Coming back I wanted to try to write again and I began to isolate phrases, strategically placing dots. I understood that the dots were crucial in the process but I didn't know why. What is their exact meaning? I had the feeling that the sentences were actually being written because I had searched for that state of deliberate consolidation. So this was how it worked after all. Afterward I was sure of their coming to be. The written phrases.
The thing is I don't know where exactly they ended. In what form. In what time layer?
-- preview from one of pun's next posts

I started a new project. I have been thinking about this for a while... I have been wanting to do this since when more that a year ago I wrote a very brief series of vaguely sci-fi posts on this blog. That series died as soon as it had started. I hope this project will go a bit further, and that it will not interfere with anything else, this blog included.

There isn't much on it right now. It is called Pun.

Reading the wondrous Adventures of Augie March -- on which I have one or two reserves that I'll maybe put together later on -- I run into Bellow's definition of present day's police strip searches humiliations and ritual abuses. Of course back then it was only for supposed criminals, and now it's for everyone's hard luck (in the sense that you don't even have to be labeled as a criminal to be humiliated):

We had to empty our pockets; they were after knives and matches and such objects of harm. But for me that wasn't what it was for, but to have the bigger existence taking charge of your small things, and making you learn forfeits as a sign that you aren't any more your own man, in the street, with the contents of your pocket your own business: that was the purpose of it.
-- p. 174

on the other hand, right in the beginning of depression, when Augie had his adventures a lot of well meaning fellows bummed around and were given the label of "criminal" free of charge. Definitions can move just a little and involve so many--

Q. what else can i say? well, an advice for free: you could avoid people commenting, so you won't know how your readers are alike and you won't be disappointed by them.

A. Why, mr. Girogio, I get two comments a month when I'm lucky, what difference would it make? Plus, I do want to know people's feelings about what I write. To me, this is one of the few good reasons left for blogging... If anything, I am tired of my unknowns to be so silent. But I don't want to really change anything, or to really complain about anything. I write so little, with such difficulty. And I'd rather stop writing in public than close the comments down. To quote that supposed anonymous blogger (which isn't anonymous, really) in the previous post was just a way to lash a feeling out, that's all.
I don't know if this happens to the others too, if it happens to you. I think it is the impressions you accumulate with time. I think that I will never know how my readers are like -- but I keep growing involuntary feelings about them, how they are and how they are not, layers of impressions, probably false, that can worn out the relation with this theoretical readership, and with the general idea of writing "for the readers". Especially when writing terrifies you because it became so darn serious and personal and exposing. Which is the reason for the other quote... I think. It probably was there for those who were supposed to understand it. Although I am not so sure anymore [goes on mumbling incoherently]

"... ma io dico rubare quando il furto è fatto per mancanza d'immaginazione, di 'genio' come si dice a Napoli. A coloro che rubano idee dagli altri quando sono a corto delle proprie, a coloro che rubano frasi e stili e parole e trovate quando la loro immaginazione è smagrita o insecchita dal troppo sole, bisogna anzitutto far sapere che abbiamo visto, sentito, annusato. Li abbiamo visti, spezzare sbadatamente i rami nel frutteto e lasciare cartacce in giro. Bisogna mostrare loro che stanno sbagliando o sprecando tempo. Che scrivere è una strada difficile verso la verità, la verità dell'esperienza individuale beninteso. Bisogna che essi sappiano che parole e stili non sono che risultati o espedienti, i quali lasciati soli sono come innesti senza gemma. Puzzano di originalità, che è il più fasullo dei frutti. L'originalità, altrimenti indispensabile, non è necessaria se si toccano esperienze autentiche... e voglio dire, di certo non intellettuali (...)"
-- Scipione Corsaro, Il mio albero

"I'm not closing this blog but I wish I had entirely different readers. I'm tired of these unknowns. I want new ones."
-- Anonymous blogger

