The first is the classic stance of the philosophy of existence. The second is the response of grace, gratuitous sovereign in moments of genuine forgiveness, of love saved from atavistic hatred, grace hidden in the everyday, visible to the initiates, to Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith, to the soldier who comes back from the Crusades disenchanted and alone and who during a pause in the game of chess with death praises the beauty of the passing moment and the strawberries offered to him by traveling artists.
I love Carl Rogers’ vulnerability, the imperfect humanity transpiring from his life before his teaching ever became a new canon. His sleepless nights, the affairs, the use of alcohol in the last years of his life…Rogers emerges as a human being, contradictory and vulnerable. Authenticity, especially in a man, must be apprehended as openness and willing exposure to the uncertainties of existence. At the same time, this cannot be allowed to subside again into the male weakness of the nineteen-eighties, with its literal interpretation of the Jungian anima and of the feminine principle, which along with various other factors contributed to the dwindling of many male fellow travellers, abandoning them to the mercy of mothers, wives and lovers, converting them into submissive beings, ethereal and emasculated. And yet ‘post-feminism’ is indistinguishable from the old models in our contemporary landscape of bad infinity (of proliferations of meanings, within the confusion of values as values given and not created).
A man in tears is an intolerable sight to some women. Perhaps they see again in a flashback their own father – until that moment considered omnipotent – pushed around by chaos and the waves of existence. Holding an image of ego’s solidity (coveted, never achieved) is at the centre of many forms of anguish and dominates the sphere of fantasy, imagination and dreams. Dreams are significant because they debunk the solidity of the self. The I of a dream cannot be reduced to ‘me’. Memory and imagination operate in a similar fashion. Poetry feeds on remoteness, flowers in the soul’s landscape. Distant lovers (in forbidden or unconsummated love, the love curtailed by circumstances, by the inclemency of need and the triumph of the reality principle) feed on distance. Fantasy is instead egoic projection, distorted sense of superiority – related to the cowardice of lowlifes (nowadays adopted by global capitalism): on the ashes of identity, manufacturing an omnipotent image of oneself. This is also the foolish aspiration of cyber-avatars in the desert of the virtual worlds.
In the Hindu tradition an avatar is a realized being that descends into life as human in order to help others, a being who chooses the prison of the body/mind to communicate the good news: there is a vaster space, free and open, although at present this might be obscured by ignorance. The avatar is a messenger of an existence (fathomed as permanent) which is beyond samsara; an enlightened being who succeeded in evading impermanence. The cybernetic avatar is at the opposite pole: a projection of an omnipotent ego, born out of low self-esteem, out of resentment towards one’s own human frailty, out of the terror towards the unpredictability of existence.
Both avatars, spiritual and cybernetic, are expressions of our desperate attempt to escape this valley of tears. Both are manifestations of human rancour towards the imperfection of becoming; both are marionettes modelled in the squalid workshop of resentment.
While the spiritual avatar has failed in his millennial mission of denigrating life and obliterating the body via various religious systems, the cybernetic avatar is for the time being succeeding. The avatar roaming virtual worlds exercises some degree of control, steering well clear of the sweat, blood and tears (but also of laughter and tragic joy), avoiding the nuts and bolts of the human condition, those attributes without which we cannot call ourselves human. We are more than ready to subjugate ourselves to something bigger, to make a deal with any deity and trade our devotion with the hope to be exempted from the dark night of the soul (or the death of God, or the great existential doubt). This so-called surrender employs sooner or later the features of authoritarian sadomasochism. The yoke could be an external deity or the divinity of one’s own ego. Take your pick, don’t be shy: both are made up. With the virtual avatar, ‘absolute freedom’ becomes in no time slavery to the idiocy of false needs and false desires. Angelic speed teleports us right into the demonic miasma of a promised land. We are the honoured guests inside the solipsistic cage, the VIPs in the mousetrap of subjective mysticism where every desire is granted, where objectivity (a state of mind of openness to the world) is drowned by the triumph of our most pathetic delusions.
