SUPERDEATH
Daniele Formica, 2024
A part of me
A part of me misses how your ethos was balancing my nymphomania.
A part of me always felt like a huntress, aroused the more the pray would run away.
A part of me would devour the world, be totally penetrated by it, engulfing it like a torus donut of pure energy and matter, a pulsing star, blossoming flower of life-time-unbalance-balance.
A part of me fears its own hunger, its own destabilizing forceful hunger, Sodom chained with spider strings or angel hair.
A
“Sometimes when I reflect too much I get depressed;” started Vincent.
“Like, when I ask myself questions such as: am I doing good?
Am I the person that I want to become?”
“Am I the person that I want to become?” repeated Daniele in his head, inquisitor tone, not attempting to answer, but questioning the question in itself. In truth, he had no idea where to start answering this question, for he was unsure whether he had already become the person he had wanted to become -and had since kept being that person; or he had stopped wanting and just accepted becoming and being; or perhaps that willing and becoming were incompatible forms of his existence of which he ultimately had no control over (yet his person was escaping their definitions by recursively becoming the willing-person and the becoming-person)… and as he was questioning Vincent’s question, he wasn’t looking for the final answer either, as he felt the fleeting nature of their conversation would not suffice to complete the logical infinity that the just start of an answer would require to undertake- and thus he simply questioned, allusively, vaguely, as he looked at the sun shining on the bricks across the street; suggesting that infinity towards them, behind the threshold of that questioned question, and closing it all together as he drew another breath.
Conversing itself had become increasingly performative lately. Daniele partly attributed this feeling to the de-personification process he had been theorizing and undergoing, according to which all his personality layers would be peeling off like shredding skins, increasing the difficulty for him to take a standpoint, position himself willingly, make a choice, decide. Why had he just ordered an espresso, that same day, at the café, briefly before Vincent’s question? The choice was easy: it was the cheapest option on the board. Daniele was really cheap, saving had replaced the possibility of taste: his chance at personification. His choices were no longer meant to shape a personal story, a self-made narrative. His decisions were not effects of a conscious will or forming force. His existence was informed by the leftover- which often meant what had been saved, isolated, left alone by the situation. Saving allowed Daniele to increasingly hide from his own sense of self. By avoiding to choose and refusing the possibility to shape taste by choosing as much the cheapest option, he was trying to reduce his life to a little more than bare existence. Of course this was not radically enforced upon himself in a totalitarian way: spontaneous intersubjective experience would allow for choices to emerge accordingly, and care and love were as much Daniele’s concerns as that basic instinct of survival.
“What will be left at the end of this? Will I finally find myself? Will I reach the core?” Despite all the love he had for life, he had no clue why he existed for, nor what he therefore needed. He kept questioning, listening, feeling, opening up. When he did that, the suggestion of an answer always quickly came. And as he heard that voice -that silent quick suggestion- he was immediately filled with infinity again, to the point that he could keep on de-personifying himself out of love and curiosity for life.
Was that answering voice God? Or was it an embedded cognitive function, a self-manifesting sign, or the void, perhaps? How could Daniele hold onto that voice of infinity? How could he keep on entering that kind of prayer, meditation, relation of proximity with a deeper, higher, lower or transcendental- other, nothingness, do-main, entity and sense of self that was greater and simpler and more complicated and yet as clear as evanescent, as transitory as eternal, as permanent and permeable, confusing, revealing, hiding, quenching, placing, alienating, isolating and communing all together and the more and the less? Was any path the right path and how would he distinguish right and wrong? How would the challenge return to him, how would he tell, every time anytime, face himself, at that crossroad, devious, obvious, committing and revolting, attempting to hold breath, suspending, almost suffocating, yet with love and willingness to reveal, to share, to bring that one into many and many into one? How would he show this? How would he distinguish invisible from visible, hesitation from patience, urgency from arrogance, humility and insecurity, uncertainty and mistrust? Where will he find that path once more, and all together once again as he drew and drew breaths along with that suggesting voice?
He was trying hard to type down every single thought that came out of that espresso at the bar earlier on in the day. The computer on the desk was breathing loudly: its memory was running in loops as Daniele was using the machine to encode his energy in information. Was this moment worth reporting? The warm light coming from the designer lamp on his left he found so difficult to describe, yet was so attached to; the old big plant in the shadowed back-ground, his bookshelf, the leather couch, the night. As he was typing he could hear the music his description played, he could hear as he was playing the sound of those words in prose, their rhythm lingering between fiction and truth, that marvelous illusion of a codex, language, as blocks of matter were drawn and distinguished and brought upon that small world of his: this fiction, a reality, the cell-phone charging in his back, thoughts tangling and dinner leftovers waiting to be put into the fridge.
“Every music needs its silences.” Julian had told him the previous night at the birthday party. Julian was referring to Daniele’s life, Daniele’s creative output, his work attitude, his manic artistic production and the challenges the present had brought forward. Julian had been concerned with Daniele’s health: as much as he admired his prolific creativity, he felt such production to be unexplainable and almost ill, sick, inhuman- to the point that, as a human composition made of sounds, Daniele himself had to alternate those sounds with silences. Was he neglecting silence? That could have been the case- Daniele had confessed, but the truth had not revealed itself yet, and his health had replaced it as the current answer: Daniele was healthy, conducting a life with regular rhythms, exercising, balanced sleeping patterns, five meals a day including all necessary nutriment, going for walks, reading, thinking, and even his sexual libido had been in check in the last months… nothing to worry about unless something else would come up. The computer kept working fine, breathing regularly, but the silence around it made its breath echoing louder. The night was only beginning, but Daniele decided to stop informing and put the machine to sleep for a while.
Night in the wrong studio
Burgers. Rain. Nightfall. Lights and hiding kids, undercover police, green parrots sleeping, burnt matches on the floor, dirt, piles of things, leftover Oreo desserts that taste like airplane food, Elmex toothpaste at the window, magnets on heater’s pipe (maybe that’s the most similar thing). Listing things to neglect the acceptance of a compromise, my alienation and the experience of it, a displacement mid Saturday evening with no real plans but to fall back to the place we always welcome ourselves in: art; or its altars- our studios. This time not mine, the sound plays different in this chamber, the space, the objects, the air. It has a different air, that of the wrong studio. Familiar, yet mistaken. Personal, yet impersonal. A limbo. Do I gently start emanating my art and conquering with love my proximities, seducing every particle and instance of space-time to the gentle rhythmic dance of my sacred core carried through this personal vessel?
The rain leaks inside here as well. It is a building problem: it rains inside most of the studios here. The system taken to deal with it here is different, though: lots of fabric scraps and old t-shirts laid on the window side to absorb the gentle rhythmic dropping.
“Hey can you help me one second?”
I don’t want to talk about this anymore. You get the idea: strange-ness, strange, weird, close contact, co-presence, co-habitation with otherness. In the habit of the other.
“My mother is going to Uganda.” Jan Dirk says while laying glue and gesso on his canvas. He will paint it soon. What will it be? Will it be a big sun, something bright, with light freckling leaves, a landscape or the Xerox of that landscape, an abstraction, a feeling of light, gentle, kind, generous and plenty abundance, carefully and elegantly balanced, given in rations of care, brushed away from fear some cautious hesitation, a heartfelt contemplation. Will it have one big figure or many small ones, will it be filled with details or will it let its modus speak beyond its forms? Does it matter? Will we get a masterpiece a month or two from now?
I sip the ginger tea and give my back to him, listening to the brushstrokes as the rabbit glue smell fills the air. The silence is com-forting too. It is familiar to be together in a room working at our own fulfilling and emptying.
“Okay, layer done!” and the water pours from the sink by the door, as the brushes get washed.
The breath that exhausts before experience
Trembling, trembling pedestal upon which my keyboard stands and fingers tap like tambourine like drums like little flimsy war drums pitpitpit pat, pat
The dancers, the dancers, the dance of life.
Amazing aperiodic crystals fluctuating unreadable unpredictable codes encrypted in butterfly spasms antifa squatter neoliberal academics deconstructive pathetic attempts my life is. My life is. The dance of life.\my life is. I want to do an act of love
I am standing across the street, at my shoulders the church where Spinoza’s bones are buried, and am looking at the brand new conservatorium and through the glass windows I manage to intra-see the dancers, two groups, on two different floors, doing different dances. The ones at the bottom rehearse a wave-like group pose uplifting one of them like Géricault’ Medusa’s shipwreck. The ones on top do coordinate legs movements and feel more like a military choreography. I then look at the office building of the municipality next to it and think of the dancers in there, or the dancers at the café downstairs, or in the trams punctually streaming through my view, and the Brecht-told theater you have already heard of and perhaps managed to act in. Nevertheless, as much as describable, this dance cannot be completed; thus it needs to keep on being performing and performed.
To an extent you may think that this keeping on is painful. You may think that having to get rid of everything that caused this is going to be painful: no, no, no. We will treasure some and most of the rest we will let the others build. I hope you will realize you can’t build any longer anything else than rotten ruins. That you have to stop dancing and start dancing. Can you please reset? Do you need to understand anything to go on, ethically acting according to what you ethically believe in, which I do not know if it’s also what you ethically know or what you ethically sense, or have a glimpse of, or is simply ethically invisible and beyond our comprehension; yet you’re so small to be powerless and totally influenced by it?
That ignorance and glooming wonderfully attractive and seductive void upon which we can’t surrender our fatalism and act deter-mined and will spirited. That void that’s seemingly so black because no light, no colour and no language matter, no matter no energy NO. That void phone call, like, post comment, notification, Hello? Is there anybody out there? Can you hear me? That void. Masters students reading poems out of cellphones void. Babel bauble idiosyncratic and victim of language fascism and icon fascism and culture fascism victim void. That butterfly free little crushed baby squeezed exploded bomb flower of blood void. That cruel kid ass pooping gift the pride of made matter void. That Cronos chronic children bite crunch void. That monster Monere money sign administration void. That monkey monastery mispronounced monk vibes, friendly images, void. Those fading things exorcised and breath catching up to experience, but forgetting comes first. That laptop correcting my beautiful miss types bitch. That violence I wash, that water I drink, that live I must. Life I must. That love big, big, big love and breathed revolution, that live-stream revolution, that never ending never beginning revolution, that tip-tap-toe threshold limbo acrobat funambulist threshold revolution, that ongoing inner outer antianti-fafa revolution, that motion, catharsis, anarsis, catabasis, anabasis, catastrophe, anastrophe, revolution. That point of connection held tight with pinky fingers and testicles, nipples, eyes, and countless dead mothers’ hair revolution. I can’t surprise my monstrosity can’t surprise it’s fun and diverging. We live. We love. Do we?
Where do I want to be tonight?
Earlier I was waiting for Vincent to tell me what time to catch up for a drink to meet his best friend Elly, but he canceled last minute as he was not feeling good. I was hurt, but I understood. That meant my Saturday night was going to be free -perhaps this is even the first truly free Saturday night where I am alone since I quit my job. How pleasant! I welcome you, Saturday night, let’s be together, only you and I, and the pasta pesto and zucchini I am digesting, and the mouse living in the static asbestos wall between mine and the neighboring unit –as well as on the ceiling- whom has been rattling and scratching since Thursday night at 10 to midnight. Since I got home I have been paranoid of having difficulties breathing, perhaps the scratched asbestos fibers are getting in my lungs (will the mouse die out of it?) or perhaps it’s the mold rising up from under the floor, or the dry air of the radiators, or psychosomatic stress, anxiety, inability of facing the full company of myself. Take a deep breath Daniele.
So here I am, where do I want to be tonight?
A castle. This answer comes out linguistically before imaginatively. I just actually don’t care about how the castle looks, it may be as small as to fit it in the palm of my hand, even made only by a couple of atoms or less and besides, it could actually look like a dot, a dark nest, actually do not make any effort to imagine a castle at all. I just brought up the castle as a word. Maybe because castle is the English closest to Italian casa, which means home. Casa, casa, casa, where are you? I have felt exiled in the Netherlands, recently. This is definitely not my home. I also wonder why I am still here, what I am waiting for (if there is anything?). I am avoiding facing something, holding myself back. I do not understand why; but I am not fully involved. It is as if I am saving up and waiting for a sign to make my move. More precisely, I am saving up and training, preparing, studying. A part of me knows that my house is in the future, it is not now: there is no need to enforce it, all that is sufficient is safeguarding that possibility, that tiny point that projects my future casa in this camera obscura of a present. All I have to do is, knowing that the image of my future is projected behind my shoulders, walk to-wards that tiny source of light, without blinding myself – and if I feel insecure I can always turn back and see the projected image, again, and how it looks from where I got.
