The sound of silence.

Kill time. Lose track of time. Time heals every wound. Time dilatation. Lost in the mists of time. A race against time. Personal time. Atomic time. Clock time.

Time. Everything revolves around the notion of duration: our life; our death, the day we tasted for the first time the lips of a woman; the moment when we fell, the first step of our son, our first loss. We could represent our entire life on a Cartesian axis that goes from the instant x when we were born, to y in which we will cease to exist.

A single coordinate, the temporal one, and  a single ordinate, the factual one: no space for emotions, for what we have felt, for what we were, for what we have seen. Because time erases everything and overwhelms without leaving any trace.

Let the pain go away. Let the anger go away. Let go the thought of what we were and … we will forget. We will forget the present and the future. We will forget Paris and New York. We will forget Damascus. We will forget.

So the desire to not forget pushes us to act: an  instant, impulsive  and unnecessary action.

In the logic of chasing time, we move ahead and, this time, there is not enough time to cry.

I took down from my shelves my Iliad; I flow through these pages soiled of my notes: the time has faded them without softening the words. I find Hector dead and torn to shreds. I see Achilles attacking the valiant Trojan’s body. I see Priam begging Achilles and I suddenly arrive at the point where the war, The War, The Trojan War stops.

At least for one moment the war would stop to mourn and honor the victims. Nine days of truce. Nine… to grant to one man the respect deserved by his people.

Today, no truce. Time to act. Time of redemption. The word time is followed by the doing, in the angst to make turmoil and movement. An ancestral savoir faire made in  Italy: let’s create a noise.

I would like to moralize but I am not in the position to do it. I would say where the right is and where the wrong is, but my value system belongs to me only. I would… but I cannot.

So I acknowledge. I acknowledge the degradation of tradition. The vulgarity of speaking and screaming. The falsehood of words. The falsehood of brotherhood in the mouth of men so far from each other. What a lack of education! When facing death we shout, others insult, whereas we should only bow our heads. We should cry, because death makes us cry now and not tomorrow, tomorrow… do you still remember?  Tomorrow, we forget.

Shh! Silence please. Shhh… silence please!

The jungle life: a tale of five days in Indonesian Borneo

How much do you work?
24/7. No rest: I finish a tour and start a new one.
Do you ever go on holydays?
Holydays?
These are holydays: meeting new people, learning new words and languages. These are my holydays: speaking with people and watching the movie playing in front of me.

Dodi is a thirty years old man from Kumai, a small village on the island of Kalimantan – Indonesia– where the klotok tours for the Tanjing National Park start. The klotok is a river ship called after the noise of its engine…klot, klot, klot. He is a weird guy. He is a social climber. He started as a cleaner on the boat, then he became a cook and, at last, a guide. His dream is to open a travel agency. Why? Because the jungle,thif you are born within it, can become boring. Dodi didn’t go to school – What’s your name? Dodi, like Dodi Alfayed…but I’m just a guide. The boat is Dodi’s gym: the book is oral. The objectives are to absorb the most, to watch, to listen silently. You start by learning new words, then sentences and then more and more complicated patterns. Life has made Dodi a guide.

When we met him the first time, his English was an unknown to us but it soon got better. It was this small man of about 5 feet tall that kept us good company during five days in the Indonesian Borneo. He led us without shoes – wild shoes, as he said- to walk in the jungle. He showed us hidden animals in the trees: always with a smile on his face and with his inevitable cigarette.

Enjoy the movie.

What do you think?

And now…what do you ink?

I would like to answer you differently, Dodi, with something less obvious but from my mouth the usual amazing, fabulous, extraordinary, nice, very nice, cool, very cool will come out. What should I say as I follow uncharted paths between high trees and observe very colorful butterflies brush against my nose. I cannot find any words when in the distance the leafy branches start to flutter and light starts to soak inch by inch: this is the sign that a nice, wild orangutan is coming. I see his little baby climb clumsily on the body of his mom, with his breezy pelt that comes of his little head.

In the jungle, you learn to recognize noises: nothing happens by chance. The creaking of trees, the falling of leafs: in the jungle chaos is rigor and harmony. Everything is linked. Everything has its own place. The jungle is noise and the concertchanges at every moment of the day. In the morning, you wake up with the gibbon’s alarm, then it’s the turn of river birds and macaques: ghastly cicadas, predators fishing, the nasal call of proboscis monkeys, the yell of apes.

