Bitter Old Lady
Simon heard this woman say the other day as she toured through Bracciano’s charming centro storico, admiring all that is medieval: “It’s because people feed them. It’s such a horrible habit.” She was talking about the cats, their numbers, their plentitude. The following is my response.
Love is a horrible habit, it is humans’ worst boon. That we have been given capacities to feel beyond ourselves, the desire to give and to share, to see all things as worthy of the most basic of care is the curse of our species. We would be much happier with rampant war, you’re right bitter lady. We should all carry guns and blow each other’s heads off instead of shaking hands.
Love is disgusting, is how I interpret you, bitter old lady. Humans are obviously the Supreme Species and we should exterminate all the rest by a slow and painful starvation. We should start with the protozoans in the pond, worms are next, which means your cadaver isn’t going into the ground old lady, it’s going up to heaven where your perfect body belongs. And why are you feeding the plants? Cut off their water, cut off their oxygen, rip out their roots. Plants! What a horrible habit that we, the Supreme, have continued to feed them the lesser, the unworthy. All else should remain on the brink of the abyss of death; skeletons and disease are better in the streets.
What a horrible habit is love!
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Personal and Professional Lives
“…the one thing i would love to discuss more and more and more is how all of us can in fact not have “personal life “ in one place and “professional life” in another…that is, after all, my primary mantra…roll it all together….”
Yes!!!
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Kitty Colonization
In Italy there is no such thing as the Humane Society, there is no public organization to keep, as Bob Barker says, “the pet population down.” There is Giorgio Armani on TV giving a gentle reminder to not kick out a pet while on holiday. That’s what the Italians do. House pets, cats and dogs, become street animals on a whim of escaping responsibility.
Cats were esteemed by the Egyptians as gods of fertility. Looking out from my comfortable stone stair I see no less than ten cats. Ten cats seen. Ten cats unseen. For an Americans the problem is simple, get them spayed or neutered. That would coast me, for the ten I see, €600. Added to the ten I don’t see that would be €1200. Let’s see what that is in American dollars: $1760. That’s no pocket change.
A neighbor said government funding was cut. But if The States can afford it, why can’t Italy, older and wiser? Too attached to their image; street cats, hungry and expanding, must be part of it.
I feed the cats. Another neighbor came by the other week to complain. She wants us to put a litter box in the front of the house. She thinks this will solve the problem: cat shit in flower pots, cat shit in the street. I feed them and in doing so take ownership to some responsibility, but I can’t solve the problem. The vet can’t solve the problem. Nature can help to solve the problem but there are more strong than weak.
The answer: Let them breed! Let kitties swarm every nook! Cute, lovable, fuzzy kittens! Tourists snap photos on the stairway as sour-faced, life-hating neighbors glare. Kitties kitties everywhere!
Kitty Colonization is part of the regular Fridays in Bracciano series. Thanks for reading!
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Libero Pensiero Exhibition 1
An exhibition of twenty-four prints from Libero Pensiero, my ongoing project on organized religion and free thinking, is currently on display at I Granai in Rome until 30 September 2008. My thanks to Angelo Paionni for his help in creating the opportunity for this exhibition—my first!
You may be interested in reading a little about Giordano Bruno before seeing the exhibit, though I encourage everyone to have their own unmediated response, of course.
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An Open Letter to Anne Rice
To Anne Rice, Of course, when I thought about this letter, after watching Interview with a Vampire, I thought about vampires, all sorts of juicy metaphors and wondrous beings, not alive, not dead, an oblique immortality. But then I did my customary research; I found you’ve became Christian! I’ve not read your books, but there is a general dark fascination around your name, Anne Rice, we think vampires, not Jesus Christ. Now, I guess, you’re after something lighter.
All the black and white is the odd bit. As a writer I would have thought the extremes of the world were worked through your writing and all the luscious middle, only luscious middle would have been seen as the unarguable “truth.” But that’s just me, the young-idealist. That’s just me, apparently unconscious of my own mortality, for if I saw the end to my days, wouldn’t I want something to cling to? Preferably something omnipresent?
I’m too young to judge, Anne Rice. I’m too young to pinpoint the good and the bad. I am young enough to say all is, all the time, good and bad and that’s all.
But anyway, Anne Rice, would you be interested in buying an ‘R’?
