Speed of Angels

by Bazzano, Manu

  5.30pm at the station; the vertiginous beauty of my city, every alley and street without you, and the angel of Baudelaire sleepy and unaware of the pain that breaks me, unaware of the train vanishing in the languid afternoon. Another day on the blue planet as the day when my mother died and I woke up unaware at dawn to listen to the gentle rain song on the pavement from a second-floor student cell, Freud’s Three Essays on Sexuality on the tiny desk and the discovery, the discovery of hurried love, of out-of-breath love and ecstatic love right next to the discovery of death. And the train disappears and nobody leans out of the window to wave goodbye, that nobody is already busy communicating virtually with other nobodies in remote regions of the globe and this is how Eurydice vanishes, this is how Amor closes the eyelids of the initiates and sends them back to the realist dream of the provinces, to the narrow-mindedness of the soil, to the atavism of work-as-survival, to the atavism of holiday-as-despair.

  I see it now, the church desecrated by my presence: it’s a ship in a derelict harbour. Next to the icon of the Virgin there is a cage with a baby falcon. A stranger has opened the cage and after brief hesitation the bird has flown out, down in the valley and disappeared in the infernal night, away from the torment of this land where it stayed captive for a short season. Who clings to the soil is a prisoner for life and lives in between crinkled days and logical nights. He cannot but dream of dissolution and the ocean, dream the dream of every woman of the harbor, of every provincial man and woman bored to death and afraid to live outside a box of pastels. There is not much choice for Madame Bovary caught as she is between suffocation and the melodrama of annihilation. The fatal error: believing that intensity of feelings is depth, that hunger for sex is love, that despair makes one noble by design. I see it now, the church on the hill, the church desecrated by my presence. And I see, incongruously, the cemetery of a Calabrian night of my youth when my companions and I, drunk and in tears, went to shake its gates because we wanted to say farewell once again to a comrade killed and buried there a few days before.

  I see a fire, the combustion will transform me into a yellow flower, Narcissus, into an angel or star of the summer nights, a star glimpsed from a car speeding through the Mediterranean summer, star of a day like any other, a star already dead and buried in the firmament, a star long forgotten. I am so thoroughly fed up with so much bad poetry. Twenty years in England cured me of melodrama and operetta. A menacing thunder brings me back to the present (but where, where is the present? show me), and no one near me in the eye of the storm to reassure me as in childhood days.

  You must have thought of us sometimes, the beauty that shrouded us under the summer sky, how we succeeded in softening it without raiding its memory. Is not memory after all a faculty of the imagination, snapshots in the editing room assembling and disassembling aggregates at every season, reworking its meaning? Doesn’t the past change with every single deed, altering its shape and flavour? In weak individuals burdened by the innumerable deaths, the final editing seals the memory in archetypal imprint, in a snapshot that will consign the event to ancestral archives. A brave soul will perhaps chew over blissful and unresolved material in the fluid sea of memory, without committing to a verdict. You must have thought of us, of our love under the ambiguous moonlight…before consigning the mystery to the glacial light of the hyper-real, to the theatre of the anecdote, to a milestone on Separation Highway. You must have revisited the musical notes that for an instant interrupted our ever-present ruminations. You must have thought of the ray infiltrating in the diving bell of the self, of the air and the scent of flowers we both felt inebriated by. Of how we fled – seeking shelter from such symphony and rapture of trees in bloom – alarmed when we saw that their roots dug deep inside the graves of innumerable deaths, dismayed in learning that love were only four letters written on water. So here we are then signing up for the waiting list of impossible loves, of hurried, half-consummated loves, a faded footnote in the tales of Eloise & Abelard, Pyramus & Thisbe, Echo & Narcissus…I had wanted your little life to overwhelm me, I had wanted to caress your solitude with my fingers and give you serenity with my timid love, with my strong love. My eyes are heavy, red with wakefulness. Women like you flee when they see a man’s vulnerability, they interpret it as weakness; they flee from any real intimacy with a man. At first they cling with great intensity, hungry for love and caresses – a prelude to the Amazon flight in the wood, a run-up before the hasty return to the only sanctuary they know: the cave of the desolate heart, the solace of space where no one can reach them. I am thirsty…I sit in the dark cold kitchen sipping a glass of water. From so much pain something will have to be born, and I assure you it will not be my end. It is simply not allowed, in the world of troubadours and philosophers to which I belong, to let yourself be killed by a woman. Fritz composed his Zarathustra as alternative to suicide, and gold has been extracted from raw metals since time began. Who cares if my Muse is hellish and my song hoarse? I watch the thronged houses of sleepers in the suburbs, each one in his comfortable coffin before the dawn of judgment day. I watch the railing of the balcony and the poor plants neglected for a whole summer; I see the garden of love betrayed for a prolonged sip of Soffocone wine, with its well-known hints of vanilla, leather and dark chocolate. Time of harvest is October, Indian summer, the summer of the dead, of those weaned to the dark, of those who no longer hear the vain lament from these shores. Every autumn is a death rattle and how similar the wheeze of the dying to the moans of pleasure, how similar the moans of the dying to the love rattle.

