The Impossibility of Being Understood by Another, and Love Painting

Long after witnessing the unraveling of desperate lovers all around me plagued by the impossible desire to be understood, after falling into the trance of ego, lust for childhood, want for emptiness and hate of love, I find myself trapped with the weight of finishing a task I’d begged to be given. Sitting on a bench thick with years of fresh red paint, silent beneath a wooden roof held high on granite pillars cut from the quarry one hundred years ago, kids squealing with joy and terror as they weave between mechanical airplanes, trains, photo booths and fortune tellers, shielded from the cracking light, deafening roar of a storm so heavy, it has filled the creek, flooded the streets and closed the roads in and out of this small, mountain town. The parallels are almost unbearable. Federico García Lorca whets my perception everywhere I go these days. Words, so many words, tumbling through imagery, metaphor, history and experience that at first it is hard to understand just what he is saying, all I know is that something within me moves to the sound of a familiar, ephemeral angst. As I read and re-read and translate and copy Tu Infancia En Menton what comes to the surface is a universal concept, one that cries out so loudly from the depths of experience that without intentionally going there, a mountain of chapters -Pop, Contemporary, Deco, Nouveau, Renaissance, Rococo, Abstraction, Realism, Expressionism, Impressionism- show up in my response. This yearning, longing, impossible desire, encouraging acceptance, dream of childhood’s empty perspective, disintegrated ego, thrown away mask and drama of a romantic who’s found his god in love, lost love, returned love -none of these prefaces matter- is so beautiful. Lorca illuminates the exquisite imperfection -the humanity!- and allows me, slowly, to revel in the ardor of process and discovery with undulating breath stirred by a delicate hope until I know without a doubt that You are not alone. ————————————- Visual Response to Federico Garcia Lorca's Tu Infancia en Menton.