"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.

(...) I'm too unhappy to write, to answer to anyone. It is not the effort to put sentences together, but the idea to send and to give, that's too tiring a thought. I don't know what it is. I have no voices in my head --only a dull annoying mess without a shape... wish to be put to sleep for good--

I got your message. "Hi, how are you doing?" you wrote. "Here it's working to the bitter end. I am not particularly happy but I'm living in a calm state, of physical and psychical silence --which I find enchanting. I'm sending you a kiss even though, harshly said, this place is eradicating any form of affection from my heart."

Nina I am not interested about what is eradicated from your heart.... or what not. How can I tell you this? You're probably too young and unexperienced to know that the heart isn't a patch of earth from where you "eradicate" stuff... nothing is ever eradicated.
Maybe the heart is a blackboard badly cleaned by a dusty eraser... how about that? All that has been removed can be written again, in a jiffy, sometimes the trace of it is still visible beneath the whitish hand-made curves of pulverized chalk, if only you look close enough, if only the light in the room is right.

I never cared much for the declarations of un-love (de-love) just as I never really minded the declarations of love... What's a declaration for? Illusions of control... (So you're over me? When were you under me?)
It was a long ago that I heard from a girl the words of love for the first time -- we were hugged kissing on a green bench in some public garden in the city, the girl's brown eyes were wide open on me.... all I could see and think was that she was all in her eyes looking at me, and that she was waiting for an answer I had to give. "Love is in the eyes of a girl". The answer had to be given. I just wanted to run... I'd still want to run to this day, if it wasn't that I need to be loved.
All I ever cared in my life were the feelings, all kinds of them: I put everything second to the feelings that were felt... including my sanity and my job but the feelings I only cared for were those that cannot be contained into words, and cannot be exchanged like goods or favors-- they are there, in between, and I am here, we are here, they're in between.

Declarations are even less important when you're away, Nina. One sees the real face of the heart when is next to it. Heart isn't a wireless fucking connection from a 12 miles high spying blimp or something-- true we haven't done anything, changed anything to be together because we never wanted to... but if we meet tomorrow, who's to say what's written on it? I know that this doesn't change anything, fuck, who wants to change anything?

I can't talk to Libi and I can't talk with you Nina about what's happening because of all the lies I said, and all things I omitted. Because I don't remember the dates, I don't know who or what came before and I am too ashamed to ask. Yeah I lied to you too, I've been hiding my feelings and I've been unable to share my worries too many times. Always took life from the wrong side (...)

But the trouble is that conscious futility is something only for the young. One cannot go on and on being 'decadent', since decadence means falling and one can only be said to be falling if one is going to reach the bottom reasonably soon. Sooner or later one is obliged to adopt a positive attitude towards life and society. It would be putting too crudely to say that every poet in our time must either die young, enter the Catholic Church, or join the Communist party, but in fact the escape from the consciousness of futility is along those general lines.

-- George Orwell, T.S. Eliot, 1942

The other day I gave a look at the insides of my mind and called. "Why nobody down there can write poetry anymore?"
I yelled. No answer.
But I know why, I shouldn't even ask. Poetry needs fresh feelings and i'm not good at those lately. Even the bleakest poetry needs the outgoing attitude of    wanting to sing the world,    not my very philosophical attitude of: renouncing-to-say-anything    because-nothing-really-matters and all that.
Not a line of good poetry has ever been written with such an attitude. That's why time and poetry so often go in different directions, because every year our of adolescence there's a higher chance to turn into a turd which sticks to the sidewalk even if you kick at it.
(...)   I believe that poetry is essentially based on what is felt the first time something is done, or looked at in a certain way, whatever that is. The ability to withhold and recall that fresh feeling entirely lies in some sort of faith one must have in the world-- that the images of it contain it all --and most of the times I'm too worried and into paranoia to achieve that.
It's a waste, I say, and    I'm even the only one to say it (about me), which could also be a good sign (or not, whatever).

There's something else, therefore, at the origins of pain, which isn't at all the brutal game of an instrument indifferent to life and for each the same. In truth, this instrument is tighten in a well different way for any of us. And we will never know what in reality is physical pain if we ignore what makes the individual, in a system morphologically identical for all.

