if they would try to enter anyway and be rebuffed. If they did, my earlier joke to the waitresses would certainly now illustrate how crazy the crazy American actually was. “Where are you from?” “S” had asked. “America,” I had said. “I am a naughty American.” “You are not an American?” she asked, not catching the naughty part and hearing “not even” or such. “No,” I explained. “I am a bad American. All Americans are bad.” My new friend “S” must have liked naughty Americans, for it was shortly after this dance of words that she brought me the finger food as “gift,” making that second glass of red wine tenable (and which she chose for me) …

[…]

The El Greco study now (with the imagined assistance of Lionello Puppi via the intervention of “IM”) involved a series of inquiries that escalated as they also came to a hoped-for apotheosis in Toledo and in his late works.

El Greco + Lionello Puppi

— Peregrinations + encounters

— Artistic agency + factions

— Works en route to life-work

What thematics, what works, when?

Where, how, under what stars?

Why is El Greco a Franciscan artist?

Venice, Rome, Madrid, Toledo

Collaborators + patrons

Interlocutors + enemies*

Influences + innovations

— Visions

Assimilation to the art-historical register + misreadings

— Expressionist

*i.e., despots and savants

This schema was meant to keep me on track with a decidedly chronological investigation of his travels, tracing the impact of those travels on his works and the emergence of the life-work. This intention privileged “peregrinations + agency” — and I could, in part, see that it may well lead to a subsidiary study of the life-work of Walter Benjamin, given that Benjamin’s life-work also concerned the emergence of illuminated works via “wandering,” and, if my sense of the common ground for such works was correct, via lived works (meaning works produced through extreme existential means and processes versus the liberties of being settled and being celebrated in one’s time). Thus, and once again, “agency + event + faithfulness,” come Heaven, Hell, or high water.

One dawning or new component in the overall study of the Franciscan oikonomia, and partly as a result of the writing workshop on the urban commons held a week earlier, was that there was the persistent presence of something that could only be called “non-human” agency that needed to be teased forth. This had come up in the papers on the urban commons in the form of subtleties that architects either honor or obliterate. Plečnik had honored it, and many of the reasons why Plečnik was celebrated is because he did honor it. “It” haunted his work. Its presence in Franciscanism, on the other hand, was highly evident, and not buried at all. It registered in Francis of Assisi’s embrace of natural, semi-divine, and divine intervention at the most prosaic levels and at the most existentially charged levels imaginable. This, of course, saved Angelology, Mariology, and the Apostolic/Prophetic tradition from becoming a heavy-handed super-catechism, dogma-laden, and — foremost — requiring ultra-mediation in the form of authorized rites and gatekeepers. What was becoming a bit more clear, even as it often then vanished from sight, was that the conceptual fold of “non-human” agency countered the conceptual fold of “in-human” agency — the primary problem of the present age and the ravages of Capital. The fact that the “non-human” was a current buzz term in academia did not bother me too much. For, its inclusion here would actually permit the inclusion of the semi-divine and divine registers the Franciscans clearly observed. Somehow, through whatever means, I suspected that Puppi would help “here” … But was he now non-human, since he was gone? Or was he extra-human, since he once was human and now was to be my spirit guide?

I checked the Cini Library collections online via the Venetian consortium (Polo VEA-SBN), a database that pulled together information on the holdings of major libraries in Venice and found twelve titles by Puppi on El Greco. They were all in Italian. He would now have to speak to me in that universal version of Esperanto known as “sign language.” Whatever was in those books was going to require the equivalent of a bibliographic séance. But it would not be the first time I had been up against such things. I recall from the early 1990s, when working on my Master’s thesis at Dumbarton Oaks, that I suddenly decided I could read French. It kind of worked. What was required was that I not actually read the books so much as follow the greater clues of what was in the books. This was not all that different than working with books in English and effectively “mining” them for affect. This usually took the form of plucking from the historical narrative of art-historical tomes key terms, proper names, place names, dates, and various clues buried in the footnotes and references. I would give Puppi a try, to see if he might offer assistance, and if that failed, I would then work from whatever English titles I could find on El Greco and circle back to Puppi to see if he had changed his mind …

March 11, 2023

[…]

DAY OF RECKONING

I awaited Monday morning, with some trepidation, to finally deal with the Branca Residence bill. It still weighed heavily upon my conscience that it was not paid yet. But they also seemed to be in no hurry for it to be paid. To lighten the anxiety, and on Sunday, just before the day of reckoning, I had received notice of a gift of 864.23 AUD. This was a wire transfer from “OO”, a gesture of immense goodwill on his part after another round of exchanging tales regarding the sojourn in Ljubljana, and an entirely serious and illuminating exchange regarding the current status of the PhD. The transfer came via a company called Wise, one of those nomad banks that exist primarily in hyperspace and which facilitate global financial transactions for a modest fee. “Our Mission: We’re building money without borders — making it move faster, more conveniently, and eventually for free. Powering money for people and businesses: to pay, to get paid, to spend, in any currency, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing. It’s not empty words. Our teams are dedicated to making each part of it a reality.” In receiving the notice of the transfer to my ANZ account, I also received an offer to “join” the operation. I promptly took their invitation to heart and set up an account and ordered a debit card. They charged me 9.00 USD to do so. Ironically, or appropriately, I paid for it with PayPal. The money was in my ANZ account the next morning, just before I headed downstairs at the Branca Residence to pay my bill.

I greeted “C”, who ran the residence hall, and hauled out my Amex card and my Comerica card. I explained there was 1,000.00 USD on each card and asked to split the bill between the two. He then inserted the Amex card into the POS terminal and it announced the transaction was “Invalid.” I could not use Amex to pay the bill. That left the Comerica debit card and the ANZ debit card. But then something truly strange occurred. The POS terminal died. “C” tried re-booting it several times, but it refused to come back online. Had the luminous golden Amex card knocked it out of service? Who knows? He explained he would have to get a technician in from the bank to fix or replace it. I was off the hook again (or I was on the hook again, depending on which hook was in play) and headed off to catch coffee at the San Giorgio café before heading to Giudecca to deal with the fact that my vaporetto pass would expire at around 4:00pm. I had noted a vending machine at the Palanca vaporetto platform and intended to use it, having examined the available options a day earlier by clicking through the menu. I had more or less decided to put off buying the Unica pass for 100.00 EUR until I felt comfortable spending that much on one of three active cards. I would buy another three-day pass for 45.00 EUR and take the hit. Drifting along in something of a daze, I missed my stop and ended up crossing the Canale della Giudecca and disembarking at Zattere. As soon as I hit the embankment, I noted a kiosk that sold vaporetto passes. I would buy it there, perhaps. But first I wandered down a few calli in Dorsoduro to see what else I might discover. I was also on the lookout for a bank and a proper ATM machine. Circling back, I bought the three-day pass. First trying the Amex card, which was refused again, I switched to the ANZ card. The amusing thing was that, just that morning, I had noticed that the vaporetto pass had the blue Amex insignia on it and the lovely trademarked motto, “Don’t live life without it.”

I decided to stroll a bit. I headed west on the embankment toward San Basilio, scanning the various shops and cafés and hoping to see a bank. At San Basilio, at the very end of the embankment before Banchina di San Basegio and Banchina del Porto Commerciale kick in, I turned into Campo di San Basegio looking for a café I had frequented back in May 2017 during sojourns related to the CEPT Summer School. I was famished from semi-fasting. I found the café and ordered a pizza margherita and a red Moretti beer. I sat outside, facing the afternoon sun, and recalled aspects of the 2017 Summer School, including the “pirate” who inhabited this square by day, and who had a boat full of books parked in the canal that he had scavenged from rubbish tips and wherever else they might be “acquired” … The total damage for this sudden wave of spending was 11.50 EUR.

I headed back to San Giorgio in time to beat the clock on the expiration of my old vaporetto pass. Three days were up as of roughly 4:00pm. En route back, and as we approached Il Redentore, I scanned the façades facing the Canale della Giudecca looking for “The Door” … I suddenly saw it. I also suddenly realized that the “pizza parlor” mentioned by the gentleman I had met on the vaporetto was Redentore, a restaurant I also frequented in past visits. I had not been there yet, this time, due primarily to the 3.00 EUR table charge that was conventional in most restaurants that serviced tourists. Fortunately, San Giorgio café and the smaller, more local establishments did not enforce that surcharge. In the case of San Giorgio café, as I was slowly finding out, it was because the Cini Foundation generally ran the place, if not owned it. “The Door” had a cross above it. I had not seen it before, at close range, walking the embankment. From afar, it was pretty obvious. The building it served was a nondescript block that no doubt was part of the greater Capuchin holdings.

