TWEEDLEDUM & TWEEDLEDEE. The real story of opposites.

What is the reason if, of all the freaks existing in “Alice in wonderland” –and Alice is the first one-, those who scare us the most are Tweedledum and Tweedledee? The Mad Hatter could have scared us with the irrational consequences of his mercury vapours inhaling. The Queen of Hearts threatens us pointing directly to what really makes us what we are: our head. The White Rabbit get us loose (and lost) in paths we don’t know and we follow him blinded by our curiosity. Despite all these major threats to our integrity, despite all these embodiments of our fears and degeneration, those two malicious twins are those who scare us.

Tweedledum and Tweedledee decided to engage in a fight one another and never fought it. What is this if not our worst fear? We are double. These twins are what we are: complementary opposites who should fight one another and never do. Their names are nothing but onomatopoeic sounds coming from our deep inside; our fears, squeaking from inside, sneaking out like weak sound that at first make us laugh but then… Oh God, what a mess they do when they are together! Same old story, my friends: black and white, ying and yang, Tweedledee and Tweedledum. Here it goes: it sounds like an old rhyme, always actual, always true. We are double, no kidding. Everybody knows it. We try to be one thing at one moment and the moment after we’re the opposite. And it’s not we change. We are always double. We are always complicated. And we complicate things even more when we think about it, when we acknowledge that we should engage in that fight and one of the twins, in a sort of biblical destiny, has to perish by the hand of the other. The scary thing about Tweedledee and Tweedledum is that we never start that fight and none dies. We’re doomed to be twins forever. Maybe the Gemini sign is the only one that can really tell something true about who we are. And it is funny, if you think about it: you might be born any day of the year but Twins are inside you anyway.

I refused to think that my scariest part could be represented by two fat schoolboys and not because I have something against fat schoolboys. On the contrary, such a figure communicates me peace and tranquillity. No neurosis. And instead, the twins are those who scare us the most. Because it is not them, it’s us. We’re Tweedledee and Tweedledum, we play with our other side. None loses, none wins. We avoid the battle. And when we have told our story, as they did to Alice, we’re so absorbed by our dangerous duality we don’t even realize our spectator has left its place and is not listening anymore. Three is a crowd and in our life we’re already two, we don’t need a third. Sad destiny of twin-hood: in being twins, we end up alone.

THE BEST WINTER I HAD WAS THE SUMMER I SPENT IN SAN FRANCISCO

And then winter comes.

Summer has been longer than expected. Wasted time, some work done, some good, some bad. Fall has been busy, storing food for winter. Then winter comes. We have been busy collecting cans, boxes, all the food we thought could last for a long time. We were so busy collecting it we never bothered checking if the shelves were all right, if there were aunts walking behind furniture, bugs hiding somewhere. We thought we were organized, we thought “Winter will never catch me unprepared again”. We should have checked out what was less evident, though. We thought we were smart, we have been silly instead. We were so obsessed not to behave like a balm-cricket anymore that we forgot to see if the aunts could be real friends or rather foes, ready to eat all we stored.

There it is: a hole. It is not clear if bugs come into that hole or if food has its legs and walk away on its own. We imagine armies of unfriendly aunts carrying our cans, our boxes away. Who cares if they don’t have a can opener. What matters is that our food is not there anymore. We sit on our empty kitchen, staring at empty shelves. We should have checked, damn us. We don’t have anything left.

The winter is severe outside. Snow starts to fall. Another fool shoots missionaries on a convent door. The fog covers landscapes and everything is blurred. Was it foggy in our brain when we start collecting without any sense of measure or any attention our supplies for the winter? How could we be so blind? So obsessed? The only thing we have now is a leaflet on the table that says “Come to San Francisco: it’s summer here”. Should we take that flight and pretend it is not winter anymore? Should we go and enjoy summertime and leave winter behind our shoulders? If we leave now we can start piling up our stuff all over again: nobody will know we have been so careless before. It will be again summer, followed by fall, and then we’ll have a winter. We’ll preten our full-of-mistakes-winter had never happened.

So we do it. We take our money, we fly to San Francisco but summer does not look like summer. Summer in San Francisco is rainy and cold, humid, foggy. It is winter again, just a little bit less harsh, less severe. But it does not mean that cold still sneaks inside your bones. Instead of being slammed on the face by our winter we have chosen to slowly get frozen by a summer-non-summer.

So, there we are, sitting under a palm with a coat on. “Well, well, it is always better than the winter at home. It is always summer” we think. During my university psychology class I was taught this is called wishful thinking: a state of mind in which you realize you have no choice, you did wrong and cannot escape and, nevertheless, want it to appear the best condition ever. A sophisticated kind of lie. But we are too smart to believe it. Winter has come and we thought we were prepared but we haven’t been careful enough. We knew it was inevitable. We’ll never stop try to be ready and we’ll never be. Not to be disappointed totally we chase after summer again: but who can fool time? Time always goes by in one direction. Maybe next summer will be better than the previous one but you need to pass through winter before and if you were not ready to face winter, well.. that’s really just your problem. Winter has come: you can try to escape it, but you’ll carry it with you wherever you go. The best you can say is that the best winter you had was the summer you spent in San Francisco. A sophisticated, lenitive lie.

