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

– Jago Noja

Our life is made by the death of others. — Leonardo da Vinci

Among minor and major treasures (berries that can be poisonous, or save your life) I find this observation in Guido Ceronetti’s Viaggio in Italia (Voyage in Italy), that gets me thinking again at the atheist scientists and their preoccupation with religion.
It is a observation Ceronetti wrote down sometimes at the end of the 1970s looking at the crowd in line to see Leonardo’s Codex Leicester (Codex Hammer back then) in Florence. Yes it is the same codex that Bill Gates bought fifteen years later and made into a screensaver for Windows 95 Plus *.

This enthusiasm of the crowds for the Genius is nostalgia for the miracle, clandestine under scientific censorship; if Leonardo is the thaumaturge then the prodigy is tolerated… It is not love for science urging them and making them so eager of that contact, it is yearning for a sign, terrible need to heal from scientific illness, from the solitude of the explainable.
The unrepeatable legacies of the past more and more will have a magic function, to carry them among the crowds serves no other purpose, it is an act of compassion.

So for example if you hear in reality or in a movie, as often happens (it happened to me recently watching Before Sunset), a character denying proudly any religious affiliation and then casually mentioning Einstein, as a sort of replacement, you should know that it is really just some magic what they are looking up to. Magic that can be sneaked out in the open without being pointed at and laughed about, that is.

* Recently I watched a 2007 incensing double interview masked as a debate with Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. Normally I find such characters quite repellent to watch, and their lack of eloquence and insight is a disgrace, although not uncommon. Anyway, I watched this in its entirety and the most sad moment was when toward the end this journalist told Bill Gates that what he was doing for the world with his foundation was dwarfing what he had accomplished making software. Then he also asked Steve Jobs if he was envious. Everyone roared with loud admiration and the camera paned on Bill Gates who bathed in the applause with a entirely serious face. Yes, there was no doubt, he was doing something world-shaking. His impersonal, floating, ever-expanding presumption, so human and so miserable, pervaded the picture. Nobody laughed except the spirit of things. I remembered how I hate everything about charity.

And since this whole world of ours is crammed, street upon street, room upon room, with poignant tragedies, drenched through and through with burning misery and distress, my days were passed from morn till night in a state of heightened attentiveness and expectation.
— Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity

I know this story very well. It is the story of my mother, her lovers, my sister who spied on her and came back to tell me (“she made love with a woman last night”) and later of myself, tearing my little boy’s room apart while my mother had sex behind the wall. I was used to look for and find in her room sex toys, porno magazines and once polaroids of my mother in a gangbang when I was eleven or twelve. And so reading I felt that all these stories and others are there, somewhere, untouched. I have written them many times, not on this blog, and they will be written again and again until the right way to tell them will come. This is the beauty of it. I have traumas, and no regrets.

The police did not disturb Beethoven, in part because he was Beethoven and because he had several friends in imperial circles, but also because he was thought to be a little touched.
— Maynard Solomon

I’m almost through Solomon’s Beethoven biography. Beethoven’s been dead for fifty pages and I miss him.
But now my experience with the book is being ruined by the Ode-to-Joy ideology that inevitably comes at the end leaving me with a bad taste in the mouth. Thing is, I wouldn’t look up to Beethoven for a ideology, or any sort of idea but music, for the little I can appreciate his music (probably very little under the surface), but when it comes to the Ninth Symphony and the “brotherhood” I am seriously repelled:

“A search for an ideal, extended communal family to assuage the inevitability of personal loss, to maintain and to magnify the sanctified memory of his and everyone’s personal Eden.”

“If we lose the reconciling dream of the Ninth Symphony, there may remain no counterpoise against the engulfing terrors of civilization, nothing to set against Auschwitz and Vietnam.”

I don’t think it is an accident or a mere necessity the fact that Beethoven removed all the parts of the Ode where Schiller’s antityrannical sentiments are expressed (“Safety from the tyrant’s power”). Only positive thinking has to survive. Idyll after struggle. This is why I feel that somehow the Ode to Joy ideology tells about tyranny, prepares tyranny.

The Ode is innocent, obviously. It is the innocent celebration of a success that was never accomplished, that nobody witnessed and that is merely imagined or promised for the future. In my mind, this means tyranny in the sense that tyranny is built on such promising futures that are never supposed to be.

