After so many years of conducting interviews and writing studies about the way people relate to death and dying, I’m not at all sure they (we) are paralysed with fear.

In the latest, say, 30-35 years, life has been dramatically – and hysterically – overrated.

The mechanisms of modernity have enforced the discipline of “living well”. Such commandment is not objectionable. It’s been, in fact, so dictatorially imposed, that people started to actually grow suspicious and – what a paradox! -  began to feel… unsafe.

The conspiracy of silence (“no death-talking , please!”), the firm edicts condemning people to never-ending youth and continuous health led to growing feeling of guilt of those unable to fulfil such  “dictatorial” precepts.

Therefore, I believe a poisonous  thought popped up in many people’s minds: what if my own sense of adventure is sabotaged? what if they kill my thought of death so they could take away my freedom?

And, all of a sudden, fantasizing about beyond-life ventures or simply feeling comfortable with speaking about The Big End has become a matter of self-dignity and existential rectitude. I believe it is a way of rejecting the seemingly unlimited, autocratic power of life.

I have a hunch that late modern people no longer believe in playing safe by rejecting death; just as they never really believed in betting everything for immortality. They’d rather play both ends against the middle.

PS: Splendid evening, splendid song by Eels. Now you’re really living.

The relationship you have with your favorite mistake is tremendously obscure. Two ingredients are not to be overlooked though: guilt and intimacy. It’s the guilt that makes it dramatic, it’s the intimacy that makes it confusingly exclusive.

The more you repeat your favorite mistake, the more you believe you were actually born to do it. You claim it with despair and you hate yourself for the arrogance of exclusivity which goes along with it. The stronger the shame, the stronger the self-hate; the stronger the self-hate, the less likely it is to plead guilty. You never had the heart to fully regret it anyway.

It is this mysterious mix of culpability and familiarity that makes it so violently strong. Much like an incest.

…You and your favorite mistake conspiring against the universe. And the consequences of this infamous conspiracy are out there for all to see; they pour through your fingers, dripping down like bitter honey.

PS: To put it in Duran Duran‘s terms: what’s so funny about a box full o’ honey? (still one of the greatest songs from Red Carpet Massacre)

I don’t believe in talent in general and I don’t believe in my talent in particular. Nothing fails you more than a gift.

Talent doesn’t prove anything except that you’re capable of something you may want to do. Most of the times you’re not even able to live up to your talent. In fact, you have to trick it into helping you; or else it just makes you feel either worthless or paranoid.

Our misery is the most specific and significant and crucial and imperative occupation we’ll ever have. Some say there is some kind of “existential dignity” in dealing with it “in style”. While I personally believe that the only justified exigency in “hard times of misery” is to assess its actual depth, consistency, impact and limits.

The planet as a whole may be a lot happier than a single person. But only a single person can be a lot more miserable than the whole planet. Indeed, our capacity to suffer is monstrously great, incommensurable even. And we rely on it. We take advantage of it; we even manipulate our own enormous ability to suffer. We play with it; like kids playing the doctor game.

So every day, we make false claims of unhappiness. But God knows we’re slightly happier than we believe; and a lot unhappier than we let others know.

PS: Great mix of high-quality ingredients. That’s what Phenomenal Handclap Band is all about. Nothing terribly original, yet very professional and enjoyable; exquisite even. “Baby“, from Form and Control (2012).

We all need a change of perspective; like a liberating hole in a worn-out shoe.

I am so unbelievably scared of those who see the same thing regardless of what they see.

Men can be immoral or moral. Women, however, are simply amoral. They lead their lives beyond good and evil, beyond all common sense, beauty, tragedy or shit. And it’s not even their choice. They’re daring against – or regardless of – their will; they never fumble with principles; they kill, care, humiliate, love, cry and lie just like a sky that rains.

Re-re-reading Denis de Rougemont’s The Devil’s Share. I can still see myself back in 1996, in my most miserable and illuminating high-school year, reading this book for the first time, taking notes, glossing chaotically over the “complexity” of the devil, and not really understanding what is it that is special about this book. One year later, after the graduation, I moved out of town and left the book at my parents’, laying on a shelf, in the coldest room of the house, among cheap novels, old medical books, and tones of magazines.

