The skull of St Valentine in the Basilica of Santa Maria in Cosmedin
for this day of lovers, their ghosts and saints...
(for the saints)
WHEN, WITH YOU ASLEEP...
When, with you asleep, I plunge into your soul,
and I listen, with my ear
on your naked breast,
to your tranquil heart, it seems to me
that, in its deep throbbing, I surprise
the secret center
of the world.
It seems to me
that legions of angels
on celestial steeds
-as when, in the height
of the night we listen, without a breath
and our ears to the earth,
to distant hoofbeats that never arrive-,
that legions of angels
are coming through you, from afar
-like the Three Kings
to the eternal birth
of our love-,
they are coming through you, from afar,
to bring me, in your dreams,
the secret of the center
of the heavens.
-Juan Ramon Jimenez (his eros bio)
(for the ghosts)
I was trying to find this interview I remember reading with Michel Gondry in which he discusses love and lovers- how old lovers will still often show up in our dreams long after separation and leave us waking with a sense of their presence...
...I remember returning home to Austin heartbroken on a greyhound bus from Chicago when I was around 21 years old. There was a coffeeshop I frequented called Mojo's and i had been building a soft acquaintance with a woman, Kate, there before I'd headed to Chicago. She had big, round opalescent blue eyes and it was mostly with those that I had mostly been speaking. On the bus I had a very intense dream that she was with an abusive lover. I think she had a black eye and bruises and I was very concerned, taking her under my protection. When I arrived back in town, I headed over to Mojo's around two in the morning for a pack of smokes, as well as a cure for my restlessness. There was Kate with her big eyes sitting in the corner. I walked over and told her about my dream, after which she immediately grasped my arm and said, "you're coming home with me." We began a brief and tempestuous affair that felt like a riotous dream. It turned out she was a bipolar manic-depressive who had not been taking her medication and had recently embarked on her annual breakdown tantrum. There was a little black cat, lots of Sufi poetry, channeling of a dead grandmother, other spirits- mostly in the radio, watercolors, laughter, and appropriated forms of voodoo. She soon earned the nickname, "The Tipsy Gypsy" and she followed me about with the hypnotic allure of a tornado, scraping me with gazes from those two bulging blue eyes. Despite her conviction, as told to others without my knowledge, that we would be getting married; our escapade as companions lasted only a month or so. She became my first, and hopefully last, stalker- waiting for me at work hours before my shift, then sulking and cursing when I wouldn't serve her any alcohol, returning later at night wobbling drunkenly in the arms of some stranger demanding money for a taxi. I found trinkets on my staircase- a gum wrapper, a little plastic doll. A wine bottle went missing from above the fridge- I learned later that she had crept in one day in my absence, and drunk it in its entirety before having sex on my bed with someone else. For at least a year after that she would show up in my dreams here and there like a silent witch, always leaving me anxious. I can still remember an image of her in a dream: it was night and i was wandering through a neighborhood and looked up to find her perched like a vulture on top of a roof nearby, staring at me with those saucer eyes. Back in the waking world, she eventually calmed down and in fact, last i heard, did end up getting married. And once we had reconnected after some space and forgave each other whatever grievances had lingered, i was relieved to find she no longer haunted the house of my dreams...
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