Thanks, Facebook, for having convinced me to write this post that lets an event non-event start. The internet itself will be the spin spaceship of this journey. A possible autobiography begins in space/time. It cannot be nothing else different from petty bourgeois journey as the one of the anti-heroes but which, in this case, does not even have a destination, an end, but aims only at a transformation of phase. The ring of Facebook is only a wider circuit, after that of the underground or of the L.H.C. where the beams turn, in that case of protons, in this one of ideas. As biographies exist, there are also autobiographies.
An autobiography January 29th
My journey is very similar to the one of protons in L.H.C. and to the one of the Big Bang. They are two excellent metaphors for me. Just like both of them, inside my journey there was a phase of darkness and invisibility, characterised by all the production of the 70s-80s and 90s, but since 2004, the date of purchase of my first computer, the visibility of these projects was made possible by the internet. That day I started creating a website of the work in progress ARCHIVIO DEDALUS EDIZIONI through the upload of my documentaries on poetry, realised in the same experimental and creative season. For a lowering of the temperature the photons are freed from the primeval soup and reach us from the cone of time; in this way from the indistinct creative obstruction of the everyday and of the great statistics - which let only the advertising systems to filter, occupying all the visibility - was born for me in the 2000s a new fire, similar to a burning glass, for capacity, that is able before to concentrate and then to spread a message: the internet. Well, the anthropology of the network and the paradigm of it had characterised me since 1994 with the experience of writing the PoesieDiTransito, realized in the underground and in the motorway network; this is the reason why I start from here, as if from this point the visible of the creative experience began, even though I had many more traces of it behind, back in the indistinct plasma of the accumulation of objects, if read from in the sense of heritage, conservation of art and of culture, if read from point of view of universal entropy: the awareness of the downsizing of every utopia, of every delusion and of possession. To give a name to the matter and to the creatures of the world is the result of our need for classification, and so also this second birth is added to the experience of the journey, crossing other wayfarers, timeless witnesses, and from Icarus’ thirst for knowledge and the wisdom of Daedalus (also here a circuit, a system, a network) of willingness to dialogue with the laws of nature, I rebut myself in the third generation: Vincenzo Pezzella Dedalus.
Dedalus and Lucy January 30th
Description of the drawing: Ink on Fabriano’s paper, 21x29.9 Archive: Vincenzo Pezzella Dedalus The first figure on the left is Rimbaud; I drew him trying to remember an illustration that goes back to a portrait that Paule Verlaine made him in 1972, when they hang out together in Paris. The second figure represents me in 1994 while the third one is Lucy, the hominid discovered by Mr. and Mrs. Leackey in the Rift Valley during the 70s. The ring that surrounds the figures is not a hula hoop but a cyclotron and/or LHC. The sign of the underground stands for the net as circuit of transit of the psyche of the energy space time but represents also the archetype subterraneity, Hades, Demeter and so on, Persephone and her return for the bloom of nature. The illustration is a metaphor of the “journey of the specie and of script”. I publish on the internet other free-readings for who may want to read them.
Dedalus and Lucy inside the LHC January 31st
There are no places on Earth, except for the Greece of Pericles, where in the last years I had the desire to go to: the only one is the LHC. This kind of desire has always taken me far from the more natural desires of travelling that are on the other hand common for the majority of people, and in the pyramid of priorities, this destination – when declared – has always caused me concern or even disappointment and kind of derision. The ones that know me are surprised when they acknowledge that I do not travel since twenty years; my last journey was the one of the PoesieDiTransito. Also this, possibly, may be considered a non-place and all places all at the same time. The core of the research of all space and all time is not just a concentrate of magnets, calculus and energies but especially neurons and psyche. This is the side that attracts me the most but not less than the mocking configurations of the sub-atomic particles in their decay, appearing and disappearing. It is true that everyone is responsible for its destiny, in part, and I understood this when I had the possibility to draw the cover of a book about the ring and the boson - I am not telling you how this happened, as this is another story. I firmly believe that the drawing was already done and was waiting for me as an announcement, considering my hesitation to make this journey now, as I have not elaborated yet a good idea to defect the beams of protons and the matters of temperature - infinite or finite? Dedalus and Lucy, in this journey of writing, have preceded me, they are my avant-garde, the most cutting-edge point of imagination that dialogues with space-time. And as for the best traditional cinema it is common to start from the end in order to come back to the beginning of the story, in the same way in temperature we find ourselves to the end and we are going back to the freezing as the weakening of Earwicker, which is a narration that finds his starting point, his beginning. And with this dissatisfied tension, I give up, as we can just imagine the infinite, but we can’t make any experience of it.
WE CAME FROM FAR AWAY: WE ARE PROTONSJanuary 31st
It is since Gilgamesh times that this story goes on: the research of immortality. A baton caught from someone else in a relay, the torch of the elixir; Orfeo and Eurydice, Dante and Beatrice, Dedalus and Lucy. When I saw the photography of the magnets inside which the beams of protons turn, I immediately imagined it perfectly conjugated into a collage in the drawing I wanted to realize. To me, it is a great challenge and a big conflict because I ask to the drawing not a manual and decorative ability but instead a vision of the world, a presence of the today. What is the point of copying Durer, Pisanello or Doré, or even the cartoons, that are rather screenplay for cinema? And there are just few people that have this ability to enclose, a knowledge of a step, a vision, after the Vitruvian Man by Leonardo, in front of which, I think, you cannot do nothing else than bow and learn. What does it mean to draw the man? His forehead, his nose, his muscles showed for what, for which event? Which kind of harmony and measure do they want to indicate? Which knowledge and\or dominion? Well, Leonardo was able to share a “man” that lived in finite and restricted spaces, who brought with him the whole of his physical machine as a fractal of nature. We are the shadows of it; that shadow which an atomic charge can leave of us on a wall, that quark not distinguishable neither in space nor in time; a fluctuation from the void. After all, we can affirm that we were more than in the meaning of the Renaissance, I would say in the childhood of humanity: his last portrait as a young dog.
