Speed of Angels

by Bazzano, Manu

  Unthinkable, in the era of information technology and of Big Brother, the diamond that is Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. We rely instead on anti-depressants, breathlessly we run to the nearest counsellor wanting to shed this sadness that is instead the dusty threshold of soul, a passage to elevated sensibility and irony, to the elegant charm of an ethereal elegant muse, to the breath-taking beauty of mademoiselle Tristesse. I too have my little semi-abandoned church in a yard where I sit to contemplate the shimmering dust: the Anglican Church in Southwark, South London, in a small street at the corner of Abbeville Road. There I sat on the cold stone just the other day, my monkish head in my hands, contemplating through warm tears a distant conversation with summer in its full idiotic swing: I love you and love your madness…May God (who doesn’t exist) help us… Not a single voice now in the empty streets. God is dead and I miss him. I miss his terrestrial shadows – love above all, love as lightning in the counterfeit summer sky. May God help us! Yes, I love your folly and do not fear it. What scares me is the folly of realistic reason, the folly that changes an angel into a common-sense devil. The angel is after all only a devil who had no chance to think. The devil, supreme in the world abandoned by God, similar in his destiny to Hermes, raped by technology: our love, 80% virtual – the virtues of love killed by virtual reality. Such virtues thrived on distance, on the inalienable alterity of the other. The imaginary bridge erected by Hermes’ glistening knick-knacks finally broke Aphrodite, demolished Salmacis’ fountain, no longer quenching the travellers’ thirst. Tourists take snapshots of the ruins and contemplate the assembling dust. The virtual dimension made us immune to the fruitful ache of distance…The cybernetic era in which we live and breathe has changed the heart of Hermes, once winged-messenger of the gods. Well-equipped with the tools of technology, indoctrinated by the new ideology (the medium is the message etc.) they foolishly convinced him that he himself is the supreme god. Co-opted by police surveillance, by plots of dystopia, by a Brave New World where everyone is linked to everyone else, available and easily reachable 24/7, a world where everyone is more and more alone. The ubiquity of a demonic Hermes in the grip of hubris and of a fantasy of omnipotence has destroyed Love. Love rests on the unknown, on the unknowability of the other. It’s impossible to love one we believe we know fully. To say I love you means affirming at the same time I don’t know you.

  From the ruins of love we move in haste. Yet among the mutilated statues in the temple, among the weeds of sensuality which strangled the wild flowers of tenderness I tonight choose to wonder. Not in order to decode its mystery, but to honour its immaculate distance.

  Eros works with Psyche, both synchronized by the system of systems, the nervous system. Their solidarity touches the chords of a secret harmony, but in most beings the allegiance is short-lived. For the tiny winged fairy it is impossible to host in her heart more than one emotion at any given time. Perhaps what truly matters is not what we seek but what we find. We have to seek only to find something unexpected. Is this the subtlety of imaginary teleology, free from the anxiety of devouring Kronos? Time is not money, but wine matured in the barrel, no frills vintage wine. A man who has lived through the seasons is a gift to his woman. And even if we uproot the vine and fly off into the wide world, roving and free, we still feel the atavistic pull. The sight of Italy provokes in me spontaneous feelings which I have no control over. I held back the tears seeing Rome’s lights during take-off. Nevermore…never more… The raven’s shadow on the floor…This endless night…No more words. Nevermore…I stutter like an idiot, and stuttering might well be the beginning of poetry. The airport at sunset. Nevermore. Never more…

  We write for the dead. Was Genet right?

  We write in order to survive, as Wordsworth did in the cruel winter of 1798 in Goslar, Low Saxony, blocked for four months by bad weather in an uncomfortable dwelling, discovering the extraordinary in the ordinary, the epic in the everyday, awakening to a non-virtual reality. The telephone itself is virtual, so goes the argument, and so is television. I remember a New Year’s Eve watching supermodels and singers drinking champagne on TV on a floodlit stage of hopeless jollity and we too uncorking a bottle filling our glasses. Then my aunt looks at me lovingly and says out of the blue How hideous death truly is…someone disappears forever and all you’re left with is a handful of memories…

  Nevermore says Edgar Poe’s raven, sinister shadow on a cold kitchen floor. The path of liberation is painful; we are torn from the soil, from loved ones who want to shield us from the horizon. And yet sometimes I feel I would gladly trade my freedom for the illusory warmth of ancestral ties. The bodhisattva path is hard. We grow fond of ties – of chains even – and end up loving the walls of our prison.

