Too late, sold out.
“I’ve been here for an hour,” he said, with his usual approach, the flat statement of fact that contained no reproof. Having already apologized profusely for getting there so late, I asked him why, in that case, seeing that he’d been there when there were still tickets, he hadn’t just bought one for me, as well.
“I didn’t have enough money.”
Again, an unassailable argument.
“Well, then, you could have just bought the ticket for yourself alone, and gone in.”
He shook his head as if that idea went against the basic principles whereby the earth orbits the sun. Arbus was too literal-minded, too rigid to enter the first, fabulous, historical Genesis concert in Rome without his friend at his side. There was no need for him to put it into words, I understood from the faint shake of his pale, ashen face. This, which had been meant as a demonstration of loyalty, proof of how indestructible Arbus’s friendship for me really was, was something I didn’t like one bit. It meant that not only had I missed the chance to see Peter Gabriel, Mike Rutherford, Tony Banks, Steve Hackett, and Phil Collins, and that it had been my fault, it had also been my fault that Arbus had missed it. I was sorry, disappointed, incredulous, a sheet of ice had descended over my heart, and without another word, I stared at the little front door of the Piper Club, which was locked shut, in the idiotic delusion (which was matched by the round and solid certainty that nothing of the sort would ever happen, not in ten minutes, not in half an hour, not tomorrow, in short, never . . .) that suddenly a bouncer would throw it open and announce, “We can take ten more,” or five, or just two, and that those lucky two would be Arbus and me.
It didn’t happen. In all likelihood, Genesis started playing shortly thereafter, or maybe they were already playing. I thought I felt the vibrations. Perhaps it was the opening bars of “The Knife,” or the prelude to the not-yet-released “Watcher of the Skies,” which just a few months later would become an unforgettable standard. While I was suffering unspeakable pangs and at least seven different feelings—rage, envy, shame, suicidal impulses, despair, fatalism, and remorse—were swirling inside me, Arbus said, “It doesn’t matter,” and, sticking his hands into his jacket pockets, he added only, “I’m going home.”
IN AN ERA without cell phones and prepaid phone cards, decisions were clear-cut, errors irreversible.
IT WAS ARBUS who had discovered Genesis in the first place, and then introduced me to them. He had bought the records (Trespass, faux-medieval, starting with the album cover, with a dagger stabbing and slicing it), he’d recorded the tapes, and he’d given them to me so I could listen to Genesis myself without having to spend the money. He, too, with such a maniacally painstaking attention to detail that it couldn’t have been the result of mere affection toward me, but must rather have derived from an abstract love of order and perfection, had recopied on the folded cardboard lining of the transparent cassette case the song titles and the band members’ names, and next to each the instruments played, imitating the typefaces used on the album covers, which looked as if they had been typewritten. I don’t know whether Arbus regretted missing that concert the way I did, if he still thinks about it. I know that in the course of a few years he lost interest in pop music and went back to his exclusive devotion to classical music—playing it, listening to it, analyzing it, understanding it, in a way I’ve never been able to do: too complex for my mind, too profound for my soul.
If you ask me, he didn’t really give a damn. In no time at all, his head was already grinding through something else, and he never thought back to the Piper Club, the hour he spent for me, on the sidewalk on Via Tagliamento.
IF YOU WANT TO GET AN IDEA of the linguistic swamp we were struggling with all our might to escape from, suffice it to consider that the prose of those writing about it, the words we devoured from dawn to dusk in the pages of Ciao 2001 (it makes you laugh, nowadays, doesn’t it? that futuristic date) or else that we absorbed like sponges from radio shows were of this variety: “Robert Fripp is a fucking guitar surgeon,” or “Once again, as if by magic, Rick Wakeman unrolls his sumptuous sonic carpets,” or even “I’m an atheist, but Billy Cobham is God.”
Everything in the universe suddenly turns crystalline . . .
It was . . . it was so beautiful.
I want to hear it over and over again, for years.
My eyes turn into water . . .
. . . That enigmatic record by King Crimson, the cover illuminated with brightly colored allegories, remains stamped on my retina, forever.