[…]

EL GRECO

I entered Nuova Manica Lunga, the palatial library of the Cini Foundation, on Tuesday morning at around 10:30am, after checking with “C” to see if the POS machine at the Branca Residence had been repaired or replaced. It had not … The mysterious Grace period provided by the Monday incident with the Amex card lingered on, as did my anxiety about it all. Having taken care of the vaporetto pass and slightly loosened the reigns on spending by “splurging” on a pizza and single beer the day before, I was finally ready to launch into my investigation of El Greco.

I entered the library, presented my reader’s card from 2017, which was still apparently valid, and headed for the open stacks that would permit me to browse anything the library had on El Greco that was not in special collections. I found a trove of books, numbering in the dozens, and miraculously about a dozen in English. Oddly, none of the books by Lionello Puppi were on the shelf. They probably were kept in one of several collections related to research carried out at the Cini Foundation. I decided I would inquire later. For the moment, what I wished to do was get a purchase on El Greco’s moves through Italy to Spain.

The dozen or so books were assembled at one of the reader’s tables, and one of the few that I had chosen that was not in English promptly “fell open” at a painting by El Greco of Saint Francis of Assisi. This was followed by nine other paintings of Saint Francis — Plates 93–102. They spanned the years 1570 to 1614 and were more or less presented chronologically. The book was by Manuel B. Cossío, one of the great Spanish art historians responsible for sorting out El Greco’s life-work, even if, then (i.e., 1908), attribution of works was still a bit sketchy. As with many artists of this period, and earlier, we are dealing with “El Greco,” his workshop, his school, and modern forgers. All but one of the ten paintings were of the event of the Stigmata. The book also had no text to speak of. What Cossío’s book was doing was presenting a chronological and thematic “tour” of then-known works by El Greco, from the time of his arrival in Venice (ca. 1559–1560) to the time of his death in Toledo (1614). This included his brief sojourn in Rome (1570–1575) and a very brief visit to Madrid prior to establishing himself in Toledo (1577). He returned briefly to Venice (ca. 1576), where, depending on which art-historical narrative you might wish to subscribe to, he made connections with Spanish notables through Titian, whose workshop he had joined at the age of nineteen. Additionally, if more recent scholarship is correct, El Greco (a.k.a. Il Greco) painted his first “Franciscan” painting in Venice (ca. 1560) — i.e., “St. Francis Receiving the Stigmata,” Plate 93 in Cossío’s book. Cossío places this painting in the period he calls “Transition from Italy to Spain” and lodges it in the period 1576–1579, meaning that El Greco either painted it just before leaving Venice for Spain, or he painted it in the first years in Spain. Either way, it is the beginning of something he will return to over and over again until his death in 1614.

The second book I opened, somewhat intuitively, and after registering Cossío’s gift, confirmed Cossío’s gift. The dedication was to Cossío and his colleagues in Spain who opened the door on El Greco studies. This book was by Harold E. Wethey, an American art historian. It was published in 1962 and purported to have sorted out the usual problems of attribution, etc., which art-historical scholars love to trouble. Called El Greco and His School, it opened with a magnificent, yet somewhat superficial biographical sketch of El Greco’s “career.” The major justification for bothering to read the narrative was to come to some understanding of his peregrinations. Yet there are major holes in the biographical narrative that suggest that the main problem, as rightly noted by Wethey, is that El Greco was mostly unwelcome in Italy and only flourished upon becoming established in Toledo. Thus, the Venetian influences, and most certainly the Roman influences, have mostly been lost. Or so it seems … In traveling to Rome though, in early 1570, he took in works by every possible notable painter along the way. Parma, Florence, Siena, Assisi … Assisi? What in the world did he “see” there? There is no historical record of his visit … But there is sufficient evidence to suggest that he fine-tuned his painterly proficiency through this tour, shifting alliances ever so slightly and generally dropping some of the Renaissance values along the way, while acquiring some Mannerist sensibilities that will take off like a rocket ship in Toledo. The Roman influences, minimal or subtle, were there, as were many of the more exquisite Venetian influences, foremost his proficiency as “colorist.” What was dropping away? The architectural mise-en-scène slowly fell away, but not all at once. New technical proficiency took place in and through what might be called “portraiture,” even if this does not quite encompass what is transpiring. Human expression jumps forth from his scenography, even as the scenography is simplified. Soon enough he will create either wholly idealized and fiery landscapes or dispense with them altogether. Minimal mise-en-scène accompanies almost all portraits. Something is being erased to release something else.

March 14, 2023

[…]

TWO FRANCESCOS

I had decided somewhere along the line of my Venetian adventures that anyone named Francesco was named for Francis of Assisi. As of March 14, 2023, and consistent with my compression of experience through circumstantial happenstance, I knew two Francescos. The first was a musician I had met in Santa Croce in 2021. He played the streets and I had joined him for an evening performance just outside a posh restaurant in San Polo. We had stayed in touch after my departure from Venice in 2021, and I was looking forward to seeing him again. One morning, on Giudecca, to scope out vaporetto options at the vending machine at the Palanca stop, I ran into him at La Palanca, a small café facing the Canale della Giudecca. He recognized me. It took me a minute to sort out that this was “F1” … I joined him for coffee on the embankment and we caught up on things. He was now living in Giudecca and beginning to record his music. He was doing what was necessary, as he explained, to feed the online music world that more or less ruled music today. Without an online presence, he explained, you could not get gigs. People wanted to sample your music before hiring you. The old days of auditioning in person were gone. He headed off to an open-air market across the Canale della Giudecca and I headed back to San Giorgio.

Francesco #2 (“F2”) was my nominal sponsor at the Cini Foundation. He was head of the Centre for Comparative Studies of Civilisations and Spiritualities (CSCS). We agreed to meet in the library at noon on Tuesday, March 14, and go to lunch. He arrived promptly, just as the bells were ringing across Venice, and I left my stack of books on El Greco, first to see the CSCS’s library and be introduced to their activities, and then to go to San Giorgio café for lunch. Strange to say, since I had been going there since 2017, there was an elegant dining room upstairs. I had never seen it. No doubt this was another Cini appurtenance and most of the other guests there that day were from the various chapters of the greater foundation. The tourists tended to sit on the terrace outside the café taking the view to San Marco.

We talked about his work, his living part time in Belgium where his wife was employed, his lack of a teaching position, which, if one had one, tended to prop up your credentials at the Cini Foundation, and aspects of forthcoming projects at CSCS. He invited me to submit a paper for a forthcoming publication on nationalism and religion. He told me about a deal he had just made with Harvard, the Warburg Institute, and a few other fairly prestigious schools and institutes to set up a study of art and spirituality — via, if I recall correctly, an EU-funded deal with the Eranos Foundation in Ascona, Switzerland. His programs were mostly headed toward forms of artistic research and this led to a discussion of my work regarding forms of artistic scholarship. We walked back toward the gated entrance to the main Cini domain, ran into “IM” (who had facilitated our meeting and, effectively, the CSCS sponsorship), and I told her that “F2” and I were plotting revolution, adding a snippet of Judy Collins’ song Marat/Sade: “We want our rights, and we don’t care how! We want a revolution NOW!” That seemed to set everyone aflame for a moment, and then we all fled in different directions to escape the inevitable embarrassment that no revolution was possible at the Cini Foundation because it was, after all, a moneyed cultural “stable” of the Italian kind and ultra-conservative at the upper echelons. “F2” had explained how puzzled they were about some of his work at CSCS, especially the work with comics and such.

