the berlin wall

June 30, 2016June 30, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Visiting the Berlin wall in Germany in March was such an amazing experience. The recent history of the most basic freedoms stripped from half of Berliner‘s every day lives for decades is a vital reminder of why fascism and totalitarian societies don’t work under any conditions. Power always corrupts, art and education are replaced by propaganda, and group think, not individuality, is encouraged. Any political or social group who fears satire or who encourages Orwellian newspeak or Kafkaesque show trials or book burning or word banning, is its own little Stasí police state ripe for the taking. The wall pieces must stay, the new city must continue to grow, and history must be taught and learned so we all have the possibility for it not to repeat itself with total abandon. Berlin is a fantastic city!

let me tell you everything from 3000 miles away

June 7, 2016October 14, 2017 | a love letter to rome and italy!

What if a girl met a boy online and they talked and talked and talked in a series of messages and photos and videos but never on the telephone or face to face?

What if a girl did this over and over again with a few boys over a few years, searching for herself in someone else, in a series of misconnections, and connections, oft times shallow, but at times seemingly, beautifully deep? What is real and what is artifice – between two people who “feel” they “know” each other intensely – for awhile? When is the exact moment the lines blur and fantasy and reality become too entangled? Where do you escape the escape when it grows too real, and therefore, too untenable?

What if a girl made a little “story” about a dead girl who rhetorically tweets a boy 3000 miles away from the tomb, and he doesn’t even know she is gone?

This is from a series I worked on and wrote two years ago (2014)

dido’s lament

Image | June 4, 2016October 14, 2017 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Loneliness is so much richer in a crowd.
False flashes of happiness skim over you like patches of sun between all the shadow. But nothing penetrates your skin. You don’t live, you just float, dreamlike, for awhile, eyes closed or open, you just… exist.

You keep losing track of yourself in the mirror. The photograph doesn’t count missing pieces or the inner picture of a brain anymore.

You strange relic to be categorized and placed somewhere not too prominent, some desecrated Venus to half-interested visitors. You’re hard and smooth as stone, you’re inaccessible, always just out of reach of the rare hand grasped to touch.

You’re not to be saved or relished by anyone.
There’s no path to get lost on in your head, no map to follow home, no ship at port bearing signs of departure.

There are no more conversations worth having or kisses to be stolen behind a smile.

All overtures are purely academic. Disavowal doesn’t make a sound in an echo chamber.
When you were younger, and almost beautiful, you shone like a light to the world. But you carried a constant pang and a dread. They were your only constants in a tempest. Death felt black and hollow and lay somewhere between your heart and the brief eclipse of a dead child once taken from there.
Silence, these days, is a relief from the lies offering escape or release for you. There is nothing to return to. There is no destination ahead.

Love is too heavy an abstraction for a literal mind. Music and lies and make believe passions do not move you the way they used to.
Desire is the new death knell, desire in your ice age, desire that can never be answered.

Ghosts cannot be measured or weighed, merely forgotten in the absence of appraisal.

So I’m using the metaphor of a broken goddess of love statue because I’m a forty year old woman and worry about losing the Aphrodite aspect of my life sometimes. Which is pretty realistic but whenever I think I know a door is closed to me another one opens up unexpectedly, so what do I know?! 😉

let us lose ourselves

Image | October 28, 2015June 6, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Are they a shadow now? Can they hear your thoughts now that they’re ether, a chimera, soon to be dust? What becomes of love when you lose the object behind it?

To think you will join them one day; older, wiser, less you than they remember.

Your dust will never become theirs. There is no map to follow, no compass, no ship or footpath to take, no direction to fly in except to fling oneself back into space.

The will of love, the struggle, the battle for tender ownership is gone. They have vanished, you will vanish, it appears life is lived to once more succumb.

What are subterraneans to each other but cells divided once more and spread through the earth? That cold science of it, when emotions which once ran hot have now ended.

What is love but a bargain with a dream to not yet wake up?

You love your visceral charge, the pulp and sponge of brains and bodies mingling, the clawed caress of longing. The rush of losing. The falling. A little pain goes a long way towards desire, toward the fumbling of the living.

You like your love laced with sadness, no, you like your misery traced with desire, you like the reaching out to hold onto another who turns and looks and then really sees you. No motherly embrace, no fatherly pat on the hand, no lone anchor inside yourself compares with the mirrored eyes of a lover.

To know the unknowable, to reach the unreachable, to fold into a future grief as though the stars made a gift for only you. The pulse means more when there is someone else to listen to it. The ticking clock of your life suddenly speeds up… Every bell once a death knell has become a hallelujah.

