II.
"Who is Ovidius?"
20 years have passed since I sat in a Los Angeles pew listening to a priest and his Christmas Day sermon. The priest transported his parishioners to Italy where he discussed his visit to a gallery of unfinished sculptures. The priest echoed the words of the docent, "Who knows what masterpieces lie underneath this rock?"
The parson then returned us to the present in examining the state of our souls. Was it not our duty to attend to the work of our souls? To chip away at the sloth, indifference and intemperance of our human hearts?
I can't tell you how frustrated I am that I do not have my war journal in hand and how important it is at understanding the man and his times as having some fragment of his thoughts. Saint Anthony of Padua has kidnapped it. He scoffs at my neglect at the duties owed to him as my patron saint. Lord Antony, Saint Anthony of Padua convicts me criminal neglect of my duties owed to God to worship Him and only Him as my God and not as an afterthought, to trust in Him and only Him with my full heart and full mind and not as one who waits for his employer's matching contribution. I have no answer to the charges laid before me except that I want my war journal!
Yet as one door closes, a window opens. The mirror and the shadows answer the questions I seek. Ten years and 100 pounds have come and gone since I kissed my wife goodbye and answered the call of the trumpet. All I have to show for it, it the strange hands of fate, the many turns of fortune are these lines on my face. Yet underneath the folds of flesh and girth, I see the athlete, the outline of his muscles, the sternness in his face, the resolve in his eyes, the man who trained his body for battle and his fingers for war.
We loaded up into the bus like quiet children on their way to a field trip. All yearned for sleep yet the golden morning dawned over the horizon bringing with it the excitement of a new day. For much of a soldier's life, even when the training scenarios involve thousands sometimes millions of dollars, it is all make believe. You train as you fight. You want realistic training but in the end, it is all make believe. So much of that time, much of that labour has as much value as an actor whose pays carry no fame or a bureaucrat whose agency enjoys no support. Prior to the great calamity, many in and out of government regarded us unnecessary appendages that should be cut. And yet here we were on our way to war completing our definition of ourselves.
Evergreen in parts, sparse in others, rolling and flat, wet and dried, excepting the odd lettering and post-Soviet Euro-traffic signage, the Romanian countryside may as well be Virginian, of New York or even Pennsylvanian. If Count Dracula claimed these lands, I rested in the confidence that it was breaking dawn. Yet the trash strewn across the land and the packs of wild dogs that rummaged through it disconcerted me. "Where was the white man's burden when you needed it?"
One piece of history disturbed me. The winter of 1989 had been relatively bloodless with one exception - that of Nicolae Ceaușescu. As a boy I watched the re-boardcast of their execution and exposure of their bodies on state television. Romania was free. Romania, land of tyrants, of torture, of Vlad the Impaler and Nazi sympathizers, was free. And yet upon a relative read of history, Ceaușescu was not as bad as others - ask Vasile Aftenie.
http://catholiceducation.org/articles/persecution/pch0042.html
I wanted to call my wife. So did every other man on that bus and the queue of busses that followed. Yet my eyes lingered as two cheeks moved side to side on a tight fitting skirt. Women, beautiful women, walked to and waited at the bus stop. "Who takes the bus anymore?" I thought. What man would let his woman walk to work or what man would let a woman dressed like that out of his house? Yes, at any moment, an unfamiliar woman can walk into your life that would shame the beauty of the one your were with, but I still wanted that one - the one I was with or in my present circumstance not with. It felt odd for her not to be with me and unlike other trips, I did not enjoy the certain knowledge of my return.
We passed be a columned bust of a handsome but conflicted man - a herma whose inscription read "Ovidius."
"Ovidius, who was Ovidius?" I asked myself.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ovid
Ovidius was a poet - a Roman poet - a Roman poet exiled for his poetry. Caesar Augustus exiled Ovid for his work the "Metamorphoses" - a heretic interpretation - a Greco interpretation of the divine mysteries that extolled hedonism and romantic love rather than the Romano-Latin interpretation those divine mysteries that extoll duty, piety and discipline. Who is more terrible those that sit next to tyrants or those that defy them?