[…]

EL GRECO AGAIN

The next morning, between 11:00am and 12:00am, I returned to my stack of books on El Greco and polished off Wethey. He was beginning to get under my skin with his quibbling over attribution. He had effectively managed to demolish at least half of the El Greco canon. But I also understood. El Greco had, upon establishing himself in Toledo, run a workshop that cranked out copies of his work. In this case those copies of a master were clearly inferior. Unlike Renaissance workshops, the master did not assign the backdrop or the preparatory rites to his colleagues and then fill in the missing majesty. El Greco seemed to have permitted many less-talented painters, including his son, to knock off a very large array of his works for the “religious market.” So, I closed the two-volume tirade by Wethey and took a quick look at the other dozen or so titles. I needed to depart the art-historical hothouse as quickly as possible and move on to something more promising. I found one or two essays in two or three other monographs that I would investigate when next I returned to the library. Then I would go looking for Lionello Puppi … The fact that El Greco’s “Franciscanism” was also part of his “marketing” of religious art had rattled me. The majority of the known “Franciscan” works fit into three categories — Francis receiving the Stigmata, Francis in ecstasy, and Francis meditating on death. The workshop copied all of it, and the number of such works of “wrong attribution” far outweighed those by El Greco proper. Wethey also made the point that El Greco was feeding the Counter Reformation mania for penitence and meditation on death. This struck me as slightly outlandish, but it was fairly typical of art-historical sweep and summary judgments. Two days into it, I already felt the need to step back before I found myself painted into yet another corner.

[…]

Wethey’s arguments are so “1960s” … Yet, he redeemed himself from art-historical disgrace by defending El Greco’s “Mannerist” credentials, something he did with slight deference to Max Dvořák, though quibbling over details, and by defying Heinrich Wölfflin’s defiance of Mannerism — Wölfflin ignoring it and moving seamlessly from the Renaissance to the Baroque. If Dvořák “invented” Mannerism, it was not his fault. Something occurred at the late end of Renaissance art, preceding the Baroque. He simply gave it a name, and it has stuck ever since. Wethey also distinguished himself in signaling El Greco’s shift to a mystical Mannerism, in Toledo, the tendencies inherited from both Florentine Mannerism and Tintoretto undergoing a classic “sea change” or transfiguration. Thus, and dispensing with the problems of the workshop and attribution of works, we are required to “see” El Greco’s life-work without the copies and the knock-off religious trade works. He was up to something … What was it?

[…]

Sitting at the café/bar at Giudecca Palanca (Ostaria Vecia Giudecca), at 5:30pm, after battling with Wethey, I had a moment of clarity or — perhaps — lucidity. I had not come to Venice to read English-language, art-historical nonsense on El Greco. I had activated my second three-day vaporetto pass at about 3:30pm. I stepped off the vaporetto in high thirst for a beer and an argument with myself. But, instead, I had one red Moretti and then headed down the embankment. I wanted to withdraw cash at an ATM I had spied and buy some provisions. I was out of food except for a slab of Lithuania-Norwegian “farmed” salmon and a jar of raspberry preserves, mostly gone. The bancomat was occupied. Two souls were pushing the buttons over and over and exchanging pleasantries, glances, and asides. When it was finally my turn to engage with the bancomat robot, I got “Service unavailable” after pushing through several screens. I headed to the grocery store, walked past it twice before finding it and bought an armload of provisions — including a bottle of red wine for 4.19 EUR. The price on the receipt rarely agreed with the price on the shelf, but I never complained. A bottle of red wine for the equivalent of 4.19 EUR was unheard of in the rest of the world. It was a Teroldego, from the Tyrol — the Dolomites. Quite nice, and 12.5% alcohol. It was the second time I had purchased it. The previous time, the Sunday prior to the Day of Reckoning, I had started drinking it at about 6:00pm and finished the bottle at midnight, listening to Johnny Cash, before crashing. The provisions bill came to 8.65 EUR, which I had kept to a minimum in case the ANZ debit card had been compromised and I needed to pay with cash. My rule of “two ways to pay for anything” was still in effect. I used the same debit card I used at the bancomat to make sure it was still working. It was.

I hiked back along the embankment, and then stopped to study “The Door” — it was part of the convent of Sainte Clarissa (Clare). Voila! Merveilleux! I slipped several times on the pavement in my 30.00 USD, 300.00 USD dress shoes, as it had rained in the morning. I thought maybe that I would fall into the canal and sink to the bottom laden with provisions and my ever-present North Face shoulder bag. I did not want to, but it occurred to me that I might. I was hiding in Venice. Would I also drown in Venice? “Hiding in Venice” was relative to what I had left behind in the USSA and in Slovenia. I was actually “waiting in Venice” for what was next. The second, smaller beer at the café facing the Giudecca Palanca was medicinal — or so I said to myself. Soon I would head back to San Giorgio and my cell and transcribe these words (written longhand nonetheless on the Giudecca), and probably open the bottle of blood-red wine.

The Giudecca Palanca vaporetto stop was fascinating. You could watch people get on and off the vaporetto, with dogs or not — i.e., locals. It had vending machines, which people would kick and pound when uncooperative. The vaporetto came from two directions — to San Marco and from San Marco. Actually, it may have circled Venice — from San Marco to San Marco. It hardly mattered. I had dedicated my Venetian lifestyle to avoiding San Marco at all costs — although I might have to go there now to find a serviceable ATM.

The dogs were almost all small; that is, fairly predictable pedigree lap dogs — no Irish wolfhounds — and mostly on leashes. (As I wrote this, a Dalmatian growled at a poodle, as if to confirm the magical properties of Blue Venice …) People often ran to catch the approaching vaporetto. There were several routes. To and fro. But the Number 2 was the big deal. The sun, as it set each day, illuminated the opposite shore — Dorsoduro (“hard ground”). They were frequent, which made the running to catch them somewhat silly, although I too had done it. I had activated Pass #2, saying to no one in particular, “I will subsidize the locals. Most of all the youngsters, who need freedom of movement more than anyone else.” But now I realized that maybe it was for the dogs as well. The weather in March in Venice was quixotic, to say the least. It tilted at rainbows. I half expected another rainbow any day, as I had last seen in May 2017.

March 15, 2023

[…]

I returned to San Basilio on Dorsoduro on Friday, March 17. I had finessed the ridiculous ATM situation by using the Post Office ATM at Giudecca, without any discernible or undue punishment. I had checked online and was warned to stay away from all machines labeled “Euronet,” which was some sort of perverse, usurious system allowed for punishing tourists in Venice with high transaction fees and absurd exchange rates. Bancomats were okay, if they worked …

At Local San Basegio di Ruan Peiying, a Chinese-run café, I ordered the vegetarian course, which consisted of mozzarella and tomatoes, plus a plate of pasta with cream and mushrooms. I also ordered a Moretti Rossa. My first guest was an African who had visited me the last time I was there. I greeted him like an old friend and he was surprised I remembered him. He opened with the same line, “Can you help me, I am actually homeless …” The “actually” was unique. He had used it carefully. I gave him a 2.00 EUR coin and said, “Good to see You …” He genuinely enjoyed being greeted like an old friend and sauntered off with a smile. Shortly afterward, an African woman approached with a double load of jewelry and a baby strapped to her back. She showed me the bracelets and I expressed interest. She then pulled up a chair and sat down. I asked where she was from. “Senegal,” she said. “How long have you been here?” I asked. “Three years,” she said. I noted a silver bracelet (probably stainless steel or aluminum) with owls and said, “I like this one. How much do you get?” She said, “Thirty euro.” I thought that I had heard incorrectly, so she wrote it in the air so that I could see it. As I was still counting pennies, I was alarmed. I said, “Whoops. That much?” “Yes,” she said and then added another bracelet with turtles as bonus. How could I resist. I checked my cash and gave her 30.00 EUR for both — two for one, so to speak, except who really knew the real price, if there even was one. And why should there be? She told me that her mother made the bracelets. Why should I doubt her? This was a cosmic transaction not meant for the ledger. By now she had pulled the baby from her back and begun to breastfeed him. He was one year old, she said. He cried and fussed the entire time and made faces. I asked if she liked Venice and she shook her head to more or less say “No.” She then asked for 5.00 EUR for milk for the baby. She had seen that a 5.00 EUR note was exactly what was left after giving her 30.00 EUR. I demurred and let it ride. She did not persist. She was breastfeeding the baby. Did she need to buy milk? Who knows? She told me the baby’s name was Amore. Voila! A visitation from Heaven. She left more or less contented, after strapping the baby onto her back with scarves wrapped around her backside and then tied tightly at her waist and breasts. I then noticed that the Chinese maître d’/waiter had been watching us. I nodded in his direction and he went inside placated. I then went to pay my bill and said to him, “Nice people.” He nodded again. I paid the bill of 15.40 EUR with the ANZ debit card, now my mainstay, and headed back to San Giorgio. I only noticed later that the maître d’/waiter did not charge me for my second Moretti Rossa. Was it a gesture of goodwill for what he had witnessed? With no way to know, I decided it was.