It was all so confusing in his head. Daniele was trying to dimension his existence, once again, while immersed in the full darkness of his tiny living room –lit only by the screen in front of which he was typing, as a new mechanism of self-exorcism, auto therapy, narcissistic romanticism, effortless reportage. Truth is, Daniele Formica did not know how to coexist within himself. Truth? Well, one of them. There were just so many things he barely knew, and so many more he knew not to know. For instance, he was still thinking about that remark Jan Dirk had told him the day before “You are such a Chris-tian”. Daniele knew very little of Christians and Christianity, he thought it was related to believing in Christ and he associated it with the church, that he had been about twice in his life and never for the whole performance. He thought that being such a Christian meant being kind to the other, whatever other may be, but then he could not bring himself to understand why Jan Dirk tone was so demeaning and accusative in yelling at him “You are such a Chris-tian”. He reasoned further, and thought that: one, Jan Dirk was probably the true Christian for he could see what a Christian is; and two, Jan Dirk tone and sentence was actually in defense of Daniele’s previous accusations to him of being “Such a Nietzschean” alternated with “Such a fascist”. Then the scariest possibility presented itself to Daniele: by the same dangerous recursive reasoning, he himself could potentially be “The Nietzschean” and even worse “The Fascist”. For a while now Daniele had been constantly denying the possibility of being a fascist and by telling himself of being an antifascist he had implicitly denied that his way of thinking, choosing and feeling could actually be the wrong one. He had bought and read many antifascist authors and was even currently studying the jail notebooks of Gramsci himself. How could it be possible that he was the fascist? And if not, was he such a Christian? Or a Nietzsche-an? Or was he an anarchist? A Zen master? A fool? The wrong one? What was he? Daniele was definitely holding back, he was running fast to escape that sentence that would frame and pin him down to a definition, orientation, modus, identity, form, performance, code, language, word. He was so afraid to be pinned down. Not so much -as one would assume at first sight- for the aesthetic problematics of colour; but rather because facing his sentence would mean knowing his punishment: knowing that from there onwards he would stop living to start becoming and being.
Ma perche’? Perche penso che definirmi sia la fine delle mie scelte?
Perche invece di utilizzare definizioni gia’ fatte, io voglio vedere, sforzandomi con tutto me stesso di tenere il processo aperto, voglio vivere dove mi portera’. Le sentenze non faranno che chiudermi dentro, chiudermi. Io voglio aprire. Io voglio vivere.
(But why? Why do I think that defining myself means the end of my choices? Because instead of using readymade definitions, I want to see, struggling with all of myself to keep the process open, I want to live where it will bring me. Sentences will do nothing but closing me in, closing. I want to open. I want to live.)
So where do I want to be tonight?
I want to be right here. How many of us have taken the turn speak-ing? How many of us have harmoniously collaborated? How many of us have structured their voices so that only one firm sound would come out clear, word by word? How many of us have argued and fought and together decided which one was the right idea, the right thought to accept and express? How many of us have worked and are working so that voices, ideas and lives are brought forward, as one? And where are we all? Where do we want to be, right now, tonight? Right here! Right here! Right here!
As the writing exercise went on, Daniele embarked himself in the journey of pluralism. He fantasized about all the Danieles present within, before, after and for Daniele. He imagined all the Danieles in a collective action, saw how multiple voices would become one, his voice, Daniele’s voice, and how that voice again would split into many, many sounds, many thoughts, many interpretations. As they were writing, the Danieles felt their breathing was expanding and contracting finally in different fractions of dimensions. They were finally feeling how every one of their cellular combustion was yes working unison within their presence, yet at the same time carrying along all of their individuality. Some Danieles where enjoying these thoughts, other Danieles where taking them with distance, even mistrusting them. But how could Danieles mistrust Danieles? How could Danieles work against one another, and yet result in one Daniele? The majority of them started reflecting on the statistic marvels coordinating those principles of decision making.
“It must have been, until now, a magical, intuitive synthesis that we hadn’t noticed before.” they agreed.
“This synthesis, in a lapse of time so fast that seems infinite and inexistent- computes all of our directions and results into one. And it is able to do it… instantly, effortlessly.” they added.
“We think its magical quality comes from the revealing essence that a unison direction manifested in a spell of time. This revealing essence, like peaking trough the unconscious, listening to our Danieles that are also there, but usually not… in the same way…” they continued.
“Danieles you are magical! For the first time we see you, and by seeing you we are left astonished, we flinch, hesitate, stumble, marvel, stare, stop functioning, miracles! Miracles! Miracles!” they exclaimed.
Many Danieles were entertained and exhilarated by the thoughts of the others. It was as if the whole Daniele was a concert of happy hilarious laughs and astute and sharp awareness and intuitions that the Danieles where exchanging with one another, all under the cosmic light reflected in the perfect crystal that they themselves were being and becoming.
“We are finally one” They asserted in echo, realizing and mesmerizing at the potential they had achieved (and were marveled by, stunned even). They could finally see each other. It was like the unification of a state (some Daniele proposed).
But now immediately other Danieles: “Be careful with calling us a unified state, a state can be dangerous!”
“WHY?”
“A state wants to stay.”
“The function of the state is to state itself”
“Aren’t we stating ourselves?”
“Yes, but when we state ourselves…”
“IF we state ourselves!”
“Okay, if we state ourselves… we must realize that we will draw a border between our state (of Danieles) and the non-state;”
“What if there are Danieles in the non-state that we do not see??”
“What if there are non-Danieles in our state???”
“Oh man so many questions!”
“How will we distinguish between Danieles?” said a dangerously looking Daniele.
“I am afraid of the direction this is taking” said a weak old shaky Daniele.
There were also Danieles writing down all the debates, and Danieles that were thinking in silence, others observing, others painting the situation, or drifting off thinking about happy places outside that hideous conversation that the majority of Danieles was taking part in. And the harder these Danieles imagined of the happy places, the more Danieles were marveled and distracted, by the same magic, and followed on imagining those places. Now many Danieles were thinking of the sun, of a bright sun and a beach and a palm tree and sand and the sea (and some analytical Danieles where questioning why exactly these images- that here the writing Danieles are unfortunately reporting as words… but they were firstly images for the imagining Danieles- why exactly those images and not others).
While all the analytical Danieles, writing Danieles and imagining Danieles where playing at interpreting and analyzing happy places (sun, beach, sea); soon some Danieles realized of another class of Danieles –the analytical-analytical Danieles (the writing Danieles and naming Danieles will refer to them as the AA Danieles). The AA Danieles were definitely in series and hierarchies and they looked like mirrors. They were a bit like looping mirrors or succession of recursive screens (to the imaginative Danieles). There could be strings of AA Danieles classes, according to the levels and metalevels of analysis. (for example, an AAA Daniele analyzes an AA Daniele) and hypothetically (the hypothetical Danieles, or philosopher Danieles, or propositional Danieles-would argue) Hypothetically there were infinite AA series of Danieles (like the infinity of a mirror reflected in a mirror), but as of now the empiric Danieles had only experienced a maximum level of AAA Danieles. Even though a wise looking Danie-le argued that the more the Danieles observed themselves, the more AA Danieles would be generated and their strings prolonged, though this mysterious intuition could not be proven by Daniele yet, argued the mathematic Danieles. The philosophers kept making propositions, the scientists looking for proof, some kept doing calculations, while others went on wandering through the marvels reflected in their mirrors.
It is still night, this night, tonight. And there is something else I want to say: while I was doing this exercise, many more doors opened up. I found it very functional and fun to generate, listen to and give life, by naming, to all these different Danieles. There are some fundamental questions such as “do they actually exist? does it matter? how can I prove it?”; but I think apart from stimulating questions what has been really interesting is also the literary process in itself. As I started the experiment with inserting the plurality within my-self in a first moment I did it in a more abstract way, more suggestive (or poetic?), and then this lead to a dialogue part. This was further fun as I was literally typing nonstop an improvised dialogue that I was actually having as a form of live-stream reflection. And through this livestream reflection another layer emerged (informed by my writing about voices and pluralism a couple of sentences before). I was having the intuition to think of a subtle inclination for each entry in the dialogue; as if different Danieles saying different things are thus also different and therefore *have different tones or voices*. This immediately erupted in the idea of the argument between having to agree and come out against the dangers of de-fining the Danieles further (why dangers?) (Because in a way by defining and naming the Danieles –e.g. The writer Danieles- they become real within the fiction, so all of the sudden this reality gives them literary mass and energy, they are drawn out of nowhere and all of the sudden have a present active role in the game of litera-ture). It was interesting to experience in first person how there were some Danieles that wanted to hold back, resist to the process of defining themselves, but how the more they were resisting (I felt it) the more the Danieles were actually being revealed, named, classified and understood. And this went on until something key happened: right before introducing the AA Danieles, I had the intui-tion that my process was quickly jumping between bringing new Danieles to life and reflecting about that act. As in, a part of me (Daniele) was still watching it all unravel before itself, and this part had managed to be out of the picture (until the secondary level of reflection). Furthermore, this game of recursive levels that I am creating was unconsciously caused earlier by alternating the first person with the third, which has been my entrance point to the third-plural and its inflation, implosion, fragmentation. I am riding it like a wave. And now, dear Daniele, I am suggested by you that//// wait……
You are saying that you think you are able to write in second per-son? As if, I am reading-listening to you, which is me, which is you, while you are writing? And so am I? And you are also all of the Dan-ieles, right? Like, hello guys!! I missed you. So cool. Wow, what a wonderful night. Who is talking now.
“Should we use the dialogue encryption?”
“I think this would make it easier for our non-Daniele readers;”
“You are a genius!”
“NO, you are!”
“this is ridiculous;”
“I think this game is getting out of hand.”
“Again, the pessimistic you, me.”
“What do you want to achieve with this?”
“Nice question!”
“I think; it is a game…. Maybe I am fighting our loneliness.” some of us are almost crying, while some are in disgust.
“It is also to show the others, the non-Daniele, that we can be this. That you, you non-Danieles are also this!”
“And what this is, exactly, we will find out only by playing the game!”
“This is not necessarily a game, it has no aim…”
“indeed, if there would be an aim, that would be to understand it.”
“But understanding it, would mean surpassing it, which would entail destroying ourselves… or would the structure fold itself so to al-ways catch up with our own revelations?”
“I like talking to you guys, do you think we are making a lot of steps thou?”
“POLL RESULT: 50% yes 50% no, UPDATE:51%YES, 49% NO”
“You have to be patient, Daniele.”
“And you have to let us all take our time.”
“You are right, thank you.”
“I have one more question:” Daniele hesitates, “so far, I have been able to use almost all persons and speeches I, you, He, It, We, You, Them,”
“I don’t know if it’s correct, yet go ahead!”
“well, when I think of all the Danieles inside us, and all the possibili-ties, and I think of all the pronouns, then I start thinking…”
“GENDER!”
“SHE!”
“yes, exactly!”
“Where is she??”
“I am here bitches!”
“Oh my god”
“She is here”
“oh wow, you too!”
“Yes, we are more than one actually.”
“Oh wow, how is this possible? I heard at least two female voices!”
“Wait a minute. Are you sure those were female voices?”
“No, well, I said that because I thought –playing by the literary rules- if I say they are female voices, then they are female voices. And also the word “bitches” really made me think of a specific way in which Daniele pronounces this word, in which I pronounce this word.”
“yes, yes, correct. But actually, in here, there are infinite voices and all of them, I would argue, are genderless.”
“there is only one gender in here, and that is DANIELE!”
“DANIELE is not a gender!”
“is it a GENE?”
“I like that more!”
“Some of us are still hesitant...”
“we will leave it at that”
“perhaps we should make some points on what to discuss next time”
“I don’t know if we do, we can also trust our guts”
“DANIELE GUTS”
“Yes exactly”
Have I been given to this name, or has this name been given to me?
How am I fitting it so well?
Am I fitting it well at all?
Would you be able to tell, among millions of us, which one is me?
The real me?
Daniele?
