Speed of Angels Read online

  First published by Perfect Edge Books, 2013

  Perfect Edge Books is an imprint of John Hunt Publishing Ltd., Laurel House, Station Approach,

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  Text copyright: Manu Bazzano 2013

  ISBN: 978 1 78279 193 5

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  O Lord,

  Nourish me not with love

  But with the longing of love

  (Ibn al-‘Arabi)

  They say the darkest hour

  is right before the dawn

  (Bob Dylan)

  I

  Wide awake in the dead of night, I call an avatar who does not answer. Genet was right: we converse with the dead. We write for the dead in the theatre of memory, the soul’s irrelevant domain. For the dead I lie awake at night, for a handful of sardonic shadows on the shores of the River Styx. For a mirage, for a dream I dream up this wounded speech in the dark.

  Awake at night, I stare at the ceiling and dig up a primal verse: The triumphant athlete defeated his opponents at Olympia and was then floored by the gaze of a young woman – read long ago to my father who was alive then, and who, alive, smiled the smile of the accomplice.

  I remember the dream I just had: walking up and up through Trastevere in a heart-drenching drizzle, then getting lost in Piazzale Garibaldi, insolent with the vanity of victory and with a lover’s despairing graffiti on the wall. I was going over in my head what I’d say to you, Life is but a shudder of eyelids do you agree? You’d understand. Summer would come back on earth.

  Is this what insomnia is, not leaning on anything? Insomnia as the cure from metaphysical slumber, from the placebo of theories and the credulity of action, from the vanity of happiness and the alleged superiority of ataraxia. Before it became a drawback, philosophy was this for me once: refusal to rely on anodynes, not wanting to sleep on it.

  Awake at night, loitering with intent in the land of the shadows, I seriously consider if I should rent a semi-detached in hell: is this what insomnia is?

  * * *

  My partner is asleep beside me. From love we learn duplicity. After all, loyalty belongs to patriots, to those who trade the blessed earth for a nasty soil, and brandish in a rowdy wind-faded banners made with the discarded shirts of some rich bastard. They love their soil, patriots: hear them spluttering their drunken tunes to Gaia, foolish goddess, benign Theilardian and Lovelockian organism magically rising one day (so they say) from her stony slumber, opening herself up at last to Spirit after centuries of ethnic cleansings, wars, gang rapes and shallow graves offered to the volcanic sun of the future.

  Gaia? No thanks. Mother Earth love? Fuck off. The earth is vertigo, wide expanse scattered with exiles, fateful locus where you can’t build a dwelling, let alone call anything mine – the blue planet whose strange sweetness tricks the blood and every summer makes us sick with yearning.

  I turn the pillow. Sleep has vanished. At dawn I will hurl my body into a ravine.

  * * *

  It’s All Saints’ night, before the dawn of the Day of the Dead. Darkness came down on our privileged hemisphere, our vision darkened by pain, by a heartache that dissolves the human face into a virtual avatar. I am thirsty, thirsty for summer springs. In the thick suburban silence where slumber weaves the dense chimeras of progress and history for the sole benefit of sleepers, I drag my feet, looking for a glass of water.

  I remember it now: I had set myself the task of telling what I had learned, of clarifying sotto voce at the edge of a bed the compendium of my traveling years, an abstract of fictional philosophy woven between theory and biography. Maybe that’s what I’ll do. The night is long. I’ll do it in our Vulgar Latin, I’ll do it in this rented tongue, stepmother tongue, forgotten tongue. I’ll do it in this Madonna/whore tongue, plum juice dripping from dark skin, a fruit worshipped to silent ecstasy. I’ll give it a try, just to kill time: it will be the distillation of the error that was this wayward life; a bundle of fragments between despair and the vain hope of the world becoming a musical room, as envisioned by that young rogue from Charleville.

