Naked Words
I came back from the Sea and I am afraid that the words I found there have disappeared. What if I can’t find them anymore? What if it was all an illusion?
This morning I came to the studio hoping that words would be there. The tree outside my window has dark green leaves now. Birds have not nested in its branches since the heavy storm. Maybe they know that this tree is not safe.
How about me? How about writing and thinking? How about words and beginnings? I want to start a work made of envelopes. I'm fascinated by what an envelope can hold. Words, objects, time. Infinite time in a tiny space, a storm nested in a dot.
Why a dot? What do I mean? Memory is like a dot. Over the past few years I have worked a lot with my own memory. What do I remember? Why do I remember? Are memories real? Are they mine?
I have vague memories about important moments, the ones that change a life: departures, arrivals, refugee camp, first day of school. But then I lose myself in seemingly unimportant ones.
I remember the color of the bedsheets at the camp: light blue, almost white like the sea when it is shimmering under a blazing sun. I remember Angela's hairstyle. I remember the scent of her body: cigarettes and mint. Angela was my first school teacher. What else do I remember? I remember the texture of the school bag, rough, like the surface of a branch. I also remember my first notebook, thin yellow pages, numbered. I remember hesitating in front of the blank page. Did it start there? Hesitation, the rapture of language, the disappearance of memory?
Now I write in this very simple, fragmented language. A third if not a fourth language for me. And I ask myself how can I possibly say something meaningful in a language that I don't really know, in a language that I don't possess.
But these are the only words I can write right now. The only ones that come out of me. Where is Italian? Where is my beautiful language?
Right now Italian carries weight, a weight that is old, that has too much history, too much pain.
I want to know that I can say things as simply as possible. As bare and as naked as feet on grass on a hot summer night. The dew underneath my sole. I want to walk and at the same time I want to be present. I need humble words to be present. I need naked words.
And then I read this poem by Michelangelo:
O notte, o dolce tempo, benché nero,
O Dark yet lovely night, the gentlest time,
you seal with peace the work of every hand
and only those who praise you understand
the good, who honour you know the sublime.
Our trailing thoughts we trim and clip like rhyme;
your moist shade sheds a quietness on the land
and then you raise me in my dreams to stand
in hoped-for heaven where my soul would climb.
O shadow of our death, who takes from life
the wretchedness of both the heart and mind,
the last and healing salve of wounded flesh,
you mend our bodies torn by Fortune's knife,
your dry our tears; in your deep rest we find,
our anger calmed, our tiredness refreshed.
(Girardi, 102, 1531-41?)
Why do envelopes interest me? Maybe because when unfolded they resemble Indian Temples. Four cardinal directions like the four corners of a house. I want to know about houses. Houses are important to me. They are because I want to know what is a home, what is identity. It is built, learned, constructed, borrowed, lost, found, enveloped? In Ancient Indian Texts the home is the replica of the universe. A mandala, the body, the cosmos.
Envelopes contain words, textual materials, but also visual ones. In Victorian times the black border on an envelope meant mourning. (maybe here put something about the history of envelopes)
Envelopes are mini archives of feelings, stories, medical reports, duties, celebrations, they are still life in motion. I have been thinking a lot about still life in motion. Can there be a still life in motion, isn’t the concept in itself a contradiction?
Am I a contradiction?
