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.

As though the sky now partook of an alien system, it became too high for the high towers of civilization in the foreground of the picture, and against the compact, menacing background the human landscape degenerated into a junkyard. The deep blue with which a time grown plethoric weighed on the world was the essential -- the scattered leaflets down below, in which only fear of life or death could beguile him (or anyone else!) to find the slightest meaning, were a secondary, minor factor.

-- Peter Handke, as quoted in this article (thanks to Greg for pointing it out)

-- in movie, above: just the nothingness recorded by my little camera from inside a coffee place.

I sit into another coffee place of that silly chain, just next to Korean town, on 32nd. I stretch my right leg under the table close to the window. The knee still bothers me, and at moments it seems like it is never going to stop hurting. But I decided not to let it ruin my trip, so I stick to the plan. I just leave it there, eat a sandwich, take the drugs. My leg smells of hospital, it's the bengay cream. My pants look a little like hospital pants, all pastel blue as they are. Girls check me out because I look like a doctor on a break. I try to accustom to the part, looking heroic and bored and undisclosedly fit. It's not hard, that's a little how I feel, together with lost and displaced and good for nothing of course.
People are using laptops on the few tables around me. Everyone went to typing school and writes real fast. So fast and aggressively it distracts me from my thoughts. Not that my thoughts are so relevant at this moment of the day. A table of Korean youngsters produces collective burst of laughs at given intervals, and two incredibly attractive young Indian girls talk animately and with a lot of mannerisms at a table behind them.

I just ended the worse conversation on the phone with Libi. I called her from a public phone on the street, it was chaotic. She was sleeping, I woke her up, had her telling me about her day. As soon as I started talking about how I felt she used her long pauses and was all defensive and then I told her about my dreams, the bare bones of projects I would love to have, it was as if everything emanating from me was there to threaten her. She said "I knew this was going to happen" and I had no idea what "this" was, and then the voice said "thirty seconds" ridiculously soon, damn polish prepaid cards.

A middle age guy from the next table gives me his videocamera to film him and his ten year old son eating pizza together. They actually took pizza from Sbarro and brought it here. I don't know why he wants me to film that. The proposal is so unexpected and the man so nice I can't think of anything, any rudeness, to avoid the thing. So I film them, the dad acts like he's making a toast with his son with the pizzas, and I even wave into the camera to convince the little kid to wave back. He does, with a beautiful smile, and asks me what's my name. I tell him. Must repeat it a couple of times 'cause it is unusual. His dad is convinced that I must be Russian. I am italian, I tell him, and he says, really, me too. Born here, though, he says. i fail to manifest pleasure and surprise. He gives me his card. Frank Positano, there's written on it. Photographer, New York. He looks expectant but I don't know what to say. "You're a photographer", I say. "Interesting."
I give him back the camera. Our moment is over. I put my own little camera on the table and start filming the outside, just out of nothingness, I hope he doesn't notice.
People walking by. Neons flickering. Girl with stilettos getting off the cab. Korean people converging to 32nd. Cars and bikes passing by. Music suggesting arbitrary feelings unasked for. I just sit there in a daze and let it flow in and out until it's time to go.

The Pope will be infallible like the Pope.
The novel will be fantastic like a novel.
The movie will be unreal like a movie.
The needle in the haysack will be hard to find like a needle in the haysack.

-- Peter Handke, Prophecy

While I am on this trip, it's pretty improbable that I will write about Italy, just in case you wonder. So for new readers, this blog's title will sound a little off topic the next months. It is not a problem because I am almost never in topic.
During this stage updates may or may not be infrequent, but there is always going to be an update at some point. And if you get tired of coming around to check, just subscribe to the feeds, they're useful.

I'm worried for Britney. I can't help to feel a sort of protective instinct for this wandering soul.
Oh, I know it's not hip not to despise Britney, not to laugh at her or at the other one called like a hotel. Well these girls are laughable, that's true. Although nobody laughs that much at men, the always forgiven.
Now, maybe the case with these pictures isn't even that bad. She shaves her own head because no one wants to do it. This might as well be a big fuck you to all the expectations of those who don't understand. It certainly took courage and impudence and some idea, precise of vague, that shaving one's own head ought to have a meaning. Perhaps a positive one.
Still the implacable force by which Britney's life is being judged and weighted and frowned upon and inquired is hard to witness. It is not voyeuristic anymore. It is another step forward into the uninterrupted ritual scapegoating that makes the energetic spirit of the world.
One feels so much he wants to save the victim: this probably is a feature, the feature of scapegoating.
The ritual weapon is the well tested continuous exposure of all the weaknesses, all the mistakes. The big-brotherly life that only concentrates on your faults and shames. Inviting you to make a better show of them.

