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

– Jago Noja

Extremely clever cretins: it seems impossible, but they exist.
— Leonardo Sciascia

So forgive me if I’m bothered by this once again but… Dawkins’ atheist campaign on buses is on the news again, with its moronic or insulting (I’m still undecided) message: “There’s probably no God. Now stop worrying and enjoy your life” and I must write about it once again. But before a note: the picture above comes from this post on the very new and very humanist blog, which I’m linking to here only to make sure they read me back so that we all have a jolly good laugh about it.

First of all: as stated few times on this blog already, I don’t believe in God– but if this scientist doesn’t cut his paternalistic crap I will end up believing in it. Then, to the point: There’s probably no God. Okay, the thing is clear enough. I still don’t know why a scientist should be bothered to argue the unprovable but, okay. But then, I don’t see the connection between the other parts of the message. They make no sense. Did Dawkins wrote this pathetic campaign all by himself? The message has no logic at all, which is kind of surprising coming from people of science. All in all, this is more like a religious message than anything else.

There is no God / stop worrying. These two pieces make no sense together since to believe in God is exactly what religious people do so they don’t have to worry. But just like priests or a vice-president, Dawkins is not working with our logic here, but playing with our feelings, in particular with our shame for ourselves. He bets we are worried and bets we are ashamed of our worries and eager to get rid of them. Because he seems to assume everyone is worried in his own little superstitious world except him and the likes of him. He is being the psychiatrist with the pill betting that we all hate our ugly days more than we hate his pill or his face.

Stop worrying / enjoy life. This other than orwellian also seems quite a simplification: it is known to adults-not-in-denial that the ability to enjoy life depends on a lot of complex things, like the way you just are, lots of luck, some pleasure, health to use it, hard work you like, goals, oblivion –to name a few. You can have it today and not tomorrow, it is never forever or granted and it certainly does not depend on the ideas you endorse, despite what Lenin or Dawkins or Ratzinger want us to believe. God can help you, or not, communism can or not, so goes for Science and equally can or cannot help you discount prices and coupons. For certain people it is hard, sometimes impossible to enjoy life, and some of those are professional atheists. Because life is fucking hard, and often disappointing or even miserable, but the amount of joy that moves about in it does not move according to ideas or slogans.
And is it really to enjoy life the ultimate goal? Were the great scientists all about enjoying life? Was Galileo? Epicure is not the only answer to religion, you know. Christ, this is ridiculous! Is it really “not worrying” and “enjoying life” the best to come up with? Is that why we have struggled with our spiritual life for thousands of years? Would you have invited Franz Kafka or Shakespeare or Michelangelo Buonarroti or even Horatio himself to stop fucking worrying and enjoy life? And how little you must think of people brains to imagine them all turn joyful this way? Are you Bobby fucking McFerrin?
Does Dawkins wants to let us know that he enjoys life? I bet he does. Do we care? I wonder if that’s why he has followers… all convinced to enjoy their lives thanks to atheism –and too bad for those morons religious people who can’t. Wow. This is self-satisfaction pornography.

And also: I was under the impression, by leafing through that book, that it was all about how religion was fucking up society (doubtful, considering that the greatest inventions in social matters and the highest achievements in arts came all from the inside of religious cultures, but whatever) and now with this message it seems all about not being worried and learning to enjoy life. Is Dawkins turning into a new, powerful –gulp– Ron Hubbard?

Well to end this post I’ll state my feeling: I feel that the atheist campaign is being used to reassure some people that they are smarter than religious people. Which might be true, or not, but that’s about it. That’s the only real honest use I can imagine for their messages. And by the way, why do they need to do that? Maybe because they’re having doubts about what they believed was a solid supremacy of their smartness? (Wouldn’t be better to prove it doing smart things?) Or are they full of it? Bah. I don’t know. I just wish they were out of my sight –same thing I feel when I see the a teacher of religion or a equivalent to that, actually.