When I entered the Cini library at about 4:00pm, I had roughly two hours before closing. I walked to the table where my pile of books awaited me and found three more books placed there by an unknown person/visitor. Someone had left them for whatever reason. I sat down, examined them, and realized that whatever accident had brought them to me, it was quite clearly not quite an accident. The missing Lionello Puppi, whom I had implored to guide me in my study of El Greco, was implicated in two of them, and the third was a strange confirmation not to take Ellis K. Waterhouse too seriously, as he was part of the snobbish British School in Rome mafia and a very close friend of Anthony Blunt, both truly effete Brit-scholars, Oxbridge educated, with immense pretensions. Blunt having been a Soviet spy was not an issue … It was irrelevant. The three books were pure gift, and I did not think anyone had left them there intentionally for me to find. They were left there as “pure gift” by absolute synchronistic effect doubling as cosmological affect and — perhaps — triply storied as example of “Grace” … I dutifully wrote down in my notebook the titles and the main points of the “gift” … Somewhat blasted by it all, I then decided to wander back to my cell and do next to nothing at all, if at all possible.

[…]

The next day, Saturday, March 18, I forced myself to begin the process of “writing” the essay on the peregrinations of El Greco. For the first three days of reading, I had felt paralyzed by the art-historical hysteria surrounding his so-called catalogue. What was the bloody point, to use a Britishism? It smacked of the usual largesse of legerdemain (hocus pocus) — that old sleight of hand that art historians love to indulge to outdo one another. One-upmanship, anyone? Points on the ladder to nowhere? Now duly warned about the effete set, by the Holy Ghost, Lionello Puppi, or an anonymous bungler, I set out to lodge a complaint and summarized in 895 words (1,976 words counting the assiduously compiled footnotes complying with the absurdist standards of the day) my initial understandings of El Greco’s “record” as he crossed Italy en route to Spain, both forms of exile that I had an inner sense of empathy for. This was written in several sessions — actually three. The first session was before I set out to Zattere to buy yet another three-day vaporetto pass, still unwilling to spend 100.00 EUR on a Unica pass, as the Branca POS gadget was still OOS (i.e., dead). The second session was when I was sitting with the locals at the café/pub at Palanca and waiting for the tobacconist to open at 4:00pm (they closed midday every day). Along the way, prior to settling in at the café/pub at Palanca, I went for another armload of provisions at the grocery store just past Il Redentore. The timing with the tobacconist had thrown me somewhat. I had planned to get back to San Giorgio before Vaporetto Pass #2 expired and save launching Vaporetto Pass #3 until Monday. I was now doing three days on, one day off, in rotation, to minimize the damage.

At the café/pub, with a Moretti Rossa and few cigarettes, I managed to knock off another round of writing as I sat in the cold on the embankment enjoying the spectacle of the locals disembarking at Palanca to head home with dogs, strollers, husbands, boyfriends, girlfriends, etc. Across the canal it was tourist hell. Here it was different. The only tourists that got off the vaporetto at Giudecca either made a huge mistake or they were headed for the one or two cultural objets d’art — including, alas, Il Redentore. The third session was when I arrived back at San Giorgio and more or less failed once again to do next to nothing. The last, third session was the dabbling in footnotes, which usually meant taking my handwritten notes and transcribing them to back up my narrative. The narrative and the notes were actually two narratives. Things I did not wish to say in the main narrative could be slipped into the notes, and the notes were preemptive strikes on anyone who dared question how well-documented the narrative was, even with its leaps into the wild blue yonder to escape mere discursive argumentation. El Greco was finally coming alive for me. His work was becoming mesmeric for me. I only needed to sustain the foray. I was one week in … I had three more weeks to go.

March 18, 2023

[…]

SANTA CROCE

On March 24, a Friday, I completed my “tour” of El Greco scholarship and closed up the essay, having been religiously transcribing my notes from Day Three or so. The essay was at about 7,000 words (with at least half being footnotes). Only minor flourishes would be required, unless a whole new channel opened up — and it was unlikely. I had had more than enough of art-historical argumentation and one-upmanship. If anything, I would go back later to hunt down the literary-biographical strains I had detected, including Cocteau, but which art historians had no use for.

I headed to Palanca at just before 4:00pm, to the tobacconist. I ran into “IM” heading off from work at the Cini archives, as she departed her HQ, and we traveled together on the vaporetto to Palanca.

After purchasing tobacco (American Spirit Blue), I went to the café/bar at Palanca to contemplate next moves. “IM” and I had discussed contacting the Franciscans a day or two earlier. I was not sure if I was ready to take the plunge. I needed another vaporetto pass as of roughly 4:00pm on Saturday. After one Moretti Rossa, I headed to Zattere for yet another three-day pass for 45.00 EUR. The kiosk was closed. This prompted a moment of reflection on why I should do this once again, and I decided to wander into Dorsoduro once again, reaching a decision part way, before circling back, to “keep going” … “Keep going” meant heading to Santa Croce for dinner, at a restaurant I had been frequenting since 2017, if not earlier. But I got lost again crossing Dorsoduro, staying west of the Grand Canal, and trying to connect up with Santa Pantalon in Santa Croce. Seeing signs along the way for Piazzale Roma — Ferrovia, I followed them instinctively. I ended up at Piazzale Roma. Pausing, I realized I might as well now actually attempt to buy a Unica card. I inquired at one window and was politely sent to the “other” set of windows I recalled being for locals to pay bills, etc. I waited. One window out of half-a-dozen windows was open for the specified transaction; two out of the half-a-dozen windows had civil servants sitting in late-afternoon boredom with nothing to do. I took the form “IM” had printed for me out of my shoulder bag and filled in the parts I could decipher. It was in Italian with far too small fields for the information it was asking for to be entered. Eventually my number came up on the overhead screen and I stepped forth to the Window #5 ready to play the clueless American. I inquired if I could buy a Unica card. “Yes.” I said I had the form. “Good.” I asked for assistance with the remaining fields. “Okay. ID, please.” I did not have it with me. I checked my wallet and shamelessly, or — more properly — sheepishly, produced my Bodleian Libraries reader’s card, the only card I had with me with a photo. No dice. Passport or other official “state ID.” I nodded, and off I went … It was classic reconnaissance and reminded me of my dealings with Upravna enota in Ljubljana, still unresolved.

I noted the two-week symmetries sometime during my walk, which were occurring over and over, and now again. In checking my calendar, I also noted that April 9, two weeks away, and when I was to leave Venice, was “Easter” …

I found Dolfin and had the first proper meal in two weeks. They had not changed since 2017, other than staff. The understated elegance and superb cuisine were still there. The beauty was also to be found in an inner expression of loyalty to memory, but also to them. Down the way a bit was Hotel dalla Mora, my first hotel in Venice, recommended by “TS” in London. Santa Pantalon had depth for me. It made sense that I was “back” — especially now, midway through the latest Venetian adventure, with “now” being when I was more less thoroughly exhausted, famished, and ready for whatever was “next” after two weeks in my monastic routine at the Cini Foundation. The bill for dinner (two glasses of red wine, mushroom ravioli in cream sauce, and a side of spinach, plus bread) was 25.00 EUR, which I ceremonially put on the gold Amex card for justifiable reasons. It was the backup card. The card for occasional luxuries. The card itself was a luxury. I used it with great care. And I used it now with semi-wild abandon. 25.00 EUR. Wow!

I stopped at Café Noir, further down Santa Pantalon, studied the drinks menu, used the restroom, and then ordered a margarita. 7.00 EUR. I had first met Francesco #1 (“F1”) here in 2017, at the seats along the calle, outside, wooden stool and narrow wooden bar facing into the café/bar proper. It was the classic, “happening kind of place.” It reminded me of NYC, for whatever reason. Boisterous, brazen, and semi-hip. It was, again, a local establishment in many respects. That was the vibe. And “young.” No elder tourist other than “mon moi” seemed to frequent the place. “Just gritty enough to be bohemian without being divey, this dark-beamed drinking den offers a long list of cocktails, Guinness on tap and cheap wine […]” Lonely Planet.

