Id Mendittorosa 2012

When I was a child, a small, single-digit one, back in the early seventies, when the little dove was not yet a dove and the world was still big and colorful and loud, that was when I met him for the first time.
He was stuck in the little black spools that my mother and her brother placed in those boxes from which, as they said, a little bird would come, which never came.
The one I wanted to search for and free on that day when I crawled under Grandma's sewing table, secretly, darkly sensing that there would be scolding, for "that's a camera and not a toy!" I had been sternly admonished.
But the little bird, the poor thing, which was surely trapped in that tight box, made me, a little girl, so very sad that I pushed aside every thought of possible punishment and pressed and fiddled until a little door popped open on the device.
Behind it, of course, there was no bird, just a shiny black film stretched between two spools.
It would be underneath, I thought, and pulled at the black film, which grew longer and longer and emitted a strange smell, sharp and dark and piercing and different from anything I had smelled before.
Celluloid - but I couldn't know that back then.
I never found the little bird, but I often encountered the smell later at film screenings, slide shows, and in my school's photo lab, finally in an overdosed "Chambre Noire" and during the very first test of "Id".

Sharp and foreign and exhausting it seemed to me, this first impression, and yet familiar and part of me at the same time.
Bridging decades with just one breath - old images emerge from the nothingness of consciousness, mixing with cinema and fantasy.
Celluloid, flint, rough rocks, dull gray light.
Desolate almost, only almost.
Do I like this, do I want this, can I do this?
Do I understand this?
Questions, riddles, fascination.
"Id" is special in these hours, very special - a demanding scent, up and out, provocative and also motivating, to follow it on its path, no matter where it leads.
And it is long, the path, long and longer still...

After a day and a night, "Id" and I meet in a village in Africa - there, where I have never been and yet so often.
Every time my path leads me there, when "Idole de Lubin" hovers by my side, that dark, bitter, spicy warm Eau de Parfum, which sets me night after night by the flickering fire of the village and wraps me in a cloak of wood and resin and smoke, embroidered with bark-brown cinnamon and dark golden fruits, beside me a glass of heavy, sweet rum.
The dance around the fire, the dance on the volcano, lava bubbling just beneath the skin.
Somewhere a camera clicks - a hint of celluloid, perhaps real, perhaps just imagined.

Sometimes "Id" prefers it bright, soft, and silky clean.
Then the scent hugs close to my skin, melts in and becomes the "I-am-you-are-I", to skin and salt and a hint of musk.
Then I do not know: Where does my I end, where does "Id" begin?
Is "Id" a synonym for I, an abbreviation for "identity"?
Then I search and investigate, I guess and sense that I can never know, feel your hand in my hair, your mouth on my skin and forget that there were ever questions.

Always different, always new.
Gray and glowing, cinnamon on dry woods, black night and misty day.
Man and woman, Yin and Yang.
Revealed and yet hidden, wet stones, red tide.
Moving images, mirror shards, dust.
Come here, go away.
And stay with me.
Identify me.