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

– Jago Noja

long story short this blog is closed. thanks for reading.

It is dreadful when something weighs on your mind, not to have a soul to unburden yourself to. You know what I mean. I tell my piano the things I used to tell you.
— Frédéric Chopin

Everyone is away and I bathe in my solitude. The warm sun on my back feels like a hug. I always pedal chest bare like old men do around here.

I pedal lazily on the roads that take away from Cadilù and go all around in Lombardia and they come back. I pedal by a field where a tractor lifts one of the two last bales of hay, moving it for a few yards towards the other one that lies on its side and looks like a big reel of thread. With a very elegant move, pushing one bale against the other, the tractor knocks over the laying bale and puts the other one on top of it. As the scene disappears at my side, the tractor is just carrying away the two bales towards the barn. The field, freshly cut and smooth, is all empty now.
There are no wild flowers in August.

You don’t need me to write you that I miss you. You were another lover who lives another life, mysteries I will never solve. I am still what you knew, ashamed and proud of it (after all it was always that way). Today, a slice of my time into the late sun, I felt that shame was smokes and mirrors.

From a window, somewhere unfathomable beyond it, came the waves of that song, “forse era giusto così, forse ma forse ma sì”, a song to which I would not add or from which take a thing. I sung it all the way home.

I believe in freedom, not bullshit freedom like most people, which means I leave what I dislike be.
— Anonymous

It is not a waterway but the Olona draining duct, carved across this territory to move mostly toxic waters. There are signs saying that access is not allowed to unauthorized personnel, but nobody can be here to enforce it, so there is consent for me not to respect it. (If you don’t understand this stay away from this country.)
I know people cut through here coming from some road out of Ha-vefat and across those woods. But now, at the golden hour, there is nobody anywhere around. The waters look like this, surreal dark oily blue. My shadow is there, very small, on a bike. Far away, the corn fields (not ready).
The tarmac ends in front of the waste waters plant. There’s a luxury car parked outside. In the shadow of the trees and bushes I walk the bicycle because of the pebbles and I am slurped by the mosquitoes. The silence is soothing, indecipherable. Interrupted only by the panting struggle of a jogger coming this way. I can hear him before he bounces out the line of the trees. When he reaches me I can also hear the joyous music pushing him on from his earplugs — and only that for a time after he is gone.

I said I liked being half-educated; you were so much more surprised at everything when you were ignorant.
— Gerald Durrell, My Family and Other Animals

I close the dogs in. Outside the sun has set and the sky to the west is a nuance of blue and pink, dead by getting dark. All is very quiet. Without warning, the horse neighs again. My mother said: ” he knows”. I get to the paddock and he seems to be staying aside, bridle on, as if he knew. He doesn’t know anything! I argue. To prove myself right I break him a carrot which he eats. Then we look at each other and I think he knows. A few minutes later, when the mother and the trucker arrive it is pitch dark already. All of a sudden I remember it is the night of the falling stars, I look up (none is falling.)
After a bit of preparation we drive the horse to the truck. The ascent seems to worry him but then, all of a sudden we are inside with him. The trucker closes us in the first half. Whoa. I feel the exhalation from the horse’s nose on my neck. I hear the trucker yell: give him the longish. Wait, what the fuck is the longish? The dogs from inside the house bark furiously. The horse has started banging the shoulder of the truck violently. We hang wet forage in front of him which calms him for a moment. The trucker has finally opened the side door, calls us down. My mother hugs the horse by the neck, kisses him. Says bon voyage. We’re out. Last I see of him, he is trying to eat forage.

(Two days later we watch as the horse is freed of the bridle and mixed in a pack with three females. He dabs the other male’s head and they look at each other from very close. In a matter of seconds he is the new alpha male. No one can drink before he does and all that. We, our carrots, our tiny voices, don’t mean much anymore.)

When angry, count to four; when very angry, swear.
— Mark Twain

The days are too long to be described. My mother’s moods are not predictable. The dogs are too many to handle under this emotional weather. I watch my mother going crazy with folded arms, I know it is because she has to get rid of the horse that she’s so nervous, her megalomania becoming so perceivable it is unbearable.
Her worst “I am in charge here!” cry to the world.

From a certain moment on, I always knew my parents were psychotic, and that it was best to stay away from them. My feelings for them never helped, on the contrary. Then again, to love is easy. The hard part is to do good without throwing ourselves away.

As she yells because I took the dogs for the walk without giving them the biscuit first, or because the younger one hasn’t eaten; as she runs out of the bathroom yelling for the alarm clock to be shut off, because with my inconsiderate hours I got her out of bed too early (I’ve heard this one already).

I think my father was right when, in all his unbelievable arrogance and prejudice, described the desire to have dogs as the desire “for a slave”, someone who has to obey us, for whom we decide a name, hours, rations and moods. When he said that, commenting some dog-related news from his worshiped newspaper, he certainly wanted to indirectly hit at my mother from afar, so that thinking less of her I would love him more. But all in all, although I laughed at his pathetic remark, he was right. There is the childish woman who still plays with dolls; the mother or grandmother of substitute kids; the nurse who takes care of the needy– and there is the owner of slaves who keeps her possession in a orderly fashion, with “the stick and the carrot”.
All frustrations can be covered and even healed (just get another dog. And another.)

