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.

How incredible the other day, talking to the girls at the bakery shop, as the radio reported of a philippine woman living in Italy, just outside our city, who slaughtered her entire family later trying to kill herself. The girls were joking about it like people do with events that are so remote and inconceivable that one cannot identify with it.
"She killed her husband with a knife!" said one.
"And her sons!" said the other. They were using the usual half phony sympathy tone of the milanese trades, hypocrite imitation of badly evoked old times.
It was so funny to them, because a woman had done it, and women are supposed to be defenseless or powerless compared to men. It was also funny because she was not italian, and thus such kind of disgrace had nothing to do with us, and could be treated more easily, like the thought of a inundation in India or a earthquake in Guatemala.
I couldn't joke with them as a customer is expected to do. All I could come up with was a sort of depressed smile I was sorry for.
But c'mon. It's years that a week doesn't go by in my country without news of some husband killing his wife. Some father murdering his daughter or son. Some lover, some brother, killing a sister, a ex pregnant girlfriend, etc. Every week. Certain weeks many times. But the girls were bantering as if news of this sort were unheard of around here. "It took a chinese woman to do it!" It was yet another big illusion sold cheap to us by Immigration. Helping us to picture our country as if it was a completely different, innocent little thing. Well, at least for a minute or two of fake conversation.
"Aren't italian men usually killing italian women?" I asked in the end, as the girl handed me a paper bag with in it the bread I had just payed for. "With guns, no?" I pursued. But the girls fell silent and incredulous. Could it be I was the only one who was noticing all the killing of women in the italian newspapers? I had had that same feeling before. It seemed like if these were events that no one wanted to really consider. Consumed rapidly, even if they kept turning up again and again, they didn't mean anything compared to other events, much more abstract and conceptual, distant and showy, that were discussed forever.
But I had disrupted the pleasant atmosphere. Especially when I ended: "If there's a gun in a house, you can be almost sure it will end up being used by a man to kill a woman! Isn't it funny?"
"I'll never give my husband a gun then", the girl proposed after a short while (I was already halfway the glass door), bursting in a fake laugh which strangely moved me.
I remember that all I could think of in that moment was "What I can't believe is that someone married you." I am always amazed when I am informed that people are married. I don't expect them to be. But I didn't said that. I only gave the usual curt salute of the non customary customer and left, to the apparent relief of the street where actually nobody was laughing.

platelet , noun | Physiology : a small colourless disc-shaped cell fragment without a nucleus, found in large numbers in blood and involved in clotting. (Oxford Dictionary)

Because of a nasty genetic disease affecting her blood, my sister produces too many platelets and the platelets cause her blood to thicken too much, this in the long run obviously leads to thrombosis, thus higher chance of stroke, ischemia, arteriosclerosis etcetera. She is 35 and they say the worse is not supposed to happen anytime soon, especially if she responds well to the containment drugs. Although right now her body doesn't seem to tolerate very well the mini aspirin, which is the standard treatment in these cases.

I went at the polyclinic today to make a HLA typing test in the not desirable case my sister should go for a bone marrow transplant in the next future. HLA stays for Human Leukocitye Antigenes, aka the major indicator of genetic compatibility between individuals.
My sister is being cured in Rome, and since the HLA test is very expensive the hospital here in Milan had to wait for some papers from Rome to arrive to authorize the test, and although it's not urgent, getting to the hospital I feel better that the papers arrived before I left for the U.S.

Later I am in the room where they take your blood for analysis. The doctor attends my arm phial after phial outlining for me the purpose and utility of the HLA typing test. She says that in case of bone marrow transplant the test must give 90% of compatibility, which is pretty hard to get. "There's only so little probability for siblings to be that compatible, actually only 25% chance to get there, and almost zero chance for any two random individuals", she says.
And the thing is risky too, I mumble.
"It is risky for the recipient", she says, "whose blood cells have to be 'destroyed' before the operation".
She makes a quick gesture outward with her hands turned down, flickering her fingers to picture the event of destruction. She doesn't go into the details of such a destruction, or the risks involved with it. She's so adapted to underplay the little annoyances of being a donor to persuade people to donate that she seems to be forgetting for a second there that she's talking about my sister's blood cells to possibly be "destroyed".
But I am afraid to ask more. She has sweet oblique eyes, dark hair and large cheek bones like certain italians have, a motherly suffering air about her that makes her immediately sympathetic. She doesn't want me to think at the details now, it's too early, and she's right I guess.
There is also a risk for the donor, right? I say then, feeling a bit coward and provocateur as I say it, and she replies, quick: absolutely not, no! Persuasive.
Behind us another doctor is going about the papers, curly blond hair and a larger body, also very gentle wider eyes. I feel weird and self-conscious as I sit there saying the names of my parents out loud for the family tree form she's filling in. I wonder for a second when it was the last time I pronounced those names.
Finally they hand me all the leaflets about being a donor, and about the bone marrow transplant, give me my documents back and off I go, rolling down the sleeve.