We passed slowly through the river, following the slowly decline of the day. It was impossible to sleep after 5 a.m. and not close your eyes around 7 p.m. Our days followed the rhythm of nature. No connection, no electricity: just a little flash light not to attract insects; simple restrooms; no running water; no smartphones. Yourself. Themselves. A camera. The great movie of the nature. “Hello People! Here the entertainment is the live streaming of the National Geographic Channel”. It is hard to take a nap. Too risky. By closing your eyes you might miss the sight of a wild animal. Equipped with a big zoom, the camera is always in my hands. But…sometimes…I would like to watch, just watch and take mental pictures. I would like to enjoy the moment, just the moment.

In this movie we saw snakes race to conquer the other bank; we saw proboscis monkeys, white and black macaques, crocodiles, varanus, tarantulas, strange insects, tarsiers, colored birds. After getting off the boat and entering in the deep jungle we met a young orangutan on our path. We approached her shyly. We      wanted to touch her: we shook her hands. Everything could have ended there, just there, because the moment is deeply wonderful.

Gibbons fly above our heads like circus acrobats. Who knows – I think- how much our eyes aren’t seeing…but it is ok. The partiality is the best resource of tourists. We move from a camp to another. You can feel the docile and fragile balance of this ecosystem: palms’ plantations, arrogant deforestation, and worrisome climates’ changes menace virgin forest’s life. Here it is true: the beating of wings of a butterfly is felt instantly across the world. A typhoon is coming; it is ready to cancel what the evolution built.

If during the day the sun lightens up each inch of the jungle, the night brings it to life: it is a change of guard that starts towards the sunset. First orangutans who start building a confortable bedding on trees. Then, it is the turn of proboscis monkeys: they earn rapidly the highest peaks along the banks, where they can feel protected from predators. At night, it is the time of insects, frogs, snakes, bats, and nocturnal birds. It is the moment of tarantulas and felines.

The jungle thickens of this nocturnal population. We glide slowly on the river looking for a quiet place where to spend the night. There is no more light: klot, klot, klot, klot, klot…the engine’s noise never abandons us. The captain springs out his den to better observe the water: he intones a traditional melody that merges with nature. Stars riseand slide on palms’ branches glittered by thousands of fireflies. We sit at the bow watching silently this amazing live show. We can cry. We can laugh. Now, we can go back with the holy idea that God, here, in these places, has managed to paint a wonderful masterpiece. But it is already bright. We are again in the dust, in the filthy, in the thunderous noise, in the western cadence.

Memories will vanish like watercolors. It does not matter if in 10 years time we will still be able to perfectly describe day 1 and day 5. It does not matter because not even the best poet or novelist will be able to transmit the emotions that we experienced silently, with tears in our eyes, while contemplating the only true beauty: The mysterious and simple complexity of mother nature.

 

My World Cup memories

 

1994, my first World Cup memory, the golden age of Roberto Baggio. Actually, I remember  something even older… I have a mental picture of a set of keys in my grandmother’s front door with a keychain shape of Italy ’90. I was a year and a half old, it’s hard to say if it’s something that I have built a posteriori, a fictitious memory, or if it’s true reality but what might be true, can still be faked by our mind. In any case, a memory not lived, but nevertheless felt, has the same weight as a lived experience. If the magic nights of Italy ’90 are my first football memory, the second one is a toy, a mouse wearing Inter’s jersey on the shelf of Mario the barber: then, over the years, memories built up.

The poster of the UEFA Cup won by Inter in 1998: Ivan Zamorano, Luiz Rosario De Lima  Ronaldo, Djorkaeff, a young Andrea Pirlo, sold too soon to the Rossoneri cousins​​; then France 1998, magazines that my parents bought me, the poster of the Azzurri, Del Piero, Vieri, Baggio, Pagliuca .. and the mockery of the penalties lost against France with Barthez, Zizou, Henry, Trezeguet. Euro 2000 and the magical evening of Toldo in the extraordinary match against Netherlands and Trezeguet’s golden goal. 

Korea 2002, yes, everyone will think about the referee Byron Moreno, the anti-hero of the quarterfinal, but I remember the middle school exams, my father at work, the goal during a test, and us, Mom, Paola and Chicca in my room: turn on the TV! A bright 42-inch (when 42-inch was a big deal), Italy and Mexico, early afternoon, ending 1-1 and my sister screaming for a non goal. Above all, I remember the great Turkey of Okan, Hakan Sukur, Hasan as, Emre (the guy of the lob at the middle of the field during Lazio-Inter).