  I must have dozed off with my head dangling on the sofa…dreamt of tender and lighthearted love with a stranger, a French woman, fraught and fine-looking, an Emma Bovary who thought me an Arab, except that the I of the dream was not me. Then the time came to leave and I was at yours and you treated me with the affable indifference of one who replies to someone asking for directions at the station.

  I would have loved you if you had been a stranger at the station. But the station was full of people, and I was there on the platform watching the train leave – no one leaning at the window, and the train went inexorably and vanished taking away Eurydice, unveiling the forgotten tragedy behind the Heraclitean panta rei.

  How are you? Here everything flows and I’m fine. Everything flows towards death and oblivion. The Buddha turned the Dharma wheel, entered the stream of becoming – which is suffering, incessant change and death. And this state of things is in itself liberation. This is nirvana: the valley of tears and scrap metal where a train leaves eternally in your memory and tears away love from your very limbs and makes you lighter. This is liberation, awakening; this is so-called enlight-enment: the unredeemable loss, the last stop of human doing. This is where the eminent cultivation of consciousness takes you, past the promise of happiness, sales talk of Buddhism: to an icy halleluiah, to the lamma sabachtani, to a heart fractured by the cruel beauty of a wounded dawn.

  I look in the mirror and see an ancestor, an adventurer without scruples. I look in the mirror and see an arms trader and a slave merchant. I look in the mirror and find it empty. I no longer see a face of flesh subject to decay, nor the odourless and shiny avatar of the cyber rabble.

  III

  I wrote love poems once – sincere hence mediocre verses polluting the glacial joy with the tralalà of a broken heart. A weird detached happiness reigns when we obscurely understand that the apocalypse is within each breathing every moment, present yet without a trace. Passion embalmed by memory evaporates. Reason’s cold daybreak unveils the cracks of infatuation. Sedated aggression, vanity, the sentimentality we hoped would resurrect us from dullness; the atrophied piano at the end of the room among plastic plants glistening with eternal and perfected love, a piano silently moaning in the nights of the black moon. Ah my poor piano! Emma Bovary exclaims. The piano, hushed, atrophied like a part of her, that same itch that makes us doubt that we are truly loved and shuts the heart in a snow cave. We heard remote, discordant notes betwe
en a practical deed and a necessary word in the liturgy of survival; a missed oppor-tunity: it was meant to let a melody break out of the tired procession of hours and days. Alas poor Emerson! To no avail in your defiant godly ministry you speak of the divine passion of love! The naked bodies of men and women are but relics, replaced by the hungry fantasy of the flesh, married to the bloodless frenzy of omnipotence of virtual avatars. To no avail you spur us into welcoming the inevitable disappointments in love as balm that would make it more human. Already we run away, after our first night of tears, to complain to customer service and demand a new shiny item from the shelves. But what an old chestnut our futuristic race towards the ideal truly is, in hundreds of chat rooms and lonely hearts columns, in the antechambers of skype and second life where ominous desolation reverberates as from churches in ruins, abandoned by the God who used to reside there in the tragic era before the birth of the ideal. To no avail my dear Emerson you spur in us the detachment that follows genuine passion and transforms love into solidarity. Our ‘detachment’ is the scrap thrown away by disgruntled customers; our ‘non-attachment’ is dissociation from the affects, dressed up in Buddhist garments. We cannot stand the sight of broken idols, the maimed statues of Venus and Apollo, even though their beauty might consist in their fragility. The unmotivated beauty of the dew beautifies our mornings and vanishes with the first sunrays. The pointlessness of flowers makes life livable. Impossible to give a present that will not be weighed in the scales of resentment, and the sovereignty of the beginning feels now so remote! Once upon a time we struggled to find the words; what we do have words for is already dead in our heart. And I clung on to tiresome pranks trying to postpone the fall, wanting to give myself without restraint, all dressed in white in the black Mediterranean night.