If all you had was my name,
would that even matter
how to call me
to call me at all
at all
all Daniele would I call
to find myself in everything
the plant in front of me, Daniele
the lamp by my side, Daniele
this empty glass, Daniele
my cell phone, Daniele
the glass table, Daniele
the leather couch, Daniele
memories, Daniele
impulses, Daniele
contradicting ideas, reflections,
ideas that come from admired non-Danieles, Daniele
to all that is not
one word only
Daniele
An hour before De Helena Podium workshop
It was exactly an hour before De Helena Podium workshop. Daniele had already drunk one cup of coffee and was half way through the second one. He had just been to the toilet, relieved, and had seen on his way back the first neighbors walking in (all people above 50), and the kitchen staff serving the first brunches. As a matter of fact, the workshop was a deal because free brunch was served to the participants and Daniele was counting on it as his free meal for the day. Classical music was playing loudly, resonating up to his studio that was 50 meters and two walls away from the kitchen. There he was: sitting in his corner by the window, recollecting all the thoughts he had been having in the toilet and before going there, as he had just finished reading something he had wrote about him-self.
“oh yes,” he remembered “there were a couple of problems.”
“First of all, I have the narrator problem” indeed it seemed that Daniele had developed an overwhelming tendency for auto narra-tion, that is, Daniele had created me, your narrator. I could not only speak of Daniele in all possible persons and make of them and their life any story I wanted, I was also, by the mere fact of narrating, tak-ing over all the other Danieles’ attempts at individuation -so that the experience of our main character would be reduced to echoes and echoes and recursive echoes of an unspoken yet heard voice (this voice) that would simply go on telling, a story, without the need for any “real” content for its literary endeavor to take place.
“well, dear narrator, that’s not right”
Indeed, I am not precise. I would need input to keep the story go-ing. I wonder where it comes from?
“But can’t you hear the seagulls gulling in the distance? Doesn’t it transport you above the rooftops of The Hague, within the gray monotone skies, looking down at us the people? Can’t you hear the kids laughing and playing outside? Can’t you hear the kitchen next door and all the sounds of preparation for De Helena podium work-shop brunch?”
Indeed, only by listening and pausing still, Daniele would experi-ence life around him.
“There are so many things that you make me think of, narrator. So many problems”
“Go on”
“One. Do I choose what I experience? Is it within us, the Danieles, to experience Daniele’s world? (Or the world as Daniele’s?)”
“Two. Why is then the world a non-Daniele? Is the world a non-Daniele? Is that connected to will, to the Daniele will, the fact that Daniele will does not coincide with the world will? But if the world is only Daniele’s world, then wouldn’t the two necessarily coincide?”
Daniele, while typing, was reminding himself to slow down, to take breaths, to focus, as many questions where exploding –like often- into an eruption of hot lava, and as mesmerizing, the spectacle was becoming sublimely incomprehensible. His left reached for the cof-fee cup, grabbed it and brought it to his mouth. He sipped a mouth-ful, yet did not swallow. He kept the coffee in his mouth while typ-ing some more sentences.
“Gulp. There is some falsity in what we are doing: here your nota-tions are suggesting the reader in me that I am talking out loud, while that is not true. I am talking to you, but only you –narrator inside me- can hear them. The kitchen people can’t, the seagulls can’t, if there were hidden microphones in my studio around me right now, they would only hear the sound of my fingers typing on the keyboard”.
Daniele checked the time. 11:39. He still had some time left to write before the brunch. Or workshop. Or both. Daniele was also right in pointing out the fallacies of his game to the narrator, and as he was doing so, he realized that perhaps the narrators themselves where more than one.
Indeed, this whole problem started while I was thinking about my voices, “the Danieles” and let me correct myself, not all of them are voices, some of them are images, some are fluxes of images, some are shakes across the bodies, sounds, vibrations, sensations, some are pungent smells, memories, emotions, Danieles can be many things… in fragmentation -which brings me to the problem of distin-guishing them. We argued before that some of us are afraid of be-ing called out, or even afraid of coming out. I think that’s interest-ing. What I also hear recently is that others think it’s impossible and even false, a delirium, to do what I am trying to do. Danieles simply do not exist, thus they cannot be distinguished. This game is non-sense: there is no narrator, no voices, no images, no sensations, no seagulls, no kitchen, no De Helena podium workshop brunch at all. All of this is not existing within Daniele. All of this is not Daniele. Daniele does not exist, Daniele (or Danieles) are only a name. A name that calls. Daniele calls Daniele and literature follows.
“once again you are not getting to the point, I like that you keep pulling me back and forth between being and not being, I find this movement to be very sexual, I…”
“Imagine Jan Dirk and Hansje making love at less than a kilometer away from us, as they confessed last night this is what they will be doing right now”
Immediately the camera view zoomed off from the screen of Dan-iele, revealing all the things around it: Daniele’s hands right in front of it, his digital camera by the bottom right corner, hard disk by the left, the colorful gouache drawing behind, the hanging underwear torn apart holding a tiny rock from Iceland, another drawing… the vision kept zooming out leaving the other details undistinguishable, now taking the eyes of a seagull floating above De Helena building. The Seagull-Daniele-camera could see the gray concrete building of De Helena, the oval shaped green grass park in front of it, the brown-red bricked rooftops from the popular houses around, the cars, the streets. The Seagull-Daniele-camera quickly transited to-wards the Schilderswijk and dove into the street where Jan Dirk house was, to peak behind the curtains, in the bedroom, what was going on.
“Perhaps they might be at Hansje’s house, I don’t remember”
“This activity feels intrusive; it is as if you are sneaking purposely on your parents having sex.”
“Yes that’s exactly what I am doing, literary, literally and psychically, perhaps even imaginatively, as a seagull with teleporting abilities.” “But ultimately, that is not what he is really doing. All he is doing is typing on his laptop (the seagull vanished in a cloud of dust and feathers). “
You know, that’s what I was actually thinking about earlier, at around 11:00 o’clock, while I was in the toilet. I was thinking about this narrator and coloring/distinguishing the Danieles. Specifically, I was imagining the zooming out Cameraman-Daniele levitating from my back as I am typing in third person. Like the third eye -or fourth, in this brief case. And I was thinking about the elastic possibilities of playing these naming games, the funny-provoking questions and challenges that come from them. E.g. How many levels of Danieles can I truly name (I previously said 3)? Is naming proving? Am I mak-ing things up?
Or challenges such as how much energy and focus do I need to be able to keep the count, in my head, of specific functioning Danieles (or parts of me)? If I consider, for instance, the task of writing, the task of coming up with thoughts, translating them from thoughts to words, doing this while I also analyze them and control that they are correct, re-correcting as I further formulate them and put them down, looking at myself from a distance doing all these things, look-ing at myself looking, imagining the looker who is looking, associat-ing all these ideas to things I have read or heard, hesitating… how many things can we do, are we doing at the same time? And does becoming aware of them as we do them affects them? Then why is becoming aware of awareness reverberating to infinity, yet we don’t do that? Why don’t we stop functioning and pause existence and get stuck in a loop like a machine? Hardware against software. I draw breath. I continue. I see that infinite chain, that echo, that abyss, yet I move on. So in a way I float on the surface, stuck in the middle of an ocean: down the infinite, above the infinite. It is all so scary and exiting. I was trying to type exciting but it came out exit-ing, which is funny. Above all, what is scary about being surrounded by infinity, (and even realizing infinity is inside, therefore only infini-ty, nothing else, and a fragile feeble line holding on, connecting to these infinite extremities -a name-) this feels so imprisoning. OR liberating. Or imprisoning. Depends on how you look at it, I guess. If you are the name, you are euphoric to be infinite. If you are the infinite, you are desperate to be a name.
I will finish to sip my coffee and go to De Helena Podium workshop brunch.
Melting in the dada world
“Oh me am I relevant?”
What was relevant? Was he relevant? And why was he afflicted by such doubt? His mother would reassure him: “you are relevant to me!!”
“Of course Mum; you wouldn’t be able to negate that even if you’d want to kill me.” He was going nowhere, or so it seemed from the point of view of those concerned with the relevance of things. They were a bunch of people with little patience and a lot of hunger for meaning, stressing about the importance to make statements, to “have something to say” “show it” “give it all” be more than “a pass-time artist”. The meaningful people where relying solely on people like him to find meaning. As a matter of fact, the people concerned with the relevance of things were filled with sadness and void and fear of life. They would cling the closest to those like him: the ques-tioners, the live-by, dada Danieles.
When he paid attention to their words, to their way of living, he was filled with silence and a melancholic emptiness. He really wished he could uplift them and find the message to say right there and then, to show them that relevance was not to be made as much as questioned, and that perhaps breathing would resolve much more than mumbling elaborated statement of sorts. The more he would gaze into them, the more his feelings would grow contorted. He would feel like wanting to explode, erupt nectar of life to feed them, evaporate into molecules they could breath. None of this would happen though, and he would be left speech-less sipping his sparkling wine on the chair of the fashionable res-taurant, listening to their attempt to push him into evolution, into tyranny.
Today I made a field where to bury the artist. This field I made cut-ting out flowers and flower-like things such as hands, penises, tools. I cut them from the former paintings of the old artist, who wants to stay anonymous (he might not like people knowing he surrenders his painting to my work). This transition of property, uplifted by a fake trade we set up -the old artist asked a work of mine in return, which I have gladly given as, right now, all is dada Daniele- this tran-sition of property is like entering the here-after, or rather bringing it upon the world. We built a bridge between old art and new. I lived shorter than the paintings I am cutting, some double my age. The field I cut out of them is an outline, a shadow meadow where the artist can lay, imaginatively. I will take a rest there too.
Oh Earlier I went on my anti-go-crazy-walk and I saw two former crushes of mine becoming each other’s lovers. How beautiful and dreadful: I failed to lay my love upon them, now they perform it for everyone and me. This encounter has welcomed their masks once again into mine, this time fused into a neutron star collision, much too distant to be gravitating towards. I just wanted to let you know, mother. This left me with a new and subtle feeling in me that mixed many. It tasted at the beginning like shame, shame of being seen seeing them by them. Their unrequited love for me now multiplying its power upon my loneliness. Shame overcome by pride and self-assurance, pride of my loneliness fiery and strong like a fluctuating monster in the universe breathing void. “I have grown love for my prison since I last loved you two.” Pride overcome by a sudden ra-tionality, for I have constructed my safe love nest as well, that an-chors me from the insanities of isolation. And after that reasoning, emptiness, steps feeling monotonous, sudden frames repeating, presences and appearances of strangers leaving no trace upon my breathing. Desolation that lasted, like asthma, until now. And it lasts still as I type these words and gaze up to the clouds within the budded branches. I shall get back to my field of rest, my impossible meadow, melting dada into silky breaths, fearful artist of doubt, insecurity, exile, noise, the inexorable dance of meaning, my uselessness, why do I must become a communist, I want to keep my breaths, these are my combustions, this is my Co2 you are smelling.
And so Daniele left his laptop to walk five steps and lay among the old artist’ canvases, cutting knife in the right hand, kneeling and imagining flowers of worlds he had not visited yet.
The battery running
This is a game. It is night, past dinner time, digesting fennel and avocado salad and a few grams of old pasta. The game is writing, telling, being happy, living, smiling, expressing, reflecting, going on, listening to Bob Dylan, looking at the strange lamp lighting the room, checking the messages from my family, fantasizing about the future, being in love, madly in love with life, feeling present, feeling precious, precarious, vulnerable, eternal, manic, simple, breathing. Doing all this, and much more than this, but much less than what it suggests, while the battery is running…. Running low, as I forgot my laptop charger and all of this might end in a spark, instant, as the energy of the machine is fully used, emptied, transformed into these sounds and lights and manipulations of information and electronic gymnastics. Is this a game? I am running out too, I am running out to you.
what if this game was a song
that I would sing,
hands in the air
shouting out loud. What if this game was a song?
A song with no sound, but verses and movements and dances of particles
Moving towards you, shaping the space between us, echoing our distances in infinite clashes, little reverberating violence, vibrating friction of a caress.
“Go with Your imagination”. We could do anything. We were up in the skies, with the airplanes, going down. We were crashing, yet we were so happy screaming with joy. There were flowers. Potted flowers flying along, yellow, red and green. The pots were of clay, of those you see in the cartoons, and the sky was obviously bright turquoise. We were going down and our masses were drawing lines with the air, vertical lines that only the wind could curl in arcane se-crets. We were going with the times, fast, laughing, making jokes, being together. We were going strong, we stared at the bottom enlarging as we zoomed in, in marvel. Our eyes were so big getting all that light in, spreading our arms pretending to hug the ground as we would hit it. We were not there yet. This was a song of suspen-sion, a waltz for three, and the third was the infinite between our beginnings and ends. Many times had we told him to come. We had begged him, he refused. He kept refusing, it was as if he were in another dimension. Anyhow, this is much too drowsy to be thinking about while you are precipitating. You cannot wonder off with your legs spread in the air.