         A couple of summers later, I’ve read it again. I’ve found it entertaining. Trained to become a journalist, I couldn’t help but thinking how awesome could be to write a piquant book about the devil. Therefore I took the book home with me. And forgot about it.

I’ve reopened it two days ago. The covers look yellow, the pages are shabby, and the underlining – oh my wavy underlining! – completely irrelevant. Going through the first pages, I couldn’t help noticing that I remember nothing. Nothing. Every sentence comes as a surprise. Every idea is, in a way or another, beyond my expectations. This is a brand new book, on a brand new topic.

I am, for the first time, fully aware of its refined reasonings and its provocative approach; and fully aware of the fact that such books aren’t written anymore not because they deal with “dangerous matters” (what is dangerous nowadays except political incorrectness?…) but because the late-modern intellectual (including the theologian) is only concerned with sociologically sensible aspects of the world. Moreover, he (or she!) always needs a “methodological angle” that could prove useful in generating practical conclusions and, for this and no other reason, win a grant and publish a book. Starting a serious book about devil by seriously stating the impossibility of “identifying” the devil would make a late-modern fellow scholar laugh condescendingly.

If you don’t want to be accused over lack of method, you’d better find an answer to the question: “what/who IS the devil?” And don’t give me biblical, intuitive or poetic facts like “I am Nobody”, give me sociological evidence, or else sit back, write fiction and who knows, maybe win a Nobel prize for literature.

Reading (or writing) a “true” or a “false” book about devil is for sure a matter of belief and perception. And of epistemology. The devil, de Rougemont declares/assumes, loves this confusion. That’s what he’s good at. He must be delighted to see so many intellectuals avoiding, say, the problem of evil, precisely because there is nothing specifically “scientific” about it, just some faint moral evidence no one would dare care about.

This devil must be delighted to see all these scholars whose fixation over methodology and “scientificity” borders on imbecility. And it must be such a thrill to see how this fixation (precisely like the Freudian oral fixation), prevents them from fully growing in their scholarly affairs, and even prevents them from ever thinking on their research matter, whatever that is (surely not the devil).

As from my side, I couldn’t help but wondering how many times do I need to be confronted with a challenging judgment before actually feeling challenged? Why did it take so long to understand that this book is among the few modern books that needed to be written? How come that reading it twice, I missed it twice? Unknown are Nobody’s paths…

It is wrong to assume that only powerful men should be feared. Weak men could be just as dangerous. They do precisely the same things, but out of weakness.

Generally speaking, everyone possesses some sort of absolute power, therefore everyone can heal or hurt absolutely. Victory, revenge, atrocity and failure come in all forms and sizes. Just like salvation.

PS: Serge Gainsbourg‘s “Cannabis“ is one of the best instrumentals I’ve ever heard.

PS2: This drawing I’ve made a few years ago (“The Secret”, ink and pen on paper, 18/24 cm.) inspired the painting I’m doing right now. I believe the outcome will be at least…perplexing.

I’ve recently realized that the older I get, the more I doubt people’s ability to stay (reasonably) sane. And thus, from the depths of my insanity, I’m saying that I don’t believe in innocence. I may believe in ignorance, ineptitude and imbecility, but innocence, my friends, it is a luxury state (of mind?) that no mature person is allowed to approach innocently.

The well-known prestige of innocence needs no further explanation. I guess it has always been intact. Even today, when nobody believes in moral values (or guilt, for that matter.)

The lack of knowledge of evil is one of the most visited topoi in religion and idealistic political/social systems. It is also one of the most used excuses we hear in educational contexts (fair enough); and, also, in infidelity contexts. In both the last two cases, the excuse goes like this: “He didn’t know what he was doing, he was just exploring the world and lost his way for a moment”. Right. You can’t argue with that, can you?

The “worst” thing about innocence is its being unable to question its own worth,  to justify its own merits, and  then use them as alibi. So once an innocent person claims his innocence, he becomes an impostor! Innocence does not and should not work as a firewall.

