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

– Jago Noja

My father says that I am always sleeping. My father says that I believe in everything. He says that I have too much imagination, and that I believe in everything I fantasize upon.

I think he’s right. I am a victim of my own imaginative talents: I know it might sound cool but in fact it is a tragic weakness.
For one thing, I can’t really rationalize to the point of discerning improbable from probable, because everything is equally probable too me. Be them news from the TV or stories of relatives and friends, I tend to participate with my imagination without any reasonable limit.
I can even feel physical pain –or the most intense emotions– to the simple thought (I’d rather say ‘vision’) of what can happen to someone else, somewhere else, by the simple evocations of the surrounding details.

So it happens that my envy or empathy can turn out to be gigantic, of course: because I feel the relative difference of experience between me and the people involved in the story in the most intense way.
I don’t limit myself to hear a story about someone and consider it as a story: I transform it in my mind in a collection of very solid (and mostly invented) experiences, just like a betrayed lover does thinking at the beloved with someone else: I see dust on the windowsill, sweat, faces, I hear voices and smell smells, rub a stain on the glass, and all the secondary stuff which is usually omitted from a story when we hear one (Saddam Hussein’s double defecating on the WC in the cell, reading a book of poems while from the outside come fainted voices of the city; the dust and flies and weird bird songs on the streets of the village where my stepbrother kills a cow with an axe; small incidents and gross jokes at the conspiracy reunions for the latest terrorist scam, things like that).

Sometimes I can go on for hours or days consumed by visions like this, especially if I somehow feel robbed or cheated by them. Although I sometimes argue the basic credibility of many things created by my imagination, they remain too real to be fought with simple rationalization. My father, who is a crazy and dangerous person persuaded to be rational, warns me: I am being irrational, I am morbid about the stories I hear because I need or want to prove similar experiences myself. We talk about this because he cannot talk of anything else regarding myself, the sum of it being too negative to be told.
My excited imagination, he implies, becomes so excited because my experience isn’t excited at all. I think that that’s what my father is trying to tell me. Because I have organized my immoral life trying to have more and more time to think and imagine, it is fatal to become cretin for too much brain activity. He’s probably right.

And he doesn’t know that with all these ill talents in your pocket you notice a lot of things that usually go unnoticed, including beauty and drama where few see it. I don’t know how to be without that (the preceding phrase is not ungrammatical).

— in picture, above: snoopy’s imagination (1951, I think)

So corriere.it says that Saddam Hussein was hanged at dawn in the green zone of Baghdad. Well I don’t really care for his personal destiny, besides I am persuaded that this was his doppelganger, with his beard-hazed face and those crooked teeth and the wide opened eyes.
Anyway if they want to send to death criminals they should at least show it to the people in the open. Why being merciless without shame, and yet being ashamed of showing what this actually means? (fear to die, cries, rhetoric of the authority, dangling jerked body, the snap of the neck breaking, hangman’s hood, etc.)

Corriere.it should say how I can always be shocked by reading the usual things about the falling country instead: like those who die waiting for some ER to open for them. This item reminds me of an eleven months old boy I know (already mentioned on this blog a while ago), who fell from the stairs and smashed his head against the (luckily wooden) floor five meters below– just two weeks ago. Few minutes after the accident he was hoisted on an ambulance which then waited 45 fucking-minutes in front of the house calling every hospital in the city for a neurosurgery with some vacant space slash time for him (luckily the little boy is recuperating now.)

And corriere.it should say how much I am disgusted to read about Somalia again, of course.
The hypocrisy and lies bubbling all over the phrases of the journalists.
The “cheering crowds”. The others who already miss the “Islamic courts” and throw stones to the peaceful military convoys.
A Somali supposed-president escorted by Ethiopian soldiers! It would be like calling the Israeli army to protect Egypt. Only the U.S. could think of such a perversion. To Support the “lords of war” that everybody fears and detest (tribal leaders only respected by their closest circles), and to call in the old enemy to help: millions of people who have been starving and fighting and escaping for fifteen years are offered this as the only way out.
I wonder, is there a real choice, for the starving and traumatized and forever wounded, between the endless war (American way) and the ordered arrogance of the Islamic rule?
But the thing is, the Islamic rule proved to be able to bring peace and law –if only because not based on corruption like any other fighting part– to a people who forgot even the meaning of those words. Corriere.it doesn’t even try to understand why.

