Invers come ona pidria
-- Milanese saying

(...) Well, damage oneself, all right. But deliberately that's the knack, thus in a perverted way, so that half of ourself remains asleep during the whole process and can later complain about it. You can do it for too much self-involvement, or too much confidence, or hatred for yourself. Self-damaging behavior is for example when we are loved, and we do everything we can to convince the lover that we do not deserve to be loved. Or it is when we deliberately damage our public face, that still gets credit, because we intimately doubts its integrity or merit, or because we hate that public face for being more popular than the unconfessed face we have. And it is a lot more than that.

Nina to Corpodibacco 05:25 pm
Come with me to Ferrara at the end of August. There's a terrific conference about Baroque Music and Science. I have to go anyway because I present a poster. I understand why you are not answering me. I understand everything. But I am sorry not to hear from you.

Corpodibacco to Nina 5:09 am
Nina, I don't give a shit about conferences and posters, go figure.
Anyway, it is not that I'm not calling for resentment or incomprehension. It's just that I'm left without bridges to connect myself to the others. I'm not getting anywhere... let's leave it at that. Libi soon will go to Paris with a girlfriend, but I don't know what I am going to do.

Nina to Corpodibacco 9:32 am
I haven't asked you to come to Ferrara to look at my poster. I don't give a shit about it either, don't you worry. I was asking you to come to be with me, but considering that you keep looking for the abysses and basically you adore this inertia of yours, stay in the deep shit where you are.

The sense of comparing someone to a upside down funnel is that a funnel cannot stand in any other way but upside down. Someone who is like that is someone integrally wrong, wrong by nature, and not seriously meant for this world, like a funnel is not meant to be piled up with the rest of the dishes and pans. Sometimes this happens because of fear, haste, or because of confusion, or because of the transiting planets. Some other time one is just born like that, invers como una pidira, upside down like a funnel. If you put two or three funnels together the results can be funny but certainly unusable. Or painfully ludicrous.

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.