We could do anything; Bob Dylan was there with us too. He had his guitar, playing all the right notes, the harmonica too, at times. He made it feel so good, climbing in the abandoned buildings. They were ruins of the past, entire scrap lands to explore. Mountains of them. All so regular, at times intervolved with collapsed structures upon which gravity was the better sculptor (we all knew by now, but we didn’t, back then, as we kept building). Oh Babel you are so far and yet so close, enclosed in a tiny image within a golden frame, electric frame, photographic frame. I have seen so many of you Ba-bel towers. Never one completed, though, as we climb the ruins and wonder. As we explore those infinite carcasses, giant skeletons breathing void. We are getting melancholic, we are getting worn off by the walking, our feet have grown dull, the blood is probably cloaked by the pressure down there. “We need to get out the rol-lies” said Laura or Sara (we didn’t remember her name, just how it sounded, vaguely). She was right, it was time for the roller blades. Yes, that’s what she meant. We found an empty highway that would run infinitely around the globe, in a spiral motion that went twice as slow as the year, so it would take us at least two years to find ourselves back where we had started, roughed up, confused by the rolling, but having so much fun. Roll on, John. Said Bob in a song. We had accidentally put that song on our Mp3 players or disk jokers or smartphones or IPod or portable computers or maybe Bob was right there behind our back, and as we would roll behind he’d keep on rolling with us, never revealing his presence beyond that voice. We had drawn so many spirals, we had drawn so many curls. We had become the wind twisting our precipitation lines in the fall.
“You are tired and writing nonsense” a Daniele complained
playfully.
“Yes man, that’s what I am doing. Would you rather hang out with the meaningful people right now?”
“Perhaps I want to read a book.
“You were going to say should. You should read a book. No “shoulds”, that’s the rule. Fuck off!”
Daniele was insecure about his will, he was lingering between Thus spoke Zarathustra-the written form, the blog he had found about “manifesting” (I hope you know what it means by this because I, Daniele, don’t-and will not attempt explaining. But its relation to Nietzsche is hilarious, gay and revealing and we are running out of battery). Most of all he was concerned about the might and solem-nity Umberto Eco was shining upon him. He knew he did not know, he wanted to know, he knew he had to study. He knew he would, when he would be willing... (Umberto shadow creeping up, looming at more and more Danieles).
“We made only petty whimsical choices Umberto, but in truth we really do love. Were you much into Zen too? Does this thing of con-temporaneity and death of the author, and metempsychosis really work better once one is gone? Can you ever come back? We wish we had known you beyond what we know of you. And this counts for all of you, Umbertos out there.”
Is Elston Gunn Bob Dylan? I ask you before I will ask google. I admit not to have known, I haven’t googled yet and maybe I will not. It does not matter (to know it right now). Is this the first step to igno-rance? Listening to the harmonica and taking turns speaking, in-stead of listening? Blowing the answer in the wind? (Perhaps the answer is already in the wind, and when I blow it, I only make if float a little further, scrambling and curling into something new).
“I am sorry for my friend, he tends to go hydra sometimes” a polite and classy looking Daniele exhorted.
“He is nevertheless, if you may pass his cryptic playfulness and learn not to indulge into his thinking... he is very provocative, interesting-ly so.”
“He likes to mock us! To mock us all!” Said a Daniele dressed in the white gowns you see in Manet’ white supremacist paintings. “He is the monkey!”
The monkey Daniele was a shapeshifter too, and was now blurring the images of Bob Dylan and Elston Gunn with those of Marcel Du-champ and Rrose Selavy.
“I am cooler, I am warmer, I am tepid, mediocre-er, squirming liter-ature. Alter-ego is literature. Ego is too.”
“Such taboos and misspellings that you cast, witch!”
“Bango jango jungo mango!”
“The guitar kept playing” narrator lost it.
“Why are you doing this to me, to us, to them?!”
Love, love, love. It was all out of love: to follow, chase, run first into the avant-garde. Run towards the bomb.
“The bomb, the bomb, the bomb, that will keep us together!”
The battery is running too! Go on you fools, save your texts! Save your sentences of nonsense! Find salvation in your life because you think you’re running alone, but the battery is running too!
And the song is almost over
we have space for a line or two!
The last song is almost over
come here, sing along too.
Sing along your only sentence
in this ballad full of life
Singe along my love, no prudence
only courage, force and might.
Sing along my only lover
for with Nietzsche you will find
only pain, no joy, no glory
maybe something for this night.
Sing along you honored enemy,
I wished you were Shakespeare for a while
but I couldn’t beat the sailor,
I’d do worse with a bard in sight.
What to say, I am left here lingering
between sadness and an empty flight
what to sing, a new beginning
for the battery is running tight
Oh man we are still at 23%. This battery is lasting longer that Bob Dylan’s longest concert; iitting the bottom of my self-confidence, feet already plunged into the dark uncharted swamp Daniele. Dan-iele Daniele Daniele. My brother, keep on hitting that guitar. We are just boys fooling around, aren’t we? Will we ever grow up; will we
ever admit our dirty slavery to yours truly mums?
“so insecure, keep up the act”
“what, are you now hesitating dada dancing while the others are working hard on the revolution?” (crying for mama)
“you thought you were the ant, but realized you’re the grass
hopper?”
“Come on! This is not the bottom yet”
“What do you hope to find between all this dirt and mud? The mold is crawling into your home.”
I have so many questions. I have so much emptiness. I do not think I will be able to fill my lungs even with all the mold around. There’s just something else than mold, asbestos or air that I am breathing, something void and dark. But not dark as in black, but dark as in in-visible, like the dark matter. This is delusional nonsense, a part of me beats me up for it. The path of reason is the hardest. The path of love is the hardest. These serpents are twisting and lurking in this darkness. I do not wish to become him, but I admire him a great much. Father? You are an impossibility. I must suspend my becoming, that is the spell I cast upon these lands. No secrets left unsaid as the battery runs out. I want to keep playing with the boys, but I am growing old of it. Have I fear? Of this transformation? To leave behind the comfort of youth. Twink to daddy. Bottom to top. This bright swamp of mine, all the fireflies are gathering to cheer me up a little. I pick up the mud, its black and gooey, your battery is run-ning low. You are almost out of battery.
Almost theatre time
They were about to go to the theater. There was just so much to say instead in those 10 minutes. His home was evaporating, vanishing. The colored dies of the concrete toys in the playground from his childhood were gone, encrusted with mold. The toys were broken, disappeared, replaced. He realized this familiar world and home of his would end very soon, as his family was dying, the parents getting old, the children escaping abroad in a never ending work-exile.
This is just the glimpse of a rough landscape; we have to go to the theatre. Imagine. We go see Hybris. Today imagination and reality interplay constructed rituals of generational bourgeois arcana.
And now on our rush to Venice
The theatre spectacle by Antonio Rezza and Flavia Mastrella was very fun last night. I am still thinking of how it echoed experiences of my psychosis, childhood logic traumas of absence and presence,
“Daniele, prepara le bottiglie per favore!!” Shouts Sylvia.
“We must go now Daniele. Ale’! Annamo. Oh Ca?! Annamo!” “Si.” And again we must rush
Back from Venice, in my childhood bed.
To try and talk, so hectic, to try and report. Failure. Fragmentation, evaporation, ongoing suspension of life. Will I keep floating; will I dive like a sparrow? Where is the prey? The direction? What is in front of me, a landscape painted on paper walls so thin to penetrate like membranes by a bullet.
Bullet points:
•Success means possibilities
•Question will to gain will
•Ignorance is comfort, am I uncomfortable?
•Resist or give in: sexuality, culture and castration
•Art and genesis, why and how to escape auto-therapy.
•Needs. What are they?
•Numbs. Numbness and suspension replacing activity.
•Citizenship: Would I be politically suspended, ever, or just controlled and submitted citizen. Majority rules what.
•Confusion. Interest in answering notifications from strangers as seductive ghosts.
•Confusion. Distraction and aperiodicity/new musical forms in performing bullet points.
•Needs: the needs of bullet points.
•Necessity: what is necessary and how language can com-municate at different levels (but who is receiving what? Who is listening? Pay attention motherfuckers).
•Pause.
•stop
I am in deep sea. Plunging my whole self. Taking a break in a bub-ble, void. Blabber. I wish I could torment myself less, I guess. Do I? Actually not. We are working, this is maybe a theatre play. These are impossible scripts, improbable fictions, delusions, disillusions, hallucinations. Light. Light photons penetrating my bubble of void so still. Psychic games. Where is the train of light going? Surfing light waves. Lightness of being. Childhood bed should I get fucked in, fuck someone in, or let it go for this time? Will I celebrate some-thing else than humanity today? I am a sock, a dirty sock without its pair. I am a particle of sweaty foot absorbed by the sock. What am I and why? It is dirty. Dirty smelly sticky. Going there in loops. Are we linking parts of my reasoning again, should I say something more about the masks, about theatre, phantoms, light, vision, spectacles, specula that are mirrors, masks that are persons, points of view, prospective, perspectives, directions and verses and costumes and habits? Close curtain. Dirty sock. Fabrics.
Bah, it is deeply uninteresting and uninspiring, restless world at the shadow of love and war. Wait. Who are they siblings with? No. I am confused. Beauty and war, Aphrodite and Ares generate Eros, that is love. It is ontologically very specific and does not mean, philologi-cally, what you probably entirely or specifically understand with LOVE and BEAUTY and WAR by now… though it perhaps, from a pa-triarchal and western point of view, contextualizes the path of ref-erence to my partial knowledge of them. Why am I afflicted by them? I am not, truly. I believe I am poor of them and surrounded by their carnal ghosts. Truth is (there are so many, and all of them are false) that I wish my monologues would go as fast as I could per-form them, one long inflating universal extension of breath, one only phatic sentence. Yet I read so much in between, between the lines of writing and reading transiting operations of both and the performance is one, yet so specific conjugated into many. I am not insecure of my knowledge, because I am pretty confident that I do not know very much and very well, so what I am doing is trying to learn and gather and understand to my capabilities. These report-ages, these writings are paragraphs of suspension, of catching breath, of relapse, as I keep on learning, studying, doubting, con-fessing that my silence does not come from ignorance, but from knowledge of not knowing. Why making so much noise about my lack of knowledge? Why is there this performance of lack of knowledge, braying donkeys? Braying donkeys Braying Donkeys Braying donkeys or mute fish, mute fish, mute fish. Braying don-keys and mute fish: picture this.
The words counted heavy on that night. The narrator took over and led everything into the past, looming romanticized distance over those contorted spellings. Ninni de Ninis was crouched on the bed-side, plastic chair in front of him, laptop heavy breathing and cutting his nails. But Ninni de Ninis wanted to take more distance than this past tense, on that night. He laid down his tiny scissors and asked the writing Nymph:
“Oh please Nymph bring me far tonight. Further than the trips white tourists take on Ayahuasca in colonized lands!”
and as the trip started kicking in, he inevitably started asking whether the presence of a white person anywhere would imply the colonization of that anywhere –a sort of inevitably step summed by the non-transitive motto “alea iacta est” that so well synthetized the causal principle at the base of linear western logic. He started fearing his trip was going to be just another form of causal coloniza-tion, that it was almost inevitable, he was already a meteor acceler-ating towards an unconscious planet full of life to be pulverized, he was already that alien object so abject, yet so attracted to and so accelerating towards that foreign -though familiar (by destruction) piece of land mass. He was going faster and faster as the laptop breathed heavier and heavier, running towards the inevitable…
We take a look at the dark, void, absence of light and physical prin-ciples at the fictional axiomatic “a priori” dimension of Ninni de Ninis trip. This darkness hides, as a matter of fact reveals – only the ab-sence of anything, everything, all. This place, if we may call it so without words, means much less and much much more, basically other- than nothing, other than- zero, biskamush, kaklidut, iligowc, fpawweg.