Innocence is not to be used by practical men. Innocence belongs to “another” world that still believes in meaning in general and in otherworldly models in particular. Otherwise it becomes not only superfluous, but also highly annoying.

We live in an insanely wrong world where even the fools are guilty. So, again, from the depths of my insanity, I would like to defend our right to be guilty, as a practical and honest solution for getting by in a hostile cosmos.

Less ironically put: a distinct guilt which is reasonably dealt with, is probably nowhere near innocence; yet it makes a lot more sense than sending “innocent inputs” into an non-ideal mechanism (like our world seems to be).

So don’t make it worse than it already is. Under earthly circumstances, just don’t be so indecent to play the innocent. If you let it be, then let it be guilty.

PS: Two of the four paintings in “The Comfort of Being Small” series are finished, as you can see above. The 3rd is in the work. The 4th is waiting patiently to be born. I’ll soon update the PORTFOLIO with high-quality images.

PS2: Tori Amos: the perfect blend between musical instinct and purposeful writing.

Anton Corbijn does something that, to my knowledge, no other rock photographer thought of doing: charging the individual (who, accidentally, has the apparent quality/qualification of being a rock star) with a new energy that pulls him off the limelight, de-constructs his notorious identity and rebuilds him anew on different premises, within a re-calibrated reality.

PS: if you find yourself near Fotografiska Museet in Stockholm, check out Corbijn’s “Inwards and Outwards” exhibition starting in 3 days from now (January 14) and ending in three months from now (April 2012).

Let me now write about nothing. I figure you will take care of everything that’s left.

This morning, for instance, I thought about  Erich Fromm’s “The Art of Loving”. So inglorious to mention it, and  what a bore for you to read about it. Yet, it remains an inestimable book with  everlasting pertinence. The wisest, the most comprehensive, and the most decent approach of love and loving I’ve read so far.

Claiming that love is too “mysterious” for being theorized looks like a comfortable perspective on human relationships. But that’s implausible; it’s like waiting cross-armed for a natural disaster to bind or unbind  what you have started “by mistake”, “by chance” or “by grace”. On the other hand, thinking that love is perfectly understood by having it studied, is wrong. No emotional crisis is ever solved only by understanding it.

Apparently, theory has never been so far away from practice as it is when it comes to loving and being loved.

We can safely say that failing is the most probable outcome of the loving process. We are always more incompetent than we thought. And, sooner or later, less in love than we admit. The most respectable father and husband, “the man of principles” himself, discovers one day how little he cared. The most dedicated mother and wife, the “woman” herself, discovers (rather sooner than later), how little she loved, and how vain her sacrifices were.

Love is a rather impossible blend of theory and practice, or, as Fromm puts it, an art (but what a  pathetic and worn-out word this is!).

Shortly, you can’t do it if you ain’t got the talent. And you can’t keep it if you don’t give a s**t about the theory behind it. It’s like you’re born with some kind of (un)natural inability of loving right, and, what’s even worse, with the very inability of ever being aware of what you’ve been loving wrongly.

These being said, I wish you all a splendid 2012 and a Boogie street to stroll on.

Knowing yourself very little is  an important precondition for well being. After all, who would bear the pain of knowing everything about one’s self and still enjoy a Christmas meal?

We, the late moderns, secretely believe that ignorance will, one day, save our souls. We also encourage “the superstition” that he who gives serious thoughts to everything  is more likely to be destroyed by his own snoopiness.

Curiosity, it seems, is a curse, never a blessing. And self-examination is, ladies and gentlemen, the worst kind of  self-abuse; obviously, an embarrassing vice not a meritable virtue.

Philistinism and denial are the two most natural man’s states. We never really undertsand why we should be brave, coherent and true to ourselves and to others.

Take this banal example: Have you ever counted how many times your friends contradict themselves during a single conversation? And have you noticed how little you are bothered by such little incongruities? And did you realize that you are unable to say what you really mean, while you have no problem with saying precisely the opposite of what you mean?

