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.

So I tried to get in touch with Jawa few times these couple of days to no avail. Today I discovered they were out on a short trip. Jawa texted that we could meet for another dinner very soon, and I answered, sure (but this is not what I wanted, baby, we should talk). No I didn't write her this, I don't want to make the thing bigger by announcing it in advance-- always hated the announce of the "talk". My father used to announce the "talk" and the "talk" always degenerated in something violent one way or another.
Get to Jawa alone one afternoon and put the courage together and ask her to know a little more about the baby so that it is possible to wake up, whatever the verdict, and know what to do (I'll know).

Put the phone down and imagine them traveling or sailing somewhere, the happy little kid among them. One cannot really be part of another family, that's the essence of it, either you're in or you're out of any family or couple-- they're all seen from a distance. It is always from a distance and that's good. The pretense of the cinema to put you closer to other people's lives always sounded odd to me. When the truth is that you're only closer to appreciate the distance. Eventually the premise drove me out of the theaters where the position of "spectator" was too awkward for me (I am a reader, a painting viewer, at most a record listener).
Nowhere closeness is more possible than in oneself's imagination I guess, banale ma vero, wherein on the other hand nothing is real and clear and entirely sound and entirely visible or told (that's the good part).

It happens sometimes with certain pictures you take, that certain details on the background are like stills from a movie, only because in them is visible the life of a couple, of a family, like if it is a part of a story (which it is) and yet it is totally out of reach --sort of desperately distant from you and inexplicable, no matter how many stories you can make up about it, also because it is not happening now (it happened then) and you didn't notice when you was there.

So is with the picture above, whose total is just a trivial picture taken in
Venice a while ago (St. Zaccaria).

Me and Jawa are crouching next to the little boy and Ernesto is standing near the stove cutting artichokes. That's us here tonight. It's the first time we're being in the same room in like four or five years. Well, except when me and Ernesto met again at the hospital a month ago, when the baby was in intensive care.
I'm looking down at the head of the baby, and the evening is about to turn weird. It's probably my fault because I didn't worried about it. I just came with few presents and my face and all. Now the head of the baby, still half-covered by bandage, has what in Italy is called a "rose", a visible and very delineated area on the back of his head where the hair seem to converge or depart in a spiral, creating a small bump or irregularity (this has certainly an everyday name in English which I don't know).
"Look what a beautiful rose" I say out loud.
"Isn't it?" says Ernesto. He has his normal tone of voice, stirring the artichokes in the paddle. He says: "I don't have one."
"Me neither" says Jawa, squatted next to me.
"I can't believe it!" I say. I even stand up and go behind Ernesto to check. He really doesn't have a rose on his head.
"I have one!" I say. "That's where my hair are all standing up" I say touching my nape.
Funny how my voice has faded out towards the end of the sentence.
I put down my glass of wine to do the gesture a second time, properly. I feel my hair standing up and bouncing against the middle of my fingers. I do the gesture again as the silence grows for few more seconds in the kitchen.

When I was a kid I thought everyone had a rose between his hair. To a certain extent, until tonight I thought everyone had one, large or small.

I can't believe it I am this baby's biological father. I don't believe it. It is so unlikely and fucking ironic and absurd. It just shouldn't be. No, it can't be. Seriously. Shouldn't she tell it to me? May be she isn't talking about it because he made her swear to never do so. It would be logic. Maybe we are grown-ups and not supposed to-- But have they talked about it? Maybe everyone is just removing the thought. Would it ever be possible to speak about something like that? And with me?
I won't ever do anything to harm them, to harm this family, I swear-- what a hypocrite, I've done that already, plenty!
I must say something now. I should really. Why all these fantasies? They're all fragments of my imagination. Just a fucking rose in the hair. It is the most unlikely thing. Yet every time I look at this baby he has something else weird that-- And we connect too--
I sip the wine now--yeah-- Oh God, must I be such a mythomaniac?
Is everyone thinking the same thing now?
I don't know what I'd give to hear our three voices coming out of our minds like in a movie now, spelling out what our thoughts are.
And yet maybe they know, and are worried also for me. Or they hate me. He doesn't seem to though. Jesus, I'm always thinking that everyone knows when no one knows, I must remember that.
Say something now.

"And so, have you thought about sending him to the kindergarten?" I ask.
"It's too early" Ernesto responds.
"Yeah, it's early, " she says, lifting the baby in her arms.
Is this normalcy? I wonder.
We start grating the botargo.
We chat.
The baby has the attention.
We laugh. It's normalcy.
I feel deadly alone and hopelessly falling for many many more minutes into the night.
I am convinced that we are all feeling that way except the baby.
Maybe it is only because we are grown-ups that we make it to the other side.

Afterwards I wish I had something innocent to feel tonight, to say to them, at least rightful, at least dividable.
So I end up staying for too long-- drinking and hypertalking-- and then being stupefied to go away-- where there's the streets and the the dusty smell of the city and could be raining tomorrow.

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)

How many Caravaggio shows can a man take in his life? In my lifetime, at least in the years I spent in Milan, I never bumped into a Giacometti or a Morandi one, a Previati or Utrillo or Rothko or Severini or Segantini or Mengs or Bruegel one (well, it's not a definitive list, it's just to give the impression of my very large artistic needs). But tens of Caravaggio's and school shows passed in the city. This could be wonderful if it wasn't that the art shows in Milan are the poorest thing.
Just as an example, in recent years: in 1999, the show "From Caravaggio to Salvator Rosa"; in 2002, "The Caravaggio from Vatican"; in 2004, "Caravaggio: The Medusa"; in 2001, "The Lombardian cinquecento: from Leonardo to Caravaggio". Consider that in the same years other big Caravaggio shows were held around in Italy, in Rome and Bergamo, Naples, Turin.
Now this show is opening in Milan.
I know, Caravaggio is great¹ and he was from Milan, too. He was born on september 29th 1573 (the day of Saint Michael Archangel, hence his name), on the same day our beloved PM Berlusconi was born.
But still. If someone speaks to me one more time about the "maudit painter" I may throw up.
It's all thanks to the great imagination and largeness of means of our show organizators and local assessors that the same bunch of artists keeps visiting this city every two years.
Other big hits are: Kandinsky and Picasso. Gee.

_{1. I have in my mind the scene at the bookshop from the movie "Hannah and her sisters", where one of the sisters asks to Michael Caine whether he likes Caravaggio. "who doesn't?" he answers.}