SELF-PORTRAIT before the Self January 31st
Here I am. Yes, I was here: if we zoom backwards, in the space time, maybe, we still find some particles of the field that slightly curved and in the same way did the synapsis that sparkled. I’ve asked a shoot to a “passer-by”, after having tried this framing. Who knows where that girl is now, which journey has she done? The map is an emotion that is in turn a geography of movements and of meetings, this is what I tried to portray at the first interaction; I have to admit that all the characters that I have met in the lecture and in my education have emerged, even if chaotically, from this turbulence of interstellar gas, shining Cepheids, surprising black holes. The polaroid has been chosen for her performative uniqueness, exactly in a moment of transition of the reproducibility of images. A picture, absolute, without possibility of repetition, as life. Her chemical support, that interacts with light, adds to that journey of writing, the real transit of man, of his body, in the space-time, sustaining the gesture of writing with the gravity of the everyday mechanic, urban, terrestrial. I have never stopped playing; when I was in transit and I made these performances, in 1994, using different languages, I have always felt as when I lived in the street as a young man, and the adventure was a 360° one. The collection of flashcards of soccer players was not so different from these of photos, to which follows a project in the 60s the case prepared me. The iconic request has more or less been modified, in the flashcards were the non-conventional positions, in the polaroid their immediate of transit or of quote of the same, as in this image from which I created, in 2002, the logo of the “ARCHIVIO DEDALUS”. In the development there is never a breaking, because a subterranean continuity directs us as a compass and maybe a daemon, a spinning top, I would say remembering the one with the cord of Maxwell, as mine with the string.
CERN’S BOOKSHOP February 1st
Here it is the cover of the book: it is half an A4. I set this graphic for the series in 2009-10, when Fanny – a student from the Statale university in Milan - was with me, on an internship; we realised at that time the first cover for the first book dedicated to Marcel Duchamp and about it I have also drawn a rebus. I had immediately rejected the solution of the photos in order to focus on the idea of a unique piece, a book in the form of a drawing; the cover is then a container, an entrance, a map. There is nothing that is more immediate than drawing on white paper, something that is quite like sketching paths on a map, in part algorithm and in part writing and symbols. The execution happened through the use of a mouse, drawing with simple programmes for the computer. Currently the book is at the bookshop of the CERN, that is surely the place in which we find a wide variety of languages and cultures. Mario Campanelli, the physicians that wrote it, is a teacher and a researcher of the Ginevra experiments that narrates about physics and about the boson as a surprising story. How many aspects I could touch upon this graphic experience, tiny and great fibre of beard as a bulb ready to flourish. This will be enough: the publication of Maxwell’s poems, that preceded him, as a reading appreciated by the most famous artist of the ready-made Marcel Duchamp, that was given as a present few years ago by physicists to their colleagues as an extremely appreciated Christmas present.
FROM MAPS TO THE WEB February 1st
Around big clusters we have the disposition of a filamentous web of dark matter, just as everything that exists in the space-time spins around us, containing the existence of other people that is alien to us, of the individuals not already met, of the ones that we will never meet and of the people that at the moment are stranger for us. I’ve always been fascinated from maps and especially from the ones of the underground – maybe Mulan (i.e. An animated musical action adventure film by Walt Disney Picture) would have been happy of this in her expedition as a warrior. Their superficial visibility contains hidden paths, webs and contacts that repeat micro and macro structures; they always remembered me a game I liked a lot and that I used to play with chocks on the bricks of the yards and of the streets, called: “il serpentone”, a track covered by the cork of the beers and the world or week, a map of days with many variables and possible paths, chosen and obliged, skipping slots and numbers. In the drawing I uploaded there is a graphic tribute, a quote to a living artist that was the first evaluator of my personal creative season then, and I still consider his preface to my PoesieDiTransito one of the most acute and relevant, and many habitué will surely recognise it: his mark that at this point has become his style, perfectly integrates itself inside the itinerary of the singular and the multiple writings, sign and symbol – I am referring to Emilio Isgrò.
THE SELFCARD MUSE, February 2nd
Here I am, after having cut the onions for a soup I come back to the narration, at least for the ones that are reading it. It is not the “chocolate machine” but the one of the tongue before it turns into the liquid form, the last piece of memory and conservation before fading, vanishing in the smartphones. The instruments conserve his eroticism and his role of muse, that I recognised her greeting her seduction, and whom I dedicated the whole work of the PoesieDiTransito. The laser pen and the writing are the fertilization in her womb that elaborates the text and gives birth to the reproduction. Many more critical readings, naturally in addition to my brief cues, can complete the analysis of this experience, performative and literary, and you are invited, if the work attracts you, to try and suggest new texts, even if more than 25 years have passed from that season of pilgrimage and writing. The most recent, and truly pertinent, filled of analysis and readings, was written by Enrico Bugli and for the occasion I inserted it in a publication that you may have seen on Facebook: the PoesieDiTransito in the PulcinoElefante, that is also available on an online magazine, “Sdefinizioni”. The self-card machines have appeared in a different technologic generation, I used different of them and also the cardboards, the logo and the print that collect the types. The texts that I wrote are an inseparable content. The machines itself have become a work of art, even if at the moment I do not own any of them; in the photo they had been borrowed us; it was the year 1999 or 2000. The dialogue or quotation of the ready-made with Marcel Duchamp is an element of the work, and the irony itself confirms the other character that travelled with me: James Joyce and his Bloom.