I know, how pathetic of me to write about all these! And how boring for you to read. But hey, everything sounds boring and pathetic in pre-Christmas times. So I couldn’t find a better moment to warn you about one thing: unlike the excess eating during winter holiday, an overdose of introspection could be lethal.  Merry Christmas! Eat more, think less.

PS: the second painting from the series “The Comfort of Being Small” is finally done. It’s a large canvas (120/140 cm) and it took me half year (on and off) to complete it. I confess I agonized over every spot and every line. It was tougher than I could ever have anticipated. One moment I was happy with the progress, a week later I was disappointed. It had nothing to do with swinging moods. It’s just that I”ve always had this weird “gift” of going from worst to best and back again; ironically, this is the only constant in my (scholarly and artistic) life. Everything I do, ends up as a severe, nerve-wrecking surviving exercise.

Sorry for the poor quality  pictures. I’ll take some decent ones (and a new camera…) in a week or so.

Oh, and by the way, in case you wonder: the comments on this post are from 2008. As you probably noticed, I’m in the process of re-writing some of my old texts.

December is crazy. Actually, if December was a person,  he would be diagnosed with bipolar disorder.

Yesterday everyone was literally running on the streets; their glossy Christmas gift bags were held in very many different ways for very many different reasons; some like trophies, some like balloons, some like hand weights for power walking, some like dynamite.

And BOOM!!! I’ve seen men looking pale when leaving jewellery shops. Someone threw up just 10 centimeters away from my boot. A couple of horrific Santas insisted in handing me horrific flyers advertising faux-leather bags. A dog was eating a bird. A woman in a Range Rover opened the window and spat out a petrifying curse. Two workers were hanging twinkling red bulbs forming the word “MEAT” ( it’s absolutely true!). A bartender charged me a fortune for a honey’ed espresso made with tap water. And finally a bunch of teenage girls bought an awful lot of home-made red lollipops labelled “Organic Santa”, from a funny cross-eyed charlatan. Later, I’ve seen the girls jiggling in the bus station. Understandingly, they weren’t keen on actually eating the candies; they were using them for other, most improper, yet slightly hilarious purposes.

Don’t look around if you’re one of those who still believe in life and togetherness after Christmas; and in love beyond the gift boxes.

After all, you, lonesome ones, you should be happy. You, lonesome ones, you look serene and self-possessed. Now you can see the whole world shaking and collapsing behind you, like a huge bug that fell on his back.

PS: some bread and circus from Marc Almond to you all.

Men invented the myth, women invented the gossip.
But we all love a good story.

PS: Ogden’s Nut Gone Flake again in my iPod. Happiness Stan is my favorite character, and Marriott & Lane is my favorite combo.

Believing that wisdom and serenity are always in the hands of the old, is naive. Growing old has to do (at most) with 1. false hopes or 2. resentment. Some aged people seem to be perfectly equipped for the first; some others seem to be perfectly equipped for the latter.

Yet, most of the times, the old grow older in highly ambiguous ways.

Roughly put, the old age is a time that sets the source of three kinds of ambiguity: 1. the waste, 2. the chill, and  3. the absence.

I’ll approach them one by one.

1. The waste is, in every respect, enormous. Illnesses wasting the body; nostalgia wasting the heart; those long, empty hours that waste the old man’s will and turn it into something arbitrary and, somehow, dispensable.

When neither the gain nor the loss makes sense, everything’s a waste.

2. The chill: the old body warms up slower, and chills down quicker. The shivering is its second nature; it’s also the closest answer to life, and the grossest hint to death. Growing old as growing cold…

3. The absence. As the world deflates becoming no more than a ghost army of forgotten names, the absence expands. Just try to picture this: the absence, unfolding itself like a blooming, inodorous, dark flower; first, obstructing the corners of the room; later on, covering empty chairs and dusty tables, shrouding faces and genealogies, and, finally, congesting the nostrils of the soul. The moment when an old soul is no longer able to breath in hopes and exhale promises, the absence comes to life for real; it turns from an insidious velvet flower into a lively beast: the shocking angel. Just like Jacob upon his return to Canaan, the old man struggles with The Absence itself, with the solid, dashing absence of everything he used to be, of everything that’s growing out of his reach.