Strangely enough, be it for logistical considerations, or possibly for reasons of persuasion, to get in and out of the room where they take your blood for analysis one has to pass across the hall where the regular blood donors lay down and give blood. So as I walk by, at least a dozen are laying down calmly looking up at the ceiling or sideways eying the doctors, nurses, patients and special occasional potential donors like me passing by for the analysis. A very pretty girl, all dressed in black, is laying down on one of the stretchers listening to her earpieces. For a second there I have the disturbing feeling she's not even donating, she's just laying there listening to music.

Outside is still another warm day. I go across the area of the polyclinic to via commenda to finally get me something to eat. A little later I am sitting in a bar eating focaccia and reading the leaflets about bone marrow transplant.
To my disappointment nowhere on the leaflet (which is not a leaflet at all, actually, but just some xeroed pages stapled together) is said anything about the risks for the recipient. The possibility of rejection is mentioned where it explains the HLA compatibility numbers, and that's it. Nothing is said of the "destruction" of the cells the lady was referring to.
There are few laconic lines about the risks that the donor runs, though. A "very little but not null" chance of a "breaking of the spleen" is mentioned,"possibility of cerebrum-vascular accidents" and "myocardial ischemia", following the "mobilization" and alteration of the blood that the donor must undergo in order to produce more stem cells before the transplant. Wow, just great.

Out of the bar. Is the sky turning gray? Is it a sunny day? Fuck who knows. It's warm. I walk down the street wondering all the things it is stupid to wonder, like what if we she really will need the transplant? And what if we are not compatible?
Me and my sister never got along very much. Nobody really got along with anybody in our so called family. We never mentioned or proved our reciprocal feelings for each other in any way during the years and so, one wonders if the feelings are really there. Well, I wonder all the time and I never got a clear answer.
And if I ever have to do something so important for my sister... at least I want to do it right, to come out right. To be useful.

I curse science and doctors. I curse medicine. I walk by the Berchet high school, the second hour bell just ringing, a girl's running in, the heavy knapsack slamming her back back. Maybe her second hour is science.
Fuck, science. There are the moments of truth when one sees clearly. I have one right there at the end of via commenda. I sort of always knew that science existed to overcome fear, and suddenly I see it so clearly. The reasons, the hope, the results, the hopeless too. So mixed up.

I dreamed I was a member of Rasputin's family.
I woke up in the dream a member of Rasputin family and thought, my last name is now almost the same as the president's.
I dreamed I was a member of Rasputin's family. I belonged to his house. I knew all the faces there, of the servants and the followers and the other family members. I knew the neighbors and the purveyors and the doctors.
I dreamed I was walking through Rasputin's house like I was in my house, but it wasn't my house, it was nobody's house.
It was a clear day of spring, the snow outside was melting under the white sky and the polished wooden floors where shiny and fragrant of wax. All the carpets where rolled aside against the wainscoting. I entered this big room where Grigori Rasputin sat alone, surrounded by few pieces of dark furniture, a table, a chair, a stove, the room was large and had barren walls. A teapot was enveloped in a red and white rag and steaming on the stove. He was reading. There was sweet smell of tobacco and a scent of urine and rotten wood.
I said, may I have some of your tea, father?
Grigori looked at me and said, you're not a member of this family. Get out of this house. He made this short speech keeping one of his fingers straight between the pages of the book to keep the place. He barely glanced at me.
His eyes where proverbial clear, almost gray as the sky outside. I said, fine, I was only dreaming it.
I walked the long corridor to the front door --nobody seemed to be in the house. I got out under the porch and to the garden where my father was standing, rake in his hands. He looked at me, sad and tired, and said, so you chose Rasputin against me and turned his back at me and went past the fence and away.
There was also a girl in the garden, hanging long robes and pants to many long lines of wires.
I ran to her and touched her shoulder. She turned to me and said no, you can't make love to me unless you are a member of this family. Then she picked up the basket of clothes and disappeared behind the white curtain of Grigori Rasputin's hanged long robes and pants --and I woke up. That girl looked just like my sister, by the way.

still deleting old drafts...

