"At some point in my life, nostalgia became a tumor. What began as a slight tendency to understand the cruelty of our established vision of time as a one-way street just suddenly got out of hand. I don't know the exact order of events, but it goes something like this. The risk factors were no joke. Direct descendant of Neapolitan nobility and the deep Italian south, daughter of a couple that had fallen in love at the end of the post war decade, at the beginning of the Dolce Vita, both of them tied up in loving knots with the United Nations and the NATO, two very benign fatherly presences in my childhood and youth... altogether not common anymore. Touches of the United States of America imbuing a bold Italian spirit, and of course, everything bathed in nothing but nostalgia. Especially since I had been the fulcrum of their most important decision ever, the decision to leave Italy and set up in Asunción, Paraguay. So as soon as I was able to perceive this, and I was a pretty perceptive kid, I took it upon myself to understand what it was I had caused. One of the ways was enjoying, deserving, the pain of longing for something I could glimpse at in photos and mute videos. Then, when I was four, my beloved cousin got killed. But nobody had it in them to introduce me to the concept of death at such an early age, so they told me he had gone on a super long trip to India. Of course I perceived things to be deliberately unclear, in a way that allowed for wide interpretation, for easy adaptation into the reality of what had happened, and understood, at a deep level, that I needed to explore my quest alone, and give the impression I was not even wondering, so as to be left alone. A part of me had to go along with them because I also had to protect them from the elevated concepts that I could understand, and the other part of me was probing the endless possibilities. There had to be a solution. I had to be special if I understood the things I understood, but I needed to prove myself at every level, while at the same time not letting my family down. My parents were gentle and loving, so I tried thinking of a place where we meet again, after death, or even in life, which was my internal hope for my long-missed cousin. This resulted in the land of Kijara, which lies in another dimension, and is among us and above us, in a cloud above Switzerland. But that is a fun spinoff I'll get into at another time.

IT MUST BE SAID THAT (Insertion #1) Hey, I was born in 1976. That means I belong to the generation that gaped at E.T. on a movie screen. In my case, a whole cocktail of magic-inspiring movies during the whole of the Reagan administration's economic pseudoboom. Given my unique coordinates and the point we were at in the family history, aided by a (probably guilt-ridden or nostalgia-ridden) uncle and aunt that regularly sent us fabulous betamax tapes filled with US movies and tv shows, I was in the perfect place, with a technology-friendly, photographer musician 15-years-my-senior brother, a father who was ahead of his years as far as home video was concerned, a mother who was an unblossomed film-maker, a simultaneously Padre Pio and US democratic devotee and JFK fan grandmother, and a fully bilingual and functional American School environment, at a time when everything literally seemed at hand's reach, when the turn of the century and the millenium was close enough that we felt the fizz but still far enough that we had time to fantasize even more and feel a very real part of it - let alone that when 2000 came along it was quite another '99. My childhood was the time for world premieres of jewels such as Back to the Future, Jurassic Park, Ghost, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Cinema Paradiso, Once Upon a Time in America, The Untouchables, Die Hard, The Last Emperor, Gandhi, Platoon, Amadeus, Tootsie, The Terminator, M.A.S.H., The Deer Hunter, Africa Mia, The Princess Bride, Rain Man, Poltergeist, When Harry Met Sally, The Little Mermaid (generation number 1), Cinderella, Die Hard, countercurrents including everything from Wayne's World to whatever spurned Michael Moore and of course the welcoming of computers into our everyday lives, oh the little bastards the little destiny altering new members of our families. It was delicious. And ah, the musical theater, it just swept my parents and me off our fucking feet. I don't know why my brothers never bit on the bait, or if they did, for that matter; as for me, Grease and The Little Prince (with Gene Wilder and the still now unreachable, impossible Steven Warner), not to mention The Wizard of Oz, Gigi, My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music, Cats, Blood Brothers, Fame, Miss Saigon and Madame Butterfly, Evita and The Inspector Calls... are you able to embrace the largeness of this, the sense of power it bestows???

"As the years went by, these seeds germinated and started flowering with great side-effects in my everyday life. Thanks to nostalgia and my awareness of the decadence of time, I needed to elevate my living to a high power of itself, let's say. I was sensitive to beauty, to passion, to anything mortal, to the course of things, to turning points, to music that takes you away, to good reading, to expressing my joys and sorrows and wonders. And the sense of pain that grew alongside all that. Then my grandparents started dying off... gently at first, long-distance, an hour or two more without seeing my dad emerge from his room with a stuffy nose...and then suddenly, twice almost, with Teresa, my beloved Grandmama.

"Then came exactly a decade of joy. And then came another of sorrow. Sorry, I... I can't go on. I need a little break", said the woman, with a weak gesture of her hand.
"Ok, we'll come back a little later, Ma'am", said the writer, with a quick nod to the nurse that was checking the woman's tubing. The woman looked out the window, smiling. But an instant later, as the nurse replaced the pillow behind her back, she caught a glimpse of a tear wiped wrong, glistening royally on a still beautiful, slowly dying, ivory cheekbone.

Here's to Now

One of the most intense problems I find when dealing with others, is that time is spent not being here, now. Look at me, for instance. Even if I forge my spirit into a wonderful synchronicity with whatever the present is, and which we never experience mentally and physically at once, it still oh Lord takes two to tango. I find myself intensely connected to the present for the first time in many years, even if I never had it and never will. I'm connected to the idea of the present, to the boat's (you know the boat I'm talking aboat, mite) prow slicing the water, so just let me dream my dream, I say... but if the other side is too busy somewhere else in the dimension of time, I just let them go and muse on the fact that I may be traveling alone - so I do indeed dream my dream, and they couldn't stop me if they wanted to.

