Avenza

Everything goes on as usual. It is odd to say “usual” when every day (every step) is new. But there is regularity to it anyway: the primordial “room,” the space that one is alone in and in control of, is internalized, I think. As when at home, I have repeating patterns of thoughts: most lucid in the late morning and kind of blanking out during most of the day. It’s almost to the point where I’m finding it difficult to think of things to mention.

I’m comfortable with this anyway, the movement. And discomforted only when I’m busy areas, in towns, or along a popular road, under eyes. Luckily Italians don’t stare as much as the people in rural France. And luckily, too, whatever body that governs and signs for the Via Francigena in this region decided pilgrims should walk lengthy sections in blind forests and climb mountains at every opportunity rather than go around them. It’s lucky for me anyway, having not had any leg pain (or any physical pain really) since leaving France, so even difficult sections are manageable. Some pilgrims I’ve met find it taxing, of course; I suspect at the end of the day that I’m at the zenith of my sportsman life.

Last night I stayed in a church hostel in Aulla, and today (after climbing and descending 600 meters, I guess, for kicks) I arrived in Avenza. I’m  finding it hard to remember the names of places, something which has gotten worse recently, and I suspect it’s for the same reason that you will remember the face of a dog that bites you but not docile ones behind a gate. It is easy here, smooth and dreamlike still, and although things are always happening, merry pilgrims find ways through it, laugh and chatter and pace on. Walking is no longer a solitary thing; if not other pilgrims, there are barmen offering drinks, people on patios, heads and arms leaning on balcony railings.

I am a rootless flaneur. On a plane once, I read Baudelaire’s “The Painter of Modern Life.” I was nostalgic reading it, with the inflamed descriptions of urban French “types,” the people who exemplify something sonorous and beautiful, and how they comport and dress themselves in order to be as such, in the image of a statue of “The Waiter,” or “The Dandy,” or whatever. There is something nostalgic about believing that typifying anything, and doing so purposefully and even with vanity and pride, is possible. It assumes a nativity to us. I don’t know many people who are like this. But when travelling (on pilgrimage or not), it is different: because you know people only momentarily, the impression they make is the one they make, and I’m not ashamed to see my mind distill people into such and such a spirit. So I have met pilgrim nationalists, flower-children, racists, joy-seekers, and people falling in love. And more. I’ve also seen immense selflessness on the part of my Italian friend, who spent yesterday attending to another friend who was injured – those among the people I am close to, of course, I can see enough spirit to fill books.

Where is Chaucer?

Sorry for his ramble. Here is today’s top photo to make up for it. The Appenines, which are now behind me, too.