// (...) I think it's endearing of her to say it. And then it hits me, while those thoughts that I have end within the boundaries of what is me, what I think it's being me, it's this kind of things, done together with no apparent reason nor necessity and totally mundane, to make two persons a couple, whatever a couple is. It is just not obvious to me why, nor whether I like this or not. //

// (...) Later they watched together the Ozu movie in color, just downloaded illegally, called An Autumn Afternoon, that made them both hungry for japanese food and beer. He asked how was it possible, that so sensitive and intimate people never touched each other, if not for some occasional shoulder-patting on the way, not even in the most sorrowful situations? It probably was the same in Italy years ago, rural life and all. But at least there were the recurrent beatings and rapes and clashes, wives against husbands, husbands against wives, parents against children, brothers against sisters against brothers, friends on friends, everybody against dogs, donkeys, cows. In japanese movies, no palpating whatsoever. Sex was awesome then I bet, she said. //

// (...) When asked of this strange behaviour, he then will defend himself saying: "They both were wrong."
"Do you have any idea of who's right, then?"
"I don't care, really!" he will answer with a smile.
"What do you argue for, if you have no idea, then."
"'cause! I enjoy to be different, and I want to be admired for it."
"But you don't get much admiration going to argue with people who have such strong opinions."
"I just want to be admired by the majority of a minority of the other side," he will answer.
That's how I am. It all goes back to when I was a teenager stuck in a too political family, and was usually considered "too much politically indifferent and substantially from the right" from my father his wife and my stepbrother, "just too much of a leftist" from my mother, and simply a misbeliever from my sister. Great days were those, I'm sure they're being kept somewhere to be repeated for me for my eternal damnation in hell. Not that the members of my so called family ever changed their mind about me in the meantime. But at least I don't get to talk with them much anymore. //

I came to Libi's studio to attach to the ceiling a couple of venetian blinds, hang a couple of scaffolding and to screw to an old table the two button-makers Libi uses when she makes cloth buttons. We already put off this thing two or three times since it is not easy to have me doing things. So Libi opens the door, I get into the house and put down the bag with the drill and there's this communication door to her grandma apartment because Libi can't afford to have her own atelier or something, and through the passage I see her grandma sitting stuffed into a small armchair with two or three pillows and a loud TV set in the background. Next to her is her Ukrainian maid, slavonic oblique eyes and large cheekbones, a skin all scribbled by lines of wrinkles. I never met either of the two ladies, so I cross the room to give them the hand. The room is an old used room of an old used apartment that used to be lived in by many people. They say some of them died in the camps during the war and others survived and later died of life. There are the old photos, the faces so dark and smiling and a collection of bad and good pictures hanging from the walls, a large opaquish mirror where I can watch my figure approaching.

We don't chat or anything, I just say "nice to meet you", stand, look around. Smell of artichokes or peas. I shake with grandma first, shriveled in her chair, and her hand is moist, kind of completely damp with a warm sticky liquid, possibly saliva. Her eyes scrutinize me rapidly and shyly, not very present in the moment. Her mind must be thinner than it used to, evaporating in the late age like the words coming from the TV and leaving no trace. I then forget to shake with the Ukrainian lady because of the saliva on the palm of my hand, kind of shocked for a second there, and I step back where there's Libi still in the door and then come back to shake the Ukrainian lady too.
"I'm sorry" I say, I smile of myself and try to make it a little warmer. I still don't give a shit about either of the two ladies or the situation but I'm here. I know how Libi sort of weeps for her family when she's alone, because she's a only child, she says she's going to be the last one to know of her family, of how it was, what all the names and things and places meant, and how even new lives brought into it would be outside of it because it's too late. I guess she's right. She tried few times to get me interested with her family story to no avail-- now I'm sorry she doesn't try anymore, but better that way-- I'm the guy who drives her mad declaring his indifference or enmity for family bonds, she found the wrong guy at that-- but it's the same for me, Libi, the connection is broken and lost --we all waited too long. But I don't care. Why? because the mythology died a long ago I guess--

Libi behind me smiles in the opaquish mirror and says something to he maid. Tries her grandfather sunglasses on and smiles. She has that slightly disturbing householder inflection I never heard on her, insensitive and strangely moving --sign of the distance-- as she gets closer to the mirror to watch at herself from behind the enveloping glasses.
"I'm keeping the glasses" she announces. Almost in synchrony her grandmother declares that she has to go to the bathroom and the two ladies get up, move to the corridor to the bathroom disappearing in the friendly water pipes noises.