1994, 4th of February
I restart my own narration posting a cardboard or whatever the self-card machine that lets this writing to start called them. It is the second after the invocation to the Muse that I do not suggest you. Naturally the readers that did not read the previous posts have less instruments of information in order to follow the thread of the maze that I followed during those years.
A POLAROID AS W.W.W., 4th of February
In this polaroid I am like a proton in the LHC. The circuit must be circular; no one thinks that the Earth is squared. Even less the solar systems or the red dwarfs or the galaxies are prismatic but rather a crown, a toroid, a spheroid. We measure the curvature of the universe in order to define the hypothesis of its development, in short, our head is more or less round, the brain is convex, it is inscribed in an igloo, what a strange fact! We talk about the theory of relativity as a warp of space-time and at the same way, we talk about the engines with a speed above C as warp engines. In this shot, even if I have a lightness closer to the one of the electrons, I am still in the journey of life, as anyone, more or less conscious, of those collisions or touches that let us meet, share or separate. A psychic magnetism directs us, it is maybe biological, in the pineal gland that the Egyptians already knew and considered as the biggest centre of orientation of the individual man. A hidden eye that see more and better than the two frontals directed toward the horizon, and also them are slightly curved in the curved space… During our whole life we are guiding particles that orientate and create fields. A poster spun with me, I would say, in the advertising spaces in the wagons; it is beyond my back, and it advertised an exhibition and a lecture that I would have hosted in those days in 1995-6, in the art gallery “Derbylius”, Piatti street in Milan and that does not exist anymore; the newscaster, Carla Roncato, died of cancer few years ago. I am proceeding that journey in other circuits that adventure brings me, as this one, made of images and liquid writing and liquid ideas and it is great, each new experience let the exploration go forward and vice versa; shame If it was not like this, the cosmic absolute zero would prevail over us; only the movement saves life, both the supernal mechanic of Newton and the quantum mechanics of Bohr. And the way in which the message is transmitted sometimes will remain a mystery, but what matters is to try, is to reach this contact to this sharing, that strange to be said, of the web itself, the W.W.W., was born in the LHC.
DNA, February 5th
The DNA of men is inside his “grace” or “epiphany”; nobody can escape, not even the ones that are not conscious. Everyone has a destiny without doors, and no one can give up. Just think about all the people whom we belong to and whom we owe our life without having never met them, and we will never be reached by their traces, their voices, sounds or protections. Yet it is upon this mountain of dead people that we raise our apparently infinite every day. The concept of “primitive”, of the ancient that the Indios told; it contained a sense of gratitude that maybe we have lost forever? It would sound strange, at the end our journey was pushed by a desire of gratitude; and I would say that there is no other way of travelling; but I wanted to go there where I could meet Gilgamesh, Ulysses, Virgil, Dante, an obscure tunnel in hyper-space, where everyone is still fixed in absent time, and that opens upon the multi-universes; the ones that we can live through reading when breath becomes word and as the blind “aedo” (i.e. Omero) would have said: “l'anima gli volò come un soffio”.
FROM THE GRAFFITI TO THE LASER: O-tu-poesia. February 7th
I have never thought about writing a book, or at least a book as commonly thought: a project, sheets, a cover and a box. I am not saying that I do not like to write, actually I have always written in the same way that I draw. It is something linked with the commercial aspect of the object; and fortunately, I was born in a critic generation that was already meditating on the instrument and form-content of the book that, all things considered, had taken my creative tension and my formal reflection high. The mere thought of speaking to a publisher or to the publishing industry in general was depressing, and in the same way it happened for the art galleries. A kind of blockage pressed and still presses in order to appear on the stage of the world; and since I believe, at the end, to be “zen” by nature, even if I have my contradictions, as I do not part from the desire, especially with respect to the encounter of the unknown; I consider identity to be a thing that happens by chance, more precisely a thing to which it is not necessary to dedicate a lot of time, condemnation: drowning. Yes, it is nice to be water, so full of memory , but in order to reach another kind of water that is the spring of the sea, remembering a Sicilian touristic myth; and in this vision words are the spring and the script of the sea. Many times, in different occasions, I push myself and I found me at the root of a behavior and of his language.
The first print and edition are literally from the street, for the street and with the street. I have not looked for it, but it appeared seducing me as in the widest myth interpreting it according to the narration of will and psyche. And I have already written before the season of the self-card and I wrote by pen; however, in those years I lived a lot in the streets, and I had always few verses swirling in my head. One day I saw someone taking a cardboard out form the machine of the business cards and I came closer; I did not even give her the money that maybe had withhold from a precedent user, as I started to write using a graphic model, and one by one, trough the pression of the index fingers, the letters inscribed in the display with a weak light-blue brightness, as if I were on the computer that guides the Enterprise. It was the invocation to the Muse “Poesiaditransito-Invocazione O-tu-poesia-o-tu-poesia/ditransito dimenticata-follia/rendimi-il-mito-sotto-ceneri/gravitazionali/bella come-una equazioneNewtoniana/ stamp.cop.16S.Babilametrò2.10.94/Vincenzo Pezzella/”
In the end I wrote in the streets since I was a child, with the white cock on the asphalt and upon the large tiles of red bricks in my yard, on the walls of the staircase in a kind of challenge of invention and nursery rhymes. And as if I were the latest “registrative” scribe, at the end of the 90s, the vision of those non-places, as though it was the last trace of breathings and verses in a calculated grid, more than each meter already known and historical. That writing had a clandestine tone already when I forced the machine and its programs that were originally invented in order to be merely didactive; I immerged in the text describing what I was living around me, as our poet of happiness and stones did at the front, but my personal one was more invisible and\or hidden in a fast and dazzled subterraneity: it was the essence. I have always claimed that the act of writing is a state of glorification of the mind that could not be possible in any other different way, the Surrealists confused it with the unconscious, but the shelf mark, the calligraphy of the used language, does not allow complete uncontrolled expression of the unconscious, rather allows for the management of the superego, the ego of a mind that acknowledges to be in a collective journey, of telling a belonging.
