“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

Lontano lontano
oltre Milano
oltre i gasometri
oltre i manometri
oltre i chilometri
e i binari del tram
Lontano lontano
molto lontano
oltre l’acqua corrente
e l’elettricità

— Paolo Conte

Actually, running water and electricity do exist here. Concrete, and sand and sea and pines and oleanders too. I saw two dromedaries tied to a fence just outside of the airport. We had just landed with all our wrong intelligence, realizing the hot concrete of the airport was not adding that much to the heat, and were being rushed to the city by a laconic driver in a refrigerated car, to a little later be lodged into rooms filled with the smell left into the carpet by generations of smokers. Our contact is passed to me on the phone, we exchange polite and not entirely intelligible english. Nobody speaks italian, that’s certainly a significant wrong piece of intelligence we had (my fellow traveler gardener not speaking much foreign himself).
In the hotel lobby, rich arabic business men lounging on the divans and near the reception half emancipated overdressed very sensual wives never looking sideways. I know I shouldn’t look for a couple of reasons.
I think about Milan, only yesterday night I was packing in the heat of the night — not so different a heat from here except for the humidity of the south mediterranean moving across the city — trying to shove one more book about gardening into the bag… Libi was asleep. She had asked me not to leave for the third time that night, again this morning, obviously I felt like shit. Gisi called and told me that her beloved dog I lived with for a long time, few years ago, died this week, suddenly. I cried over the phone, almost silently and without words, I can’t say I left with a light heart, but hey, I wouldn’t have a light heart anyway. Never had one. I was so terrified I didn’t want to leave anymore, but I left anyway. That’s experience, I guess, when you lack recklessness. Little it matters, now it’s the time of the great expectations, namely going for a walk, watching the unknown, listening to it, and all the rest.

You know how it is with me baby
You know I just can’t stand myself
And it takes a whole lot of medicine darling
for me to pretend that I’m somebody else.

Joliet Jake Blues, Guilty

From the terrace where I am standing I can see the whole beach… you can’t tell from here but I know it is a beach of dark smooth stones, opaque and hot but shiny when wet, and the crowd sun bathing on the stones has troubles turning upside down when stretched, or moving without some kind of shoes on, timidly reaching for the cold waters of the mediterranean. (I bathed for one minute this afternoon).

(And other thoughts: They say gardens of presidential villas in North Africa are waiting for me and my too young colleague –waiting for prestigious italian gardeners which we are not. I am leaving in four or five days. My passport is exchanging hands. All I can think of is how much I am unprepared for the job, or if I really am not. The contract is not even here, it is there. Hopefully not in arabic? Unfortunately these consideration are even too much rational. It’s unfathomable what the required tasks will be, the embassy does not leak details, the agency does not. Security. Or arrogance. We don’t seem to care. Am I really about to be back to Africa after almost eighteen years? (a kid without a clue, in Somalia). Libi resents it all, coming really close to detest me. But not even for a second I had the faculty to say ‘no’, probably because I had nothing equally sane to oppose this thing to).

I can see Libi’s naked legs behind the terrace corner, a girl asleep in the sun. The dark tent above my head flaps in the wind and the cat is still nervously exploring the place not known. Keeping the head low and eyes wide, refusing food.
If I close my eyes I can recognize Liguria as I experienced it many times during the endless afternoons at my father’s court, one mile away on the other side of this small mountain, with a slightly different landscape around, not observing, maybe reading a book or trying to sleep.
Someone’s working, hammering and sawing on the other side of a rib of trees which gives a close echo; the birds chirp and sing below and above, the turtledoves monotone coo goes on at short intervals. The wind. The hairy bees droning by, very close, far as well. A child yells powerfully from a large distance, probably the beach, and the neighbor’s dog barks again. From down below in its garden he sees the seraphic cat moving along the edge of the terrace, the cat’s in need to be menaced. Another La Spezia bound intercity runs by without stopping, right in the middle of everything alive, an insane rumble that shakes the village for many seconds, then it is the bellowing dissolving inside the tunnel; then again emerges the skewed engine noise of the occasional moped taking the bend; then it’s the turn of a bubble of silence, wide and frail, inside the silence the sea breaking against the shore, and then it is the someone hammering again. (I recall myself hammering in a silent valley up north, realizing I was being the background of the landscape. What a stupid thought).

So is the punctuated activity of this greedy and sober land. Nothing bucolic. I have no particular feeling for it, but we spent these few days with little joys and this is more than we usually get, although everything is also sad, of course, and unjust, sadic, filled with guilt and loath and fear and things not said and disturbing milanese fixation with perfection and happiness.