(RENÉ LERICHE, La Chirurgie de la Douleur - 1938. Quoted today by Guido Ceronetti on lastampa.it)

At first Libi wasn't ready for it-- she had never tried, she had tried once, it was unbearable pain-- This is why now, when I ass-fuck her, I direct her with orders like keep quiet stay still hold it now shut.
Once trying to-- I said something like that, in a brusque way, and her body suddenly relaxed and welcomed me. She became silent-- swallowed-- I smiled and thought: women. My mother would kill me for that smile-- but that's how it went.
I couldn't see her face and I wondered what was going on with the pain-- I pulled her shoulder, her hair but nothing happened. She was resting her cheek against the pillow-- her eyes undetectable in a haze of hair and lashes-- 't was like she was buried in a book-- I am a selfish lover and went on.

Does this instinctive masochism have something to do with not feeling guilty and letting go-- because-- for a second, the body is convinced that there is no way out, no escape from it?
Orders and rough manners, that's for her-- how the pain is suddenly bearable, tidying the room for the arrival of pleasure.
Sometimes I wish I could feel the same when I have sex-- not having a way out. The recurring forwarding of moments of exit from the moment --taking decisions-- can estrange you-- It is more about being an individual than being a male.

So mistreat her, call her names. I know it is like a comment --to the solitude of the bodies that are having sex-- tangled together but isolated-- like nearby teeth in a mysterious mouth.
The mouth is chewing our feelings putting them together-- but the manducating tooth above doesn't know the first thing of the wave of pain or pleasure passing through --the tooth below.

--In picture, above: when she reads, by italyisfalling.com, 2006

I wrote that post about La Dolce Vita recently, following the already classical article about Italy on The Economist "Addio, Dolce Vita" that just came out.

My post derived from a series of ideas I have been toying with in my mind for years, as I tried to grasp what being italian was about, and what was happening to this country.
I didn't get any anwser, I don't even think anwsers are useful anymore, but I am beginning finally to get what Italy has lost in the last fourty years or so. Not that I am really able to explain it anyway.

"What a wondeful contry Italy is" the man thought with deep affection, and to better love it he directed his thought to Porta Capuana (Napoli) to the water of the faraglioni (Capri) in the spot where an under water cave crosses the first rock, to the trippe of the restaurant Troja (Florence) to the movie La Dolce Vita (Roma), to the slopes into fresh snow among the Tofane (Cortina) and he was moved by a feeling which he could not name.

It certanly was an italian feeling because he had never experienced it during his trips in other coutries. In Indochina peraphs, at sunset, when children astride buffalos dive into the ponds and lotus flowers start to open up; or the uproar of the cycadas at dawn, over the eucalypti, that lasts exactly ten minutes and than the silence and the first bells of the chineses' bycicles are back. This was a very much beautiful feeling, but different and not so cheerful. No, that unnamed feeling was only italian.

"But feelings do stretch or abbreviate life?" the man asked himself and he "felt" that, for unjust that it might be, the second conjecture was more real if not more probable. (Goffredo Parise, Sillabari 1972-1982, Translation by Italy is Falling)

If feelings do abbreviate life, I will hint as by accident, does have this something to do with the fact that Italian people is the older in the whole world?

As this way of life vaguely defined la dolce vita, (that was not really sweet, but bitterly enjoyable, as portrayed by Goethe, Cellini, Casanova, Belli, Porta and later Fellini, Flaiano, Parise etc) was not because of richness (we already stated that in our previous post) neither it was to be enjoyed for too long in one's life person, or meant to make that person's life to last longer.

It was supposed to consume people just like any other form of this illness we call life.

Nothing yesterday has been more exciting than this:

If you think it's easy fleshing, with this 3 meters long attached rambling passionflower you already saved by certain death a couple of times, you are deadly wrong.

When the re-potting operation ended, I was shaking, breathing heavily, not for the cold. Quite surprised, that I made it, and that I was shaking.
Hope she makes a fucking good winter now.

--post-winter update: the fucker died miserably.