WHEN I WAS SIXTEEN YEARS OLD we’d sit and listen to this. We’d set the needle down on the first track of the album and listen to it, all. No distractions, no cell phones to check constantly. LPs were the only technology for listening to music, it was a pain to skip a track, you ran the risk of scratching the vinyl. So we listened to albums, forty minutes of music, from start to finish, the A side and then the B side, with the ambient segments, the endless solos . . . And then, frequently, we’d listen to it all over again.
MY CONTEMPORARIES FROM all over the world now write as follows:
Recuerdo que salía del colegio e iba a casa corriendo a escucharlo a todo volumen.
Io lo ascoltavo facendo i compiti mentre ero al liceo e, incredible! mi aiutava a concentrarmi.
I remember when i was 17 or 18 years and i was smoked and i put music something like this, Tarkus! It was real estyle of the life!
FREE HAND, by Gentle Giant; Close to the Edge, by Yes; Jethro Tull’s wonderful ballad “Look into the Sun”; the despairing “Nobody needs to discover me!” in “Looking for Someone”; “Book of Saturday,” which still raises goose bumps on my flesh; “Manticore,” by Emerson, Lake and Palmer; Caravan’s “Hello Hello”; Mahavishnu Orchestra’s “Celestial Terrestrial Commuters,” where in fact the drummer is God; Van der Graaf Generator’s “Killer” (from H to He) and The Least We Can Do Is Wave to Each Other; Mahavishnu Orchestra again, The Inner Mounting Flame; the mellotron . . .
“LOOKING FOR SOMEONE” is better to whistle or sing under your breath, its mournful melody, its breaks—better even than listening to the record . . .
EVERY ENHANCEMENT OF PLEASURE is analytical in nature. The culmination of the curve, and it’s no accident, is attained by obsessives: by those who fixate on the object of their obsession to squeeze out every last quirk, savoring, thrilling precisely to that endless analysis. A wine connoisseur, an opera lover, a soccer commentator—they all break down the topic of their interest into individual film stills, phonemes, snapshots, scents, impressions, and then they relive them, they review them on a moviola, scrolling back and forth endlessly, tasting and savoring and spitting out. Madness is just a step away, but there is no pleasure unless you venture at least somewhat close to madness, running the risk of falling in. Those who wisely stay away from the brink miss the pleasure. All wisdom is founded on the renunciation of joy.
(And in fact, that was how Arbus and I listened to records. I would say, rather than acolytes or priests, like scientists in a laboratory. And if the method that makes an experiment significant is to repeat it, many times, until validation is attained, we did the same thing with records, listening and relistening to the same record for a whole afternoon, and it was stunning the way that with each new listen we would discover something surprising. By that point, I knew those melodies and arrangements by heart, and yet every time I listened to them again, I would always take another step forward. A step forward into what? Into knowledge, into understanding.)
IT’S POINTLESS TO SAY that pleasure is natural, instinctive, naïve, spontaneous . . . quite to the contrary, there can be nothing more artificial, that is to say, nothing more constructed, artificially shaped. Pleasure is cumulative and comparative, and it is intensified, in fact, by accumulating, comparing, and grading. Anyone who says that knowledge and understanding blunts the shock of discovery, habituates, fosters indifference, is talking nonsense; who knows, perhaps when we’re old (
though in my case the passage of time has actually sharpened my sensitivity, pushing it to the verge of the feverish, life experiences rendering it morbid and profound . . .), but when you are kids, this is certainly not a danger, in fact, when you’re kids what you feel are the pangs of a genuine hunger for knowledge, enrichment, because without knowledge, without repetition, without attention, without dedication, there is nothing. Nothing. No pleasure, no sweetness, no conquest, no heroism.
WE WERE TWO SPONGES SUCKING the liquid out of the music, the lyrics, and the images, swelling up and squeezing out, only to swell up again as we were dipped into the ocean of the new and the unknown.
5
HHOW I MISS ARBUS!