The bartender shook the tequila, triplesec, and ice vigorously and then strained away the ice. It was “up” — no cocktail mix in sight, and no ice in the glass. The rim of the glass was appropriately dipped in heavy salt. Miraculous elixir. The bartenders and bar-mistresses all had tattoos — numerous tattoos. The interior extended however far — to the canal at the back of the ground floor, as far as I knew. But I stayed outside smoking, and sipping away at the margarita, taking in the carnival of the street — the to and fro of revelers on the narrow calle that led to San Toma. I did not actually engage with anyone, other than through silent reflection and observation.

I chose to wander back through the same calli I traversed en route to Piazzale Roma, as if to prove to myself I could walk this district again. I turned on my radar and headed across the part of Venice I identified as essentially “Ca’ Foscari” — a university embedded in the transitional borderlands of Santa Croce/San Polo/Dorsoduro. I crossed Santa Margherita where, the next day, a group of anarchists intended to occupy the square. Crisscrossing canals, and occasionally walking very narrow and very empty calli, I emerged a stone’s throw from Zattere and hopped the Number 2 vaporetto back to San Giorgio, returning to my cell for another round of contemplation and literary-exegetical mischief. I was bound and determined to begin to “network” the El Greco essay, dropping it as well into the thesis manuscript, which signaled that it was effectively “done.”

[…]

I awoke fairly early the next morning, March 25, at about 6:30am. I had that usual sense of partial regret for having spent any money or time “on the town.” This was a recurring theme for at least a year. I felt at times like the reluctant bon vivant. I was actually feeling a reaction inside of a reaction, an antipathy toward even wanting to engage with nightlife. Somewhere inside of these dueling feelings was a hybrid person who was an ascetic-bon vivant. A contradiction in terms, perhaps, it also made sense. The type is actually typical in terms of activities undertaken. Both scholarship and art are intensely inwardly calibrated at their existential levels. Artists and scholars have often been utter recluses while also craving social interaction. Where was the middle ground — especially these days. Rousseau and Flaubert came to mind … and then left … They were not quite indicative of what I sensed. Both needed isolation, and both would dive into Parisian high society anyway. Perhaps I craved salons as well? Yet the inescapable sense I had these days of renewed wandering in pursuit of the Grail, the Golden Fleece, the Knock-out Punch, was that I needed something that I could not see or understand. It might be a middle ground or it might be one or the other of the two extremes. Plunging into social activity could wipe out the required reflective side. Ramping up the isolation might produce what was needed, but at what cost?

I shook it all off and headed back to Piazzale Roma via Number 2 vaporetto to acquire the Unica card. I arrived at about 8:15am not knowing if they would be open yet. I had failed to note their hours during the previous visit. They were open, and they had actually opened at around 6:30am. There were about two dozen people waiting in line for various services. It was, after all, a Saturday. There was also a heavy police presence in Piazzale Roma due to the expectation that the anarchists were coming to occupy Santa Margherita. I had confirmed this rumor by glancing at the newspaper the previous evening while at the café/bar at Palanca.

I watched the four out of six windows that were open to try to discern if they were all doing Unica cards. At least several were, from what I could make out. That would, at the least, expedite matters somewhat. It took about 45 minutes for my number, D004, to come up on the electronic screen. I stepped forward, presented the form I had haphazardly filled out, having guessed what certain fields required for info, was asked if I was making my first application for the Unica card, answered “Yes,” and the woman behind the Plexiglas wall launched into typing everything into her computer. I gave her my passport and a passport photo I had left over from Ljubljana, when, in August 2022, I had paid a photo studio to make a batch in preparation for the Upravna enota visa process and the renewal of my passport at the US Embassy.

She typed away, transcribing the details of the paper form to the computer system, and eventually took a photo of the photo I had given her. I had noted that other people buying the pass had their photo taken through the Plexiglas wall by a small handheld digital camera. For whatever reason she decided to take a photo of my photo, which struck me as very curious and charming. I signed an electronic screen with an electronic pen about half a dozen times as she clicked through various agreements I could hardly read or even care about, and — Voila! — I had a Unica pass. The plastic card cost 100.00 EUR, and was good for five years. She asked how much I wanted to put on the card, and I said “20.00 EUR.” She handed it to me and explained that I now had 14 trips on the vaporetto — i.e., roughly 1.43 EUR per trip. I glanced at the card she handed me and noted that the photo she had taken of my photo was beautifully blurry. How perfect. The entire experience was a blur. I departed and decided to walk back through Santa Croce and Dorsoduro to the Zattere stop and hop back on the vaporetto. I wanted to confirm that I knew the route. I also wanted to see if the police were in the area near Santa Margherita. The only sign of a police presence that I noted was a few trash cans covered with black-plastic bags — probably so that no one could place a bomb in any of them. There was no sign of the police.

Back at San Giorgio café, for a late-morning cappuccino or two, I received two email messages from Venezia Unica. They both had PDF attachments of documents I had signed at Piazzale Roma via electronic pen. The message for both emails was the same: “Gentile ‘GK’, in allegato il contratto da Lei sottoscritto e firmato in data 25/03/2023 presso l’Agenzia Venezia Unica. Ogni eventuale risposta alla presente non avrà seguito: si invita a utilizzare esclusivamente i moduli di contatto presenti all’interno della sezione ‘Servizi al Cliente’ dei siti aziendali del gruppo AVM. Cordialmente.” According to Google translate, the message was entirely performative: “Dear ‘GK’, Attached is the contract signed by you on 03/25/2023 at the Venezia Unica agency. Any response to this letter will not be followed up: please use only the contact forms in the ‘Customer Services’ section of the AVM group company websites. Cordially.”

In quickly examining the two PDFs, I noted that my birthdate was wrong, my address was scrambled, but my name and email address was correct. The two main details of the transaction had been transcribed correctly — i.e., name and email. The rest was unimportant anyway. Additionally, somewhere in the Venezia Unica system was my passport info. No doubt that was all the authorities really needed, plus the 100.00 EUR.

I had yet to pay my 850.00 EUR Branca Center bill, through no fault of my own, and it continued to be a source of anxiety. I wanted it out the way and out of mind. The money was, however, now parked on one card, versus two, since the delay had also permitted yet another SS payment of 1,003.00 USD from the USSA to arrive on March 22 — just following the Spring Equinox and more or less coinciding with the New Moon in Aries. The car crash of planets in Aries on March 21 was impressive: Sun, Moon, Jupiter, and Mercury. The astrological report from Hare in The Moon described this pile up as epochal: “The New Moon at 0° Aries is switching on the ignition keys of life, aligning with Pluto, Saturn, Mars and the karmic Nodes of Fate, sparking strong Will, forward momentum and initiation. This is the first of two New Moons in Aries — the next one on April 20 will be a total eclipse.” For Librans, the forecast was promising: “Your sign is going to be centre stage along with your opposite sign of Aries until 2025. That’s due to the Aries New Moon at the Equinox on March 20 being the first of two this year with the second a total eclipse. You’re ready to express a new way of being in the world and experience the evolutionary impact of others in your life and a series of wild card eclipses across Aries/Libra will ensure just that over the next 18 months. On March 23, Transformer Pluto enters futurist Aquarius until July, giving you a preview of what the next years will bring. Pluto has been in harsh aspect to your sign since 2008, creating disruption and change in your home, family and tribe. As he enters your 5th House of creativity, the pressure will start to recede.” And: “Ask yourself: ‘If everything is up for grabs and nothing is a given, what would I want to create in the world/for the world and how would I go about creating it?’” I decided to decide that this was confirmation of the project underway — i.e., the abolition of “intellectual property rights.” Why not?

[…]

Curiously, I now had two invitations to academic, law-related events — one a conference in Rome, and the other a workshop in Lucerne, Switzerland.