  Virtual sex and the meeting of avatars in the antechamber of second life are not mutation and metamorphosis. If they were, we should agree with Samuel Butler and say that the advent of technology implies the annihilation or at least the apocalyptically serene overcoming of the human dimension. Instead, virtual worlds are strictly guided by the most artless human idealism. They represent a return to the grand narratives post-modernism had naively believed defunct, including the time-honoured denigration of the human and of the body. But the human body (not the raw body of biology and atomism) remains a secret, it continues to astonish, as well as provoke horror and disgust. Bedfellow of death, at once walking corpse, etheric and erotic vibration: from the body we avert our gaze and turn towards the Platonic city from which the complexity of becoming is averted. The cult of cybernetics professes a devotion to horizontality but in fact rejoices in low-cost Platonism, the triumph of the idea outside and above the chaos of becoming. The avatar is a fake metamorphosis, a shortcut that allows us to flee the body (house in flames, anachronistic temple of ruins bearing witness to being human in the next future). I do not mourn the imaginary nemesis of the human but denounce instead the all-too-human plot guiding and manipulating each step of technology and cybernetics. I denounce the unresolved angst of the creature who dreams ethereal perfection, its gaze glued to a portable screen, its animal fingers clutching a mouse and a keyboard. I lay blame on the illusion of a trans-human future, and mourn the disbelief revered by Lyotard, the ironic incredulity in response to theologies and teleologies. With the advent of the cyber era and of the strange guest at the door (the nihilism of certainty), post-modern scepticism ends up representing the last glimpse of the human dream of intelligence.

  Sweet twilight, the fragility of daybreak at Sils Maria and in London – if there will be a dawn at all after this interminable dark night…I do not mourn estrangement from humanity, nor reclaim an ephemeral membership to the vicissitudes of a species whose importance has been exaggerated and all too often narrated as epic tale – its pathetic journeys inside the celluloid of memory, on both sides of the stage curtain…I do not mourn the loss of the ego’s vain dream – the melodrama of lovers, their ineffective balms. I sing instead the tragic joy of the twilight in a station empty of commuters at Kensal Rise where fascist-era loudspeakers declaim the vainglory of recorded timetables to crows and nettles. I sing the incomparable beauty of every dawn that always defies the stupidity of our species – millions of dawns untouched by the human dream of domination. To this non-human sphere plead the best minds of humanistic therapy, although they mostly dress their jargon with the requirements of etiquette and fully prostrated to the Zeitgeist. Carl Rogers’ actualizing tendency is not the wish to actualize this fiction we call the self but affirms instead an impersonal will to power, or instinct of freedom, or life’s desire to overcome itself. To such impersonality and even universality – and this is where transcendentalists of every persuasion fall flat on their venerable arse – one has access solely via existing, via bare living, what we take for granted and exploit as backdrop for the manufacturing of a phantom on whose neck we hang a label with our blessed name on it. But this phantom is but an assembly of aggregates (poorly perceived, badly studied) clumsily dragging along other assemblies of aggregates (poorly perceived, badly studied), gaze fixated on the horizon, forgetful of the humdrum splendour of the everyday, of the bare existence which is the very symphony of the spheres. In the meantime, outside the virtual screen the folie a deux unravels like an Ibsen drama or a Thomas Hardy novel: pierced by a ray of sun and not realizing that it soon will be night, lovers meet on the prettified and deadly ground of feelings. Choose among the following options: press 1 if you intend to drown in your feelings, for having failed to understand them; press 2 if you wish to collect another pearl for your necklace of pain, for yes, you did understand your feelings but have failed to acquire the means to assimilate them; and finally, dear customer, press 3 if what you really really want is to get lost in limbo, darling customer, considering that you have fully denied and denigrated the mighty power of feelings. Among such free choices, the third one will regale you with a sense of dignified belonging to schizoid normality, while the first two will give you the melancholy decorum of the human creature prostrated at the feet of the magnificent monsters. No matter the shape of our suffering and the exact nature of our stupidity, all this provides material aplenty for poets, philosophers and playwrights. For it is love that makes the world go round, and daybreak chases the night and on and on it goes. And daybreak must surely come at last, the dawn of the Day of the Dead.

