We often cuddle in our past like little children cuddling in bed with their teddy bears.

But the truth is we reinvent most of our beautiful memories. We make them softer and nicer to sleep in. And play with. What has happened, is whatever each one wants. There’s nothing truer than something that was supposed to meet our will at some point in the past. There’s nothing sweeter than a trick of mind. The texture of a memory that never quite existed as such, is softer than the softest pillow.

As we grow older, we gradually achieve a state of “existential trance” that turn our all-time favourite dreams into past realities; sweet old memories that we can finally sleep on, drink on, live on; then off we go.

PS: I don’t think I’ll ever live to see a better performance than Cohen’s, from last summer. And I don’t think I’ll ever find another Boogie Street to get back to.

Sitting in the train, thinking there can’t be anything more grotesque than a woman displaying an interest in money.

Money turns a woman into a nobody, it makes her fall into a luxurious anonymity, an insipid sum of brands and trends, an inglorious victory over her own (supposedly natural) femininity.

Little can be said about her anymore. Little can be done to her. Little can be hoped for her. And little can be  seen in her. She is the least interesting part of her money. She neither cares nor smiles for free. She never hums a song. She’s boring and frigid. She is this Vegas poetry in motion.

PS: Message in a bottle to all music freaks (and readers of this blog): Is there anyone willing (and being able) to send me a Spotify invitation? Meanwhile, check one of my fav Bowie performances.

Not every missionary has a mission, and for sure not every mission is entrusted to a missionary.

Sometimes, a true mission gets lost in the sea of absurd ideals, abandoned hopes and daily boredom of the common guy next door. He will never fish it out, because, as it is often the case, he won’t even be able to discern it in the muddy waters in which he sails his life away.

Some others are born with the obsession for a mission they’ve never been entrusted with. Which is even more pathetic because there’s nothing sadder than a missionary stuck in a false mission like an ostrich stuck in sinking sand. What this missionary lacks is the self-distance. There’s nothing “true” about his mission (regardless of its importance) as long as he who bears it is not free from himself and thus,  in a way, from what he believes to be his own mission. No obsession can ever turn into a “true call”. It takes no more than a twist of mind, a banal psychological turnover, and the missionary will no longer be interested in the “vocation” into which he seemed so comfortably settled. You know, almost every comfortable belief is false. And almost every indisputable vocation is a mixture of sheer vanity, paranoia, honest enthusiasm, and imposture.

A true missionary will feel in due time that his mission is beyond him.  Yet, “the call” can’t be resisted. The missionary will not release himself from his obligations, but he will hesitate. He will doubt himself and his vocation to the point of capitulation.  And it is precisely this peculiar love and hate relationship with his “true call” that certifies its realness.

You can’t seek it and you can’t avoid it. The moment you make your choice for one of these two extremes, you are disqualified. And the world is full of tasks that will never by found by  the proper achievers; and full of apostles that will never come across their gospel.

PS: “Chocolate Jesus” anyone?

I would like to read a pertinent, well-written book about everyday lunacy: the most foolish things you do on a daily basis: bizarre compulsions, hysterical little scenes, horrifying spasmodic movements, strange words coming out of your mouth when nobody’s there to hear you, innumerable fears, magic tricks, forbidden obsessions, eccentric lies.

With “normality” comes pressure, and with the pressure comes anxiety.  In a way, anxiety is not only the guarantee of sanity, but also the most reliable token of “normality” being genuinely fragile and,  above all, disputable.  You will be horrified to know how far your friends can go when they are under pressure. And if you’d know everything about your neighbors’ tics, you’d probably conclude they are the most extravagant neurotics you’ve ever met!

As for me, I have a strange morning behavior. Everything involving my muesli is sacred, therefore feared, praised, and susceptible to taboo-ification: the bowl, the milk, the honey, the spoon. I never change my muesli mix in the middle of the week. I always eat my muesli with a teaspoon. I never drink coffee and eat muesli at the same time, this could be a fatal mistake that would  endanger my safety. I never surf while eating muesli, but reading is a must. I always count the number of muesli mix spoons (5 and a half). The day I change the honey type or the milk type, or even (very seldom) the muesli mix, I prefer to stay inside the house, and not taking too many things upon me. Is this normal? God, no. At the most, it’s just a banal, isolated symptom of  some an obsessive-compulsive disorder. I indulge myself for years with the moronic illusion that if you control the morning, you control the day. Indeed, sanity has many dirty secrets… What are yours?

PS: Great, genuine music coming from Ronnie Lane and the Slim Chance!

The life of many is simplified by their immovability. And, in the end, ruined by it. Preserving your status quo at the expense of taking uncertain decisions brings less and less life. And more and more death.

PS: Jarvis Cocker’s album is just as smart as expected. Go here, scroll down till you reach the player, and listen to the whole album for free!

Indeed, a morning is open like a flower. You never know what your coffee brings. I’ve seen the hell threateningly babbling in the coffee foam, and I had, just like Blake, visions of paradise reflected in my cup. I’ve seen earthquakes, and I’ve seen the banalities of my life, which are to be feared the most.

Dealing with a new morning is like dealing with the demon inside you and with the angel above you, all at once. You are guarded and you are tempted at the same time; you are free and you are a prisoner of everything that you fear of, and of everything that you hope for this very day. I had some hopes for today; all of which have become, with every passing hour, fears.

PS: I am soon going to buy Jarvis Cocker’s Further Complications and that’s the only hope that will most likely become a wonderful fact of this little world I live in.

Pop music is crap. At least that’s what Adorno said sometime in the first part of the previous century. I don’t quite agree. Popular music might be, every so often, crap, but it’s also the closest we can get to spontaneous consensus.

Besides, pop music is closely connected to our most elemental and intimate sense of time. I’ve once read that popular songs are all about personal memories, about those small details of our lives that meant nothing to others, but everything to us.

A pop hook that we used to like is the shortest path back to our basic self. It’s not the hook, it’s the process engaged by the 3-chord chorus that, for better or for worse, drags you back into what you used to be at a certain moment of your life when you first heard it.

The only way to listen to pop music is the “retrospective way”. No new song can do what an older song already did, it just “excavates” and re-enacts a previous emotional reaction. If you’re old enough and you feel like you’ve heard it all before, every new “hit” that you happen to like is, in fact, an exercise of nostalgia, an underestimated process of sweet regression, something that “hardcore” thinkers would, of course, despise. But never losing control to a pop song is a sinister way of avoiding your daily emotionality. For heaven’s sake, the world is so round! Get excited!!!

Let me now write about nothing. After such a long (but deliberate and reflective) break, I thought that a glorious comeback should be avoided. As a matter of fact, I wonder whether a “glorious comeback” is something that makes sense in the context of blogging. It rather doesn’t. Only a twitter post can be more inglorious than a blog post. And the two of them together can’t even aspire to the most wishy-washy form of “eminence”.

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, with or without its being  mentioned within the blogosphere, it remains an inestimable work with a perennial pertinence. The wisest, the most comprehensive, and the most decent approach of love and loving I’ve read so far.

Imagining that love (and hate) are too mysterious for being “studied” is a comfortable perspective on human relationships: it’s like waiting cross-armed for a natural disaster to bind or unbind  what yourself have started “by mistake”, “by chance”, or “by grace”. However, it’s just as easy to think that love (and hate) are perfectly understood by having them studied. How wrong. No emotional crisis is ever solved only by understanding it.

The 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!).

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 Saturday. Take a stroll! The sun should be somewhere upthere! As for myself, I’ll go straight to the music shop and buy the new Cohen live dvd.