  A great part of my sleepwalking compendium will be mere theory, I’m afraid. Yet theory is for me play, not foundation: maybe a dance, interrupted by your handwritten words, the only ones in this electronic liaison: I’d like to be alone with you, shrouded in silence here and now…as slipping slowly under-water…the sound of your voice is supreme. I was touched, and forgave the cheap mysticism in that ‘here and now’ and in that exaggerated ‘supreme’ I fastidiously perceived the ruinous fall that always follows the hyperboles of love. I answered as a scheming schoolboy: your bite on my lower lip, the brush of a flower.

  I’m thirsty. My chest aches. I’m thirsty for summer springs. I remember it well now: it’s a daring feat for a client of mine to simply get out of the house and drag himself to the park in the pale sun and remain there seated on a bench to observe the to and fro of the cheerful shipwrecked in the quiet desperation of a London afternoon.

  Never before had I been met at the airport by someone holding a sign with my name on it. Didn’t notice at first. Went here and there, shocked by the heat. Then with our greeting we reassembled an androgynous creature. My friend Stephen told me months later that on his arrival in Korea he too had been met by a woman whom he later married and with whom he lives after thirty years.

  * * *

  Last Wednesday in a crowded tube at six in the afternoon in the belly of my city I already seemed not to feel anymore the pain that made its home in my chest (how could we, darling, and why?). I am grateful to work, I am thankful to Ananke goddess of necessity whom Freud believed antithetical to Eros and the pleasure principle. I perceive in my love of work the scent of salvation, a hope born out of the union of love and necessity, Eros and Ananke, pleasure and reality. Or you can make art out of life, summoning private, transient deities to your rescue: young Mahler, whose piece in D minor for string quartet mercifully filters in my memory; Oscar Wilde, because like him we all are brokenhearted clowns.

  Transferred from one prison to another on 13th November 1895, and kept there waiting at the central platform at Clapham Junction (where I find myself every Wednesday on my way to work), Wilde was handcuffed and in tatters, poor Oscar, brought there suddenly from the infirmary and without warning. When people saw him, they just laughed, and when they recognized him, they laughed louder. From two to half past two he was held there waiting for a train next to two policemen.

  * * *

  Wide awake in the dead of night I prostrate one hundred and eight times towards the East, to Quan-Yin who aids sea travellers in the storm, appears as a maiden to those thirsty for love and also as sister death to terminal patients in overcrowded hospital corridors. I prostrate to the South to my dead parents who conceived me on a night in June (fatal, hermaphrodite month, month of Hermes and Aphrodite).

  I prostrate to fr
iends and foes of my hometown, to past loves of whom I ask forgiveness for having thought that this last craze was a first love. I prostrate to you, dream creature whose teachings now obscured by pain, I will no doubt decode one day. It doesn’t matter if it’ll be too late, if a cruel twist will have had the upper hand, as in a badly written novel. You see, monsieur Genet, just like you I converse with the dead, I call them to behold this fragile life exposed to the vagaries of fate, since there never ever was on the blue planet a more diaphanous existence than the life of philosophers…

  * * *

  At times I find solace in the melancholy of absence. The heart decelerates after the fury and the heat.

  And how strange that everyone, from self-righteous blasphemers to court poets, all grow silent when they listen to Bach or smell fresh bread. The angel becomes human, gladly decelerates his flight to a standstill and burns his lips with hot coffee on a winter morning. Humans amuse him – he is moved by our plight of Buddhas asleep on a bed of roses and thorns.

  But you cannot, oh no, hear me, you can’t go smoothly into that dark night, you can’t with a light heart go and meet the dark dark night, you cannot with a gentle heart go and meet the dark death that at every tolling of the bell, at every toll comes nearer. Can’t hear no bells, your voice on the phone from the warmth of your kitchen and I heard mockery in your voice as I stood on the bridge stunned by love and a gust of wind listening to Big Ben at seven pm, cut in two by contrapuntal memory – in two places at once and the icy wind feeding on my cheeks. I just stayed there as a biblical stone listening to Big Ben, listening to time itself as Heidegger did, listening to time like the old mother in my client’s tale:

  “I gathered from our conversation with my mother that she had spent most of her day just staring at the clock! So I thought, She just stays there, resigned, waiting for death. And my son on our way out whispered to me, ‘You know, Mom, grandma’s breath smelled like grandpa’s before he died.’”