Railway station of L.
I board the “intercity” train to Milan, exceptionally leaving on time.
I find my seat after the hassle of having to mind for the seat number, which wasn’t necessarily until a while ago.
The train leaves quickly and I don’t even have the time to watch the platform glide out the way.

In a little while, though, I am reminded by the harassing canned female phony voice of the loudest intercom that the train will indeed “arrive in a few minutes to the station of L.”

So what? I live in a country where even when a train isn’t late– it is assumed to be late anyway.

My father’s house in L. is filled with all the paintings he did since when he retired from work. The house has three floors and a little garden and it faces a steep terraced cliff that goes down to an invisible river which flows silently in winter and noisily in autumn. If you lean out of the balcony you see the blue sea down to the right and the mount before the Five Lands. On the other side of the small valley there’s another village fortified on the crown of the hill which looks down to the house. Although the village is the single most visible thing from any window of my father’s house, my father recurrently portrays it in his paintings copying it from a photo.

My father and his wife always complain about the cost of life, remarking the bad habits of the middle-class and the non-authentic lifestyle of the Italian bourgeois. They don’t have a mirror in the house where they are visible to themselves for what they are in reality. They live in an imaginary world, always on the side of the oppressed and where they don’t oppress anyone. For them life is all about revenge and compensations. Never about trying to make peace with things (that would be reactionary).

If it makes him feel better with himself, my father has no problem to demolish anything or everything he can reach for, either by ridiculing or criticizing without stopping short for his son or wife or daughter or whatever. He always saves himself. He always did. Half bald since when he was 25, my father is the kind of guy who can show scorn for your too long hair without feeling ridicule at all. He feels better, instead, because when he was young his hair where ‘thicker’.

My father’s aggressiveness is always boiling inside him even when it is not noticeable. In the past it was always noticeable, actually, but because we see each other just three days or less at a time, he must believe he has to behave somehow and so he masks it behind silence and occasional exhaling. If I listen to my sister, I am supposed to be thankful for this effort (I am).
But it’s there, just like in the old-times, ready to explode as soon as you contradict him more than once. When it happens, in a second his voice comes out sudden and violent, for the smallest thing, and his look turns suddenly crazy and ready for violence. You back out. He has to prevail anyway. Afterwards he makes fun of your wrongness.

His lack of sensitivity depresses me. I know it is not incapacity (he has a great musical sensitivity for example) as much as it is the result of a choice: having decided many years ago that real men don’t indulge in sensitiveness and sentimentality, he gradually atrophied them slowing down his empathy responses to almost total immobility. When I came to life he was 37 and already totally affected by this process beyond a point of no-return.

My father’s position in life is that he is a victim. Every little thing he does is followed by a moaning of pain and fatigue. His stance with family relationships has always been that nobody loved him enough, period. The largest painting he ever did represent himself in foreground, naked and screaming in pain, while on the background other people, who look a little like his family (his wife, his sons: without being exactly them, all naked) try to pull him away with cruel or dull expression on their faces.
I remember the first time I saw that picture. My father was trying to convince my sister to make her bed on the coach facing the picture.
“Why, what’s the problem with facing this way?” he was asking. My sister, who suffered her entire life of nightmares and night fears, was shaking her head firmly, moving the pillow on the other side. My father insistence wasn’t wicked, it was only the conflicting desire of not being judged too harshly by his daughter, and still be pitied by her.

I knew then I wanted to tread on that picture and tear it apart and for the first time in my life do something directly against him.
One wants a lot of things he doesn’t really wants.