* * *
Psyche catches Love in an alcove; she finds him barely awake and modest, gentle in his humanity and forgetful of his wings. Both are absorbed by the slowness that is the joy of the human dimension; both are ushered, plowing up the grayness of linear time, into the human realm of poetry. Angels envy us, they covet our inclinations, alien to them for these are distillation of suffering and precariousness. Angels only know speed, the immediacy that in their flight burns what is a mirage – our only reality – in the murky interlude between birth and death. Angels only know lightness and the ecstasy of reflected light.
Of all angels we love the fallen ones best; we love their rebellion and erotic intensity. Finding both attributes in the same fallen angel (as in Milton’s splendid Satan) we bow in deep reverence and join as accomplices in his heady subversion of the firmament and his voyeuristic contemplation of Eve’s voluptuous curves.
The opposite movement, of emulation and human aspiration to the angelic dimension, is escapism, denigration and antithesis of the aesthetic dimension: the magic arts of Milarepa, riding a ray of sun, traveling between hemispheres; Jesus, changing water into wine. But I want to ask: Is water not miracle enough?
The human becomes angelic out of excess, as an error. Hart Crane, Arthur Rimbaud: to inhabit poetry in one body and one soul. The rest is banality, asinine braying motivated by best intentions. Think of the cutting irony, the difficult aestheticism of Oscar Wilde reduced by Roberto Benigni’s magniloquent populism to flashy Sanremese homily in praise of the Italian vice of sentimentality.
The human remains human and runs into the angelic only via the self-combustion of passion and compassion. In any case angels are messengers, their services must be handled with caution. Worshiping their speed is idolatry. Angels are frightening creatures, the frisson of wings on the floor of the living room where I sit in my exhausted reverie would kill me. Among the six realms, the Buddha did not favor the realm of the gods but the human, the only one through which there can be liberation. An angel is condemned to the eternal apparition of a long-deceased God, to the insalubrious exhalations of the divine carcass, cursed by instant wisdom to the obliteration of distance and dignified solitude. But humans can extract poetry from the ephemeral and mine diamonds from the iridescent mud of their tentative existence.
The indiscriminate use of information technology burns distance. It robs us of the gift of solitude where love comes into flower. It robs us of the gift of love where solitude comes into flower. You were the archangel of a pagan annunciation; the androgynous archangel who appears in a vision to Joseph in the Gospel according to Pasolini.
* * *
And even now that your text messages sound like press releases from the Ministry of Health and Education, I feel nothing but tenderness for you. How are you? – you write in response to my suggestion to speak with an open heart –here everything flows and I’m fine. How am I? The tree in the garden is now bare and in the morning airplanes flying south above my balcony vanish inside autumn clouds. There might be solace in the easy art of indifference, a sense of satisfaction gained by one’s momentary control over the magnificent monsters. A sad victory, for the price we pay for it is high: our very humanity quits, and once the heart is fenced we are shut to the world. There are other ways to distance oneself from the magnificent monsters: cynicism, for instance, or crudity. There are ways to exhibit one’s superiority over the numen of sex, many ways to keep at bay the joy of the senses alight, many proficient ways to feign d
etachment from psyche, the multicoloured butterfly. We can raid its garden with ungainly steps, with our indiscretions and songs sang out of tune. Take the cruel hilarity of dirty jokes, where we snort and chuckle at the misfortune and inadequacy of some unlucky fellow; or the predisposition of the ‘man of the street’ (monster, racist, and colonialist) to conceive of squalid designs behind any noble and generous action. Consider then the claim that such vulgar unmasking coincides with the psychoanalytic method, with the stylish cynicism of Hobbes, with the pessimism of Schopenhauer and Freud, with the positivist devaluation operated by aristocratic minds such as Nietzsche’s. But in Nietzsche we find freedom from vulgarity and cynicism, in him who courageously debunked the moral and religious pretense of our overrated species. The trans-valuation of all values did not lead him to crude cynicism, for he was able to cultivate veneration and respect for the inherent sacredness of passions.
