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 devil.  Or, as I have learned meanwhile, about love in the Western World. Therefore I took the book home. And forgot about it.

I’ve reopened it two days ago. The covers look yellow,  the pages are shabby, and the underlinings – my wavy underlinings – completely irrelevant. Going through the pages, 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 (although written at the middle of the previous century, and read two times already), on a brand new topic.

I am, for the first time, fully aware of its refined reasonings and 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. 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 scientific in 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 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 does someone 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…

PS: Work in progress in the picture above. I’ll finish it during weekend, hopefully.

IN THE STEREO: Antony and the Johnsons new album The Crying Light is abstruse, abnormal and stupefying, yet very predictable. If you’ve been (like me) a Antony Hegarty admirer ever since the beginning, you shouldn’t expect something different from I Am A Bird Now. The similarities are so striking, you won’t even notice when an album ends and another one begins. A year ago, when Antony got into the acclaimed Hercules and the Love Affair‘s dancing affair, I secretly hoped for a new Antony and the Johnsons album that could, at least to a certain extent, enlarge (or fulfill) their previous idea of disturbing metamorphosis and putrefying bodies. I, the death and dying most committed and miserable researcher, wanted a hint of life coming out of Antony’s  (wonderfully lipsticked) mouth. But time stood still in Hegarty’s mannerist mind, and those vibrant, pained words about decay, cold graves and startling beyond-the-body experiences, have never really left his lips. That’s a shame. And, worse, that’s a limit.

In spite of a most refined sense of arrangements and amazing vocal performances (I couldn’t have imagined a “Dust and Water” sung better than live, together with the audience , but the album version is  indeed divinely…overdone), this album is as superfluous as one can imagine. Antony’s musical imagination seems to go round in circles: piano intro – dramatic mumbling – climax – suggestive repetitions – anti-climax – obsessive lamentations – slow string fade/ enigmatic piano closing. The constant vibrato in his voice is meant to create rich dramatic effects, but once you’ve grown accustomed to it in a certain musical ambiance, it somehow turns to sheer affectation. I suspect that Antony’s incredibly melodramatic voice needs new contexts of expression as often as possible (lend an ear to previous collaborations with Bjork and Wainwright, for instance) otherwise it fades in a sort of pathetic self-referentiality that weakens its message and becomes suspiciously…cheap.

Precisely because A & J tend to make such an exquisite and wholly different musical statement, the danger of slipping into kitsch and “low-cost” morbid obsessions is greater than within “normal” Timbaland-spiced pop that is not concerned with abyssal matters and peculiar vocal achievements. It is not my intention to sound picky or ungrateful for such an unique album that, after all, I have it in heavy rotation for weeks. But. I think that no one – not even me – can’t bear with this “baroquely built” feeling very long. It just seems to diminish its initial avant-garde, unheard-of meaning, while slowly sinking into a confusing mannerism.

Favorites: the album opener, “Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground” (it does sounds a lot like “Man Is The Baby”, but gentler); the album closer “Everglade” (very strong lyrics, slightly more “optimistic” then others, the flutes are divine; I dare say that this song is THE achievement of the album). However, the song I tend to play most is “One Dove” – very emotional, and less ceremonious than others.

Our thoughts, for the most part, will remain prisoners in our heads. Jailed for life.

There’s a forbidden circus secretly going on in our head, risking, at any  given moment, to become banned. Clowns doing mortal jumps,  hippos eating dwarfs, illusionists fixing word & image cocktails made of elaborated suspicions, anticipated scenarios, outrageous reasonings, intolerable fantasies, lies we’d never dare to lie, truths we’d never dare to tell, heartbreaking farewells and dazzling presentations we’ll never say out loud, curse words and petting words that won’t make it to anyone’s ear.

I believe that our head becomes, with age, a glorious and frightening place filled with everything that’s extreme about us; a concentration camp for  the highest hopes and crappiest cowardices, for our lowest and most sublime reflections, for all the stuff we couldn’t imagine to live on. Funny, we do act and look like living on bread, but we’re essentially enlivened by circus; that circus of it all.

