Fragments, Roman and otherwise...

Last night, I came back home to Paris from Rome, from one eternal city to another. I fell asleep to the sight of the Eiffel Tower glittering from my hotel window – such an easy manifestation of the illumination I am seeking. The longing in me for Paris that I had been feeling while in Rome was made more pointed by the frame of the hotel, the celebrated refuge for the restless and the aimless.


The Eiffel Tower sparkles each hour on the hour for ten minutes, from dusk until 2 am (1am in winter). Its illuminations are composed of 335 projectors ranging from 150 to 1000 watts, equipped with sodium lamps shooting their beams upward from the inside of the monument's structure. They are operated by an automatically piloted computer program that assures their rotation sweep of 90° and a perfect synchronization of the double light beams, diametrically opposite to the other, pivoting around 360°. Each projector is equipped with a xenon 6000 watt lamp. When visibility is ideal, the beacon is visible from 80 kilometers away. It is activated each evening when the Tower lights up, and shuts down when the Tower does.

The only thing that I could think while watching such an awesome display was that I wished I could organize my love into such discrete time fragments. Instead of chronological purity, I am devoured by this desire for emotional absolutism, of always thinking in forever terms. And in Rome, a city which lends an easy credibility to such a phantasm – so many different time periods cohabitating with an anachronous simplicity – it seems almost possible. While there, in Rome, sitting on the sun-warmed stones of Saint Peter’s Square, I could only desire some sort of similar concretization of my own emotional pantheon. How could this specific moment, this feeling, last forever? How could I project this, myself, into an image, a possibility of the future? Would it be possible to weave together these present, momentary strands of myself into something, to somewhere, to hold me in the future?

As Diana pours out her genius into her MA pages, she tells me of the beauty of the etymology of the word refuge: now meaning protection and shelter; but coming from the Latin fugere, to flee, with re-fugere meaning to flee backwards, to go back to an original starting point. This desire for refuge – is it a flight to or from protection? This hope to find, or build, this pantheon (emotional and physical) which I seek, does it not just cement the binary, the logical fallacy, between home and exile – a binary that I have been trying, through living and writing, to deconstruct? This feeble lifting of a first stone towards a future – is it courage or cowardice? The only answer that sounds a resonance is Diana discussing Saint Augustine’s memory of flight – how do we know to remember the things that will change, transform, revolutionize us the most?

I do know, though, that the most important thing is writing – of any kind, letters arriving for me today from San Francisco and New York... This writing that sends out threads of love, of connection – threads with tensile strength strong enough to catch us in these tapestries of intimacy, yet fluid enough to allow for a return to the self. Always nostography – writing about return – returns to the self, to the memories that are sheltered there.