On Italy, on Love, a Keatsian letter never sent

Image | August 16, 2015June 6, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

I write to you from Italy. It’s where I belong, if I belong anywhere in this world. I should be writing this in Italian, that beautiful language… the language of Dante, and poetry, and of the maestros, but I’ve mastered one language only, English. Mastered it with the devotion of a life long lover who never grows bored. Such is my devotion to Italia itself. To the stories of Italy, to the soil, the sun, the gleaming stripped marble of ruins, the art, the hum of life for centuries still playing in stone.

(film still)

Love and Italy are entwined for me. But love for a place feels less dangerous than love for another soul. What is it about love more than any other sensation or state that makes it worth dying for for nearly everybody? Is it the intoxication? Is it that danger of falling; first in love, —the surrender of giving oneself so completely to another, and then, —the alluring danger of falling into disrepute and disintegration?
(‘before sunrise’ trilogy film still)

You’ll never have nowhere to go, I heard in a song once. That’s the other thing about love too, isn’t it? If you are my fail safe, I’ll be your home. We’ll never have nowhere to go, we’ll never be quite alone, never be utterly lost in the world with our pieces of love tethered to an anchor. Love gives you the buoyancy of floating, even at the end of a rope. The deeper the love, the deeper the water, the longer the line, the sweeter the kiss, the saltier the tears. The deeper the knife plunge. Something like that.

(Shot by me, double exposed b&w film, protestant cemetery, Rome, Italy, 2008)

Loving is swimming that feels like floating, falling that feels like flying, until loving feels like drowning when there’s still a spark in the brain and air in the lungs, — quickly quickly at first, then slower, slower so there’s a flicker of hope, until the last tick tick tock of blue veins and dark arterial blood, and with the sounds of a few trite memories, voices of ghosts before you’ve forgotten, —then the spark is faltering again, then flickering out, the air is now escaping, —then, at once — nothing.

(shot by me, portra film, capri protestant cemetery, isle of Capri, Italy, 2013)

Keats said, “Love is my religion; I could die for it.” Not for religion, not for country, not for god or even one’s soul, but for love itself, that fickle slow dying and quickening and petering out and rushing back and dissolving of self, that is worth dying for, each and every time.

We hope for one great love in life, but perhaps there is a beauty in a few great loves, slipped into and out of like different characters? Multiple loves for multiple lives.

(analog photograph by the amazing Francesca Woodman)

That’s what we have, you and I, isn’t it? We fall in and out of love, in and out of each other? We hunt and repel, we submerge together, and reemerge on opposite sides, —we crash back into, then back away, sometimes we look away when speaking…

Tell me when does love stagnate? When the newness of sex becomes too familiar or the nuances of our narratives loses their mystery? When we lose ourselves a little too much to capture the other, and no longer “get each other?” When the brains soften followed by the body?

(greco roman style neoclassical painting)

I fear I’ll never feel that with Italy, my love will never die for its myths and beauty. I’ll always return to its warmth, its reminder of death, and of the temporary. My love for you also feels endless, for it is already a ruin we revisit, happily, to hold onto the dust a little longer, to declare we were once here, to hope when we’re carrion our love will find itself in the hum pressed into stone too.

some nights

August 14, 2015June 7, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

standing at the ruins on a quiet roman night

Image | April 28, 2015January 31, 2018 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Rome is pieced together by fragments old and new; a broken clay pile of people who have lived and died, and are forgotten, rivaling the Monte Testaccio in size and obscurity.

Rome is the heaviness of time. It is the marks left on humanity. It is a walkable history book, forever unfolding its pages.

Rome is monuments of the big whigs leaving you breathless with their grand scale and an overwhelming rush of beauty.

‘Everyone is dead here’, the city whispers, in a voice softened against the bone-white marble of ruins.

The palatine lies silent under the stars. This is your one moment to catch your breath and savor Rome.

Try to stop time by breathing it in slowly. Hold it in, and take a sensory snapshot. Stand there, holding your breath, recording, feeling as immovable as a statue; a Henry James’ American willing a sacrifice to the pagan gods.