As we made our way along the snowy gravel path, we were suddenly no longer two but four, for ahead us walked, clearly outlined in the crystal-clear moonlight, our shadows… and it afforded me some satisfaction… to see that my shadow was longer, slimmer, I might almost say ‘better’.
— Stefan Zweig, Beware of Pity

The gray city is cold and shook by discreet earthquakes. The cats, now plural, come closer and stand intent. Libi is still at the center of all the things I am losing, or letting go. She whose face I cannot look at anymore. I glance at it by accident as we pass each other in the kitchen or as we sit at the table for the silent dinner she joins late– mostly are parts of her body I see, a shoulder, her breast, her chin– my desire for her that was always in this urge for possession and use, the impulse of the consumer– is kept at bay now since I don’t allow myself to entirely look at her figure, and as long as I am very particular at leaving her face out of the picture the longer.
I feel her eyes on me all the time and her eyes as always see everything, everything from another world I can’t see and so little of the horrible one I know. Did I wrote horrible because I think of myself as horrible — I don’t know–

The desire, the desire is so present when she is not present and I think of her, funny like that. I turn my back at her as soon as — late at night, early in the morning — I lay next to her in the bed which is not ours. I have nightmares of her possible lovers to be. Sudden certainties of her present or next abandonment. And not unusually, erotic dreams of her sex life without me. But I stay strong I don’t touch or use or consume. I am lost into our silence and silenced by some restraining energy I don’t understand. And bitter. Too long without making love to you, Libi. Please don’t make love to anyone else.

I don’t call this my home anymore, all the books stacked against the walls and the guitar and the letters and the pictures on the inside of the closet door can’t make the difference. My stuff. There was a time when it meant something to accumulate this. Never a easy way to rid of it now. I felt so tired at the idea of being here to carry it away so I didn’t do it. I’m sorry, although I know you take it as a good sign, an open door of some sort. A captive. Not even checked at the self-storage hole. Turned my back at it. And now it is fucking Christmas again.

This is the season when the city looks the more possessed by its daemons, relics of bribes carried in paper–

The things I am losing and Libi stand out in this gulf in the middle of a unmistakable city, maelstrom that moves away from me but close to me– other things are there in this monotonous dance and by looking at them I know that what is lost is lost and there is no other way.

I am so full of hatred, my dear. These words I would love to say. Resentment, spite, hate. Yes I hate, all these friends and relatives who stood between us– from the first moment to the last– because they had their spot and you were going to keep it for them no matter what– I didn’t want a parking lot I wanted a story far away from everything, where the world was made from scratch –you know, the horrid kind of place I dream of where we’d have children and fight to keep them out of school– but this was never the case. It is funny how much I still hate all these people dancing around you, parking next to you, giving you to read the books I hate– the girls you make the clothes for and with, and the exhibits with, your companions to the movies, your parents, those who need you, those who need you are legions. You have no idea how much I hated your generosity, and their obtuse inability to feel that something more crucial, more life-like was at stake.

Yes I want to dive into this maelstrom and destroy them one by one! Maybe I’ll be in peace then. And if that’s not true– if it’s all an excuse for our wounded pride– then I want to destroy my hatred is what I want. For myself as well, my inability to love purely and be loyal — Only there is this fear to turn around and appreciate yet how long is the road that takes there, where some love for you survives intact and usable, somehow, into this impoverished soul of mine, possibly somewhere else in this impoverished world of ours.

My biggest mistake– being convinced for too long that you weren’t normal the way I ain’t, that you came from Babylon like me. But even the weirdest kinkiness in bed, so strangely present when I masturbate now, tells nothing of these origins, of a disposition, of the nothingness-to-lose that you don’t have. See, I didn’t know that.