  I silently return to bed and listen to her breathing, her whom I betray every minute with my thoughts. I listen to the breath of the one who truly loves me with a love I cannot match because more than anything I love this longing to which I stupidly gave a name and a face, rather than loving its pure song as it’s done among authentic troubadours. Can’t sleep, that’s what it boils down to, and tomorrow having sold love to the Pharisees I’ll run breathlessly along the river, a condemned man, and hang myself before the seven o’clock news because it is written in the scriptures.

  * * *

  A flower bloomed in our breast on a day of iridescent calamity (Friday 13 in the Anglo-Saxon world is bad luck but not in the Bel Paese, once cradle of the Renaissance and now dazed in front of government TV channels). This transient blooming of ours wasn’t conceived in divine screenplays, karmic laws or Akashic records, oh no, nor was it a fruit of Turkish, Chinese and Sicilian fatalism. I’ll tell you where our ridiculous encounter was written: in the disorderly classifieds of blind biology, in the blind Darwinian wallowing of blood pursuing its inane course in the wheel of living-and-dying. In the pages of airport bookshops’ good reads, that’s where our beatific/idiotic encounter was foretold, my ex-darling. Wait, mustn’t give in to the pull of cynicism which from Socrates onwards has been the weapon of the mediocre and embellishes today the new evolutionist Oxonian creed in a world bereft of God, Buddha and crystal gazers.

  A philosophy compendium? The journal of a post-modern sailor? You must be kidding…

  I shiver at the sight of two nineteenth-century silhouettes in the room where I come to sit so as not to disturb my partner’s sleep. In the frail shadow before the Day of the Dead, sipping Courvoisier in the plain delirium of this prolonged wake, I recognize Lou and Fritz sitting on the sofa, shrouded in the darkness of this interminable night.

  They caution me with their silence. They tell me that a love chained with knowledge and discipleship is doomed from the very start. Lou admired Fritz but ended up mistaking the thought of the eternal recurrence for the accidental revival of metaphysics, the muddled discovery of a myopic Columbus. The beautiful Lou was running away from love (run baby run) and from her prescribed role as Zarathustra’s disciple and companion.

  There is no peace anywhere in this endless night. I take my leave from the eighteenth-century pair and walk towards the bedroom. On the staircase, I stop. A scene seizes me, cruel and clear. I see a bookshop in Lucca on a distant summer evening; I see a copy of When Nietzsche Wept by Irvin Yalom. I dry my eyes (no more brandy, for heaven’s sake), and recall with a grimace that I had not forgiven Irv (and had told him so during a brief correspondence) the reduction of a genially perverse thought to the rank of psychoanalytic noir. But on this night where nothing escapes the clutch of darkness I make amends and bow to his perseverance, to his existential rendering (in our era of philistine pragmatism) of the irreducibility of the Joyful Science’s great jester.

  Motionless on the stairs, shrouded in autumn darkness I incongruously recall the laughter and sadness evoked in me when I read The Schopenhauer Cure, the other philosophical novel by good old Irv Yalom. But here, you see, things get sticky. Because, you know, he’s writing about sex addiction. Now lying on my bed I pull up the blanket and a shiver hits my lower belly…The prince claims your lips, your mouth, your hands. Above all it claims the velvet lady, the slow entry right inside the gate. Uncensored and cold to my entreaties he proclaims: I want to surge inside her mouth like a spring from a Buonarroti statue.

  This fire inside made me dance when walking through the summer avenues. Here too is summer at last I recited, a poetaster in shorts, dreaming oat flakes for breakfast and the caressing voice of one born in the afternoon of a spring day in the island pillaged by Saracens and Turks and never surrendered to eruptions. Life comes back every spring; soldiers die and are buried; on the third day new loves spring up with the anemones and the scent of caponata and the stubborn gaiety of genistas.