‘Just let me remember this. Let this enter me. The endlessness of it. The cobwebs. The broken stone. The bones. The dust. The pulse remaining somehow. Let me carry Rome where ever I go. Let it become a part of me. No, let me become a part of Rome. Another story never writ, another name unknown.’

A quick photo hello

March 6, 2015June 6, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Shots from Rome in October.

the sea inside

Image | January 1, 2015June 6, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Feeling unloved is the first, and the worst, but it comes and goes with the tide.

There’s love, there’s dust, love, dust, love, dust… then simply, … the wave.

Italy and England

Image | December 31, 2014June 6, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

There’s old Winston Churchill watching Big Ben, in Westminster, London, in March 2014.

An anglophile’s dream: the omnipresent iconic red telephone box.

Wandering around Portobello Road, in the Notting Hill neighborhood.

The street art / grafitti is like The Sex Pistols and the Bbc all rolled into one.

Tea at Sherlock Holmes and Watson’s house was quite amusing.

Enjoyed searching for british china tea cups and white darjeeling on a half deserted faire.

After wandering the many lovely garden parks of london wound up at Buckingham’s Gate.

Making the pilgrimage to John Keats house at Hampstead Heath, London, after years of visiting the flat he died in, and laying flowers at his grave, in Rome.

A room with a view…over the Thames, I was always excited to wake up to (and to raise my glass to) Big Ben.

Saw the beautiful La Boheme set in 1940s Paris at the Royal Albert Hall.

From the window of “221 b Baker Street, London

From the beautiful garden of John Keats home, where he fell in love with Fanny Brawne and wrote some of his greatest poems.

From the cloisters of Westminster Abbey. I do love a cloister.

You have no idea how deep my anglophilia goes because I am always going on about Italy but these signs gave me a profound joy.

This sign is so British it hurts.

One of those moments in London an American or most foreigners savor.

Always, a pilgrimage, a beauty, a joy. John Keats forever. English Romanticism forever.

Down the cloistered hall… like a dream of English classics, literary characters dancing in my head, London, a city looming in my brain of larger than life characters and eccentric, wonderful stories and frightful tales.

The heartbreakingly beautiful dream of Italy view from my dreamy Sorrento hotel room terrazzo.

Walking along the Appian Way on a quiet, car-free Sunday in Rome or along the Renaissance Via Guilia, I am forever excited and in awe over the small beauties and signs of the ancient world in this magical, mysterious city open-armed to the world.

The architecture and cafes are familiar but I feel and live Rome anew each visit. There’s always something new to discover or a passion to stumble onto. Life is in the moment. It is heavy with the past, it is so alive it smacks of the future, but it is so wildly, lightly felt in the now, in the moment, Rome is like dreaming awake, feeling everything. Everything!

Finding new off the beaten path cafes was a big favorite of mine in Italy this year. Always in search of the quiet moments and the hidden corners of Rome. This cafe was in Trastevere where you can sit and sip espresso and gaze at a Baroque Madonna painted onto a church exterior wall.

I love the Eternal City because it has so many layers of history and love and unknown stories and marks of time and beauty in decay and new life bursting forth in a macabre, colored, brilliant celebration in Roman life today.

Took a boat around my favorite island and swam in the Tyrrhenian sea on Capri, a place which invokes everything beautiful, lush and ancient about Southern Italy. There’s nothing quite like it.

Returned to a lot of the same pleasures of the past, freshly squeezed oranges and lemons, under the Italian sun, by a Neapolitan woman who sings all day as she flitters around her Kiosk on the gorgeous Via Tragara.

A return to Pompeii, the fascinating buried city with Vesuvius watchful in the distance.

Meeting new friends abroad 🙂

Long walks soaking in the sun and the past.

Architectural details in half-obscured gardens of small villa art museums (full of amazing Renaissance, ancient and baroque Italian art)!

Being the foreigner in a city you fall into like a comfortable affair.

The moments you can’t anticipate but happen upon in the most beautiful of happenstances.

My favorite spot on earth for the golden hour, on the Pincian Hill in Rome. This is before the view of the Popolo.

A typical Roman street, wrapped into the mystery of fragments and pieces of history.