  I dreamt of coming down stone stairs in a new morning, opening the piano and playing the notes of a song written on a distant summer. I dreamt of an abandoned piano out of tune with a red cloth covering the keys. A woman sitting on the floor like a child listens to the shaky chords.

  The path of liberation is hard, and the crow perched on the fence in the cold sun repeats nevermore, never more. I resist the ancient call and renew my face, the face of an exile: I don’t believe Italian melodies, the melodramas of clammy emotions; I don’t believe the S.O.S of vain regret. I despise the small-minded Italy of Pavarottis and Jovanottis, of mascarpone and panettone; I hate the bloody sentimentality, the racism against the gypsies and the sans papiere, I can’t stand its bigotry, the trendy drugs that keep models thin and ridiculed by Italy’s sadistic designers. I don’t believe your little tunes o land of my birth nor your emotional gesturing your inebriated pseudo-compassion; can’t stand the sickening symbiosis of your single mothers softly strangling their male children. I hate your mamma myths, devouring, seducing, poisoning mamma, inevitable as fate according to Dr. Carl Gustav Jung. But I don’t give a damn, mamma my foot, mamma dancing on my grave, bound like the deadly ballast that will pull you down and make you drown. Here, I give you a sacrificial gift, mamma whore – I’ll distract from your ever-present and famished torment and I’ll escape your claws. O yes I have discovered something more powerful than you, I have discovered art and poetry, here I offer it to you as a gift, mother of the gilded shiny corn fields, fertile mother dancing on the rope stretched between one season and the next. Thanks to poetry I am no longer your slave – mother lover Italian woman, green-eyed Aphrodite manufactured by technology, but surely an avatar of Aphrodite is not the goddess herself but a pathetic winged fairy unable to contain in her soul more than one feeling at a time hence a poor male child is subject to the martyrdom of her mood swings, and a lover, my God a lover is truly lost.

  But it’s not permitted, no sir, in the tower of song it is simply not allowed to be ruined by a woman. I work in that tower you see, I am a jester, a troubadour, o yes I’m a singing philosopher and they simply won’t allow a woman to slaughter me. And that pathetic voodoo toy you use to exercise the waning powers of your hatred, well it doesn’t have the slightest resemblance to the undersigned I dare say, for I is another and so, my dear Italian mamma, I send you straight to hell.

  The baby falcon flew away from the church desecrated by my presence. It flew away, the baby falcon, free to roam in the Presbyterian northern skies, away from Pavarottis and Jovanottis, away from a putrefying and double-breasted suit cavaliere. O land of my birth, laughingstock of Europe you’ve got the rulers you deserve but I am free from the claws of the falconer, from the motherly claws of a fatuous and vicious homeland, and this freedom is the fate of every lucky son who wriggles out of the amorous castrating clasp and stops carrying blood-dripping trophies snatched from the blue expanse to be brought to the feet of his mummy his sweet and tender little mummy, no more gifts torn from the ribs of the infant and pubescent male. The cord is busted the chain is broken the falcon is free, the male falcon is free, he is free at last.

  * * *

  My coarse and bitter freedom…Running, I barely dodged in the dusty wind all t
he pathetic statues made of salt and finally stopped at the edge of the blue planet to contemplate its sunsets.

  Nevermore, never more.