  Yalom writes of one who cures sex addiction through philosophy. Not just any old philosophy, mind you, but Arthur Schopenhauer’s, the grumpiest of all philosophers. I have no idea if in the Italian Boot the notion of ‘sex addiction’ exists. I lost the grip, my thermometer slipped from my coat pocket in the crowded train of exile. Sex addiction would mean, let’s see, resorting to sex in order to buffer one’s anxiety and the very uncertainty of life. And so you catch yourself on a sweaty bed, in hyperventilated and salacious embrace; later, while getting dressed, you patch up the embarrassment with verses borrowed from the Baci Perugina candies: Uno dei benefici dell’amicizia è di sapere a chi confidare un segreto (Manzoni). Doubt thou the stars are fire…But never doubt my love (Shakespeare). Following famished and sterile intercourse & platitudes murmured in the prehensile, ungrammatical ardor that demands the world and ends up with dust, you find yourself more creature than ever, more mortal and alone than ever in a world meanwhile grown colder and more banal. The respectable yet inexpensive tombstone will read, He enjoyed a good fuck. And the same, as Irv has it, could be said of his dog. Perhaps this is what uninhibited sexuality means to the average Italian, for he inherits an unbroken lineage from Gaetano Rapagnetta, who traded his farcical name ingloriously rhyming with the scurrilous pugnetta, with ‘Gabriele D’Annunzio’, the archangel of bad breath, bad teeth and martial posturing, down to Il Duce and the Cavaliere. And does the Beautiful Country have any notion of Schopenhauer, especially after the bad example set by Leopardi who morosely embraced the deterioration of the will preached by the cantankerous Teutonic – Leopardi, who married with zeal both the pessimism and the bitter diatribes against life?

  What’s more, the distance from fatigued, satisfied Italic senses to sheer dejection is very brief indeed. I have read all the books and so forth. And that a fictional character in contemporary California manages to sew up shreds of his sanity by using Schopenhauer – is that a sign of the times? I may be speaking from puritanical frenzy, or from the regret for having lost an imaginary Eden (how could we, da
rling? tell me), but the idea that others enjoy life doesn’t bother me, quite the contrary. I care more for liberty, however, than mere pleasure: to disentangle myself from the clasp that divides and detains, from stupefied hedonism wedded to pessimism of action, from the atrophy of will cloaked as religious decorum.

  Could this explain why a people so diversely shrewd and bright have then put up for decades with a succession of rulers straight out of third-rate operetta? Marcuse would have explained such a phenomenon in terms of desublimation, of a loss of conscience coupled to the ‘happy consciousness’ that follows the attainment of simulated freedoms. Sated and befuddled by assorted anesthetics, we agree to infamy and monstrosities dished up daily with bread and Nutella. Mind you, Marcuse knew nothing of the new generation of pissed-off pajama-clad hordes, the sofa-bound revolutionaries and inheritors of that prime motor of modernist imbecility answering to the name of F.T. Marinetti, (whose idiotic ‘Futurism’ badly hid from the start the crudest fundamen-talism), those deluded souls who ‘explore’ the social jungle armed with mouse and laptop.

  How to justify the fact that a people with so many emigrants all over the world are then so intolerant towards those who manufacture a possible survival and venture on the sea and drown on the shores of the Adriatic? How to justify the total absence of civic responsibility, the betrayal of the Hippocratic vow transmuted in espionage against illegal immigrants? How to justify the absence of communal feeling and of community itself? Detained inside the diving bell of the I, armed with a mouse, a keyboard and a set of headphones, weaving networks of virtual non-encounters. Singles of the world unite. Oh yeah? But relating is painful; after the ecstasy comes the agony; after the laughter, tears; and after orgasm the tears, the tears of Eros. Detained in the diving bell of the I my avatar meets yours. Tonight I don’t remember your face. The human face draws attention to what we wish to hide. The human face is the beginning of ethics and love. Our own face is alien to us, subject to change, caught by surprise in a mirror, in a shop window. If one had to wear a mask by law, to show one’s face would be a daring and uncommon act of trust, the beginning of ethical and erotic exploration. And you? You sealed the end by wearing a mask on skype.