I didn't said hello to Libi very warmly before. I am grumpy and bored and disappointed by everything. Why is it so? All so unhappy and tighten up, ridiculous. It is like wanting to see faces without the courage to look for fear to be looked at. I think of a word to describe this feeling but I don't have any-- I think at what is Libi thinking of me when I feel her glancing at my sphinxy face. That I am crazy, that I am a tone deaf music, that my distrust is cruel-- that I am lost to her love or help--
Why is it that I can't-- admit that I am better now than I used to be?

I should have told her how she looked beautiful in those sunglasses and instead I looked away-- there's always something more important in the thoughts and I can't be there. I never learned to be there-- I only managed to, by accident-- I still don't believe to or seriously take all the wounds we're carrying but it must be fear-- lack of desire--

How was the phrase in that movie, "that's what makes me clumsy, the absence of desire."
Peter Handke, of course--

The atelier in her grandfather studio. All around is the endearing Libi's classical mess, piles of clothes and the armless legless dummy I bought her in that little store of used stuff on the navigli.
I start drilling holes making the awful noises go around in the house-- and I picture the noises entering every room of the old used apartment, door after door, carpet and walls and chairs and quavering cups, and it's like if in the noises we all hide how much alone we are.

"The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps against solid reality, usually on a battlefield.
-- George Orwell, In front of your Nose, 1946

For the first time in nine or ten years my father called me on the phone few days ago. "Ciao corpodibacco" he said. "How are you doing." My more aware reader knows that what I mean is not that I haven't seen or talked to my father in nine years (we met on Xmas), but that he just never calls me or search for me or anything. That's our deal apparently.
Anyway he did, with my greatest surprise.
Surprise didn't lasted long. He needed help because his email wasn't working anymore. So it began a series of phone calls that went on for the following days entirely revolving around his problem with the fucking email. I mean entirely, like calling the helpdesk of your company and throwing at the voice that's helping you a single "how are you" balloon at the beginning, just to get rid of all formalities and focus on the important things.
There aren't questions about life, about love, about feelings, about the state of the soul or of the pockets or of the bodies or anything.
Where do you live, corpodibacco? What do you love? How's your health, fucking dad? There isn't hesitation, all you are is a name and a cell phone number very easy to remember when you need it --and my voice turns all round and prompt and filling the empty spaces. I keep the thing on track and focused on names of menu commands and procedures and send him home satisfied even when the problem isn't solved. Today he wasn't satisfied because I told him I hadn't time. He used his resentful tone to say "OK. As you wish. Later then". But usually he's satisfied that I took care of him. I'm the good whore.

I wonder what was it that turned my family into this splintered pot, cutting and blind. And where is love? Seriously?
My father always played the victim and always claimed love, the love he deserved and I wasn't giving him -- even after a beating or an humiliation he claimed to be the betrayed one.
But now I am adult, I am lost, I am dispersed and still I wonder, where is love? Love was supposed to be behind it all but there is nothing instead. Just crabbiness and insensitivity, that's all.

I know what's wrong with the splintered pot, it is that truth was never that important -- and it was so easy for him to forget the real face of it -- either when I was staying at my mother's or at my father's but with him it was scientifically perverse-- Politics and commitments and laughs were twisted to adhere to doctrine and so was the constant induced sense of guilt for everything. I dragged so many times my father onto the battlefield and cried and trembled trying to make him a rational enemy and not a so irrational one and was beaten and humiliated --and he never kept a diary of anything he said or thought or did, so that he hadn't to remember all the evil done, all the shit dragged around, or the wounds inflicted. He was the one who believed in Stalin and in the repression of the masses and then worshiped T.S. Eliot--

Yeah thanks for having had so many books dad, I don't know what would have happened of me without books, they showed me the way to sneak out-- so many times

Dad, wait, do you remember when you descended the stairs in a thundering noise and burst into my room where I was staying awake reading and you just started to violently throw the content of the bookshelves at me on the bed, dad? Remember when you sent me off on the streets of Mogadishu alone, eleven years old kid at noon in the empty dusty streets to find the five shelling bill I had somehow lost on the way? In the poorest neighbor? Remember the boy you publicly humiliated countless times because he wasn't brave or virile enough, and later humiliated because he was becoming too much virile? No dad, I know you don't fucking remember.

But I was wrong all the time, I am still wrong, how could I have known that my father was insane? And that I was going to be insane like him, in a different way? Because it's easy to see. Insanity is the only situation where the Orwell rule quoted here doesn't mean no shit. Nothing means no shit with insanity, only being the good whore and placate the beast and forget about the love that was promised a long time ago. I don't know who promised it anyway, if there ever was anyone.