Sex is a deity and if we want to make fun of it we must learn how to do it in a cautiously divine way, as celebrants of Dionysus. In his crudeness the average man (and the post-feminist woman who deludes herself by thinking of having reappropriated a hypothetical ancestral femininity) betrays instead the laughter of Polonius. It betrays Newton’s metallic compass in William Blake’s painting; the scientist absorbed in his minute calculations and oblivious to the terrifying beauty all around…
Ministerial bulletins and dirty jokes exult in the snug superiority momentarily drawn between us and the magnificent monsters. I’m fine, and you? Everywhere the self wants to reassert its position within the landscape which instead belongs to psyche, multicoloured butterfly nailed to the table, dissected and now long-deceased. It is a declining civilization that can number among its aspirations being able to hear the death sigh of the multicoloured butterfly, psyche, exiled from the world, stabbed by cynicism, vulgarity and obscene language, its carcass desiccating in between the pages of ministerial bulletins, of your text messages, my ex-love, bloodless echoes of what once were love letters, your love letters, my ex-love.
Here it is then, the only sovereignty left to me: the melancholy of detachment, a sharp pain in my chest; to be preferred nevertheless to the vulgarity of setting up home in a place not my own, with two hamsters and a cat the colour of ashes, protected, or so one likes to think, from the abyss, from the hurricane quietly building up in the belly of the volcano in the land of your birth. Surely this is to be preferred to the hardening of the heart (but what if it turns out that love is the only event giving luster to existence?), of the atrophied heart, protected for fear of bleeding.
Like an assassin, a spectre, like a hungry ghost I walk the path near a lake, I reach a building dreamt up in my delirium and find the place deserted, asleep, shrouded in the lavish mist of memory. The soul is strengthened perhaps through memory, through dreams, in the crucible of pain where it swims around in circles, utterly lost.
The broken heart ceases to be a resting place, it expands in the autumn sky, in a dark archangel cloud marching steadily from the east, heralding a storm. The cracks in objects no longer let the light in, as auspicated by friendly theologies, but instead they declare desertion, to be filed under past event yet – and here is the tragedy – never assimilated. Not every event is experience. If we flutter from infatuation to disappointment to terror to rupture, we are ready for the circular repetition and the vicious circle. Future circumstances will be used to reattempt solution or completion. Here is another option: to assimilate an event as would an apprentice of love who has given, received and managed to maintain a tender heart, respect for the lover whom the adverse fortune has now cast as opponent in the cruel game of survival. In spite of the similarity, there is a difference between the compulsion to repeat and the experience of the eternal recurrence. The final test: to be ready to repeat the whole experience – the good bits and the awful ones –eternally.
* * *
And who should come to mind but Emma Bovary with her cheap sentimentality, the bad poetry of her gestures…Oh but the snow shall fall at last and kindly stupor will be my companion. I must freeze the heart; I must not feel anymore. I must become non-human. Tunnel of frost, catwalk where Ice Queens prance about: where does chilliness originate? Defence/ fear/ wound? On this interminable night I reflect on the two souls inhabiting the Italian psyche, the Etruscan and the Roman; aesthetic sensibility and braggadocio…But I have a headache, I don’t trust what I’m saying, not a tiny bit. I am raving…Here it is, I’ve got it: there is rage behind the aloofness of your texts. It is rage coming out of my own lips. Italians? The most illiterate people with the most ignorant ruling class, says Pasolini via his alter ego Orson Wells in La Ricotta. And what to say of the province, dressed up, technological, sick with foulness and nonsense? What a letdown for Nietzsche who read excess of depth in Hellenic superfi-ciality…
* * *
The original sin is the sin of property, and Adam was the first landowner, forerunner of petit bourgeois values now universal, kicked out of Eden by an agrarian deity.
Soul as Polis? Dear Plato, this town is in ruins, it suffered a blackout and every communication among its citizens has broken down. And in your utopia, surprise surprise, gypsies and exiles are kicked out of the walls of the sunny city. And if they come in sick to be cured, doctors report them to the police.
Soul as a firm? Dear Roshi, the capitalist confraternity suffered a major crash from Wall Street to the City, here in my lunar town of ghosts where the controller is drunk and wisdom is an avatar hired by Lunacy herself, a crazed avatar driven by profit and more profit, here where every landlord and landlady is a sadist.
Soul as the sea? Dear ex-love, but of course I love the sea, your brainless sea, the nauseating vastness that was my first love. The adventure of the sea, I hear you say. But what do we know of the tedium of the sailor’s life, of the strenuous yearning to be buried in its depths?