I can’t say I am not surprised by the overbearing victory of our local criminal tycoon Silvio Berlusconi (ecstatic face in tiny picture). Honestly I thought he didn’t even want to win. Besides I thought the center-left was more in control of the transition.
The fact remains that the center-left, kicked out of power after only one miserable year, with its ineptitude has paved the way to five more years of Berlusconi’s invincible domain of criminal activities, peculations, embezzlements, conspiracy, collusion with Mafia, dumbing-down TV shows and all the rest.
Freed by the soberness of his former allies, such as Casini, now out of the games, and strengthened by the huge support given (as customary in time of disappointment toward politics) to the xenophobic party Northern League, Berlusconi will have no limits. Everyone is guessing it is going to be really tough on a country already crippled and falling like Italy, that still had to recover from the past five years of Berlusconi’s governance (since the year of center-left governance in the middle basically served nothing and accomplished nothing.)

I wonder if this defeat will finally make the idiotic arrogance of the leaders of the center-left (grinning face in tiny picture) go away. You would think that losing with almost the 10% to Berlusconi again should do it. But I have a hunch that not few of them are actually happy of the outcome.
First of all, with their moronic single party they racked the 33%, which within the italian left is quite enough power in few hands. But most importantly, with this election they managed to erase from the political scene the “extreme” left, the green party and communists (serious face in tiny picture), which for the first time in thirty years or so are going to be out of the parliament.
I think back at the Democratic Party they couldn’t dream anything better than being left as the only left, even if they have nothing of the left except the desire to be in control and the arrogance of those who think they have a exemplary, romantic past.

Well, Italy is screwed anyway, economically but more importantly spiritually and morally. The majority hates to be italian, others who love to be italian do so for the worst reasons. Everyone seems ready to sell everything only to get out of debt and buy a new car, a new political season, a favor. The political oligarchy is disgusting from the first to the last man not only because they are so corrupted, because they are always the same faces, because they are not capable of doing anything good that lasts, because they are a burden to this country, dragging it backwards against happier forces of conservation and change (both badly needed by this country).
They are disgusting because they are a mirror inside which our worst face reflects itself. I am sick of looking at that mirror, actually.

And yet were there still more pictures?
Yesterday, March 30, 1988, in the La coruña wineshop in Galicia, Spain, the children sitting between the casks at the back of the room kept looking at the television while conscientiously doing their homework. Or the day before yesterday, in Vigo, on the Atlantic Ocean, there was a kind of marriage of river and ocean waves: one did not incorporate the other, but rather, there in the estuary, incredibly gently with a light snapping sound, one was dissolved into and extinguished by the other. The river’s murmur met the tide’s rush and, with a stronger murmur, the river and ocean waves crept first to the edge of the river’s mouth and then, with the ebb and flow, stole into the land’s interior (…)

— Peter Handke

So, Peter Handke wrote the above twenty years ago today. It is the beginning of a three-pages long micro-epic later collected in the splendid little treasure Once Again for Thucydides. This epic is entitled “Last Pictures?”, and I think it could fare as the germinal manifestation of Handke’s 2002’s masterpiece novel Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, also set in Spain, whose original title is “Bildverlust”: I think “Longing for the Picture”.

Well, nothing, only it is funny I bumped into this today, having found Once Again for Thucydides laying around in the house and having browsed it while putting it back on the shelf.
In case you were wondering, the book has nothing to do with Thucydides except that Thucydides stays as a early model of the art of telling a story of something experienced first hand, and not heard of– nor completely invented.
And what about the last, longed for pictures? It’s about the same thing, I think, because nothing is harder to recover and easier to lose than a portrait of what we see, what we experience. The greatest loss in everyday’s life, is the day itself, our ability to describe it and save it: not what we made of that day, with our careers and loves and cries and tasks and ideas, but what unrelatedly made that day around us, the little slice visible to us and put together by the accident of us being there then, I mean here now. End of the post.

Mis pies son como de cartón
que voy arrastrando por cada rincón.
Mi cama se hace fría y gigante y en ella me pierdo yo.
Mi casa se vuelve a caer,
mis flores se mueren de pena,
mis lágrimas son charquitos que caen a mis pies.
Te mando besos de agua que hagan un hueco en tu calma.

Bebe, Razones

At five the half moon moved above the roofs in the watery air, visibly spherical. I laid on the floor listening to an american voice talking on the PC radio into the earpiece, conscious of my back in the neat silence among the familiar walls. Talks of war and politics and people went on and I partially followed, gliding above details, motivations, tones, only minding the flowing of the voice in the stream. This inadvertence is what makes entertainment, I thought, that’s why everything can be entertaining.

