There's something else, therefore, at the origins of pain, which isn't at all the brutal game of an instrument indifferent to life and for each the same. In truth, this instrument is tighten in a well different way for any of us. And we will never know what in reality is physical pain if we ignore what makes the individual, in a system morphologically identical for all.

(RENÉ LERICHE, La Chirurgie de la Douleur - 1938. Quoted today by Guido Ceronetti on lastampa.it)

At first Libi wasn't ready for it-- she had never tried, she had tried once, it was unbearable pain-- This is why now, when I ass-fuck her, I direct her with orders like keep quiet stay still hold it now shut.
Once trying to-- I said something like that, in a brusque way, and her body suddenly relaxed and welcomed me. She became silent-- swallowed-- I smiled and thought: women. My mother would kill me for that smile-- but that's how it went.
I couldn't see her face and I wondered what was going on with the pain-- I pulled her shoulder, her hair but nothing happened. She was resting her cheek against the pillow-- her eyes undetectable in a haze of hair and lashes-- 't was like she was buried in a book-- I am a selfish lover and went on.

Does this instinctive masochism have something to do with not feeling guilty and letting go-- because-- for a second, the body is convinced that there is no way out, no escape from it?
Orders and rough manners, that's for her-- how the pain is suddenly bearable, tidying the room for the arrival of pleasure.
Sometimes I wish I could feel the same when I have sex-- not having a way out. The recurring forwarding of moments of exit from the moment --taking decisions-- can estrange you-- It is more about being an individual than being a male.

So mistreat her, call her names. I know it is like a comment --to the solitude of the bodies that are having sex-- tangled together but isolated-- like nearby teeth in a mysterious mouth.
The mouth is chewing our feelings putting them together-- but the manducating tooth above doesn't know the first thing of the wave of pain or pleasure passing through --the tooth below.

--In picture, above: when she reads, by italyisfalling.com, 2006

Because I am "too hard on myself" -- someone says -- too moaning and self-deprecating probably, today I will start by saying that I am quite happy of the drawing I just did. Well the raised arm is completely wrong and the head too small, but still.

This sort of question-marked statue of liberty fuelled with faces (like the other one), needed a pencil, a large white piece of paper, eraser, camera, a cracked copy of photoshop to "burn" the pencil strokes-- and a couple of hours.
Okay, I don't know or care what it represents. I worked with the headache, awfully tired (20 hours awake today), splay on the floor, eyes sore, following my hand and the two or three tricks it masters and can perform nicely.
No music in the background-- I listen to music rarely 'cause it suck up all my consciousness-- but there was the annoying engine noise from the trucks at work down in the avenue, at full throttle to remind everyone in the city that the city itself is decaying and needs a lot of make up and constantly. It was all below the usual sparrows, below crows and blackbird calls, city birds who are brave enough, impudent, opportunist enough, and all below these European gray clouds, loaded with acid waters, moving about and beautiful. And it was all, I liked my drawing.

my relationship with her, something is happening-- suddenly I find boring what she says and I drop out of conversations without a warning-- suddenly I don't want to touch her or hug her for too long and I'd rather hug someone on the tram-- then i take it back, but then the thought is solid for a moment and I look at it as if it isn't mine--
She says something to me and I look at her for a second too long, because something slips into my mind in between, the thou-- the thought, why are we together? why do I live here? Then I lean my forehead against the cold pane over the low courtyard by the round roofs, astonished to see how I am just letting this love go, when I know love it's so precious and rare, I would find hard to forgive me afterwards, I think, for having let this rare and precious love go, and where-- and her pain and frustration--
It's like if my hands were just to weak to cling at it-- "shitty hands" my father used to call me when stuff dropped from my hands, then he would slap me hard in the face, so I learned-- Christmas ball, breakfast cup, keys, brand new issue of "Topolino" down the manhole, gas lamp at camping, Aguilas Spain, 19** -- but this has nothing to do with the thing--
I push my forehead against the pane and I think at my mug behind the window from the other side-- is it mysterious? I wish--
Behind my back she is still at the table where we ate and nobody has anything left to say, dirty dishes left to take to the sink, efforts to break through the sphinx my soul is becoming day by day-- whatever a soul is, why-- (curtains)

I only imagine these characters who look at me with complicity, much irony, a possibility to get away from it all together. It's all invented. I draw them and they come out when their expression is right, but then again the expression doesn't change, and it all remains dead. I am trapped in my daydreams, an enclosure under the sun or the dark clouds and the sudden showers, my friends are long gone ('cause I ignored their calls), my heart is too wrapped up in itself for love, and just like I was obsessed with pleasing my father in the past, now I am obsessed with displeasing him. But I just want out.

from the hangouts of the day-- everything changes in the way I see her body-- I don't know if it is different from the way I ever seen any-- because I camp in my head-- When I am turned on-- the consistency of her body is important, the way it feels as I grab it-- when, feeling ridiculous, I push her down weighting on her-- or clenching the back of her neck in my hand, from behind, pushing her down to-- when our eyes meet and there's a glimpse of scare that keeps anything ridiculous down with the body-- the only reason left for violence-- if I am feeling warm and I want to be close, it's important how it moves, battlement hollows making way to my body against hers-- if we walk down the streets, it's important that her arm slips under mine-- walking over the pavements gray-- from where the lifted dust reaches for our hairs, our nostrils, the depth of our bodies walking in the last sun-- or anything killing it until it's alive

Because of those more hours in front of the computer I am kind of mislaying my thin sense of reality. So often I feel like my brain is draining out its ability to grasp and to wonder, leaving only this naked sensitivity that makes me dumb. That's where I think I'm feeling something that is inside me, doh, but I can't reach it.
I know my mind is doing so by keeping itself busy moving aside rubbish, and wounds, as they were the same thing.

(if you're new to the thing, there are more sketches around here. They all look alike though)

Music: Louis Armstrong, Because of you. Outside the sky is white in the background and clad in grey blue skeins, the city seems to hide and seek behind the squared pierced walls, quiet before the offer of the night, before every light goes on. My homely frustration grows as the world gets nearer my reach, and I wonder, is there any way out or in. I like the chimneys over that roof, I also think, which are in a cluster and all different and undoubtely a sign of the Life going on at the other end of the pipes.
Libi is patiently waiting for me to agree to watch that movie with her for her dissertation and I just can't come out with anymore excuses. In my pockets, my longing for when I lived in Venice is just getting out of hand, I think.