This must not be a place, Ninni de Ninis name repeats like a mantra. “Ni ni ni ni, ni-i-i-i-I, ni-i-i-i-i-, Ni ni ni ni niiii, nininininiiiiii, ni-i-i-i-i-. ni-i-i-i-i.” We need music, needles to notice in a night of knights and Nymphs Niagara Nile Nigeria Nugget Noble Noise in Necessary Null Naming as Nuisance Animal nodding of nannies and annuities and announces and annihilations and anniversaries and anabases and analphabets and inharmonic music. Ninni de Ninis travels un-straight, corrupted, bent and paralyzed. Ninni de Ninis hates the English language, upon which they now travel. They hate the light of screens. They hate the keyboards forcing their fingers in certain rhythmic syntactic dances of typing. Their eyes are heavy of the light especially, their souls grow heavier of the television back-ground noises coming from their living room where Mama and Papa are watching 7 channels in aperiodic chains of intervals (excluding the uncountable zapped ones) in a stream of unraveled possibilities that only total exhaustion puts an end to. Ninni de Ninis wants to escape all this, but he is too servile to get out of here for another walk in the cold and dark city center filled with shut down stores and repetitive shiny vitrines where reflections of drunkard teenag-ers and various youth mixes with laborers of the night. Ninni is try-ing hard to walk those streets as a 6 meters plush T-rex spitting hot chocolate. Ninni wonders why this has not been done by the mu-nicipality yet. He actually intuits why and realizes he is only wishing it had been done at least a little, instead his linear reason plasters nuances of cynicism on the children’ smiles. Back at the historical center, back in Corso Vannucci, he now looks at the stones of the floor tiling. He confuses them with the San Pietrini from Rome. He sees cigarette butts, crashed receipts and bus tickets mainly. He sees some more littering containing a percentage of 80% paper, 15%plastic and 5% of other. He wonders as well how much organic human fluids have been spilled on the Corso in the last hour. Spit, snot, piss, feces, blood and any other body fluids include this sur-vey. Ninni does not go further. Look at the clouds, it was night but now there’s a blue-orange sunset sky with a couple of clouds stun-ning their volume here and there against the gradient flatness.
“Clouds do shapes that mean a new, I want to escape!” Ninni shouts. The clouds hear him in another language and they keep do-ing what they do (which Ninni thinks to understand to a certain point).
“As I dive down the line of cause your image draws my reason, as anything does: from the mold infiltration stains on these old city walls where new green is growing; to the throwing constellation patterns of cigarettes and plastic glasses around night venues. They look like the drawings of bird defecation (or droppings, as Myrthe calls them) printed under the trees where the winged animals nest and live.” He shouts.
“Waste, disintegration and the relation between one and many- these cast the kaleidoscopic images of the world, these are the drawings of life, but further more I am inferior to see these as drawings, as manifestations, or signs: they are life itself!” he con-tinues, thinking that as it would be reductive and wrong to read life as a book, it is wrong as well to see it as a series of drawings: “life is life” as this stupid song reckons in my brain). Life was life indeed, and information was spinning through Ninni’s trip. Now Ninni de-cided they were going to be a drag queen performing in a small provincial queer discotheque called “Bequeer”. They had a green dress, they were slightly overweight, heavy make-up, blonde plati-num wig full of hairspray you could smell it from a picture.
“This must have been Ninni de Nanis average image of a drag queen”, said Daniele in his head.
“A quite approximate one since I have seen so little (yet so much compared to others)”.
“What is the right measure, the right amount of Drag Queens to be seen before painting the right image? Or are all images right enough as they transcend logic and mathematical quantification and rather work within qualitative realms?”
“Can we really assure that quality escapes as much interpretation so that a “Situationist drag” can exist?” He had intentionally cut the term short: Situationist Drag. The queen was left out. He thought the queen word somehow less important (maybe the most transi-tive from a male homosexual point of view, as well as the least fem-inist; but he lacked the historical knowledge and facts to base his argumentations upon, and he much rather wanted to focus on the combo of situation and drag).
Situation and drag.
Oh god I got distracted. You can dress up as you want, you put on anything that is in your closet, yet you come out of the closet. The situation is dressed up. Habits. Customs. Let us use our imagination to put a costume on the situation. Let us transform our situation into something new and unexpected. Let us queer up the situation. The Situationist drag is a move, sounds like a move a Situationist is pulling out, performing to dress up the whole shebang. Can we share clothes? At the same time? Like users converge in one point of the labyrinth, the situation being the threshold of all windows, convergence of all personas masks, the tunnel junction of light points of all camerae obscurae. What habits, customs, clothes are the fittest for these drags? It is always about tripping. Ninni de Ninis is a nickname my mother pulled out as she handed over the tiny scissors to cut my nails. She made it up in an instant, pulled it, drew it out of herself. That quick draw, naming: a spell is cast. Ninni de Ninis is a Situationist drag. Daniele Formica becomes Ninni de Ninis by the sentence of their mother. They are almost one. And many too. Nomen Omen. Ninni de Ninis is a soundy roundy namey. It is playful, childish, gentle, like a nanny. Indeed, it is onomatopoeic for it sounds like the Italian word “Ninna-Nanna” which means lullaby, so Ninni de Ninis is a character related to the gentle cuddling soothing song that warmth leads you asleep in the realm of inside outside, the dream, where images are created and caused, generated and repurposed, where experience is blurred with in-perience (My mum was called Cinis by her mother, generational echo). Ninni becomes a mask for a Daniele, that instead of performing Daniele, is now baptized by the soothing mother like a matrix and master. So we dressed up the situation with Ninni for a while, and it worked. Where will this bring us? What will it contribute to the bigger picture, the one that even a Situationist fails to frame, the one that is not a picture? We will only find out going on. Report is over, we move forward with De Ninnis on board. Chuz!
Writing in front of his mother while she is on a work video call
He had just come out of the shower, listening to Daniel Johnston Life in Vain. He had been masturbating in the bathroom before to entering the hot water. He was very relaxed; his tension was gone. He had been swimming in the morning, the usual 3 kilometers. Apart from that and having lunch, he had spent most of his time (about 8 hours) chatting with other gay men between 20 and 40, flirting, working at the fantasy of a meet up to be realized in all possible ways. Since he landed in Italy the week before, he had been thinking that “going back home” was always making him horny. It was caused by his re-entering the parent-child relationship by returning to certain places, behaviors and relations of his teenage past. First of all, that whole city was (better than a simulation) the encrusted and dusty version of his life 0 to 19: the schools, re-pressed gays, decadence of public infrastructure, youth pullulating a city center the size of a village, the almost non-existent presence of art and culture (or very traditional and patrimonial art and cul-ture), the few counter-culture and sub-cultures run by non-ambitious left wing people (They were better than the conservative opening fast-food and fast-fashion chains in any window of the his-torical center, yet he could not admit to himself that the political panorama of left and right was splitting between slow and fast, this was a contradiction in terms. Something was up. He started re-membering F.B. Berardi writing that “the moderate middle” was the problem of contemporary media-regimes politics and that a new polarization would mean a better future for politics, especially the left. He was not sure he agreed. He thought “we might as well be-lieve in the person and the sacred”. These thoughts were resonat-ing with that gelid Wittengsteinian conclusion to language: that we simply must remain silent of what we cannot speak of.). Out of that long bracket it was getting cold. He was leaving a character of him-self that felt confused, disoriented and uttering in a political de-liration. He liked oxygen very much. Every time the lungs, his lungs, would take oxygen in, he would feel so refreshed and renewed. His mind felt heavy, did he need sleep? What did he need to do? The psychic opening of realty. The big yawn. The magnum opus.
The light in front of him was bright, his eyes were getting blinded by it. His mother, sitting still at the laptop in front of him, had not spo-ken a single word yet. She was listening with her headphones to the conversation and looking around the room. They were avoiding eye contact, as if their staring into each other’s eyes would immediately break the laptop-screen spells and bring them in that field in between, outside (the glass desk by the open living room), where both would be missing their function, purpose, operation, and instead would attend an alienation of stare. He had been trying to steal some looks at his mother, for what he was doing took way less concentration than her operation. He started thinking whether this path, his path, his “completely comfortable and at peace with life path, where I do not need to focus in restraining myself, whatever that means, but instead I rather expand and explore” was the right choice. While he was thinking this, his mother finally asked her question, breaking the silence that had been laying upon the glass table since the beginning of this text. It was always a mix of nice and annoying sound, like a wakeup call to arms, to work, his mother voice. She always was so right, or at least righteous, that her tone felt often undefeatable –accompanied with smiles and jokes, you simply had to accept and obey, to be the good son. Perhaps it hadn’t always been this way; he could not remember right now. He went somewhere else.
There was a box, a cardboard box between them. It had an image on its top. He could see what looked like a square of a village covered in snow, from a frontal top to bottom view. In the back, some buildings with fluffy snow on top of them. Above that view faraway mountains and a night starry sky. The lights in the houses were on. There were also street lamps in front of them, of the sort evoking a modern imperial style, looking like oil lanterns. As a matter of fact, the light in the image was fake, neither electric energy or direct combustion was producing it. Or maybe it had, in part, in a very small percentage… a form of energy had produced that image and thus also the optical illusion of light and darkness within the image. Next to each street lamp there were potted Christmas trees that were drawn rounded like butt plugs or snake heads. They were decorated with three Christmas balls each: red, blue and yellow. There was also a snowman, on the bottom right corner, a classic snowman: a figure made piling up 3 balls of snow from the biggest to the smallest, inserting a carrot on the top ball (which is as big as a human head usually) as well as laying a hat and some buttons for the eyes and the smile, twisting a scarf around the space between the second and third sphere, inserting two branches on the side as arms and adding some rocks to simulate the buttons of a long coat, through a vertical axis that passes through the carrot and splits the snowman in two symmetrical parts.
In front of the snowman there is a sledge. A meter before the sledge there is a man in the back of a yellow old fashioned truck with a logo. The logo has one chicken and one rooster on an elliptical golden background. The man is carrying a white box with both hands. Is this the box that, by a Droste effect, we are describing? Behind the man there are some footsteps left in the snow, but it is unclear what route they suggest. Perhaps a fault of the illustrator or of our interpreter, or an intention of the man himself to hide his footsteps as he picks up or delivers the box (from or to the truck?). We were brought to think, suggested that the truck was brought to the village and not the village to the truck, for the truck is more mo-bile than the village. Yet this could be no village at all, these could be cardboard cut outs positioned around the truck to make it look like the truck has arrived to the village. The man with the box could be a cardboard cutout too, or worse, a hologram. Must we trust the physics, semiotics and metaphysics of the image? Thank god our world is not an image at all.
The meeting was still going on; it was almost over though. He had drunk some glasses of water and went back to the chats in the meantime. His mother clapped. Was it the end? He was thinking about that young man that was supposed to come over, earlier in the morning, but decided last minute to cancel… he did not want to go between him and Vincent. How arrogant that kid, to think such thoughts. He had nothing to fear about going in between them, for he was, first and foremost, a hookup. What was he thinking? But he was sad because this last minute cancellation showed a sort of mirrored insecurity from the kid side, and all he wanted was the boy to grow strong and confident, just like him. We use mirrors not to meet the monster in the eyes. Will he help the boy? Will he find a way to ignore his phantom? Will he just read tonight? (Oh, he did eventually grow up.)
Inability of living song
In my teenage bedroom
With my childhood lamp
The inability of living song
This is taking way too long
We had to find a meaning
We had to learn to move on
I don’t know what to say
The inability of living song.
Laugh love, live light
Sometimes the sun is shining bright
I want to say that I miss you
But I don’t know if it’s right.
I look above, between the clouds
I hear life screaming and the friction of the celestial bodies coming from the planets
I look above, I scream along
The inability of living song
I look above, I scream along
The inability of living song.
Hamlet and the Symposium were laying on the chair. He thought one day this song could become something. Maybe he would sing it too.
I write so much in third person; I so much want to escape myself. I constantly feel this pole attached to my spine, it’s like a four-meter selfie-stick with a camera attached on top constantly filming me. The cameraman is also me. I direct everything also. I am the producer of the movie as well. The actors, writers, costume designers, location scouts, make up team. Oh but this is not a movie: what are we (me) going to do about it. “Is everything alright?” slow decline of happy times. Wishy washy wars to come. What are we going to do about it? The inability of living song, the inability of living song will tell.
The dada decline and the song that is too hard to understand, too easy to sing, too simple to be true, too poetic to be accepted, too hazardous to be real. She was a cryptic provoker.
“Make big works and they will understand you” kept saying the in-secure ones. Her truth was that nobody understands, but most lie better than average. She was a very bad liar. She was a cryptic provoker, and this could be a song too. But she’s too tired to keep singing, her ideas flowing in a whimsy darkness, bed time gets closer. She is running away from the street lights, the purse swinging like a sling. Swinging scythe of death my mother. Shining purse chain details falling through the sewage grates, down the drain hole. Rats scrambling sounds. Mouse nuisance, mouse nuisance in her attic cranial chamber.
