Notes on Captivity
Or: The Kegelarium
Summer travels began with a trip to Arles, where a friend bought a house in hopes of building a life with a French novelist. He needed help making sense of things after their breakup. Which was messy. She was still living there, not paying rent. What should have been the guest bedroom was her second office.
What should have been a dining room she’d made a mystical kegelarium.
The Latin word for guest and host is the same, hospes, and is also the root of the English word hostage for obvious reasons – the invitation was for nearly two weeks, I should have sensed something off from the start. This was not a vacation, but a mission of friendship.
And one from which I’d have bolted after a day or so but for the difficulty of traveling with a dog. Who spoke for my soul at night, tip-toeing from the creaky pull-out couch down to the Kegelarium to snarl at this woman’s strange equipment, her makeshift altar filled with Virgin Mary candles. Mookie had recently been chemically castrated, and he’d taken it like a pro – but here he drew a line.
“She’s dating a guy in town,” my friend said.
I tried to help him accept the end of the relationship, in his house where graduates of Harvard and the Sorbonne had failed in basic matters of the heart. A house with, I now see, suspiciously many books on Empathy (I Am We, by Miranda Stark; Empathic Journey by Dkembe Moss, MD-PhD; and Collected Empathies, ed. Poppy Rhinegold) as if the topic was somehow elusive, or exotic; as if this house wasn’t in the old Roman corpse district, a stone’s throw – stabbing distance? – from the ancient colosseum whose awful cry rang in my ears as the voice of my wasting vacation days: We who are about to die salute you.
Mornings I’d write in a cafe by the colosseum. I thought I’d found a workaround, an escape, really. But just before noon came a specter beyond even hypertrophied intellectuals attempting love: Bucket-listing Boomers.
Disgorged from tour buses, many walking with mountaineering poles, often titanium-tipped, chipping the ancient stones that had survived Vikings and Moors only to be gnawed away by Herman and Cathy from West Palm Beach.
I began to imagine – fantasize? – myself on the edge of a Sci-Fi movie. There was a great chasm inside that colosseum, a howling pit into which the Boomers couldn’t help but wander, guided by darkest American curiosities. Like Get Out, but Get In. But they always came maundering out. Then sat for lunch, staring at the colosseum less with awe than like it owed them money. Nowhere to hide, I jumped at my friend’s suggestion of a day trip to Avignon, and the Papal Palace, whose history, to borrow a word beloved of the Empathy crowd: I found relatable.
*
Because it, too, had known captivity.
The Papacy was dragged here by a French King whose name doesn’t matter for our purposes, only that he had goons beat the Pope to death over money, then got a French pope installed and took him hostage, or guest (see how the words commingle?) in Avignon. Even when the Popes returned to Rome, Avignon kept naming popes, figures now called Antipopes, they lived in this palace, which like the rest of my trip was a giant let down: It’s basically empty.
There are almost no chalices, no tapestries, no treasures in Avignon’s Papal Palace, once so lavishly appointed. This is because the Popes took a lot with them when they went back to Rome. And also because with the French Revolution came the Nose Boppers. They were radical atheist rationalists, who tried to blow up Notre Dame cathedral and, proving clumsy with explosives, determined to free the masses from faith through their own faith in bopping off statue noses.
And fires.
Two big fires swept through Avignon in 1354 and 1369, devastating the interiors. Most are still bare today with a few exceptions, including the portraits of two of the purer souls to inhabit this place; a pair of hunting hounds whose regal noses escaped bopping - likely covered over with ash from the fires. Which have revealed the palace’s exquisite bones, the curves, the planes, the shape. And made room for fresh life. In the former grand reception hall, a ballet company practices their coming performance, all so fixed on their art they barely register this passing tourist.
I sat and marveled:
Fire had made way for this, cleansing the hall of captivity, freeing it for dance, the art form that most touches the divine; Brother Fire, Saint Francis of Assisi called it, and maybe Francis was watching over sweet Mookie as he administered destruction to another place in need of cleansing: the dining room turned Kegelarium.
We returned to find him devouring a sacred object of this space: an ergonomic ass cushion, yes, plopped right by the Virgin Mary candles, perhaps even the same kind of ass cushion Mary used to tone her own glutes.
“What do I tell her?” said my friend.
“That French courts are very pro-canine.”
I could see that this hurt him, here he thought he’d found a home, a vision so enticing, to anyone, really, that his dining room must once have seemed a small price to pay.
“You gotta sell this place,” I said, “The sooner the better.”
And now see that in Arles I received a wild gift, not despite but because of so much waste: the relationship; the chip-chipping Boomers; the gladiators in the arena, and the poor brutally beaten Pope, who probably didn’t know his own name, by the end, so won’t begrudge me for not knowing it either.
All led to a feeling quite as foreign to me as empathy must be to Poppy Rhinegold: one I’d not known since I’d left America, in 2023.
I had meant to go away for a month or so, from our colosseum (O Thunderdome) and yes, reader: our captivity. To a tyrant raising an arena on the White House lawn; to the algorithm and its mullahs; to the old with their despotic envy of the young. For three years, I’d never once longed towards home. I just kept not wanting to go back. But now I longed with all my heart - for Lisbon. I wanted my little apartment by the garden, with its art deco lights, its consoling Biedermeier mirror (Austro-Hungary, too, did pass) and the Persian rugs I’d bought off eBay, a little drunk; and the Juliet balcony with the planter of tulips that never came up this spring, I missed them too.
I was fully, deliciously, homesick.
Up in the air, as Lisbon came into view, I promised Mookie that, sure as God would never again flood the earth, I would never again inject him with castrating chemicals. Not because canine castration is bad, but because valor deserves reward: Sancho Panza got an insula; this was his due for smiting the ass cushion.
“That’s all?” he said, with a raised eyebrow easily read.
“No, sweet boy.”
I reached into my bag, and produced an object Mookie had once loved devouring and so been forbidden from touching since puppy days: a book.
This one had gotten slathered with bits of duck rillettes from a jar that came open mid-flight, yes the cover of Empathic Journey was glistening-slick with duck fat, making it an even more delectable treat for Mookie, O nobre cavalheiro.