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.

"What is the matter?" Molinari shouted at him. "Has using that time-travel drug scrambled your wits, you don't know you've got only one tiny life and that lies ahead of you, not sideways or back? Are you waiting for last year to come by again or something?"
Reaching out, Eric took the paper. "That's exactly right. I've been waiting for a long time for last year. But I guess it's just not coming again."

-- Philip K. Dick, the novel I finished to read today; in picture above, at gardening school in the morning fog. days of exams.

Reading the wondrous Adventures of Augie March -- on which I have one or two reserves that I'll maybe put together later on -- I run into Bellow's definition of present day's police strip searches humiliations and ritual abuses. Of course back then it was only for supposed criminals, and now it's for everyone's hard luck (in the sense that you don't even have to be labeled as a criminal to be humiliated):

We had to empty our pockets; they were after knives and matches and such objects of harm. But for me that wasn't what it was for, but to have the bigger existence taking charge of your small things, and making you learn forfeits as a sign that you aren't any more your own man, in the street, with the contents of your pocket your own business: that was the purpose of it.
-- p. 174

on the other hand, right in the beginning of depression, when Augie had his adventures a lot of well meaning fellows bummed around and were given the label of "criminal" free of charge. Definitions can move just a little and involve so many--

Q. what else can i say? well, an advice for free: you could avoid people commenting, so you won't know how your readers are alike and you won't be disappointed by them.

A. Why, mr. Girogio, I get two comments a month when I'm lucky, what difference would it make? Plus, I do want to know people's feelings about what I write. To me, this is one of the few good reasons left for blogging... If anything, I am tired of my unknowns to be so silent. But I don't want to really change anything, or to really complain about anything. I write so little, with such difficulty. And I'd rather stop writing in public than close the comments down. To quote that supposed anonymous blogger (which isn't anonymous, really) in the previous post was just a way to lash a feeling out, that's all.
I don't know if this happens to the others too, if it happens to you. I think it is the impressions you accumulate with time. I think that I will never know how my readers are like -- but I keep growing involuntary feelings about them, how they are and how they are not, layers of impressions, probably false, that can worn out the relation with this theoretical readership, and with the general idea of writing "for the readers". Especially when writing terrifies you because it became so darn serious and personal and exposing. Which is the reason for the other quote... I think. It probably was there for those who were supposed to understand it. Although I am not so sure anymore [goes on mumbling incoherently]

"... ma io dico rubare quando il furto è fatto per mancanza d'immaginazione, di 'genio' come si dice a Napoli. A coloro che rubano idee dagli altri quando sono a corto delle proprie, a coloro che rubano frasi e stili e parole e trovate quando la loro immaginazione è smagrita o insecchita dal troppo sole, bisogna anzitutto far sapere che abbiamo visto, sentito, annusato. Li abbiamo visti, spezzare sbadatamente i rami nel frutteto e lasciare cartacce in giro. Bisogna mostrare loro che stanno sbagliando o sprecando tempo. Che scrivere è una strada difficile verso la verità, la verità dell'esperienza individuale beninteso. Bisogna che essi sappiano che parole e stili non sono che risultati o espedienti, i quali lasciati soli sono come innesti senza gemma. Puzzano di originalità, che è il più fasullo dei frutti. L'originalità, altrimenti indispensabile, non è necessaria se si toccano esperienze autentiche... e voglio dire, di certo non intellettuali (...)"
-- Scipione Corsaro, Il mio albero

"I'm not closing this blog but I wish I had entirely different readers. I'm tired of these unknowns. I want new ones."
-- Anonymous blogger

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song.