“I want to be a tennis player with my magenta purse”.
Break: why and when have you become so surreal? How fast will your writings, narratives, styles change? Are they changing at all or are you actually making something out of this?? Slang! She slams her purse mid hair. The pressure is too high; the straps don’t hold. Magenta meteorite crossing the street at night. A little group of ants living by the sidewalk assist the miracle. They were working hard on decomposing a small bird that used to fly too, but it was too cold the previous night and nobody picked the carcass up through-out the day because the street then is very trafficked. So the ants are there at work to get all that goody foody down their terrestrial guts. Purse flies. Ants stare. Small general colony strike, birdy emits one last post-death heart beat just as the ants pause themselves. So much literary dirt getting out of a bird’s heart. High heels. Her magenta high heels galloping across the street. Sudden turn of light, car lights to be precise. Screeching sounds, not from the mice. She’s flying too, meteorite across the night. “You killed her too”
Imagine her, me, on a blue background, spreading legs and arms in a four of spades, floating and rotating in a spinning wheel-like mo-tion. This is the animation that I want you to picture. I am blonde, long hair, I got magenta and jeans. I spin like a star on its central ra-dial axis. There’s many of me, just like stars, make a pattern of it in your blue background, all spinning, clockwise to start with, moving from left to right...
This is what was going on in the smoking crocodile’s mind, as the smoke came out of all the teeth and long mouth. The crocodile had also a very elegant black smoking, they were wearing it and it was fitting very well. A hat as well to complete the cigar. Now zoom to-wards the reptile’s face, catch the eye and look in it, closer. Like a dragon eye within the scales, a golden eye. Zoom in, look at the crater of the pupil and the erupting pigments around and through the organic glass. Look closer into the dark. The pupil reveals its re-flection, the reflection: which is you, distorted in a fish eye lens. Your ugly face, big right cheek, big nose. Stare at your face mirrored in the crocodile’s eye, try to find your eye in the reptilian mirror. Your eyes are now so close. They are almost touching. You are looking at your own iris through the crocodile’s one: and none of you is crying, holding the eyes tight open, not even blinking.
Guitar music preceded the explosion of light, and then a white horizon laid upon their imagination, splitting it in land and sky. It was a nice rhythm of four fourths, very danceable like a tip-tap toe music. Little dark silhouettes, stick figures, where dancing at the rhythm, hopping here and there, trying their best not to look like Charlie Chaplin. But Charlie smiles intensely, his right hand to the cap, his mustache slightly curls, the make-up makes a bluff: and so the dance begins, he is bowing to the right, tapping left and backward walking, cane is swung with all the might. “What in the world are you doing Charlie?! That is Poker Face by Lady Gaga you are doing! You were supposed to show us Beyoncé All the single ladies now!!!” They were all so confused, Charlie was the least of their problems. Can you really go that fast? Can you really follow? Are you still making sense or has this gone too far from the comfort freedom of the middle class, yet? What? You want another jacket, a pair of golden earrings with rare rocks and stones? A new haircut, it begins bright blonde and ends deep dark brown? A lipstick too, oh no wait you said a Rolex and Viagra? That false confiscated Viagra? It did work anyways, but the price was too competing? Beware of the original, beware of the aura. Laura, laurel, bay leaf sculptures they are forcing me to make. It’s Telfusa’s spring you have to find, not a lost young artist on his way to life. Perhaps I should indeed read Finnegan’s Wake. Is this a katabolic process, just as Isidore Isou was describing? The many references are making these ter-rains sloppy and unfertile, I fear the end is hidden in the cracks within this ground. The field of studies. The field of research. The battlefield. The field is space itself (added later, after reading about Einstein). The inability of living song.
What, had you forgotten we were singing?
Let me refresh your spirits and your tongues,
For tonight we sing and have all sorts of funs
Together we sing, we laugh, we cry
Our friends, rejoice, tonight we fly
And if you need another song or two,
Just let me lead and I’ll sing with you,
And if you want to be alone,
Please let me sing then I’ll be gone.
Is this live metabolism? A breath in – breath out metempsychosis? Is this a joke? Dark. Silence. Switch off. Bruce in, Bruce out.
Beauty is a reactionary and totalitarian story
I did not plan to write; I was looking for beautiful things. Since I was at my laptop while the beautiful things were outside, I tried catching the sun without going out again. I did not want to stroll without purpose, I had done that too much it had become my purpose. The story goes I looked for beautiful things in my laptop. I typed: beautiful things on the DuckDuckGo search bar. I went on the images and saw a lot of landscapes. I thought it would be cheesy to consider them beautiful, it was so obvious and bucolic, peaceful and impossible, idealistic and naïve, reactionary even, to visualize beautiful things as untouched natural springs, landscapes and environments of sprouting life. Lights, colors, vegetal life forms, air, water, earth, the sky, the stars, all those different fantasies of plants, all those gestures of shape, all that creativity at work… I thought I could accept it in front of my ugliness, for a second. I thought I would began studying that beauty, that impossible and unfair beauty. Was it really so much to ask? To be left alone with beauty? That was what those images where showing me: you are enjoying beauty alone, many times, you own beauty alone. You are the eye. Only you. I thought I would write a piece about this, after all, small idea of the totalitarian and reactionary story of beauty. Totalitarian because it forces me to be alone. Reactionary because it enforces upon me a myth of the untouched, unviolated past. This story is ultimately a demonstration that I, the violent eye, am the ugly conqueror of beauty. Can I blink? Can I blind myself? Would I rather let the light burn the depths of my vision? Reverse heat, reverse time, cold gets warm. Static gets dynamic. Beauty beauties the eye, the story gets modern and moderate. Pigeons come save me, the sunset is coming. Pigeons come nest on my shoulder, the sunset is coming.
I won’t tell you a story
But I’ll sing you this song
That from beauty to glory
All my rimes will go wrong
And I blind myself purposely
To cast beauty away
And I force myself cautiously
To live and dismay
For frankly I behold
Not the truth in my eyes
But the shadow foretold
Of our only goodbyes.
Efforts were made to tell a story
Attention was paid to fake glory
These rimes are a trap to the enchanting rhythm of the future
These dimes from the tap are melting the hymn to the mutual end
Confess that beauty escapes the mediocrity of your vision
Confide that the ugly releases your joy of illusion
Shatter dimensions can we not
But utter some nonsense a lot
Tomorrow shines bright from a peephole
The shadows creep up of the people
I am a simple child playing demented
De-souled, desolated, implemented
In a world full of love for goodbyes
In a world full of love for the eyes.
Oh God this was bad forgive me. I am having strange days. I am becoming a sort of time machine dog fragmented and there’s writings and signs and drawings and I could interpret it all, like the infinite semiotic chain or just leave it at that and float through, keep breathing. Like tying my shoes and genocide. I don’t know, I don’t want to watch TV. Everything is so boring it makes me feel I am the boring one… so I sleep lots, look at the clouds, at the sun. I do not want to be seeing and looking and watching for most of my time. I want to do something that does not necessarily involves seeing. Especially seeing. My throat is aching; I think my cousin gave me an infection. This text is wrong; its birth is wrong. Will we kill it? Will we throw it down the mountains like Spartans would do to get the best out of their prole? Would you pile your children in a compost-wasteland of carcasses when you can’t see the future in them? (This monstrous rotting carcass growing near you and your prole, together as a happy family split by a visible decision between seeing and unseeing the future? Well, it went like that down there. Or so the story tells, what a beautiful story.
Handwriting at the park
I came to sit on the concrete table by the park for my favorite spot (a wooden bench within the park) was taken. Parking disclaimer. I am also handwriting this. Other disclaimer. I thought I would handwrite to reflect on my other recent writings (or better, typing). A dog owner is mumbling in an eastern accent to his property-dog.
“Scooby, Scooby shut! Shat! Scooby domnje.”
He’s trying to take the dog’s attention and ended up taking mine as well.
“Scooby?! Scooby?” Whistling sounds going further out. Scooby fades. Bye-bye forever Scooby golden dog.
Another older silent owner walks in with a black dog. I forgot to mention the table is by the dog area, which 10 years ago used to be an arena for the game of “bocce” (pétanque or boules), but I fear all the players have died and the dogs have taken over. What a wonderful transition. White puddle walks by, stares at me. It was not about dogs and owners I intended to write about, but perhaps they are related to transition.
Motorbike roar in the distance. Soda can frizzle sound popping open, chattering of high school students raising from the building by my right. Transition and cognition: imperfect portrait of the world. Limits. Peephole. Mirror. That late Duchamp masterpiece, the limits of interpretation, Situationist drag. Turn page. It is sunny, I breath heavily, my handwriting is a welcomed handicap. The early spring sun brightens the green vivid vital vermin grass. High contrasts and saturation. I wonder what to say about the incarceration and prison meditation of Oscar Wilde, for something should be said about it. Virtuosity and decay, the fading of meaning into suffering, inverted redemption highlighting the banality of evil. Wilde was strongly condemned by one of my exes, Eric, whom had been taught the writer was a “Bad Gay” for he used his wealth and power to have pleasure with minors in foreign lands and other vulnerable and exposed young male individuals, customary to rich Englishmen at the time. When I heard this podcast, the catchy “bad gay” title, I felt one growing discomfort: generalization and superficiality. The podcast was working with the assumption that the listeners had already read Wilde and belonged to the common social group of knowledge shareholders. It focused -much rather than connecting, deepening or contextualizing facts – on enforcing anachronistic judgments with mediocre rhetoric to entertain, by means of leverage on emotional factors, its vengeful audience. And it made the listeners feel intellectual, when all the opposite was happening. The podcast was superficial, banal and catered for the ignorant masses (that have not read Wilde, paradoxically). I felt a growing anxiety for my abstracting and ephemeral, conceptualizing nature: I was once again forced to face an unpassable mountain of suffering embodied in the concreteness of ignorance and those who establish it.
Am I a bad or a good gay?
The pigeons are hopping around me, my father just called me to organize lunch. I want to eat alone. The superficiality of facts.
There was once a young man. He wanted only meaning. He wanted to bathe in meaning, to plunge, submerge, re-emerge, float, splash, erupt hot melting meaning like a drooling edge of a cup filled to the brim by life nectar. This boy was suffering so much.
The black dog is done sunbathing, the owner is done drinking the soda can and has disposed of it, they silently reach one another and walk towards the nearest water fountain in total peace and harmo-ny, not a voice revealed. As I write this, a woman sitting afar shouts at them something about drinking that water. She makes hand ges-tures as well. Next to me (8 meters away) someone is eating their packed lunch from a Tupperware: it is pasta with tomato sauce, but I haven’t taken a proper look for discretion. Vacuum cleaner from above.
I have a snot beginning to descend out of my left nostril and I forgot my tissues. I was swimming earlier and this is the water from the pool coming out. It is extremely annoying and challenging my focus.
Am I trying to make my disease an art, as Gian Marco has told me Lacan had said about Joyce? Am I sick and healing? Is life a disease? Death the cure?
She is done eating, the closing clicking sound of the Tupperware took my attention, I instantly turned left and caught her hiding the plastic box in the black leather purse, she turned right facing me with a slightly confronting gaze. We exchanged eyes and symmetri-cally departed gazes, proceeding with our own operations. More footsteps and paws around me. More exchanges of eyes.
I was, I have been, I may be and might become that young man concerned with the terror of meaning. It is a formal catastrophe. Tango-Catastrophe. Pigeons flight from the bang of a trash can shutting. Snot still moving on. I cherish Wilde’s prison meditation. I don’t exactly know why yet. Maybe it is because I found the book in my dead grandfather’s library and took it behind my grandmother’s back (as getting closer to the better end, she no longer can accept homosexuality… I avoided bringing it out again–especially out of her former husband’s book choice- and harm her life-almost-in-deathbed peace). Maybe it is because much prior to discovering the book I had listened multiple times to and fallen in love with Rzewski homonymous composition De Profundis. I did not know the compo-sition contained literal transcriptions from Wilde’s letter-book. I did not study it at all, only lived with its sonic manifestation, with the quotes declaimed out loud. It was via a YouTube video where the audio was combined with a slideshow of Rzewski’s and Wilde’s portraits alternating. While I recognized the first one, I did not feel the urge to investigate the second one. Was it a contemporaneity fault? I am getting lost in details, forget me.
