Rome
Bright blue skies, yellow and red buildings, dog shit on the sidewalks, the many rude people, the kind people, people in your face, at your side, all around you. The cupola of Saint Peter in the background, small cars everywhere (where did all the scooters go?).
Once again, I find myself in the familiar and alien city—as my mother, familiar and alien, her face and Alzheimer's mixing and overlapping in a new person I don't recognize any longer, difficult to watch for more than a few seconds. This impossibly beautiful city, loved and impossible to love, dirty, sideways, always the same and so different. The thing is, I can't recognize myself in the faces of the people that I see all around me. They look smaller, darker, angrier, more bitter than I remember, locked in a world that is not mine. Not any more.
I look at old pictures (70s, 80s) and they seem to come from an ancient age, from a third world country, and yet I was there, I know that if I look hard enough I would find my face in the crowd, among the young people in jeans and olive green jackets, and the different anger of those years (as if we could change the world with screams and desires). The world (our world) changed alright, but not as we hoped. It changed in the opposite way, with more divisions, more distinctions, and fewer opportunities for all.
But if this is not my place, which one it is? This new country that gave me a job and a family, wealth and excitement, too much work, and the most beautiful city in the world, but doesn't take me as one of their own? I'm not here, not there; not in the old world, not in the new world. Suspended, a country on my own, lonely place.
What do I want?
When people ask me what I want, I often can't answer. Which movie do I want to see? Which food do I want to eat? Which project do I want to work on? Where would I like to live? I look inside, compare the options, listen to my thoughs and inner dialog, and I still don't know.
People get upset at me because they think that I don't care enough to answer. Nothing is farthest from the truth. I seriously consider the question. I weight the answers. I try to be fair. Sometimes I come up with a fake answer, just to say something. I know they have the best of intentions. They want to make me happy, they want me to stop complaining or being moody.
What is it? Perhaps the right option for me doesn't exist, and everything else is at same level of mediocre desirability? It's just a failure of my imagination that prevents me from dreaming of new possibilities? Or do I have weak desire system? (I do however, have very strong feelings about the things I don't want)
Perhaps I'm confusing these questions about immediate gratification with questions about life and happiness. "Which movie would you like to see?" becomes in my mind "which movie will change my life forever? Which food would be my madeleine and trigger the creation of my masterpiece? Which project will make me feel loved and fulfilled?"
I really would like to be able to spit out simple and strong opinions about everything in the world. I would like to be able to give the black and white answers I hear from people all the times: "I love this! I hate this! This is what I really want! Yuck!" But I can't. I try sometimes, and it sounds fake.
But I also think that my inability to know what I want has to do with the porous borders between myself and the world. What is real? What is true? What is me? What is not-me?
As young kids, both my sister and I had strange perceptual experiences. For both of us, these altered perceptions only happened when we were alone. They were not exactly scary, but they were strange and unsettling.
In my case, the texture of reality would slowly change, drifting away from normality. The entire world would become rougher or smoother. Matter would became larger and lighter, as a balloon slowly inflating. The familiar "sense" of reality would be lost. The way the world looked, sounded, and smelled changed, in a tactile way.
My sister called her altered perceptual states "velocite." Time seemed to change its pace and got progressively too fast or too slow. I'm pretty sure that it was the same phenomenon, and we just described it differently because words are a poor tool to describe altered perceptions. But it's impossible to tell.
Only when somebody arrived the spell broke and the world would suddenly recalibrate itself. The presence of another person would function as a reference point and bring time back to the right pace and give back the right texture to the world.
This experience convinced me that reality is much more of a flexible concept than it seems at first glance. The sense of "reality" is a mix of ourselves, the physical world, and the social world.
So, where does this leave our selves? Which movie do I want to see? Which life do I want to live? So many questions, so few answers.
Outside the Castle
Yesterday my horoscope urged me to get cozy with people and "do not remain outside the castle." I could really see myself outside that castle. It felt so right. Everybody is in the castle having a good time. I'm outside the thick walls, looking up and unsure what to do. Should I knock at the door and try to get in? Should I stay outside? Should I just go home?
It reminds me of when I moved to Pisa to go to college. I'd just left home for the first time, and I felt very lonely. I rented a room in the house of a crazy family from Naples. From my window I could see the apartment on the other side of the street. There were people going in an out at all times. They would shout from the street, the girls in the apartment would open the window, look down and greet the visitors with laughs and witty remarks. The sound of those windows opening and closing, the laughs and the greetings that were never for me made me feel even more lonely.
That feeling is still with me today. I was sure then that somebody had locked me outside the castle, but now I know that it's not that simple. I bring that feeling with me, anywhere I go. Even when I'm invited in the castle, some of those thick castle walls follows me, revealing the awkward outsider.
It's about protection and about not losing myself. It's about the distance between one person and another and the effort that takes to cover it. It's about the lack of social efficacy and the fear that my boundaries will be violated. It's about the intense desire to be with others and the intense desire to be with myself, and the impossibility to find a balance. It's about feeling vulnerable and the fear to be hurt once again. It's about the danger that I always feel in the presence of others.
Most of all is about the boundaries between me and the rest of the world: fragile, full of holes, leaking, and kept together by pieces of tape.
For every beginning, there is an end
Yesterday I was looking at a the copyright page of Dance Dance Dance and under "Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data," I saw "Murakami, Hakuri, 1949— " . The "1949— " gave me a small panic attack. I couldn't breath right. I couldn't think straight. The palms of my hands were sweating. (It didn't help that I was on a plane and we were taking off. I'm always afraid of plane take-offs.)