FORTHCOMING — 23rd International Roundtables for the Semiotics of Law (IRSL 2023), Pontificia Università Antonianum, Rome, Italy — May 24–27, 2023

FORTHCOMING— Critical Times Workshop, MOVEMENT(S), University of Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland — June 5–9, 2023

The former would cost 170.00 EUR, plus travel and accommodations, while the latter would cost 500.00 CHF, plus travel and accommodations. Both were also outside of the Schengen 90-day window I was dancing with, making the arrival of the student visa somewhat critical. The only other way to pull off both events, which I doubted I could afford anyway, was to step outside of the EU by going to London again. Yet going to London again would just add further cost to the equation. It all made no sense, per usual. I decided that it would have to sort itself out over time. Both events would be occasions to present the ideational Franciscanism project. The price tag attached to that version of “reporting on works” — versus, for example, mere publication of research — would be high, regardless. Rome and Lucerne would have to wait … Rome was already waiting, given that I had demurred and asked to be permitted to pay the conference fees after sorting out the visa, etc. They were saving me a place … Lucerne required confirming my intentions by late March — and late March was fast approaching. Would they also permit a “creative” solution through postponing the decision? The generally impersonal email of acceptance suggested “No”:

Thank you once again for your application to participate in this year’s Critical Times workshop on Movement(s), due to take place from Monday 5 to Friday 9 June 2023 at the University of Lucerne.

We are delighted to inform you that you have been selected to take part in the workshop. Congratulations.

Could we please ask that you confirm whether you would like to take up the place by Friday 31 March. We ask this, as we have a number of applicants on a stand-by list, and would like to re-allocate any available places to them.

Once you confirm acceptance of your place, we will send out the details for the payment of the registration fee (500 CHF).

As advertised in the call, the fee does not include accommodation, which participants will need to arrange themselves. Below this message you will find a list of possible accommodation options.

The fee does cover tuition, materials, lunches and coffee breaks across all five days, as well as a number of evening events and receptions.

It was impossible to know if the “stand-by list” mentioned in the e-mail actually existed. It could … and then it might just be boilerplate conference-speak. In this case, given the event was a fairly expensive workshop, it was highly likely that the “stand-by list” was an alibi for pressing candidates to pay. The first option I had was to withdraw. The second was to ask for more time — to play for time. Rome had agreed to this strategy. Would Lucerne? The Lucerne invite arrived on March 22, the moment of the celestial car crash noted above. Was it a red herring? It struck me as so. My concern for building a conversation around the “No Rights” project had hit a peak at this same time, and this message seemed the perfect carrot on a stick from “academia” … The ridiculous price warned me, somewhere not so deep within, of the need to beware of the renascent machinery of the neoliberal academic model. The empty conferences I had been attending remotely for the past two years had warned me that such venues were increasingly pointless. I had little information to go on as to whether Rome or Lucerne would be pointless and a waste of money. It was best to dodge both, for now, if possible — to await clarification further down the road via circumstances. Saying “No” upfront seemed unnecessary, though kicking both down the road also seemed slightly illicit.

March 25, 2023

[…]

HALFWAY TO “EASTER”

Sunday morning, March 26, I headed to Giudecca at about “8:00am.” The clock had just changed, due to Daylight Savings Time. It was actually (probably) 9:00am (CEST). Yet my various phones and my computer were in general disagreement as to what time it actually was when I left my cell at the Branca Residence. Arriving at Giudecca, I had a cappuccino and a muffin at Majer, the only café open serving coffee and pastries, and headed west down the embankment to look for any opportunities to buy tobacco. The usual suspects were all closed on Sunday. I noted Franciscans preparing to open the doors at Sant’Eufemia Church, and lingered. Would I step inside? I crossed the small canal to Fondamenta San Biagio and noted a small patch of greenery on the embankment. It was very rare, with most of the paved embankments along the Giudecca sporting, at best, a few stunted trees. I strolled straight into it … I immediately saw a few patches of clover. Crouching down, I plucked two four-leaf clovers and one five-leaf.

I crossed back to Sant’Eufemia and people were entering the church. I went inside and sat down. It was a very simple church without a great deal of ostentatious décor. It had an ancient ambiance … (I would find out later that it was of Venetian-Byzantine origin, first built in the ninth century.) It appeared “mostly baroque,” at least to my eye, from the few paintings I could see and the architecture of the altar. The exterior facing the Canale della Giudecca was utterly nondescript, despite its portico, and I had at first thought it might be a charterhouse or such.

The service began with two guitarists (one Franciscan monk and one teenager), a keyboardist (with a small laptop keyboard of some sort), and a drummer (with a single conga- or bongo-type drum). A woman and a young girl, sitting behind this ensemble, had tambourines. They opened with a folk hymn of some sort (perhaps a canticle). The service (Mass) was punctuated by their simple performances, the Franciscan guitarist providing the lead vocals. The priest, dressed in purple, held forth in Italian, with occasional parishioners reading various texts. Everything was miked up, including the priest. Finally, after one especially long performance (a sermon or such) by the officiating priest, the Sacrament (Eucharist) was prepared. I watched his every move and gesture. Here was the sacred rite within all Catholic rites. I did not step forth to receive Communion … I felt it was wrong. I am not Catholic, and I doubt I ever will be Catholic. (I heard myself saying to myself, in defense of myself, that I am a Protestant.) At the end of Communion, I watched the second-in-command, the assistant to the priest, place the remains of the communion offering (Eucharist) in a reliquary at the high altar. The reliquary was designed like a small church. It had two doors, one inside another. The doors were golden. He closed the first door, after placing the now-consecrated host inside the reliquary, and then he closed and locked the second, outer golden door. Or so it seemed that he locked it. There was a curious twist of the wrist and the gesture of palming the key. It was a type of vault, regardless, for the Sacrament/Eucharist.

[I immediately thought of Nikos Kazantzakis, and his departure from Mount Athos, in Report to Greco, something that had been “returning to me” over and over these past days. Upon touring Mount Athos, and after a particularly dark passage where he had entered one of the most severe orders at Mount Athos, witnessing some monks lost forever to a whole-heartedly, dark-vitalist catechism, an almond tree burst into bloom, almost upon command, as he was departing the quay. Or so he wrote … The book is a novella-memoir. It was a signal, according to his own catechism, to continue on his journey, unalarmed, but without delusions regarding escapism and the darker reaches of religion. But it was also before his journey to Italy, and his engagement with Francis of Assisi, if I recall correctly. And it was before his journey to northern Europe, and the great scene where he is sitting on a bench or such at Normandy or Brittany, and the German Luftwaffe is passing overhead, en route to bombing London. His High Romantic “modernist” naïveté is duly shattered.]

[…]

I wandered back toward Palanca, passed the closed tobacconists, and kept going. I passed Il Redentore, clearly the church for the privileged, and which I had yet to enter, crossed several more arched bridges, and then watched a father and his young son of maybe half-a-dozen years heading toward Zitelle at the east end of Giudecca. At Fondamenta de la Croce, with a quick flick of his hand to his father, the young lad dashed ahead of his father to enter a calle, stop and look back, and, once again signaling to his father, enter a door next to an ATM. It was a shop I had never noticed before. I followed. It sold tobacco. I sent mental thanks to the young lad and then lingered a bit. I observed the various wares on sale, mostly household items and paraphernalia of various kinds, including magazines and newspapers. At the back of the shop was a small set of slot machines attended to by a group of elderly gentlemen. These hybrid machines, half slot and half video game, suggested a little casino.

I caught the vaporetto at Zitelle and returned to San Giorgio at High Noon (CEST). I had scored two hits to my new Unica card in the process, but I had two four-leaf clovers, one five-leaf clover, and my first encounter with the Venetian Franciscans under my belt. Once at San Giorgio café, I turned on my second cellphone to pick up wi-fi. Being a smartphone, versus the dumb phone that did not know what time it was earlier in the day, it welcomed me to Italy for the first time since arriving two weeks earlier.

Taking a closer look at both phones, I found that the US-based smartphone was picking up its signal from Vodafone IT and the EU-based dumb phone was picking up its signal from something called Windtre. Most likely the latter had not yet converted to CEST, but would do so at the appropriate appointed hour …

[…]

[Passage currently withheld]

[…]

On the morning of discovering Sant’Eufemia, I had transcribed the following message from my inner artist-scholar, yet another attempt to demolish everything standing in the way of writing what seemed to be — at times — an utter denunciation of “our times”:

The Myth of Works

The myth of works is something altogether different than the myth of genius or the myths that objective-empirical scholarship loves to demolish. The auto-hagiographic nature of life-works is effectively “non-human.” The mythos is the mysterium, and vice versa — e.g., in the precise sense that, for Hegel, the ideal is the real and the real is the ideal. (It is also possible to say the ideal was the real and the real was the ideal, given that Hegel’s radical and totalizing project toward a system ended up mired in socio-cultural terms once it began to privilege the real and forms of mediation that bordered on an ideological putsch masquerading as pragmatism and a political utilitarianism that could be coopted by the left or the right. Marx was, thus, correct to invert and subvert Hegel’s system, insofar as the diachronic political agenda was veering off into dangerous territory.)

