-Milan Kundera
Desperate this other morning, sweat beads itching against my spine, I knew I had to walk, just walk and walk like I used to. To climb those hills just because their ascent was interesting. I didn't think about anything but the new beats in my headphones and whether or not the ratio of Daisy pulling vs my new heels was worth the shoe investment.
But as happens with walking, the light hits a building, the smell changes, suddenly there are cinnamon buns and a dusty sunrise blinding you. This day, I had found myself deeply aware of an 'opening' desire, a sudden want to expose, and, surprisingly, my neighbors' curtain decisions became philosophically relevant.
When I was twenty, I was smoking some weed with friends in a car parked up on this hill. Before us was a thirteen story hotel/community living place, and up on the maybe eleventh floor we all watched in slow motion some man approach the central window. Because of the layout, we knew he was in the stairwell, unaffiliated from the rest of the private spaces. And while he stood there, a Gatsby or Alexander surveying his profit, the light behind him performed an SOS type of flicker.
This car full of six twenty year old stoners froze. What do we do?
Often, the only thing to free me from myself is this "peeping" element. There is a desperate lurking within me, an addiction to ascertaining people's lamp choices, favorite plant pairings, whether or not they are a carpet or hardwood floor type. I often play a silly game with myself where I pretend I'm entering my room for the first time, but then I usually just get deeply overwhelmed.
The personal carrot always dangling in front of me are these San Franciscan walls. You know the kind. They are huge, non-descript concrete slabs. They seem to take up a rude amount of space on the sidewalk, looming and leering over you, unforgiving. And like their European predecessors, these huge barricades come equipped with a tiny door. Should you be be lucky enough to see that door open, the feelings of sidewalk claustrophobia scatter, dissipating in this now lovely expanse.
I'm talking about il giardino segretto, the secret garden.
Planning my trip to Rome, I was researching various gardens. Doria Pamphilj was one of the first to implement the secret garden technique. It is a raised garden, high above the street. It's walls are topped with citrus trees. From the house, you can look down into the garden; from the garden, you can look up to the house. This dialogue of vision was to change the Roman experience. Typically, these gardens were used to plant the herbs, vegetation and medication needed to sustain the family within, or for monastic uses as a place of meditation.
It wasn't until the late Renaissance that these walls came down.
As lonely as ever, I balance my difficult schedule of park visits and watching old classics. Reading, traveling, walking, walking, walking, each day is different and yet feels exactly the same. Watching An Affair to Remember yesterday, Cary Grant takes Deborah Kerr to visit his grandmother in France. Waiting for her outside her small chapel, Grant explains to Kerr that she's here waiting patiently to be reunited with her husband in death.
In Frankie and Johnny, Al Pacino explains to Michelle Pfeiffer that there is no giving up, no walking away, as this is love.
(Have you ever noticed how much the 1980s work ethic defined their concepts of love? As if the higher the sleeves were rolled, the more frantic the movements, the larger the sweat bands, the greater their capability for love was?)
In Immortality by Milan Kundera, he wrote: "I found a beautiful saying: true love is always right, even when it is wrong. But Luther says in one of his letters: true love is often in the wrong. I don't feel that as good as my dictum. Elsewhere, however, Luther says: love precedes everything, even sacrifice, even prayer. From this I deduce that love is the highest virtue. Love makes us unaware of the earthly and fills us with the heavenly; true love frees us of guilt."
Without romantic love and having lost many of my closest friends this year, my love is my intention. From my fingers, I wish lace and vines would pour forth. I wish the wind would turn my hair into trellises, a new kind of hanging garden. A few months ago, I had this dream in which, having descended a lapis lazuli mountain, I was made to choose a path. Before me was an amethyst one leading blindly around a small island in the ocean, and a spiral jetty made of rose quartz. Neither one struck me as particularly optimum: blind knowledge or circular loving. Having told my friend Chris this, she was thrilled to report that on a recent trip to the House of Intuition, she found a rose quartz/amethyst chevron, a natural fusion.
They don't teach Ovid's Metamorphoses in school anymore. Though not surprising, I do find that irritating. If nothing else, the tales of change, evolution, shape-shifting are as relevant today as ever. In fact, it was the publication of Metamorphoses that started the giardino segretto movement, as he described the ancient gardens of the Romans.
Noting collective change, in his chapter "The Ages of Mankind", he wrote:
"Men were content with nature's food unforced.
And gathered strawberries on the mountainside
And cherries and the cluutching bramble's fruit,
And acorns fallen from Jove's spreading tree.
Springtime it was, always, for ever spring."
And later, "Last came the race of iron. In that hard age
Of baser vein all evil straight broke out.
And honor fled and truth and loyalty,
Replaced by fraud, deceit and treachery
And violence and wicked greed for gain."
According to Kundera again, feelings themselves are of value. "The transformation of feelings into a value had already occurred in Europe some time around the twelfth century: the Troubadours who sang with such great passion to the beloved, the unattainable princess, seemed as admirable and beautiful to all who heard them that everyone wished to follow their example by falling prey to some wild upheaval of the heart."
