Beauty or Nil
Beauty crowds me till I die
Beauty mercy have on me
But if I expire today
Let it be in sight of thee—
Beauty mercy have on me
But if I expire today
Let it be in sight of thee—
- Emily Dickinson -
This has become a world of on-sale, rebates and special offers.
Rarely the value of something keeps steady.
And this is true for intangible values, too.
The value of values fluctuates, as in a free trade market.
This fact has become so diffused to be considered "normal", probably not without deeply troubling the human beings.
I have often been thinking about beauty and with great difficulty. I have been thinking about the sense of beauty.
The canons of beauty are tightly linked to the culture of the moment and, as all time-related things, very keen to changes and fluctuations.
This is crystal clear…
And yet, and this is remarkable, we still are fully capable to appreciate the beauty from another age of time, if we understand or sense just a little of its language.
Like a fil rouge through ages and experiences, the sense of beauty has the power to overcome the anachronisms and to unify the differences on a common ground.
I came to believe firmly that at the root of many sufferings of our time, both personal and social ones, is the lack of a true education about the perception of beauty.
I very reluctantly use the word "education".
In my native language it came to mean very different things. Good manners, discipline, habit, schooling, indoctrination: all these refers to "education" in a way or another.
When I say education to the sense of beauty I think more of a training or a workshop, that is an active and participated process that make people discover and develop something already present in the person, but rarely used before.
I don't think about a conference or school lesson about what is beauty and what is not. I think about a journey of progressive opening up not to a new language, but to a vast dictionary we already vaguely know, one whose we have till now used only a few words, always the same ones.
It's difficult to think about beauty. Because it's difficult to express it through words.
And yet every appeasement is in beauty and every dynamics.
I still have a lot to learn, a lot to listen to.
The sense of beauty, however, is a stronghold of my quest…
The alternative is not the ugly, but nothingness, nil.
"There's nothing like poverty to get you into heaven…"
… a verse from "Poor's man house" by Patty Griffin
He was a man of few words. And one of many shouts.
He came to us out of the blue one bright and cold morning, at the homeless refuge I was volunteering in Naples, Italy.
After a few days he became to everybody "four wheels drive Tony", because he was amazingly able to go everywhere with his wheel-chair, even down steep stairs.
Both his legs were gone in some kind of accident years before, we never found out anything about it.
He probably was one of the many psychiatric patients that were discharged by a hospital after the approval of the so named Basaglia act. This important law abolished the chronic hospitals for mental disorders and instituted day-hospital ambulatories, in the belief that families and communities were better and healthier solutions than segregating. The problem is this last part of the law was never fully funded and activated.
Antonio was dismissed by the hospital, but his family was nowhere to be found. And so, armed only with his wheel-chair, he moved out of the hospital gates and got lost into the gorge of the slums of Naples.
He was a chain smoker and begged the money for it and some food on the streets. Somehow he took to unlit the cigarettes on a circular scar he had on his right thigh. It progressively became deeper and deeper assuming the resemblances of a flesh ashtray. He kept it full of half smoked cigarettes.
We’ll never know what kind of sufferings he faced before arriving at the refuge. He never used many words and even those few were just fragments, interspersed with wild shouts and spits.
I used to have some spaghetti with him at lunchtime, trying my best to have a chat. He seemed to tolerate my company, but never gave it for granted. It was a fresh start every time, like there has been no yesterday and there would be no tomorrow.
He was assigned a room with other people, but never really used it. Even if it was wintertime, he enjoyed to sleep on the concrete floor of the courtyard, barely covered with an old blanket, stars above, ice cold concrete as mattress.
This image is from one early morning, one of the last he spent in the refuge.
I suppose, something in his head told him he was done with us.
He just slammed open the gate and flew.
We never saw him again. I roamed the streets for several days looking for him, but he was simply gone.
This picture is to me both the image of the close intimacy and of the sidereal distance we as humans may be exposed to, sometimes without a chance of understanding…
His story remains untold, his destiny unknown. And, by the way, what a common and extremely human reality this last phrase depicts…
Well, at least, even if obscurely, a small part of that story was told here, Antonio…
So long Lucky…
It's almost thirty years…
Today I was reading "A permeable life: Poems and Essays" by the great poet and musician Carrie Newcomer (http://www.carrienewcomer.com/artist/).
I found these words touching and thought they were written for you.
It's almost thirty years and I still miss you, girl…
"Arthur B and Bob
by Carrie Newcomer
From the Betty’s Diner Collection - inspiration for the song “ Arthur B and Bob”
Arthur B and me are very good friends. I love Arthur B and Arthur B really really loves me. Arthur B and Libby-dearest picked me out of a hard-worried cage. Libby-dearest smiled and said I was a fine retriever-hound-cocker-spaniel-brown dog and this made me very proud. They took me home and away from the hard-worried cage and now my name is Bob, which is a fine name, and I am a good and grateful dog. Libby-dearest gave me biscuits and let me jump up in the big bed and called me Slobber-Bobber and she smelled so so so good. She laughed a lot and danced in the living room with the shiny bell on her fingers. Libby-dearest’s shiny bell dancing made Arthur B a little nervous, but I could tell it made Arthur B a little proud. Before Libby- dearest went away she stopped shiny bell dancing and slept and slept and dreamed and dreamed and smelled like something worried. Arthur B sat next to her and I sat next to Arthur B while she dreamed and dreamed. Now I take care of Arthur B so he is not alone in the big wide worried world with dogs and cars and buildings and no shiny bell dancing Libby-dearest smell. When Arthur B is sad we are sad together. One night I howled for sad and Arthur B howled for sad, and we howled for sad together in the dark worried night. Arthur B is thin and he forgets to eat and once he forgot to put food in my good-dog bowl and he felt very very sorry and he cried no Libby-dearest no shiny bell dancing tears. I didn’t mind even though an empty good-dog bowl is a sad thing. I love love love to go for a walk with Arthur B and sometimes we go to the nice lady cold hamburger place where he ties me up outside and tells me to guard the parking meter, which is a very important job and I am a good and grateful dog. I can see Arthur B through the window and the nice lady brings him things to eat and sometimes she brings me cold hamburger pieces. Cold hamburger pieces are the best best best food in all all all the world. One night when Arthur B was sad the nice lady brought me inside and I put my head on his knee under the table so he would know that he was not alone in the big worried world. I love Arthur B and Arthur B loves me and I am a good and grateful dog."
-- Carrie Newcomer --
What age?
Paesaggio, Parco Nazionale d'Abruzzo Lazio e Molise
I believe in time.
I don't believe in age.
At what age did great photographers shoot their best work?
It appears to happen in their late forty or fifty.
Apparently experience, enlarged vision, deeper understanding matter a lot and are time related.
Forty or fifty years learning to see, to listen, to be part of…
It takes time spent working to reach the heights...
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