10:15 PM - My Mentor
Current mood: grateful
Category: Religion and Philosophy

Allow me to introduce a pivotal figure from my early twenties.  Professor of Italian literature James Chiampi was one of my first instructors at UC Irvine and is perhaps the only person I've ever considered my mentor in the traditional sense.  I studied Dante's Divine Comedy under him, and the experience fundamentally altered my view of literature forever and saved me from buying into the catastrophic philosophy of despair.

Below is an interview I conducted with Chiampi while writing for the New University newspaper.  I've revised it and restored parts I was originally forced to excise due to space limitations.  Chiampi does most of the talking, but it's a striking portrait of a wise gentleman.  If you've read any of the interviews I've given, you might see shades of Chiampi in my answers.  The title of my "Versions of Happiness" is likewise a nod of respect to this kind and intelligent human being. ~ Abel G. Peña

15 Minutes With James Chiampi

By Abel G. Peña

Italian professor James Chiampi has a reputation for being one of the most charismatic, jovial and passionate teachers on the University of California, Irvine campus, of being moved to tears while lecturing on Dante's "Divine Comedy."  Yet, in speaking with Chiampi, one understands that his life has had its fill of adversity, as all lives do. It is, however, his appreciation for life's dichotomies that forges Chiampi's renowned passion—for even Dante found poetry in the depths of the inferno.

Abel G. Peña: Why did you decide to become a professor?

James Chiampi: I decided to become a professor in part because the Vietnamese War was on. They used to send little guys like me after Charlie, and Charlie used to prepare a welcome with poisonous snakes and sharpened bamboo stakes. So I decided I had a choice between Yale University or doing that, and so I went with Yale University. But also, that neglects the really important thing—which is I loved Italian. I love Italy. I love the idea of sharing with students things that I love.

Shadowy Prefaces by James Thomas Chiampi

AGP: You're Italian yourself?

JC: I'm Italian-American myself, but I grew up speaking a dialect, and not grammatical Italian. So, learning Italian for me was like learning a foreign language, because I spoke the language of the very poorest. A lot of us are from a place called Montefusco, which is in the Provincia di Avellino, and it's really the poorest part of Italy. It's dirt poor.

My father was born in 1908, during the voyage of immigration.  My father died in 1999, at age 91. My mother just turned 90, April 5. She was born the week before the Titanic sunk.

AGP: Why did you end up here at the University of California, Irvine?

I ended up at UCI because it was the plum job of the year. I got married that summer, and I came west on Sept. 15 1973.  And I thought I was one of God's anointed because I was going to start at 10,500 dollars a year.

AGP: It's common to hear the word "love" when students are asked how they feel about you.

JC: You just make me melt inside when you say that, because I teach about love and with love, and I feel like I'm one of God's anointed with this job. They actually pay me to teach Dante, and I love doing it, because every time I teach it, if I've got a good class, my nerve ends are tingling as I enter the class.  I've got a thought on my mind as I walk from my office to the classroom.  If I have really good students, they'll take that idea and show me something I did not see, and my perceptions of Dante grow deeper and more exciting. I walk out of the classroom sometimes as if I've had three cups of coffee.

My language classes are like the Jim Chiampi Show. They're sort of cabaret. I go in there and I have a wonderful time. I am showing these students, look, they could have an absolutely thrilling life in a gorgeous, exciting place. So basically, I feel like the candyman: [voice deepens] "Here try this, kid. How do ya feel?" [laughs].

I try to bring everything I have to my study of Dante. I try to illustrate his philosophical points with my own personal experience. I just feel immensely blessed to be able to give from my abundance, and in that act of giving, I often receive far more than I give. Some of the friendships I've formed with my students have been great blessings to me. It's like I have an enormous family, and perhaps that's because I was an only child, and I had a somewhat lonely adolescence, but I've overcome that with stunning and crashing success.

AGP: Your reputation isn't of being easy, but students still love you. How do you create this devotion?

JC: I believe that there's no such thing as a difficult thought, there's only poor teaching. I strive to take large thoughts and make them people-sized and make them familiar. They say I'm hard—I demand that people give their attention to Dante.  

Chiampi's preferred translation for teaching the The Divine Comedy.

You see, so much in our culture favors distraction. Everything's multi-tasking. A book's gonna come out, you know, "How I Made a Million Dollars While Curing My Acne and Experiencing Multiple Orgasms." But I believe there is a beauty in seeing and loving deeply one thing. Like a woman that you meet that, oh my god, that place just between her nose and her cheek where you love to kiss her. And you look at her and you find new and more beautiful things everyday, little funny and clever things she has to say. It's intimacy.  It's about intimacy and renewal of vision.

AGP: How would you describe yourself?