People say, why caring for a person like this? She's loaded with cash, she has no fucking real problem.
Thing is, I look at the pictures and that's not what I see. In the pictures the shadow of her smile appears under eyes that cried, the calm attitude of one who doesn't expect to be helped or stopped anymore, pictures that she has no power or intention to escape, taken by people like you and me who find it natural to help the scapegoating.
You know, I read stories of the showbiz like everyone else, because tragedies and weaklings are all over the place there. And we need tragedy.
Britney, I don't know squat about this girl. But in general, I don't really care for money, that someone "has a lot of money": How not seeing that money is a burden? Look at her. Don't you see the burden? She's calling for help from under it (and fine, there's nothing I could do about it: but I'm not so lifeless or dumb not to hear her calling.)
I see a person, yet another one, by the piercing eyes and a lively character and the many trivial hopes and the evident solitude, crushed, or so it seems, by the world of show business and the wolfs of the headline news.
And it's not that you don't know that worse species of suffering are always going on, every day in every city of the world, breaking the backs of millions of strangers of which we don't know anything about.
But like few others Britney's story is everywhere, instead. One can't ignore it, not after seeing pictures like this one. On every newswire, in every tube. And I cannot avoid to read it or to see it.

25, lived five lives already, single mother, two kids that the fascist CPS will soon take away from her, large house, three cars, two pools, rage and displacement, misunderstandings, selfishness and generosity, never left alone a single moment by the blind eyes of the crushing machine, the blind eyes of the millions who innocently eat her alive watching. It is known the witnesses are always innocent.
It's not just for her, this laughable girl, this strong and not yet lost person. But is also for her.
To say it with Peter Handke, this is one of the cases where the witness of a humiliation, if still is a human being, feels exposed, and humiliated too.

(Following this post) This is so horribly plebiscitary.... I hate all these left-wing european intellectuals, their awards and theaters and universities... They're so much the greatest cowards in the world, who love to look heroic only if the majority of their minority is with them. And the politicians? There are no words to describe their idea of the world.

After being selected as this year's winner of the coveted Heinrich Heine Prize of the City of Düsseldorf, Austrian author Peter Handke has now been told he will not receive the award after all. After heated public criticism, the Düsseldorf City Council has announced it will revoke the prize. Read more

They shouldn't be entitled to give away awards, really. Only to receive them. "For having chosen the path of least resistance once again, this year the award goes to..."

I am quite happy to learn that Peter Handke has been awarded the new Düsseldorf 's Heinrich Heine Prize. Not that I think prizes are really representative of someone's art or greatness: but this can so much piss off all the creepy attackers of Handke's work and it's very welcomed.

Yes I am quite happy for it, regardless the opinions of a once-great-novelist Salman Rushdie, who called years ago Handke 'moron of the year' for his opinions about the Yugoslavian war, starting the whole pillory against him, and regardless the so called 'philosopher' Bernard-Henri Levy, who recently stated that Handke's plays should be banned from all theaters of France; for the Comedie Francaise too, that cowardly and accordingly removed Handke's plays from the scenes, and for the many others who insulted or neglected him and his work without even reading it, because he (while accomplishing new great results with it, particularly with the splendid recent novel 'Der Bildverlust') asked for a country and its people, the Serbian people, room for listening and understanding.

I don't know if the Heinrich Heine Prize is meant to be a political one, since many European literary prizes unfortunately tend to be political (the Nobel Prize for Literature, for example, it's shamefully, stupidly political). The point is that Heine himself suffered criticism and censorship during his life, in his quest for an outspoken truth, but he managed anyway to be first of all a poet. I think that this is the best award Handke could receive, if only to accent this, that he remained first of all a storyteller and a poet, and his politcal opinions have not reduced his talents.
Heine was a poet, a satirist, an endless traveler just like Handke proved to be. And just like Handke do, he always kept his eyes wide, to see, understand, and live to tell. (I must have said already that Handke is my favorite living writer so I'll leave it at that. End of the post.)

-- in picture: Peter Handke in Kragujevac, 1999

"There is an indifference that is more helpful than your blabbering about being humane, as the right hand pets some of us like Mother Teresa, and the left hand swings the sword of the tribunal against others. Little devils of goodness. Humanity hyenas. There is no one less open to suffering than you official humanitarians. Marsbodies that appear as the protectors of human rights... The people here have become as evil as they are not. And the war has made you tourists as evil as you are."

