“Cathy? Have You Seen My Zibaldone? It Was Here a Minute Ago . . .”

April 22, 2024

Forty-Eight Hours to Lift Off

“Observe the light. Blink your eye and look at it again. That which you see was not there at first and that which was there is no more.” 

Leonardo da Vinci

I have been thinking a lot lately and I’m beginning to wonder if it is a worthwhile endeavor. Thinking, that is.

Does it ever strike you just how much we once knew we no longer know?

Let me give you an example. In about forty-eight hours . . . but who’s counting . . . Cathy and I are off to Italy. It’s our first time together, so we’ve decided to see the biggies. . You know . . . the David, the Sistine Chapel. Your Casey Cason Top Forty of the Renaissance. (Who needs Tuscan solitude when you can stand in a long line to catch a glimpse of a big naked guy with marble marbles.)

Despite what you might have heard, I’m not a complete dolt when it comes to art. Well . . . okay . . . maybe close. But I did once take an Art Appreciation class in college. It was a “Ten” Course. A fella name Wayne Thiebaud was the professor. He painted gum ball machines, ice cream cones and slices of cake. This appealed to me. I could relate.

Dov’e la gelateria?

A “Ten” course was a survey course for non-majors. So, I’m pretty sure we covered all your High Renaissance masters. Your Michelangelo, da Vinci, Donatello, Raphael, and Bernini. I took the class on a “pass/no pass basis” and nailed the “pass”, so I know I once knew something about these guys.

I know I did.

But if you had asked me a week ago . . . before I began to cram for this trip . . . I wasn’t entirely certain if Bianchi made busts and Bernini made bikes. Maybe it was sewing machines?

Where did that knowledge go? I know it’s been fifty years so I accept that it may take time to find the right box in my addled attic and blow the dust off. I get that. But you’d think once I find the box, and lift the lid, the memories would come floating back.

They don’t. I got nothing. It’s not that I can’t find the box. The damn rats have carted it off.

I’m told I should shake this habit. Learn to “live in the moment”, observe, accept, and free my mind of the angst of losing information and this desperate desire to cram more information back into it. My Peloton spin instructor says to exhale through my nose, drop my shoulders, and drop my “baggage.” Cathy reminds me of the emotional energy I waste each morning dwelling on things I cannot change. 

Apparently, I need to quiet my mind to achieve peace of mind.

I get the idea.  I’m not sure about my Peloton instructor . . . I think she’s a man hater . . . but I know Cathy wants what’s best for me. My problem is I have a narrow nose, have always relied on my mouth to breathe, and serenity . . . like sleep . . . seems something for which there will be plenty of time later.

A data dump now seems premature. Why purge even a small corner of my meager mind when, judging from my deteriorating recall, empty headedness should be complete long before the movers arrive.

My problem is I’m a lifelong cogitator.

I don’t want to clear my mind. I want to fill it to the rafters with useless information. You know . . . the kind of stuff that makes you look bad-ass watching Jeopardy or prompts Cathy to look at me with wonder after I pull a random answer out of my ass during the Sunday Times Crossword.

In my experience, while “now” is a nice place to visit, it’s best not to overstay one’s welcome. Better to slip out of neutral, rev the cognitive engine, and get busy stewing about something. You can’t very well be an old codger if you don’t cogitate, now can you. 

Case in point: Leonardo da Vinci.

I’ve been reading Walter Isaacson’s biography about da Vinci in preparation for this trip. Leo had it bad. He ran around with a “zibaldone” hanging from his belt. It was a sketchbook in which he jotted down his observations, thoughts, “to-do lists”, and questions to ponder. Historians have found 7200 pages, but this is estimated to be only one quarter of what Leo wrote. Imagine . . . 28,800 pages of rumination and cogitation from a mind raging with curiosity.

Not that you and I would understand the missing pages even if we found them. He wrote left-handed, right to left, so as not to smudge the wet ink as you might were your palm to trail the nib of your pen. And just for shits, grins and giggles, he wrote everything in a “reverse” fashion that you and I, even if we could read Italian, could only make out in a mirror.

Think about that. And while you’re doing that, ask yourself, why does a mirror flip an image side to side but not top to bottom? Ever thought about that? I don’t know the answer, but I like to think Leo would be proud of me for asking the question.

Talk about “SQUIRREL!” The man went down more rabbit holes than Beatrix Potter. Everything . . . I mean everything . . . was a shiny object. He didn’t fight off distraction; he slept with it. He once made a note in his trusty zibaldone to remind himself to “describe the tongue of a woodpecker.” Then he did.

Why? Who the hell knows.

Take this page. It’s my favorite from his zibaldone. Leo was curious about the muscles in the face, particularly how our lips work to produce expression. How is it we can smile or frown or pout?

If you look closely at the center of the top of the page you’ll see a squiggly horizontal line . . . a crease . . . and the feint outline of the upper and lower lip beneath it. Recognize that crease?

No?

How about now . . . ?

You see.

I do too. . . now.

I didn’t used to. I’ve “seen” the Mona Lisa in Paris. Several times. Each time, it was mid week in November. I went early, waited at the door until the Louvre opened, and beelined to find her so that we might have a “moment”, just the two of us, with no crowds to get in our way. Each time, I came away saying “yeah . . . I dunno . . . I don’t see what the fuss is about.”

I know . . . I know . . . stupid, huh? But in my defense, I was . . . as John Cleese once put it . . . “too stupid to know how stupid I was.”

I know that now.

The most enigmatic expression in all of Western art came about because da Vinci (1) wondered how lips work, (2) spent hours wondering about the interplay between light and sight, and (3) observed that when you really look at how we look, we see things different with peripheral vision than we do focusing.

Da Vinci knew all that when he set out to paint that smile. He wanted to capture more than the appearance of Lisa Gherardini. He wanted to capture the sometimes endearing, sometimes maddening, always mysterious nature of femininity. Her smile, like her mood, like time itself, changes with the blink of an eye.

Glance at her from the corner of your eye and she appears to be smiling. Stare at her straight on, and she appears indifferent. From whichever angle you look, she looks back bemused at your uncertainty, pleased that she has you guessing.

Kinda like Cathy looked at me last Saturday at the Rincon Valley Little League field when I told her I plan to take only one pair of shoes on the trip. I couldn’t quite tell whether she was saying “grande idea” or “tuo funerale.”

Leo was right.

Time changes in the blink of an eye. The light we see is gone. The things we knew . . . or thought we knew . . . recede beyond recall. I suppose it’s not half as important that we remember the answers as we remember to keep asking the questions and jot them down in our zibaldone.