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.

there was this beautiful sky. I was staying in bed, I had cried, not hardly or for long or anything. Just a result of scattered thoughts of people far, the inability to summon them up, the clumsiness or weight of the world that couldn't be moved or pulled, the bitter promises of the future. I couldn't see very well, because of the wet paste in the eyes. I unhooked the mosquito net, it rolled on itself with a slam! after which the radio was playing quietly. I cleaned my eyes with my fingers curled. a unsteady coolish breeze came to my face with diverted noises from the avenue behind the condos. all words were mixed up in my head, all thoughts still as if queuing up on a bench against the wall to be called forth. it was all so familiar and this familiarity what I could stand less, less than any other form of pain or boredom. the things a ghost of once intense things I hardly could connect to now. the hatred for the city was one thing with hatred for myself, the weak--

no, not exactly that. i took the pictures of the sky automatically thinking 'this will go for the blog'. I knew it hardly mattered because I still lacked the courage to take out for a walk the things I wanted to say. the sunsetting sky was seriously beautiful. if only I had the ability to see into things like I used to. i closed the left nostril with a finger pushing air out. the right one still half-closed since then, not creaking anymore. I think it will stay this way, I thought satisfied-- so since nearly about the time my last intense emotions were, some is still trapped-- and the most shitty thing is to be uncertain of the accuracy of your own memories and the details that are fading out and, you know, this unwillingness to explain.

little updates are about to be swiped in like a metrocard. Patience. I'm in the city, still.

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).

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.)

At the flea market I always end up poking among old photos and postcards. Not that I usually buy anything. I just pass by and occasionally stop and look at the old portraits, and wonder: is that the same humanity I am part of?
All the faces and bodies in the pictures seem so different. What was phony back then, and what was sincere, and what was a caricature. Everything seem to be made of another material. Some of the ladies look like my grandma looked like, a little. But she was real. They seem to be invented by someone else. Some of the men seem to have bodies out of proportion, probably due to the unusual fashion.

Few days ago I was at the flea market of Bollate (Milano), located just next certain horrific "modern" projects that plague that lousy part of the town. There, just like in any other italian flea market actually, the pictures of the times of fascism were the majority. And not only pictures: statues, posters, memorabilia.
Mussolini and his acolytes were everywhere, in pictures and on any little thing from those times. Buttons, pins, boxes, the usual. And there were also other pictures, where no "fascist authority" was present but, in small details like a black handkerchief in a pocket, or a military hat, or a certain advertising in the background, or a certain way of the men to pose in front of the camera, everything still spoke about the times of fascism in Italy.

The times of fascism. That was when my miserable falling country manifested the will to make of its typical cowardice and its worse defects an implacable force. It happened that once and we are still thinking about it.
What was that force? it was a gigantic, inevitable, shameless, black Mafia that pervaded the country and screamed itself from the balconies and the bullhorns instead of hiding in the villas or at the outskirts of town. It sung songs, and wrote poems on itself, and celebrated its new order as if people had expected it for long, when in fact nobody had expected it. Like any other mafia, it brought injustice disguised by justice, and ferocious illegality by peace and order, lies by adamant truths. It got rid of all the other mafias because there ought to be only One-National-Mafia.
Then it faded away, leaving behind    the bare bones of a raided country,    starving, deadly wounded and corrupted forever and covered with shame.

And evidently it also left behind a stubborn army of nostalgic individuals that went on sharing the shreds of that propaganda for decades, passing on the mania to sons and nephews, until today.
Such were the memorabilia at the flea market: in the end, a nauseating collection of phony poses, of silly objects, of unintelligible dialogs of mysterious faces ornamented with propaganda chasing you away from the stalls, able to extend their rule over the past memories for absence of concurrence.

-- in picture, above: one of the few glorious almost-non-fascist pictures found at the flea market. Unless the little boy's hat is in fact the very fascist military d'annunziano alpine hat of his father.

Since this new blog address is somehow like a fresh new start for the whole italy-is-falling thing, I'd like to make more changes with it if that's OK with you.
So, I am getting rid of the link list on the sidebar, that "collection of blowjobs" as someone would have called it.
Yes, goodbye to my blogroll.
Instead, I will pay my debts to the blogs I read and to the blogs that link to me by referring to them more often in the posts, what do you think. After all, those in-post links are much more important, if only because you have to give grounds for them.

Thus, today I am suggesting you all to pay a visit to the magic work, the evocative prose and the disturbing beautiful paintings of Birds will peck you (see picture above). I got caught into this great blog coming from Dennis Cooper's blog, where a lot of other outstanding artists and aspiring artists hang around.
I will link lots of them in the future because I'll need their attention here, or so I hope. And this will be real slutty blogging, I know.

-- picture thanks to Birds will peck you