Actual Light

One reason I’ve come to Rome is to see again. I’ve lost my ability to really see, and to pay attention to what I see. I’m addicted to my phone, to alerts that the news is breaking again and always, to gifs and memes. As I’m working on a novel about the farm in Illinois where I grew up, I start wondering what the weather is like in Illinois, and the next thing I know I’m looking up the etymology of mortgage, a recipe for ancient hummus, available campsites in Yosemite Valley, where, I tell myself, I’ll finally put my phone down to pay attention to the light on El Capitan.

And so every morning in Rome I leave my apartment on Via di Ripetta to see the Caravaggios in Santa Maria del Popolo. I saw them a decade ago, but I was probably drunk, and all I remember is how you have to pay to light them up. That idea—of having to pay to pay attention—appeals to me. I should say I’m no expert at looking at art. Like most poets, I practice the old ekphrastic trick, learned from Rilke and Auden, of thinking through a painting or sculpture via a poem. But though I bring a notebook with me to the church, I’m not interested in writing about the paintings. I’ve given myself permission to just look, though it won’t be easy. Indeed, it will be harder than writing. I want to look ravishingly, as if immense things depended on my looking, to fill my empty eyes with something inarguably abiding and true. Caravaggio’s actual brushstrokes in the chapel’s actual light.

Stepping out of my apartment, it’s already hot. The waiters stand at attention in front of the café. I walk swiftly across the empty piazza, keeping the church in sight. I pass the fountain with its inchoate obelisk, cold water spewing from the mouths of stone lions. Up the worn sunstruck steps. The beggar who sits here every morning, and who called me Professore once, doesn’t bother to ask me for anything, only mumbles something out of habit. I enter the cool of the church and, without thinking, run holy water through my hair. A few people in the pews, lingering after early Mass, or who’ve come here as I have, out of the sun, to begin the harrying day in peace.

The Cerasi Chapel, where the Caravaggios are, is to the left of the altar. Sometimes I find people already there, the chapel already lit, and step into the light they paid for. I study the people as much as I study the paintings they’re looking at. The light lasts two minutes, which is a relief. It frames our looking, delineates it. Were the paintings lit all the time, it would be too exhausting. This, I think, is the real reason one must pay to light them up—not to generate church funds or to keep the paint from fading, but to give us permission to look away.

But today I find the chapel dark. I slip two euros into the machine that triggers, after a slight delay, the spotlights over the paintings—Crucifixion of Saint Peter and Conversion of Saint Paul. They face one another. I stand in the fuzzy magnetic field between them, held as if in pincers, and choose to focus this morning on Crucifixion.

Peter requested he be crucified upside down so as not to suggest any equivalency with Christ. Now, his three torturers are struggling, incompetently, to set the cross upright in the hole they’ve dug. My eyes flit around the painting in an avian way, searching for a place to alight. The light on the spade that was used to dig the hole is like the light on dental tools—cold, clinical. On the back of the man pulling on a rope falls the shadow of the rope. Peter himself looks like my Uncle Terry.

I’m wasting my time, literally. I need to choose one thing to study. My eyes fall on the soiled foot of the torturer who’s putting his shoulder to it, like a high school football player heaving himself against a blocking sled. I don’t know how Caravaggio managed to make a human foot—flesh, dirt, creases—out of paint. He must have studied countless feet like these. The feet of slaves, of pilgrims. I picture him straining to study his own. Is the soiled sole a symbol of the man’s sullied soul? Even if it is, Caravaggio wouldn’t have called the sole of a foot a sole, but pianta del piede (“plant of the foot”).

It’s hard to just look. I always find myself wandering into language’s realm. I blink, take a step closer, look again. I can sense that at any moment the chapel will go dark, which helps me look harder. Hopkins said that what we look hard at seems to look hard at us, which means I am being looked hard at by a man’s dirty foot, which is actually just paint applied to canvas by a man’s surely dirty hand 422 years ago. And yet this foot that is not really a foot is the dirtiest foot I’ve ever seen.

Maybe what we love in art is an excess that allows us to fall back into reality.

The light goes off—not all at once, but like it’s being drained. I have more coins, but I’ve seen enough, for now.