1949— : Murakami, Hakuri is still alive, but he will die. We don't know when, but his death is so certain that we have put a long dash and left a space after his birth year. And when he dies, we will add the year of death, and the information will be complete. Our job will be done.
We don't have shelf space for aging, death, and dying. They are so unfashionable. But small signs remind us that deep inside we know the truth. Journalists write obituaries when people are still alive. We make wills. And yet we maintain the illusion that what is true for everybody else will not be true for us. That, as Christopher Hitchens says, God in our case will make an exception. It's not surprising. The experience of the the end, as the experience of the beginning, is something we don't know anything about.
When it comes to human experience, I have a graphic and unstoppable imagination. When somebody dies, especially if they die in frightening circumstances, I cannot stop myself from imagining how it must have felt. I can feel their fear, hear their screams, think their thoughts, even sense a shadow of their pain in my body. An extreme form of empathy, I suppose.
But this is still experience of living. The final, scary, moments of life. I cannot go beyond the wall of an experience that is no longer life, no longer human.
An interesting situation, if you think about it. We are trapped in this interval between a beginning and an end we don't know anything about. The end is particularly mysterious. The end is unthinkable. We don't know when it's going to come. We don't know how it's going to come. We don't know what will happen (or not happen) thereafter. Yet it belongs to our history and the history of all the people we know.
Grateful to the City
I'm grateful to the City because it doesn't make me forget about what life is about, what death is about, what money and lack of money are about.
The City (and the Subway most of all) doesn't allow me to forget me what urine, shit, and spit smell and look like when they are out in the open, communication devices as much as bodily excretions. I come home and wash my hands, but I cannot wash my soul clean and blind as I did when I lived in the suburbs.
At night, the City is magnificent, paralyzing in its beauty of lights and skyscrapers, crowds of people and cars, loud noise and incessant movement, a futuristic dance of humans, buildings, and machines.
I'm grateful to the City because it reminds me every moment what being human is about: in small gestures, in the kindness of strangers, in the expressions on people's faces early in the morning.
A family taxonomy of anxiety
I grew up in a family divided by attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors and united by anxiety.
My father was constantly afraid that something horrible would happen to us, to the point of being controlling, unreasonable, and occasionally violent. I don't know for sure what made him that way, but I have an some thoughts about it; let's call it the "fear of flying" hypothesis.
Let's start with a supernatural event that happened when my father was a child. I don't remember all the details (the place, the people, or the exact time); my brain has decided to save the story that my father told us so many times in the form of a few clear images.
I see a child, perhaps three or four, standing on an unprotected sundeck on top of a building. On the deck there are two chaises lounges with faded blue and orange stripes. It's summer, and it's a hot sunny day with a beautiful blue sky. The child faces south and the sun blinds him. He steps forward, stumbles, and suddenly the familiar sense of standing on solid ground is replaced by a new sensation: he is flying.
His terrorized parents found him on the ground unscathed but somewhat delirious. He told his mother that a beautiful angel made of light held him in his arms and delivered him safely on the ground. The doctor who later examined him found nothing wrong with him. I wonder if he absorbed some of his mother's terror after this event and decided that relying on angels for his survival was not necessarily a wise choice.
A later event might have reinforced this belief. My father had an older brother. He was a cool guy who flew helicopters and looked really handsome in his uniform. He had survived the war and seemed untouchable. Unfortunately, he wasn't. One day—my father was a teenager—he did not come back from one of his routine flights. No angel showed up to save him.
My father never took an airplane. He made a practice of choosing safe, familiar routes over daring and exciting ones. He tried to teach us the same, with fairly poor results. I still crave very much for my freedom of choice and for daring and exciting experiences. Except that I live them with this nagging feeling that if something can go wrong it will and that I'm risking my life at each step.
My mother's anxiety was of a different kind. She was afraid of dreaming something good for herself and her family, because she learned early in life that desiring beautiful things (like spending a vacation her father or marrying the man she loved) can turn into devastating losses and long-term suffering. So, she never wished anything good for us, and actively fought our dreams. But really, she was just trying to protect us.
Although I've absorbed quite a bit of my parents anxiety, my own anxiety is different and much more American: it's about having to make every moment of my life productive and valuable at all costs. The result is that I waste a substantial amount of time and resources because I can't just take time off and relax. If I relax, it has to be productive relaxation or else it would feel as I'm wasting my life. Most of the times, my rebellious other self takes over and decides that it would be a good idea to just waste time: playing a useless video game for hours perhaps, or doing some useless but complicated research online. Anything but relaxing productively or going through my to do list.
I have been out of work for almost a week, and I'm just starting to feel that relaxing may be a really good idea. For example, I could take a walk: no, not an exercise power walk or a walk to the store to buy grocery. Just a walk, for no reason whatsoever except that walking is pleasant, it's a gorgeous Fall day, and I want to.
And while I'm just walking, I realize why it's so important for me to do things that don't have a predefined purpose. I'm taking time to explore what's happening to me. I give time to my brain to process the latest events rather than thinking of (obsessing over) them. I do what feels interesting at the moment and let myself be aware of how it feels. Does it feel good? Exciting? Boring? Is it enough? Should I move to something else? I realize that I rarely use my own internal signals to drive my decisions.
So, I take some of this hectic time with so many things to do to relax, and spend some quality time with myself. And now that I'm not bossing me around with errands to do, places to be, things to worry about, I even start to enjoy my company.