But there’s no way for him to see “the face” of this Absence (his Absence), and live. He either lives on in a sanctuary of illusions, hallucinating by the edge of reality, or he dies. The moment he chooses to live sanely, the ambiguity creeps in. “Who am I?” Who is he, the man who won the battle with his own Absence? “Who am I?” Who is he, the man who trips on his shoelaces, drops the tea cup, and stumbles in everyday recollection? “Who am I?” Who is he, the man who has no social legitimation to be alive, and no existential justification to function socially? “Who am I to be?“

The old is ontologically distinct from the young. And nothing can fill up the gap between that which is ontologically desirable (because socially triumphant), and that which is ontologically a waste (because socially absent). The young is gold, the old is cold.

PS: And no, I’m not done with Olympia album yet…Check this out!

PS2: See above apiece from a series of charcoals I’ve made for someone’s office. Soon, my most…sophisticated and largest painting (not sure it counts as the best though…) will be completed. Watch this space, it’ll show up in two weeks or so.

There must be so many cowards hiding behind their dreams!…

A life full of dreams is just as full and just as empty as a newly-freed hotel room: thousands and thousands of absences floating around, filling the corners, thrilling the bed sheets. Everyone‘s in there, and no one‘s to be found.

“Never give up your dreams!” is a dangerous modern edict. And – as perplexing as it sounds – a humiliating ideology, an insult to our intelligence and adaptation abilities.

No, we cannot do anything. And no, not everything’s possible. There’s nothing positive about “positive thinking”, and the idiotically positive views on “personal growth” have made more losers than winners.

Optimism is not about ignoring the bad, but about acknowledging the slightest form of anything remotely good that comes your way. How can you detect it if you never pay attention to reality? And how can you pay attention (and respect) to what is yet to come if you’re too busy refining our dreaming skills, building up on air?

A most beautiful dream is no more than a very absence. The more extensively dreamt, the more absent and pressing will become. Till it’ll swallow you in. And then, it will no longer be you working on a dream, it’s gonna be the dream working on you, haunting your rooms, switching your lights off, sucking your powers, turning you into a zombie ready to throw himself out of the window for the sake of his master.

There’s no higher existential “savoir-faire” than managing our ideals; that is, knowing when and how to give up our dream for saving our reality. For a start, never check in a double room, if single. It will only double the absence.

PS: A musical update for this old post: yeah, again, it’s all about Bryan Ferry. It has always been him in the latest weeks. Olympia album: the most glacially vibrant music I’ve heard in a long time. No wonder it was made by a 60-something man. Don’t miss it for God’s (or at least for Kate Moss’) sake. There’s a sense of achievement and a sense of loss all over this album that makes every sound and every word sound gorgeously heavy. I tried to dig into the whole loss-and-gain game of the old age in my latest book on modern dying; not out yet, for reasons beyond my control. Anyways. Check out Ferry’s “Me Oh My”.

Cesare Pavese’s The business of living: Diaries 1935-1950: thick, uneasy, imperative. Unlike Julien Green’s, Pavese’s diary ideas, intentions and interpretations cut like a knife. The whole book is bleeding. Even his theoretical thinking (the art of translation, philological reflections, writing tricks) reveals a kind of neurotic excitement of the mind that – usually – one saves for life matters only. I’m under the impression that Pavese had the talent – the rare talent – of making everything sound complicatedly alive; then he panics; and turns everything (himself included) into a safe, sad story.

PS: The DJ in me thinks you should start your Friday afternoon with this track. (Exquisite booklet, by the way…)

What do we know about the precise nature of our goals and ardent expectations? Not much, I’m afraid.

In fact, the most comfortable expectations are the general ones. The precision of our destinations, desires and ambitions is a bravery that borders on barbarism. It scares everyone away; and we’re always the first ones to run off.

PS: Try Bryan Ferry’s new album Olympia and you won’t regret it. It’s sophisticated, seductive, gracious, complex, not dated yet not trendy. This man and his music are effortlessly timeless. Check out “Reason or Rhyme” for a start.