"What he had written that day was irrelevant and meaningless; he should have never written it, for to write was criminal; to produce a work of art, a book, was presumption, more damnable than any other sin."
-- Peter Handke

You may think this blog is sleeping dead. Instead I have written five posts the past week, all unpublishable (disorienting). Two in italian -- and they were the less hazy, to tell you how bad the situation is. Really, it went together with my efforts to write emails, in spanish, that I never finished or sent (then I sent one, but it got no answer).
The following page about a pencil is the best I could come up with since when I came back and tried to tell my story here on the blog. It has nothing to do with the story. I was writing on a notebook with a pencil, I only use pencils to write. It was one of the pencils I bought the past year in Prague (supposedly good graphite, lead pencils is one of the things Czechoslovakia was famous for): this one actually too light to write with, but of good paste (no crumbling like a infamous french pencil) and hard to break (good for traveling). I held it in my hand (the pencil had gone and came back with me from central america), and looked at the side with writings on it, only partly removed by the sharpening. I tried to make sense of the writings, black on green as they were. There was a 13 figures long code number, then a bar code, then the famous name of the brand, then another five figures code number at the rear end.
Che cazzo, I always loved pencils, even before Handke's "History of the pencil" (Die Geschichte des Bleistifts), obviously because what you write can be easily deleted (even though I never do that, and behave with a pencil like with a pen, scribbling all over the wrong word and writing the new one next to the scrawl) and because of the old joke or myth of the russian astronauts versus the american ones -- when I think about it, holding a pencil still gives me the feeling of holding a irreplaceable technological achievement (so much more irreplaceable of the iPhone, for example), because there is no possible better way to write on paper in any position of the hand. You can't make it better or more economical. Not to mention the smell of wood when you sharp it. Better: the pause in writing or drawing you are forced to take when you have to sharp it.
But then I was holding one and trying to make sense of the writings on it and because they made no sense at all (they were not meant to be read by me, but by a machine) I felt that holding a bar coded pencil was like holding another piece of human stupidity (I don't want to write 'contemporary stupidity' anymore). Except for the brand (the pencil bore no indications of its toughness) the codes undoubtedly were signs of digital classification, a bloated one, and digital classification could only remind me of human stupidity.
Why? It's obvious and depressing to be told, but I'll explain it. Our times are times of a special form of stupidity that considers information, classification and memory (absolute memory) as forms of knowledge. This is a mistake that only kids who went to the wrong schools could make (the schools where nothing is learned by heart anymore.) Not forms of knowledge: classification and memory are tools that should follow and serve knowledge. When they lead, like species without predators they multiply and invade and take over the making of knowledge and experience, everywhere, at all costs. Because humans are stupid, or weak, or vulnerable (pick your word) we let the machine classify every aspect of our life, and our safes (digital, or chemical) to preserve every bit of memory: we assume we are being given cheap forms of knowledge in exchange. That's why a bar coded pencil easily reminds me of this special present moment of global stupidity, sort of matrix-like war between man and machine, only machine have won already and left their mark on every surrendered bit of reality and we don't really notice it anymore. Anyway that's not true 'cause I noticed it today writing with a pencil and this post was about that. I am about to hit the 'publish' button so help me god, because I didn't want to write about this. I wanted to write about that other form of human stupidity (or weakness, or vulnerability, pick your word), called love. But that's how it goes, next time maybe, ice be broken.