Speed of Angels

by Bazzano, Manu

  Of course I love the sea, but in the sea the miracle of individuality is dissolved. Tin-can mysticism and wisdom-while-u-wait are not for me, I’m afraid: I’ve lived too long in these barren regions. I have been the lighthouse guard, happy to finger each constellation in turn, contented to breathe in and exhale my own private ecstasies. Dispensed busloads of platitudes; covered my cracks with a hand of fresh paint. After forty years I found that ‘working on oneself’ is but a descent into the abyss. An abyss of light: Nietzsche’s impossible image confounds me and gives me solace in this endless night. Fritz (Joyful Science, V, 343) spoke of the open sea, of new dangers and new fears that seekers of knowledge and true sailors must face. On reflection, though, the sailor clings to the linear perspicacity of a daily routine that on a ship keeps at bay the tedium of water and sky; connoisseur of every brothel and tavern on land, paradises where every woman is a tender-hearted whore and every host a poet.

  Angels & sailors, such fatal union seized me as a twenty-year-old on June nights (cursed month, month of Hermes and Aphrodite), inviting me to pull out of the bright sky the paths of ancient navigators, my fingers bloodied by the menstruation of a lover whose name and face are long forgotten (but not her dark sex, not her skin and the heady perfume, not her moans and sighs). I knew already it back then: it is my sex they want, not my poetry.

  The sailor who ventures between water and clouds is not Ulysses hauling out the rudiments of his mercenary science from astral routes and quiescent monsters. Ulysses, scientific informer, wants to detain experience, convert it into knowledge but he doesn’t know how to listen to the sirens’ tune, doesn’t know how to give in to their deadly song. They rest on him: the de-humanizing objectivity of science, the vainglory of technology and hubris of white medicine cabinets. He boasts of a mission, even a goal, raising knowledge to fetish status. It was not a scientist, the hero whose footprints lovers found at dawn among the seaweed, but a human being who, like the most revered among the Achaeans, was subject to lust and wrath, to the folly of the errant gaze, to the inconsulta temeritas condemned by prim Plato from the pulpit of presumptuous probity. Achilles stands alone among Homeric heroes in full recognition of his own mortality. He knows he is inferior to the gods for the mere fact of having been born. From here stems his disappointment with the war code, his profound solitude and the inconsolable sadness of his lyre. Not just his physical prowess, or the intellect, or the ‘work on oneself’; not just the music and the poetry…Instead his vulnerability, the fall (brought about by Polyxena’s betrayal), the unique beauty of the mortal hero, of the hero as a human being – so remote from the modern hero, the man-object of billboards, the shiny avatar of virtual worlds. In a nutshell: not Ulysses, but Hart Crane, who followed the sirens’ song to the bitter end.

  But I’m raving…I’ve had enough in fact of sea and sirens. And in any case a siren is not the muse but a run-of-the-mill chanteuse with a bloated face; an insecure, whorish creature who mistakes her cheap melodramas for love, who gulps up in her phony embraces credulous voyagers stranded and with their heart dangerously open, gambling their dear life for the bogus pleasures of a balmy night. They start believing that dreams will brim over into the light of day, that life itself might become poetry! And all just to escape the cruelty of the sea! A rude awakening awaits them, I tell you. When the effect of the potion starts to fade, they’ll gasp like crabs thrown in the boiling pot.

  II

  Daybreak has to come at last, the dawn of the Day of the Dead, and with daybreak some common sense! Stones in the hall, the sun of my homeland: time before information technology, when human feelings had bright rooms to waltz in, widening circles to infinity, rhythm and sequence; time before swift hunger set in to bolt the other in clunky embrace. Inestimable value of distance – allowing silence to weave ever-new and unknown patterns. If only we could allow time for sketches of Moira who is higher than the gods. Finally the cells mend themselves without fuss: praise to the incomplete, to what is eternally suspended.

  * * *

  Unforgivable blunder: tracing back one’s steps, crossing the automatic barrier at stations or airports, begging the attendant to let you in, to make an exception. Orpheus’ mistake: turning to look at Eurydice who vanishes and becomes a memory.