It is all, nonetheless, a case of a doubled tautology at play in/through works and of/for life-works. When transferred from authors to works, in terms of an analytic of works-based agency, this mythos is inherent to works, versus applied to works. It becomes in the process an odd echo of modernist theories of autonomy. As inherent nature or anti-nature, it also is sacrosanct and cannot be confirmed or denied. It merely is. It is identified versus constructed. It is the ethos and telos coming into combined effect through life-works, the life-work representing the entelechy of the agency of the works that comprise the life-work. The Aristotelian cut is not required to speak of such an entelechy, for it overflows or exceeds any vitalist estimation of its supposed ecosystem — e.g., its reliance on a pre-existing gramma. The Neoplatonism of the antithetical view is also not required, for such life-works as mythos removes any need to premise works on direct antecedents, spectral or otherwise. All of the errors of modernist cultural analysis are captured “here” and neutralized — and foremost sociology as pseudo-science. The antecedents are there, as forms of prior art, but they are transformed and transfigured through new works. The implicit homage to prior art is part of the entelechy. In the ecosystems to come, for non-proprietary forms of artistic scholarship, the mythos, as ethos and telos, will need to circumvent or circumnavigate the premises of the current or last vestiges of the socio-cultural biases of modernist revolt against conventions, an insurrection most often portrayed as a revolt against the edicts of Big History. Hobsbawm was almost right in his estimation that any avant-garde or any art that remains “beyond” the reach of the everyday (thus cuing Bourdieu, Lefebvre et al.) remains effectively pretentious and elitist. The mythos of an artistic scholarship to come (as embedded in the transitional gestalt of the various and absurd, present-day broken ecosystems of late capitalism) also negates, through the explicit but elective abolition of intellectual property rights, the failed prospects of “postmodernist endlessness” — viz., that late-modern complex, sociologically and psychologically conceived, of serial deferral and ponderous inoperativity (Nancy, Rancière, Agamben, Žižek, Badiou et al.), plus the equally ponderous demand of the capitalized humanities to make everything “public” (Latour et al.). Critically, this “last” revolt will be through collectivist-based life-works, and an entelechy of mythic composure, if it is to have any historical or a-historical merit and “grip” on reality — to change “reality.”

It was intended as a “coda” to the El Greco essay, more or less wrapped up on Friday, March 24 with a last session with the art historians via the Cini Library. They had finally done me in. I had lost almost all regard for them. One, in particular, had finished off any interest in the art-historical record by lambasting that record and then situating his own bias as an antidote. I felt some empathy for him at first, since that was also my apparent agenda, but “lost it” once I read more about the antidote. He wished to make El Greco a product of his times, as if that was unique. But in doing so he was rehearsing the entire tragic, art-historical charade that passed as due diligence on El Greco’s “record.” This passage on the mythos of works, notably, was also a segue to the next section in “Essay Seven: Illuminated Mirrors” of the PhD thesis, a treatment on the subtheme of the W4W2 project regarding luminous works, and which had arrived out of the telepathic visit to Assisi in late 2022. The next section slated for development in that essay was to be called, “The Peregrinations of Walter Benjamin …”

March 26, 2023

[…]

Semaforo: Divination Cards. Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice, Italy. Photo: Gavin Keeney.

SEMAFORO

“O unsuspected riches! O goods that multiply by being shared!”

–Dante Alighieri

The Venice research project closed itself up on Good Friday, April 7, 2023.+ Dante had arrived the previous Friday to assist. He dropped in via The Divine Comedy, and Paradiso, wherein he retold the story/tale of Saint Francis through Thomas Aquinas, confirming that the thesis “reduction” of ideational Franciscanism was more or less sound. He also effectively announced closure of the thesis. He wished, apparently, to have the “last word” … I agreed to agree.

On April 6, with the assistance of “IM”, I had asked the set of divination cards left at the Cini Foundation in July 2017 “where” to take W4W2 — i.e., the manuscript. The answer was fairly straightforward, though veiled through the mysterious imagery of the cards: Back to LJU … To an enforced silence … To an austere reduction … A sustained vigil. “No hurry,” the cards instructed … “Laze about” like a golden cat, but with eyes open. Rest and prepare for October-December 2023 …

+Feast of the Holy Annunciation in the Orthodox tradition, as observed by “N” …

[…]

THE READING

Where to take W4W2: “No Rights” …

Card 22 — Golden Cat (S) (Plenitude) ©

Card 23 — Café Society (b)

Card 1 — Digital Eye (Y) (Plenitude) (o)

Card 8 — Black Cross (v)

Numerological Reduction One — 22 + 23 + 1 + 8 = 54 = 9. The number 9 signals revolution and closure.

“Golden Cat” + “Black Cross”

“Lazing about” in Ljubljana (cards 22 + 23 + 8) … Extended Vigil … One eye on the time frame of October 31 to December 22 (cards 22 + 1) … Cat’s paws (card 22) … “No hurry” (card 22 + 23) … Vigilance (card 1 + 8) … Absolute reduction + vigil (card 8) …

The embedded sense of this reading of the cards was, “There is no hurry.” The Golden Cat is half asleep and ignoring people, yet with both eyes open, wary. The digital eye (cyclops) is always open, always on. It is watching everything. It is vigilant beyond reason. Manuscript as Black Cross. “No hurry” is suggested by café society and by the half-asleep golden cat. Perhaps it was all a ruse — a projected ennui and deference to “whatever may come” (yet only feigned). Thus, the vigilance is “tripled” (the cat, the digital cyclops, and the black cross). The Golden Cat card (22) and the Digital Eye card (1) are both cards of plenitude (with luminous red hearts). The Golden Cat card, however, is the trump card, and rules the roost (all of the other cards). The time frame (marked by Celtic-Christian festivals) is from All Hallow Eve (October 31 to November 2) (S) to Yule (December 22) (Y) — Golden Cat and Digital Eye combined. This coincides with the next semester at ZRC-SAZU and the next cultural window (season) following Summer. The Black Cross card has multiple meanings — it is a sign of the abstract and the avant-garde (Malevich + Laibach + NSK). Number 8 also signals “home” (LJU) …

The images on the reverse side (verso) are all semi-abstract and obscure, and perhaps serve as force majeure or/as possible escape route — e.g., opt-out via intentional obfuscation. None hold additional notation other than alpha code. This suggests that the reverse side of the cards (in terms of the works-based agency of the encoded system) represents an alternative route/answer for the question posed — and/or a supplementary reading.* The abstract nature of those images also tends to emphasize the Black Cross card, which, given the presence of Malevich, signals austerity in “representation/ presentation” … i.e., a performative silentio (argument from silence) …

Numerological Reduction Two — Alpha code on the four primary cards (c = 3), (b = 2), (o = 12), (v = 5) = 22 = 4. The number 4 signals Earth. “Return to Earth” = re-register the project “here and now” (escaping the historical analysis), while preserving its evocation of the zero degree as passage “out of this world” … Thus, the sense of “return” is doubled — or tripled. Return to Ljubljana (and “N”) and return “to Earth” …

*The divination cards, as of April 2023, are still relatively untested, having been read only three times in relation to transmedia projects since their formulation in 2017. The first reading, from July 2017, regarded “where” to take the performance-based research works produced in India in early 2017, inclusive of the CEPT Summer School project, “Media, Transmedia, and the Multiple Arts,” which produced the cards. The second reading, from August 2021, regarded “where” to take the performance-based study of Veronese’s The Wedding at Cana. Two of the four cards in Reading Two were also present in Reading Three: i.e., Digital Eye and Black Cross. Additionally, the Veronese project would finally come to fruition, as predicted by the cards, in May 2023, the time frame from Reading Two having been “June to December,” via the Celtic festival notation, Lithia (Summer Solstice), Mabon (Autumn Equinox), Yule (Winter Solstice) …** The imagery in this third reading, April 2023, concerning “where” to take W4W2, tends to verify that the cards have predictive agency insofar as they access works-based agency in works underway and yet to be completed, if ever completed. The supplementary cards (i.e., verso imagery) concerning “where” to take W4W2 included: crystalline forms resembling apples; a crystalline and illumined glass cylinder; a vertiginous and reddish spiral staircase, viewed from above; and a drowned partisan (a cropped image of a bronze sculpture from the Canale di San Marco, en route to the Giardini). Notably, the combined import of the imagery, across all cards, in all three readings, tends to “sink in” quite slowly, i.e., across 24 hours, slowly building to a type of cognitive roadmap for and toward answering the question asked.