STANDBY

Control panel. Energy save settings. Standby after… I don’t know how much time it takes before one stops being active and just switches to standby.

Being in standby is not being shut down. It is almost like that: there is the same difference there is between sleeping and being dead. There is a spark of life in the standby state, a regular breath, which is simply given by that small light (green, blue, orange…) that flashes on the edge of the computer. Yes, there is life even in a standby state. Weak, intermittent, faint but always life. Of course it is not as good as being running fast and productively with a multiple Giga byte RAM. Of course it is not as good as being luminous, multi-tasking, busy, busy, busy… so damn busy… When you are on standby you just do one thing: you stay there.

What happens sometime is that somebody comes and turns you on again and suddenly you’re back to your luminous, multi-tasking, busy, busy, busy, so damn busy state. Maybe you’ll be working differently from the previous session but you’re back to activity and that’s all that matters. God, how you have been waiting to be turned on again by that finger! You have been there, intermittently intermitting your existence waiting for that finger to press the right button because, if it is the right finger, it knows where it has to put pressure.

When you are in standby you always think the right finger will come and press your key to life. Sometimes disenchantment brings you to wait just for a decent finger and not for the right one. Better than nothing is the overall compromise of new millennium. When you are in standby you have one main thought running in your head: if you had to be shut down you would be down in first place. You think: it is cruel to put you in standby, leave you there waiting and then die. Just cruel. Sometimes it happens, though, and it does happen more often than necessary. It happens just because of an absent-minded attitude or more likely because most of the times people don’t know what they will do with you: they put you in standby and wait to see what happens, if they can take a decision, make their mind instead of just being there, scratching their heads with their nails. Rarely it happens that people put you on standby because they need to get away from a second, they admit that, they leave you there but they know they will be back with a decision. The sad truth is that what happen is that nobody switches you to standby: you just switch yourself to that state because people often just go away and leave you there while you’re still way too active. You keep staying active for a while –as I said, I don’t know exactly how much, I guess it depends on people-, then you roll your eyes around to see if there is anybody around, then you go on standby and wait. First you think it is just a natural pause –everybody needs to break from time to time-, then you start feeling useless, then you go on standby even before realizing it. I wonder if in the moment right before shutting down we said some kind of little prayer like we do just before dying. Our own kind of prayer… something that sounds like Please, hold on just a little bit longer… Please. Maybe the right finger will be back. Maybe.

Control panel. Energy save settings. Standby after the time you need to understand they have gone. Shut down as soon as you realize they won’t be back. The quickest, the safest for the whole system. It is the iron law of energy saving. And of human relations.

I SAW A GHOST

I’ve never understood why ghosts come out at night and very rarely during daylight. Maybe they don’t like it, maybe they are busy, maybe they don’t want to get burned. Maybe, though, it is just us. I mean, during the day we keep ourselves busy. We run like aunts everywhere, small and always in a great hurry. We always have something to do and even when we don’t really have anything to do we are busy doin’ nothing. While there is light outside the window we don’t really stop for a second. We are frenetic, lazy, busy, tired, walking, running, jumpin’ on and off the bus, the tube, the car. If there are ghosts around us we are just too busy to recognize them. We can get to the point that we are so absent minded to grasp our ghosts hand, shake it and say “Nice to see you again” – thinking we are talking to somebody we have not seen in a while.

When daylight ends something changes and it is not just the colour of the sky.

I am personally unable to sleep. My head is always on as a radar. Maybe if you have an antenna on the top of your head like I do, then you really can understand what I am talking about: I attract ghosts. In the Ghostbusters movie the brave ghost-fighters attracted their enemies with some kind of electricity, sucked them into their backpack and set everybody’s life free from easy fears. Now, it comes I have a kind of antenna on the top of my head: I’m always awake, attentive, thinking. My antenna attracts ghosts with its electrical outputs… but unfortunately it happens that I have no backpack. I hate backpacks, I prefer bags, better if big and soft, but bags are not shaped to contain ghosts. I have never seen a Ghostbuster with a Dior bag under his arm. Now that I think of it, I have never even seen a female Ghostbuster. By the way, I attract ghosts and then I don’t know what to do with them: I have no way to suck them out my head. They keep on flying, they come and go constantly. They just hunt and haunt me. “Well, it is their job: if you are a ghost you hunt and haunt people…” you might say. I agree with you. Poor ghosts: they have to hunt and haunt me. They have to. Problem: call me a bitch if you wish, but I could not care less about ghosts needs. I think to what happens to me an my little head when they do what they have to do. I have tried, I swear. I have tried so hard to trick and then get rid of them. It just did not work.