  Sure I wouldn’t mind at times being a Casanova, a Don Juan, just for the hell of it, or out of suave aesthetic cruelty of intents. But I fall in love each time and the heart breaks in the gray autumn air, listening to the ancient refrain of abandonment and separation. Listen to me, Doc: my mother died when I was nineteen. It happened in March; the sea took her and I couldn’t save her. So I went wide-eyed into the wide world in search of fortune, up and down, Doctor, through the Presbyterian North where they make love without fuss, they do it, how can I put it, efficiently; in Northern Europe where one gets drunk on Friday nights after a forty hour working week. And each time the heart crumbles, at each departure bleeding the pain of farewells. Each time a symphony in a minor key on the waves of a transit tears my rib, as with my own hand I reach the heart right into the bones of my ribcage as a pagan Calabrian Christ, Doc, a Calabrian Christ but adopted by merciful London town.

  Damn it I had it here, a permit that’d ship me from life to death and back, I did have it, I am telling you, right here in my retina the blasted image that protects me on the journey to the other shore. Kanzeon, Quan-Yin or the Virgin Mary, if you must. I have no age-of-Enlightenment qualms, Doctor, oh no, not me, incense smoke does not upset my nostrils in the least. And I have travelled, I’ve seen a bit of the world you know, loved women who loved me back. And I do love the distant love for yes I do the distant love for whom no song or sonata was composed, the love for whom no dance was choreographed. My mother vanished in the waves and my adolescent arms could not save her and I am still not hopeless enough to renounce the very idea of salvation.

  Death, anxiety and despair you say? But nowadays the real challenge is to be able to speak to a person in the flesh at the customer-service department of the local branch of your bank or pay your bills on time and resist the ever-present pull to go up and up along the staircase of private property’s rosy happiness. Grand themes, great thinkers you say? But those are luxuries of a bygone era…This pair of buffoons you see, the Socrates/Plato double act, the standup comedians whose routine is devotedly recycled at the turn of every bloody century by new gray eminences – this pair of cheap clowns to whom we owe our chronic self-created disappointment, the nightmare from which no civil war will ever awake us: history. In the Italian language (the bemused English-speaking world point out) the word used to describe events – war, devastations and coronations – is the same as the one used to describe a tale, a fable and a fiction: storia. Could it be that the Italian language has inherited by mistake the profound frivolity of the ancient Greeks?

  * * *

  Cancel my subscription to the resurrection Jim Morrison sang already in 1967. I would add, forty-one years on: cancel my subscription to the idolatry of salvation. And now that you are at it, cancel my subscription to homeostasis, to the wellbeing of accountants, to therapized equilibrium, to the very idea of happiness. Cancel my subscription to Buddhist enlightenment, to so-called spiritual awakening. Cancel my subscription to philosophy, metaphysics, to the very idea that something or other is keeping the whole show going. Cancel my subscription to psychotherapy and counseling. Cancel even my subscription to such negation in which I disport myself on an autumn night, having realized with some anxiety that I have used up all my savings – spent in search of joys and vain certainties, spent between survival and the regality of a risible yet graceful existence under the cloudy sky.

  On a cold autumn day I sipped red wine with an old friend – both of us straight out of a Beckett drama, coming out of two white sacs and with different illusions in our skulls. We both watch buses dashing by in the cold in a town where every road is obstinately without her. Alone later from the upper deck of the 24 bus at Camden Town I put my monkish head in my hands to hide the tears.

  * * *

  The daily exodus from the everyday towards the virtual world is denigration of the ordinary. Its antidote is the magnificat of the commonplace with Joyce as a comic celebrant and Wordsworth a meticulous one, Wordsworth who deserves among English literati the epithet of genius as Joyce wrote in a letter to his brother Stanislaus in 1905. From the splendour of the everyday (revealed to those who meditate, who are absorbed by work and love and can appreciate the uncertainty of life on the poor crust of the blue planet) flee those who manufacture a pathetic virtual avatar, bloodless and unable to sweat and build around it Hollywood and Tuscan landscapes with oriental statuettes, swimming pools and silver fountains. Wordsworth deserves the attribute of genius, Joyce said, because just like good old Giacomo Joyce adopted by Trieste he saw the extraordinary in the ordinary, the epic in the day-by-day. Joyce’s letter was written in 1905. Only three years later an earthquake razed the Sicilian town of Messina to the ground. The town Nietzsche had loved was buried under the rubble. Of his Dionysus Dithyrambs I sense the distant hum in the radiant air, this air without you; without you and yet so merry.

