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.

Inertia and other revelations

What does 'LIES' mean? Was it written by a disgruntled passenger 

with no room for his suitcase? Is it the name of a kid with an unfaithful parent?

Was it a comment to a conversation?

While I was on the train today, I noticed this intriguing graffito. A battle immediately ensued in my head between Adventure and Inertia. Inertia suggesting that I could photograph it another day (?), or, better still, never. But because today was a day filled with revelations, Adventure prevailed. Inertia was talking with a voice very similar to Depression, 'Why should I bother taking this picture? What's the point? Is it consistent with my unity, is it in line with my consistency as an artist, as a poet, as a brand, as a friend, as me? Is it revealing, unveiling, understandable, useful, progressive?' One of today's revelations is that Inertia is the force that stops you from overcoming imaginary obstacles. The obstacles can be summarised as the difference between who we are striving to be and who we are. In most cases we are striving for acceptance, hence we are striving for whatever image of adulthood we've had in our head since the age of four. We look up to people we are incapable of emulating, as we see them as real adults, while we see ourselves as promising kids. As we keep on failing to become like the adults we admire, we hope at least in their benevolence, in their acknowledgement that eventually we'll get there too. Of course, when the kid in question is older than the accomplished adult he/she wants to impress, or when the admired adult is already dead and cannot validate you anymore, Inertia steps in to save the unity or integrity of the dream. It protects the dream from shattering into a million imperfect, immature, pieces. The faulty logic is that, in our solipsistic nature, we project ourselves into others, and look back at ourselves with disdain for having failed to reach all those goals that are, ultimately, only known or important to us. Until today, I thought that my goal was to please my dad and Pablo Picasso, and I tried so hard to speak a language and follow a path that were not natural or even possible for me. It's a lie, I didn't try hard at all, I just listened more to Inertia than to Adventure, because, in order to impress my dead heroes I thought I had to be deliberate, know my destination before embarking on the journey. Who I really am, though, is a vagabond, led by an insatiable curiosity and a relentless douleur de vivre. Wherever my mind takes me, there is where I need to go, no matter how winding the path, how many real and imaginary obstacles, how uncertain or far away my destination. When I see it at the horizon, I am sure I will recognise it.

To hell and back

I've always been intrigued by different realities, different states of consciousness, and the idea that, armed with your accumulated wisdom and the right mental tools and training, you could just close your eyes and astral travel. I was sure that the umbilical chord that keeps the astral you attached to the awake, "normal" you, would snap you right back in place with no effort at all. I thought I knew a lot, and why shouldn't I? I have a first degree in philosophy, a PhD in ancient philosophy, and I spent my entire life studying religions, spirituality, psychology, anything to do with the mind, the exploration of the mind, and the mysterious Universe. Which to me, of course, held virtually no mystery... So, what exactly happened on the night of October 15th, when I closed my eyes and suddenly fell from a state of joy into a world of utter terror? When, from a place of certainty, I ended up on quicksands? When, instead of one umbilical chord linking me to me, I found dozens, and didn't know which was the right one? We shall never know. Because you cannot really understand a state of consciousness when you are in another. It's either or. Either sane or insane, happy or unhappy, dead or alive. Of course, you can tell stories, anecdotes, recall images, try to relive (or forget) the emotions, even, to a degree, describe them, but you cannot be in two places, you cannot reconstruct the dynamics, the feel of that other place, most of all its logic. The climb back out of the hole is still going on, but today I felt like putting some of it in writing, creating a distance between today me and the me in the hole. I've learnt a few things in this journey: we are not always in charge, we don't know very much at all, we are vulnerable, yet the force that holds us together is pretty strong. And we mean to others much more than we think. Time, patience, faith and our internal guiding system, for how confused or blurry it may seem, will eventually takes us back into the light.