I saw another ghost last night. I have to be honest, I tried to fight this one harder than ever. I had a strength in my body, a special trust in my capacities I never felt before. I pulled up my pyjama’s sleeves and said to myself I could make it: “Just don’t be afraid, Kiki”. So, I saw a ghost last night and I recognized it. It was a ghost I had seen many times before. It is the only ghost that potentially could suck me in its backpack, lock me in and set everybody’s life free from their enemy, namely me. That ghost is a freaky Kiki-buster. It is powerful and scary…and we all know ghosts power derives from their capacity to scare us. It was my plague coming and visiting me.

I wish I could tell you an happy ending. I wish I could tell you I fought my ghost and I won over it. I wish I could tell you I did not surrender to tears. I wish I could tell you I did not shake, not even for a second. I wish I could tell you I stood brave and proud in my pyjama in front of my worst enemy. Bullshit. I cried, I screamed, I shacked, I fell on the floor and I start to sail a sea of tears. Coward. I swam to the coast and I put my clothes on, run out of my house and took a train. I tried to run as fast as I could and went away. I wonder how I can be so stupid: when I run out of my house I forgot to take off the antenna from the top of my head. Tonight -even though I will be over a national boundary, I’ll be speaking French and walking on a lake side- the ghost will come back and find me. Look: here it is already… reflected in this little mirror I carry on my hands.

VITTORIA

A volte ce la facciamo. A volte riusciamo. A volte abbiamo paura ma ci impegnamo e ci riusciamo. A volte sbattiamo la testa milioni di volte e alla fine però quella crepa la facciamo. Poi da lì cominciamo a scavare. Io non lo so perchè uno si intestardisce sulle cose che sa che sono sbagliate. Mi chiedo spesso perchè di milioni di cose, compreso il perchè io continui a fare cose per le quali non ho una spigazione razionale. Perchè ti fissi su una persona? Perchè le persone si fissano su di te? Perchè di solito tu ti fissi su una persona che non si fissa su di te? Perchè a volte ti fissi su una cosa o una persona e a volte lo sforzo che fai produce dei risultati? Mioddio che soddisfazione però quando funziona.
Non dipende da me, non dipende mai da noi quando vogliamo risultati. Forse saranno congiunzioni astrali, ma succede che certe cose te le senti dentro. Certo, speri che tutto lasci una traccia non solo dentro di te. Speri che la gente impari la lezione, non quella che tu hai insegnato perchè tu da insegnare agli altri non hai niente, ma la lezione che la vita ti dà. Esattamente come quando colpisci con una mazza da golf la palla. Non dipende solo da te: ci vuole il vento giusto, la forza giusta... è una combinazione di fattori. C'è da dire che se ti alleni però le cose vanno meglio. Forse questo è il senso di fissarsi sulle cose. Di sicuro non possiamo controllare tutto quello che succede e non possiamo controllare i fattori esterni, ma possiamo allenarci e farci più furbi possibile, ascoltando il vento prima di tirare. Magari non essendo superfciali e pesando che un tiro da vicino sia più facile di un tiro da lontano...Non sopravvalutare, non dare per scontato, insistere, insistere... Credo che ci fissiamo sulle cose come decidiamo di preparare il corpo ad uno sforzo. Poi la partita ce la giochiamo, l'importante non è affatto partecipare ma giocare al meglio delle proprie capacità.
Poi, però, bisogna ricordarsi che il trofeo che alziamo alla fine del torneo finirà su uno scaffale a casa e si riempirà di polvere. Così domani ci fisseremo e prepareremo per un altro torneo. Non gareggiamo mai da soli e tutti hanno lo stesso scopo. Però capita che siamo noi a vincere, certe volte. Anche se il trofeo si copre di polvere l'abbiamo vinto. Possiamo dire che siamo convinti che aver partecipato sia la cosa più importante: sono tute stronzate. A noi piace vincere.