WHERE WE ALREADY WERE: THE PHOTON IN 10^-43 SECONDS, February 13th
We cannot escape from a continuous and permanent “iconism” of our perceptual horizon. We in fact translate whichever experience of contact with reality through perceptive languages in synthetic signs that we used as a memory and exchange of development during the whole journey behind us, since an anthropological and physical point zero, if it ever existed. It is appropriate to frankly say that these signs, that have become iconized in perception, as we use them to sell and then we reduce them to substitute the reality from which they were born, impoverishing the processes of analysis and knowledge. But if what we miss is the belonging, if only the sense of belonging can complete us, why do we hesitate to complete the only road that would make us happier? To live the real rather than the superstructure of all its meanings, as the verses “vivere vorrei, addormentato, entro il dolce rumore della vita” remember us. We prefer to be assaulted by nostalgia in a world that we ourselves have destroyed through opposing the monstrosity of the ego with nature. And we are not anymore able to re-establish that kind of listening, that sharing, that journey in beauty and measure; we miss the song, the voice itself is voiceless when asking for the offer. And precisely because of these evils and absences we look for the sky and the stars, in the journey that before me many others have done, and that every day when we wake up is a hope to which we want, we have to believe in; here there is what I heard of the whisper, of a calling around me and in the places of transit, in the tunnels, on the faces, in the eyes, in the rush of isolation. And behind each there was the resentment of not having said everything, of having kept the biggest desire quiet, of being allowed to say: “Here I am: I am alive!”
The city that surrounded me was changing, Italy was changing in the faces of immigration and of the more widespread poverty, letting it to be swallowed and misleading the corruption of the dominant class that was at the service of the cruel holding companies related to the worldly capitalism. Art has become iconic when it wanted to give men the appearance of a god, surpassing nature and in a certain way subjugating it with a will of power that this god himself would have given him in return for the submission of the body more than of the spirit. But that process birth in the sharing of the membership in a group and of the ritual has suffered a phase of inflection very similar to the one of Guth that has dissolved the initial equilibrium, causing a phase of subrogation, where we prefer the “copy” to the original, and we even ignore its existence and the fragile uniqueness of his birth state: the incomparable condition of being a fragment in the space-time and then of our history.
I was in delirium, yes, as when you cannot fall asleep because the soul is too full of things to do and cannot find a way out, there is not anymore a common language, we are in the blindman’s buff of fate. All the nights seem to promise and end, after the insomnia, with a changing of life, a baptism of water and grace: a simple rebirth. The latter shows us what we had never seen before, blind because of the immense desire and because a wrong interrogation about the nature of life, its impermeability with respect to time and to the will of power, finding himself only in the water that streams. As those original shadows we desire and want only the things that narrates us of reality as a mold: we do not have any more the strength to front the real and we alienate it substitute in a “new world”. Still, to resist means not to forget and to enter into those shadows setting your world on fire every day, every minute of that little light that a photon can originate and light, with a sign, a verse, the common destiny, the rhythm of the whisper of the heart.
Our fragility is to have forgotten the limits, the limits of being, not completely, only part of that nature that prevails over us, a fractal of it? All right, but as for the different repetition of a variable periodic number, when the quantic fluctuation did not still generate hierarchies, before each imaginary that characterizes us?
S/T: where are you? February 17th
When I was a young boy I used to collect and play with stickers, as many of you. Aren’t all these images, photos, maps, drawing maybe close to that spirit of identification, of celebration of track and mark to follow and at the same time to leave beyond, loose? The entire chain of Facebook’s posts was not born as a collection: the book of faces. Hence, we continue to be picking explorers even if many of us do not pick potatoes or carrots. We are afraid of losing ourselves and to lose something of us unless we put it into an image: the myth of Narciso, Eco, Psyche, they are inside us and we cannot tear us apart from them; it is a formation process. And yes, I want to take it this way, this having devoted to my growth, as Tom Thumb, the time and the gesture of leaving crumbs, clear traces of losing me or finding me? In my public presentations I declared many times that the project of documenting the Lombard poets was born from the desire of discovering their paths of childhood, of the territory, of the ways; isn’t retracing that path with verses and word that they have chosen a sort of collection together with a recollection? One thing is sure, and is that it is possible to collect only outside time, being outside the current moment, from its streaming, and it looks like a paradox. Now you will say: the biography must not be confused, anyway why may someone easily exclude it, believing it is possible to separate time from space? We do not proceed, in all the meridians, excluded for the Zen choice, in the realization of a collection of the global album of the consolatory images of something lost forever, but also capable of inspire to us an enthusiasm, a change in the state of mind, a key for a reality that may feed us from the heaviness of the everyday life? I have always believed that not sufficient critic attention has been put, in the process of writing, to the materials and to the places in which it was elaborated, and I refer also to the so called “Poesia lineare”. A lecture and an inquiry may strengthen the space and the time that seems us to be extremely separated into the work of poetry. Campana and Leopardi wrote on papers and with different pens, in different places and alterations. Chasing an emotional geography is the investigation that brings all of us together. The problem is that today the disappearance of writing is immediate with the smartphones, thing that authorizes us to the use of an instable language and at the same time transversal and immediate, the support is without coordinates of space-time to the point that in our social networks’ pages it is often proposed a possible choice: where are you? Yes, it is the same “where are you” of Tom Thumb, it is the “where are you” of the journey of live, and that “where are you” of all of us in the everyday, either when we are coming back home, or when we cannot do this or when we are going towards a stranger or our first love, to which we are entitled to answer.
