Speed of Angels

by Bazzano, Manu

  I look for you through the mazes of the virtual world, through the hyperactive, desolate hysteria of second life. I look for your avatar and mourn the loss of the human face. I am in mourning for the disappearance of the human face in present-day relationships. I weep for the concealment of the body, this inconvenient, late-Romantic artifact, once sovereign of love affairs before the advent of global capitalism.

  Got nothing to teach you, you said, at the most, information technology. So I became your disciple. You initiated me into the I.T. magic thanks to which we could be reachable every day, every hour. You initiated me to the artificial delight of a disincarnate voice, to the immediacy that burns natural distance between beings. But you didn’t teach me how to fathom the presence of your avatar. What does a wretched man do during the interminable night in a London suburb? He switches on his laptop; the warm glow of the screen sends waves in the dark, while he reads the electronic mail of a summer now remote. I am tired of these toys – mobile phones, text messages, skype – they make me dependent…they trick me into thinking that there are not thousands of miles between us…they trick me into thinking that you and I share everyday reality…I am in pain, but I respect my solitude.

  * * *

  What has changed since then: I look at the sky more often; I speak to distant voices with non-chalance and punch numbers with managerial ease. I would know how to conduct telematic adultery. What has changed: I look at the sky, southward; I speak to distant voices while my surroundings fade.

  Detained in the diving bell, removed from contiguous phenomena, from the dharmas, from the teaching of the ten thousand things, from everything that generously sustains me, I erase myself from my surroundings. Hermes, once messenger of the gods – his sublime mission as a postman now perverted by the dictates of egoic power – poor Hermes walks with difficulty but I make out his wings from under a frayed pair of trousers.

  The ancient Hermes, when he still was the gods’ messenger, warned Ulysses before he went to visit Circe: “Watch out,” he said, “make sure you unsheathe your sword; make it gleam in the morning sun.” Hermes invites man to not forgo male dignity; he reminds us that the meeting between the sexes is a necessary dance of love and hatred and that to forget this is naiveté. But the Italian male is a straw man, a rapagnetta, the shadow of a man vacillating between ostentatious machismo and complete abdication to the feminine (since he believes woman to be ‘spiritually superior’). He cannot avoid being devoured by the Great Mother; Kali will spit out his bones in a football stadium after the unmediated collision and the wheezing intercourse.

  Look at the suicidal squandering of the great patrimony of the Italian political left, once the most hegemonically ‘Gramscian’ in Europe, yet the most impotent and invertebrate left the world has ever seen. From Berlinguer to D’Alema to Veltroni and Bertinotti, a rosary string of nauseatingly obsequious abdications to the Great Mother, Catholic and corrupt, and all in the vain hope of obtaining a tiny slice from a cake already salivated in the foul jaws of Andreottian and Craxian mastiffs.

  Immediacy (absence of mediation) has been for centuries an obstacle to the growth of love. Foolishly we entrust ourselves to the cold flame of passion where love is mutual consummation and finally turns into the perverse intimacy of hatred: possession of the other, isolation from the world (what did you see of my world, what did I see of yours?), ecstasy metamorphosed into exhausted futility, the creaking gates of hell wide open, where fault always lies with the other.

  You can’t live in ecstasy. How soon roses wither…An erotic-religious view of existence is an infernal vision, a place that quickly turns from total freedom to complete dependence. Without mediation and a common venture, love is mere passion, nuptials of moods marinated in despair. This pointless exchange of ill-combined instincts confuses Eros with carnality, with the idolatry of the body now converted into flesh; gobble it quickly before the onslaught of entropy. I had dreamt of taking you to the temple of Taoist love…we opted instead for the brief and desperate flight into the hyperreal.

