A rather strange morning when my husband read to me a beautiful piece of poetry "A Livella" by Totò that talks about death. Like a mason level, death renders everyone equal. Young and old, rich and poor...
That brings back poignant memories back in the days when we were living close to Certosa. As I wandered around the city of the death, came accross my eyes tombs as large as a chapel, decorated with fanciful chandelier, silver candlesticks and guarded by marble angels behind whimsical fences. There were also many common people rested in what I call 'drawers" embedded in the wall, their name written in cursive, their little photo framed. Richer families would reserve a whole block for themselves and their future kins. And then there were tombs of infants, of stillborns, the poor, the abandoned, those without flowers and without names.
Maybe not on daily basis but I think about death quite often and it's not even remotely suicidal. It's just a thought. What lies beyond? Why the fear? Why the pain? Why after thousand and thousand of years, after so many lives lost to the corrosion of time and so many have written about it we still struggle to understand and to make peace with death? We afraid of what we know little about, and death, ah yes, is The Great Unknown.
And I couldn't help but thinking of "Into Oblivion", a little painting I made earlier this year that dwells on the same theme. The perfect farewell as one drifts into The Great Unknown and their body and soul dissolved into a soup of lost, disintegrated information. An absolute end, to have all traces erased.
A theme I would like to keep coming back over and over again. Art is but a fragment of my inner life after all.