I first saw Jean Luc Godard’s “Contempt” during college in the early 1980’s. The film portrays the failing relationship between a writer (Michel Piccoli) and his girlfriend (Brigitte Bardot) during a film production and it held multiple levels of exoticism for me at age 19. The French language, European locations and manners, adults living the sort of creative life that I aspired to. The famous apartment scenes depicting the couple’s estrangement affected me more deeply when I saw the film again in my thirties after the end of my first marriage, as described in the first episode of this story. But what most impressed me during that first viewing was simply the producer’s house on the cliff edge and the Mediterranean landscape surrounding it. I initially read this location as a Greek island, perhaps because the film within the film is an adaptation of “The Odyssey,” and it fully captured for me the allure of the world outside of small-town Wisconsin. Walking out of the Lawrence University Film Club in 1982, I resolved to travel to the Greek Islands at some unspecified future moment in my life. That future moment turned out to be 1998, shortly after the events described in the first episode of this story.

I finished drawing my second animated film “Desert Dive Inn” during my separation and divorce from Sayer. On the basis of that film I received a Bush Foundation Fellowship in 1997. The stipend at that time was thirty-six thousand dollars, a fortune to me. My first thought upon opening the notification letter was, “I’ll take a leave of absence from the Arts High School,” where I was then teaching, “and travel to the Greek Islands to find the clifftop house from ‘Contempt.’” I booked a flight to from Minneapolis to Rome, leaving in February of 1998 and returning in April. This was to be my first trip to Europe, my first experience with jet lag, my first extended foray outside of my own language and by the time I arrived in a tiny penzione near the Termini Station in Rome, I was pretty bewildered. It was only 5 Rome time when I arrived and I was already desperate for sleep. But everyone told me to try to stay awake until 10 the first day, so I started walking around. Saw an American girl holding a “Let’s Go Rome” book, crying in the street. Two other girls in floral print skirts were begging coins in front of the church Santa Maria Maggiore. Inside there were confessional booths specifically designated: English, French, German, Spanish. It’s a lonely feeling to walk around a strange, busy city without the language. You feel very shy. I’ve just committed myself to ten weeks of this. I eventually bought an odd-smelling sausage and some bread with great timidity in a small grocery and then slept heavily

My first intention when I awoke the next morning was to locate the Fontana di Trevi, which I would recognize from the famous Anita Ekberg/Marcello Mastroianni flirtation in “La Dolce Vita.” What I found was a diminished version of the fountain, wedged into a tight alley and completely lacking the grandeur that I remembered from the film. I wondered if perhaps Fellini had had a more magnificent replica constructed in the Cinecitta studios for the purposes of his shoot. My obsession with books and movies had prepared me for a different world than the one I was now experiencing. Spring Has Overwhelmed Rome Today The monument of spring has overwhelmed Rome today The way that no banality of cathedrals ever could Asparagus and strawberries, staring fish on ice Ornamental dog shit at the base of yellow walls Hungry as the clock is steady Darker than the night above the sea Ten weeks away from anything That could explain this all to me Sad woman in the corner is animated And given sudden grace by the arrival of her friends Promenading in the park, rowing boats across the pond Africans sell sunglasses, jewelry and belts Hungry as the clock is steady Darker than the night above the sea Ten weeks away from anything That could explain this all to me The light falls through the ruins on my notebook And I am just a stranger in these unfamiliar streets One young girl practices her English Pronouncing all the words on a tourist restaurant

I wandered around Rome with my sketchbook for a few days, drawing statues and stray cats. On one of my walks I passed a movie theater playing current Hollywood films. “Great, this is a way for me to get my bearings.” I understood from the posters, however, that the films were overdubbed in Italian. I recalled an interview with Jim Jarmusch; he described watching movies in Japan without subtitles and imposing his own subjective narrative upon the visuals. That night I watched “The Jackel,” in which either Bruce Willis or Richard Gere plays a professional killer. As I sat waiting in the theater for the film to start, a man approached me and asked something in Italian. Just as I was about to respond, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italian,” it occurred to me that I would then have to explain why I was there to see a film overdubbed in Italian and so I just shrugged my shoulders emphatically and said “No.” He scanned the four or five empty seats next to me and asked his question again with a skeptical tone. I adopted a slightly more irritated demeanor and said “No, scusa.” He shook his head and walked away and it immediately dawned upon me that he was asking if he could sit in the empty seats next to me.

