Malta 3

March 6, 2012


The fact is that Valletta rolls up its sidewalks at 7. I was striding into town about then, while hundreds were striding the other way, toward their homes, presumably, and the streets that are so lively during the day were all but deserted. Previously I had wandered into Floriana, which was dark and creepy and devoid of amusements, though there was a great plaza in front of a church, with the butts of columns like a great ruin, and the fat moon had risen above it, with the two companion stars which have been with it for a month.

Turbulent night full of the strangest and most cleansing, dreams. It was as if I were freeing myself of a myriad issues, some of which I do not understand anymore, if I ever did. One involved an argument with my sister over how to keep baboons out of the house. I knew how to do it, and couldn’t get her to cooperate. In the end I walked off and left everything to her and the baboons, singing in French on the road, like Saint Francis. Then it was Ellen. I came home from a long journey (we apparently shared a home) and found her living with a girlfriend. I didn’t care, but they said I couldn’t stay there because I would interfere with their relationship. I insisted that I would not, and they cited instances where I had disrupted relationships, of all of which I was ignorant. I said they were making it up, and they had these smiles pasted on their faces that implied how lacking in self-knowledge I was. I opened my closet and found the new girlfriend’s scarf collection hanging there. I won that fight, and at the end of that portion of the dream we were dividing the space. In a third, I was at a performance of one of my plays. The audience was small, and the second half of the play was awful. Susan Stevenson suggested cutting the second half and I realized that the second half had been written by my students, which I kept including out of loyalty. My subconscious was active and quite specific, though I don’t understand it all. Give up bad arguments? Stand up for my rights (or believe, against present conviction, that I have the power to act upon others’ emotions)? Don’t be held back by sentiment? I don’t know. That these were messages was clear, the import, less so.

Evening. Bear Grylls is on the only English station that I can get that isn’t the news. He’s sleeping inside a gutted camel in the Sahara. After the night of psycho-social dreams, I met Michael for a tour of the island. It was his day off from being a bar-tender, so he was a guide and chauffeur. He was good about stopping at scenic spots and letting me use my camera. I asked about the plants–all with yellow flowers at this season, to give Malta a golden winter. He didn’t know them except for a sorrel-resembling little golden star called by the Maltese word meaning “bitter.” When they were kids they split the stems open to taste the citrus-y bitterness. He had me do the same. I feel I have a tiny particle of a Maltese childhood. Michael took me to a gorgeous church in Mosta through the domed ceiling of which a bomb fell in WWII, without exploding. A replica of the bomb is in a chapel. The gorgeousness of the churches and public buildings is surprising, Rome-rivaling. There must have been a whole lot of money here once. The place I wanted most to go was the Silent City, Mdina, a walled fortress founded by the Phoenicians three thousand years ago and fortified by the Knights of St. John. From a distance it was a city of dreams, lofty and ancient. Inside, though, it was hard to get a sense of things because of all the people like me, because of all the tourists. But it must have been silent and noble once, wind blowing through the narrow golden alleys, chanting from the necklaces of churches.

From there to the coast, with a little island sailing like the prow of a sunken ship. Through fields of golden flowers one approached Malta’s two great megalithic monuments: Hagar Qim and the Mnajdra Temples. They are wonderful and mysterious. They make Stonehenge look meager. Great roofs are built over them for protection now, which makes it impossible to see them against the sky they knew for five thousand years. But that too shall pass. When experts are looking for the reasons for buildings like this, I think they under-consider the possibility that they were built just for the hell of it, because people then, as now, wanted to do something remarkable. One wishes to see them in their own time. Malta has such a varied past one wants to see all of it– the time of the temple-builders, the Phoenicians, the Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Knight of Saint John–all deeply exotic for an Ohio boy. We had lunch at Marsaxlokk (I’m not making these names up) at the edge of deep- blue boat-bobbing Mediterranean. I have paid for three more hours, but by then that’s all I could take. I am not the best tour-consumer in the world. Michael has three children, and wouldn’t eat lunch because his wife would be disappointed if he weren’t hungry when he came him. For the sake of conversation, I made up a son who is an actor in New York, and then told him about my real nephews. Michael was sort of boring, and not much better than I at local history, but he was kind and I had, for some reason, expected a monster who would make me regret every moment. So all was well there.

Walked in the town afterwards, to tire myself out as insurance against another night of over-vivid dreams.

MerHpah means “welcome,” and is printed on the sign for entering every little town. Malta is mostly urban, town after town joined together with different unpronounceable names, with here and there a ribbon of farm to remind us of what was. Each one of those town looks exactly the same, pale gray-yellow stone with graceful, distinctive vernacular architecture, overtopped by a spectacular church.