The Ripples In The Water When It Rains Look A Lot Like The Rings In A Tree Stump

When a man is tired of Venice, he is tired of death

-Sian Tamsk

I allowed myself to take one photo in Venice. The city is horrendously over photographed and it cheapens it. I feel sorry for it in the same way I feel sorry for Marilyn Monroe.

    Jazz In Venice, 2018

You can see why it works so well as a backdrop to Don’t Look Now. When one is lost it compels his sense of it. It could never be accused of a place where one goes to, as the mind and body lot like to say, to find one’s center; there isn’t one. Even when you think you have got to grips with the town, come to a familiar place, you turn the corner and find yourself walking through an alley you’ve never seen before, that you’re sure has just appeared manifestly from some neverland, but has of course been there the whole time. Much like how one memory leads to another which leads to another, and so forth, until you’re so far removed from the original memory that you can’t for the life of you remember what it was. You find yourself in an endpoint you have no conception of, and you’ve only yourself to blame, and even he isn’t all that culpable. The map of Venice does not look dissimilar from a diagram of a brain. You’d have to be incredibly literal-minded to be able to make any sense out of the map. To walk its streets, as has been remarked before, feels like a dream.

  As with anything of the mind, you begin to question whether it is real. There you are amidst all these buildings, and all this history, and it’s difficult to fathom how any of it came to be. Surely it can’t be serious. Surely it cannot be. If it is conceivable, it is my shortcoming that I cannot get much further than it might be.

  All the while the sea flows indifferently by through the canals.

  Something about the city is conducive to sickness. To mourning too, though those things are hardly mutually exclusive. That is why it is such a good place to convalesce. There’s something about the sound of it in the afterhours. Water takes on a different persona in the nighttime. Then there’s the mist. It nearly hides everything. However, it stops short of that and allows you to see through it. Rather than hide it, it coats it in a mystery. That thing that connects us all as much open space connects the universe. That connects as much as a looking glass when we look at it the same time. It contains reflections, Brodsky writes of the water, among them my own. All mirrors look the same, though not to different eyes.

  You cannot walk over one of the many bridges without contemplating jumping in and pay a schoolboy homage to Ophelia. A friend of mine tells me that on his stay here he should have like to have held a gun to his skull and relieved it of its tormented contents. Just like Hemingway. There’s probably not a suicide that hasn’t been done. What could be more derivative than death?

Inevitably you find me in a bar. The girl next to me has ordered another Spritz. Campari, I’m pleased to say. I order another beer. I’m going to let the day be whatever it becomes. Like water … (if only this town was a little bit cheaper).

Notes

·         Though the walk ways are filled with little doggies, I have yet to see one cat. Have they all been put in a sack and thrown into the canal in an act of mass felicide? Like Joyce’s Copenhagen, are there no cats of Venice? Or, are they simply confined to the apartment? Either way, the seagulls flood the square cawing out an obscene parody of a cat wailing. They hurl sneering contempt on the whiskered adversaries with relish. Presumably kitty sits somewhere plotting a revenge more exacting than Shylock’s. Like him they may come to find their spoils come to the privy coffer of the state. It always does around here.

·         More significant than the absence of cats is the absence of cars. This is an obvious point to make but you don’t realise how profound it is until you are once again surrounded by all those fucking wheels. (As I write this a gondola sails past with a long haired gondolier teaching his young buttercup blonde daughter how to use the paddle, (are there any female gondoliers?))