One must learn to live. I practice every day. My biggest obstacle is I don’t know who I am. I grope blindly. If anyone loves me as I am I may dare at last to look at myself. For me, that possibility is fairly remote.
— Ingmar Bergman, Autumn Sonata

It was still dark when I woke up. It was very cold. The trick hadn’t work and the heat had largely dispersed through the fissures of the doors into the cold rooms.
I got out of bed with a blanket on my shoulders and slacks and socks . I went to the kitchen through quarters I thought as cold as the outside. The thermometer pointed 7° C and I mumbled “wow” in the empty house. I jumped twice on the spot and said “brrr”. I assembled the moka and placed it on the cooker and went to the bathroom. The water felt to the point of freezing. I turned the knob on the radiator and had my hand on it until it felt warm. It had to be done. Later I turned all the other radiators on as well. I was worried for the GPL. Coffee was fine. Daybreak. I went to the window and realized it was snowing. It probably had been snowing all night long. The hills on the other side of the river, the warehouses, the main road were white. The branches of the walnut trees highlighted by a layer of snow. The silence. I was surprised. I put my clothes and boots on and went out. The snow flakes were large and stuck to my coat. I cleaned the lid of the GPL fuel tank with my hat and opened it and looked at the indicator. It signed 95%. I wandered to find a small stone not hidden by snow and tapped with it against the tank. The needle bounced to 40%. It meant with that weather I could last a ten days at most.
There was no point in trying to set the car free. It only had a remotely reminiscing shape of a car under the white blanket. I took off to Gargotta. I wanted to go hillside but after few hundred yards the road virtually disappeared in the snow that covered the fields. Hadn’t be for the flakes falling, everything around was so smooth and unreal. Only a dog was barking in my honor from behind a metal fence. Her ears were very long and flapped visibly aside as she jumped forward and leaned to the fence. The house she was protecting looked empty if not abandoned. She actually looked the loneliest dog on the planet. I told her “hey”. A green truck came into view on the road and halted waiting for me to pass by. It had skidded and fought up the road and the radiator steamed. A guy inside, the pitted sad face of a drunkard said “what you looking for around here.” He was so hostile I replied with hostility: “I ain’t looking. What about you?” He took off looking away with fragile eyes. I climbed down the slope and fell back to the main road. The snowplows had passed but a while before. I trailed along the banks of broken snow turned over next to the tarmac. Very few vehicles passed, very slowly. It was funny to look at the cars pass by, traction wheels chained up, so slowly where they were normally so fast and almost condescending.

Gargotta was a mile away, not visible behind a large bend of the road and the lines of poplars and locust trees along the river.
In summer the river looked almost white because of the dry stones, and the waters were present only in spirit; under the nice bridge of Gargotta the waters rumbled now, and looked almost green against the white of the snow.

The old people of Gargotta were waiting under the pergola of the bar at one end of the large and long square. They waited for the coach without moving at all, dark statues regarding the snow with secondhand wits and unfriendly manners, eager to constantly let know each others how little there was to give, since so little they had ever received, and now the snow was tormenting them too. They didn’t care for no one but each oneself.
Mostly everyone in Gargotta was very old, and I felt tired at their expectations of respect. I didn’t feel any on behalf of their age nor of their conduct. I had coffee and pretended to wait with them for a bit, just like some of them were doing, and for the same reason. “I am like a retired old man” I thought with disgust. I went off to buy some groceries, the local paper and got back along the road to the castle again. The flakes kept falling, a breeze moved them sideways above the road. I thought of the groceries getting wet in the shopping bag. The cars approached me with a metallic pensive noise and passed at a large distance.

In the utility room open to the court there were unequal piles of pieces of wood stacked against the walls with bricks, slabs of rock and pieces of old furniture and toys. I took two double bricks and a scrap of copper probably coming from a old stove. I carried them inside and came back for the wood.
In the fireplace, I placed the two bricks and above them the plate of copper. Above that I set the wood and started to make a fire with pieces of paper made into a ball. After a while the fire was set. It was burning, and the chimney was pulling the smoke up. This was the trick Daniele had thought me and it worked beautifully.

I pulled the couch closer and sat in front of the fire. I looked at it for a while, and came back at it later when it was dying down. I felt glum. I wasn’t thinking about London, or Milan. I wasn’t thinking anyone. I was thinking at the small pieces of wood whose edges gleamed so intensely, as if each one of them, now set apart, was a creature or a planet consumed on its own.