  Allow me to explain: your arrival was an ordinary event, but I need words and colours unknown to me to portray the visionary exhaustion that seized me when I was faced with your solitude, to paint the tenderness I felt for your little one, his tender life bound to yours, to spell out the plea you both sent out to me, the echo of you two bound to each other and turned towards me, to the life of a wanderer called to halt and worship your solitudes and become con-sort, sharing a fate through thick and thin. But I’m raving…The pain will surely serve some purpose, if it’s true that Fritz wrote Zarathustra as an alternative to suicide, if it’s true that gold materializes from raw metals, that the lotus flower comes out of the mud, I mean the flower of the Buddha who praised with Joyce and Wordsworth the extraordinary beauty of the ordinary, as testified in the erotic scriptures of Molly Bloom, worthy of the Sermon of the Mount wild flower of the mountain mmh yes the power of a woman’s’ body if memory doesn’t fail me. Molly’s monologue worthy of the Buddha for in its own mischievous ways it moves the Dharma wheel, which is nothing but dust and pure light, and to these dust particles swiveling in the moonlight I prostrate 108 times, and in the dust I seek refuge, in the dust and in the three Dharma jewels.

  Why then rely on virtual relationships? A universe as ancient as Plato’s republic, a fenced universe, divided between us and them, enemies and friends. Exiles roam outside its walls, outside the wall of an enclosed world, privileged, delusional. Beware of exiles and rebels: they dream up utopias; they’ll end up choreographing new dictatorships. Utopia is by definition a place that doesn’t exist. Hermes, empowered by information technology, helps us build what is not meant to come into existence, for instance the dream of love initiated in the garden of daily life. And in doing so he destroys its fundamental prerequisite: vulnerability.

  The old dream of capitalism disguised as the new frontier, with the help of technology: a comfy life, armchair safaris galore. Come along, buy something, it’s two for the price of one. If you resist the universal panacea, the charge against you will read: affected by mood disorder, prone to doubts engendered by low self-esteem. But to the negative faculty of doubt we owe our blossoming as a species.

  We run away from love’s liabilities, from sweat and tears, we run upwards and onwards towards the toyshop, a skype camera, the image of a virtual avatar. The disappointed lover says to her man: I thought you’d hold me if I fell, but you can’t even hold yourself. The man replies: He saved others, he can’t save himself (Matthew, XV, 41).

  Love grows after the journey through vulnerability, through the pain of a finite and imperfect being. Descending the mountain, back from the weekend’s peak experiences, we renew the tenderness of the dark earth and the sweet tears of things. We are discontinuous beings, broken at the source.

  The lovers’ meeting place is now a pile of rubble. A fire destroyed it. How can I describe the ecstasy of love now that it feels so remote? Each pleasant sensation dissolves at the observer’s touch, but here�
��s the good news: this is also true for pain. Through observation each sensation has room to breathe. Thirty years of studying and practicing meditation did not make me happier; instead, the primary, immutable pain has found some room to breathe. I respect those who look for happiness in Buddhism and sincerely hope they’ll find it. I had a formula once; I wrote it down on a piece of paper, but it got lost inside this mess. Buddhist practice is now to me a method of inquiry rather than a strategic plan for escape from samsara. Impermanence confirms the tragic nature of existence, roused by pathos, moistened by the tears of things. The artist has at her disposal two means: irony and pathos. Those who tend towards irony often deride pathos and keep aloof from its intensity, tiptoeing around extravagant emotions. At the genius of irony one arrives via the pain of disappointment – via an overdose of pathos, but irony is normally married to the dullest cynicism. A genius of irony – Rabelais, Joyce, Nabokov – resists the temptation of cynicism. Those inclined towards pathos and prepared to pursue its hellish path without compromise eventually come to rest within tragic joy. Our era praises objective distance and the false superiority of sarcasm. It praises irony without grasping its active pessimism, content with its passive form, typical of those who have seen their feeble dreams disintegrate with the first breeze.