(Every single repetitive lament uttered on this blog against my father is mostly here to adjure away the capital gut-wrenching fear, and that would be to wake up one day and discover that for some crazy rule of hereditariness I am becoming like him.)

When the soul of a man is born in this country, there are nets flung at it to hold it back from flight. You talk to me of nationality, language, religion. I shall try to fly by those nets
— James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Since when it started I should have posted this famous quote above as the very blurb of this blog. It certainly speaks about something that could be said of every time and every place, but it fits like a glove to the falling country (and how I see my position into it). At least talking about how coming from a certain place and culture can be a senseless burden carried on your back, instead than a part of your body you can use.

I think that what disturbed me about this quote (other than it referring to the ‘man’ forgetting the ‘woman’, which is a too common fault even to be mentioned) was that it didn’t include the ‘family’ among the nests flung at the soul. (Obviously ‘family’ in Italy is any sort of ‘mafia’ you belong to, but as my reader knows I don’t need to think to mafia to imagine family as a trap.)
However, it’s the wrong way to look at the metaphor. Family is the first and foremost net-flinger, not a net itself (because family is not a ‘value’ as the imbeciles like to believe).
Inevitable family members will be the first ones to use a net to restrain a soul from flying or to send it to fly in a direction and not another.
Why? — More or less for the same reason why dogs smell each other’s ass: because they can.

Individual freedom, when not entirely crippled by a repressive society, largely depends on the effectiveness of family’s nets, or on their health. Meaning that they better be ineffective, obviously. This post was a shred of thought about that, and this is the end of it. Oh and in picture above is a detail from Robert Betchle’s painting ’61 pontiac, 1968.

One of the consequences of spending three days with my family: the need to come back and write down my will –as soon as possible.
A sort of will, I mean. Not that I have any property or valuables to bequeath.
For one thing, staying next to my father for too long makes me feel in danger. The rate of anguish and desperation raises enormously in my stomach. I start speaking by myself as soon as he’s not around only to lift a cloud of protection behind which my mind must hide. The feeling that the end is near and that there is no hope becomes palpable.
Also*, the feeling of being despised or ridiculed, or not accepted, the feeling of being looked at without being really seen at all, of being negatively compared to someone else’s story, or character, or hair, gives me the urge to put myself in safety, on the other side of an impassable Canyon possibly. A place from where either die, disappear or give the immense finger.

On the train coming back from L. I think that I don’t know what I should write at all, in my will. The only thing I know is that it shall begin with something like: nothing of what I have used and left, particularly things I have written or drawings I have made, books I have read and kept, or pictures, must fall in the hands of any member of my family. If there isn’t anyone (I mean anyone else) who can put her or his hands on my stuff, the next preferable option is total destruction.

* details later

But the trouble is that conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on and on being ‘decadent’, since decadence means falling and one can only be said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon. Sooner or later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude towards life and society. It would be putting too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the Communist party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines.

— George Orwell, T.S. Eliot, 1942

The other day I gave a look at the insides of my mind and called. “Why nobody down there can write poetry anymore?”
I yelled. No answer.
But I know why, I shouldn’t even ask. Poetry needs fresh feelings and i’m not good at those lately. Even the bleakest poetry needs the outgoing attitude of    wanting to sing the world,    not my very philosophical attitude of: renouncing-to-say-anything    because-nothing-really-matters and all that.
Not a line of good poetry has ever been written with such an attitude. That’s why time and poetry so often go in different directions, because every year our of adolescence there’s a higher chance to turn into a turd which sticks to the sidewalk even if you kick at it.
(…)   I believe that poetry is essentially based on what is felt the first time something is done, or looked at in a certain way, whatever that is. The ability to withhold and recall that fresh feeling entirely lies in some sort of faith one must have in the world– that the images of it contain it all –and most of the times I’m too worried and into paranoia to achieve that.
It’s a waste, I say, and    I’m even the only one to say it (about me), which could also be a good sign (or not, whatever).