Today I’m visiting Ostia Antica, the ruins of a Roman town. It’s peaceful here, a nice break from the scooters of Rome. I’m having a little picnic with clementines, sausage and bread near a schoolyard full of noisy little girls in light blue smocks and black shoes. A dog wanders over and lays by my feet. Later a Japanese woman takes a picture of me feeding a cat a piece of sausage. After a week in Rome, I took a train south to the port town of Bari where I connected with the ferry to Corfu. The Mediterranean refugee crisis of that moment had resulted from the collapse of the Albanian economy and, as I walked through the port, I passed groups of mute, placeless people who had just crossed the sea on rafts and had been herded into makeshift pens. Once on the ferry, because this was the offseason for tourism, I found myself alone with a group of Italian truck drivers. They chain-smoked, passed a bottle and, when they looked in my direction, would laugh mockingly and say something that ended with the word ‘signora.’ Eighteen hours later, I arrived in the port city of Corfu, rented a room and tried to sleep while I listened to noisy sex through a wall with a rough-hewn wooden cross hanging on it.

Sunday Morning in a Port Town Sunday morning on the curve Of a port town past its prime Where each dry stone found a cat To nod wisely at the rain I was the solace Of a garrulous old woman She’d clearly rather talk than listen She knew I would not interrupt Drawing the view The first line has to go somewhere And so I separate the sky from the sea This false boundary Exists only in my mind As a mark of my insecurity I protested that I Did not speak the language Didn’t seem to matter She’d clearly rather talk than listen I smiled and peeled an orange I justified her monologue Understood as best I could The contents of her small gray eyes Drawing the view The first line has to go somewhere And so I separate the sky from the sea This false boundary Exists only in my mind As a mark of my insecurity The following day I boarded a bus at random and rode to a village called Paleokastritsa. I climbed a steep stone-cobbled path. Passed goats and sheep being led down by an old woman with a stick. Bells clanking, bleating “yah yah, ah yah,” spindly legs clacking on the stones. At a certain point, I was walking on olives that had fallen on the ground. They are surprisingly juicy and red inside like a berry. The path led to a monastery where I briefly watched monks squeezing oil out of olives with a squeaking wooden press. Then I walked to the edge of a cliff and looked down upon the shifting sea; I had suddenly arrived in “Contempt.” (Audio from the film.) The landscape resembled exactly that which I’d seen in the film, but it was deeper and more resonant, a great blue world of air and sky and water and rock, atwitter with bird sounds and redolent of almond blossoms and something like oregano. Remarkably, these islands and this sea outdid their romanticized depictions in films and travel posters.

I began to wind my way through the Cycladic Islands, staying about a week in each port town, allowing the infrequent, offseason ferries to determine my route: Syros, Tinos, Mykonos, Naxos, Santorini, Rhodes and back again to the port Piraeus near Athens. My routine on the islands was simple: wake up, eat a boiled egg and yogurt in the one hotel open during the winter, search for a three-day-old International Herald Tribune newspaper in English that I would read slowly to the last word and then hike in a different direction than I had the previous day. I would return for lunch to eat some indefinable part of a goat with a fractured bone protruding from watery tomato sauce, drinking a large bottle of Amstel beer. Despite the desolate beauty of the islands, which I recognized as the rugged tops of mountains emerging from the sea, my ten weeks began to resemble a prison sentence. I’d follow a path to a cliff’s edge and sit looking at the water, like Steve McQueen on Devil’s Island at the end of “Papillion,” cultivating patience. My main interaction today was freeing a goat from a wire fence. They are like weather vanes, pointing their noses into the strong wind to stand upright while they graze. This goat had stuck his head through a fence to reach some good grass and got his horns tangled. He just rested calmly on his knees, trapped, continuing to chew. After I worked his head out of the wire he walked casually away from me, pausing and turning back with a look of benign gratitude. Where the Walls Meet, Momentarily Some old man is hacking his lungs out As he rolls a cigarette Birds are all atwitter in the sun The dogs enjoy the doorways The shade of empty shops, laundry in the alleys Smells of cooking have begun Empty white sky, almond blossoms Sausages, newspaper and beer Empty blue sea, sails against the olive trees Half-drunken drawing of the pier Sound of a telephone carries through All the cobbled streets Big sheep abluster in the wind The children watch a priest Conduct his make-believe Father, son and holy ghost I pray my soul to keep Empty white sky, almond blossoms Sausages, newspaper and beer Empty blue sea, sails against the olive trees Half-drunken drawing of the pier I stood in one place for so many hours That my shadow crept from out beneath my feet Where the walls meet, momentarily