Shall I erase and go back? Was this thought worth reporting?
I feel like this is also a quote from someone, a spell I have learnt to repeat as naturally as my own individuating breathing. Poiesis is the necessary synthesis through which the world is suggested by an opening not wider than the Euclidean point.
Rhythmical sneezing of an ugly woman walking her dog. She must have gotten some spring pollen up her respiratory system. She is still sneezing loudly in the distance. Peirce’s synechism.
So many bystanders, by-walkers and by-passers. This is bigger than cinema.
Vacuum cleaner is on again. School chattering hasn’t ceased for the whole duration.
Pigeons have landed and flown by. By-flyers.
There is also this delightful whistling of spring birds whose names I do not know. Names are important, young man! They draw the world into your text, the frame catches them, and within that frame hopefully the eye of the spectator is kind enough to see the right path too. Transition, situations, the generous spectator. Eye of the other peephole mirror to the self, opening interpenetration light life. What is worth reporting? Living? Performing? How much dust has the vacuum cleaner sucked by now? Where will that dust particles be in a month from now? Breathing. World. Culture. Castration. Ejaculation of dust seeds in the whistling little birds. The average amount a citizen lives in a city park. The average they run. The average they think, and what thinking is, truly. The ergonomic secrets of handwriting.
The secrets infused in this and not that pen ink,
in this and not that concrete table,
in this and not that dog.
Marvelous facts forced to fit a story, a story so imbecilic it fails to even mock the world, a story so banal it fails to be its useless prosthesis; a crystal so premature and dismantled it quickly falls lost among the dusty branches, cigarette butts, plastic lids and small rocks around my feet. Dario Formica IIIA is written on the folder I am using to write on. The agony of slow handwriting. With so many report around bird sounds kids machine lunchtime presence dog pigeon car parked hunger I must go.
Television night
We are sitting on the couch watching TV. I hate it. I can’t stand all the images streamed at us and having to follow these storylines makes me dumb, so uncreative to follow a dictate step by step like a dictator of clichés, sexy woman walking, man drinking, following, black and white photo with a clue… a symbol of a spider. Cars and rain. Fancy cars, it was a criminal with the name of a foreigner. We are surrounded by slot machines. People are rude to one another. Why is this like this?
Are you a cop? Backstage questions. Worse, I am a journalist. Can I follow? I have stopped thinking already. So blasé. I want to be free, I will write something challenging this situation, demonstrating that I can. Oh my god, abjection on the TV. The spiders have amputated the nose and upper lip of the guy from the slot machines for a revenge, a punishment. Do we think of the meaning of punishment? No, we fear it from aberration. We obey. Now it’s a cozy situation in a house, after I have been punished, I am back in my bedroom, my nest, the core of the person. They keep repeating this name that an old friend of mine was using as an alter ego. Lisbeth Salander.
The colors are oranges, blues and grays. It all feels slightly dark and neon. I can see the flashes of the TV coloring the whole living room, epileptic. People talk so rude to one another there in the TV. We have so much silence here on our side. Only my typing sound and the dishwasher in the kitchen next door. My mother is next to me on her laptop as well, looking at flights for work. My brother is absent, though he wouldn’t have joined even if he could have. I do not know why I have decided to be next to them tonight, my parents.
My father had expressed earlier that he wished he could have spent more time with me, but he had to work and do Pilates today. He then offered to take a day off tomorrow afternoon so we could go shopping some clothes for me (which I hate to do as I find it one of the most dehumanizing activity a father and their son could do together, but he reassured it is to take care of me). It is the only way he knows, like sitting and watching the TV is what they have been domesticated to do, evening by evening, week by week, in these very long lasting years. Scary. Familiar. They must have spent, let’s see, at least an average of 3 hours per night in this living room, perhaps 5 days a week. That makes 15 hours a week, approximately 60/65 per month (almost 3 days) … oh I have been interrupted by the violence displayed in front of us. People are fighting in the bath-room. Shooting. Oh it is like mermaids constantly calling me, distracting me. Dragging me in…
My parents have been dragged by these luring images for so long and so was I for a while, but I have found the strength and will to resist the callings. I just wonder if it’s a problem, to be falling prisoner of these prisms of light and sound that reverberate sweet illusions of domestication and numbness. Sometimes I wonder whether creativity was truly given me to dismantle and rebel against all this and find salvation. Red lady in the snow across the bridge, we just survived another shooting. What are they fighting all about? Are the specifics so important? Are they fake or do they contain a pebble of truth? I must focus on the in between, on this dark crepuscular space between the screens, on the reflections of light in the floor, the obfuscated image revealing its true essence. Like medusa’s gaze, I cannot see it directly or I will be petrified by it, instead, I now watch the TV from its reflection on the floor, at the side of my screen. In this way I can be in a space that is neither fully absorbing me in, neither forcefully trying to escape its luring callings. Still the sound is also a hard enemy to defeat, this medusa is a hydra of serpents, my parents completely petrified, their brains finally following the one idiosyncratic verse: culture.
There is another reflection of the TV in the glass door that leads to the balcony. Through it, the semitransparency reveals the outside, a small portion of it. We see, behind and around the reflection of the TV screen (where the kid-victim and the hero-violent woman are playing chess and talking about past and sucking black holes) around the TV screen I see the railing of the balcony, the building in front of us, the roof, a tiny rectangle of the night sky, totally pollut-ed, looks like a flat dirty violet obtained spraying orange on a deep blue background. What else? The shadow of the chandelier above our heads, projected on the ceiling. It looks a bit like an upside-down spider or a field of flowers. The TV is also talking about the criminal organization spiders. I like how the colour of the ceiling changes according to the saturation of the TV, how certain colors reveal the contrasts in the shadows more than others. Red, orange, purple, beige, ochre, gray, all surrounded by a flat darkness that is slightly warm. The cold light of the TV makes the shadows warm. This is the opposite of a warm light from a fireplace. I am not sure about this. I like the idea of warm shadows.
Advertisement time. Now images go so fast its psychedelic and im-possible to follow by typing words. I am tired and lazy and these images are punching me like a boxing sack. These sounds hammering my memory and filling it with true nonsense, which is very linear and seemingly logical, that is I have the sense I am following something, but as a matter of fact this something is like a virus: a long string of codes that pollutes my encrypting genetic mnemonic operations.
The future of work. Economics, live stream political activism, the female workers’ representative is on the TV! Zapping is the worst. So many possibilities hidden in a rotation of prisms like a kaleidoscope. The possibilities are the real prison. Klaas once told me that success means possibilities. I used to like this thought until now. Now I realize that possibilities alone are the real prison. Sometimes it’s important to give in, to let them get you. The red lady is now revealed to be Lisbeth Salander’s sister and has also infiltrated her hideout. We are at the final reckoning. Every name I invoke is a spell cast upon my life. Warm shadows embrace me.
I give up. The television has won. I haven’t been able to produce a text of such depth to satisfy me, in the here and now, to the point of fully taking my attention away. The television keeps winning my attention, I keep taking it back, our fight goes on. It is wearing me very tired. My giving up will not be, of course, in favor of the television. Simply in favor of ceasing my attempt for today to sustain its powerful distracting call. I will win, ultimately, and have the final divergence. Just not tonight. Tonight I have spent a sufficient amount of time exploring the possibility of salvation. It is time to rest, it is time to shower and rest my eyes. Warm shadows embrace me.
It finally rains in Perugia
I am sitting in the old armchair in my parents’ bedroom.
This is not the bedroom I was conceived in.
This is the armchair I was breastfed on.
It is dark gray with a rectangular grid pattern of beige tiny squares. It finally rains today around me, which means the outside is less inviting and the light is deemed enough for me to be inside and look into my laptop screen even if its daytime. I am happy about this because it means I can write in comfort, or at least reach that threshold of comfort which situates me into the writing, a new kind of writing for a new kind of situation. Kind kinder kid. Generation, genesis, gynecol. I have installed an antenna in my head. I will tell you about it later. I keep repeating in my mind the word “gustatela” (which literally means taste it, enjoy it, and the Italian female declination suggests to enjoy female gendered nouns such as at-tesa/waiting, or vita/life, or esistenza/existence, or risposta/answer). “Gustatela” was Antonio Rezza’ answer in the theatre play to the person asking “who is there?” after knocking the door. The joke was intended to dispel the inquisitor, teaching to taste and enjoy the moment without immediately acquiring the inquisitor stance. That is why I am now repeating it. It was our fa-vorite line from the play. We kept playing it again and again in the following days, it stayed with us. Quite some things have stayed, now that I recall them. The sentence “Was this worth reporting?”, the name Laura, pigeons, dogs, the television, my parents, peephole, person and mask… but now I am getting distracted and mixing concepts and ideas with images and even more specifically with evoked images. Asking “was this worth reporting?” is for me an evoked image, as much as it is staring into each other eyes (which happened with the mum, the crocodile, the woman eating pasta out of the Tupperware and is also connecting with staring into the peephole of the camera obscura, the peephole becoming an in-verted eye, Duchamp’s work, the projection…). There is also a relation between Ninni de Ninis T-rex plush, the drag queen (also wearing green) and the smoking crocodile. Laura or Sara from the rollies could be the same woman wearing magenta and jeans that went spinning in a wheel-like motion in the sky. She first came out as a voice shouting: “Bitchesss!”. Her blonde haircut and makeup is not so different from the drag queen one, but definitely she is skinny and the queen is fat. My mum has called me Nini or Ninni repeatedly in the past days and now I immediately notice, I might explore the possibility of breaking that spell in front of her: asking her why, where does she draw this name from. “Gustatela!” indeed the time has not come yet. I also like how in the Netherlands I have con-nected Jan Dirk and Hansje with my parents by simple sexual asso-ciations (sneaking on the act). I also noticed that the first bullet point in the bullet points list, success means possibilities, is later revealed to be a quote from Klaas that has had an impact on me. And the fear of quoting the other ignorantly, of loss of individuality in the unconscious spell that I also find in the sentence “was this thought worth reporting?” is inculcated in me by Oscar Wilde him-self. This fear is ultimately out of love. Directing my operation to-wards love is an idea inculcated in me by Julian, who is in search of love and its wisdom. Jan Dirk once accused both of us “you are such Christians”. Love is a skin I shred better than Julian for I am lighter here and now, and younger. Wilde tells Christ to be the first roman-tic artist. It is important to declare that these writings have been written while I have conducted a psychoanalytical process. The reason why I started psychoanalysis is that I did not want my art to be a therapy process, I finally see it. I did not want to be a crazy artist who is doing reflective art therapy. The fact that Xue made me see this in me and my work meant that this was the step to take. Now I got into a space where it seems impossible to separate culture as the process of generation of meaning and therapy as the process of individual healing. The culture part is the parents, the “genitori”, those who give life, who generate. My life is a question mark. I, as the child, am facing the question mark of genesis. This is the cultural question mark. Getting to answer is healing, curing, growing. The answer is an oscillation between reproduction and pleasure. This oscillation, its frequencies, are not determined willingly. The oscillation between reproduction and pleasure is vocational. That frequency is the wave of my voice. There is much singing, much dancing and silences too in the verse of life. A concert? Impossible to play, even in the head. The language gives us limits like the word “infinity” (that is desperate to be named). Suggérer, voilà le rêve… It is a quote by Mallarme I found on Eco’s novel Il pendolo di Foucault. Perhaps also in the essay collection Opera Aperta, the open work. Suggérer, voilà le rêve… how it was introduced to me felt kind, comforting and relaxing like returning to sleep in the warmth between my parents on those nights I would run away from my scary bed. Though this sentence at the same time tells me some-thing about what is hiding within the blankets of that lonely bed. There are so many images, information of all sorts and forms, so many objects, things, words, pictures, ideas… reality. Only in this bedroom every day the light has new photons hitting on the prints of the swan and the woman, hitting on the golden earrings that irri-tated my mum’s ear yesterday night (is it real gold then?), hitting on the underwear, my father’s old watches, the printer (why is the printer kept in their bedroom? The former study room was turned into my bedroom as I grew older and needed to be separated from my younger brother. The desk and its chair –and the traces of my adolescence- have been moved, together with the printer, in the only corner available that happened to be in my parents’ bedroom). Could I imagine being my own child? Could I make such an effort as to teach and grow a kid out of myself, be both the parent and the child? What is growing a child, what is educating, what is teaching, what is transmission of life. Climbing the linear causal chain, moving forward. The dogs in the park reincarnation of old bocce players. I have been breastfed on this armchair, but I fail to recall the taste of my mother’s breast milk. A part of me feels guilty to conceive this thought, but I am no Spartan and I report it. Yes, there are many worse evils and perversions to conceive and I could equal and perhaps better the marquise of Sade, but I am not here for this. That is not my oscillation. When I think of the fibers and representations of space-time after general relativity, I am brought to feel that any image conceived with mathematical tools is nothing other than a pictorial effect of something simply impossible to depict. Far from a perturbation of truth, we stare at its smallest refraction. Abstract painting is much more precise. Most truths do not fit. It is our impotence. This impotence of lacking the means -be they linguistic or vocative- to express all in one, is as frustrating as beautiful. Frustration is the symptom of freedom. Even surrealists and poets that play by the rule of omission, allusion, suggestion and fugue are left frustrated by the unbeatable entropic fugitivity of synthesis itself. From every corner or direction, you look at it; this bubble is not a bubble and this void is not a void. I am not even sure I am looking, or suring, or aming. Iing. The antenna I have installed on my head is one of those spider-like metal massage tools that gently scratch your head in concentric directions and generate goosebumps to the newest users. I have been wearing it since I had breakfast this morning, most of the times I forget about it even. I am still in my pajama. I need to pee.