JC: I don't know. So many people tell me I'm passionate it must be that I am. But one of my failures in life has really been controlling my emotions. And I tend, for better or for worse, to be transparent. There's a good side to that and of course a bad side to that. I seem to play with all my cards face up. Everybody seems to know what I'm thinking even before I do. It's a weakness. It's a vice. But, I think in the classroom, it helps me, because when a student shares his or her thoughts with me, I can't help getting excited about it. I want to show people that you can find something that you do and, via mastery and via love and via deep insight, be thrilled by what you do.

AGP: What do you like to do with your free time?

JC: I like to be with my son. I like to be with my daughter. I like to go to the ARC [campus gymnasium]. I'm a 58-year-old man, and I've had a very depressing last year, so I thought, hey, here's a dignified way to drop dead. Nobody'll recognize it as suicide. I'll go out there and play full-court basketball with these 18-year-olds.

And I love antique stores, and I love talking to intelligent guys and intelligent girls. I love bookstores, and I have a lot of secret reading I admit to nobody, like I love mafia books, and I love books about the Cambridge 5 spies, and I love books about the KGB, and I love reading about Winston Churchill. He's my idol. Because he's such a complex and rich human being. He saw almost with prophetic clarity what Hitler was and what would happen to Europe. His example has inspired me.  I'm fascinated by the way people deceive themselves with monstrosities like communism and facism. I very greatly believe in the superior rationality of free markets because I fundamentally believe that individuals choosing for themselves are finally more rational than committees in far off places judging for them what they need.

I like to play tennis, but nobody plays with me. At one point, I could kick butt, at least among faculty. I also love to watch the Sopranos. There are some shows on TV that I genuinely appreciate.

AGP: Films, too?

JC: Films I prefer. I think "Blade Runner" was among the very best American movies, and I can watch it over and over again, because this movie asks us that even when a machine has consciousness and has therefore the awareness of death and the anguish of death, and has memories and values to protect, how do we draw an interesting and valid distinction between it and the human? And that last scene where it releases the bird, a great romantic gesture. And "The Godfather," I was an addict for that movie. And of course, I love Italian films. "Hawks and Sparrows" and the "Dolce Vita" are my favorites, with "8 ½" following that.

AGP: There's an interesting line in "8 ½," where an elegantly dressed though depressed woman says, "I understand too much. That is why I'm alone." What's your reaction to that philosophy?

JC: Oh, but I believe that's true. I believe that increase of wisdom is increase of sorrow. I believe that where intellect is not joined with love and a sense of purpose, when one lives in the moment with a coldly intellectual and cynical understanding of things such as certain reductionisms give us – the Marxist and the Freudian come to mind – that does make one alone. But if one had the knowledge of Dante, that the universe is fundamentally a creation of love, that everything that arises arises from love, then knowledge cannot leave one alone. On the contrary, it brings unity with the cosmos, unity with nature, unity with God. So, yes, I can certainly understand that. An intellectual knowledge divorced from will and love can make one alone. Unspontaneous.  Alone.

"I understand too much.  That is why I am alone."

AGP: What do you think is important in living a happy life?

JC: What a question. [pauses] I think it is the proper relationship between one's intellect and one's emotions. People who call me a passionate professor and exalt feeling forget that at 3 a.m., when you wake up in the middle of the night and there's nobody there and you say to yourself, "My life is worthless. It all amounts to nothing," that at that moment you say, well, if I am worthless, why do I have students 20 years later saying to me, "Professor Chiampi, you're the reason I became a teacher?" That's not worthless.

When I have that feeling of bleakness, I go to facts. They are hard, firm, out there, separated from me. But on the other hand, when these emotions are emotions of delight, as when my students grasp what I have to teach and laugh at my jokes and seem very moved by what I've shown them, well, that's a positive thing. So it's living in harmony with one's emotions, understanding that even from terrible pain one can profit and learn. But always having intellect as a bulwark, a control, when those emotions are negative ones.

Because feelings are great, but there's one terrible feeling, and that's despair, and people tend to over look that when they exalt feeling to the stars. No, no—there's also intellect, respect for fact, and at 3 a.m. during the dark night of the soul, you don't need more feeling, you need fact, you need truth. Emotion knows nothing of truth.

A way to happiness is transparency, but a controlled transparency. Wholeness of response, guided by intellect, in love, is a kind of happiness. I think there are happinesses. Sharing with you my pain, and sharing with me your pain, is a happiness. Happiness is conscious recognition and creation of value. That's a great happiness. Oh my god, I'm getting lost in versions of happiness [laughs]. Sadness is the destruction of value. As if, when you look into Satan's eyes, what you see there is nothing.

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Currently watching : 8 1/2 - Criterion Collection Release date: 04 December, 2001

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