follow...

i kept running into the same figure over the course of a day. it seemed coincidental at first, but when you consider our movements and patterns, there are very few fatal intersections. our coincidences are driven by habit. i broke habit and coincidence, following her.
she lead me through a series of dark rooms and mazes. i did not focus on her face, only her movements. she could have been anyone. in the end, we both stood at length to look back at each other from a long hallway. she never saw my face.

a two hour siesta with calvino's "invisible cities"

"He was thinking about these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is a wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories."


"As this wave from memories flows in, the city soaks it up like a sponge and expands."


"From one part to the other, the city seems to continue, in perspective, multiplying its repertory of images: but instead it has no thickness, it consists only of a face and an obverse, like a sheet of paper, with a figure on either side, which can neither be separated nor look at each other."

"You walk for days among trees and among stones. Rarely does the eye light on a thing, and then only when it has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing: a print in the sand indicates the tiger's passage; a marsh announces a vein of water; the hibiscus flower, the end of winter. All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are."

"But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered. Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her."


"It is more difficult to fix on the map the routes of the swallows, who cut the air over the roofs, dropping long invisible parabolas with their still wings, darting to gulp a mosquito, spiraling upward, grazing a pinnacle, dominating from every point of their airy paths all the points of the city."

i have a few maps

that i don't know how to use, so i usually don't--but i have them, just in case. and these maps will show me metro stops, bus routes, pictures of infamous monuments and landmarks, but rarely does it show me the way home. i'll probably buy a few more maps while i'm here. maybe start a collection of unhelpful things. the street signs look like grave markers to me. everywhere i go, ends up in a piazza. now i know why they say, "all roads lead to rome". they don't use these maps.

the narrative of trash and things left behind

this is broken and waiting
for a foot, i think, bitter
from being used and tossed away:
but i found it, instead, and made
a poem about love and what is
broken is sometimes more
beautiful than what is
whole.

this is wood that once was
a chair, but it has been
plotting for years, i think--
notice how dull and beaten?--
making a plan to return to the
earth. so this wooden chair breaks
and just a piece of this leg remains,
basking in the sun.
a perfect roman tragedy.

the flower keeps its perfect shape
even in the street, after falling
beside a table for two. i pick it up
it keeps it's perfect shape for days
on my bedside table. it falls off
the table, i almost step on it--but don't.
the flower keeps its perfect shape.

i am not afraid of lost

as hana would say: "'lost' is good. 'lost' is our friend. we don't get lost enough."
well, i do get lost quite a bit. i once told someone that the only way to really get to know a place is to get lost in it--a few times--and find your way home again. 'lost' and 'fear' are relative, though, and i now find myself 'lost' not only in the landscape, but in a culture. i am dealing with 'lost' on foot and in everday scenarios. italian is 'lost' on me and therefore, communication is lost. this picture represents 'lost'. the bus driver is lost, his friend is a stranger we picked up at a gas station, and none of us know enough italian to ask what's going on--much less to get us home again.

Trastevere, Finally

we finally made it to trastevere, which did not seem as touristy is everyone had warned it would. it does have a sort of custom-made charm, but is still very Roman with it's ancient buildings and modern graffiti.
we wander as a group, looking for the jewish orphan and the heterotopia, which are easier to find than recognize.

Mapping the Private Space

http://maps.google.com/maps/ms?ie=UTF8&hl=en&msa=0&ll=89.456192,175.78125&spn=123.134487,360&z=0&om=1&msid=106123827893470080196.00000112f44ddd2ae8cbc

Invisible City

Functionality is invisible here. There is only beauty and light. A doorway is no longer something to walk through as if with some purpose. It is a question. What is on the other side? What does it mean to have a doorway that leads to nowhere? These archetectural details are symbols of the invisble.





An excerpt from Michel Foucault's essay entitled "Of Other Spaces," (1967) Heterotopias.

The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating past, with its great preponderance of dead men and the menacing glaciation of the world.
We are at a moment, I believe, when our experience of the world is less that of a long life developing through time than that of a network that connects points and intersects with its own skein...it does involve a certain manner of dealing with what we call time and what we call history.
One could say, by way of retracing this history of space very roughly, that in the Middle Ages there was a hierarchic ensemble of places: sacred places and profane places: protected places and open, exposed places: urban places and rural places (all of these concern the real life of men).
And perhaps our life is still governed by a certain number of oppositions that remain inviolable, that our institutions and practices have not yet dared to break down. These are oppositions that we regard as simple givens: for example between private space and public space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure and the space of work. All these are still nurtured by the hidden presence of the sacred.
The space in which we live, which draws us out of ourselves, in which the erosion of our lives, our time and our history occurs, the space that claws and gnaws at us, is also, in itself, a heterogeneous space. In other words, we do not live in a kind of void, inside of which we could place individuals and things. We do not live inside a void that could be colored with diverse shades of light. We live inside a set of relations that delineates sites which are irreducible to one another and absolutely not superimposable on one another.


What is Foucault saying here that I could take and make my own? What is he saying that carries cultural weight in Rome? Let's start with history and the "ever accumulating past".
I've chosen history as my invisible city. Rome is full of it. You cannot take a trip to the supermercato without bumping into something ancient and mystical. Even when there is no real mystery, we create it. Romans, on the other hand, live among history as if it wasn't there at all. It's less my invisible city as it is theirs and in order to see it (or should I say, see it without looking for it or actually ever REALLY seeing it), I would need to become invisible myself. I would need to become a fleneur: a person who strolls while thinking and thus, moves through the urban landscape. So I am the new fleneur, strolling through personal and public spaces, which I have started to map, in detail. I expect many of these spaces to overlap and intersect and parallel. I expect these spaces to become typologies for conceptual spaces yet to come.

What I Carry with Me

a chapstick for every bag i own:
chapstick because my mother
once told me that wearing lipstick
drains the natural color from your lips.
so i'm carrying around at least 4 chapsticks,
just in case i need
one.



i'm in search of romans
with chapstick,
soothing and sweet.
i imagine it won't be
easy. rome strikes me
as a lipstick city.

Introduction

Ciao.

"Ciao" is an informal "Hello" and "Goodbye". It implies both the beginning and the end. It is fitting that Italians greet and bid each other farewell with this simple word because in Italy, nothing is written in stone and there are no definites. Everything is negotiable and there is always room for interpretation. Back home, we say "Nothing is certain in this world but death and taxes" (Bejamin Franklin), but in Rome, I'm not sure even those apply.

The great Italian Film Director, Federico Fellini, said:
"There is no beginning. There is no end. There is only the passion of life."

La Bella Figura.

When Italians say, "Bella Figura" they mean, literally, "Beautiful Form". In Italy, they talk about Bella Figura the way Americans talk about Freedom and Equality. Although we contradict ourselves more often than not, you would be hard pressed to find an Americano (as Italians would say) who didn't, in some respect, buy into the pursuit of happiness.
So, with my ideals tucked away, I am in search of this Bella Figura. Italians love to put on a show. Even Fellini had this idea in mind when he said that all Italians are good actors and perhaps the only bad Italian actors could be found on the screen.

The stage is set. From this point on, I'll leave it up to you to decide what I mean when I say "Ciao".