The beauty of being overwhelmed in Rome.

Cafe life in Italy, a class of wine or a coffee, a little treat, there is nothing like it. Another layered moment captured, to be savored and remembered palpably.

On every wall there is a reminder of death and a reminder of love, the eternal kind, of love that lasts, and of life in the hand too.

Rome, a city to return to, one that keeps its shutters open to the world, long enough for an unforgettable peek.

Since that first moment I arrived there, now, and always, for Roma.

For traveling, for seeing the world, for meeting new people, and for being at home in the world.

Here’s to 2014… and here is a cheers to 2015 and a new year of adventure and experience and chasing beauty!

throw out your guidebooks

Image | November 11, 2014June 12, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Throw your guidebooks to the side (after you’ve seen the major sights) and get a little lost for an afternoon in Rome.

Side step vespas and taxis and pilgrims and other tourists behind maps, and get lost for a while.

Do as the Romans do.

Bow in and out of the slants of sunlight and vespas, use sounds of water fountains and laughter as your navigation.

An off the beaten path is not merely a passage but a rite and a full circle.

When walking in Rome you are witness to the many passions of people in a cacophony of color and sound and motion.

Roma begins to makes sense to you as you feel follow its rhythm; it is foreign and antique and familiar all at once.

Rome is history in the bones of the city stirring the blood.

Roma changes you.

What could I suggest to you but to drink in the sublime here?

See the city for the thousands of layers rather than one wild jumble.

Beauty is on display, oh yes, —but so is reflection of the human and the divine in every corner.

The celebration of the individual is found even in the smallest of details in Rome.

Art is a living thing.

The story of mankind is in a treasured relic, and in a sip of espresso, and in a stolen kiss.

Life is found in another language where the words are less important than the feelings they conjur in us all in the moment.

Rome is the tug of a heartbeat in a pulse before the veil falls over you.

Rome is a reminder of death that is very much a reminder to live! To live now!!

eternal city

Image | October 10, 2014June 6, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Spend some time in the eternal city and you will feel death like a whisper on the back of your neck.

Go there young, when you still feel invincible, and watch the tombs and monuments to a crumbled past deathmask-smile at you.

Return after you’ve loved and lost a little, when you’ve begun to collect possessions interchangeably with memories, hold hands past paupers and ruffians and the modern courtesan; the tourist liaisons hovering by menus, beckoning, offering, waving.

Return again after you’ve lost more than you’ve loved but you still have a bit of youth on your side, and you can take in the big picture.

Return next when you’ve hit your peak and now the edges are fraying a little. When fountains and paintings once trumpeting romance and pleasure are grimier and more worn than you remember. When the seducers and the money takers suggest more pallid languor than sex, where every turned corner is a missed opportunity or a new experience, depending on how beaten down or defiant you’ve become since that earlier youth on your first visit. You have a decision to make… Strength for strength or a quick decline.

Return a final time, as cherubs and seraphim throw off shrugs and hands in the air when the whisper of death becomes an aria crowding out the ears. Stare at the details or miss them, memorizing the picture of life doesn’t matter so much in the short term. The marks on your soul have already been decided for you. This is the golden amnesia hour, where every thing thought and felt is only for the rushing moment, water slipping through fingers, spilling out of the mouth, tasted, cooled but most of it landing on your face, your shirt, your shoes, the uneven cobblestones. Keep drinking it in.

Anaïs Nin’s 111th birthday

Image | February 21, 2014June 7, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Today, February 21, 2014 is Anaïs Nin’s 111th anniversary of her birth. She died in 1977.

She was the artist and writer who inspired me to read more books (she detailed and listed classics of literature in her literary diaries and helped in no small way to introduce me to much of the more interesting side of the western canon.

I found her through Henry Miller, who was recommended to me at 17 by a smug faced twenty something dishwasher at the restaurant I was a cashier girl and bartender for, the famed Harvard haunt Bartley’s in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I found Anaïs searching for another Miller book to read after Crazy Cock and Tropic of Cancer, and ironically, (I would find out later), I found Anaïs and forgot about Henry for awhile , until I got to Henry & June, in which he featured.

