And yet were there still more pictures?
Yesterday, March 30, 1988, in the La coruña wineshop in Galicia, Spain, the children sitting between the casks at the back of the room kept looking at the television while conscientiously doing their homework. Or the day before yesterday, in Vigo, on the Atlantic Ocean, there was a kind of marriage of river and ocean waves: one did not incorporate the other, but rather, there in the estuary, incredibly gently with a light snapping sound, one was dissolved into and extinguished by the other. The river's murmur met the tide's rush and, with a stronger murmur, the river and ocean waves crept first to the edge of the river's mouth and then, with the ebb and flow, stole into the land's interior (...)

-- Peter Handke

So, Peter Handke wrote the above twenty years ago today. It is the beginning of a three-pages long micro-epic later collected in the splendid little treasure Once Again for Thucydides. This epic is entitled "Last Pictures?", and I think it could fare as the germinal manifestation of Handke's 2002's masterpiece novel Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, also set in Spain, whose original title is "Bildverlust": I think "Longing for the Picture".

Well, nothing, only it is funny I bumped into this today, having found Once Again for Thucydides laying around in the house and having browsed it while putting it back on the shelf.
In case you were wondering, the book has nothing to do with Thucydides except that Thucydides stays as a early model of the art of telling a story of something experienced first hand, and not heard of-- nor completely invented.
And what about the last, longed for pictures? It's about the same thing, I think, because nothing is harder to recover and easier to lose than a portrait of what we see, what we experience. The greatest loss in everyday's life, is the day itself, our ability to describe it and save it: not what we made of that day, with our careers and loves and cries and tasks and ideas, but what unrelatedly made that day around us, the little slice visible to us and put together by the accident of us being there then, I mean here now. End of the post.

Biba goes across a corner of lawn following something. It's the noise of the dry leaves below the frayed wall, and the blur of white flowers against the green lawn. We chat as we follow her, me and Gisa, until Biba turns around to check on our presence, smiles and goes a bit further. Gisa wants to steer her away from things dirty and rotten, but Biba knows better. There are things she sees in the way little stones are trapped by the brown dirt, and the way flowers crumble between her fingers when she pulls them hard from the ground. There's a mystery in the way green musk layering the bark of the trees pulverizes under her thumb, and the dogs behind the fence are thrilling as they come closer to smell and lick her fingers and she backs away, excited. They are very big and strangely attractive and incontrollable.
There are gray hard stairs in a corner of the garden, that Biba wants to climb up and down over and over again, it might be for the satisfaction of doing it or for the way the landscape changes as she moves. She doesn't really know. They're very high steps for her, she's is so small, it's an adventure. Gisa wants to hold her hand but she doesn't. So she stumbles and hits her forehead against the base of the railing but just like her father, she almost never feels physical pain. The bump doesn't bother her. Cries a little for the shock, gets back on her feet and up and down the stairs again. We follow. Talking out our fears and hopes and the distance in the sunny milanese spring day.

note: I wrote this post when I came back from visiting my father on Xmas. However I am publishing it now--

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 about.

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 or jealousy (all lousy kinds of feelings) can turn out gigantic: because I feel the relative difference of experience between me and the people involved in the story in the most intense way.
Usually I cannot really 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-- I rub a stain away from the glass, and close the window left open-- all the secondary stuff which is usually omitted from a story when we hear one (Saddam Hussein's double before the hanging 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; Leni masturbating thinking about some guy; 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. Also he doesn't know that with all these ill talents in my pockets I notice a lot of things that usually go unnoticed, all petty stuff that distracts me and possibly --who knows? including beauty and drama.
However I don't know how to be without that (the preceding phrase should not be ungrammatical).

-- in picture, above: snoopy's imagination (1951, I think)