Later in the morning sun, helping Gisa moving a table into a elevator, I was gifted a couple of gratis not liberating laughs during the efforts. Also just before the cat had chased a fly against the window panes and effortlessly won it, as the moka blurbed its smell of coffee in the whiter space.
The story went that Gisa had lent the table to us two years earlier, and now we were returning it, and we were without a table. As me and Gisa took the table away the cat mourned the loss by looking up from where the comfortable shades between the legs of the table had just been, in the room in Libi’s house. As we went across the terrace I wanted Gisa to admire the plants, to ask me which was what, she did it but only a little bit (where one quietly should squat next to the planters).

Down in the street, to the rackless roof of Gisa’s long car we strapped the table with hooked elastics running through the back seat windows, the radio singing desaparecido out loud causing reproving glances of the sidewalkers, while passengers waiting at the tram stop looked upon us benevolently, mistaking us for a informative diversion.

I disengaged although previously meant to chaperon Gisa to her new house outside the city, we said goodbye, always inadequately, and she went alone and I walked away down the street, table orphan, under the tall trees fluttering up above in bright green and dark green against unequal patches of clear brown and white where the sun reached the bark. The black roofs, upper edges of the canyon, seemed to wave as well behind the waving trees. I longed for unconscious sex, for open smiles, for solidarity, for friends, for undefined merit.

I thought of Libi who was not there at the moment, at myself and my collections of guilt, I saw how she must have gotten sick of me in the end and how I– I got frustrated with the world she wanted me to join, chosen for me, unfit for me, and I though at how we kept loving or wanting each other nonetheless, secretly, unreasonably, not able to give anymore that little much. Egoism is what makes love beside other things.
I hated all the rights and all the wrongs now, my rights and her wrongs more than everything. I walked by the windows and the beggars, entered the Panificio for a supply of focaccia, got out and felt so tired, I wanted it to be night, the peaceful night, with us separated one from the other, living off each other different rhythms of sleep, the moments I most likely loved her the most. More freely. Most sincerely. But it was too sad and I couldn’t think about it anymore. The street appeared all crowded now, hurrying me against the stone walls of the condos.

— In picture above: Lince, quarter to one.

 
I look at you and am
sort of discouraged at the thought of describing
this matter of becoming experienced
the incredulous taste of the many involuntary steps
  the shades of iello tangerine blue

I look at you and sense
my imagination that made itself
thinner over the years and worn,
to skew be yearned and altered, industrial variation of a
  vegetable never otherwise tasted

I look at you and shame
little child alive I have inside, fingers dirty
looking away and shy
  unhealed
who never yields but
   knows nada’ll be the same.

— in picture, above: carrots.

You can live your life in a crowded city,
You can walk along a crowded street.
But the city really ain’t no bigger than the friendly
People, friendly people that you meet.

— Bill Withers, Lonely town, lonely street

So let’s keep the big brothers updated on my whereabouts then. So this part of learning is over, so I am looking for a job. I reckon I probably am not pushing as hard as I could, officiously because of my love life falling apart once again (sent Gisa to be on the lookout for a new home for me, down in the outerlands where she lives now, where the men burn their wages at the Bar Tabacchi slots in front of the school or consume the afternoons fishing the Naviglio dry), mother writing me letters again to nail me down to her post-mortem future (basically to attend to her animals, in the letters she always refers to herself as dead, unconscious overhanging to snatch away frail forms of love never given), father ignoring me as always (fuck that), the waste-land of friendship (Elsa would say it’s Pluto in the eleventh), school betraying me with its favoritisms –and few other alibis I pass finger to finger as the little dusty clay stones at the bottom of the planters, who cares, I attend to the vegetation on the terrace just to keep the feeling alive, the shit is blossoming, the new green is bright and little, moving, simple, courageous, all which the cat vandalizes, and Libi, I am feeling sorry for Libi, when she’s out with friends and I eat alone, when we don’t make love, when I come back to the old habits of staying awake at night, when we stay silent at the table and she asks the questions, that sound too much like a interrogation, and the answers are all curled up under my tongue in a word-ball, untangled strip of syllables, untellable, like the d in the keyboars that oesn’t work anymore. So I dropped few papers, self-printed free-lance gardener cards, the curricula I sent or brought were ludicrous I admit, there was this page with the “green” experiences (the school, gardener, organic farm, all that) followed by the non-green experiences not having nothing to do with anything, real pretentiousness and out-of-placeness, what a gardener has to do with your fucking buried-in-the-past job as assistant to the professor of contemporary art shit at the faculty so-and-so and all that– what an asshole I am, including the shit to the curriculum lest to be spotted as the loafer, the good-for-nothing that I am– I mean that (my father) considered me to be or whatever– So nobody answered (I mean not even “NO”), typical italian arrogance, but basically I didn’t give a shit except for what others want to think of me, y except maybe for that one vacant spot, the job I really sought for, sure that they were going to call for me, but didn’t, see I always believe I am going to be lucky, funny like that.