It’s terrible to be a failure. People think they have the right to tell you what to do.
— Ingmar Bergman, from The Passion of Anna

One of the drawbacks of a human world like the one we’ll living in is its age. It is all very structured where we live, very complicated, and totally unprepared to new untried ways, new societies were you’d possibly feel more at home. And I am not talking about a ‘developed’ world against a ‘underdeveloped’, more rural and authentic one. I don’t believe in this antithesis. I am talking about the human world in its entirety, the result of contradictory hopeless efforts of countless individuals that came before you.
None of those individuals were you, and whatever they pretended to be doing for the world, in the world, against the world this is not what was left behind. What was left behind is some sort of desperate conservation of bits of civilization colliding together. So in short there is no freedom, only a marginal freedom of movement inside an aged world, but the static drawing of individual freedom on the canvas of chaos. It is a world so much accustomed to itself and its own manners that all other possible manners, all the possible worlds are invisible from its standing point.
I don’t know where I was going with this.

Ah, yes. Naturally there are things you like and dislike about a place, and it’s not even about that. I quite liked the row houses, the small gardens, the countryside, the absurd way they mended my work pants at the indian cleaning place, the fish, watching a car program on the bbc, the incredible quietness of the residential streets when you’re at home weekends with nothing to do. To finally speak english with english people, going to the gardens out of the city at dawn and walking with the tourists along the Thames. I disliked my boss being a maniac and a warrior and a freak and a bigot, and his apologies for screwing me over I disliked as well. I disliked the subway and the palms in too many gardens corners. The money flowing almost as shamelessly as in the States. The way everyone seemed to be seriously caught in the scheme of the “zones” and the poverty of it all that this implied.

Who cares? No matter. Now my ride is bumping again, and the things I have to figure out are just too many. This is a public journal and you who are reading get to know this much.

Well perhaps the thing I wanted to say is that never like now, coming back this time again, watching the land and the sea from inside a very high airplane fuselage, my supposed country approaching, I felt our world of humans so much defined and so much refined and so filled with walls and doors and mirrors wherein basically I was getting lost. Totally lost. Seeing thus life, not only into your choices and your destiny, but into others’ as well, pretending not to be a tragically predictable thing. Or something like that.

— ps maybe some of you noticed, I changed my nickname here and as far as I’m concerned everywhere else, for as little visible as it was, you know, to fool google a bit.

to be loved is why we’ve come.
every drop of rain that fell or falls
is always falling
on and on and on and on.
— Rickie Lee Jones, A tree on Allenford

and I look at everybody else, they go about their business and their lives, busy and less, and i’m in my own idiot single boat and i want to think that i’m better off, because I am going at my own speed and i still haven’t let anyone pushing me forward more than the one or few times they unsuccessfully tried to. As a matter of fact the only problem being to me the boat itself, this going alone, more than the speed or the destination of the cruise.

I recently ran into this expression in an old dear book that I am rereading in english translation, and I thought it would still be lovely to be greeted by a ‘what good wind?’ welcome: that someone would see yourself as brought by good wind on your occasional visit. It’s unlikely to happen. Certain sayings are worn out for a reason, because that particular part of existence, and the feelings involved with it, aren’t really possible anymore (only a mockery of those feelings is possible. A mockery is always possible). Winds nowadays only bring “storms” or “victories” and such depressing things.

there is not much choice left. in the end I point to a form of bread too big for my needs. Can I have half of that? “No.” Half of that other one? “No.” Why. “Because I won’t sell the other half then.” Suddenly I have memories of when I lived in Rotterdam. Money as the last cocoon. I have seen too many phony smiles already. Slight emetic sensation. Deep down, the detestable image of myself a while down the future, the linkage to the world completely severed. A questo siamo! At this we are, Sciascia would say.