IN THE STEREO and IN THE iPOD: Antony and the Johnsons, The Crying Light (2009). I will soon review this amazingly wonderful (and morbid) album, the most emotional music I’ve heard this year. But for now, I am doomed to bed rest.

There’s something engaging about Mondays, something adventurous and crazy and sparkling that cuts through the illusion of an amorphous, fluid week going down the sewer.

There is, or there should be, a special chemistry between humans and Mondays. They legitimate each other symbolically. They are partners. They negotiate sweat, blood, tears and time.  You could kill a Friday, a Sunday or a whole weekend. Or two weekends.  Or you could kill three of them in a row  if you’ve really got the talent to. But you’ll never put a Monday down. So better come to terms with it. He who raises hand against a Monday, is, by all means, a man divided against himself. By next Monday, he’ll be on Prozac.

YouTube TIP: He’s not the loneliest guy, he’s the luckiest guy.

This evening, coming back from the library, I had the feeling that the world is complete. That nothing is lacking, and nothing exceeds. The bus was warm and slow, but it mattered little whether it moved for real or just created the impression of moving by hiring  a couple of standing guys to swing back and forth so that I could believe I was actually going to reach home in some future hour. The lightening was poor, a kind of greenish lurid yellow that made reading difficult. I had Matei Calinescu’s A Diary of Sorts with me and I was basically reading at the (passing) lights coming through the bus windows: electric signboards and other glittering emanations of the city. I read Calinescu’s ruminations about keeping a diary. Its uses and abuses, its restorative stake, and its basic ridiculousness, and its pathetic solemnity, the time, the ennui, the everything of everyday. I had Jane Birkin in the iPod, singing, as if for the last time, “My Secret”. And I suddenly had the feeling that something overwhelming is going to happen. Precisely like in a David Lynch movie. The most terrifying and enigmatic thing in the world, the most waited for and the most feared of. I knew that right there, behind the lurid light, behind those pages turning green, red, yellow then green again, beneath my wintercoat where the warm iPod was hidden, inside Jane Birkin’s voice, and, still, way beyond all these, the sharpest edge of the world is slowly revealing itself: steel-cold and reassuring, like a knife and like a cradle.

IN THE IPOD: I can’t get over Duran Duran‘s Red Carpet Massacre. I just can’t. I keep listening to it, every single day, for two months already. It’s insane. Each time I start playing it I sincerely hope it’s for the last time. But I’m always wrong. I keep coming back to it, for reasons I can’t really tell. The only reasonable thing I could say about my deviated musical behaviour is that, an album as such, is a deadly blend of lowest frivolity and highest professionalism. I could never resist that.

A couple of days ago I have read, in spite of my will, a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer. I don’t like  Singer’s prose and I’m not proud of that. I find it hard to cope with his honest ways of story telling. He’s too true for me. The epic, too strong. The woman, too perfect. The facts, too substantial.

I could never read a story precisely because it is a story. Pure stories scare me. Especially the good ones that Singer narrates, especially the spectacular ones that McEwan picks up. I can’t cope with the excess of life in literature. I take delight in those books that are not exactly alive, and not sufficiently true. There’s nothing more life-like than its beneath‘s and beyond‘s. But you’d love to argue that, don’t you?

IN THE STEREO: Moody Blues, A Question of Balance (1970). I used to like this album. Now I find it  rather boring. It simply fails to get me. I once loved “Question” and “It’s Up To You”. Now “Melancholy Man” stays the only favourite. So tender and simple. Every time I listen to it I fear it’s going to fade once for all, but then it suddenly grows  again,  to my own surprise. I go like this for years. But better check it for yourself.

As you may have noticed, I don’t have a blog-routine. I do not wake up every morning with a brand new  ”blogable” idea in my head. In a perfect world, I would perhaps blog 3 or 4 times a week – that would be my “natural” blogging cadence; since the world is nowhere near perfect, the blog gets updated when a “blogable” idea  pops up precisely at the moment when one (that is, me) has taken a break from other writings/readings/paintings. Such timing rarely happens. As many of you know, I am seldom – if ever – idle. And none of you was told that, whenever I have – by desire or by force of events – a “spare moment”, I actually avoid to “fill” it with blogging. Summing up, blogging is, for me, an exception to the rule of not blogging.