  What makes love last? Do I have even the right to answer? Can Judas pontificate on the secret of disciplehood? But I will do so complacently and with the tenderness of fresh wounds suffered and inflicted. Here is what I have to say, hear me out, will you: ahem, the first requisite for love to endure is not to run away from difficulties. Big fucking deal I hear you say! But wait, listen to me: the honeymoon cracks up sooner or later and the night sky smears itself with the colours of the bittermoon. Get it? I’m not talking about the skirmishes of litigious love, of the bittersweet refining of palates that keeps spiritual diabetes at bay. Not at all, I am talking of the bittermoon, the menace banned from poetry anthologies and from Valentine who was a martyr by the way and not a Hollywood star or some Nureyev. I am talking of the profound need to smear oneself in ashes and diligently chew one’s own shadow and – even more difficult – chew and swallow the shadow of the loved one. Such passage is obligatory, I’m afraid, and no discipline (philosophical, religious, amorous, you name it) can afford to ignore it. No birth happens without blood, sweat and tears and it’s a fatuous aesthete (one who gives aestheticism a bad name) a father who refuses to be present with eyes wide open to the birth of his little one, why he is a right ponce in my humble opinion, a rapagnetta who flees from the pain implicit in all relating.

  Without the bitter moon, love is infatuation, fatuous flame that zealous bonking on beds and inside vehicles does not transmute but precipitates instead in mere fatigue. Oh yes we have tasted the vinegar on the cross: it was the other’s cold sweat. We recoiled from it in disgust, seeking refuge within the armor of self-love and the shield provided by that renowned Italian vice, wounded vanity, egoisme a deux: mutual infatuation – beautiful, sumptuous – journeying through the spasms of bad poetry, lasting the time of the silly season.

  This caustic self-reproach is already, I feel, a pathetic plunge into the swamps of rationality. I find myself already emulating that eminent couple of slapstick buffoons, Socrates & Plato, the Laurel & Hardy at the dawn of the provincial world of philosophy, cradle of this Western world of ours which survives egregiously in our privileged hemisphere alternating deeds of heroism mixed with bouts of tenderness & idiocy, all veering towards an apocalypse always fashionably late in coming. Why is it late? I’ll tell you why: because the apocalypse is immanent, darling, it’s here, ever present, punctuated by every ticking of the clock. This is why I must resort, in the end, to the drug of the terminally fatigued: reason. I chastise my own pride for having engineered my own imprisonment in the net of an infant Dionysus, for having been deaf to the teachings of a mature Dionysus, to the sensual lucidity that I believed I had absorbed from Goethe. But it doesn’t matter: last night I danced to Scarlet’s violin in Dylan’s Hurricane…

  Thing is I’m fed up with you, fed up with every bloody reference rotating around you. I am not being a good disciple of Heraclitus and Nietzsche, am I? To the eternal and discontinuous flow I’m juxtaposing pathetic musings of cut-rate eternalism. And here’s a confession: I want to re-live ad infinitum that handful of hours spent with you, give the Nietzschean eternal recurrence bad publicity, selling it cheap to those imbecile interpretations that read it as upside-down Platonism, aesthetic hunger of beautiful, revealing moments. Yes I would want to live again its pains, the pain of that handful of hours, thus reasserting the frightening authority (existential, not metaphysical as Heidegger had it) of the eternal recurrence of the same and absurdly reasserting also this love that carries on, this incurable love that goes on (and on). No escape from the eternal recurrence: its ingenious (mythical, literary) proof is Freud’s Unheimlich (untrans-latable, like psychoanalysis) and the compulsion to repeat. You yourself have confirmed its bitter truth, by re-enacting with me your ancient plot, the vicious circle of an infernal deity: I carry in my heart the beautiful moments. Oh yeah? And what about the ugly moments, eh? What about the not-so beautiful moments? What about the cyclical drama of beauty and the be
ast? What about going around in circles in the circus of samsara?

  Cut a long story short: a) every being and inanimate object projects a shadow; b) if we fail to recognize this, we end up roaming eternally within the confines of the metaphysical fairground in search of sublime candy floss or, c) befuddled and desublimated in front of a screen owned by a bejewelled tycoon and where every foreign film is dubbed. Or, d) we end up munching bread and Nutella in the peremptory darkness of the Mediterranean evening or, worse e) we end up rehearsing lines lifted from Hobbes for Beginners in order to shock naïve liberals at dinner parties. In such condition of extreme de-privation – gift of the private property – we communicate with a splintered world while seated on the decomposed wings of a gargantuan dozy Hermes.