sooner or later someone will ask you if you believe in God. My boss goes to church every Sunday and firmly believes in all sorts of charity, which well I don’t, I mean, I only accept any remedy as such and not as a solution, so it was fatal we had to come to discuss this also, in a conversation which won’t be reproduced here because of its triviality and inherent stupidity– but it occurred to me that I don’t believe in God, because, well, nobody ever taught it to me, nobody ever planted that belief in my mind so why should I? but like everyone else, willingly or not, I do happen to think about it. I think how a god would judge a certain situation or if I could be helped to overcome my despair or my irresoluteness if a god existed.
I wonder does this account for religion? For spiritual life? I doubt this is what they mean by spiritual and I suspect it to be mere superstition, of which I am full of. What I think is that sometimes with my swearing or praying or damning I make a wish for a God to exist, with its evening order, but I also think that if said God really existed I would hate it, because, well of the problem I have with authority.
Now because my problem with authority comes from my rotten relationship with my father, it is also obvious that my correlation with my father beats my correlation to god hands down and in every which way. I suspect this to be a rule more widespread than expected. Even among those who declare their lives to be ruled by God. (I want to add that I do respect religion, I find it moving, although numbing, it can be often useful, and certainly filled with creative inspiration; and also that I consider Richard Dawkins kind of devoid of common sense.)

as you might have noticed I made up a new face for this blog, I had time this weekend and I got tired to look at the old courier-new face and because I don’t wanna fear the less original I made this one, which I bid more readable, but naturally I’m uncertain about it so let me know if you care.
Here’s the end of another useless post. It had the perfect title for a entirely different incident of words. Meanwhile things here are pretty unbearable and I’m fed up, etc.

To bring this about, destiny must be overturned; and, incapable of action, cursing God and accusing himself of cowardice, he turned about in his desire.
— Gustave Flaubert, Sentimental education

I get downstairs to the busy kitchen. My landlady has relatives over and we have a awkward meeting in a late morning. I’m an alien there, and it’s monday and I am not working so she inquires. I’m likable and make them laugh about something. She’s already fixing some lunch or dinner food for them, and they are chatting in the gloomy light coming through the veranda from the wet garden, making themselves ready to go visit some museum. They comment on how astonishing colorful some of the things they saw in Rome last year looked.

((I wish I could chat with them about my own experience with a museum. I went to the National gallery myself yesterday, but I had to get out because it was too depressing. Just like I witnessed happening over the years in Venice, they virtually erased out the Renaissance by restoring (as in unmercifully cleaning) every single painting, ruining them all without exception. The two or three minor pictures not restored stand out for intensity and truthfulness. And you feel sorry for them and for the destiny they will face soon. The others are lost forever. No turning back thanks to the scientific idiocy of our times. Because everything is scientific but no one seem to have an idea of what a school of painting was about (not bellowing hues all over the place.) Titian’s, Bellini’s, Lotto’s, Tintoretto’s, Raphael’s, Leonardo’s, etc. Materpieces so cleaned up that all you can see is the dumb colors painted by some pupil back then, no overpainting of the masters (gone with the supposed dirt), and the grain of the wood or of the canvas, standing out like they could have been okay with it. These pictures, I see them: to me they are the contemporary product of our mediocre idea of light, tone, and beauty. After three or four halls walking in despair and visual boredom I knew I couldn’t stand it. And all these people walking around not knowing. I had to get out the bloody National. I unfortunately still can remember every museum I visited before these global restoring tabula rasa began, ten or fifteen years ago.))

So I let it go and make my coffee, steal half a glass of milk and get out of the way soon. My feet hurt walking uphill along the damp sidewalk of the quiet avenue, I think because of the hard boots I use for work. It worries me.
The sky is a grey blanket stuffed with rolling clouds and the trees are brushed by a cold steady breeze. Involuntarily I consider what the gardens I pass by would need to get a shape up. Not a trace of yesterday’s snow obviously– I wonder if the landlady will take the money I have left in the room. I clench the bills in my pocket, I have less than one hundred pounds to the end of the week which does not seem a good thing on a monday. I think I am not paid enough to live in this ridiculous city.
Nobody you meet in the streets looks at you in the eyes, it is so frustrating. The lights inside the buses are always on. I wish I had at least a barman or a grocery girl to talk to. The cars keep coming from the wrong direction when I throw myself in the middle of the street. I reckon I will be either run over here very soon or when I get back home, all my customs mixed up. It makes me good to speak in english, the sounds coming in and out of me, it only happens so paradoxically little.
If I had a car I would drive north out of the city until I get lost. I forgot what I wanted to say.

