Venice’s carnival, like most of Venice’s topology, is a tourist fly trap, a material carnivorous spending spree of rainbow colors and pollution. But inside that very carnivorous carnival, there is il carnevale - a spiritual repetition waiting to spirally repeat itself through the material repetitions of the hedonistic carnival screaming above...
No matter how much color and life the authorities try to put into la serenissima there is no clearing of the melancholic atmosphere of decay and death that haunt/s the wooden foundations and stony surfaces. Death in Venice, as Thomas Mann profoundly narrated: the narrator tries to leave all the signs of decay, disease and death he fells and senses, but he comes back, magnetically drawn back, to follow Eros along the winding alleys...
One has to wait for sun-down, and in the cold February misty night of a drowning city, resolve oneself to follow the contorted labyrinth, towards a secret Venice: where the shouting, clinking tourists and dressed-up-fun players, do not tread, where angels fear to tread...only masked demons amidst the sweeping mist and golden lights can walk the Venetian land...
The I, masked and dressed up as an eighteen century libertine (a kind of Marquis De Sade without the wig and lice) walks the Möbius bandy alleys, with a determined resolve...the crowds dilute into trickles, the mingling crowds fall away into the distance...One continues to repeat the stony footpaths; one by one, the costumes and masks become realer, less touristy...one quietly falls into the darkly depths of la serenissima.
Suddenly, a threshold is reached...one enters an opaque dreamland of sparkled lights, mist and fog, where luscious ladies made of satin and veil, glance furtive eyes through baroquely contorted masks...One gets possessed by an alien passion, another tempo, another rhythm, another becoming is awakened from within: another repetition is beating its erotic rhythm - one is simultaneously stalked and stalker...
Masked and cloaked one is perpetually seduced by mysterious female shapes and figures coming in out and out of the swirling background, into the foreground, and then back again, back into the abyss of white and rosy cheeks...Are these figures for real? or is it all just a dream within a dream, waking up to another dream....
It would come as no surprise in the land of il carnevale, of courtesans and Casanovas, that it is the erotic, the erotic signs of embodied figures, that one follows and feverishly decodes...and hopefully consumes...
The beauty of naked flesh in the cold pale mist amidst the flowing stiff baroque folds of satin dresses swirling in the mist...nipples cold as rubies, set the stony alleys afire....The revelry is now only a distant murmur, a more somber affair awaits...
One takes her by the hand or is taken by her hand, it is hard to tell which, the misty swarming threads absolve all distinctions; but I guess, it does not matter. Her slit eyes are so pure it almost breaks one’s heart, like a Dante’s Beatrice, it almost suspends one’s being in purgatory, in between heaven and hell; it could be either, neither or both at the same time...
The paradox of the mask, of the disguise, is that it allows and reveals; no deception and ego games are allowed to play their reign anymore - a deeper Dionysian self emerges through the Apollonian surface disguise of mask and appearance... spiritualizing all the profane habits of the material world one has left far and far...behind...
A spiritual dimension is broken through...in the cotton depths of la serenissima, in the eye of the storm, one swirls and swirls, hand in hand, kiss in kiss, embracing and embraced...intertwined fevers before the fall...Complete strangers beckon a purity that no knowing and habit could ever achieve - in the abyss alterity of the other, not all is lost, there is a dim ray of recognition, of distant communication, shining forth: Adriane’s eternal laws of attractions are the only signs of recognition that can thread and illuminate the dark places of absolute strangers. The moonlight beauty of it all, is that it is not totally arbitrary, without rime or reason...the same in alterity, alterity in the same....one seeks the only one, the only figure that attracts and distracts... To my favorite Esmeralda, to all the courtesans of the colddddddddd Carnevale' february nights, the Venetian nights are truly yours, and no one can take them back from you...wherever Esmeralda, Serenissima forever....