I spent a lot of time as an English major and bookish girl trawling the college library shelves and the second hand bookshops of Boston and Cambridge. Nin’s childhood diary Linotte literally jumped from the shelf when I was looking for Henry and landed in front of my feet. How could I refuse a book hurling itself at me? It was a sign from the fates.

I picked up her beautifully written, rather innocent, girlhood journal which began as a letter to her absent father at aged 11 as she sailed across the sea to New York and the new world with her European mother and brothers. I couldn’t put the book down and when it was finished I eagerly sought out the continued series of Diaries which detail her whole life from ages 11 to seventy something. I also read her fiction, novellas, poetry and my personal favorite, her astounding literary criticism and advice on writing. D. H. Lawrence: An Unprofessional Study and In Favour of the Sensitive Man are two stand outs.

As I sit here and sip champagne and blood orange juice and re-read her timeless quotes, I am reminded of how radical her thinking and living was to a teenage girl who loved the lost generation and the 1920s. Anaïs not only encouraged me to travel, she encouraged me to read what I wanted and to write, to paint, to sketch, to meet people, to look for adventure, to see the magic in every day life, to risk things. To question authority and identity and ask myself the questions: is there really only one self or multiple selves? Can dreams ever be actualized? Can a woman really live more than one life? Can life be fantastic some times? What role do I want to play in the world?

Although, like Anaïs, I grew up with an absent father and an artist mother who had to work very hard just to feed, shelter and clothe her and her children, and who was poor growing up, I followed her lead in dreaming big and making plans to see the world and pursue art and culture because that is what mattered to me. I refused to see them as out of reach. And today I have been able to realize those dreams, step by step, of traveling and becoming intimately acquainted with Italy and other places I love. I have pursued my love of photography and writing.

It is not always easy to feel talented or confident about your work but I do try to search for the marvelous in every day life and seek out the fantastic and what moves me.

I try to engage with people who are also questioning life and their assigned roles, other artists and thinkers. I pursue passions and pleasures and try to find a balance…

I can be too much of an extremist, hedonist or dreamer some times in an absent minded professor way, which isn’t always great for paying the bills and attending to mundane responsibilities!

But I have had the attitude that we are here now, we live now, and I don’t want to wait until I am retired to see and experience the world. I also look for art and culture where I live and in creative friendships and partnerships which enrichen and enliven, as Anaïs did with some of the most creative and eclectic minds of the 20th century.

Nin’s dragged up relationship dramas aside, I focus on the brilliant, courageous, rebellious, mischievous, fascinating, multi-layered, artistic, open writer Anaïs Nin was and in her gorgeous, atmospheric, insightful writing, I find that constant source of clarity and inspiration I need to live fully in my dreams and in the day to day.

I owe such a tremendous debt to Anaïs Nin and her work.

You can also find me on twitter quoting her work:

http://twitter.com/anaisnin

I had always believed in Andre Breton’s freedom, to write as one thinks, in the order and disorder in which one feels and thinks, to follow sensations and absurd correlations of events and images, to trust to the new realms they lead one into.

“The cult of the marvelous.” Also the cult of the unconscious leadership, the cult of mystery, the evasion of false logic. The cult of the unconscious as proclaimed by Rimbaud. It is not madness. It is an effort to transcend the rigidities and the patterns made by the rational mind.

Winter, 1931-1932 The Diary of Anaïs Nin , Volume One 1931-1934

You live like this, sheltered, in a delicate world, and you believe you are living. Then you read a book (Lady Chatterley, for instance), or you take a trip, or you talk with Richard, and you discover that you are not living, that you are hibernating. The symptoms of hibernating are easily detectable: first, restlessness. The second symptom (when hibernating becomes dangerous and might degenerate into death): absence of pleasure. That is all. It appears like an innocuous illness. Monotony, boredom, death. Millions live like this (or die like this) without knowing it. They work in offices. They drive a car. They picnic with their families. They raise children. And then some shock treatment takes place, a person, a book, a song, and it awakens them and saves them from death.
The Diary of Anaïs Nin , Volume One 1931-1934