Eroticism flows and marks the career and verse of Publius Ovidius Naso much the same way a river feeds the cities it serves or commerce floats along its mighty currents. If a society could exile a 51 year old Bob Guccione, Hugh Hefner or Larry Flynnt, would the question then beg itself, "Why didn't we do it sooner?"
Having read some of what Ovid wrote even through the strange filter of time, to compare Ovid with Hefner praises Hefner too much. And even if the comparison stuck, why would Augustus exile a man for publishing a poem seven years ago? Further, a poet could have a career in the arts if he did not enjoy Royal patronage which Ovid secured with the aid of prime minister Gaius Maceneas. A definitive answer to why Augustus exiled Ovid escapes Antiquarians even those steeped in palace intrigues, but it is true that Augustus exiled both his grandchildren Julia the Younger and Agrippa Postumius that year and his only daughter six years earlier in a lengthy sex scandal. Did Augustus act out of personal reasons, was Ovid a traitor and implicated in the Paullus palace coup or was it simply because his 78 year old patron Maceaneas died in October. We do not know. We have seen Slavic societies punish poets. And yet this man, Ovid, lords over Romania like forlorn and reluctant father merge East and West only under force.
If Ovid, Roman as he was, served in exile for doing his job, how much for us - the New Romans? When soldiers go off to war, home is always in their hearts and in their minds. It is as true as it is for our soldiers in Afghanistan or Alexander's soldiers in Afghanistan. And yet these men and women can never come home. The world I left behind was one where George W. Bush enjoyed 80% approval, Bob Hope was still alive and 2 Islamic terrorists held our nation's capital hostage on a 3 week killing spree - John Allen Muhammed and Lee Boyd Malvo. And I can't speak for every one else but for me, every time I left and came back, I always came back a completely different person and then maybe I wouldn't come back. Eight of my dear friends, never have. I see them in the shadows. Their silent longing, their hopeful waiting, yes, I see you brothers. I will come home soon. Ovid, I share your tears.
To contemplate a man who lived 2,000 years ago, should we forget those peoples that lived the rivers of the Dneper more than 45,000 years before Christ? Who were these Slavs? Who were these men that lived in this land that looks like Pennsylvania what peoples live here. They were the Scythians that broke the first horse. The ancient Dacians whose gold Trajan pillaged and is still seen on his column. They were the Thracians who sired Achilles and Spartacus. And yet the word Slave comes from Slavs. Did these peoples trade their brothers and sisters in civil strife? Perhaps the Slavs have something to tell us about us after all.
400 million Slavic peoples occupy over half of Europe and yet they are as strange to us as Martians. I still trembled then somewhat that these peoples lorded nuclear annihilation over me. Perhaps some dark cell would await me if I make a small misstep. It was easy to hate the Slavs then. Especially for me who had a grandmother whose Grossdeutsch sympathies prevented her from getting a job in the Department of War. But that was all over with. I was their guest. The war was over and I was welcome in their country for now.
The convoy of buses pulled into the Hotel Rex.
http://www.grandhotelrex.ro/#
The estate looked magnificient, a perfect set piece that would make the location manager of the movie Patton proud. The fountain appeared more delapidated then what the pictures on the website look like. But for a boy who was a long way from Tucson, I had arrived.
Andy stood up. From underneath his clipped mustache that made him almost look French, he looked like Charles Boyer or Robert Goulet, or Chef Boyardee. (No, he didn't look like Chef Boyardee - bad joke.) Upon reflection, he looked rather dapper, chrome dome head bald as a cue ball and mustache more fitting underneath the kepi of a French legionnaire under attack in Marrakech or in horizon-blue uniform and Adrian helmet about go over the top at Somme than underneath a Green Beret. Always gruff, Andy bellowed, "Get off the bus."
We did.