  But is not memory herself the real Muse, the one addressee worthy of love? Is not Mnemosyne herself imagination and poetry, the locus where the soul of the world absent-mindedly grazes, in perpetual exile, serene in the ecstasy of things undone? My one unforgivable blunder to which I owe the curse of impossible love.

  Orpheus at central station just stands there, watching the train go, the train that takes her back to the land of the shadows. I failed to reply – how could I? – to your double request: a) unsheathe the sword, having dismounted, and tear you away from the spasmodic embrace of your tribe; b) enter your world on tiptoe, wed it without altering it in, become a pattern in the wallpaper. Unforgivable blunder: cultivating heartache after farewells, anemones in the garden of sorrow fertilized by distance. A fatal blunder in our technological era that seals the end of literature, the end of Eros, the end of sumptuous pleasure extracted like honey from the petals of defeat – antechamber of happiness – from the inevitable defeats of love.

  The end of a madness most discreet; the end of my only love sprung from my only hate! And it’s not just Shakespeare reiterating this via his Veronese dabblers, but also the Shakespearean novelist Sigmund Freud. For hatred is more ancient than love. Our instincts would thrust us into a tragic scenario but technology saves us for pleasant mediocrity, but even in non-virtual life one can escape the chaos of relating by turning every lover into an illustration, a signpost, a stage in a path unscathed by contact. A gloriously sterile path: welcome to the tourism of relationships and the virtual safari. Don Juan knew it well, and every man or woman for whom encounter is a step in a pointless journey, unmoved by sorrow or joy. Is it narcissism? But to bequeath this clinical slur to emotional sightseeing is an insult to Narcissus to whom we owe the precious little we know about the self. No, we are still in the playground of seduction, and seduction is, in a wide sense, sublimation. Se-ducere is to take oneself (or another) away from one’s real path: distraction, deviation, and detour. Is this the set course for contemporary women: from seduced seductresses to independent mothers? No, this is not the province of Narcissus, for the sixteen-year-old boy is tormented by a passion for a mirage.

  The hyperboles of love: at the death of Antonio, Cleopatra said: there is nothing left remarkable under the visiting moon. If it was not for love and love’s hyperboles, what would we utter when out of breath, through whispers and broken words and caresses…A dog bark in the distant valley, then the sound of cicadas: life is cruel, cruel, cruel…We could fly into the distance and right into a Chagall painting. We understand every sound and enter phenomena, fired by a lyricism that inflames us. And finally sets us apart.

  Not that the everyday becomes grey; rather, each new enthusiasm renews ordination – not to liturgy and beliefs, or the Dharma of incense and statues, but ordination into living-and-dying, ordination to praise – from Kandinsky’s geometries to the symmetries of supermarket shelves.

  * * *

  What is it? I don’t know. Most people call it love – the longing, the sweet pain, reckless smile breaking through a countenance at rush hour, the silence descending in the midst of city noise. To inhabit such distance is the consolation of memory, the certainty of defeat in days that start to fade and give way to autumn. Sitting in my room in the late afternoon I feel the sun and life itself on the planet dissolving. In the vast silence I mourn the momentary absence of pain. Re-entering this flighty skin, I embrace again my destiny after the detour of seduction. Is this path the very path of erotic thought? Seduced by love, we are prey to hatred, for hatred is far more ancient. Unable to resist the vicissitudes of the instincts reawakened by touch, we run for shelter to priestly blessings, to a thalamus that may keep the Furies at bay. Others flee: the
y run as fast as they can from the inevitability of hatred; they rummage in the crowd looking for short-term tenderness and frantic embraces. The deed is done, and half asleep they search for a melody among the sheets and in the first sound of dawn. Unmovable, untouched, they pursue their reticent, introverted path. Rotten luck of contemporary woman, offspring of feminism: once seduced seductress, now ‘independent mother’. They dart past you, these young mothers, from a yoga weekend to a ceramic workshop, bad poetry and shopping lists in their head, perched between hints of tenderness and the episodic groans of a life implied. And ye shall faithfully trail the stream of seduction, for seduction is sublimation. And embers will bear witness to the fatuous flame of summer. Some cut it short, take their leave early on: I envy them. Others linger on, divining embers and remains on sleepless nights, simmering sense and direction.