POESIEdiTRANSITO LHC in MilanRome underground, 21st February
I end this first part with some images that are the memory of that intimate collection in which we bury and rediscover them, we evoke and remove them, we create an entire civilization. Will the Anunnaki have them? Christian theology, the mythology would have been born there. Few days ago, there was on the net a short video of the central stations of Moscow’s underground; they were so extraordinary that they looked as museums’ rooms. I could never have written in them, neither they would have inspired those verses, as the emotional geography of those places already had its specific aesthetic, a will of being a place and a time. What I uploaded are different fragments in dialogue, as the set theory in the theory of numbers.
A poetic manifesto for only one author and billions of consumers, March 2nd
Thank you Facebook, you ask me more than what I am able to do, a post per day is quite difficult to elaborate; there is life: the market, cooking, the meetings, my daughter, art and at the same time I continue this autobiography in the form of a comment of the past, and I try to narrate an experience.
POESIEdiTRANSITO: a poetic manifesto for just an author and billions of consumers We have three multiples-boxes related to the PoesieDiTransito, and they collect the self-card (cardboards) of the Canzoniere from 1994 to 1999: the “scatola zincata” (galvanized box) , the “scatola mandorlata” (almondy box), the “scatolafaro” (headlight box).
While I peel some apples for a cake, I reflect about all the poems that have already been written, about the ones that will remain and about the ones that won’t because they have never existed. The word that gets lost in the poem, in a certain sense the watershed of our society that transforms breath into word, its sound and its sign and technology, in a code of script and signifier; Socrates perceived its risk, the weakening and also the disguise, the possible corruption, whenever it is parted from its living organism and therefore critic: opening, with the text of writing, like this, at the sunset of absolute truth, the word of the oral speech, the only one that will give us measure and knowledge because experimented in time, here and now. And isn’t this, maybe, the time for truth and for what is right, and now in our ethic vision, is also the one of love?
Which boxes can substitute these three from a far childhood: the box of the stickers, the one of the glass marbles, the box of the spikes and of the cork with the yarn of nylon for fishing; cans for the “Bucaneve” biscuits or the pack of the “Colomba” (i.e.: Italian Easter cake in form of a dove), in order to store treasures, to play with time and its measure and to give a symbolic value to things, to the objects that do not have it, or to the ones that have value only for us as “Rosabelle”; and they accompany us in that “jump” that we may do at the end of our youth, giving up the utopia that was in our blood, in our everyday breath, to be like the “adults” without hopes, dreams, while those collections of the imagination let us grow up – and it would be a pity if they would not exist. A manifesto is written in order to have others to follow it, doing the same or similar actions and having them to incite similar words, the same project for life, demolishing old paradigms, striving for horizons to share. But if we write at the sunset of an experience, the ones that will wake up in a new dawn will unconsciously bring with themselves those “new” words? Ant this happens because the technological prediction of the everyday life has absorbed and incorporated the contents and also the forms and the instruments into it. I looked for boxes that could save alphabets of magical explorations, immediate and also stratified narrations. I realize that my wandering has ancient roots; in my view, it is following a map that neither I see nor I know but I explore, and that expands a little bit every time I stretch my leg and I walk, taking a specific direction, the earth grows under my feet as a root that appears, sprouts, shows herself to air and to light; it is an emotional map, a geography that I have in my blood, that governs me as an obscure energy of the cosmos in an acceleration that increases. And in this way I learnt that in each journey you walk alone, as in that each contains the journey of our life and of our destiny: we are “thrown” in the awareness of not being able to come back in time. And as adults, even if we left the utopia to the childhood’s dreams, all of us still look for those improvised and unlikely boxes. We feel that bringing them up from their forced destiny, taken them way from the trash is our way to feel a belonging, in order to compose a common synapsis, a mitosis, a scalar field of energy. What swirls in my head is the binomial excitement-satisfaction, the closed system of our experiences, as I talked with Veronica that follows me on Fb in this period. We base our exploration in any world and at whatever age on this behavior if we keep our brain alive and we feed all the rest of our perceptions and of our body. A Pavlovian reflex that stores the stimulus to the exploration relentlessly, “fino e all’ultimo respiro” beautifully mentioned by one of the masters of the nouvelle vague. Yes, it is like having a portable Wunderkammer, as a fellow traveler, our ambition; all the previously mentioned ones, many boxes in one, where to raise the cover and climb down to the bottom of it, as in that magnificent Neapolitan song “Cum me”. We built that box of the “extraordinary”, possibly reaching that bottom, in a strange apnea from reality, though connecting continuously to a subset of it, with some interruptions only made by contacts but not by web that is an open-system energy, a phase transformation of the void; in it we find again the dreams that we made and the ones we would like to make in the 0 and 1 code. And from a valley to another one, from a continent to another one, from the Rift to the Silicon, from the Kubrickian mandible to the Hubble’s satellite, those impulses of field spread in the most magnetic screen of our contemporary time, in the box of all possible games and of the memory of them, the magic talisman of desires, the oracle, the tabernacle of our everyday: the smart-phone, without whom we feel deprived of the map, a trip toward the unknown, at the research of alien worlds, as the most science fictional starship of our affections as consumers.