Clearly it is not Beethoven’s intention to favor more tyranny. He had been disillusioned with the French Revolution and Napoleon for a long time, always had been critic of the Imperial Austrian regime… He wanted to express a resolution to the war between faith and skepticism and this was “the closest approximation to a provisionally satisfactory outcome” he could find. But Beethoven, through Schiller, borrowed into a set of images that are fragile because too simple. Something we didn’t know back then and we probably have forgotten now.

Brotherhood. Joy. End of slavery. Everyone’s equal. A great father watching us all from above. The great embrace. Anything that today would come along the lines of Lennon’s “Imagine” or something similar. In the end, only those who have a desire for domination and control will make practical use of such images, since they cover so easily everything else without asking anything serious in return.

And thus, it is not surprising, although pathetic, that the European Union’s made the Ode to Joy its hymn. Because its words come cheap, are uncompromising, and naturally leave the door open to tyranny. But reading Beethoven’s story, I don’t get the feeling that such thinking encompasses his rich, struggling, tragic life: unless maybe if I think that the heft of the tyrants, the crowns, the ceremonies, the bureaucracy of the empire, the censorship, the conformism, the bigotry, the slavery, the police state, the homeland wars stood on his shoulders and those of his contemporaries, for his entire life, forcing his body and soul to live within those terms. To survive to them. Maybe passing for a “little touched” old man.

“Do not be misled by the Viennese”, Beethoven warned his doctor: “If a sincere, independent opinion escapes me, as it often does, they think me mad.”

–In picture, above: Beethoven in the rain, sketch by Johann Hoechle, ca.1823

I clean the house in preparation to go to Milan. I think it is true that cleaning can clean your mind, if you don’t do it only when you feel like it or have to. I will always be incapable to do anything regularly so these revelations come rarely to me.
I cringe at the smell of this detergent. I close the shutters, feel sorry for the little birds that won’t be fed by me for a while.

I drive as steady as I can on the motorway. The city is just the same. The avenue has parking spots. I find myself visiting the little sunday flea market near the beltway, I don’t enjoy any of it, everything is horrible or dirty, piles of junk are tagged a price, unhappy hostile faces glide next to the stands and over the alleys of dust. I am sure there are treasures, but the scavenging isn’t worth my effort.
She wants to stop to a bar, the unhappy word “aperitif” is pronounced, I pilot her towards eating a sandwich at least. Later we find out that a sandwich costs twelve euros, which we deem insane with resignation. We sit outside in the sun. She says I smell like fireplace, which makes only sense. A car so big it wouldn’t fit in a apartment pulls over next to our table. A couple of twenty years old comes out. They sit just next to us. He makes phone calls, she has a baby. The long black car shines in the sun as they eat cake.

Sometimes I think that this blog isn’t as much read as waiting to be read. And the public gardens of Porta Venezia come to my mind, in the morning, on a sunny day of winter. Maybe I’ll go there tomorrow, I tell myself, but I know I won’t, ’cause I don’t belong there either.

…funny thing. After I linked the blog of a mysterious editor of a mysterious italian publishing company in this post, I noticed that the mentioned post attracted the attention of a visitor with a IP number from Mondadori, which is the largest publishing house in italy I believe. No matter because, even more interestingly, thanks to a trivial google search one learns that the same IP number, thus the same desk back there at Mondadori, appears recorded among the anonymous editors of a wikipedia article about an author, Roberto Pazzi, who is published by Frassinelli, which is part of Mondadori itself. The editing consisting in updating the article about the latest books and awards. Ah, the coincidences.

We are Hong Kong Network Service Company, Limited. which is the domain name register center in Asia. We received a formal application from a company who is applying to register “italyisfalling” as their domain name and Internet keyword. Since after our investigation we found that this word has been in use by your company, and this may involve your company name or trade mark, so we inform you in no time.

— a message to the blog

One of the apartments where I lived in Venice was at the ground floor. It had a bulkhead that could be slipped in front of the door for the high tide, and I could touch the ceiling without extending my arm. I didn’t stayed there very long. I took long walks around Venice with a pair of old Reebok shoes that Gisa’s father had given me. In summer, I stayed in with the door and windows open, very often I went out to buy things leaving the door unlocked. I am like that. One evening after having washed the shoes I left them out on the windowsill and the next day they weren’t there anymore. Someone had taken them. Last year Gisa’s father died. Sometimes I think of him and remember how he was. How Gisa would need him around. Only today, for unfathomable reasons, I remembered that I had had something of him and wished that the shoes were still around, taken care of by someone. Which was really, really unlikely.
 

