Under the sign of Pothos
Eros has a sibling, a beautiful boy, Pothos, sometimes aka Anteros, who signifies love for someone faraway. I suppose you could call him, you could call his kind of desire, his kind of love, longing.
I find out that there is no direct way to translate “longing.” In Italian “desire” and “longing” translate to “desiderio” or “voglia.” (Voglia is the noun form of want – it is “wanting” as a noun. Yes, “want” can be a noun in English too, but always strange.) Is that it? I ask, disappointed. Well, you can have a strong desire or wanting, or you can desire or want strongly. No, no, no, that’s not it; that doesn’t do the trick; longing is something else. And why? He wants to know. Well, because – I have to hesitate to sort it out – because LONGING, and TO LONG carries in it the idea of distance from the object of desire. I have never thought before, never realized before, how subtle, how beautiful and complex, this word is. It is not the same as desire, I have to say. It is desire with sadness. It is desire that is sent out, like a kite or a telegram or a voice, over a distance. It is desire with a sense of direction, and not with hopelessness, but with something like it, a particular melancholy. It is desire with a spatial aspect. It is desire in space.
TRACCIARE. When I am with B in a bar, he is always explaining something to me (the correct way to make a Ricard, the different winds of Italy, the different, interesting ways the Mafia has to kill someone) which require drawing. He pulls out his fountain pen and uncaps it in a gesture that architects have made since the beginning of time and fountain pens; a gesture filled with a manly panache that I still envy even though I understand, now, after years of confusion and embarrassment, that the reason I can’t make that gesture, that is, the reason I can’t use a fountain pen, has nothing to do with manliness, and is not because I am fundamentally unfit to be an architect but because I am left-handed and fountain pens are designed for right-handed writers of English and all languages that go left to write. In Arabic I would put all manly Western architects to shame with my fountain panache. I make B label and sign everything, under the pretext of needing Italian captions so I remember the words for things, but really I need his handwriting, which I think, in the future, when he’s not around, will be a kind of way of staying connected to him. Through seeing it? Through touching it? I don’t touch the writing, it’s not like that. Through owning the piece of paper with his letters on it, especially his name? Some inexplicable mixture of seeing and owning amounts to some kind of enduring connection. A superstition of sorts, that through owning the ink and the paper that is marked, through being able to trace over and over with my eyes the letters and the movement of the letters, the gesture of his hand as recorded in the letters, I will have access to him, whether he knows it or not, I have some kind of key to him. The photograph is a way for me to remember, but it is not a means of access; for me soul-access is in the handwriting. Am I a thief, like someone who steals hair from a hairbrush to make a spell? If I could, I would steal his hair, but after the act itself the hair would be meaningless. It would lose its meaning for me. Only the intelligent, deliberate marks of the hand, in writing, retain their meaning.
A few months after my mother died my sister and I returned to her apartment to clean it out. It was a double-edged process, in which objects called forth memory and meaning for us, but also during which objects were drained of their meaning. We dreaded taking down the big green Chinese bowl from the wall, and the act and its immediate aftermath was painful, but after lunch, when we returned to the room, it was just a bowl like any other. We went back and forth from the dumpster in the street, sometimes bringing bags of things to it and sometimes reopening bags we’d already dumped, because of a particular shirt or ragged pillow we realized we had to have; but two days later the shirt was drained of meaning, drained of mother, and we’d return it to the dumpster.
Pictures and writing are another story. Pictures are to remember with, but writing is something more potent, and I mean handwriting, the evidence of the act of writing, the tempo imperfetto, the imperfect time of writing – not ho scritto but scrivevo — the duration, the motion, the gesture, the gestural inscription of nerves and pulse, and the pressure of the hand and the leverage of the elbow. TRACCIARE, to trace, to leave a trace; a groove, like the pressure of a pen or the mark made by the plow. A tractor marks out a tract with a trace; contract. A dead person’s writing: a dead person’s handwriting. In mom’s case, there was so much of it, such a sheer quantity of records kept and hundreds of tiny lists and notes and journals, that we had to throw a lot of it away, and this determination, this discrimination, was the most difficult thing for me, and still is; it exists still, in a tempo imperfetto in the present, the imperfect extended moment. So imperfect.
I have extended, distended that moment, estendavo, suspendavo, continuavo, that moment, into the present, with no desire for closure. Her boxes of envelopes, papers, notebooks, are in my attic; I have stopped pretending I will ever read them thoroughly; I have no reason to look at them again. But if I ever throw them away, then she will really be dead, which is unacceptable. Or if I ever throw them away, it’s as if she never existed at all. Or if I ever throw them away, then no one really ever loved her, ever cherished her existence, at all.
The writing and the ashes go together in my refusal of the cheesy idea of “closure.” I am traveling this time in Italy again with a film canister of her ashes. I don’t know where, or if, I’ll put them this time. They are already in the drain in the center of the Pantheon, so that takes care of Rome, and in a field in Torcello, so that takes care of Madre Natura; maybe I won’t put them anywhere this trip. I don’t have an infinite amount and the point is to choose only the most fundamental locations and be stingy with the amount. I don’t know why a pinch is any different from a handful when it comes to ashes; what I distribute each time is about a half a film canister. The film canister has become my unit of measure when it comes to her ashes.
There is that classic trip in which the lover or the kid goes to (wherever, whatever point of origin or place of remembered or imagined happiness) to put the ashes. It seems extreme, but I understand now that the ashes are an excuse for the meditative journey, not the other way around. And why should this meditation not go on forever?
Thus we continue, under the sign of the god Pothos (sometimes aka Anteros), the sibling of Eros, who is the god of love-at-a-distance, love for the distant object.