POESIEDITRANSITO: The Canzoniere of a Mathematical constant, March 9th
The exploration is our fate, if it wasn’t like this we would still live in the caves, or inside the borders of a specific land as it happens with other species. The Neanderthal man, the Sapiens, and the Denisovan, they all wanted to go somewhere; but why do we always want to go somewhere? Aren’t we satisfied with the place where we are? Is the unknown our destiny? We have already aspired for going to the sky when we had our feet in the mud and we were more similar to a tree rather than to a bird, even less to an airplane and not at all to a spaceship or a satellite. Yet, the sky is dark, silent, in a certain sense less conquerable; then, by what are we attracted? The knowledge of what? The need, yearning of which contact? Here it is the magic word of our thirst of exploration: the contact. No creature can live without contact. The contact is the engine of the exploration, and it doesn’t ever perish, it doesn’t satiate us, or at least it looks like it doesn’t; is it our damnation? Our entire life is a research for contact, contacts, waiting for them, hoping for them. We may say that it is a constant with its own mathematical formula that currently we are not able to decode. As to confirm what I am writing, “Acqua”, my cat has just jumped on the table meowing in her alphabet a request for a caress, without asking for something practical as food, water or something else. In this we bring something that is bigger than us and of our intelligence and will. The languages are nothing more than instruments of contact, and the same is for the arts and the sciences. But if nothing is sufficient for a time only, this means that, in the research, we are condemned to die many times. In the infinite enquiry do we remain who we were at the beginning? And if this was true maybe we wouldn’t need to spend all these energies, don’t you believe? A trip to Italy is also a journey in the writing, is a song for Italy; a “canzoniere”. It is a word that I love a lot, from the rhymes of Petrarca to the ones of Leopardi and Saba. And yes, Emilio Isgrò had gather it correctly since the first lecture of the cardboards written in the underground. I collect here two or three posts, let’s see how many pictures does Facebook allow me to upload within the three hundreds that I have, about poems, maps and photos, and I complete in this way the second part of this autobiography on the net.
I keep on travelling: friends of Facebook, each photo of you is a place; I went to some of them while in other I didn’t, neither we met nor we spent the afternoon together. We live a common journey that is this exploration that I mentioned in the opening, this contact that constantly brings us to a big doubt, that Kubrik in his “2001 Space Odyssey” or Tarkovskij in “Solaris” and also in “Contact” by Zameckis were wisely able to suspend from their narration, that is as if at the conclusion of the trip we end up with, surprisingly, find ourselves again, meeting us another time! Then, we are not looking for places, but for the memory of ourselves, emerging from this drowning that the time of life and possibly also of history has forced us to cope with. Ilia, Narciso and Eco, a triad that sustain us on a common pillow, the rest that we can imagine in the noise of life. And the tiny square of a little district is similar to the underground of a city, in the same way in which the seafront of a city is equal to the path of a countryside landscape; in each we hit our brain with the question: who is coming towards us? Do we ask this even when we have our life full of things to be done, but none of them satisfies us completely? Is it maybe because we actually torn us apart from life? As we expected it? Had we always expected it? And in the same way the words? That line by Antonioni that he let pronounce to the female character of the tales of suburbs “Sopra le nuvole” (ndr: “Beyond the clouds”), is particularly important: “una donna le parole le aspetta, le aspetta sempre”. In here we have the life that waits for us, we mention the world both to lose ourselves and to find us again as in a mirror. And in a certain sense we find also the illusion, it is like when you look the laundry moved by the wind outside the window on the horizon; a nostalgia comes to you, and you say: ah, here there is the time! No, we are not anymore able to live in the fence of our classification, if the latter has ever existed and if a fence has ever been present. With the religious narrations we imagined some, and this imagination has given us a lot, such as the cave of Lascaux and the Sistine Chapel.
The POESIEDITRANSITO e the double CC (…Grandmother’s Footsteps) March 25th
The word is our pass. We are not driven by our feet but rather by our tongue: the word. For us, it is the watershed between to be and not to be. Our certainty of existence is like a symbolic act projected in a space-time that is a bubble that fluctuates inside the void. The word crosses us and with it we pass through ourselves; our condition is the transit, not just because it is our final destination, always a bit beyond the horizon, but precisely because the word is in transit, in its prefix we have the transit of a real property to a symbolic one, that is indeed the language. Be it of faint structure or gravitational or also of other constants, the principal, unifying, convergent and convergent to a singular phase transition, it seems us to be allowed to say that C as Contact satisfies the answer: where we are, how and why. In this constant apparently not mathematical there is the root of our word and I like to think that this is intertwined with the necessity of the others, with their space-time variability as in the biology of a flower “l’energia che spinge la vita dal calamo alla corolla” (i.e. “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower/ Drives my green age…”, from the poem “The force that through the green fuse”) in the magnificent lines by Dylan Thomas. And, if the constants are the pass, then why shall we exclude that this lasses-passer belongs also to the image that is modelled in its proper organic complexity, whose apex is the word: naming itself? With it we investigate the constant of the universe, of nature and we create new worlds – even if imaginary and confined in our space-time; we give them a fluctuation, a singing. We cheer in this way each prior action, worth to be sung, the principal constant: the contact. And the word gradually accompanies us or better becomes our puff. The mantra to which we harmonize the biology of the heartbeat and of the neuronal synapses lighting the contact in an almost imperceptible yet still existing osmosis, and it is deep as when you enter in the “jump of the rope” while the game has already started: “…Grandmother’s footsteps!”. The fact that we may find other constants, a bit different, in which the chain that has led us to draw with chock on cobblestones has not risen, is for us, definitely, a void of meaning, a double void with respect to the quantum vacuum of the fluctuation that here gave us the word and with it the splendor, don’t you think? We are born in the word, even if it is not articulated, onomatopoeic, and with the speech in our throat, through the transformation in whisper we murmur; in the middle the “Passages” in which the characters of the “Commedia”, both linked with Dante and with Fellini, line up, that face that we struggle to identify in the everyday events, when the time cut through its measure imposing us the departure at the horizon of our journey as in “The Seventh Seal” by Bergman. In my trip the passages were the instruments of transit and not the items, the landscape was more an absence than a presence; yet, I come back to this theme related to the fragments precisely in these months with some drawings for a book about Benjamin, not forgetting the “Angelus Novus” that I previously drew and put forth again at an ambiguous age. The “Petrarchian” absence that we inherit is not just of the face that the word can bring again to life but also of the landscape, because in it and in its circles our hope has been consumed and with it our life. It was difficult to recognize the view around me while I was writing, I perceived the alienation and the detachment; the “pasolinian” contradictions of the peasant’s life in the urbanization did not leave traces since the 80s. I was a lost one, as Maurizio Cucchi would have said not just of himself; nevertheless we circumscribe the territory as dogs, also Dino Campana and Ungaretti, “Zonzotto” underline this; we transform in the landscape. It is a rite of thanksgiving that we carry since the mists of time in the code of our pilgrimage or rather blessed by a god, as Bauci, Filemone, and the more famous Dafne?