Ok, grabando, 3, 2, 1, ... Muy buenas noches. Aviso de puesta al día:

Después de un 2013 de trabajo a cabeza gacha, de poca recompensa y mucha inversión física, mental y espiritual, me encuentro en el segundo trimestre del 2014 con unas pilas inmensas. Benedetta terminó sus papeleos médico-legales, Francesco y yo entramos a formar parte de una banda tributo a Quentin Tarantino que este año nos dá sus primeros frutos, yo pasé los exámenes del concurso para profesor de inglés de secundaria, dejemos de lado que probablemente al pedo, y Max pasó a quinto grado mejorando y adaptándose siempre más. y... compositivamente? A la chica se le llenaron los ojos de lágrimas mientras hacía señal de que cortaran la grabación. El camarógrafo apagó el rojo y salió a fumarse un puchito mientras la chica se recomponía y el director llamaba por celular a su novia. Era, sin duda, un día más. O uno menos, como quiera verse.

I´m offended at times, and I can't really understand why. I have these miniature breakdowns, like small extra dimensions that close up in the blink of a microsecond, right as they are about to exist. I'm left with a very tired heart and a clouded mind. Damn mysterious dimensions... But they haven't always been like this, like a black hole... sometimes they were exceptional treasures closed up till a later time, when I'd have the right key to open each one of them. Take heed of the little bastards, Manfred, some call them "alephs", they're the bonus lives of life.

Fractal Attraction

Be wise as thou art cruel; do not press

My tongue-tied patience with too much disdain;

Lest sorrow lend me words and words express

The manner of my pity-wanting pain.

-William Shakespeare

Sometimes, as thoughts glide over each other in my head, the meta of the meta of the meta just slips through and there is nothing present to slow the acceleration: there I am, slightly forlorn and speechless before the fractal nature of my probably useless mental jests. For example, I’ll be thinking of my mother, and before I can stop to enjoy the details of the memory - or the pain of its fleetingness - I find myself focusing on myself as I am thinking of her and on myself as I focus on myself thinking of her, and so forth till the thought itself is a long lost nebula and I come up with someone else focusing on me. Preferably someone who soon, listlessly, majestically, looks away and forgets about the whole thing. A dog can do. 

So voilà the way I am. Not new at all. I end up engaging in bloody battles against these perspective trips, greatly aided by the same sophisticated mechanisms of self-control and discipline which allowed me to finish conservatory two years before I graduated from high school. And sometimes I win, actually, and manage to pin a precious memory down, look at it queer before reluctantly letting it flap its translucent little wings back to oblivion. Did she really live through that? goes my inner narrator. As her narrator expressed her awe, she covered the keyboard of her piano - at once a gesture of sacrificial offering, self-denial and self-ridicule, perfected through the decades, goes my meta-narrator… well, well, what have we here? Just another dog looking away. Goes.…who?

This is what happens when someone with what amounts to a boundless, magical childhood is violently hurled into the sordid injustice of what is really out there. A girl is born late-ish but turning-point-ishly in the story of a Neapolitan aristocratic family prone to extraordinary adventures, near-misses, near-hits and ridiculous levels of nostalgia. She lives three lives and alters three hundred others in the space of half a life in South America, travels for years, and then, while becoming an orphan is quietly informed that the rest of her days might, or will most likely, be spent in a room, unless. One might think being in a room sounds more like being ‘in there’ than being ‘out there’. But these concepts deserve a better look. Being in a room with your friends far away, three quarters of your childhood family dead, and all of your certainties put to the test by unintended but unshakeable teachers introducing you to devious arts, the least of which contempt, for the first time is, to my understanding, being out there: far, way beyond the surf. Even more so in current times. And the ride may very well be worth the seasickness, but oh: the answer to the question would you do it again remains as healthily veiled as ever.

In a world, fractal inwards as much as outwards, that spells out the message that I should shut up and pay attention if I want to make any sense of things at all, I decide to take the first friendly step towards enlightenment and healing by learning to silence my voice without silencing my voice. Yes, I can learn to be silent in order to hear my thought unfolding. Shutting up my thought, besides being idiotic, would turn out to be not only cruel and disastrous but unnecesary. I must have vowed - unbeknownst to myself - to let thought and emotion embrace with no hesitation within me; I must have vowed to have a surplus of spiritual marrow as long as I was alive, in order to sift through my inner world and just enjoy every discovery, no guilt involved… And indeed, searching for repeating patterns in the most unexpected spots of my reality, without discarding stuff a priori, is what continually saves me and injects me with joy, however absurd the pattern. It suggests the opposite of an Aristotelian reasoning path, no matter how much I’d like for mine to be just that. In practice, it translates into this me I see with luminous tendrils and open-ended chord progressions reaching out from my being in every direction - an image which doesn’t do much to convey methodical reason. 

With a start she realised that there was no reason to feel forlorn in the face of accelerating fractal patterns, goes my narrator. I can think things through, however unconventionally. I can let brilliant deductions sail through my Bosphorus. And I can defend them. Even nothingness, which I can imagine and thus summon a void. I can do all of these things, and luckily I can also stay still and marvel at the views inside the views - as I wait for the right cues. Indeed, you never know when a healing thought could come to your rescue, making any room actually become the coolest place on Earth. In the stillness, in the stalking heart of the night, my spirit reaches out and back to me, and I can see what’s gone: it’s right here. As is the meta of the meta of the meta.