— in picture, above: out of the bloody national

"Yo soy el árbol conmovido y triste
Tu eres la niña que mi tronco hirió
Yo guardo siempre tu querido nombre
¿y tú, qua has hecho de mi pobre flor?"

We are silent. I sit lulled by the sharpening lights of dawn and dazed by the jet of warm air heating the van cabin. A day begins over the cold wet ground and the big city. The nefarious please-enroll-at-the-university commercial prick goes on the radio once again. He’s telling me how life is good to him, one of its most remarkable features being that him, the prick, never has to turn back and wonder what it could have been. He really says so "never turning back". If he was real I would have no hope whatsoever in him. I listen grudgingly embarrassed by the cretins who forged the message.

The funny disquieting thing is the widespread conviction of being sane. I might be wrong, but I think humans used to know better.

I lean my head against the side window and with my emptied mind consider the walkers, the cars, them all people. Faces, moods, gaits, prompt me now tenderness, now vicinity, now boredom now nostalgia. Love people and be loved. I send these feelings out unwatched, where they go? Besieged and made up by gossip news and horror stories and conformism, where do they hide? They trickle down through the city swallowed by its thirstiness and disappear.

Will it be a good day today? Nobody slows down to ask. It will be what it happens to be. I clutch my hands hoping my body will be ready. I pray to be fast, focused, energetic, then direct my sincere contempt to this need of being fast and focused and energetic, major sign of the corruption of a civilization. I know that my precision and efficiency to clean shit out of rich people’s gardens declines during the day. I try to justify it with the fall of civilization so that I don’t think at my own falling. But I need contemplation. My wish should be to have enough of contemplation everyday. I fear becoming numb to this.

Wow, if only the next one could imagine what my problems are, I would be submerged by ridiculousness.

So my empty mind rambles on. This post is too similar to the previous one. Mood isn’t changing. I am not grasping. My boss is trying to talk again, but I pretend I am not listening.

We already are at this point, funny. I don’t give a shit about political or social correctness, it actually bothers me, but after a while his manifest nervousness on every thursday on the job, his load of prejudices and his inability to listen are a lot to take– so I keep just watching outside. I think he resents it but this is what it is. I don’t fear losing a job, I expect it.

There, look! is a girl who trots alone, hurrying without boldness, without confidence, harassed by the cold wind. Some books against her breast, the short skirt and the skinny legs wave, her unimaginable thoughts are carried inside her. I decide she’s a friend, a soulmate, and I smile in her direction as the van hiccups forward the lazy traffic line. End of the post.

— in picture, above: in traffic at dawn

Quel che tu vuoi dire in fine, dillo da principio.
— proverbio italiano

I don’t see very far across london. We roam the streets in a truck which I still have to learn to drive — on that funny side of everything– and they’re always the same streets. They have plane trees, shaped up small gardens along badly built pretty houses that are all the same. Occasionally there are shops and traffic and buses. Toff’s where I had fish three times. Every kind of plant grows around you. No limits. On the job the construction workers deploy an accent I can’t break, but I am called a mate. Most of the times we start before dawn. Every day is different days into one, one of them is a rainy day usually in the afternoon. But we work on anyway. Airplanes fly down above our heads occasionally and the blackbirds and the robins and the squirrels and the ravens are somewhere all around in the gardens, gaping at our work of uncovering treasures for them. The flowers fall under my secateurs, as they call it here. The shrubs are still in blossom. I become a better gardener day by day, well except when there’s something I detest like moving leaves around with a blower. Or similar. Then I am a bad gardener.

