Questa sera

Si affonda l'onda nell'oblio
per non vederne piu' il bagliore.

Ritmi contatto e sguardi sepolti, esatti, odiati
sono invece ricchezze certezze doni di un unico scorrere.

Dalla stanza vuota

ancora si alza l'onda nel respiro
il suo bagliore proteggo.

Fuori si spegne la Senate House questa sera a mezzanotte.

Dentro rinasce ogni cosa.

THUNDERSTORM AND CIRCUS SWINGS

Copyright: Jack Picone

What a beautiful day. So, yesterday the crazy 12-hour-a-day cramming was over.

So, yesterday someone was saying that one has to be one’s first lover. And weird enough this is something we all know during our most thoughtless years of childhood. Their simplicity and feeling of self-awareness make them in fact the most mature years of our lives.

So, two days ago I had lit a candle for myself and followed the sun down the horizon on its most glorious day: summer’s solstice. Slowly it fell behind the grey chimneys of Holborn and left behind Bordeaux clouds on a gloomy sky. And in their stretch and vigour I saw the extent of the American horizon, of a closer than ever 1997.

So, three days ago I had returned home after the usual full day cramming. And I opened my window, like every night, after shutting it in the morning to prevent crazy british weather to surprise my room with joyful flooding during the day. Like every night I open it to feel the sharp breeze on my cheeks and feel the shivers down my naked arms. And as I glance out, a convulsed motion of swirling flows of rain stuns me: I stare a while to test the strength of the storm. How much do I miss my childhood scares at grandpa’s countryside old home! Now, breathing in the pungent scent of city rain and filling my chest with breeze from the wind dances, I sit on my soft duvet, the silence around me. And only those thunders own the room.

Maybe it’s the cars of central London and not real howls of thorn skies like in grandpa’s house. But in this theater world of virtual realities and realistic fictions, what does it matter whether they are cars or thunders? They are thunders in my ears. And the swirls are storm in my eyes. So I smile, serene, from my bed.

So, today, I will go to the park. Whether rain, whether sun. And if it’s sun, let it be volleyball in the park! I will go to the park and bring with me “Water to Elephants”: a “story of first love, of murder, mayhem and animal and human brutality, of hucksters, whores and the general hoopla created when the circus rolls into town…”. Today I’ll let my circus roll back. The innocence and the rigour of childhood’s flings in the air, the sharp grasp on the thick climbing rope and the tight postures in lifting my body in vertical off it. The beauty, neatness and articulacy of arches shaped hanging down the trapezium.

Let all this come back. Because today is a beautiful day. And, as we knew as kids, and as we shall remind our own daughters in riper years, we are our own first lovers.

TODAY

Addii, fischi nel buio, cenni, tosse e sportelli abbassati. È l'ora. Forse gli automi hanno ragione. Come appaiono dai corridoi, murati!

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

- Presti anche tu alla fioca litania del tuo rapido quest'orrida e fedele cadenza di carioca?

Eugenio Montale, Le occasioni, mottetti

Whose Growth?-elements for further writing.

Zimbabwe - Today, agricultural output is less than half of what it was at its peak in the late 1990s, and tobacco, the main export crop, is just one-fifth.

The budget deficit is an unsustainable 50 percent of gross domestic product. Inflation is now more than 3,700 percent. Four out of five Zimbabweans are unemployed. Half of the country's 11 million people are dependent on foreign food aid. More than three million people have fled the country. One in five of the population is afflicted with HIV or AIDS. Life expectancy is down from 60 at independence in 1980 to 36.

How then are a large number of people still making money?
The politically well-connected can purchase the U.S. dollar at the official rate of 250 Zimbabwe dollars at a time when the market rate is at least 100 times greater. This enables arbitrage on everything from luxury goods to essential imports, notably fuel from South Africa.
It does not matter that there is insufficient foreign exchange for basic food and power imports. The state relies on international largess in the form of aid and credits to ensure that these keep flowing.

If the perverse economic incentives on offer to his followers were removed, Mugabe could fall from power quickly. He might also find himself before the International Criminal Court, facing charges not only for his recent actions in Zimbabwe but also for those in Matabeleland in the early 1980s, which caused the deaths of more than 20,000 people. At 83 years of age, Mugabe has less to look forward to than he has to fear from his past.

Hovering mind

F. Barocci

Tonight, tonight I stop.

Eager, eager to caress my keyboard with my thoughts since long. And tonight, a few drops of limoncello, special limoncello, hovering in my mind, the soft hair caressing my nacked back, in the heat of the claustrophobic yet cozy room, against the rumours of the frenzy city, by the light of my thick orange candle, that lit numerous other evenings of pause and thoughts in yet other rooms and other countries… I stop.

As I did not for long.

A glance out of the window before throwing my thoughts on this screen, I pause on the surroundings that have defined me for the past year. I search identity in where I am now, where my work and my dreams brought me to. The roofs of London, outside of my window, dark and quiet, every night embrace the green glass of the British museum, as I stare out, shy in my luck.

From behind this window, the world seems so much bigger than what it may be. Tonight I decide to stop.

Set aside the daily routine, the worries of the exams hibernated for a couple of hours, for a few bites of succulent chocolate cake, and a few sips of limoncello, for many genuine laughs and many stories, identical across continents, for personal family histories parallel in time and space. I find out tonight that the word calf has the same root and almost exactly the same sound in Arabic and in Portuguese! And that in both languages the word comes out so similar as to potato… makes you wonder! Makes you wonder how communication was possibly born, how it shaped along history across the meeting and melting of different cultures, how the visual more than the semantic might have guided languages to develop as to pull different worlds closer to each other, in this shrinking globe.

Stories of childhood scars surprised and amused us tonight: same injuries across three continents, checked and double-checked in frenzy observations into each others’ throats. What is it that makes us, scattered pieces of longed belongingness, crave for a self-reflection in the stranger in front of us? We need to know that we are not set aside from this moving world, taht we belong to the core. We need to feel that we are essential pieces of an evolving system of friendships and special circles. But in the era of the undefined and of the shared, our identities hover over lost moments of timeless staring into each others’ smiles.

Until we stop. In the perfect geometry of this residence, where identity and privacy are secured by long dull corridors, each one of us enters her room, gathers in her own world, a candle to be lit, freshly left red roses to be smelled in the air, or the last day’s cigarette to be enjoyed. Each one gathering her identity, from such diversity.

One wonders what the story of the chicken and egg is between emotions and communications: do we communicate for a need to share emotions, or do we share emotions because we have shared experiences? It seems to be the secret of love too: do we give because we feel, or do we give for the need to feel?

You only need to look at a candle glowing to understand that it can only burn of its own light. If its light reaches out to you, its warm shades will paint your cheeks and its energy warm you. It might relax you, spur your fantasy, make you smile or just serene. But the flame will have glown of its own light. Its glow will continue to paint your face until there is wax to be burnt, or until you decide to blow it off.