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.

music: Maurice Ravel, Trio for Piano in A-minor-- as far as I can hear it while keeping my ability to concentrate on what I'm writing. noise: drills and bangs coming from yet another apartment renovation in the complex; muffled rumble of the city; rattling of trams in the avenue: (the usual)

Yesterday I tried to get in touch with Jawa again-- apparently they're away for the entire week. I steered to Gisa's and managed to talk with her about the situation, and it was useful, I guess. She was so surprised to hear the story. After all it all happened in her apartment, when she lend it to me for few months and I had that affair.
See? I said to myself. You lead a interesting life.
Then we agreed that every possible outcome was going to be either unsatisfactory or unjust, or painful. Whether Jawa happens to "know" that their son is actually "our" son, and she deliberately is hiding it from me; or she doesn't want to know and gets evasive; or Ernesto knows too and it's the way they decided to live this thing (the fact that they're both quite rational and science-minded individuals can be a factor); or it is all a fantasy of mine; or she realizes the possibility as soon as I tell her: in all cases what happens next is the same thing, which is, nothing.
I list to Gisa all my fears and obsessions. I say that maybe they both know, and are hiding it from me because they're scared that I might want to barge in, if only on a given hypothetical day far in the future. This can be disappointing --people not trusting me and all-- but understandable: and the consequence could only be not to see them anymore, for ever, for life: To reassure them that I am willing to spare the child a shock tomorrow that only a misunderstood idea of science or nature (what being a "biological" parent means) may consider necessary.
"Talk to her" says Gisa.
"I want to, believe me. But she seems to be sneaking away from it all the time. Why is she avoiding me anyway?"
"Oh, she probably thinks that you want to fuck her again-- and with the baby and all she doesn't want to have to tell you that it is not going to happen" Gisa answers.
"What?" See, I haven't thought of that.
"Why do you want to know it so much? What can you really do with it?" she asks.
Nothing, I know she's right. "Maybe Jawa knows for sure that this is not the case. Blood types, DNA, whatever. She can reassure me. Or maybe I just want to know what happens next with the story, you know. Describe it to myself as it happens. I can't keep that part frozen."
Skeptical look from Gisa.
"I know I have lied many times in my life" I say. Hell I have been lying to Gisa too, she knows me."Still, I hate to hide things when it's not my choice: I hate to know that there's this sort of terrain I cannot walk on. At least I would like to know that Jawa knows that I am willing to do whatever it takes to make her or them more happy with the situation."
"I bet they're happy with the situation."

Gisa is tidying up the apartment. I follow her around as she piles up stuff and takes toys out of the way, throws away stuff. Little Biba is taking a nap in the other room, Loris (the rockstar) is about to come back from a sound check. There's white light pouring in from the high windows, smell of budino and hanging clothes.
"Funny" Gisa says then.
"What?"
"You telling me about this, and I reading Dostoevsky's the eternal husband these days. It just is a very similar story. Have you read it?"
"No".
"Well is about this guy who receives a visit from a friend who recently became a widower. The guy and this friend's wife were lovers until 9 years before, when she abruptly put an end to their relationship without an explanation. Later he meets the daughter of the widower and from the moment he lays his eyes on her he is convinced that she is his own daughter. The little girl is 9 years old, and the age makes it possible if not probable for her to be his daughter. More importantly, there is something with her that makes it even more obvious, some affinity and special bond that they have."
"So how it ends?"
"I don't know, I haven't finished it yet. But you said you felt some connection with Jawa's son."
"Well, I thought. But probably the boy is too little to say." I know you can't cling to something so irrational, you're not supposed to.
"Man, I really would like to know how the story ends." I mumble. "Please let me know." Like anything depended on that.

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.

"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.

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)

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 upon.

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 can turn out to be gigantic, of course: because I feel the relative difference of experience between me and the people involved in the story in the most intense way.
I don't 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, rub a stain on the glass, and all the secondary stuff which is usually omitted from a story when we hear one (Saddam Hussein's double 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; 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.

And he doesn't know that with all these ill talents in your pocket you notice a lot of things that usually go unnoticed, including beauty and drama where few see it. I don't know how to be without that (the preceding phrase is not ungrammatical).

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

My father's house in L. is filled with all the paintings he did since when he retired from work. The house has three floors and a little garden and it faces a steep terraced cliff that goes down to an invisible river which flows silently in winter and noisily in autumn. If you lean out of the balcony you see the blue sea down to the right and the mount before the Five Lands. On the other side of the small valley there's another village fortified on the crown of the hill which looks down to the house. Although the village is the single most visible thing from any window of my father's house, my father recurrently portrays it in his paintings copying it from a photo.

My father and his wife always complain about the cost of life, remarking the bad habits of the middle-class and the non-authentic lifestyle of the Italian bourgeois. They don't have a mirror in the house where they are visible to themselves for what they are in reality. They live in an imaginary world, always on the side of the oppressed and where they don't oppress anyone. For them life is all about revenge and compensations. Never about trying to make peace with things (that would be reactionary).

If it makes him feel better with himself, my father has no problem to demolish anything or everything he can reach for, either by ridiculing or criticizing without stopping short for his son or wife or daughter or whatever. He always saves himself. He always did. Half bald since when he was 25, my father is the kind of guy who can show scorn for your too long hair without feeling ridicule at all. He feels better, instead, because when he was young his hair where 'thicker'.

My father's aggressiveness is always boiling inside him even when it is not noticeable. In the past it was always noticeable, actually, but because we see each other just three days or less at a time, he must believe he has to behave somehow and so he masks it behind silence and occasional exhaling. If I listen to my sister, I am supposed to be thankful for this effort (I am).
But it's there, just like in the old-times, ready to explode as soon as you contradict him more than once. When it happens, in a second his voice comes out sudden and violent, for the smallest thing, and his look turns suddenly crazy and ready for violence. You back out. He has to prevail anyway. Afterwards he makes fun of your wrongness.

His lack of sensitivity depresses me. I know it is not incapacity (he has a great musical sensitivity for example) as much as it is the result of a choice: having decided many years ago that real men don't indulge in sensitiveness and sentimentality, he gradually atrophied them slowing down his empathy responses to almost total immobility. When I came to life he was 37 and already totally affected by this process beyond a point of no-return.

My father's position in life is that he is a victim. Every little thing he does is followed by a moaning of pain and fatigue. His stance with family relationships has always been that nobody loved him enough, period. The largest painting he ever did represent himself in foreground, naked and screaming in pain, while on the background other people, who look a little like his family (his wife, his sons: without being exactly them, all naked) try to pull him away with cruel or dull expression on their faces.
I remember the first time I saw that picture. My father was trying to convince my sister to make her bed on the coach facing the picture.
"Why, what's the problem with facing this way?" he was asking. My sister, who suffered her entire life of nightmares and night fears, was shaking her head firmly, moving the pillow on the other side. My father insistence wasn't wicked, it was only the conflicting desire of not being judged too harshly by his daughter, and still be pitied by her.

I knew then I wanted to tread on that picture and tear it apart and for the first time in my life do something directly against him.
One wants a lot of things he doesn't really wants.

(Every single repetitive lament uttered on this blog against my father is mostly here to adjure away the capital gut-wrenching fear, and that would be to wake up one day and discover that for some crazy rule of hereditariness I am becoming like him.)