THE DEATH OF MR.LAZARESCU

Mi immaginavo che la prima volta in cui avessi scritto dagli Stati Uniti sarebbe stata per raccontare di quanto è bello, particolare e divertente stare qui.
Invece, la prima volta che scrivo dagli Stati Uniti è per raccontare, dopo che un regista low budget l’ha raccontata a me, la morte del sig. Lazarescu. La trama è semplice. Dante Lazarescu si sente male in una notte di Bucharest. E’ un vecchio che vive da solo in un appartamento puzzolente coi suoi tre gatti. Ha una figlia che se n’è andata a sposarsi in Canada. Lazarescu, come Dante, passa attraverso il suo personale inferno. Prima una vita solitaria tra alcol e medicine che non servono. Quando il suo malessere si aggrava, prima i suoi vicini si limitano a metterlo su un’ambulanza,con un pigiama in una borsa di plastica, poi tanti inferni si sovrappongono. La malattia si aggrava velocemente, c’è un tumore, un ematoma cerebrale che lo trasforma in un niente umano. Ci sono quattro ospedali, nessuno che lo accetta. Lazarescu viene spostato da un ospedale all’altro. Sua sorella non arriva mai. Sua figlia non sappiamo se sia stata informata o meno. Solo l’infermiera dell’ambulanza l’accompagna. Forse una Beatrice stanca e spettinata. Lazarescu e il suo inferno.
Non ho mai scritto o commentato un solo film in questo blog. Ho sempre raccontato stati d’animo e paure. Forse neppure questa volta mi allontano da questa attitudine. Nessun film mi ha mai colpita come “La morte del sig. Lazarescu”. Di sicuro non avrei mai pensato di potermi sentire così toccata e spaventata. Ci sono mostri orribili, demoni tremendi in questo film. Sono vicini di casa, medici e paramedici. Sono persone che aspettano in corridoio. Siamo circondati. Siamo noi. Non so che ne sia stato di Lazarescu. Non è dato sapere, perché quando finisci all’inferno davvero non sai quello che ti succede.
E’ facile avere paura quando si guarda questo film. Perché è la vita che fa paura. E la morte, fa paura. Tanta. Morire senza dignità ancora più paura. Nessun sollievo dalla morte del sig. Lazarescu. Si muore come un topo per strada. Si muore come una merda. Da soli. “La morte del sig. Lazarescu” non è costato molto. Non costa molto morire così. A chi rimane sul divano incollato con gli occhi spaventati, con il cuore che batte e le lacrime che non si vogliono mostrare ma che a stento si riescono a trattenere, resta poco da fare. Ci si alza e si comincia ad essere ipocondriaci.
Non consiglio “La morte del sig. Lazarescu” a nessuno. Si consiglia un film quando si vuole che gli altri sperimentino le nostre sensazioni. Io *sfido* a guardare “La morte del sig. Lazarescu”. E sfido chiunque a dirmi che non ha avuto paura. E’ un film geniale. E’ la vita. E’ la morte.

SALA D'ATTESA

Non so quanti aerei debba prendere una persona prima di sentirsi davvero stanca. Non è una metafora nuova, quella del viaggio. Quante volta ancora la vita può essere paragonata ad un viaggio prima che tutto questo diventi noioso? Quante volte ancora si può dire che ci si sente uno straccio prima che la gente smetta di sentire il disagio che in effetti l’ennesima partenza porta con sé? Quante volte ancora si potrà salutare qualcuno con la consapevolezza di essersi guardati negli occhi per l’ultima volta? Moltissime.
Mi chiedo che cosa ci sia di diverso ogni volta che si parte. Cambiano le valigie, cambiano i vestiti e cambia il numero dei meridiani e dei paralleli che si attraversano, ma non è questo che fa la differenza. Forse il prezzo del biglietto fa la differenza, ma i soldi vanno e vengono, li dimentichi presto. Che cosa rimane impresso dei viaggi che si fanno? Perché i viaggi che facciamo ci lasciano dentro sempre più amarezza che gioia? E’ forse che quando lasci un luogo per un altro ti rendi conto che stai lasciando qualcosa che invece vorresti tenere?
Ci sono luoghi e occasioni che sono fatti di proposito per perdersi di vista ed è questo che forse fa così male. Ci sono persone che non hanno altra funzione nelle nostre vite se non quella di farci sentire che stiamo perdendo qualche occasione. Per questo ti rimangono dentro. Perché sappiamo che le abbiamo perse. Quello che non riesco a capire è il motivo per il quale quando ci sembra di aver capito, raggiunto uno scopo, uno stato mentale o un sentimento all’improvviso poi ci accorgiamo che questo non combacia con le idee di qualcun altro o con i piani che facciamo. Vai in un posto, fai un biglietto di andata e ritorno capisci che non vuoi tornare. Ma, se tutti gli altri se ne vanno, noi che possiamo fare? Restare da soli in un posto dove saremmo ancora più soli? Non credo. E’ come quando da piccoli cercavamo di infilare il mattone quadrato dentro al buco rotondo nella scatola. Non funzionava. Poi abbiamo capito che il rotondo non va col quadrato. Cresciamo perdendoci e senza ritrovarci, anche se proviamo a ritrovarci di continuo.
Così, ci alziamo, prendiamo la nostra valigia e ci avviamo al check-in. Perdere il volo di ritorno creerebbe ancora più problemi che restare qui ad aspettare che gli altri prendano le decisioni che vorremmo prendessero. Alla fine, prendiamo tutti il volo di ritorno. E’ solo che andiamo tutti in direzioni diverse.