-- Peter Handke, Dugout Canoe, The Play About The Film About The War

You may be taught to believe that it is great how wealthy people donate amounts of their money and time to some "humanitarian" cause. But it's not. It's disgusting, instead. First of all, it is useless: the world is more and more divided among the lucky ones and the unlucky ones, so the system obviously doesn't work. But also, it is a race for hypocrisy so disgusting and shameful it can't even be called evil: it must be called shameful, so that we don't waste time with exceptions, like those who do it not because they're "evil" but because they're "good", those who didn't mean it that way, those who went there in person, those who just wanted to do good, those who "wanted to see", those who couldn't find a place for them at home, those who made so much money they "felt it was right to...", etc.
For example, on the past week's issue of TIME.

( Parenthesis: I made the mistake months ago to subscribe for $5 to TIME magazine in order to access their archive on line. I wanted to read some stuff happened on the year I was born. The stuff wasn't interesting at all, but I have been receiving their crappy magazine every week since then, although I have canceled my subscription as soon as the trial period expired. And every time I read it, I know there is something in it that gives me the creeps. )

So, on the past week's issue of TIME there was a list of the supposed 100 "most influential" people of the world. Well, typical TIME's crap, I guess. "Influential" according to their lousy point of view of course.
I browsed the article terrorized to find Berlusconi's face in it. Luckily there wasn't.
Among them though, looking upward so that his double chin doesn't show, with his "I'm so committed" smile, was obviously Bill Gates (and wife). They were on the cover of another disgusting issue of TIME with Bono few weeks ago already, and it was all about how much good they were all making to Africa. The caption about Bill Gates went: "Giving money and Hope to the world". See, he "gives money to the world". He's not part of the band of brothers who drain money from everywhere wishing for a crowded unhappy world where everybody uses his cheap products. He actually gives hope.

Not surprisingly, more than a half of the names in the TIME's list are of American fellows whose supposed merit is to give away part of their money to some "association". The fact is always citied among the great things they did in life for which they turned out to be influential.

It's interesting to learn why affluent men of rich societies tip around more than women. Even if they do it with all the discretion in the world, the reason is always public. Psychologist Geoffrey Miller explained why in his impressive and fascinating book "The Mating Mind" (a must read, first book I ever read to give a reasonable explanation to why creativity exists): tips and donations are part of a sort of "peacock tale" extended behavior. It is all about the show of fitness we use to extend our right of choice in our circles under many forms. Everybody does it, in a way or another, you know, just to be "influential" in his own way, just as we all do creative things or test jokes around to allure the other sex, or friends.
The way I see it, though, to donate to Humanitarian Associations is particularly hateful in the picture, even though is almost a must now, especially in the US. Because the unhappiness of the world is transformed into your personal triumph, and everybody would be disgusted and ashamed by the deal if it wasn't for the physical distance between the tragedies you throw money at, and the living rooms where you can announce how you threw the money.
After all, all you gave is just your money, but nothing permanently good can come from the money itself.

I always thought that most of humanitarian associations devoted to the developing of "peacock tales" of affluent or middle-class men around the world should be banished and neglected, so that the evidence of the problems our richness create around wouldn't have any excuse.

Now, when I read that this is a world where in survivors camps peacekeepers in Liberia exchange beer food and cigarettes -- and trips to town on large SUVs -- with sex with boys and girls and kids recluse into the camps, I am not really surprised. I can perfectly imagine how and why this happens. What strikes me though, is that nobody seem to notice how this is obviously in the nature of "Humanitarian" help. It is bound to happen in this context.

In the "Humanitarian" world, in fact, everything is supposed to relay on the "Humanity" of the people involved, because nothing else in the order of things is ever discussed: not the unjust world, not the wars, not the price some pays for our Oil or Gas or goods and all that sort of stuff. It all relays on the fact that someone is "Human" enough to go there and do something without changing anything in the long term. "Human" enough to go there and face all the problems knowing there's nothing effective to do about them, grinding his teeth for the moment he will be cheered getting back home -- that "human".
But "Human" is also sex desires, greed, perversions, deceit, the fascination of one self's power, the unbearable sight of others' pain, the long hot days idling far from everything you know, the routine of misery, the temptations of corruption etc. It's all so human, just like craving to be influential is. Because being human never meant being good, how come we always forget it.

-- in picture above: another engraving by Bruegel