  * * *

  Many have said it: you go back to your native land and find it changed. So you become a stranger in your homeland. You travelled from A to B. In going back, you discover A has become C. Unrecognizable. Shopping malls where once there was open space.

  I left Italy in 1984. I travelled for six years – lived in France, Germany, India, and the United States. In 1990 London became my home. The city welcomed me as it welcomed from time immemorial exiles, refugees, and émigrés from the colonies of the Empire. ‘Londoner’ is to this day synonym and symptom of ambivalence – wobbly sense of belonging, an absence of roots. The interlocutor hesitates: Londoner? It can mean all and nothing. He waits, is tentative. After a while the accent, a gesture, the way a person walks reveal the shade of a belonging, but what is revealed is a remnant that sheds its hue as we speak. Who leaves the homeland becomes a hybrid: not entirely English, no longer Italian: a monster. This could create pain, if belonging to a tribe were important to me, but the thing is, being uprooted suits me just fine, thank you very much, for I am one of those who sing on their way to the gallows. Stateless, and childless too. In love with love beyond the preservation of the species. Devoted to ecstatic consummation, paying back the munificence and grace bestowed on me from birth. My private credo: praise the fragile beauty of the dew, do not attempt to organize goodness, for ethics are but generous folly. Power of the lotus flower and of the rose, stronger than the stone. The experience of the limit. I had tears of gratitude when someone reminded me of Lama Yeshe. Long before my ‘nihilist’ writings made me persona non grata in the Institute for the Embalming of the Teachings of the Great Vehicle. Finally, a pagan archangel resurrecting in me the accident called grace, annunciation in the midst of the traffic jam where I exercise my duties as citizen of the world, loyal to the carousel of alienation.

  How I had loathed the Bel Paese with its crooks as Prime Ministers and its dapper scroungers, with rockers sponsored by corporations and murderers clearing their throat in ostentatious humility before singing in church. But the so-called homeland has touched my heart. What virtuous deeds did I perform, I thought, to deserve such bliss? What test awaits yours truly? So much joy is unsustainable. The past – luminous, transfigured – was knock-knock-knocking at my door, beckoning me in. It became present: joyful, ecstatic, yet modest in its grandeur. I asked myself: where from here? The path is lost in the wood and footprints fade. Under the open sky, all directions are possible, a troubled freedom, chance in ambush at every corner. In disclaiming linear time, every minute is apocalypse and the liberation following the refusal of a bargained redemption. In disclaiming dialectical encounter, the chance of poetry arises, the recognition of the other’s unknowability. The abyss between the two shores is not filled, explained away or hidden. We decline from building bridges, from seducing and convincing. We swim together in the pond where a heron elegantly skims as we speak.

  * * *

  I accept your accusation of narcissism. I salute the new madness sung by Ovid. Welcoming the insult, I face up to inner tumult and bow to you, virtual lover in a dream that once was and now is no more. To the evocative sound of your voice, Echo, Narcissus bows, o nymph who waited on a summer day by the prayer wheel, bequeathing a semblance of logos to your recurring melos, giving life to phrases heard in the antechamber of dreams. From the beginning I, Narcissus, loved in you a mirage. From the beginning I loved in you the remoteness of provincial life, that intimacy unknown to my Babylonian solitude.

  Thanks to me, Narcissus, the soul can evict exterior deities generating for the first time interiority. To me, Narcissus, all of you folks owe the very birth of inner life, linked (sure, like the river to the sea etc.) to the anima mundi. Yet without the ford in the river (drunken boat as well as heart of darkness) to approach the sea is certain shipwreck. Soul (psyche) is born with me, Narcissus. All of you lot owe it to me, your imaginary distance from Darwinian monkeys. It’s not my fault or is it? If the Judeo-Christian brigades have later regimented the soul, frozen it inside a monad, preserved in formaldehyde until judgment day. If I, Narcissus, am allowed to live (but usually you all want me dead in tender youth, as Icarus, as Hart Crane, as Jeff Buckley whose songs you forgot already, as Luigi Tenco whose songs never win a prize at Sanremo), I will then one day reveal myself to be the wise hermit of the fables. Same applies to Rimbaud, who would have surely become Imam or Benedictine mystic at the age of seventy-two if he had been allowed another go at the Russian roulette.