The blush of love is the breaking of sun through the tops of trees, the breaking of the waves, the sky after the storm, the first cry at birth, the first hint of pain that can be sweet. To become alive in another’s eyes and heart, to ignite a mind, to wish for them more than you wish yourself.

—An excerpt from one of my pieces in the ongoing writing and audio installation series “Let Me Lose Myself” in Skogskyrkogården in Stockholm, Sweden, 2016 — for ccseven.

Naples, Italy; seducing and fascinating me

Image | October 21, 2015June 6, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Sorrento, Capri, and Napoli… The dreamlike beauties and chaotic back alleys of the Campania… Southern Italy… Always I hear the sirens call. Ruins, art, the pastoral by the sea, sweeping views, intense, looming cities and everything in between.
There were some days I had to dedicate to love and experience (so I took spontaneous shots with my iPhone) because if I don’t check myself I live, sleep, eat & breathe my cameras and film. (And men like attention sometimes)

Rome in October

Image | October 18, 2015June 6, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

I caught a ridiculously photogenic couple in Rome taking a selfie together on the pincian hill at sunset, with cupolas and Saint Peter’s behind them. Oh, to be young and beautiful and in love in Roma, what many in this world wouldn’t give for it. If only, I think to myself…

Persimmon trees bearing fruit with a view.

A little ruin and a little Renaissance (and rococo).

Dance of the tourists on the Villa Borghese’s Pincio overlooking the Piazza del Popolo.

A kissing dove and pigeon. White doves always strike me as a symbol of Ancient Rome, much like olive trees.

I like watching the beauty of Rome unfold before other people.

Down the Pincio, on the way to the Spanish Steps, there are views everywhere of cupolas up close and far away.

The endless flow of Roman water over stone and newly fallen leaves.

There’s always a sense of play and humor in the Villa Borghese park, especially in the Pincian hill section.

Walking along the Appian Way one is reminded why Rome will always be the eternal city, winter, spring, summer or autumn.

greco roman

Image | October 17, 2015June 7, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

My spirit turns more and more toward the West, toward the old heritage.

There are, perhaps, some treasures to retrieve among its ruins … I don’t know.

— Lawrence Durrell

western civ

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

“There is no culture whatsoever in western culture” and “western civilization has contributed absolutely nothing to history ” are basically code for ‘I’m a philistine.’

It’s a comment on the loud and proud philistines who don’t do their research and remain ignorant by choice of the history of art, literature, philosophy, music, science, and more.We’re living in an era that is essentially the Age of the Philistine, where anti-culture is a populist trend, and comforts the often rabid fans of groupthink.

We’re dealing with the kind of masses who pride themselves on not self-educating beyond their own lifespans unless it’s a clickbait article they skimmed one time or a hashtag that instantly outrages them until the next hashtag and the next and the next.
Reading anything of depth or substance is so passé now that the most staunchly opinionated, reactionary and inflexible have never even tried it.

Sometimes I feel like we are along for the ride of other people’s drives off a cliff, their cold comfort hostage to our murder-suicide.

It is fitting somehow, dare I say even Romantic, that death cults now rise in Europe, and soon enough in America, as culture itself breathes her very last.

one of the Death / Love / pieces from the Sweden series

August 22, 2015June 6, 2016 | a love letter to rome and italy!

Once more with feeling. The last, final hurrah. One more college try before admitting defeat. Before the decay sets in, and you begin to crumble, a ruin of riches falling to dust; a wreck one can never revisit.
It wasn’t that long ago you felt so terribly young, so terribly alive. Yet it feels suddenly as though youth itself is cut short, before the last hold out, a Mexican standoff between beauty and the loss of beauty, where there is one inevitable outcome. Time seems to make you more stubborn, as though longing is the one last thread holding you to the earth; — not fate or an internal clock, but the capture or loss of desire.
The longing comes in waves some nights, and it never quite leaves you. It grows inside you where life belongs, growing and expanding, until it is a monster who mocks your solitude. You lie awake and feel yourself changing. The monster remains. It is watching while you bide your time with dazzling hopes and plans, which appear foolish in the light of day.
When you’re closer to death, and no longer feel beautiful— boldness deserts you. Instead of life feeling more fleeting it overpowers the senses. You long to be lost in something, in someone, in yourself most of all. You must break out of all the building and balancing and routine and live before this one final chance eludes you but you don’t know how. And that’s what makes the roots take hold faster and stronger before they pull you down. The tree of life is also your coffin. The delicate balance keeps shifting. You recede back into it.
Longing is a question without an answer.