What travels

You are here. Your senses tell you so with certainty. You can touch the surfaces and taste that scrambled egg you just cooked. You sit in the hot-tub wondering if a big black bear is going to climb over the fence. You hear the fountain trickle. You are here. But not in a permanent, historic sense. No time continuum has brought you here, a job or family in Tahoe, a cabin for sale. No, you are here, but only in the moment. Now. You are here NOW. But if now is all that ever exists, then, if you really, really, relaxed into this immense feeling of belonging, you would perhaps find the KEY that shifts you into a different continuum, the one with the past and the future you always wanted. In this expanded windy morning, out in the desert, in a later now, you try to imagine what kind of act of rebellion or enlightenment would have brought you to live here, in that other life, of which you are only living, intensely, the now. Later still, you look in the mirror, the same mirror you looked into last year, and the year before. You have more wrinkles, you are skinnier, fatter, fitter, less fit than before. You discover that now, as you are not protected by your continuum. You are naked. You also find that you are not as flexible, nice and funny as you thought you were. Divided as you are between fear and bliss.
As you travel, you morph into a new person, you shed some resentment and grow jewellery, new t-shirts and hats, sunglasses and a tan. All of these things, you think, will keep me here. Time is slow at first, and during the walks on the beach with your travelling companion, the now and the future of here seem so permanent, so exciting, so infinite. And your past, really, doesn't feel that real. It's a remote blue planet seen from space, round and simple, easy to conquer. Your life seems easy to conquer. As the journey progresses and time suddenly accelerates into shorter and shorter nows, the walks and talks on the beach change intensity, not so much about future adventures, but on ways to bring back all of this, to pack this light, this sun, the funny dogs that lick your knees, the chollas, the desert, the swimming pools, how to pack all of this in your 23kg suitcase. And, in the safety of distance, you approach conversations based on change, on solving, on climbing mountains, conquering the universe. But the very last night, while emptying bins full of your discarded bottles, hiding in the shelves the books you thought you might want to read and now are not so sure. While you pack all your knick-knacks, bits of stones and driftwood, the pain of separation becomes overwhelming, the light seems to dim, and you find yourself walking with your partner on a dark beach, staring at the stars, and feeling that you are now torn even from him. Because you've failed. You failed to find the KEY.
Silence on the plane. You try to sleep but your eyes are full of images going faster and faster. And then. Then you are here. For real. Although, it doesn't seem real at all. The key fits the lock. You slip back into your continuum. But it doesn't feel right, at all. You sit on what you rationally know is your couch, and think, I can't cope. I WILL NEVER COPE AGAIN. You open the suitcase, pull out all your knick-knacks and new t-shirts and put them on the floor. They are all dead. You take your socks off, and there is sand between your feet. You look at your partner, shyly, "We are still there, aren't we?". We are still there, where we belong. In a life without continuum and just an expanded intense magical now. You realise that all the stuff you put in your suitcase, the sun, the rented car, the museum tickets, has lost its fizz, like imported champagne. You are here, again, naked.
Too much sleep or not enough sleep, images flitting, tan fading, bills paying, going for local walks, slowly, some of your cachinas end up on the TV shelf, some new recipes sneak into your cooking routine, and a sense of achievement, peace and expansion slowly takes over. We were there, you say. We were there, together.

Want what you find

I have been blessed lately by lack of internet access. Of course it doesn't feel like a blessing at first, like when you find a lot of acorns and wonder if they are edible, but, alas, you can't "look it up". So you start writing your little or long "look up" lists with everything that you would like to read, make, find out. Find out how mad Mark Twain really was, so that you can enjoy Roughing it a bit more. Without google or wikipedia telling you what to think, well, you have to make up your own mind. You also suddenly have a lot of free time to surf the world instead of the screen. To look around instead of up. And things start serendipitoulsy to appear, like a book on zen philosophy ( The way of zen) that tells you that rational thinking is not that rational, that after we have weighed all our information scientifically we still make decisions based on a hunch. The same book also explains i-ching as divining the lines on tortoise shells, but, should you not have a tortoise handy, you can just look around (not up), because signs are everywhere, they are there to show you your path, to give you solutions. But by now your look up list is so long you need about 10 starbucks cappuccinos to find out how to make books out of brown paperbags, how to recycle old books to use as photo albums and whatever other creative ideas you need a bit of visual inspiration for. And that is when you remember how tedious it is to try and find what you want , how many dead ends, how many digressions, how lost you get, how full your stomach with frothy milk. And this is when you finally realise the secret for a happy life: don't try and find what you want, just want and treasure what you find. Serendipity will help you (and save you from cappuccino overdose).

