‘If you do not love me………………….’
DESIRE LINES – PATH POEM PROPOSAL 2016
Some ‘rough’ pathways are made by people usually across a space where architects/planners have made a right-angled, paved footpath. The paths made by people are ‘desire lines’. I want to find possible, appropriate ‘desire line’ locations in or around the d14 venues in Athens and Kassel. There could be more than one location in both cities. If suitably chosen, and agreed, one or more of these poetic ‘desire lines’ in both cities could remain in situ when d14 has finished.
The text in Greek and English for Athens and German and English for Kassel, is a couplet from the Samuel Beckett love poem, Cascando
‘If you do not love me, I shall not be loved.
If I do not love you, I shall not love.’
It will immediately become apparent that ‘desire lines’ have been made by the movement of peoples from Syria and other parts into Europe and that, what is in short supply, is love. Beckett’s words, written in 1936 to a woman he had fallen in love with, are like a puzzle carrying a certain obscurity as if he could not quite come out and say, ‘I love you’. However he does set up a necessary reciprocation where love is concerned – that we are dependent on each other for love to flourish.
New, permanent path in Rizari Park Athens.
with Sam Ainsley and Sandy Moffat.