 

 Germany, 2006: Calciopoli,  the era of the big turbulence in the Italian soccer.  We started off with just a little hope at the beginning of the competition and nothing more. These memories are legendary: I was a teenager, I had just met Gio and it was a period of epic evenings enjoyed with friends, the celebrations that never end (a time when celebrating was a moral duty that was more important than the game itself). At every turn we found new ways to celebrate: my scooter hosting unthinkable loads; underwear wore on top of pants (white, red and green underwear as shown in a picture that still runs on the web) and then, the greatest of all, the famous red Punto that kept accepting new passengers match after match. The flamboyant Punto, led by my father -a skillful boatman of fools,  became the base from which we started our water guns war: our original idea was soon imitated by everybody. At the final against France, we were at Renato’s place: a nightmare atmosphere, the jump in the pool after Grosso scored the last penalty, then we ran riding our scooters and from there directly to attack Nettuno’s streets: shirtless, joyful, in 18 on 4 wheels endured by our ecstasy. And after few days,  the capitulation: I crashed with my loved Majestic 125, a very bad joke played by two French people unable of reading the STOP sign.

Let’s face it: Italy in 2006 wasn’t good, we all knew it but nobody wanted to say it: we had won; in football this is enough. Then 2010, a bad year for the national team, but less bad for Inter supporters. We remember clearly the historical triplete and Mourinho’s hug to  Marco Materazzi. 

Euro 2012, the first competition lived out of my beloved Italy … base of operations: Harper’s Pub, a quiet place that during the magic nights of football turns into a mass of Italian immigrants guided by Mattias the ultras, a fascist from Ticino with Italian origins with whom we became friends. We reached the semifinal and won heroically our enemy of always. Luckily we celebrated dancing the qua qua dance at Saint François square in Lausanne. I finally discovered how a ball scored by Mario Balotelli can make you regress to a state of mind comparable to that in early childhood. 

Brazil 2014: expectations…many, results…few. I did a tour de force between work starting early in the morning, Vo-Vietnam and matches; I was looking for the challenge that makes your hair straight, to add it to my football memories … I tried to watch almost all the matches to find something close to my mother’s stories about  Bruno Conti’s raids, about Paolo Rossi, the hero of the Mundial, about Sandro Pertini that showed  Italians how a president can support a team; to this I must add my father stories about Italy-Germany 4-3, the team that surrendered only in front of Brazil…Pelè’s Brazil. 

Maybe it’s because at 25 years old what is epic ends and you start to look at football through the eyes of a man that is looking for something, but he still hasn’t found it: what I look for is the emotion, the passion, the fight. I look for  Brazil who made the world dream, I look for the Messi of Barcelona, ​​I look for Italy suffering but winning, I look for the show, I look for the competitive nastiness, I look for things to tell to my children and I find disillusionment, I find calculations, I find strategies, I find frightened men, I find the difficulty to know how to lose and how to win. I find the maturity of who knows how to observe and understand and who is now barely able to easily jump on the plane of the irrational emotions.

 

Inscia’allah Malala, you are going to change the world

Dear Malala,
I followed with passion your speech at the United Nations. How much energy, how much strenght you showed. You are a real giant in a world of drawfs and I am standing on your shoulders. Life and your experiences have made you a child first and then immediately adult but I can see your ineptitude while growing up and I am thankful to God for that. Hopefully you have not lost yet the fire and the trust in the future typical of your legal age. One time, I was like you, I thought that a pen, a book, and a teacher could be powerful weapons. But You know, dear Malala, blind trust in these simple instruments have vanished into thin air. You know Malala, I cannot deny that education is the key of progress, of emancipation and civilisation, in fact, It is not a coincidence if my beloved country lives in a deep sociocultural crisis that is killing us. My Italy is succumbing under the bullets of ignorance and not under the shoots of the spread. My dear Pink, pink because you really like this tender colour, knowledge is destroying us from the inside. I was a great eater of books in the past: when I was your age, I have bled up half of the most important books. Now, of course, I still read a lot, but I do it with such reluctance and oftentimes I prefer to go back to old stories rather than start new ones. If I had studied less, now I would be like the “pastore errante” of Leopardi. If I knew less, I could appreciate the world like only children do. My dear guide, the conquest of full intellectual maturity has destroyed my young side, it made me look at the world as a desolate land driven only by causalistic laws. If on one side education makes us free, from another it deletes the magic and puts us in front of the bitter truth where men are alone and play in a tragedy. Dear Malala, I wish and hope to be in wrong, at the end westerners have all they need and this make us weaker. Maybe I am just an actor in an era that turns to the sunset. You younger, you braver will be able to do better. I have tested with my hands the extra oomps of orientals. In India, I have seen the wellness and the extreme poverty, only in that I have found true smiles, true beauty and the hanger. A little indian without shoes and clothes still continues to dance in front of my mask of indifference. The happiness of life is in he who does not have it yet. I wish you will succed in your challenge and that you, new people, will be able to establish better connection of values with objects than we made. Assalâmu ‘aleikum ua ràhmatu-llahi ua barakàtuhu Malala. May God bless you and may your innocence never leave you.