At the flea market I always end up poking among old photos and postcards. Not that I usually buy anything. I just pass by and occasionally stop and look at the old portraits, and wonder: is that the same humanity I am part of?
All the faces and bodies in the pictures seem so different. What was phony back then, and what was sincere, and what was a caricature. Everything seem to be made of another material. Some of the ladies look like my grandma looked like, a little. But she was real. They seem to be invented by someone else. Some of the men seem to have bodies out of proportion, probably due to the unusual fashion.

Few days ago I was at the flea market of Bollate (Milano), located just next certain horrific “modern” projects that plague that lousy part of the town. There, just like in any other italian flea market actually, the pictures of the times of fascism were the majority. And not only pictures: statues, posters, memorabilia.
Mussolini and his acolytes were everywhere, in pictures and on any little thing from those times. Buttons, pins, boxes, the usual. And there were also other pictures, where no “fascist authority” was present but, in small details like a black handkerchief in a pocket, or a military hat, or a certain advertising in the background, or a certain way of the men to pose in front of the camera, everything still spoke about the times of fascism in Italy.

The times of fascism. That was when my miserable falling country manifested the will to make of its typical cowardice and its worse defects an implacable force. It happened that once and we are still thinking about it.
What was that force? it was a gigantic, inevitable, shameless, black Mafia that pervaded the country and screamed itself from the balconies and the bullhorns instead of hiding in the villas or at the outskirts of town. It sung songs, and wrote poems on itself, and celebrated its new order as if people had expected it for long, when in fact nobody had expected it. Like any other mafia, it brought injustice disguised by justice, and ferocious illegality by peace and order, lies by adamant truths. It got rid of all the other mafias because there ought to be only One-National-Mafia.
Then it faded away, leaving behind    the bare bones of a raided country,    starving, deadly wounded and corrupted forever and covered with shame.

And evidently it also left behind a stubborn army of nostalgic individuals that went on sharing the shreds of that propaganda for decades, passing on the mania to sons and nephews, until today.
Such were the memorabilia at the flea market: in the end, a nauseating collection of phony poses, of silly objects, of unintelligible dialogs of mysterious faces ornamented with propaganda chasing you away from the stalls, able to extend their rule over the past memories for absence of concurrence.

— in picture, above: one of the few glorious almost-non-fascist pictures found at the flea market. Unless the little boy’s hat is in fact the very fascist military d’annunziano alpine hat of his father.

Things suck here, but the future is the future for a reason.
The laptop that I was using growing so
mysteriously sludgy that I can’t use it
though my car is relatively on its wheels again, which is something
it’s quite possible I’ll miss a question or something
Remember that you need to get your porn

Yury went to school. I wrote some and did the blog.
no real news on the visa problem.

LA has become a difficult place, but I would never
wear a serial killer t-shirt–

I’m hunting and pecking, the heating in my apartment is broken
so I’m dressed for the Arctic
and huddled
next to a very inadequate space heater.
But whatever. Once a year and all that.

There’s a screening ere long, and I’m going.

* _{dennis c.’s p.s. words can be read on his blog}

Doctor C., dentist M.D., becomes irresistible when he has to vaselinize the customer slash patient who is paying him at the end of the sessions. Together with the other doctor and the help, he prevents the customer slash patient to go out without feeling loved, and smiled at, as if he or she suddenly was the only person in the world with whom the doctor could really crack a joke or talk at all. Not a single moment the customer slash etc. is allowed to stop and consider of how much Doctor C., dentist M.D. is relieving him or her, and that his reasons to refute checks have a lot to do with him cheating the government more than his jokes about standing in line at the bank reveal. The customer etc. has no time at all, because he or she is submerged with sympathy, loud voices and warm goodbyes and best regards and yet another joke and has only to walk out on a small cloud inflated under the shoes.

This simple example can illustrate why commerce generally thrives in our kind of society and our age, where most of the people feel lonely, and usually not loved, and not accepted enough.