Monday, August 2, 2010

What's in a name?


I started blogging while living in Venice and called my effort "My Own Private Venice" because it was not a blog about Venice. There are plenty of blogs about Venice; I wanted mine to be not about Venice per se, but about my experience there.

Having left that place, and having decided to continue to blog as a creative discipline, I wondered what to call this new state of affairs, these further experiences and other imaginings. I was clear on one thing: I didn't want it to be geographically oriented; I wanted something to denote and accommodate my peripatetic life and, above all, the limitlessness of imagination.

Another part of the island. An oft used stage direction in Shakespeare's Tempest, speaks to an imaginary location on an imaginary island in an imaginary sea in an imaginary world quite like our own. Without a subject, this object effectively ceases to exist. It lives only in our experience of it, in our minds, emotions, imaginations. It has infinite shores and coves and hills and caves. We call each into being and send them away like sleep, like dreams.

So this is my new place. Welcome to another part of the island.

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