Every afternoon at three my mother watches a soap opera. Every creature must be silent. The TV is loud and outside there are no cycadas.
Once after dinner, she watches her VHS of Rocky Horror Picture Show, laughing out loud. Singing the songs. It is the only movie she ever deliberately watches, her bottle of vodka close to her on the table.
We don’t talk much because of the mortifying tension. Informed of what I am re-reading, she once quotes me a passage in french (“it is always under a transitory mood that we take the most definitive decisions”).
At night, awaken by one of the dogs who tries to jump on the bed, I read for a long time, wondering if I will stumble on the phrase (A Love of Swann). Near morning, from the door open between the rooms (“all dogs must be able to circulate at all times”) I heard her calling, in a sigh: “Oh, Help me God.” I consider for a moment giving her a voice. She goes back snoring.

It is annoying. Ro promised me sex between the lines should I go visit her at a town nearby, where she also came to these days to stay with her mother (under different conditions). But I can’t get myself to abandon here lest I come back to be rewarded with worse moods. (This is unlikely, though. My mother could unload better while I am away. I think I just don’t like Ro enough. Or better, don’t know her. Ro is friend of friends whom I never explored.)

So I stay here. Sprawled on a deckchair under the roasting sun, surrounded by dogs. In the still country, only very rarely a car runs by, making more intense the absence of any noticeable noise. All weeds are dry, the insects are scarce. Thunders, like the sea, are very far away.

Today the dread of dangers is as major as major are unhappiness and the general boredom of which Death would free us… the ancient people lived not scared of dying, and the moderns, not living, are scared by it: the more life is similar to Death, the more Death is feared and escaped, as if we were terrified by the constant image of it that in life we have and contemplate: its effects which, although living, we make experience of.

— Giacomo Leopardi, Zibaldone

mother: Yeah, no, I suppose I called you 30 times. I wanted to warn you, because I… had another of my hysteric attacks this morning. See I yell to everyone, I mean the dogs, I throw things… I also have problems with my chronic diarrhea that you know and problems with my eyes so I wanted to tell you this, to alert you, though you are coming here to help me take away Ram, there’s a part of me that is happy to see you but the rest of me wants to be left alone, I might be very hard to be around, maybe you want to consider coming later on, sunday, what do you think, I know you were supposed to leave today, which was pretty reasonable considering ferragosto and all, I know, you would have only one day to rest, but you know the idea of anyone around, I can’t stand it, I can’t go to the beach, I know we never did that, or fix a dinner, except for the dogs, I know you would do that, but you see I cry hysterically, for any reason, invoke death to give me peace, and you know that Mar had another opeartion two days ago, by the way he woke up in a pool of blood this morning he told me on the phone, because he can’t feel his throat and the stitches… and he’ll come here when you go away and that will be hard too, because it is clear that this time he will have to take radio again and what will be of him? No, I told you, now the problem is that I worry sick about Ram, also Marcel is dying, I can’t feed him, when he turns his muzzle away, it is heart-breaking, and Ram, I am afraid that those criminals of the riding school might come and steal Ram back from me, if the word that I am giving it away gets to them, they are very mean bad people, involved with drugs, you know– no you are right, if you are here we can defend the horse, please come, hurry, just don’t drive too fast, call me later.

On certain days she chatted with feverish rapidity, and this over-excitement was suddenly followed by a state of torpor, in which she remained without speaking, without moving. What then revived her was pouring a bottle of eau-de-cologne over her arms.

— Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary

The rain came upon the village and for a day it seemed as if summer was over. The world had that gray-azure hue, white light came from a woolly ceiling of clouds and all was cool and wet after the showers. I stretched my hand out of the window, rubbed it with the other instinctively, as if I had to be protected from the cold. I took cups and dishes to the sink. I yet had to build the kitchen table. The boiler still leaked methane. I had three bills in my mailbox. I got out and felt less unhappy because of the change in weather but equally desperate for a clue. I went. My bicycle skimmed lines off the long rippled puddles, the small cold drops squirting on my toes. No, I was sad or at least hopeless. I wasn’t good enough to make use of the atmospheric conditions. I felt it in my shoulders, gathered too close to my neck, and because I didn’t feel like going without leaning on the handlebars. The round-abouts of Ha-vefat made me especially sad as round-abouts often do because they don’t have anything worth circling in the middle. To get to the Esselunga you go across a town called Ha-vefat. The peculiarity of this town is that it is impossible to know your way around it except by memory and, as Flaubert demonstrated, stupidity is where things are complicated for no reason. Ha-vefat is a labyrinth of one way streets on a confused map. And yet even in that artificial labyrinth there were a thousand useless details that, had it been possible, would have been urgently removed or tamed by the needs of normalcy and practicality of the natives. I should have focused on the shapes of the old front doors, the curved invisible lines designed by the birds that explored the roofs, the old brands on the old bicycles that passed by, the words mumbled in certain secondary corners, the little objects lost by the walkers in between the curved stones that made certain roads of the town center. All these things were still the necessary sign of a friendly world I was too asinine to see. Instead the only thing I had, later when I got back, was a remnant of elation because at the supermarket I had found quadrangular lumps of cane sugar, and I had liked the idea of taking them back home as if I was carrying them back to a child who had a sense of wonder and a sense of humor cohabiting his soul. I imagined having a witty laugh about it because they were alternative and square at the same time. But also moving. End of the post.

