III. Blissing
“Every silence consists of the network of minuscule sounds that enfolds it.”
Next to the art deco styled pool, she was holding her The Course of Love by Alain de Botton, waiting, here I was, learning how to love.
Because of its difficulty, the people in the said city love to love, no, they are addicted to love. They love the torment how they wish to be tormented. Like the young Werther and Charlotte in Goethe's saga, like Jerome and Alissa in André Gide's epistolary realm. Because when you are here so I cannot miss you. You must be absent. As if in one of a scene from Godard's films - 'My favourite place of your body is the back of your neck. Because this is the only place that you can't see me when I kiss you.' Your body is like a map, each place there are meanings and history attached to it. Dialectic, maladies, it takes me to travel, to explore, to fall in love again. Any connections aren’t just an experience, but also a skill. A skill that we all have to spend a lifetime to master. Protégé and Apprentice, the fluidity of the role, dabbling, switching, turning.
From swerve of swim line to bend of each lap. Sunset on the rooftop, the city awakes. Father and I climbed on top of the rooftop, plunge into the hot pool, overlooking, watching the ray of dawn the sun of the sun, steam rising on a winter's morning on one's birthday. Reflection of something Calvino oscillated back and forth in his Invisible Cities, in the most rigorous mathematical structure: Cities & Memory, Cities & Desire, Cities & Signs, Thin Cities, Trading Cities, Cities & Eyes, Cities & Names, Cities & the Dead, Cities & the Sky, Continuous Cities, Hidden Cities
The names of the cities seemingly atonal yet whimsically feminine:
Diomira, Isidora, Dorothea, Zaira, Anastasia, Tamara, Zora, Despina, Zirma, Isaura, Maurilia, Fedora, Zoe, Zenobia, Euphemia, Zobeide, Hypatia, Armilla, Chloe, Valdrada, Olivia, Sophronia, Eutropia, Zemrude, Aglaura, Octavia, Ersilia, Baucis, Leandra, Melania, Esmeralda, Phyllis, Pyrrha, Adelma, Eudoxia, Moriana, Clarice, Eusapia, Beersheba, Leonia, Irene, Argia, Thekla, Trude, Olinda, Laudomia, Perinthia, Procopia, Raissa, Andria, Cecilia, Marozia, Penthesilea, Theodora, Berenice.
But we all know that Marco Polo is describing Venice to Kublai Khan. Say it. Say it out loud: Ve-ne-zia, Ve-ne-sia. He made our imaginations imaginable. In search between Buda and Pest, Danube River divides us. Yearning, longing, intensively as possible.
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