Later I, walking around in east finchley… I, longing for someone to go visit, to call, or a call to wait for. Fall in love, be surprised. I dragged such pointless feelings all the way from Italy in my freitag bag.
I stand in a mirror inside the window of a real estate agency! I’m such a handsome man, so charming when I want, used to be a clever boy and I don’t know anyone lonelier than me.
I lazy, I paranoid, I absent-minded and fool. My true hidden soul is a bum in disarray. Is anyone seeing it? That girl? That the reason of a tender smile possibly? Doubtful. No mothers around. No cereals.

So I came here to london. I sleep in a 6 square meters room and wake up at five thirty… I shop for packed food that doesn’t even look like food. But it wasn’t about the work, not because I reputed the location special or better, only my efforts not to sink in the obviousness of my little, mediocre sea. I can see how I am tired to look at the others as the giants who can live where I can’t exist and be, but even here all I try to do: to lessen them –picking on their possible despair. Such are my ramblings in the megalopolis far from home. I take pride of trifling in my hateful solitude then, saved. Hypocritically sorry for those who take antidepressants, for example– paraphrasing Kafka who wrote that his peers had found “companionship through means of intoxication” which made them sociable, which was the point. “I, however, cannot force myself to use drugs to cheat on my loneliness – it is all that I have”. So, consolation! I am not social because I don’t want to cheat. Lonely because honest and so forth.

It’s a city. I know the drill. Like on a parade the dreaded leaves fall from the tallest creatures of the avenue down to the dark bottom of it no matter what the souls’re at. Looking for a parking spot, swearing in a whisper and scanning both sides of the road from behind a smudged car glass. Waiting for the dog to take a quick shit in between the garden paths, looking sideways to give it time and privacy. Smoking a cigarette outside a restaurant talking on the thin cell swaying slowly while the smoke dissolves. Walking by the glowing windows of the shops catching glimpses of things to buy, shoes furniture towels more thin cell phones bangladeshi food. Nodding off on a crowded bench on the number something. Nodding off on a empty pew inside the church. Dragging the children, the bike, the shopping bags, the questions, the moments of the day past. In line at the cashiers. Avoiding the looks down the road. Forgetting the legendary fears exchanged between us and the TV, privately, and carried around in disguise. On the surface, it is tuesday night at five post meridiem, dark, people are diverse, I am unable to use the word elegance here or anywhere, I certainly am ~alive. Etc.

I popoli settentrionali meno caldi nelle illusioni,
sono anche meno freddi nel disinganno.
— Giacomo Leopardi, Discorso sopra lo stato presente dei costumi degli Italiani

I had that known feeling again this morning, same as yesterday. I woke up and wondered where I was, in which bed I was. I might be wrong but I swear it doesn’t look like home I thought. I mean, it’s no big deal because if it’s not home, it will certainly be something else, equally habitable.
And why am I here again? What have I done? Where is the window? (It’s on the opposite side!) On which side of the bed am I? Have I not too much room? Am I not kicking someone out of bed? Where is the loved one? (Not here.) What house is this? What world is outside? (what if it is a world I don’t know?)

After which the swinging of the black walnut leaves against the smooth perfect sky of the morning; something in the line of the hills, or the sheer factuality of the hills; possibly the smell of the wall near my face (of all the visible objects, the odd abat-jour, the wooden dark seat, the chandelier, the vaulted ceiling, so full of clues, none seemingly but placeless, not belonging to anywhere): I couldn’t say with what feeling I learned where I was. Relief acceptance disappointment wonder. That is right, I thought, I am in the castle. Outside is the province. Fields villages dry rivers gardens petrol stations old folks. All the lines at the horizon are crooked and the long road to Plaisance is the swoosh of that engine running by in the early morning and felt between the thoughts.

