Firenze

Which one of the elemental catastrophes? The Butterfly.

Fading in memory, a decay more rapid than anticipated, Italy in October. Scavengers pick it apart by night, dream weather leaves the harder materials in place, those towers of aggregate in the badlands of the Dakotas showing time as erosion. A choral landscape. This quality of memory is what may be reproduced in the prosthesis: the electrate augmentation of human capacities in the machine. To turn the database into knowledge the interface must learn to forget in this way, to become dilapidated and erode, at a collective level (the way the effect of art requires subtraction for the face of measure to appear). In search of this measure called chora, I offer this commemoration of recent travel.

The Ponte Vecchio is behind us ( "one of the emblems of Florence"). The street vendors (vous compra) arrived carrying loads of knockoffs on their backs in large blankets or drop-cloths, like a cadre of elves on Christmas Eve. Just as quickly as they came, they suddenly rolled up their bags and fled, ahead of two caribinieri on motorcycles slowly making their way through the crowd of tourist along the bridge. Our family has left a gelateria encountered on the way from the Ponte towards Santa Maria Novella. The portions scooped into our cono or coppa were generous, excessive, double the amount received in the famous Vivoli Gelateria, promoted as the best in Firenze, if not all of Italy. Because it is the best, it can provide exact measure: the quantity you order is the quantity you get, in a cup filled precisely to the rim with the excess scraped off and returned to the vat. Off the beaten track, late at night, the measure is different. What of the quality? Kathy and I were sharing "wedding cake" which was the best we had tasted. Lee always gets stracciatella, and this flavor became the point of comparison throughout the visit, as we joined in what the guidebook declared to be an Italian passion, no day ending properly without gelato.

A history of video games explained the origin of PacMan in similar terms: inventors searching for a game that would appeal to girls started with the ritual visit of Japanese girls to sweetshops. "They love to eat," so a game about eating. The design was inspired by a pizza with one slice removed (between 3 and 4 o'clock of the circle) and a strategically placed pepperoni for the eye. A mugshot of the generic twentieth-century imagination: front is Happy Face; profile is PacMan. So the choral measure has something to do with sharing a meal.

It is some time after 10:30 PM, rain drizzle, the chill in the air qualified by the scarves purchased that morning at the central market. The Uffizi after that was an introduction to Italian bureaucracy, standing in lines in order to stand in lines to get the tickets to stand in line. As we shuffled along, getting acquainted with those assigned to this same limbo, a couple pushing a stroller stopped and the man inquired: "Professor Ulmer?" It was Shannon Banes, a student from 1993, now living in Zurich. Exclamations all around (the first time in Florence for both of us). "This sort of thing happens all the time," I lied afterwards.

Even as I waited my turn for a spoon of wedding cake (a streak of carmel in there somewhere) there was one of the Botticelli's that persisted in my ruminations: the Cestello Annunciation. Botticelli Lee pointed it out, noting especially the angel's gesture, the formal alignment with the doorframe, the sequence of inner-outer pairings, from the evocation of the Virgin's womb in the right foreground, to the room and the doorway middle ground, and the landscape outside background. Gabriel's hand aligned with the doorframe marks the division between this world and beyond ("The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee," St. Luke). The image gave me a scene with which to anchor my readings about St. Paul's theology of the Church as institutionalizing the Virgin's womb, this womb as chora, making a place for God's embodiment in a physical world, the event for which icons are the relay, vehicles of a relationship, a ratio, a proportion, not a representation. That is the structure, the site of what we seek, quiet annunciations of the vortex around these openings between realms or regions. A doorway, a portal, opportunity.

The brightening of the street ahead signaled promise, in retrospect, as we moved into some piazza with better prospects for catching a taxi. The angels are everywhere in the museums of Italy, not just the archangels but swarms of putti on the ceilings and walls. The classical heritage underfoot exposes the more ancient daimons, surviving as the household imp of Lorca's duende, direct descendent of Socrates's daimonion that he consulted at the threshold of his home before leaving for his trial. Nietzsche's thought of the eternal return of the same was whispered into his ear by one of these messengers, voice of intuition so hard to hear nowadays. What if you had to repeat your life minute for minute forever? "Every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself" (The Gay Science, #341).

I already knew it, after three steps into the piazza, that the moment was now. The rain was more visible backlit by the street lamps, whose reflections from the wet cobblestones turned the atmosphere a fluorescent blue. On the far corner two caribinieri in conversation with a woman were laughing. Lee is in front, waving to a taxi up the street just dropping off a passenger. A young man on the sidewalk, seated on the low steps of an oversized doorway, guitar case open before him, plays allegro con brio the theme from the animated film The Triplets of Belleville. The guitar is amplified, channeled through a small black box that seems to be adding some effects (knockoff music?). "Ben Charest [creator of the score for the film] fuses the score's snappy, predominantly le hot jazz mindset with everything from hip-hop and Bach to the Italian opera farrago 'Cieco Cieco Barber' and 1960s proto-surf-rock of 'Pa Pa Pa Palavas'. But that conceptual stew isn't the least of Charest's delightful surprises, as he giddily infuses it with his own Django-esque guitar stylings and a hodge-podge of found rhythmic instruments that include bicycle wheels, refrigerator shelves and a vacuum cleaner."

In the time it takes to recognize the number the scene composed itself, a double perspective by division, the daio of the daimon that allows me to live and to tell at the same time, in a loop, a circumspection of time. Today the annunciation is more modest. The universal offers an empty doorway, without God, Polis, Reason, Utility, or any other content with which to prop it open. Our theorists (Serres) chart the legacy of angels in our airports (Perez-Gomez updated Polyphilo by setting the erotic dream journey on an airplane). From angelology to communications studies.

What is the message delivered in this way? It is simple enough, self-evident (I repeat myself), as if by Casandra, even if beyond good and evil, so that to hear it involves a transvaluation of all values, seconded in infinite variation by entertainment narratives, including angels to personify the authority of the insight. Wings of Desire (Wenders) got it: the willingness of the angels to exchange their eternity as spirits for the finitude of embodied experience, the heft of a stone, the track of a footprint in the snow. Why do we always go right by it? The American remake misses the point in City of Angels, critics agree, unable to believe it is just this little sensation of (dis)pleasure, to foreground the love story instead, which is there only as a bonus. Life. That is the feeling for which chora forms the category.

Then chora is the mobile fragment, the categorial metonym that memory finds in the scene. Not quite Stevens's Anecdote of the Jar. "The wilderness rose up to it,/ And sprawled around, no longer wild." Stevens placed the jar in Tennessee upon a hill. In Anecdote of the Gelato the trait is there already, not added. Certainly I am selecting it to intimate the moment, Augenblick, the gateway with its guardian or keeper just for me, to show me my law, how I may become what I am, my striving to persevere in my own being. That is, to live. The Christian church declared many pagan sites to be basilicas and marked them with crosses. The symmetry of history predicts that someday the Duomo will be a gelateria.

Behind us in the dark is the sign recognized throughout Italy as gelateriagelato The smooth chill in our mouths orders the chill in the air, dampening mist of October rain, arm in arm, Lee at the taxi, Ty with the umbrella, Kathy spooning wedding cake, Anita finding a euro for the guitar case, Django-style rhythm driving the score. Against the ascetic ideal, the piazza shifts into a pose for the snapshot, holding open the doorway for now, as we pass through.