| Europe is coming apart. I like watching. Like having to struggle to understand present developments. Predict future directions. Also, its disintegration is a perfect mirror for the state of my spirits right now. If Europe survives the transition into tomorrow, perhaps my heart too, in spite of its currently crazed, solitary state, stands a chance. For the past three years, Poland has been trapped in a new war. To be precise, in a “no man’s land” between the old EU and the new Asia. As long as its border with Germany remained subject to passport controls, it was still in limbo. Friends here keep talking about this question of where Polska is – Central or Eastern Europe? What do Brits think? What do Poles say when they hear their motherland misplaced and mispronounced? Is being “Eastern” really so bad? Next week, when those checkpoints finally shift to its borders with Ukraine, Belarus and Mother Russia herself, the war over Poland’s future will finally be over, regardless of what its politicians and enemies say. And so I wanted this week to question these shifts. Will Europe ever manage without internal borders? Like the US? Belgium is without a government. Denmark is sick with xenophobia. Parts of Poland, like Spain or Croatia, are becoming a British holiday home zone. I wanted to ask – if someone offered to take your passport and replace it with a non-national EU travel document, would you accept? The Euro is already removing currencies from our continent. What will you be like without papers to place you on a map? Will it threaten or empower you, and why? I was going to ask all this, but I can’t. Not this week. Conversations I keep having with women of late have not been about politics. Not about borders or trades or societies. They have been about a line I discovered once and have been stealing across ever since. The border between us and love. I can still feel and cry over and sing songs to the first time I found it, even today. That the woman who showed me “where” turned out to be a perfect actress who seduced and then left me when she discovered she wasn’t who she wanted to be is not important. Although hurt for a long while, I did not fight or seek revenge or turn against love itself. I got up, forgot her phone number and went looking for someone real I could feel the same about. Ever since then, this search has been at the heart of who I am and everything I do. All my journeys, all my conversations, every piece of art I create, are a way to return to that “state”. An effort, I am sorry to say, I am failing at miserably. I’m a little like Europe. Look at a map, a piece of perfectly flat paper, and tell me it is not a betrayal of the living, breathing, evolving world it is meant to represent. Meet me at work, in the street, at a party, and all I will show you is a sketch of who I am. I will appear in the uniform of a smiling boss, an easy-going host, a considerate friend. But all I am ever, ever at heart about is love. In all its variety. The few women I have met who were real and did make me feel home again. The few artists who have moved me to tears, and then to work on my own creations. The few heroes and landscapes and signs that have shown me what love, be it romantic, platonic or purely spiritual, can do to evolve our world. I have travelled Europe without a map in my hand. On foot, on motorcycle, with friends and with strangers. I did not see borders. Did not lose one place in favour of another. I always felt at home, wherever. Love is like that. Every new experience neighbours every other. Every mind which meets yours overlaps in a way flesh or possessions can never hope to do. I am an adult and smart and responsible and yet I accept so many false borders. Between me and my experience. Between your language and mine. Between our need for love and its mutual source. Which is right here, any time we care to stop studying maps and look up. Celebrating the recent 250th anniversary of William Blake’s birth |
| all site design, art work, photography and words are mine |
| all site design, art work, photography and words are mine |
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