-- Pablo Neruda

The nervousness would pass with another jump in the sea probably. Any kind of sea, better a ocean. With a sleep in a new bed, a stranger bed. With a walk, finally, in the woods. With a argument with friends at a windy window of a bar. If I had friends. Reading a story from a book feeling that the story is really about myself (haven't had that sensation in years). The obscenity of this diary in public is that there is no solution to what happens, no perspective. It is a shame and a betrayal to the right reasons one should write for (put some distance between you and the events. Despite the mexican loves, I am no Jack Kerouac and I'm glad I ain't. Creativity is not a filtery flux but an alternative)
Martina had wrote "por que te amo tanto y podria amarte mas. eres tan diferente, eres la persona indicada para mi. recuerdas que en la playa me preguntaste; ¿cómo seria la persona a la que yo podría amar? y seria muy parecida a ti." I read and I thought, how is it that I am? How can I be loved? I guess it's a normal reaction. And it was for just a instant. Then I sucked it up, thirsty and excited and lonesome -- and let love grow insanely, foolishly (now look what you have done!) It was even sweeter and stronger when the words were said face to face, mouth to ear. I don't wish to take anything back, or to push it on. I just wish it made anything else smaller (it didn't). I wish that the distance I feel with my parents, or better the unfriendliness, so ungrateful, would fade. Healed like a small cut. I wish for a late afternoon, idling on a wooden bench, touching the guitar and feeling placated because I did my bit, my duty, what I had to do. But what is it that I have to do? What is my bit? I think that not even once in the last ten years I felt that I did my bit. This is comic. Comic... after the argument, the night we slept in different beds, in Mexico city. I wrote her: "es la una de noche, yo he regresado recién en el hostal dormiente y silencioso. he ido caminando para el centro, un poco llovía con much ruido y un poco no, las calles estaban casi vacíe-- y volviendo soy pasado abajo de tu departamento-- y pasando pensaba todas las cosas del mundo, pensaba que en la cama tu pensabas a mi, esperándome-- y pensaba que en aquel preciso momento tu estaba haciendo l'amor con alguien -- y que yo sariá estado aliviado de descubrirlo-- con una escena un poquito cómica (...)" but then I stopped thinking at all the things. Now I try not to think. I close my hands and the hands are empty, only a little dark green dirtiness beneath my fingernails remains, and I cannot think because I am not holding something in my hands. If only I could start thinking again, and walking across open doors, the last open doors before the doors to be opened. Whatever that means. To a reader I own this explanation (this custom declaration): that still in the world for me there are things of beauty, things to revere; that in between the swearing, the nervousness and the whining stays on the unceasing need to contemplate, and describe (describing being the way to give) and move into the world and be a friend of the world; that if I fail, and stumble, it is not for a moment that I seriously cease to believe that "we are worthed as much as anyone who came before us, and each one of us is destined to conquer the world. That we are close to the origins more than ever." Amen.

-- In picture, above: Volcano Poas, Costarica. Not visible in figure the smell of sulfur that the old man from Colombia described as "the thing Chavez smelled"

(...) y sé muy bien que no estarás,
ni aquí adentro, la cárcel donde aun te retengo,
ni allí fuera, este rió de calles y de puentes.
No estarás para nada, no serás ni recuerdo,
y cuando piense en ti pensaré un pensamiento
que oscuramente trata de acordarse de ti.

-- Julio Cortazar, Futuro

Linate is the old claiming baggage hall, the dark grey and yellow interiors, the faces of the policemen saying welcome back to Italy, the guy from Modena coming back from Brazil -- he says laughing, welcome to the place in the world where it is the hardest to make love -- I stand there feeling dizzy for the twentyfive hours three planes flight, my bag sliding to me over the conveyor belt, opened from the top, the plastic bag with coffee from chiapas and oaxaca chocolate spat out few bags past -- a pair of pants from guatemala is there too -- I don't care, what's lost is lost, I throw it all above the plastic seats and repack the bag mumbling a welcome to italy to myself-- outside, she's there in a violet dress, others unknown crowding the picture of the waiting --the warmth of Milano's air around us is less intense but somewhat ready to suffocate -- the sky low over the airport, in hues of gray and blue too bright to be looked at -- our embrace is honest? it is honest--

me and Libi have sex inside the car outside of the airport of Linate, her body is in my hands, obeys in the old familiar hard way we know --she gives out high pitched shrills, I feel like eating and swallowing and digesting her body-- it's different from the other sex across the ocean. I think I can't compare. I warn her to be careful, because I have a half broken nose I should take to the hospital tomorrow or so-- not that I feel like it. I don't make up the story of how it got broken, I just leave out the detail -- of the girl I was with --I don't even let the thought get into my mind. I say I know, it doesn't look broken, but I can feel it, like it is harder to breathe with the left nostril -- also it creaks when I touch it-- kept together by the skin -- gives me a weird feeling to the stomach. I learned to talk about love with my heart and now I suspect I love two persons, or I suspected it. I wish I had the room to say that as well.

At home we talk and make love again few times, I am tired and what I see is confused at moments --though real. Later we are half naked on the pavement, I am pouring out the many presents in front of her, it's fun, but then the feast is over pretty soon. I missed Libi, and yet her picture in front of me is not entirely on focus. Now I just feel in need to talk it out with someone. What I can't say bothers me more than the need to sleep-- although pretty soon I fall asleep, and wake up at the beginning of the night -- and awake in front of the window I still try to keep down the thought that, all right, now I wish I could leave -- tomorrow -- again. The bulky memories, labyrinths of words and desires -- the thought of Martina and the bad bad way we said goodbye to each other is down somewhere too, and it's like when the story you want to tell or write about is so big -- too big -- you'll never find a way to begin the job to tell it all out.