— in picture above, three from the terrace. which reminds me, it’s equinox tonight, time of the year to plant few of certain seeds I have left.

To see you tryin’ to be a part of
A world that just don’t exist.
It’s all just a dream, babe,
A vacuum, a scheme, babe.

— Bob Dylan

There are two new parties in italy that as always are made with the ruins of the old parties with the same old guys running the show and pretending to be new guys, like comedians changing their hats. Elections are coming again and our unlucky cities are filled with depressing billboards with moronic slogans and ugly smiling faces (what the hella you smiling at, dickhead?)

To make the matter even more idiotic the supposed two new parties that will be dividing the italian cake soon want to be commonly referred to as “PD” (center-left) and “PDL” (center-right).
The only possible comment left being “oh, go to hell!”.

I won’t even try to reason with the inexistent tricky shit coming from Berlusconi’s front. It’s the usual nonsense that works so well with my people in times of disgrace.

Except maybe I could comment this ad I saw today. I swear its message is identical to one of a popular italian insurance company. I wonder what is the link.

But the pd side has its own horrific thing going and I am forced to consider it as I walk by in disgust, head down like in a 1984 novel.

The grinning shitface is Veltroni. Here in an unfortunate side by side with a “divine comedy” billboard. Veltroni is supposedly the new leading candidate of the center-left, although nobody elected him as such (apparently we are stuck with him because all the other center-left wing bosses burned themselves out in the past few years. But we are supposed to be glad about it, I forgot why.) Funnily enough, Veltroni is one of those pretending to be the “new” although he’s been around in the political scene, in positions of power, since the 1980’s.

You might have noticed how PD’s billboards seem to be all composed the same way: “don’t do this. do that”.

The first is: “Don’t change a government. Change Italy” (reference to the fact that the center-left was in the government last time, and failed, yet now there should be no rotation of powers for the good of Italy. But, first of all, even if the center-left wins, the new government is going to be such a dramatic change anyway since Veltroni is “new”, right? and I thus imagine that his clan will be all brand new too and shit? So I am going to change the government, right? Second of all, Veltroni, if I only could change Italy, none of you new guys would be in the picture anyway.

The second is another nonsense: “Don’t think which party. Think which country” (I don’t know why, going to elections to elect a party, one should not think of which party. Anyway, I am sure, this message suggests to everyone’s mind the sweet idea of emigrating to, let’s see… Switzerland, Austria, Morocco, Denmark, Australia, Thailand, etc. Not being able to emigrate, being stuck here, one walks by more depressed than before, as if passing in front of a travel agency.)

Now, mr. Veltroni, dickhead. First of all, to whom are you telling what to do and not to do, to think or not to think? Who do you think you are?
Second, it was only past month that your pals were in the government and they crumbled miserably after a year of governance and you still pretend to know what is to be done or not to be done? Please. I could stand a more humble approach, like “we’ll listen to you guys this time” or whatever. But this, you know. Is too sad. Why don’t you go away from our streets? They say you already know you are going to win. That your globalist-corporate-banking ties are too strong and that unbreakable deals have been made securing the center-left as the winner already (obviously to unfortunately later pass horrible things on our heads, for the greater good, as always). So why don’t you leave us alone? Why don’t you bless us with a magic moment of forgetting all about you? Please?

“What is the matter?” Molinari shouted at him. “Has using that time-travel drug scrambled your wits, you don’t know you’ve got only one tiny life and that lies ahead of you, not sideways or back? Are you waiting for last year to come by again or something?”
Reaching out, Eric took the paper. “That’s exactly right. I’ve been waiting for a long time for last year. But I guess it’s just not coming again.”

— Philip K. Dick, the novel I finished to read today; in picture above, at gardening school in the morning fog. days of exams.

question: what are you going to do at 75, childless, jobless, without a pension, a insurance, savings, retirement plan and the whole package? uh?

answer: I don’t know. I am physically unable to think about it. Present, Past and Daydreaming take the most of me, keep it very busy. I don’t extend to the future, I can’t plan. I reckon I should, but the rest I am left with is used for despair, laughters, efforts of sincere wonder.

Hey, but you look dumbfounded. Sorry next question.

–In picture: this morning.