An Old Green Letter

“Everyone discovers their angel by having an affair with the devil.”
(Mia Couto)

 

ROME – 28/29/30 September 1993

Drawers should never be opened.

My mother has always repeated to me to throw away all the old papers and drawings kept over the years.

But I'm a compulsive; I have to keep everything, even the most insignificant. Rack up.

As if these piles of cards, albums, plastic bags and receipts could fill in the gaps.

To throw everything away means to live in the void, for me, not to be distracted by what is outside of me and to be forced to observe what is inside.

 

Last night, in solitude and silence, I decided to look for some old drawings, because there are many friends who want to see how I drew as a boy.

There are not many drawings left, they are all in a drawer full of papers, letters and notebooks of poetry.

I found this drawing dated 28, 29, 30 September 1993: three days to complete it, at the age of 19, in the midst of my poetic fury and avid reading. Certainly one of the most complicated periods of the first part of my life, from an emotional point of view, as soon as I entered the University and with thousands of pages of books read and poems in my head.

One of the rare pencil drawings; I have always preferred the (black) pen because you can't go wrong, you can't erase, everything is more instinctive and primitive.

If I had to summarize my existence – highly bipolar – primitive and intellectual in a dualism, they would be the two perfect polarities.

It has always been a tug between these two tendencies, even in a violent way: when the mind tended to rise too much it was dragged down to the ground, aggressively, from the wildest and most primitive part of me. This, I think, is the reason why I can be at ease, in the same way, in university classes teaching as in the maze of slums between darkness and degradation. They are not places where I could spend my life but they are places within me.

It's hard to explain.

 

However, drawing with a pen, like writing on these notebooks instead of on the computer, responds to that primitive side of me, where you open a tap to the maximum and let all the liquid come out with an incessant and overwhelming jet.

Like everything that belongs to our past, and to our adolescence, I feel melancholy and tenderness in healing this design.

I think I wanted to try to represent my soul, what I was, in detail. That's why it took me three days, when I was usually very quick to draw.

It looks like a session by the psychologist spilled on a sheet.

I am well able to interpret the thoughts and read in people's feelings because since I was a child I have done it on myself, without mercy. So I'm sitting at the table and looking at myself, in my room where every little element has a meaning.

 

Of course, reading oneself after more than twenty years doesn't make much sense, we change every moment of our life, and some symbols I can't even understand them anymore.

I really like the eye on the hand holding a pen with a keyhole on top. For me, writing has always been a way to “see better”, to spy on what happens beyond a closed door. To dig into the psyche, mine and who is in front of me, which now I do better with photography and portraits.

The writers I loved most have always been the ones who rather than entertain or make the reader relax, instead plunged the pen into the darkest holes of the human soul: Dostoevsky, Kafka, Thomas Bernhard, McEwan, Ciroan...

A list that could fill many pages; let's say all those who have always written with an eye on their hand.

Samuel Beckett then I just put it in the photo frame on the table on the left, without knowing at the time that it would then be part of my thesis at the University.

Then a lot of unfinished music, between a pierced violin hanging from the ceiling and the piano that becomes a book.

At home we had an electric wall piano (it's still in my parents' room), and as a child I played it continuously; my mother wanted me to enroll in a music school but I was too young, I had to wait to go to school to learn to read and write, and nothing more was done.

One of the few artistic forms that has never come to me, but I am a devourer of music as much as of books, and around the age of twenty I enjoyed myself as a DJ of electronic music for a year.

 

In reality it is a drawing full of despair, but to which I myself portrayed almost with disenchantment, imperturbable, as if it were a habit.

If you can never get used to your pain and madness.

After all, it's only a drawing, at 19 years old, too cerebral for my taste; this was to satisfy those who asked me, and to show a part of my childhood.

What I write now and as a photographer are also the result of the content of this drawing.

But it is harmless, I repeat, it doesn't affect me that much.

 

The problem is not the drawing.

But a letter that fell from a poetry notebook, full of other letters and sheets, which was on top of the album of drawings.

A letter written not by me, signed only by the initial of a name, dated 24 October 1996, on green paper.

A letter whose existence I had completely forgotten and which cost me a lot of effort to remember whose name it was.

In all my life there have been few people who have loved me very much and loved me and who have tried to extricate themselves in the labyrinth that is in the middle of my chest, as in the drawing.

There are also those who get hurt in doing it, who left, who I forgot.

Some went so close to the dark core inside me that it still hurts me to remember it.

 

This letter is a tremendous stab, which left me stunned on the carpet, sitting for long minutes, with wet eyes.

One hundred thousand times more than the drawing.

And that had been done by me, it had to be the faithful mirror of my inner world. But it doesn't go as dangerously as these words.

 

What's the point of making you read them?

It almost seems like a form of private pornography. A form of itchy narcissism.

Absolutely not. I know well the fate of Narcissus, who by dint of observing his face reflected on the water falls into it and dies.

It's not this.

I do it for myself. For those who love me, for those who continually ask me who I am.

I do it to exorcise my inner demons.

Like shamans, who sing ancient formulas to treat sick minds, because the word is a cure if it comes out of ourselves.

I read these words, write them and cry:

 

“What a terrible fault
directs your action?
What torment
guide your thoughts?
There is flesh and lust,
there is an angel without eyes to cry
who cannot and will not see the Beast.
There is love destroyed by madness or death.
There is despair and perdition
almost a dark consequence,
as if to satisfy that enormous chasm.
But then you realize
and try to expiate it
with the torment of cursed loves,
unlived or tragically finished.

I read cries of pain
waste and obsessions
towards that Beast
you try to tame
and of which you are periodically enslaved.
But why don't you forgive the Beast?
Why don't you warm her up with pure love?

You can neither stun her
nor distract her with orgies of senses."

24 X '96

 

I loved this girl very much at the time. She read all my poems and we talked for hours on end, nights, locked in the car. But everything remained imploded.

She left one evening and handed me this letter.

I never saw her again.

But her words still make me tremble.

This was me at that time, and maybe even now...

Now you understand why I like to laugh a lot.

So as not to cry.

 

Recommended books:
Fyodor Dostoevsky: “Demons”
Franz Kafka: “The tales”
Thomas Bernhard: “Gargoyles”
Ian McEwan: “Atonement”
Emil Cioran: “The fall in time”
Samuel Beckett: “Happy Days”

Suggested song: Andera Parker — Clutching At Straws

READ ALSO:

• My Five Favorite Books 
• My Five Favorite Poets 

Italian version