What doest thou in heaven, O moon?
Say, silent moon, what doest thou?
Thou risest in the evening; thoughtfully
Thou wanderest o’er the plain,
Then sinkest to thy rest again.
And art thou never satisfied
With going o’er and o’er the selfsame ways?
Art never wearied? Dost thou still
Upon these valleys love to gaze?
How much thy life is like
The shepherd’s life, forlorn!
He rises in the early dawn,
He moves his flock along the plain;
The selfsame flocks, and streams, and herbs
He sees again;
Then drops to rest, the day’s work o’er;
And hopes for nothing more.
Tell me, O moon, what signifies his life
To him, thy life to thee? Say, whither tend
My weary, short-lived pilgrimage,
Thy course, that knows no end?

And old man, gray, infirm,
Half-clad, and barefoot, he,
Beneath his burden bending wearily,
O’er mountain and o’er vale,
Sharp rocks, and briars, and burning sand,
In wind, and storm, alike in sultry heat
And in the winter’s cold,
His constant course doth hold;
On, on, he, panting, goes,
Nor pause, nor rest he knows;
Through rushing torrents, over watery wastes;
He falls, gets up again,
And ever more and more he hastes,
Torn, bleeding, and arrives at last
Where ends the path,
Where all his troubles end;
A vast abyss and horrible,
Where plunging headlong, he forgets them all.
Such scene of suffering, and of strife,
O moon, is this our mortal life.
In travail man is born;
His birth too oft the cause of death,
And with his earliest breath
He pain and torment feels: e’en from the first,
His parents fondly strive
To comfort him in his distress;
And if he lives and grows,
They struggle hard, as best they may,
With pleasant words and deeds to cheer him up,
And seek with kindly care,
To strengthen him his cruel lot to bear.
This is the best that they can do
For the poor child, however fond and true.
But wherefore give him life?
Why bring him up at all,
If _this_ be all?
If life is nought but pain and care,
Why, why should we the burden bear?
O spotless moon, such _is_
Our mortal life, indeed;
But thou immortal art,
Nor wilt, perhaps, unto my words give heed.

Yet thou, eternal, lonely wanderer,
Who, thoughtful, lookest on this earthly scene,
Must surely understand
What all our sighs and sufferings mean;
What means this death,
This color from our cheeks that fades,
This passing from the earth, and losing sight
Of every dear, familiar scene.
Well must thou comprehend
The reason of these things; must see
The good the morning and the evening bring:
Thou knowest, thou, what love it is
That brings sweet smiles unto the face of spring;
The meaning of the Summer’s glow,
And of the Winter’s frost and snow,
And of the silent, endless flight of Time.
A thousand things to thee their secrets yield,
That from the simple shepherd are concealed.
Oft as I gaze at thee,
In silence resting o’er the desert plain,
Which in the distance borders on the sky,
Or following me, as I, by slow degrees,
My flocks before me drive;
And when I gaze upon the stars at night,
In thought I ask myself,
‘Why all these torches bright?
What mean these depths of air,
This vast, this silent sky,
This nightly solitude? And what am I?’
Thus to myself I talk; and of this grand,
Magnificent expanse,
And its untold inhabitants,
And all this mighty motion, and this stir
Of things above, and things below,
No rest that ever know,
But as they still revolve, must still return
Unto the place from which they came,–
Of this, alas, I find nor end nor aim!
But thou, immortal, surely knowest all.
_This_ I well know, and feel;
From these eternal rounds,
And from my being frail,
Others, perchance, may pleasure, profit gain;
To _me_ life is but pain.

My flock, now resting there, how happy thou,
That knowest not, I think, thy misery!
O how I envy thee!
Not only that from suffering
Thou seemingly art free;
That every trouble, every loss,
Each sudden fear, thou canst so soon forget;
But more because thou sufferest
No weariness of mind.
When in the shade, upon the grass reclined,
Thou seemest happy and content,
And great part of the year by thee
In sweet release from care is spent.
But when _I_ sit upon the grass
And in the friendly shade, upon my mind
A weight I feel, a sense of weariness,
That, as I sit, doth still increase
And rob me of all rest and peace.
And yet I wish for nought,
And have, till now, no reason to complain.
What joy, how much I cannot say;
But thou _some_ pleasure dost obtain.
My joys are few enough;
But not for that do I lament.
Ah, couldst thou speak, I would inquire:
Tell me, dear flock, the reason why
Each weary breast can rest at ease,
While all things round him seem to please;
And yet, if _I_ lie down to rest,
I am by anxious thoughts oppressed?

