through europe

(Italian version)

In 1931 Mussolini asked the Italian academics to swear allegiance to the Fascist regime. Only a dozen of them – out of 1600 – refused to subdue. The best minds were already abroad: Piero Sraffa was teaching in Cambridge as an exile, and scholars like Enrico Fermi who were working on the most advanced frontiers of physics were already in the US.
Something similar is happening today in this country where twice in a century totalitarian barbarism has found its political shape. While Berlusconi government is destroying the public school and the University, the academic class is not less coward than it was in 1931.

A dictionary begins when it no longer gives the meaning of words but their tasks

(G.Battaille, in Athey, 1997, 'Visions of Excess', p. 31)

May 2007, Titnore, West Sussex. Let me begin with a reflection on a series of key terms, written whilst I was resting on a couch, suspended 30 feet off the ground, hoisted on a tree; attempting to analyse the functioning of a treesitting protest site through it’s vocabulary:

Since 3/11 and subsequent calamites, I have been thinking all the time about Japan, the archipelago in the Far East where I was born. Now it has been thirty years since I moved to NYC, but beginning from the 1990s, I began to reconnect myself with various veins of radical movements there. So I have many comrades and friends suffering and struggling there at the moment. I am communicating with a number of them every day by skype and e-mail. Along with a few other Japan-born activists in NYC, I cannot remove my attention from what is going-on there. We are destined to be closer to the situation than the majority of New Yorkers.

I know there is one where women rule. Perfect matriarchy, with women sleeping with everyone and men looking after children. It is in some jungle in Africa, or maybe in South America. I heard there is another one where everyone shares everything, in some sort of perfect communism without bureaucracy or secret police. And there must be another one where people with mental or physical disabilities are treated like gods. Not sure where that one is, or how many people are there. Anyway, all of them, all these isolated tribes lost in jungles, I am sure, live in perfect harmony with nature, their spiritual selves, each other, the universe, animals, women, wealth...

rubber to the road, roaring rage : burning. shelby gt and he jet setting arizona afternoon sunbaked desert setting, black and blasting fast. busting past, empty space. dense air, hot and sand. salt white blurring visions blinding, grey strip scissions sections right and left : Lee racing leftlane lest he die – test drive.

he hand heel holding the wheel, right between bottle and gear. whiskey wet his lips, cigarette breath. chuck the butt, had enough : eight years of endless effort, crosscountry constant concrete slabbing. fatigue facing, work waking fifteen hour days exerting. building bridges, making gaps : pissing from pittsburgh to portland, constructing the world. tens of tons a son of steel and stone, unshaven. alone.