For some reason, I cannot take my online activity as a distraction. It’s just an act – among others – of sweet duty. The only liberty I can take, while blogging, is that of a rigor-free writing. Stylewise, this blog is rather worthless. As for the ideas, they might have meant something if wrapped differently and defended properly. But that’s not something worth to be done online. I’ve asked one of my thoughtful funny friends if he can actually follow a dense, 250-word text published on the internet, and guess what he replied: “and if so, why should I?” Indeed, why should he? He has plenty of books to read. If one feels like printing the text one has just found online in order to read it later, it’d better be an article intended for a  serious publication, and not a genuine www-material…

Therefore, when I started blogging, the only three things I had in mind was this , this , and this . In the latest, say, 6 months, I got a lot of private (and public) feedback concerning this website. Unknown people have written emails filled with the nicest and the weirdest things you could imagine. I don’t mind reading them. I am neither satisfied nor dissatisfied with them, I never get amazed and I never get puzzled, I never get irritated and I never take them too seriously; but I do wonder once in a while how come that such abstract and uncool texts are actually read by those surfers that don’t seem to be concerned (or familiar) with the “living tricks” I am actually writing about.

With time, I’ve learned that a blog (any blog) gets read anyway. And that the world wide web is a most peculiar space where the laws of the media reception are easily contradicted. Trust me, people do read stuff they are not interested in, and, on the other hand, people are indeed under the impression that he/she who blogs, actually owes something to him/her who reads. The relationship with my readers (especially with those that do not post any comment) is dizzyingly unpredictable. The moment I seem to “discover” their main interest, the website traffic suddenly goes unexpectedly up or unexpectedly down, challenging the media consuming logics. To cut a very long story short, blogging my way is all too fun and too adventurous to be divulged right here, right now.

Since, as said above, a blog is nothing but low-profile literature, I don’t intend to change it for the better. But I do think of changing it for the worse. At least for a while. For the sake of experiment. If, for two years and a half, I have let myself fall into my own ways of writing without thinking much, I am now considering writing without thinking at all. Much like letting out a sigh. Or something.

So watch this place for more. I mean, for less.

PS: Waiting for the new album signed by A Camp, take a look at their youtube channel.

Some say 2009 sucks. Some say 2009 rules. Yesterday I agreed with the first. Today I agree with the second. I’ve got (and you’ve got) strong evidences and strong indicators for both alternatives. Things have never been really that obvious, and yet really that shrouded.

It is not only the financial crisis that made us all economically vulnerable (and extremely annoyed over our own vulnerability); also the fact that we are no longer able to “get the picture” of what’s going on within us, inside us, has lately brought everybody in a state of obscure paranoia. Plans get crushed easier than ever. Other plans, coming from nowhere, rise up over night. Either way, we don’t quite know how and why. The  world is full of causes and effects. Hard to tell which is which. Things are smoother than ever and rougher than ever.  Things are quite solid, yet rather liquid. And so are we.

Don’t tell me this is the very core of high modernity, because I know it is. But there’s something really special about 2009, something that’s beyond Giddens, something that’s more otherworldly than Mircea Cartarescu’s overrated prose, and weirder than Damien Hirst’s overpaid art, something trickier than Beelzebub, something more provocative than Marylin Monroe. Believe me, we are soon going to look in awe at the year that has begun less than 24 hours ago. This is the year when we are supposed to meet ourselves, one way or another. So pity us! From now on, no minute is harmless and no day would pass without requiring considerable courage. There’s not enough space, time, oxygen and money for all of us to actually enlarge our comfort zone (whatever that means psychologically and financially). On the contrary, the shrinkage would be visible  and, according to many, extremely embarrassing. We will soon feel the disconfort of going back to “basic,” that is, back to building significant relationships, based on nothing but self- and mutual confidence. So pity us one more time! It’s gonna be the death of many! And the redemption of so very few.

2009 is going to teach us something we wouldn’t dare to learn on our own: now and then, it all comes down to trust.

PS: “Heart With No Companion” for everybody out there (including myself). I apologize for the crappy video (though it’s taken from the best tour ever). You may however want to check the “normal” version here.