Perhaps, if I had wings
Above the clouds to fly,
And could the stars all number, one by one,
Or like the lightning leap from rock to rock,
I might be happier, my dear flock,
I might be happier, gentle moon!
Perhaps my thought still wanders from the truth,
When I at others’ fortunes look:
Perhaps in every state beneath the sun,
Or high, or low, in cradle or in stall,
The day of birth is fatal to us all.

The old man loved his tiger: a consideration about our language- Andrea Vovola

“The old man loved his tiger, evidently she did not return the same affection”, Studio Aperto (Italian newscast), 3rd july 2013. I would start from this sentence to try to briefly illustrate how our usual vocabulary is inappropriate to talk about the animal world. The abomination of the statement of the journalist is patent – even if we are talking about one of the worst Italian newscast, the news has been covered globally. The man loved the tiger, but she did not. It sounds as if we were back in first grade, when the teacher told us that you cannot sum apples with oranges. Where is the flaw in that reasoning? The problem is always the same: the tendency to anthropomorphize animals. We cannot, we must not make human what the Nature made different from us. All that belongs to the sphere of ethics, morals, or of the notions of good and evil, kindness, tenderness, humility, generosity, in short to the great sphere of feelings is a human invention. It is the result of thousands of years of evolution of the human thought – unfortunately the only thing that humans are able to improve. Philosophy, jurisprudence and society have changed over the millennia also thanks to the teleological Christian model, based on a Manichean vision of good and bad. In  mystical terms, we might speak  – as a great contemporary novelist has already done- about good for everything that that pushes us towards a supreme perfection commonly called God; and about bad for everything that makes us walk away. God, black and white, Ying and Yang and even Heaven and Hell: these ideas belong to human beings and not to animals. This is just a small foreword to go straight to the point. When we speak of the tiger’s cruelty tearing his loving master, of the cat taking care of the puppies of an another animal,  or of the lioness who dies after killing a gazelle giving birth, because the bitterness was too heavy, we are employing human notions that have nothing to do with an animal logic. I will not deny the presence of feelings in the animal world: I am only saying that the vocabulary used and the ethical principles that are the grounds of this vocabulary are inadequate. There is love among animals, there is affection, understanding, racism, homosexuality, evilness, goodness, perhaps there is even the spirituality, the concept of life and death, the genetic idea to spread the species, but all of this is far from us. We know that young dolphins not yet “married men” amuse themselves  raping in gang; we know that sometimes they kill a creature of an another specie without any nutritional aim. We know that penguins are necrophilia and we have seen them have sex with carcass. Newspapers have shown these behaviors and medias have drawn conclusions: even dolphins and penguins are bad. First of all, they are bad, but in what sense? Take the example of the necrophiliac penguin. From the beginning of our existence, men were not pleased about their earth life, so they tried to project their bright future  in the afterlife. The afterworld  was born and at the same time we developed the respect of the dead that perpetuated their life in a mystic Nirvana. May that be the point of view of penguins? And of the young dolphin rapist?  Courts around the world still find it hard to place the fault in the rape and rape as a guilt, they are victims of centuries of machismo during which men could abuse the women treating them like a knick knack. Imagine, if in a society so different from ours, as the dolphin is, they would give the same value to the body of the female. These issues ought be the subject of the attention of journalists, specialized sites and science communicators.

Recently, thanks to a friend that shared a video on Facebook, I found a boy who lived in total harmony with lions, panthers, cheetahs and tigers : this has touched me. I have seen a dog into the water saving a little cat in agony. I have seen the ferryfrog succumb to the poison of the scorpion. I have seen a lot of videos. I have read so many testimonies: in my heart, I will keep getting emotion, but then, I will meditate about the pertinence of humans feelings in animals.

We were so lavish in antiquity and we are still in coining new slang to overcome the deficiency of languages. Originally, the Latin modeled his scientific language on the Greek scientific terminology. Today, all disciplines from forensics to the literature have their specialized dictionaries. We push to let this happen also for the sphere of animal emotions, because they would be the first to benefit. It is too dangerous to make an animal a human. The risk is a misrepresentation of the animal world: this makes it harder to identify the real needs of animals, to completely understand them without any misunderstanding.

Andrea Vovola