Once he left school, the fact that I might now be the smartest student wasn’t a source of any particular satisfaction. And then, I wasn’t the smartest student, people said I was, and sometimes I even thought I was, but always in terms of potential rather than in terms of any actual achievement. I’m condemned and will be for the rest of my life to hear people sing the praises not of the things I’ve done, but of the things I could do. The book that I could write, not the one I’ve written. People refer to my supposed intelligence as if it were a patrimony that hasn’t been properly invested. And which in the meantime is being squandered, devalued . . . Which means that these compliments ring at the same time like criticisms.
With that head of yours, you know the things you could have achieved?
And what did you do, after all? Fucking nothing.
Then I, too, left SLM.
NO DIFFERENT from my dear classmate Arbus, I had the clear sensation I was learning nothing. At least, in that case, as the headmaster had advised, I could have learned something by getting to know those around me, my teachers and my classmates, yes, I could have learned something from them, understood their lives . . . their thoughts and their needs . . .
THE REAL PROBLEM is that I lacked a personality. I still didn’t know what a personality was. When I found out, I tried to construct one for myself, using segments of movies I’d seen and books I’d read, and striking phrases uttered by the few people I had around me: people a few years older than me, my cous-s-sin, unattainable heroes or secondhand idols. Everything that back then struck me as ridiculous and idiotic, nowadays seems lovely and decorous to me. And the other way around.
THE PARADOX OF SCHOOL is that things are taught too early that are too complicated, things that have nothing to do with the actual lives of those who are learning them at the moment that they learn them. And yet, that moment, and that moment only, is the time to learn them, when you still can’t even begin to understand them. At age fifteen you find yourself studying the metaphysics of love, woman made angel, la donna angelicata, the cor gentile al quale rempaira sempre amore, the noble heart to which love always returns, when you don’t have the foggiest idea of what these things are, what love is, much less its subtlest and most extreme declensions, distilled by medieval poets teetering on the brink of lunacy, in the wake of exceedingly complex abstractions that cost them centuries of thought and thousands of miles of burned-out nervous systems. And then there’s the difference that runs between substance and accident: the substance, about which nothing can be said, nothing known, that you cannot define in any way, otherwise it would already no longer be substantial . . .
On the one hand, there are these unattainable concepts, which the brightest teacher on earth could never bring within your grasp, because they lie outside his as well, and he, too, struggles with them—and on the other hand is you.
THE FORMULA THAT DROVE us crazy back then was this: “What is, is, and what isn’t, isn’t.” Signed: Parmenides. Sure, let’s say it over again: “What is, is . . . and what isn’t, isn’t” . . . Oh, really?! What a thought. And this is supposed to be philosophy? That which exists, exists, that which doesn’t exist, doesn’t. “What is, is, and what isn’t, isn’t.” In that case, if my grandfather had had five balls, then he’d have been a pinball machine: why don’t you put that in the textbook, too? What is, is . . . and what isn’t, isn’t: to come up with this platitude, we had to turn to a great thinker? In that case, the subject we call philosophy is nothing more than a scramble of incomprehensible concepts and disconcerting banalities, and the idea that someone should go down in history and that we should still be here, twenty-five hundred years later, mulling over a phrase that really didn’t ring all that different from “that dog is not a cat,” and especially to exclaim over this scrap of foolishness as if it were the quintessence of the wisdom of the ancient world, necessarily led us to think of philosophy as a fraud; and the much acclaimed Greek Man we’d heard so much about as a poor sap. The problem was that, in fact, we started with things like this, these were the topics of the very first lessons of a brand-new subject that was being presented to us as the art of reasoning, the treasure chest of human wisdom, in short, intelligence in its purest state: and right from the very first pages we stumbled across mysterious personages, of whom all that survives are a few phrases, lopped off in the middle, stating that all is fire, no, wait, all is water, all is numbers, that arrows float motionless in the sky and that atoms fall straight down but then, at a certain point, they change direction, and who knows why. The clinamen: what could be more alien, more genuinely distant from the experience and the common sense of a fifteen-year-old boy? What can the apeiron be to him, and he to the apeiron? Pointless to put the blame on the usual teachers, there is no teacher good enough to popularize something that by its very nature defies reduction. Oracles aren’t designed to be explained, otherwise what kind of oracles would they