Forgive me for sending this to both of you simultaneously, but you both asked me the same question about my daily life here:

 

Usually I awake worried about North Korea dropping nuclear missiles on me, so I leap out of bed screaming and devour a big bowl of LSD then run through the forest to hunt vongole, which I try to sell to the Indians. Business has not been good this period.

 

But seriously, I spend my days writing (when my brain functions). Much of the work is trying to recreate from memory lost parts of the novel -the one I expected to finish in October- and I will hope to finish it this winter (I am not trying to finish now because 2017 was a terrible year for me and I don’t want it written on the copyright). Also I have the more ‘philosophical’ essays I am working on.

 

It is not too strange to me…all during my life I have alternated between city and country, city and country… the country retreats always in isolation, which is good for my work. For now I must de-toxify myself after the last year of people poisoning. I also use the time to fix up the cabin, which had no heating and no real kitchen or hot water. It is still very basic/incomplete. To escape the work I step outside to smoke a cigarette and refresh my thoughts, watching the deer and turkeys and squirrels.

 

You, Marco, emphasized your materialist character. Well, I am definitely not a spiritualist. But I can observe nature as a holographic presentation of life and consciousness itself…each detail containing the whole, ad infinitum. It is doubtful that we can divorce external nature from consciousness. This isn’t any sort of mysticism. But my materialist starting point includes the human and natural ecologies. I never separate the political from nature. Although politics is a man-made system, man exists in the world. My view and my work, which I call Surrealism, could also be called Phenomenology…or a permutation of it. As such, it runs in a line from Hegel through Husserl, and probably closer to my own version, Merleau Ponty. Pausing for a moment on the road of Marx, to me one of the most important discoveries he made was that money itself becomes a commodity. -That (inadvertently) takes us into the deep psychological roots of fetishism. Phenomenology we can say is the study of consciousness. I wish to amplify that to a knowledge and observation of consciousness while it occurs, and further expand it to include the same for the unconscious, then the two combined, then expand it all more to include the cosmological consciousness. So it will be a new step in Surrealism (mine). The key: Perception. This is a small part of the second ‘philosophical’ piece I am writing, which is titled The Ethics Of Perception.

 

From biological evolution to the development of consciousness: from cones and rods to horizontal and vertical planes: the primacy of perception, informing us what is near and what is far. In infancy this develops as the first sense -or comprehension- of the contours of the self and the distinct world around. That same sense grows to encompass the understanding of social proximities and distances. Then language evolves from a need to describe similarities and differences. But -like with music- the human mind senses language instinctively in spatial terms: What is similar is close, and what is different is distant.

 

If the perception is distorted, the subsequent information, communication and actions are erroneous and even detrimental. Ergo ethics are intrinsic to perception. Of course, there is much more to the philosophy than this…concrete evidence in the fields of neuropsychology and quantum physics join in the mix as they advance to almost Zen proofs. The only reason I am writing about these things is because they developed from the main philosophical work I am working on, which is about that which we pursue and that which we flee until our final breath: Identity.

 

(I once made the mistake of attempting to summarize some of all this -it was at Flavio’s birthday- when Marco, Ermes’ brother asked me what the fuck I am always looking at/thinking about. Because of where I was sitting, the discussion included him and Chiara and Silvio. Marco and Chiara seemed to respond with anger. I think Silvio got it, more or less. Naturally, I sounded like a Chinese donkey trying to explain it in Italian).

 

But back to the material: The socio-political mechanisms, and the whole fabric of the culture, will always be ugly failures unless they are built on truths. Just looking at the examples of Italy and America, the political has collapsed into the realm of psychopathology. A century or so of the complete perversion of language destroys any common basis of reality….Americans still like to defend their positions (at least up to the era of Trump), and will verbally rationalize…not deeply, but the social pulse still beats and they wish some degree of acceptance among each other. But what I saw in the last 5 years in Italy -a result of the destruction of the culture under Berlusconi- is a nation that has cut any connection between individual perception and shared reality. Italy has experienced the atomization of all social cohesion. Firstly, people’s perception has been pulped by the exterior forces of a bloated political force, and then any accountability has been replaced by solid denial. ( non culpa mia, l’ho non fatto niente, non e vero). And a sort of omerta virus has invaded: actual bad behavior must not be mentioned and it is only the person who speaks of the transgression who is the bastardo. Or shot. So now you have a socio-political dynamic that runs on 100% lies; nobody does what they say (apart from you 3 or 4 guys in Cesenatico) so nobody else can proceed in any sort of planned manner. It is a social minefield. Because there is no common reality, life has become a constant power struggle: in homes, on the bus, on the street corners, in the panificio …and all for nothing. In sum:Total paranoia and aggressive ignorance willingly pursued.

 

Art, and all the products of knowledge, must start with a pursuit of truth, and the consequent quality is humanistic. Indeed, the impetus for the renaissance, for example, was re-discovering the truths of the past and learning from them. This thirst for knowledge after the Dark Ages cultivated a methodology that grew in many disciplines -from all the Arts to philosophy and politics- that, combined, created a holistic, luminous culture. That culture’s oxygen was veracity first in perception and then in language. The residue of the humanistic culture was still in Italy through the 1980s. It is heartbreaking to see it completely erased now. (It never existed here in America, so I cannot miss it). But I think it is still to be found in the undercurrents of some European society.

 

You are now re-living a recurrent nightmare: elections. Democracy is a mechanism, but if somebody fuels it with shit your machine won’t go, and it will always be under the control of corrupt plumbers and ‘repair’ mechanics.

 

Anyway…Outside of writing, my only life here is with doctors. Discovering and defanging -as much as possible- whatever is masticating my existence will take a long time. Sometimes I get in Broadway Phil’s truck with him and go to the blues shows, but honestly I don’t even see him often. At night, when I go outside to smoke, I watch the sky and try to not look like food; I heard a mountain lion growling nearby…recently there has been a coyote objecting to my presence (they have a two-note bark, the second note higher, with a occasional third bark a half-tone lower). And a BIG raccoon tries to seduce me from the tall grass about one meter away (Ciao, Bello! Come here and see a marvel of nature!)

 

During this season all my commercial prospects are in hibernation. -Which is why I have not yet been able to send any money to Cesenatico. I certainly don’t eat much…just beans and tortillas (burritos, Tex-Mex Cowboy food). Because my friend knows my business -and because I was traumatized by cold- I looked at used items on Ebay and he advanced me enough to buy sheepskin boots ($8) and a big, long, feather-filled, hooded parka ($15), so I now look like an eskimo whore. I also got a bag of tobacco as big as a zeppelin ($17).

 

This is not a great happiness, but I was already habituated to a life with almost none and I do not expect any in the future. This kind of life is mostly boring and I write what I do because nobody else has done it so I guess I must. Like an obligation. But I do not automatically believe my ideas are vitally important, or that I myself am important. Perhaps someday people could use my observations to improve their lives, but I doubt they will. I still don’t have any interest in living, but I continue. It is only in the surrounding nature that I find joy…so that is why I speak about it.

 

For Monday I wish the gang there Buon Anno and tanti tanti Auguri (and fuck 2017).