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The Reason I Did Not Watch The Olympics
Because, the Olympics don’t seem to me to be about individual athletes—about humans, any more. Because when an athlete wins, he usually wraps a flag around himself and gives away his own individuality in a violent act of division.
Perhaps if the system of athletes ‘representing’ certain nations is abolished, I will watch again some day, but I don’t think that day is near. Man’s great Quest, the quest for freedom, is so far away from peoples’ minds, yet nothing less than a global revolution in thought is required to set us free.
Down with flags and the disease called nationalism! Isn’t it time we all become citizens of the world?
“As human beings living in this monstrously ugly world, let us ask ourselves, can this society, based on competition, brutality and fear, come to an end? Not as an intellectual conception, not as a hope, but as an actual fact, so that the mind is made fresh, new and innocent and can bring about a different world altogether? It can only happen, I think, if each one of us recognises the central fact that we, as individuals, as human beings, in whatever part of the world we happen to live or whatever culture we happen to belong to, are totally responsible for the whole state of the world.
We are each one of us responsible for every war because of the aggressiveness of our own lives, because of our nationalism, our selfishness, our gods, our prejudices, our ideals, all of which divide us.”
— Jiddu Krishnamurti, Freedom From The Known, Chapter 1, 1969.
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Universal Value
“Originally, I did not want to make the book or the exhibition,’ he says. ‘I knew already I had selected the 10 best. And, to be truthful, when I was working on this book, I did not discover one that I would have added to these 10. They are the ones that have a universal value. In them it is not so important who is Russian and who is Czech. It is more important that one man has a gun and one man has not.’”
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Dark Holes
Sofá Sofonisba—the cat—has thrown herself into what she can’t get out of. Under the door she slipped, into a cantine, and I can’t help her. If she got in there, after all, she should be able to get out. But she sits in the cool shadow and puts her paw out into the warmer shadow then withdraws. She must thrust herself through the small flat hole if she wants to get out.
This reminds me of myself: placing myself in a situation with no exit. I’ve done it on purpose, for whatever happens in art doesn’t really effect my role in life. Kind of, not really. Though my failures cast long cool shadows sometimes I must thrust my body through the small slit of light I’ve left open. Through the small slit of light is an answer to a question I haven’t even thought to ask yet but think of in the part of me left sleeping. What I mean is: to start over again on page one and ignore the hopelessness which tells me to give up.
Another installation in the series: Fridays in Bracciano.
Thanks for reading!
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FIB: Ferragosto
Hip Hooray! It’s a holiday! Friday was Ferragosto and by sticking within the bounds of good Italian tradition, Friday in Bracciano can only be posted now. Walking out on the street that day I thought, Ferragosto is more important than Christmas, than Pasqua; what reverence for the Holy Virgin Mary’s ascension into the sky! Personally, I have to prefer the antiquated purpose of the holiday, the pagan version is nearer my grounds: fertility, the bounty, the abundance of summer almost finished.
That day was a blustery day in Bracciano with large grey bottomed clouds passing overhead. On that day I knew summer was ending and that it has been short. Maybe the extensive vacations on and around Ferragosto act as some kind of memorial, catching up for a whole summer with a week or two of sun and sand, family and friends. Like an acknowledgement of necessity in the passing of the season. That’s what the pagans must have thought as they wearied from the collection of their bounties. The hard labour of summer; the harder and more expansive is the fun.
We’re not pagans anymore and we’re a long way from it. Reading Shikasta by Doris Lessing rubs off in its distant views of the Earth, what she calls, our “Degenerative Disease.” When we begin to account for ourselves and our individual advancement above the human kind, then we suffer, it eats at our guts from the insides out. Ferragosto in Italy is awash with the do’s and don’ts’ of Bella Figura, like much else in our nonsensical world. So much of what we do is dictated by the social laws of making an outward “impression.” But, I think way back, in the origins of our times, we were bound together by tighter ropes. The closed signs in shop windows have meaning deeper and beyond what we outwardly admit.
Celebrate the passing of summer, the passing bounty; share it for a day or for weeks on end.
FIB is Fridays in Bracciano. Check out an old FIB with new controversy!
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Reality
“Few people have the imagination for reality.”
— J.W.v Goethe
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