be? The most daunting concepts remain daunting, otherwise they degenerate into tomfoolery. In fact, in fact . . . an honest teacher ought to admit to his students his helplessness in the face of the steepest concepts and emphasize, instead of concealing or minimizing, their difficulty, how hard the knot is, don’t think you can untie it with some trick . . . The more you explain and delve into the depths of these concepts, the more you realize that they elude your grasp. To say nothing of Italian literature, which begins from the end, is born already adult, a newborn with a monstrously developed head, with degrees of difficulty inversely proportional to the age of those who study it. So that throughout your entire time in school, the literature almost never intersects with its reader at the same intellectual level. The reader grows, the literature declines. At a certain point the two lines intersect and the student may even become too mature for the material he’s studying, such as the various gloomy youngsters who complain about everything, or those renegade Futurists with their sound effects, all tratatrak, tri tri tri, fru fru fru, ciaciaciaciaciaak. Whereas at the very beginning it’s truly tough. It’s as if, in the very first lesson, the diving instructor pushed you onto the board, expecting you to perform a full-twist double pike. It’s not the instructor’s fault, it’s not that he’s too demanding. I am still left breathless when I read certain of Dante’s cantos, and I try to imagine what it must have been like to confront them as a boy . . . but I no longer remember what that was like.
LEARNING AND UNDERSTANDING don’t go together, or hardly ever: for a long time, you learn without understanding and then you understand when it’s already too late to learn anything more. This is just one more reason why studying necessarily must be sheathed in a certain dose of coercion.
The same applies to prayers: first you have to learn them, and repeat them over and over, recite them from memory, many many times, as if they were a piece of music and the words didn’t count; then, perhaps, years later, you’ll understand what they meant in the first place and realize that what you were murmuring actually had significance. Or didn’t. Or else you just drop them, stop saying them, period. Religion was founded on traditional practices performed from childhood without any discussion of their meaning, without a meaning ever being grasped: there was no need for that. The meaning would only have constituted a stumbling block. Nowadays, on the other hand, people expect someone to believe in God and ex
plain God and only then can they enter a church, otherwise the act would be illogical, but in the old days people used to go to church out of habit until, one day, perchance, they actually ended up believing in it. Once we drop the custom and routine that is a precondition to the experience, then the experience itself dwindles and fails. Only those who gradually become familiar with something are able, in the end, to recognize it. First you pray, then you’ll meet God, first you march and you chant and sing, then you’ll wind up loving the fatherland, this is the foundation of religious and civil rituals. Nowadays we expect everything to justify itself immediately, giving good reasons. We no longer concede a lapse of time, a decent interval between learning and understanding: the two things must be simultaneous, everything must be clear from the very start, there is no room for boredom or for mystery.
EVEN NOW THAT I am an adult and I have, sadly, stopped learning about any new topic—with the occasional sensation that I am starting to understand something I actually already knew all about, but I hadn’t ever really understood—many concepts and a great many issues remain beyond my grasp. I know about those ideas, but I don’t understand them. I could even teach them to others without having grasped them in the slightest. Perhaps I have to become old in order to penetrate them, to be penetrated by them, as if by a ray that slices through a material turned featherlight and transparent. I imagine the mind of an old man as something lean, diaphanous, spare, scabrous, fragile, similar to his skin, stretched thin by age. A fabric tattered by too many washings. In the end, thoughts, crossing through this arid room without encountering any further obstacles, will dematerialize it once and for all, with a whoosh and a puff of ashes. This will be death. But until that day I’ll continue to react with an astonishment mixed with a sense of the ridiculous in the face of many notions learned as a child (only to set them aside in haste), when I was both docile and skeptical, more likely to obey than to be seriously convinced of anything. I can guess at their hidden grandeur, but for now all I grasp is their peculiar aspect. Let’s take for example the Myth of the Cave. Is it truly imaginable that men would walk around with statues on their heads, back and forth like the silhouettes of bears in a shooting gallery, and this for no reason other than to deceive other men who lie, trussed up like turkeys in a cave, staring at a rock wall? And that those men deep inside the cave are actually us?
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