* * *
The eerie calmness we reach once we know for certain that we are in hell…From Café Chantant to Café Chagrin is only a short step, intensity persists but implodes, it now feeds off one’s own exhausted mind and who cares if it’s night or day or if the wind howls in my reddened eyes. And no book, no matter how thoroughly I might search, contains my individual pain…Where are you? ……… For a moment I saw you near me, with your cruelty gone…Where are the days and nights, hours spent on the angel’s wings, fast and joyous in pursuing the infamy of history and correcting it with the tenderness of love? History reassembles itself now, restored to your celebrated banality, the greatest curse against life, against the life that is lavishly offered to us every moment. The everyday, with its peaks of cyber ecstasy and the sterile raptures of a Semiramis sitting crossed-legged in the lounge of a virtual bar in second life, an evil and lonesome spirit ruminating in a computerized pit, and me hanging head down from a rope forced to reconsider the vanity of my knowledge, the fragility of the slipknot tying me to existence. I summon up an empty platform, the train is about to depart on any Sunday, eternal, autumnal, drained by memory then rebuilt and ready to leave again in D minor just like philosophy, just like Mozart’s Don Juan.
I search the sky looking for the south – still? What south? Whose south? The south of what? From what latitude, longitude, according to what centre? The centre has dissolved, night is a deeper night and the only light is the reflected infernal spark of the grey river I love, (so many journeys not taken, i.e. a boat drunken with love on a heart of darkness along the dark river of Babylon from Charing Cross to Greenwich up and down along the barbaric river of my town, of the town I love). But there was no time, the river was going to the sea. There was no time, life had no time to lose, it ran breathless towards death, like this night of All Saints towards the Dawn of the Dead where the Furies wait for me with their make-up on, all dressed up for gory sunrise. The dead sleep off their tranquil deaths and I sit here wide awake with no anesthetic, with no religion or Platonism, without sex or love, without art or métier, without cyber avatar, without t
he religion of virtual reality, without the new consolation of Platonism for the people.
It is only a short step, let me say it, it’s only a short step between the Café Chantant and the Café Chagrin, one moment is enough, getting used to the languor of the senses before the heart is torn from your breast by some ridiculous ice queen. Life? Bad poetry lived and loved in the Babel of voices of provincial Italy. The soul, I hear you say, the soul! The strokes of a clock in the kitchen of an eternal night; she finds shelter in sleep, he sits zazen all night to contemplate the beginning, with eyes half-closed contemplating the beginning, you hear me, the beginning of the end. Shadows in the infernal night of a lost eternal summer, the spent body of Passion, a distant church on a hill, a church desecrated by my presence. I see it now, the little church in the night of All Saints prelude to the bleeding Dawn of the Dead. Dark silhouettes huddle up all around it. I see your ancestors – they want you there, clutching the soil as a succulent plant, feeding on their bones on their memories and ancient fears, as a fat plant where on a summer day a butterfly landed by mistake (the error that moves the wheel of life and knowledge). I see an icon of the Virgin on top of the hill desecrated by my presence, where desperadoes go to pray. Mary, Kanzeon, Quan Yin, protector of wanderers in the vast and cold sea of existence in this night when clouds gather ominously, oh Avalokitesvara Bodhisattva, refuge of hellish beings, of sex-starved beings, of exiled poets and forlorn amazons, allow me, I pray, to have a taste of true solitude so that one day I may be able to truly love. Where, where is love? I have betrayed in my dreams my innocent companion for an Emma Bovary, for a Soffocone wine-taster who in turn betrayed me in the name of a gener-ality: necessity, the everyday, second-rate realism, complementary to the sentimental enthusiasm that makes of her and of all of us, and without a glimmer of hope, Emma Bovaries (oui, c’est moi). Marry me: I’ll wait for you my whole life. Mmh, Soffocone wine, let’s see: it displays hints of vanilla, leather and dark chocolate; 90% Sangiovese, 7% Colorino, and 3% Canaiolo. Time of harvest: October; with velvety tannins, medium acidity and medium-long length on the palate, the wine is both approachable but structured and suitable to a variety of foods. Marry me: I’ll wait for you my whole life
Speed of Angels Page 4