.

His fingers deliberately tip in her direction,
a little nervous but inching ever closer. Slowly,
so she does not notice. His shoulder nearly
touching hers, leaning forward to one side. Skin
that chases the rim of an empty glass. Poised and
pressing thought to bone while perched along the
edge of some unfinished idea and untangling it
with his voice. Saying something about how funny
it is that the word Bologna is slang for the
notion of concoction. An ironic scrap of
linguistic fate. Extracting pure baloney from
the sausage invented there. Mortadella; flavour
from the deadest part of a pig, from bones and
bristle, with hoofs thrown in. Not pure like
humour but something nebulous. Like his feelings
for her, the ones he can't quite track. Neither
the sausage nor the city, with its streets that
twist into secrets, are pure, he adds. Stretching
elastic eyes across the table in my general direction,
searching for purity with a hint of fear that
escapes t/his inevitability: she is unmoveable.

Two days earlier, in the studio, he is telling
me about the latex mold he just completed on his piece.
The shims fit perfectly, a work of art. And how I
should see it, come over, before it gets cast.
Of course, he is asking for more than this.
A longing in absence for the quickening of pursuit.

And what I see in him is something medieval.
Something very Peter Abelard, very 12th C.
Young and hungry. Ready to relinquish money
for intangibles, for the invention of dangerous
knowledge; deductive reasoning for the subjection
of religion to philosophy. Pure heresey from the
mouth of a starving brat who coins the word theology
in a juvenile act of defiance against The Church.
Theology; a word that signifies another kind of
imagination. Not to mention his love affair with
Helöise, the one that leads to charges of calumny
and an outrageous nightime raid by his teachers
to cut off his testicles. Nothing says 'logic is
not welcome here' like no more testicles. And what
about Cavalcanti entering this kind of academic
frenzy at the height of the 13th centuried
University of Bologna, in search of dangerous
knowledge. At a time when lenses are being
invented (but will not be used for eye glasses
until the 15th C due of a widespread belief
that appearances are deceptive). With no balls
and no vision but trusting the inner meaning of
things and favouring writers who appeal most to
the mind and least to the eye, Medieval Bologna
with its doctors who invent a procedure called
autopsy to decode the mysteries of the human body
by plumbing it. The preeminant Body remains Bologna's
claim to fame; human anatomy first taught there in
the 14th C. But even more than this, that the first
woman to ever teach at a university teaches in Bologna
(even if while concealed behind a curtain).

The novelty of self-knowledge described by Ezra Pound is

"that new style in which the eyes and the heart
and the soul have separate voices of their own and
converse together. God became interesting, and
speculation, with open eyes and a rather didactic
voice, is boon companion to the bard."

Further upholding the Guido myth that the soul lies in
the semen, the bodily event of poetry discharged by
pressures of the heart, by dissemination, asking

"Where is the border, this place where ecstasy is not
a whirl or a maddness of the senses, but a glow arising
from the exact nature of the perception?"
(Ezra Pound).

And all of this, the shims, the studio, dinner with
shoulders perched on elastic eyes that become entangled
in a bottomless quest for connection, as if to interlace
fingers and to keep them there, touching hers ... all of
this is as if to sink into her moment forever, like so many
splintered stars falling down to earth but never getting
dirty in the descent ...

This.

This is his Bologna.