  From the folly of interiority naturally we cross to the horizontal serenity of phenomena; Tathata, in the words of the old swindler Buddha Shakyamuni; being-in-the-world, according to the highfaluting tones of that renowned Schwartzwald redneck.

  Onto this shore we disembark at last via the waterways of interiority (a journey that is painful, ecstatic and finally grotesque), harder to perceive in the epoch of bad infinity and information technology. Narcissism? If only we were given the chance to linger in the ruinous arcadia of Echo and Narcissus! If only we had access to the privilege of metamorphosis – of Narcissus into a flower, of Echo in disincarnate voice!

  The self-combustion that in these beings produces a metamorphosis is fostered by the passions to which they abandon themselves, thus honouring human emotions and passions (consider this: even the gods give in to them). On the other hand, the ‘narcissism’ of a virtual avatar is the part-time, half-hearted metamorphosis of a bored and frustrated individual seeking with such egoic fantasies to flee both passions and emotions, to flee what Nietzsche called the ‘magnificent monsters’.

  The magnificent monsters are the true protagonists of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Violent, unpredictable, overwhelming passions perturbing the self and fraying the fragile membrane of an armour. Passions educate the self, make it humble, more malleable (if it survives the threat of a flooding of the unconscious into psychosis), more willing to honour their presence. Passions are part of the vast psychic territory which the ego must respectfully take into consideration. In dreams too, in spite of the interpretative recipes and their utilitarian function in aid of ‘health, wealth and love’, the ego must genuflect and watch their plot unravel in the theatre of memory, perceiving itself as one among many spectators of a drama. A virtual avatar is instead a phantom of the ego, the synthetic creation of an entity nailed to a computer screen. Not sub-personality, but fabrication, projection of one’s own frustrated will to power. Not a journey through Hades or the vast ocean of the soul but reproduction and multiplication of a double repeating litanies along a sterile path. With the fake liberty of a virtual avatar the Platonic delirium of transcendence is finally actualized – escape from corporality, the arrogance of having understood and assimilated the body, forgetting that the body is a mystery.

  An avatar does not sweat, does not come. He is immune to the emotional and subtle current and the sub-currents emanating from human bodies. The virtual avatar, as well as the spiritual avatar, are at the opposite pole from the Nietzschean overman and of the person of the Dao. To shun love’s wounds one gives in to the acrobatics of a Don Juan (except that Mozart’s ouverture begins, like philosophy itself, with a minor chord) and
I wonder if it’s only men resorting to such poor expedient. Each partner becomes symbol and bookmark along an isolated track (in spite of tentacles and protuberances, in spite of pleasure’s cavities inviting contact). The partner met (or rather bumped into) is dismissed once their function is used up. In such Don-Juanism of experience the ‘desire’ the other believes they are feeling for us never makes of us real objects of relation, i.e. autonomous persons endowed with sovereign humanity and experience. After decades of feminism we are back to the old models. Women want the strong protective male; but even the best men shiver in winter and it’s the best men who are not afraid of vulnerability. The tallest tree feels the storm first and is the first to fall. Evolutionism is subverted. In the Darwinian order of things, adaptation happens thanks to the gross attributes of strength, shrewdness and cunning, but the intelligence of the overman, of the man of the Dao is not unlike the fragility of a flower and the elusive magic of the dew. No more the authenticity smuggled by Heidegger, no more the umbilical link to the abstraction of the neutral Being, but instead vulnerability as new criterion of integrity.

  Are you shy or are you pretending? I am shy, I am dumb when faced with the magnificence of living-and-dying, with the power of love, with the pagan sanctity of affirming this existence in which we are thrown (like an actor on a stage who has forgotten his lines, like a rain dog) and at the same time overwhelmed by a shower of cherry blossoms.