so many times songs are there for those who want to look into their own feelings, sadness for example. so happens to me as I listen to "Bene" by Francesco de Gregori, I watch my buried sadness with affection and sympathy-- while the tears accumulate at a higher rate inside, effortlessly -- and so once again, the absent melody enthralls me, words that go around and around things explaining nothing, only scraps for grabs, besides who can tell a whole story? It's a beautiful song. I think song writing is in the making these things generic and general-- everything becomes mine, the mood, the poetry in the bathroom, even the "vietnames face". Especially the vietnamese face. I won't get into that.

The milk of buffaloes (Italian buffaloes: see picture above). With the milk of buffaloes in Campania they make the "real" mozzarella (not the glossy white plastic you can find on most pizzas nowadays). But buffaloes are wild animals, not easy to tame and milk. Here is a bit of a story Guido Piovene run into, at the breedings in Paestum, Campania (y. 1953). Makes you think at the very beginnings, the mysterious moment when men began to tame wild animals with wise respecful tricks. I doubt things are still made that way though.

This primitive animal is strange and intelligent. She refuses to be milked if her calf is not attached at her nipple; only then, to feed him, she releases her precious milk, which otherwise she can hold back. And so, for each milking, the calf is shown to the mother; this ceremony, though, requires a sort of rite. At the moment of birth delivery, the only man the buffalo recognizes, the keeper, yells her name into her ear. The name does not consist of one word, but of a sung phrase. The buffalo does not forget the phrase anymore; it becomes her proper name forever, and at the same time the plea of the calf asking for milk. Even among two hundred buffaloes, each one of them knows her own distinguished phrase. The keeper told me some of them, which I transcribe from the local dialect: "She meddles in everything; you're never happy; the song is nice to hear; I like her because she's good looking and young; Donna Rosa controls them all; you are being presumptuous; I am truly beautiful". Other phrases, according to the moods of the keeper, reflect political ideas or sport passions; with some the keeper take advantage of his master, and even insults him, since the master cannot interfere between the buffalo and the keeper. As I said the phrases must be sung; it is an oriental chant, certainly of remote origins, similar to the one the muezzin sings from the minaret, and that the keeper sings at dawn before the cattle. After the song the buffaloes get out of the cattle and docilely give themselves to the milkers; without the magic phrase they wouldn't come out and they would use all their wild fury to rebel against any attempt to milk them.

(Guido Piovene, Viaggio in Italia, 1953. Translation by Italy is falling)