My life with Bowie and mirrors

Me in my Bowie days, age 18

One day, when I was a kid, I found a discarded, tattered journal. And in every page there was a picture of a creature who cultivated, or had, an odd and profound beauty. To me, already obsessed with fragility and ephemerality, this young and old, male and female ker with orange hair, who sings My Death Waits, who know Jacques Brel, like my father knows Jacques Brel, like he actually is Jacques Brel, and the other Jacques, a whirlwind of feullies mortes in Paris. To me, he becomes the key to a mirror maze, where history repeats itself with so many minute variations that you find yourself lost and so far away, seeing reflections that don't see each other, and walls that are not really there. I needed to hear him, though, not just look at pictures glued in somebody's book. A friend goes to London and I ask her to bring him back to me, his voice, his words, a piece of his stage. And she comes back with the Man who Sold the World. And I stand in front of my wall, of course, and stare at it so deeply that it melts into the other side. The night side, the blurred boundaries. And my own mirror where I practise to kiss, wrapping myself in a feather boa. The street is silent, the room mine to play with, the shackles still in place. But the boundaries have become blurred. And this is Genoa, not too spiritually far from the Port of Amsterdam. Genoa, with its streets of decadence, struggle, red light prostitution with creatures of all ages and sizes and multiple variations of sexes. Was that not a stage? A play of mirrors where the red light smooths your skin, where the too young seem old enough, and the too old are still good for a night, or to hide you under their beds until your crimes are forgotten. Crimes, I had committed none, I preferred dreams. And then Jean Genie was another piece of the puzzle, although the roofs were a mixture of Florence, Paris, the greyness of the Genoa slates, and not so much of New York. And it was Jean Genet that I followed, not yet Iggy, through the meanders of his Lady of the Flowers, his bizarre films, his castling in prison. While my father tried to point out that the lumpenproletariat didn't even know (or care) about the Nazis. One little twist of the mirror and the scenario behind is totally changed. I found my Lady of the Flowers, called Cinzia, who liked to embarrass me by comparing freckles. She wasn't interested in girls, and her world was so remote from mine. Then aliens came, and 1984, that my father said it had been safely written or published in 1948, not during the war. And the game continued, where he knew my every move, from a slightly different angle, and introduced me to a world of real cabaret, Paolo Poli, who called me Grillino (little cricket). And not White Duchess. I am, after all, still a Grillino much more than I have ever been a creature of the night. Bowie taught me about different worlds, the flimsiness of self definition, the constant search, the slight changes that become rifts, that become slight changes, and that eventually melt into one marvellous, harmonious, if dissonant, melody.

Points of view

By chance, I came across an article my father wrote in 2002 about the view from our Genoa flat. The view was indeed amazing, over the greenhouse with its palm trees, the whole city and, on a clear day, the sea. To the left there was a castle. Throughout my youth, I used to look from the window, at the grey slate roofs and the castle, which, against the setting sun, sometimes looked like a skull. I loved that flat, and it will always be in my heart. So, holding back the tears, I read my dad's article, curious and scared to learn how he felt about the place. It turned out - and actually I should have remembered - that, while I, in my room, was looking ahead, at the buildings, the castle, and the sea, my father, in his study, was looking through his bay window at the winding road. And while he was looking and thinking of all the years gone by, of his ghosts from the war, he was also waiting for me to come home. This image, this different point of view, the looking ahead and the looking to the side, made me suddenly see a different person, not my father, the all-knowing, the powerful, the wise, the giant, but a man, a mortal, with all his insecurities, fears, and sorrows. As I don't have children, I never really think of what it must be like to be a parent, of how mysterious a young life must appear. Mysterious and worrisome, fragile, yet in need of space and trust in order to grow. Being a rebellious, exploratory and dreamy child, I must have appeared particularly mysterious to him, while he pondered on how to be a good father, looking at the winding road from the bay window. Sometimes, out of desperation, he would make me sit on the couch and read to me from the Ecclesiastes, 'To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven:, A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted...' He was hoping to slow me down, to make me wait until I was more prepared. But the time was right, it was the right time for me. Now, I like to think of this sense of time as an intuitive clock, that has its natural speed, its right time for things. Even though my fast clock was cause of concern for my father, back then, I followed its rhythm, like a dog on a walk, sometimes running, sometimes stopping to investigate a scent or a movement. It was only later in life that I started fighting against my clock, wanting to learn things faster, to work harder, more and more, in order to get to that place that is supposed to be my destination. But my intuitive clock thinks otherwise, 'To everything there is a season... a time to get and a time to lose.' The journey will take the time it needs to take, for how valiantly I fight against windmills. I am glad I didn't know that my father was not omniscient when I was a child and needed to think it was possible to have control over our own lives. And I am glad that my intuitive clock has shown me a different version of my father today, today that I am the same age he was then, when he sat on his chair and read me from the Ecclesiastes. There is indeed a time for everything.

Things

I have learnt and I'm learning a lot about things lately, how we surround ourselves with things to feel secure and how things actually fail to do that function -  they instead often stunt our creativity, fill precious space, and keep us where we were, stopping us from moving forward. One of the reasons why I like travelling is that I leave all my things behind. I now pack a tiny bag and rely on the masses of things accumulated by others. Adapting to what I find, in terms of books to read, accessories, paper, pens, toothpastes and hand creams, is a fantastic exploration of the world and of my relationship to the world. Travelling only with hand luggage makes me feel that I am at home everywhere and nowhere. Even my sketchbooks are becoming smaller. I love this super tiny Moleskine. I brought no art supplies with me to Genoa, thinking that I would find something there. I bought only this fun pen called tratto pen that turns blue if you wet it. Back home the tratto pen is now sitting together with all my other hundreds of pens, and has lost some of the charm it had when it was the only one. Possessing things or being possessed by them is a funny, delicate balance. Travelling is a great way to test what is and what isn't important.

to rescue a felt tip pen

Landing in Genoa

The pen

It was a daunting trip, going back to that flat, to a piece of distorted history, distorted by distance, time and many inexplicable events. It was difficult from here, so many miles away and with such a wide gap between my me and other people's me, my version and other people's, it was difficult to face such a potential flood of feelings. What would I want to rescue from my past? Nothing really, some memories, perhaps, the essence of me, the thread that we call conscious life, but nothing physical, no weight of objects to pull me down... except for one pen, that I never got to use. I knew it was in the drawer, next to my bed and I wanted it, and I thought of nothing else, for days, for weeks. Now it's here on my desk, in my present life. Here, to share with me some magical moments in the future, create sketches and look forward to harmony and joy.