I’m sitting, drawing a row of olive trees curving out of sight over the edge of a hill, a bird croaking at me from a safe distance. I have a colored pencil called “olive.” It’s nice to have a color named specifically for the thing you’re drawing. Though, in truth, the leaves are a little drabber than the pencil indicates. One of the compensations in my glorified island confinement was the movie that arrived once a week with the ferries. Every port town had a weekly screening in a provisional theater with whatever print appeared, usually a recent Hollywood film. Unlike the Italians, the Greeks subtitled films, keeping the original language soundtrack. One night, in an old fort above the port town of Naxos, I endured James Cameron’s “Titanikos” over the course of five hours. The screening lasted that long because the cinema had only one 35mm projector. 35mm prints were shipped on twenty-minute reels and the projectionist normally created the film’s continuity by switching back and forth between the sequence of reels on two projectors. I sat in a damp stone room with two dozen locals on folding metal chairs. We watched twenty minutes of the film. Then a necessary intermission followed to mount the next reel on the sole projector, but the break evolved naturally into smoking, talking, drinking and eating grilled cheese sandwiches. During the first few reels, I sat on my own as an outsider, waiting a little impatiently for the movie to begin again. As we progressed slowly in this fashion through the story, the emotions in the breaks grew more intense. I was eventually adopted as a member of the tribe and handed a bottle of beer. By the end of the film, nearly five hours after we set out together, everyone was weeping and slapping their chests in identification with Leonardo DiCaprio’s nobility. A big woman with a pronounced moustache took me in her arms and lifted me off the ground, sobbing powerfully.

I walked past a church today and saw a dwarf combing his hair in an arched basement room. He sensed that I was watching him and said “English?” He came to the open door, eager to practice his English with a native speaker. He was missing both of his front teeth, so he held his index finger over his lip as he spoke, which made him appear as if he were doing an impersonation of Hitler. I heard his name as “Kolchak” and when I told him I was American he launched into a series of random questions, as if to test me: “Who shot Abraham Lincoln? Who wrote ‘The Red Badge of Courage?’ When was Truman president?” Then he asked me if I was married. “I was, but I’m divorced now?” “Children?” “No.” “No children, not really married. No children a hundred times and still not married.” Then he laughed and said “You take Kolchak to America. First day in America, Kolchak have T.V. show.”

On a largely undeveloped island like Tinos, one could walk almost anywhere because the vegetation was so sparse. But inhabitants in a remote past had decided that some routes were better than others and had stacked low rock walls to designate official paths. While walking everyday between these rock walls, I began to consider metaphors of how one stakes a civilized claim in the wilderness. Stacking one rock upon another is a first significant gesture. My daily sketches of these landscapes, as a slightly more abstract example, always began with the wilderness of a blank, white page. I organized that unstructured mental space by committing graphite marks to the paper and creating a representation of my experience. I’m doing the same thing by writing this sentence now, watching the letters trail out like a path on the background. Somebody Built These Paths Somebody built these paths Who didn’t want to do everything For the first time anymore Sweet smell of urine Guarantees this town within A wilderness of salt Against the final sea Waves thump the shoreline They set it ringing Like the bells above the church Church bells and schoolyard noise Guarantee this town within A wilderness of salt Against the final sea Every day I write this line for the first time And I have to choose to start somewhere Making marks and signs on the paper A simple path through the wilderness for me Birds hunger on the wind Over lizards sunning themselves On the steps of a derelict church Old hands on rosaries Guarantee this town within A wilderness of salt Against the final sea One day late in my trip, I climbed to a now familiar spot at the very top of Tinos where a weathered stone crucifix stood on a flat rock. At this altitude, the wind was strong and constant. I spun with my arms extended, leaned into the wind, and scanned the horizon in all directions. I saw other islands that I’d also climbed recently, vibrating in the haze of distance, and I recognized suddenly that my confidence had returned. I had survived the death of my marriage and the loss of my youthful expectations. It struck me as remarkable that the people we loved could transition from an inextricable part of our daily lives to an uncomfortable, depressing circumstance and then to a merely bittersweet and manageable past. In retrospect, this arbitrary desert exile, motivated originally by a misconception while watching “Contempt” fifteen years earlier, provided a necessary path through the wilderness for me.