  Hannah Arendt was eighteen when she became Heidegger’s pupil at Marburg University in 1924. He was thirty-five. Three years later he would publish Being and Time. She was beautiful, he told her, and they became lovers; both genuflected at the altar of the genial mind of the philosopher. Heidegger publicly declared his support of the Nazis during the infamous talk in Freiburg in the spring of 1933. The summer of that year Arendt fled Germany and for seventeen years became an exile and a radical writer of high standing. In February 1950 she returned to Freiburg and in spite of the promise made to herself she phoned him from a hotel. The two lovers met and spent unforgettable days. Arendt later admitted in her letters that the only obstacle to her ‘automatic’ gesture of picking up the phone and dialing the number (the automatism of love, of gratuitous generosity) was not ideology, or history or destiny but pride. Pride prevents lovers after a long absence from saying I love you my sweet one, I happen to be in your city, let’s meet. Love (tragic, immortal, yes, a love full of pathos) survives: Eros, Amor, Liebe, distant love, the distant sigh of a blue planet dissolved in ice, love full of pathos…what is life after all? The shadow of a fleeting dream. The brief fable is over, the true immortal is love.

  If married to the liquid love of late capitalism, the non-attachment the spiritualist middle-classes prattle about offers a grand pretext for their inability to love. In such middling milieus two are essentially the pet hates: attachment and projection. But without attachment there is no relating, no cathexis, no leaning out of the diving bell of personality. And without projection there is no communication whatsoever, only a desolate echo inside a
maze of mirrors. After their meeting, Heidegger wrote four letters in quick succession – sincere, passionate – to Hannah Arendt. He told her what joy her reappearance had brought into his life. A relationship of this kind would nowadays be judged harshly, filed in haste under transference and counter-transference. But Socrates and Plato knew it, and so did Freud and Oscar Wilde. Eros is the subterranean current between teacher and pupil, master and disciple, analyst and patient, and love is the burden we carry on our shoulders in the commuting journey from darkness to darkness, from light to abyss of light in this dark night. Classrooms are awash with erotic desire, with love unsaid and unconsummated between teachers and pupils. The stereotype demands the female pupil to be univocally exploited and then dismissed by an aged male tutor; it demands that pleasure be entirely his domain. Research and statistics show that, exposed to nubile Venusian bodies, the tutor suffers a contrast effect and perceives his older partner as less attractive which in turn would explain the high percentage of divorce among teachers etc. Schools are awash with the impetuosity of Eros and I don’t believe you when you say that you would have loved me if you had caught a glimpse of me as a stranger in a station’s waiting room. No, you loved what I represented; you loved the messenger. You raised me to the heavens and later tore down what you could not reach. Hannah Arendt picked up the phone after seventeen years. An irrational gesture, as with authentic forgiveness: unmotivated, or motivated by grace. Neither redemption, edification nor the crude fantasy of accomplished maturity, but the move of an angel, swift, preceding thought, preceding history as well as the birth, from the rugged womb of a cogito, of a separate I.