The words as telomeres, March 29th
Hello Facebook friends that are reading me; there are just 4 episodes left of this autobiography of the “PoesiediTransito 1994-1999”. I keep on going.
Writing, writing, as unravel the seeds or following the stream of a river, it is the genetic twirling chain of a lithic time as I remember the nib of Luciano Caruso that handwrites each object turning it into an evidence; it is that archaic witness, that I couldn’t use anymore, the thread of my pouring on a ribbon and laser, a writing closer to the liquid of the bit, a dialogue with the telomeres that resist - as words – to do say something, to do want to be something, to do conserve something. The urban landscape offered me new instruments and contacts that the word could have harnessed in its laying out, opening and fluctuating, reclosing and tearing apart; a machine with an internal camera obscura as the blackbody of Planck, the dizziness of Balthus or l’étant donnès by Duchamp. And above me the celestial vault with its seductive eyes, from a net to another one as the golden rain of Danae that I find in the narrations of the Talent’s, global at this point, America, Australian, British and so on, the song upon the stage of the world awarded with “golden buzzer” and tears.
It comes to my mind “… bella come sei”, the gold of the Neapolitan summer, the pale blue and the blue that I used for my first works; at that time I bought a long roll of cloth and the seller offered me some big cans of pale blue, and I bought them, “I’ll paint the blue” I said myself. It is as I wrote painting; in those years, I took back the graffiti as an image of the dialogue, and with the writing the verse is the image of itself; a serial calligram without an end. I did not look for the technique of the Renaissance that I think is more adequate for restorations, but I tried to perceive through an osmosis and a little bit also alembic the technique of contemporary times, with those ways and themes that surely could not be present neither in the medieval man nor in the renaissance one. For each different time its vocabulary and its challenge.
What language are we referring to? The one of the Sicilians of Federico, the one of Dante or Petrarca, Leopardi, Ungaretti, Montale, D’annunzio, Bertolucci, Pasolini, Zanzotto, Sanguineti? The written language is always formal precisely because it has to be translated in a form; its algorithm is also a visive one; a property of writing that is more explicit and conscient in the Chinese and Japanese cultures. The writer does not act solely with the property of time but also with a coordinate of space, some through the disposition of notes and sketches in a very personal way in a map or graphic-visive position, and also the double tables of writing may suggest the practice as it was for Italo Calvino. In some way his support and his limits form also the breath. Still, the musicality ends to be intrinsic to the text and to its arrow of lecture. Now we don’t pay attention to this because, through the display of the computers before and the ones of the smartphone later we are used to the linguistic scrolling that never existed before; the futurists would have been crazy for it. After all, they have anticipated those contemporary results with their experiences. Writing is very close to the mathematical abstraction, to the formal system of logic, to the point that it is subsequent to pictography. Writing is the first equation of the mind, it is a process of reduction of the phenomena of the real world to their imaginary synthesis. This is why writing is the most cutting-edge technology, and it is primarily thanks to the Minoan and the Greek later that the foundations of the society of technique and then of the dialectic thinking have been laid. But writing is also the first degree of separation individua-world, it is the self-absorption of the psyche that nominates itself, a verbal lapsus. The writing language is likely to further simplify itself, getting closer to mathematics, the formal language of the constants and of emotions. Some new contents can be written only modifying the language and changing its paradigms, taking it apart and reassemble it as Lego bricks.