I wonder if stories like this one and this one could be connected. The editor disgusted by the writers whose books has to manipulate, and the debuting writer who finds out that her book is made of things she never wrote. Be it as it may, they both stand for me for everything that is repulsive about the italian publishing word. Pushing to be part of it would be like willing to join the ‘ndrangheta. I think I dawdle with stories like these only to let myself be warned, reminded of one of the important reasons why I don’t write in italian anymore– and I never will.
 

I can always find what I like online, mostly makers of blogs, preferably writers and thinkers and photographers and visionaries and poets and artists. There’s many, some of the writers for example are as good as if not better than most of the things officially published you can find– I have a incidental scrapbook made in large part of fragments of works of a tiny portion of them, and I don’t care if — like I occasionally read — the internet is squeezing out the creatives in favor of the collectors, the humanists in favor of the technocrats, the grown-ups in favor of the teenagers. There are always good things to read. I like especially those who are not devoted to their own identity… those who have not a face and or a real name. Usually, although not necessarily, what they write is more honest and relevant. They seem more geniune… I only wish, in truth, they they all created less. I wish everyone would write and create less, for a number of reasons, among which, protect the art, respect the art, give me time to read.
 

In one swift move, I have to leave this house, find me a job elsewhere before the season begins, take stuff away from here and, still, the heap of books and shit from Libi’s apartment in Milan, find another place where is the new job, and manage not to squander too much money in the process. Alternatively, find someplace where to store everything and try to emigrate again. I should do all this, and quickly, instead I am using the first disquieting sunny days to go for the walks and trips around here that me and Libi never took together. Then I come home, wink at myself in the bathroom window, and wonder how do I still expect to survive in this world after all. Etc.

I got off the couch… The first light of the morning, cold, was entering from the window. The embers, crackled still. Hamza el Din sung softly near the fainting glow of the abat-jour. The parus major whistled from the windowsill, and I thought of you, our last phone call fading out with its load of detachment and sadness and disgust, I took a shower. I made conversation with you under waters, in english, during which I declared I would survive through the pain, and the solitude, and I explained to the best of my abilities how this alloy of love and hate was going to fatally decay into indifference or easy to use well-wishing. So I was about to “move on”, like it is said, like I was encouraged to do (not by you). It was macabre. I was reluctant to welcome this future of unloving a once beloved, a future of indifference that unfailingly awaited me, and you. The fact that this, in turn, would make me feel better was irrelevant. I didn’t want the love-hate to go. What was going to replace it was not meant to do justice to you and me and I felt bad at the idea of feeling that for us. So this was also why I will never forgive you I said, because you accepted this order of the disorder of the things, and with wisdom you welcomed these simple scars on our hearts.
So I made conversation to you, I was not eloquent, all the contrary, and later, preparing for my empty day and the walk to the boar woods, you were a collection of memories, the tumble of your shoes, the color of your toenails, the tools laid out for your breakfast, the contempt for the past and the corners of your mouth when, unconscious of your beauty, you were sad, or tired but smiled. Everything was collected into living quarters where I did not live.

Now a quick change to things internal from things external. We shall surely see each other soon; moreover, today I cannot share with you the thoughts I have had during these last few days touching my own life — If our hearts were always close together, I would have none of these.
— Ludwig van Beethoven, letter to the “Immortal beloved”, from Manyard Solomon’s biography

We sit in the dreary small office, outside is the mediocre square of a village, parked cars and tilia cordata, the evening descending in accord with the snow and the usual three bars where bottles are opened and televisions are on.
My emilian boss and the substrates salesman do the talking. I look at the titles on the shelf of the gardening books wishing this wasn’t the only connection with other people I will be having for the whole week. The topic is immigration, rapes, the crisis– my emilian boss declares now he will vote Forza Nuova. I remember this autumn when taken by his rant he had declared he was going to vote S.S. — I still laugh at the memory — he was driving but nonetheless had had a hint of fascist salute while saying it.