Adolphe Ritte wrote "The dominant characteristic of an époque of transition like ours is spiritual anxiety. it is not surprising we are living in a storm where a hundred contradictory elements collide; debris from the past, scraps of the present, seeds of the future, swirling, combining, separating under the imperious wind of destiny."
Last I was in Rome, we circled this one block about eight times until finally giving up. The huge concrete walls didn't seem to allow an entrance. There was no way into that church.
Desperate to not repeat that mistake again, I've been researching that little block. In art school, they teach you of these opposing little churches, made famous for their ovular shape, sweeping arches, the essence of the Baroque. I promise to keep it short, but there are two men I adore from that era: Bernini (for his sculptures) and Borromini (architecture). I recently discovered that the two were rivals and so four years after Borromini began his ovular church, Bernini decided to copy his style, on a much more elaborate stage. Borromini's is considered more contemplative, gentle, an hommage to San Carlo, whereas Bernini's has been likened to prosciutto, having used a red and white marbeling, too graphically reminding us of Christ's violent death.
What interests me in this example is that Borromini knew San Carlo, having actually worked with the man years prior, and was so moved by him that he actually took his name. San Carlo's surname is Borromeo. But what happened was a few years into the project, riddled with depression, Borromini committed suicide before ever finishing this - his most successful work. Having written a desire to be entombed here, the church was unable (and apparently deeply saddened) by their inability to inter a suicide.
Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote, in the Secret Garden:
“The Secret Garden was what Mary called it when she was thinking of it. She liked the name, and she liked still more the feeling that when its beautiful old walls shut her in no one knew where she was. It seemed almost like being shut out of the world in some fairy place. The few books she had read and liked had been fairy-story books, and she had read of secret gardens in some of the stories. Sometimes people went to sleep in them for a hundred years, which she had thought must be rather stupid. She had no intention of going to sleep, and, in fact, she was becoming wider awake every day which passed at Misselthwaite.”
Pliny the Younger describes a concept of otium vs negotium. Otium is seclusion, serenity and relaxation, whereas negotium is the urban busy life. In ancient Rome, houses were built around the atrium, open courtyards that let in light and ventilation. Because they were in the center of the house, they cut out the street sounds and smells.
Pliny described the differences of living. To live "a good life and a genuine one, which is happy and honorable, more rewarding than any 'business' can be, you should take the first opportunity to leave the den, the futile bustle and useless occupations of the city and devote yourself to literature or to leisure."
Standing on the lighthouse, I watched her watching the whales.
Kelpie: a water sprite who comes in the form of a horse to drowning sailors.
"The time has come; the idea of love will be communicated to all men; art will return to the light in a new form, the earth has been worked from which the new flower will rise, but we will not see this rise before the complete obliteration of the present." Henry Van de Veldo, 1894
In Immortality, there is a passage in which a married couple debate nature. She glories in it's beauty, power and mystery, whereas he is adamant, "cement it all". For him, nature is nothing but gruesome, extremely violent and malicious. I think of Goya's Black Paintings, in which otium and negotium seemed to come together. Towards the end of his life, he bought this villa (La Quinta del Sordo - the fifth deaf, or the Deaf Man's Villa) already richly decorated with landscape paintings on the walls. I cannot find the source that clarifies his mental anguish at the time (I remember reading that he had developed brain tumors from eating his paint - a thing Van Gogh did as well), but whatever the case, you'd be hard pressed not to find some deep mental instability at work here.
According to the New York Times, "These paintings are as close to being hermetically private as any that have ever been produced in the history of Western Art."
Though his work is thought to be premonitions of looming war, products of the Romantic notion of artist as original, "many of the characters in the Black Paintings (duelers, frail old men, nuns, spies, and informers of the Inquisition) represent a world that was rendered obsolete by the French Revolution."
Even Goya was a dinosaur?
And yet you see his dog painting. There is nothing time specific about it.
Manuela Mena, curator at Prado, "There is not a single contemporary painter in the world who does not pray in front of 'The Dog'."
Kundera adds, "The basis of the self is not thought but suffering... In this intense suffering the world disappears and each of us is alone with his self. Suffering is the university of ego-centricism."
And yet, "the secret garden bloomed and bloomed and every morning revealed new miracles."
Resigned, tonight, I put my shoes and binoculars under the bed. I fear the threat of the chase. Am I too addicted to the adventure to recognize the destination? Am I too in love with what I can't have to never be happy with what might be? Am I to live the fate of Echo?
"Shamed and rejected in the woods she hides
And has her dwelling in the lonely caves;
Yet still her love endures and grows on grief,
And weeping vigils waste her frame away;
Her body shrivels, all its moisture dries;
Only her voice and bones are left; at last
Only her voice, her bones are turned to stone.
So in the woods she hides and hills around,
For all to hear, alive, but just a sound."
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