**There is some slippage here between “May” and “June,” suggesting a delayed effect … “Fruition” of the Veronese project concerns publication of the research in Vesper: Journal of Architecture, Arts & Theory 8, “Vesper” (May 2023).

Reading witnessed and assisted by “IM”.

ARCHiVe

Cini Foundation

Venice, Italy

April 6, 2023

[…]

I had booked a Go-Opti transfer, from VCE to LJU, on April 1, for April 9 — Easter Sunday. All that was required now was that I actually manage to board the shuttle and “make the return” to “home base” …

[…]

GOOD FRIDAY, (CAP)ITALIA

At around 1:00pm, and needing to kick into flâneur mode, I headed for the Giardini, to find the drowned partisan and say “Hello” … There was a light breeze and the sun was a warm presence, finally, after several bone-chilling days. I took the Number 2 vaporetto from San Giorgio to San Marco/San Zaccaria, having avoided traveling in that direction for four weeks, but also mocking that direction for four weeks … I marched through tourist Hell until I reached the edge of the Giardini district at Via Giuseppe Garibaldi, and then stopped to roll a cigarette in a small park. The light breeze cooperated and merely tried (pretended) to blow away the loose-leaf tobacco. I marched on and finally found the unnamed drowned partisan in a swirl of water at the edge of the embankment, covered in (and now drowning in) algae and seaweed. (I realized that I had been gazing in his direction for four weeks. Isola di San Giorgio Maggiore was in the far distance across Canale di San Marco.) I stepped over the railing meant to keep tourists at bay, and crossed stepping stones amidst garbage and muck to get a closer look. I felt agitated. I left. I headed further along the embankment and stopped at a café, which I recalled from my days of visiting the Biennale, for a beer. A young woman greeted me with a smile and presented options. I chose a Peroni red. I asked the cashier for a glass, pointing to a cabinet full of them, and she told me it cost 7.00 EUR versus 4.00 EUR to have a seat outside in the near-empty terrace. My temperature started rising. Finally, she gave me a plastic cup and I went into the park behind the café/bar and sat down on a wooden bench facing the Giardini. I rolled three cigarettes (doubled rolled them, because they last longer that way) and exhaled. I drank the beer and smoked, all the while feeling sick to my stomach and wanting to scream … Basta, (Cap)Italia. So much for café society at this “level” (circle of Hell). It is quite possible that my nausea was partly induced by being so close to the site of the Biennale, an event I no longer had any respect for insofar as it represented some of the worst aspects of the art-world and its incessant need to re-invent the wheel.

[…]

Knowing that this was abstract capital at play, in “the garden” no less, I headed back along the embankment feeling increasingly ill. Along the way, and feeling like I might vomit, I decided to test my faith in humanity, or what was left of it, by going all the way to San Marco and mingling with the tourist hordes. In my delirium, I had passed the vaporetto stop at Platform B anyway and, throwing caution to the wind, decided to just keep going. The crowd thickened, the pace slowed, and I crossed bridge after bridge clogged with tourists, many stopping at the crest of the bridge to take a selfie, no doubt instantly uploaded to YouTube or Instagram. I tried to refrain from bobbing and weaving, letting the torrent dictate pace. I coached myself to bracket judgement. I reached San Marco and noted a huge queue at the Doge’s Palace. The entrance resembled a security checkpoint at a secure compound, with guards barking into walkie talkies and a screening procedure upon entry that no doubt, in part, accounted for the slow-moving queue.

I continued on … refusing to enter San Marco proper. Instead, I headed along the embankment toward where I knew the ultra-famous and ultra-chic Harry’s Bar was. I doubted I would enter it, but I needed to “see” it and to “feel” it — for “ZF”, who had asked about it out of curiosity, and because he was once prey to fashionable, “literary” hang-outs well past their sell-by date. I found it and stopped to observe a few posh people squeeze, sidle, and wiggle in and out of the narrow entrance. Satisfied, I marched on, until the narrow calli required waddling and a stop-and-start pace that was driven by the unseen motor of collective madness. My mood improved considerably (even dramatically) when I reached the fashion boutique district. Store after luxury store lined the narrow calli. I was now also following signs to Accademia, where I would cross back into Dorsoduro and pick up the Number 2 vaporetto back to San Giorgio. I had one eye on the shop windows for a sign that I might find and acquire a long black coat, something light to wear as additional layer over the three other layers I was currently required to observe to stay reasonably warm. Passing Miu Miu, I stopped to smoke and considered a caprice that involved walking in, taking off my battered-and-frayed, black-wool Miu Miu jacket (bought in NYC at Saks Fifth Avenue sometime in the 2000s, or maybe even the 1990s), and offering it as a holy relic in exchange for something new. But I doubted they actually had menswear anymore. And every shop seemed to feature women’s handbags and other overpriced accessories, at least upon entry, and actual clothing was probably limited to a few choices, currently au courant statements.

[…]

I finally exited San Marco district at the bridge to Accademia, headed toward Zattere, and caught the Number 2 vaporetto feeling somewhat restored and maybe even partly redeemed from the catastrophe of the Giardini visit. Along the way I had stopped to offer the elderly women prostrate on the pavement with paper cup “alms” (i.e., whatever coins I could muster), and always saying “Hello,” such that I could see their eyes. Their eyes, I told myself, did not betray them. There was pain there, plus gratitude. No doubt an urban legend exists that would dispute their authenticity. But I did not care. I had heard it all before. Just before reaching Zattere, and after a last offering of this kind, with the kind and bruised eyes of the “beggaress” signaling something or other, I saw the back of a jacket ahead that said, “Obey.” Yes, I thought. It is the Feast of the Annunciation and Good Friday. “Of course.” Then I heard an accordion player midstream through “Que serra, serra.” Basta, (Cap)Italia.

[…]

On the vaporetto back to San Giorgio, I noted a golden cat at Palanca — from the vaporetto. He was maneuvering through tables and chairs along the embankment at a café/bar just down from my “now” old haunt at Palanca stop. He permitted a child to stroke his back once or twice and then ducked into an orange-plastic enclosure that was part construction site and part rubbish tip. A-hah! But “IM” had told me about him. His name was Van Gogh. To see him was the a-hah moment. Then, as the vaporetto approached Il Redentore stop, I noted reflected in the Plexiglas of the platform enclosure a black cross. It was the reflection of the shingle (sign) of a pharmacy on the embankment. Golden Cat + Black Cross. The two foremost signs/sigils of the reading of Semaforo from a day earlier were thus confirmed.

[…]

To close up the afternoon sojourn, I stopped at San Giorgio café for a glass of red wine. It was “S”, one of several waitresses I had come to know over the past four weeks, who recommended red wine over beer, due to the late-afternoon chill in the air. I then presented the two bracelets purchased for 30.00 EUR from the Senegalese Madonna of Santa Margherita and environs to “S” and her colleague, two of three waitresses who worked long hours servicing the riff raff such as I that washed up at the café/bar. I then gave three four-leaf clovers to “L”, the maître d’ so to speak, who once had dreadlocks and played guitar, but now held forth at San Giorgio café with his partner as service staff for whomever it was that actually owned and ran San Giorgio café. “L” seemed poised to flee … or at least it seemed so. I wished for him to have the four-leaf clovers toward whatever came next. I gave him a mini-lecture about their care and value. We exchanged phone numbers. I departed. I now had but one full day left at Isola di San Giorgio Maggiori, before embarking for “else-where” … “L” told me that if I came back to the café, on Saturday, it would be “on him.” I told him that I would then spend the entire day there …

April 7, 2023

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