Tonight the salesman goes along. I’ve never seen him before but suddenly I realize he wears a black sleeveless padded jacket that gives him away. Immigrants should be kicked out of the country. Or hanged. Politicians shot! People will soon be tired. They can’t take it anymore. The police should leave to the citizens the execution of the death sentences. There should be no lawyers. My ass starts to feel sore and too flat by sitting down in a horrid chair made of very similar ideas. I long for the rotten air of the village. If they come into your house you have to shoot them on sight. Then dump their bodies in a ditch. I want to have a cannon in my garden declares the salesman. The communists who yell “racist” to everyone says my boss raising his voice don’t know the first thing about what this country is becoming because of immigrants who come from countries where they only understand the stick. So we shall give them the stick! My emilian boss who only ever hired immigrants because it was a better deal says so. I try to join the discussion agreeing that communists probably consider immigration something that after all is coming to punish the idleness and sins of the bourgeois– hence their compassion is a big joke– this does not take much effort on my part and generally my silence goes for agreement on everything else. Besides disagreeing would be much more boring and not interesting. I reflect that it gives me this morbid pleasure to be near words like these, but only very briefly until I start to be disgusted, not even by the substance (it is a transparent substance, a watery substance), but by how the words go always around– cowardly, useless, in whirls that could repeat themselves forever– which is very frustrating and makes me drowsy.

My emilian boss, the fascist, is a swindle and a prick… At the same time he has these wounded eyes, slivers of a fragile feminine soul buried underneath some misplaced bits of education and an unusual hatred for the greater part of society that is almost deranged and makes me comfortable. When with him on the job, a job he knows, none of the miserable ideas makes itself visible– and the humanity of the work is manifest. The salesman trapped in his life of car driving and aperitifs is instead a integral cretin without any streak of folly and very tiring to look at– so I don’t.

I daze myself, thinking how everyone I met since I’ve been in this forsaken valley revealed himself, or herself, as a fascist or at least as a far fetched right-winger, prey of imprecise fears but certain that the answer to them was somewhere in between mussolini and berlusconi. It is indeed a monolithic valley to look at, where everyone from the grandmother to the disco kid share the same gloomy view of the world and yet, it is not a community not by a long shot, and the highest common ambition is a high fence, a large cannon in the garden, extremely secret hopes to become valuable enough to prostitute themselves–

Finally we step outside– the smell of heaters and fireplaces, the wet snow– the salesman goes and no one will regret it– we enter one of the three bars so that in few words I can learn that there is no job for me– or is there, at conditions that are scary or puzzling– I refuse a subsequent invitation to dinner making a imprecise excuse. I drive away slowly under the snow and finally, finally out of the village to the depths of the valley. I sigh with relief and terror of the future. I turn the radio on, a split second, and I turn it off– Despite the snow, the valley is dark tonight. I have fantasies of letting myself die of starvation like Beethoven wanted to– or of breaking the siege because of the eyes of someone who looks at me, precisely at me, in a way intense and inexperienced. I live a sort of physical memory, the recollection of a smell, the fragrance of a body, the warmness of it, it explodes someplace between my lips and my nose, on the right side of my face with such reality– becomes the measure of my solitude, or the mark of it, a sudden call of the body! I slow down the car even more– this solitude, which is volatile is with me and more estranged than everything else in this valley I climb, end of the post.

At that point something told her to wear the blouse and a pair of pigskin pants. She did, she looked at herself in the mirror from all sides (two times she stretched her lips) and felt she was being little boy enough. Thinking this two very big tears leapt to the blouse with the small blue checkers.

— Goffredo Parise, “Woman”

I am driving through the valley and into a thick fog which makes everything fuzzy and mysterious. With a vibration a message arrives (the marvels of the times we live in). Later at the village, after having disposed of three days of trash into the dumpsters, I read the message. The traffic down the road is scarce and slow. The car is parked at the curb blinking and steaming. We are creatures barely visible. The message is from Jawa. It goes like this: I walk in a dizzily Milano after a night on guard (she works in a hospital). I see again after months the bench in Porta Venezia where I waited for you the last time we met. Almost a year ago. I kiss you and again and again.