Later during the day, I am half naked under the sun and entrenched in the umpteenth boring Toro irrigation plant, I am digging or screwing pipes one to the other, mounting sprinklers etc. I am alone at the endless building site in the remote val d’arda, high up on a hill where a villa is being made. I have no time to enjoy the scenery, the unusual birdsongs, the silence and wisdom of this particular dale. Only I notice how suddenly the sun is not present as it was, the clouds of the second half of August have arrived. Now and then I squint and look up at the dramatic canvas in the making. By the end of the day, the sky is broken into many districts, layers of skies of different intensity, drawings of nothingness and vapors of rare beauty. Some strokes are dark grey, others white against the blue and boringly, all I am able to think, pervaded as I am by a feeling of smallness and wonder is the classic: wow, it is so beautiful it seems fake. And then to laugh at the eternal joke, that if it was fake (a sky of Canaletto as this could be), it is so beautiful it could be real.
What a disappointment, a disillusion: to be in the world and yet not having a grasp on it, only a handful of small tricks and jokes to deal with it day by day. I think I have written these pages already a million times, sign that my feelings are not moving but in circles.

Driving back home, alone in the noisy truck, the sky above the road is of yet another sort, because it is so late. Getting dark, closing up and low, the end of a day’s tale. And melancholic I keep on driving, thinking that skies were all there it was worth remembering today and it is all so difficult to keep together.

La domanda è rosso fuoco e la risposta è blu.
— Paolo Conte

Without any emotion I get the old Fiat truck out of the garden gates, thru the village and across hills and fields, down the slopes, up the slopes, in line at the stop and behind the tractor and on. The truck is hard to drive, noisy when I try to extort its gears, hard to steer. Pedals are too high. The tumble of tools and machines and vegetation remains of a day’s work shifts and rumbles in the dump, I occasionally check on it in the rear view mirror like there was something I could do to prevent a disaster.
The other cars speed off pissed and liberated as they pass us.
My hands let go and grab at the same time. The truck is pulling us away from here tonight.

The sun is about to go down, the clouds are resting on the Apennines, the yellow and warm light comes in somewhere east of the road, then it moves in front and hides again, only for few beats I feel its touch against the dry skin of my face.
Nothing looks like in the big city far away. For one thing, there are hills again and again green in patches, where the corn has been reaped bright and troubled. Striped by the vines. Dark green where are the lines of cypresses. The bales stand scattered and still and like a vision in a courtyard a old watermill is spinning. There is nothing romantic or idyllic about it, everything is equally dying or slipping away as if far from the reach of the hands of those who live it.
Cars are parked out of the occasional bars. Ladies and Men are visible smoking at the tables. What do they talk about in the end? I wish I smoked too to give something to do to my fingers now, take ’em off the wheel. Hooded crows glide down from the hills to the fields. The magpie flies away from the pave. The last cicadas. These know nothing.

I sing in my head trying to remember Tupelo Honey, La busa noeuva, Fuck me pumps (no luck). There is no radio in the truck, but me and the young colleague don’t make conversation this evening, we are tired but it’s not that it’s those stupid disputes about this or that menial bullshit regarding work, when everything pushes against it and we don’t have the right things at hand, or the machines go wrong or I make too many questions and the time passes and we both feel left out and frustrated — and here we are, at the end of this long lost day in the province, and we’ll rest on our bitterness until we part. Tomorrow morning it will all be forgotten.

Lord, this trip is endless. Maybe it is all this silence above the engine of this god forsaken truck. These words in my head. I am amazed. The tiredness seem to be getting out of my spine and my hands and get to the wheel and through the wheel to the road and all the landscape with it, enormously tired and incapable of coming to an end. The world vibrates with our bodies and this truck and we roll, forever.
After every bend there is another piece of road, other trees and gravel pathways along our way, farm houses tractors and old men still working the fields. Only old men. Light stops where are the houses. Huge trucks full of sands coming the other way. Fanatics in full cycling gear hard to pass. White signs with places’ names on it. All the signs of the province. I feel sad because we don’t even comment the two or three pretty girls walking by and fuckable. I feel sad for this day gone, swallowed by the fatigue, I am incredulous because I got out of the house almost thirteen hours ago and I am still here, at the wheel of the truck, trying to bring our ass back home, and I wonder exactly on what I proudly consider myself a free man. Etcetera.