Beauty

Not much has changed since my last post. Or maybe everything has changed but there was no time, heart, energy, space, stomach to write about it.

It is all so miserable and dull and soulless that words have lost taste, colour, shape, rhythm, texture. And then this morning I was hit by a short poem. It just came flying at me and floored me. I don’t have it in English. In Italian it reads:

C’e’ un incontro fissato,

ancora senza ora e senza data,

per trovarci.

Io saro’ li’, puntuale,

non so tu.

Julio Cortazar

And that’s when it came back. The craving for beauty that has been denied to most of us for years now. The thirst for connection that theatres can no longer provide, that other humans have no time or opportunity for, as I sit -day after day- in my small prison. This time it snaked swiftly into some words by an Argentinian author I didn’t know and slapped me in the face. And for a not so little while, I searched frantically, I read, I made notes, I compared languages, I breathed in beauty and kept grasping from more. For a not so little while, I felt again. Not the usual despair and pain and longing and emptiness, but that overflowing of beauty that had seemed like a computer-generated effect of my imagination for months now. It is here. I hold it. I stare at it. I feel it slipping.

Please stay a little longer.