Nuance and Memory

The topic has been raised a few times:

How do the steel ice and stone images and the machine and bird call sounds metaphor the things I write about with regard to the work (see post November 17, 2011 )?

A few weeks back I wrote about a nuance I stumbled upon recently, of when I was in Cologne in November. I'd spent many Novembers in Cologne a few years back--enough to accumulate a small jewelry box of memories. Some were like little gems in hidden compartments; others were in the center tray reserved for flashy, well-worn costume trinkets, ready to be thrown on at a whim. 

The nuance flooded my senses as if I'd opened that imaginary jewelry box: the sight, the cold feel of the metals within, the gentle jingle of the contents. That's what this work does for me. 

I get a chance to muse back on that dusty chamber of my past and pull yet another memory from the faded corners.

Thinking back to when Alex and I were kids, when we went to Europe. We never went back together. But, that first time, in Genoa, behind the Caravelle esplanade in Piazza della Vittoria, there was a colonnade of sorts,  overgrown with ivy. It was very mysterious to me; it could be climbed to via a staircase that seemed to disappear within the ivy (see it below).

All these years later, I think of having been there with Alex, it could have been one day or many. Alex not being here anymore makes that place no longer exist for me, although its nuance, its memory, floats by like a cold wind.