Images

dido’s lament 

Image | | 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 | | 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 | | 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 | | 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…
romeprsimmon

Persimmon trees bearing fruit with a view.

autruin

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

dance

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

doves

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

woman

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

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

water

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

bust

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

caes

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

western civ

Image | | 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.

On Italy, on Love, a Keatsian letter never sent

Image | | 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.

standing at the ruins on a quiet roman night

Image | | 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.’