It is still raining outside. How many water drops? When will I quench my thirst? No drugs, no food, no nothing can quench it, but perhaps art. Is this art. When is the end coming. What is an end? I am not an artist, most of times, for my inability and refusal to end. Ending masturbating is so easy. Ending a sexual intercourse is so easy. It is the least satisfying thing in the world. It is so disappointing. Pleasure never ends though, for me. Pleasure and the reaching out is ongo-ing, never-ending –yes with pauses and silences- but this song will last forever. But forever is not me. Forever is not you. Forever is not forever either. We are not given the keys of lasting, I tremble in front of these insecurities of my soul, so elastic and expansive it gets lost beyond the breath of God itself. (I have a linguistic prob-lem in mentioning God, I find it my fault and intellectual verbal ina-bility to find a substituting general and generous enough word, art gets close but does not reach it, dada is interesting, but splits the story as much as Christ did, ultimately I am yes the critic and the writer, but did not choose any of the roles, so be it). I do not choose, so be it. How canonical, solemn, phatic, deterministic. The rain I hoped would wash away my words into the future, yet every drop the future is as near as here as far as there. This could be a fantastic movie, I thought, but it would turn illustrative. It could be a theatre play, a monologue so pathetic to face Hamlet in sorts. But it would be a spectacle. This is real. And it won’t be as you are reading it. It would be erroneous to consider it a reportage as well; it would be simplistic to accept it as a code. All the images right here I fail to tell you. The ultraviolet light stains on the breastfeeding armchair. Griso used to sleep under this armchair, it was his favorite place to sleep and retreat in the whole house. Griso is dead now, euthanasia. We killed him last year. The day before we put him down, we went out at night for a walk by the sea and there in the sand, within those low Mediterranean bushes, staring at the dark waves refract-ing the coastline lights: another same breed, but younger cat appeared to us. What sign could that be? Griso staring at the sea in the night. Griso facing death.
E il mio maestro mi insegnò com'è difficile
trovare l'alba dentro l'imbrunire.
There is a constant sound of traffic rising from the street beneath. There is a luggage laying on my parents’ bed, it is open and filled with mountain and skiing gear. The predominant colors in the bedroom come from a gradient of blues: this must be how the sky looks, from close enough. The square pattern in this armchair a handful of stars. It finally rains in Perugia and I feel so lonely, cast away, locked in a room with nowhere to go. And yes, I am free, I am the freest of men right now: I could go anywhere, do anything, there are no laws that apply to me. The entire universe is my pris-on. The entire existence is my prison. Infinity is my prison. I am drawing heavy breaths on this breastfeeding armchair. My parents are out working. My brother is out working. My friends are out working, or studying, or doing art, or thinking, having fun… I have reached out so many times and so many times was I turned down, I have given up. Perhaps I should not give up. Perhaps my art is all a reflection of refusal, is all a matrimony with loneliness. Most artists, even Wilde, have looked for loneliness to produce their art. I fucking drown in it. I am so rich of loneliness my art cries crystal tears not the finest diamond has shined as much. But who has the eyes to see those sparks? Who has the time to watch them tearing down these cheeks? The infinite distance between my eye and the edge of my face. Why was I breastfed with so much love to be sitting here right now? Even my cat, whose company I looked for and then neglected (for, as he knew better than me, his loneliness mirrored mined and I tear apart thinking of the pains he, I, had to endure in this violent existential wasteland of emptiness and void we shared at distances. His eyes are perhaps the crocodile’s eyes I was describing, confused by my elusive imagination trying to save me some heartbeats. I can still vividly recall my reflection in his eyes, a fucking cat I am crying on. It finally rains in Perugia and there is mold and cracks on the ceiling of my parents’ bedroom. We are dying. It is crumbling. So gentle, so profound, so marvelous. Why was I put in this prospective? How can I scrutinize the end sitting on the breastfeeding armchair? Why am I given all these visions when I fail to share them with the other, when either my words freeze or their attention fades, when either my ideas contort or their interest expires, when either my time runs out or their presence runs away. It is never enough. Some of us were made so hungry. Cursed. Sickened the most. I have tasted and enjoyed many fruits in this garden and paid my thanks, but cannot stop asking why were they given to me? What to do about the end? Save the text. Church bell. Hours are a spiritual creation. I accept my prison. I accept this bitter fruit, this suffering that is now given to me. I accept this text.
New Microsoft word document
It has stopped raining. I see the reflected golden clouds and turquoise grays brightening the windows of the yellow building with the green parasols. Je suis en pipe. The music is really kicking vandaag. Melting in the blues, do we? We do.
“I am almost done here” they were saying. Who were they? We did not know. We could not place their gender, their looks, their species. They just sang really well and sounded like a choir.
“have fun and dance creation” what kind of music were they singing? Every time they played it, it was something new. “I am a real artist” “I create” “I am mocked” mocks creator. Monkey. Copy, no, je ne suis pas une réplique, je suis l’originelle! Death of the land-lord. Who owns this land. Come own this valley up my butt cheeks. She gone crazy. Ula lula Emily Molly monologue from high school English literature teacher Carla like my dad Carlo say what? “Hey Jan Dirk, how’s the masterpiece going?” “I am falling in pieces” shatters glass. Shuttle go to space, go fuck off. Black eye (A.L.C.’s black eye painting). I love signing, in my imagination the world is singing all the time. In my imagination every employee is dancing at work, my mum’s swinging on the table in her office. Shake that butt princess! Saxophones rising from the sewage. It is a decadent march of dismay. I realize my vocabulary is a networked textile loop. Ups. Poop. “how’s the masterpiece going?”
The situation was created. They were no longer here, nor there, the text was finally cleaned up.
Abracadabra. ABCDB. Bye-bye doggies.
There is a washing machine centrifuging in the room at the heart of the apartment. The washing machine dances in frequencies of cosmic secrets. Inside it there are a number of stories, sorted by clothes. The black socks. The red jumper. The beige sweatpants. White underwear. A bra. Etcetera, etcetera. Which one will he pick out first? Will it be the story that we all wanted to hear? But she doesn’t know his hands have fallen off already, and he won’t pick no clothes at all. Eaten by a horse in rampage, that’s what the newspapers will write, but the story is much colder. He had left ear-lier that afternoon to go pick mushrooms in the forest. Well, it used to be a forest, now it had become a municipal park. Nevertheless, mushrooms still grew within the areas where the public gardeners where too uncomfortable to work in due to criminal activity. The painter was a criminal himself. He knew where to pick the best mushrooms.
“Okay end the story already, we are getting bored!”
“We don’t have time to read it anyways, we either have to work or watch something! Is this necessary? Is this truly necessary?”
The sky transformed into a colossal pupil. Because they were inside the eye already, the pupil was not reflective at all and they were almost unaware of it. Reflection was an exercise of getting out.
“Stop making fun of me. Stop talking metaphors” Said my grandma last Sunday in distress. She has grown more and more mistrusting and her visions are delirious. It is as well true we have been making fun of her, since forever. Why do you manifest your awareness now, grandma? Why spoiling these last months of fun with a gloomy truth? Where are you trying to lead us, has the light perhaps finally shown you some love?
Horror has never been so static, so gentle, so silent. Horror has never been so blasé. I can’t run faster than the moment, I can’t catch the future, I can’t prophesize, I can’t tell the fortune, I am blind and less creative and more honest than Tiresias or the Pythia. They have taught me it is thanks to not knowing the future that we can go on with the show. This show is the only one with a true open ending, that will never therefore be a happy ending. Massages, pandemic massages, stimulate the surface of the earth, cutaneous shake. The border between my particles and the air. Mine, mine, mine! My air, leave me the oxygen Mum, there is not enough for both of us. claudicat ingenium, delirat lingua, labat mens. I was sure I could make sense of this performance, I was sure I would have stepped out at the end, even applauded myself if it got to that point. My selfie stick is not long enough. My stick is average. I cannot take it fully, I cannot frame it all, I cannot see the whole picture, I cannot focus either. Mediocrity, the scariest of truths. Few of us have truly loved you. We elevated your nature, did we not? You did not devour us in our attempt to escape you. You spared us, because we venerated you. We saw that fear of being lost and pulverized among the baubles. We are the baubles. Oversaturation. Singularity emerges through the community and not in isolation, that is why the community isolates you. Didn’t you want to isolate your-self? For fear of getting lost… The baubles… You tried until you realized …
The snake was typing. How could a snake type? Their body was trained in a circus to do so. The operation looked like a flower bending from the weight of the snow. The snake was typing very slowly. That was the secret. Some things last a long time. Density speed presence… What is your favorite routine? I will leave this one soon. I will go forward to something new, I am excited. It takes a lot of creativity to quit. To exit. More than courage, a cocky behavior and a transition are distinguished by creativity. I hope you will see this; I hope you will be free enough to see it. Creativity requires humility, not courage. Only when I passed my arrogance, that was my negative urge to homologate to the phantom of power, only when I faced empty handed my void and realized the incumbent desolation did I truly start building not my self-confidence, but my humility. After all, and since then, many phantoms I have seen and loved them only. This is not a moral story; this is a snake typing.
A happy sandwich for two. Make one today, and share it. Two is metaphorical, as long as it’s not you: do not fear! I am not making fun of you. I am having fun with you. Sandwiches for two.
The never-ending problem. I want to be positive so I can start solving it and flip it to the never-ending solution. Go back to study! Go back to study! Go back to study!
“Patience, Daniele” a quote by my dead grandfather.
For who is this? Well I hope there will be someone like me at a certain point, and I think they will need this. I would have needed it… it would have helped me a lot, it would have made me much more comfortable with myself, inspired me, made me feel at peace and ready to live in the world, in the world that I’d be living marvelously anew every breath I’d take. It must be so beautiful, to forget and remember everything, to forfeit and re-win everything, to be able to give it all up for the next breath to come, just like that, anywhere anytime anyone. I am ready. Are you?
Superdeath
They had reached writing through the refusal of apparent pleasures and duties. This refuge in writing was the refuge in conscious performance. From it, reality was a surrounding bubble shattering in its illusions of truth: persons, parts, infinities, pluralities, voices, languages, visions, images, facts, presences, situations… All shattered; leaving space to loneliness and a mysterious kernel, seed of falsity. This seed was an alien entity of incomprehensible life that auto-generated, grew, was cured and isolated as a possibility of salvation in itself. Salvation became a constant revolution of opening through the shattering; of waiting and preparing for the end that never came, but always stood vigil. In this watch of the end, the eternal uniqueness of life’s times and spaces was found again, reflecting the inhabitant between cycles of beginnings and ends experienced along statistical and unconscious paths. For lack of comprehension, lack of physic capacity, the case and casualty intertwined with the causal awareness of knowledge’s own limits. This manifested in concerts of flux of consciousness orchestrated and diverted in storms of which the causes were as unreachable and incomprehensible as proximal and simple.
A miracle of physics? A conspiracy of metaphysics? Doubt and que-ry, the only willing dimensions in front of the end, alternated with breathing: the work that for excellence cannot be suppressed by will. Breathing returned incumbent after every suspension as the only inexorable rhythmic transit between beginning and end. Were they secretly suggested that all is but a little more than a succession of breaths?