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They say, “I went on a trip to find myself.”
When I set out, I thought that I knew myself. I do know myself. But traveling has stripped away what is accidental. In the last five weeks, I have been to ten cities I have never been to before. I don’t stay in any of them for long. I have had the first thirty minutes of a friendship with more people than I can remember; I only know a few of their names. So I am constantly exploring a new place, a new room, a new culture. Every place has its own character, its own quality: this one goes to bed early, that one gets up late, the third never sleeps at all. This one is quiet, that one loud, in another there is always music playing. And I’m new here, in all of them. By the time you read this, I probably won’t be in the same city I was in when I wrote it. (There is a girl running; dogs chase after her.)
Humans are, like cats, territorial animals: we possess our space, and through the space, ourselves. Who we are, if we are anyone, is the story of the space we are in. It is the story of our lives in that space, of our parcourses and trajectories through and across that space, of how that space becomes part of our identity and imagination; we are who we are in relation with the space we occupy.
Before this trip, I was in an apartment: that was my space. And I poured myself into that apartment: it became saturated with me, with my neuroses, fear, and pathologies, and with the waste junk released by a human when they are left alone. Most days, I didn’t speak to anyone besides my cat. I was an animal in an enclosure, resenting its capitivity, and terrified by the lights and noises that menace it from outside; when the door is opened, it cowers in the corner, unable to claim the freedom for which it longed; and so I paced back and forth, grinding myself into the space I was stuck in.
Then I shot out into the open. That apartment is gone, a dim memory. Good. There are new places to explore, to discover, to become a member of. (The children are kicking their football against the brick facade of the basilica, and the girl with the dogs is walking home.) I met a man who went by the name “sendomulo”, which means “person without a home”: he has been traveling for years and years. Who is he? He is who he is, wherever he is. What is space to him? The earth is his territory; perhaps someday it will be mine, too.
In other words, I finally broke down and bought a digital camera: I’m having a terrific time exploring Bologna, led by the lens. I missed the careful, methodological process of photographing a city: I am rediscovering the joy of crossing and recrossing the same space and encountering and re-encountering it from every angle. Expect many more photographs on this site in the near future.