Asshole that I am, I can’t recall anything about the bench in Porta Venezia. And what we did that day must have rolled itself up against the background noise of my mind, along with the notion that that day even existed. What? Bench? When? I try to picture Jawa sitting on a bench somewhere in the gardens of Porta Venezia waiting for me but I come with nothing that doesn’t feel entirely invented. Her dear anxious eyes and her familiar smile, the grace of her body and gait– erotic and shy and eager and because of that tender and abandoned. It is all clear in my mind when I want to see it. Where is that day? I know I met someone else at the gardens of Porta Venezia this past year (Is it so? that too is uncertain). Not without amusement I sit there and scratch my head and observe the blankness in my head.

I put the cellphone down and pull away making a dangerous turn into the road where nothing is visible. The radio is droning with a voice that comes and goes. I think of Jawa and drive on with this warm annoying feeling of regret and boredom, paean for the days we had and cry for those we hadn’t. Not because of these few lines that sweetened this one of my dry spell days I take hold of this certainty that me and Jawa could have been happy together at least for a while, and, like we agreed one day during a conversation in bed (or was it in a car?), we would have made wonderful trips and had memorable experiences together, more memorable of the few afternoons or nights stolen to our lives cheating. And with that, the certainty that this will never instead happen, not a chance, I hold that too.

The road is empty now, or so it seems with the little that can be seen. Driving in the fog is much more peaceful and interesting that one may think, and the anxiety for the increased likelihood of a accident (two ambulances pass by me screaming) makes it less predictable. The radio just ceased to give any human sign and the world all around moves by in a bizarre way, appearing and disappearing so gently and close to me. A dream I had this morning comes to my mind, Libi was in it, it was not peaceful, I was so pissed when I woke up. Now I don’t care and muse, even in my dreams Libi does not tell me stuff directly, she just let me guess like she always did. In dreams there’s a improvement though, which is the solemnity and focus on the moment which instead reality defies so easily. In reality the slipping away is through and through, it never really stops: there are well refined strategies of communications and perception that make everything ungraspable. In the dream a silence, a glance, a coward roundabout are unmistakably relevant. Even she, there, cannot ignore it. Dreams are better, then, unfortunately they are too disorganized and inconsequent to make a proper reality.

Then it comes back (everything is forever inside our minds), I know the bench. It must have been one of those benches in a line along the fence in front of the planetarium. Behind is the busy sidewalk and then the avenue. I remember that meeting now, possibly the sunny end of a afternoon… The image of her waiting couldn’t exist in my mind because I did not see her waiting for me, she had seen me first and had come over to me. How fantastic. What a discovery! The bench existed in her world only and not in mine: It had a meaning for her only, a meaning that I could never associate with that day and our encounter, and that encounter now appears in all its uniqueness because it has these two angles that do not match, as if the size and life of that experience is still extending way past what I can or can’t recall. Yes, I exist in the others. How startling. And I don’t know nor can imagine in what form I do and this fills me with a eagerness of learning and connecting that is so clearly frustrating now, but is uplifting also, if that’s the word, which I doubt. End of this post.

“Stupid”, father Antonio said all shook “do you know what a wild goose means? You should have brought the carbine you monkey, a goose, good God to let a goose go…” and at that word “goose” it started to snow around the house.

— Goffredo Parise, “House”.

We were in bed, the room was almost dark, laying next to each other under the blankets our arms were taking our arms. We talked softly, we looked up at the ceiling and occasionally again at each other. Outside was the quiet city and the snow which is not really white, but orange because of the street lights.The sky is orange too and the noise of the city is a small squashing, a quiver and nothing else. She said, so we can be like lovers and friends now? and it took me a while to say something back– maybe I had something similar in mind or it was the surprise to realize that now we wanted to be ready for something like this. We had talked about us and as always the tone of the conversation had gone past the rage, the will to fight and the bitterness getting warmer and then affectionate. The tale of how everything had went wrong mixed with the love-making and the eyes opened and closed, her need to be seen and known and the familiarity which in vain tries to be unfamiliar. Behind the scenes the cats move sideway and look away and fight for just few seconds and everything is hard for us. I replied –I don’t know if we do, we just might.
Then we were silent in the dark room because you know, I just said something quite irrelevant to the story.
But in my thoughts I knew something that night (yesterday night): I knew that what Libi had just uttered were legendary words– words I will never forget as long as I live or as long as my brain works. Those words are legend. Even if they land to nothing and we just part like we are expected to do.