NO TITLES – POESIEdiTransito 1994-1999 March 31st
In order to write this post, I literally consider your friendship gateway, Fb. I send this last episode of the literary autobiography about the PoesiediTransito to all the people connected with me on the net. A dialogue with the case that we cannot exclude from life, as it is the basis of our voyage. I am an epigone, my first language is not even Italian, but precisely Neapolitan. I found in my mouth a language of a splitted everyday life divided in tiny pieces, Joyce could already catch its end et the end of the previous century. I wanted to write as our ancestors of the stones and of the graffiti, the only difference is that I made this through an electron machine, in this action, Baudelaire and Rimbaud were whispering in my ears and in my brain, and then I had yes, an Italian heart; “sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle” (i.e. Leopardi) that my horizon did not have, could not have, because there was not anymore a geographical horizon but rather a cosmic one. In this journey, my eyes, as airwaves, the infrared, the payloads of the satellites launched towards black holes and deadly dances of galaxies. Yes, it is true, I felt in this presumption of being able to testimony our falling of our story and in our story: always drawn between truth and conservation. But all of this happens because we awake from being thrown in the world with a sensation of absence as being consecrated to the only duty and sense that is “Oltre la sfera che più large gira, passa ‘l sospiro ch’esce del mio core”(i.e. Dante Alighieri). Its function of memory of accounting cannot be separated from the actions that identifies its procedure and then from the delineation of a border, a norm, a ritual context, in a certain sense a first victory on Gods and on whatever divinity; in this the first conquering of the encephalon of the Homo, indeed, Sapiens. However, as Plato already had grasped, narration in the form of writing had a dark side or we may say a reflecting one, that is it would have opened the vase of the interpretation, in a certain way it would have confirmed what the Sophists said, it could have become a mumble. And yes, my mumbling is precisely this in this work that streams to the millions of minutes of life, metaphor that was loved by Giancarlo Majorino. I am a “homo senza lettere”, my falling of/in the language is that stone thrown into water of a pod from Vinciano and from De Dominicis, the translations of Ketty la Rocca, the paradigms of Di Bello, or simply those molds that were put out of the pink gums that were stumped on the scrapbooks. No, I’m too young for the season of the “Visivi” that I believe is forever faded away, as the amateur painters that imitate the au plein air painting without understanding it. I am a lost one without culture, with the only tradition still possible, the one of belonging to this species, or at least it seems like this. I am not a peasant, I am not a factory worker, but I am not even an intellectual, that is not really necessary in this system. I am like the Pasolinian excavatore, that digging finds just ruins, actually, not even ruins, as also them were buried from the obstruction of our times, from the plastics, from the trash of the cesspit where we have fallen into. In the same way, the time of the boys of Portovenere, and also the one of Denver, Tanger and of “Urlo”. Now the Windsor’s royals will sell a line of smartphone in order to hide themselves and resist to the homologation of capitalism; is the time of man, possibly, ended with Ettore and Achille? But if we are not even that hope of Gilgamesh of becoming “gods”, who are we? The delirium of Molly that confirms Calderon de la Barca and its eternal wheel of the bells that everything is dream; nobody of us begins something because that something is since ever and does not go neither to any place or has any end. And yet, we cannot renounce to that waiting for a news, even if this was “la cavalla storna” of a scholastic memory, with a message of tragedy and suffering; because we are designed or condemned to narrate that suffering. Picking it up on the stage of the world and of our weaknesses, turning it into a moment of sharing as the Greek with the theatre. I enjoyed to throw the target at the Luna Park when, as The Catcher in the Rye and I still went to it with my childhood friends, wandering in the streets, but we went there with girls that kept on telling us to spend those few money earned thanks to a parking or “a strisc a ‘muro”, with a shining smile that only the Rom girls can show. Pascolinian age and of the “Angel”, faded forever away as those summer lectures, mediocre both in the aspect and in the content, that I went to buy to an improbable supplier, close to the San Paolo stadium, Fuorigrotta, where we played football and the book was useful only to delineate the goal post.
THE SUPERVISOR OF THE NEW WORLD - Fourlough of the PoesiediTransito, April 6th
You do not have to be surprised if I affirm that the first addressee of this narrations was Fb. I don’t know who there is behind the display with the task of reader. I would compare it as being in the middle between the customs checks of Troisi-Benigni in “Non ci resta che piangere” and for the other half a Faust or a Borges that narrates the origins of narration. It is your homework to individuate a description of it. I acknowledged that I did not make this journey in the web all alone. I met the attention of who knew me, old friends and also more recent ones, collaborators, students making an internship of the past years and currently doing it, curious perfect strangers that may be potentially involved or on other frequencies of ideas and living, biographies and identities offered by Facebook. For this reason I dedicate the epilogue to the materials that some of them, Luciano Caruso, Enrico Bugli, Giorgio Moio, Giorgio Zanchetti, Raffaela Costagliora and many others that you will be able to read in the post wanted to write upon this unclassifiable work. Someone in those months have gathered together my doubts and my reflections sharing the spirit a bit epistolary of the narration. My aim was the one of telling an experience of contact and of web of few years ago, when we still “walk by feet”, a journey of my hominid ancestors and of the homo sapiens going through the chain of the same gene?
LETTER WRITTEN UPON THE WATER: +- E=0, April 9th
We always have a letter to deliver, but we do not ever choose because we have to write in it the person we have been. And we miss the bravery. In addition, the castle that we have to surpass nor does not provide for a return and not even for the certainty that we will arrive to a specific place or that someone will be there to welcome us, neither that we will be listened. During our whole life we have been concentrated with the pen in our hand in order to catch that moment that would have let us to say: “I get it! I have lived!”. Fortunately the rush and the impatience decrease with the time, and in this way when we will be close to the place that may receive our petitions of a rediscovered humility, after having crossed the Desert of the Tartars, we will understand that we have looked for an “America” that we already had in our blood as a Gan’ Eden, a garden of our utopias where we hoped to lose history, to get free of the chain of Psiche. But uselessly, because time has been our measure and the speed of the train was the only one that our senses perceived; it was our limit: no formula could help us neither saying something about the birth, nor letting us imagine the mother, the father to whom give our debt, our letter or those few words that we were able to write on the water-paper. Luckily, regrets inexplicably re-open our scars, that strange to be said, connect us in a contact of species, even if conserving that fearless spirit of migrant that belongs to me more than the suitcase of the tourist. “Io – vagabondo… quell bambino che giocava nel cortile…” and took with it the freedom of the unknown, when in the years we fight with that pale blue sky that is not able to welcome us, reminding us of our gravity, while a golden powder, between the spray of milk of Era and the fertilization of Danae, in the talents, promise us a famous life. And it will become a semen and will flourish in the blackbody of Planck as it happened in the womb of Mary and of Mariée and before of Eva and Lucy, and in the same way it will happen to my daughter Margherita, of Faustian memory, also her Lucy’s daughter and of many more mothers in the infinite genetic chain? Aliens and people alienated in order to mature the burning knowledge that we are that letter, and it will be too late when we will realize, opposite to the supervisor and with indescribable surprise, recognizing it as in a mirror, that we have to give that letter to ourselves.