You think you can leave the matter to your lips
and they don't work right

-- Emanuel Carnevali

This morning it seemed so important to write down the dream, but at night its importance dissolved and plays now remote like some music fading out (in my head is Leo Reisman). So many hours later it is almost as not interesting as someone else's dream. So it happens with dreams, rapidly marvel is substituted by vague unfamiliarity and the effort to rebuild hazy details ruins it all.
Once again I toy with the idea of writing more about my so called roots or about some old classmate or relative I don't see anymore -- because I can't stare directly at my life right now, and honest I tried to put down few posts about it but my interest on the matter so soon dries out, and what I thought was fun to write about suddenly does not even faze me anymore. With memories of the past sometimes it is like with the dream I made this morning as seen from tonight, all smudged out like a faint stain.
I visualize a two lines image of my father, where if my father gets in touch too much with the world, you know, socializing or looking out for the others, they shot him with a tranquillizer an take him to the zoo. Like one of those bears they find roaming around in Bavaria.
I think I took too much from him but my heart is much bigger, and luckily less neat.
I don't really care when Nina tells me that she still loves that man (no, not my father, I changed subject don't you see). Yet driving in the night to vague destinations, possibly Vigevano, I feel disturbed and intrigued by hearing once again the story. Unchanged after so many years. Disturbed, I don't know why. Maybe because someone else's unfulfilled loves remind me my own, and everybodies'.
ANd I care when Libi tells me she loves me so, but we can't help each other just as well. I will think these things better later in the night, not usefully.
Not during the days, which are beautiful, warm and dry, good in the shades. The Nights, windows open on the courtyards, voices from the televisions and the dinners and the dinners in front of the televisions. The stunning full moon not right above my head. I called about the job at the University in Sardegna but it was too late already two weeks ago. Later talking on the phone with Bruma I convened, I had hoped to be helped to find a direction but it's on by myself now. I also asked in vain, I mean with the wrong code words, what was the grown-up choice to make, but nobody seems to get that I seriously don't know.
I dreamed it was me, a young Allen Ginsberg and Giampiero Epidermico. Giampiero Epidermico is not his real name. He was a junior high classmate of mine who since then has become a Very Young Internationally Renowned Contemporary Art Critic. A cousin of mine, the one who can see in the dark, is a Contemporary Art Critic too, senior editor of a Important Magazine abroad, and at one moment of their lives, years ago, the two of them were running errands together in a famous Art Magazine in Italy. And they hated each other very much. Which surprised me when I found out. But then I saw Epidermico and I realized. He was constantly in a good mood and that was about it.
I was living in Venice back then and they came for the Biennale on different trains and visited differed pavilions but for me and my Russian friend the Biennale was good only for a good laugh and a good depression, the present only existed as a distortion of the much greater and very humid past we were living into.
I was stupidly radical about it back then. I'm not saying I was understanding. Once I said to my cousin that I thought Contemporary Art should not be called Art, you know, not to confuse it with the real thing which although it is dying, destroyed by restorations and abysmal ignorance, it is still somewhat alive, and we can at least pretend we know why it was supposed to be so great. Not that in fifteen exams of Arts I took at the university I ever met anyone capable of telling me why and how a Bellini is so great compared to a minor. No, it was all crappy theory there, all methodology (but then I learned, outside of school, and now I could tell the difference why and where.) But my cousin looked at me as if I was completely out of the world. He was probably right to look at me like that. It's not Art I said is satire! we should call it Visual Satire or something I said. He kept looking at me like that. What he said? He said Art is what it is happening now.
In my dream Allen Ginsberg and Giampiero Epidermico they went on putting green toothpaste in their pants to melt their dicks onto their balls sort of JT style and I was by myself in the dream until Allen Ginsberg came to me and told me I was cool because or even if I wasn't putting the toothpaste on my balls. The post ends here.

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song.

-- Pablo Neruda

The nervousness would pass with another jump in the sea probably. Any kind of sea, better a ocean. With a sleep in a new bed, a stranger bed. With a walk, finally, in the woods. With a argument with friends at a windy window of a bar. If I had friends. Reading a story from a book feeling that the story is really about myself (haven't had that sensation in years). The obscenity of this diary in public is that there is no solution to what happens, no perspective. It is a shame and a betrayal to the right reasons one should write for (put some distance between you and the events. Despite the mexican loves, I am no Jack Kerouac and I'm glad I ain't. Creativity is not a filtery flux but an alternative)
Martina had wrote "por que te amo tanto y podria amarte mas. eres tan diferente, eres la persona indicada para mi. recuerdas que en la playa me preguntaste; ¿cómo seria la persona a la que yo podría amar? y seria muy parecida a ti." I read and I thought, how is it that I am? How can I be loved? I guess it's a normal reaction. And it was for just a instant. Then I sucked it up, thirsty and excited and lonesome -- and let love grow insanely, foolishly (now look what you have done!) It was even sweeter and stronger when the words were said face to face, mouth to ear. I don't wish to take anything back, or to push it on. I just wish it made anything else smaller (it didn't). I wish that the distance I feel with my parents, or better the unfriendliness, so ungrateful, would fade. Healed like a small cut. I wish for a late afternoon, idling on a wooden bench, touching the guitar and feeling placated because I did my bit, my duty, what I had to do. But what is it that I have to do? What is my bit? I think that not even once in the last ten years I felt that I did my bit. This is comic. Comic... after the argument, the night we slept in different beds, in Mexico city. I wrote her: "es la una de noche, yo he regresado recién en el hostal dormiente y silencioso. he ido caminando para el centro, un poco llovía con much ruido y un poco no, las calles estaban casi vacíe-- y volviendo soy pasado abajo de tu departamento-- y pasando pensaba todas las cosas del mundo, pensaba que en la cama tu pensabas a mi, esperándome-- y pensaba que en aquel preciso momento tu estaba haciendo l'amor con alguien -- y que yo sariá estado aliviado de descubrirlo-- con una escena un poquito cómica (...)" but then I stopped thinking at all the things. Now I try not to think. I close my hands and the hands are empty, only a little dark green dirtiness beneath my fingernails remains, and I cannot think because I am not holding something in my hands. If only I could start thinking again, and walking across open doors, the last open doors before the doors to be opened. Whatever that means. To a reader I own this explanation (this custom declaration): that still in the world for me there are things of beauty, things to revere; that in between the swearing, the nervousness and the whining stays on the unceasing need to contemplate, and describe (describing being the way to give) and move into the world and be a friend of the world; that if I fail, and stumble, it is not for a moment that I seriously cease to believe that "we are worthed as much as anyone who came before us, and each one of us is destined to conquer the world. That we are close to the origins more than ever." Amen.

-- In picture, above: Volcano Poas, Costarica. Not visible in figure the smell of sulfur that the old man from Colombia described as "the thing Chavez smelled"

So I fantasize that I receive the emails I am waiting for, open them, give a look at them, very fast, jumping from one line to the other (certain words appearing as in bold, or as slightly larger than the other words). Then I put the emails away -- without actually reading them from start to end, instead going to bed, finally sleeping knowing that waking up the next day won't be a disappointment or a torment. I think we have these dreams (with the classic open eyes) because we dream to do good to ourselves-- And I remember all the times I did that, even as a kid: with letters my mother wrote, or my father, my brother. Letters girlfriends wrote, that went in the drawer without being read until later. But inexactly now it feels like I never waited for those.

-- In picture, above: magic episodes of traveling, from the museum of anthropology, Ciudad de Mexico.