  Open-minded bloke in his forties with GSOH would like to meet woman or couple for adult fun. Triumph of Marcusian desubli-mation; annihilation of the opposition (cultural, political, of feelings): happening everywhere you look, including within Italic Buddhism, a mere extension of magical thinking, exotic furnishings in the safari of one’s own epidermis. The statue of Gautama as an item in the shopping list, his potentially devastating influence thoroughly sanitized. Once upon a time receiving a Buddha statue as a gift meant having to rearrange the design of a home if not rebuilding it from scratch. If not giving it up altogether and becoming homeless. Could it be the same with Christian faith as well? I can see how in Kierkegaard faith is fatal adventure, vertigo and despair: I do not recall similar responses during the sluggish hours of catechism. Unless one is willing to repeat the experience of Jesus, existentialist hero par excellence, who only on the cross became the Christ through the lamma sabachtani… Unless one is willing to experience Søren’s painful renunciation of his love Regina in a nineteenth-century Copenhagen and in the name of an absurd longing for the absolute…But faith is now a Sunday pastime, obsequious humming from a shady larynx, at times a croak from a double-breasted suit. Same goes for Eros: love is not acquisition or decoration. Eros is a god, a reckless mendicant who wrenches your guts before you can say hi: That’s why we sing his praises in love anthologies and, beset by his ascendancy, pull back in quiet recollection embalming the ‘beautiful moments’ for our retirement years on the Riviera; that’s why we exchange Eros for generalities.

  You have betrayed love, my short-lived-darling, you betrayed it for a generality: by diverting at first its blinding light into your daydreams of carnality; by placating the obscure gyrations with the palliative of pleasure; by shrinking its magnificence into yet another signpost en route towards the isolationist advance of an I. Straight on, third on the left. It is humiliating me to see Eros reduced to flesh, to parts of the body, to the hunger that we trick ourselves into believing will be one day satiated. Eros is a relic of antiquity, on display in museums next to literature, art, and love letters. Hermes, brutalized by information technology, has flung himself on Eros. You are just one click away from a virtual brothel.

  A risqué utterance is electrifying during sex. But foul language debases me, the swagger and braggadocio of a nation once host of the Etruscan Atlantis and today avantgarde of inanity. It humiliates me, the defensive reduction of Eros to the common sense of the common man. It’s cowardice, to interpret the passion and enthusiasm of a male who is no longer young to the potential acquisition of fresh pussy. I hate the phony wisdom of the man of the street. The common man is racist, colonialist, fascist, Mussolinian, Berlusconian. It mystifies me, the squalid vulgarity I had naively misread as post-feminist irony. I cannot forgive myself for having thought that the exploits of a handful of seekers of knowledge could influence the sentiments of an entire epoch. The idea that the students’ and workers’ revolt of the nineteen-sixties and -seventies could have unwittingly laid the foundations of our squalid present gives me sleepless nights. Our present era lives transgression as a fashionable gesture sponsored by the corporations, and the once groundbreaking motto nothing is true, everything is permitted, has become the jingle of global capitalism.

  Our street embraces and protests were animated by a sense of justice, hence of ethics. It humiliates me, seeing the daily fascism and the blind vitalism rearing its head in lovers’ bedrooms, right into the dark sacredness of sex and love.

  Already the boudoir is stuffed with trophies and skulls of past loves. Already a congregation of brand new skeletons crowds the courtyard waiting to join the grand finale, the naked dance on the deathbed when pleasure given & pleasure received turn out to be the anxious gesticulations of baffled souls who lost their core on a distant day and never found it again, never ever found it again. Already we hear the jarring chords of a Requiem played by an orchestra of debutantes. A slow drowsiness seizes us (God, if only I could sleep for a few minutes), a metaphysical drowsiness, the very drowsiness of metaphysics, the heaviness of this flight of futile consolation above our sad affairs.

  * * *

  Did I just doze off? Don’t know. I refuse to look at the clock. I would gladly swap my PhD. erudition Piled High and Deep like shit through the years for a good hour of sleep that would restore me to the metaphysical illusion, to the superficiality of sleepers and metaphysicians. There’s superficiality and super-ficiality: 1) There is the superficiality of those who imagine that depth must exist somewhere, the amalgam perhaps of various notions reified by poetic doodling sketched on water through the centuries: God, the Unconscious, Buddha-nature, History, Dialectical Materialism, the Actualizing Tendency, Europe, Being, Truth. 2) Then there is the superficiality ad litteram of those who have woken up (with no fanfare, without the special effects of so called spiritual enlightenment) to the realization that there is no hidden coming-and-going behind the stage curtain (no being behind becoming; no sublime behind the everyday; no absolute behind the relative), and are able to embrace what is as it presents itself to the alert senses. Profound is after all only that which is remote: darkness for the eye, silence for the ear, non-being for being. The former speak of ‘peak experiences’: they fall in love right, left and centre, break their neck or prostrate themselves at the altar of a god never seen to be defecating, a god considered such because one has not seen it defecate. They flee the everyday, hastily construed as banal, a realm in which work is equal to punishment.