Tiepida una fanciulla e grassa brami
chiusa nelle sue piume bianche e grige,
la neghittosa ilarità, l’argento
opaco del suo corpo di piccione.
— Corrado Pavolini

We lay our heads on each others’ feet. Her body feels warm and foreign. The room is dark, the sheets bright. My Affair and I lie naked in bed. We have different regions of the ceiling and walls to look at. Outside the shutters glows via Roma, Cadilù, a scorching afternoon.
Her thoughts are invisible… I sense them somewhere just out of reach, mysterious and natural at the same time.
But I am only human so I let them go, get back into myself. Caress her leg (feels beautiful.) She will leave soon. The light behind the shutters wavers as a car comes and go. Blessed silence. I let my breath subside. Feel the multicolored taste under my lips.

What was that tattoo of that actress that was ungrammatical? She asks.
“Vivere senza rimipianti”. Amazing how it makes me genuinely laugh every time I think about it.
That’s why I asked, she says.

The desire to be older that I had for most of my youth has been replaced by the desire to be younger now. Revelation: it is the same desire.

Early on My Affair had walked through the door with an expectant smile and a shade of blame as a vapor in her eyes. “Where were you yesterday?” (she had called.) I made fun of her. We tentatively neared each other in conversation.

Ico, she stamped the floor, you cannot welcome me in your undergarments like that.

It had been a day-long fight (she pointed to a bruise), last of many. Years of debates, struggle. How obtuse he is when we argue! she inveighed. His deadpan muteness, his final argument. Eventually she had to leave and “roam out”. Yet at four in the morning she came back with a urge to hug him. So tired (her eyes flooding at the account of her trials.) The things I forgive! she says. And he too.

I thought of all the times Libi asked me to do something, I said no. I wanted to say yes sometimes but I said no anyway, because at that point I felt too self-conscious and committed to the no.
How stupid we can be. Now the fighting meanness so well contained in the lives of the couples has taken me — the constant molding of each others’ ways to be, the drying out of love. Makes me walk away (it never happened before).

In my arms My Affair went on talking but I didn’t really want to picture the fight the faces the phrases the tones, lest the ugliness or melancholy should camp in my brains– and my part in the triangle should become apparent, and hurt me.

The words we share come –to sweep dust in the corners.

No doubt in the account there were lies, who cares… They come so natural to all of us. It is easy to tell them. As Collodi’s story so effectively explains, lies are what make our path. But the monster of solitude is much more important than that, because it follows us no matter where we go or how. And I somehow never forget it (my gift).

I nodded at the story, asked this or that. I knew the hinges had to be worked from the inside and advice was lame.

As I touched her, stroked her cheeks, her hair — her eyes filled up with tears once again but this time she smiled back, and we laughed and then it was not as if our stories had vanished, or were forgotten, but they stood aside, out of a door of ground glass, or dismantled, spread on the unharmful floor.
The drama had gone, lightly like a small, careful bird. Our kisses had a good taste, the right amount of energy in them.

Making love to My Affair is not obvious in any way yet and we fuck and cease to for unexplored reasons. Sometimes I am puzzled by her looks and moans, the red invading her face in waves. She seems confused by the exhibitions of scurrility, crude fantasy. “I can’t believe you are making me do this”. Sometimes when I leave her body she flutters her limbs and shakes her head. My Affair carries within the saddest and sweetest traces of innocence. They are no one’s.

It seemed to him that there was within his breast a great space without any light.

— Joseph Conrad, An Outcast of the Islands

Later on the crowded beach the terrors of solitude, spawned by the smell of the orange bodies under the sun, drowned in chats, cast here from their workplaces– the trails of cigarettes, the merciless music of Bar Nadia above head and far away — the blackened seagull who glided out to sea, vanishing against the dark mountain.
A purple jellyfish came floating innocuously along the shore, in waves — the humans stood in a respectful circle around it, hunters armed with nets and masks, lack of initiative — I looked at the jellyfish and it bore that solitude.

I kept my eyes closed to the sun. I sung a song in my head — unexpectedly figured out the verse that goes “and my favorite color is red” (it is about menstruation.)

(this morning. My father gulps the coffee I prepared for him.)
— I really don’t like these hours you keep. You woke me up.
— I did? I am sorry. I thought I was being very quiet.
— It is not only that. You went to sleep too early yesterday. I don’t like that either.
(Imaginary answer) — but I had a very adventurous dream and I am very rested.
(Goes away mumbling. I can’t stand the guy.)

I took this shot of a predator and its finished prey. The body of the predator pulsed visibly, the insect was excited and quiet. There was no witness, no spectator, no story for the small killing. All happening in a formidable vast indifference with no friends.