Beryl Bainbridge, envy or not at all, just sunshine

Looking at a slither of Thames from the back cofee tables at Somerset House with the sun playing hide and seek with the clouds and with the temperature, and me putting my jacket on and off at all the wrong intervals, while pondering whether I still feel envy, my friend asks me if I am still writing my blog. "Of course I am", I reply lying. Well, not exactly lying, it's just that instead of writing first and thinking after, or as I go along, I wait for that ephemeral thing called inspiration. And, as inspiration comes at the most awkward times, like when you don't have a pen, a computer, it's raining, you are standing on a bus. Then of course you can repeat what you want to write over and over as a mantra, but by the time you get home, you are already sick of it. So that's what happened to last week's skipped blog. I was going to write about the Italian P.E.N. Club, on how becoming a member in 2007 was/could have been a life changing experience. How it wasn't so, for various sad personal circumstances. And how I had thought about that upon receiving a copy of the magazine and reading about Mario Luzi, the Italian poet. The articles about him were describing his sunny apartment in Florence, the gentleness of his person and thoughts, his long walks even when in his eighties. And I felt something, something that in the past perhaps would have been envy. But it was a softer feeling. I had been myself  in his sunny flat in Florence to interview him when I was a rebellious young radio presenter. And yes, everything seemed gentle to me too. And the bright light was there, just as described in these articles about him. If you are a human being that has touched the heart of a number of other humans, they will collect little precious memories of you, they will remember how the sun shone on you. That, I guess, is what saddens me, more than makes me jealous. When I'll be gone, everything will be put into a pile for the recycling centre, all my dreams, all my little collections of stones, all my many collaged journals. And a similar emotion I felt looking at the Bainbridge art exhibition. Look at this woman, I was thinking, she did what she enjoyed, was successful at it, and had the space and confidence to paint, draw, write and doodle on journals during her travels. Everything preserved, because she touched the heart of many. She had the life I wanted to have, so I could be envious. But she didn't, did she? She didn't live a life that I could have lived. Because I'm different, doing different things. So what exactly should I be jealous or envious of? Because everything she had was a reaction or interaction with her circumstances, which are not mine, and what I do or not do is an interplay with my own circumstances. That's why I am not capable of envy anymore, only of dreams of getting where I want to go, or strategies to be as happy here as I would be up there at the top of that success that opens your world to time, connections and people who will preserve your treasures. It's all good, even down here, sipping cappuccino and reminiscing, looking at the Thames, the sun, the clouds and the end of another summer.

Malevich and me

At the Malevich exhibition half of me flies out of my body, leaves the Tate, London, and ends up, old, in a dark an sparsely furnished apartment in Genoa - an artist, finally, telling a story. My story, or my father's story, I am not sure. But something that seems to make a lot of sense. "However confusedly and meaninglessly our way may deviate from our desires, after all it does lead us inevitably to out invisible goal.", says Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday. Suddenly the tense muscles of exile relax and I feel the purpose, the continuity, the explanation for it all, for my journey, my suffering, my search. It's all very beautiful. Except for one thing. It's an impossibility. I cannot tell my story, or my father's story, or his father's story in a dark flat in Genoa. Because we are all dead. My ancestors, as they really are not here to influence or take part in the events, and I, because there is no "back" to go to. This is not how it's done. The only people I can talk to are the living or the not as yet living. While the only people I want to talk to, the only people I want validation from, are the dead. I want to be a Russian suprematist, yet think that the graph paper I am sketching on should be already tanned with age. It is, indeed, a senseless proposition. The game has to be played in a different way. But which? The past always makes more sense than the future. Anxiety flies out of the past. About ten years ago I was asked to translate Pirandello's Henry IV into English for Tom Stoppard. I read Pirandello as a kid, but found him claustrophobic. Something to do with his nose, while I had just discovered at the age of 12, that I had a nose between my eyes that blurred somewhat my vision. Pirandello came back many years later, this time in an apt text, because longing for home is often longing for our roots, in other words for the comfort of the past. "Whatever happens has happened, however painful the events and brutal the battles, they're history and nothing can change them... so you can sit back and admire how every cause leads obediently to its effect, with perfect logic...", says Henry IV. In the present, the past is safe, yet, when it was present it was uncomfortable and insecure and as illogical as the present is now. What we really want is logic, the logic that seems so clear when we look at the past - cause and effect - so linear. There is where home is, the comfortable place of logic. This whole exile thing feels more and more like Schrödinger's cat. I can only go home if I don't exist anymore. I can only go home if I am already there and have never left. But perhaps I should be grateful for that. The beauty of travel, the beauty of the present and the future is, ultimately, the lack of certainty. ZAUM = Beyond reason. ZAUM = Beyond logic. ZAUM. How peaceful Malevich's anxiety feels today.