  From Nietzsche (genius of suffering), Valéry (genius of despair) and Proust (genius of jealousy) one learns not so much the inevitability of affliction as the possibility of extracting raw diamonds from it. This type of learning is foreign to the Judaeo-Christian perspective. It belongs to the existential perspective, on a good day.

  In the realm of love we pay a high price for escaping from the inevitable disappointment and a broken heart. We pay via dissociation and the selling out of our very humanity. Farewells are an example of this. A person in love experiences departure and separation as mourning, albeit momentarily. The stronger the love, the more acute the perception is of the transient nature of existence. (Before the sweetness of melancholy overwhelms me, Melanie Klein soberly reminds me of the opposite pole of the equation: the stronger the hatred of the loved one, the deeper the sadness in parting, linked as it is to the desire to destroy the one who, having so much power over my feelings, makes me suffer). In the attempt to avoid our slipping into victim mode, we miss the incommensurable gift of vulnerability.

  I was coming back from work; it was pouring with rain and there was a cold wind. Sheltered under the bus stop I looked at the rain. Then, I don’t know how, the anguish and despair I felt turned into inexpressible joy…It is not possible to force such moments of rapture, when the fragile beauty of the world is revealed to us. Maybe these intermittences of the heart are but small trophies, and yet in recounting such cheerful shipwreck I know that I’ll miss its consolatory music on this endless night.

  * * *

  I speak to you from a place beyond the grave, from an autumn I do not recognize in spite of the stubborn grace by which the tree opposite my house reproduces its motions, in spite of John Keat’s pagan puer asleep in
the hay. The summer that went past was life, and summer is over. I whisper this from a sleepless night, and insomnia is for me a gift: I refuse to swallow sleeping pills, or sign up for a cognitive-behavioural treatment. Insomnia is my metaphysical revolt, an act of resis- tance, my own personal refusal to lean on anything; to the life of a happy primate, of a reconstructed chimpanzee leaning on the soft pillows of a new belief system I prefer the human wound ablaze in the hour of no healing.

  * * *

  I have loved the sea since childhood, since the day my mother taught me how to swim. I’d imitate her and go far and felt blessed with water and sky, happy to exist. I loved the sea in Calabria, and during a journey from Brindisi to Athens, learning by heart and on an empty stomach Rimbaud’s Illuminations. I loved the Indian Ocean, its grey ferocity at the end of the monsoon season glimpsed by a convalescent bed, tended by a Dutch love (where are you now, M.? did you forgive me for having left? A shudder darts through me when I think of you on this endless night. I see your smile our morning hours stretched out on a nineteenth-century balcony, the exultation of protracted pleasure. I loved the ocean from a house on a cliff in California, resting at sunset after twelve hours of labour (where are you now, S.?).

  I love the sea, even the puddle of Italic shores…I dozed off and dreamt of us two after a swim among the rocks (the tenderness I felt in seeing you in my dream tentatively entering the water) and from a screen up on the wall MTV played Carly Simon’s Coming around again prophetic words in the refrain there is so much room in a broken heart… But you can’t fool around with the sea: I had sensed in your sea imagery the impersonality that later on flooded the bridge I hopelessly tried to build. The sea is dissolution and oblivion; from its reflections we weave the infatuations and longings of earthly life. Andrei Tarkovsky knew about this and expressed it beautifully in Solaris. Joseph Conrad too knew that you don’t, no you don’t fool around with the sea. No thanks, I belong to terra firma, to the heat of lovers – to the newborn’s ancient face, to the pain of mothers (but what do I know?). I belong to the earth. No one walked on water. Isn’t there enough beauty and grace when you walk on earth?