The fall of immortals

First posted: 24 march 2010

Philosophy is dead and we killed it, apart from some gleam of men appearing here and there (although a missing person) within the decay we are passing through.

Even at the universities, during the lessons, we can feel the burden of this immense loss. We study informations (dates and datas), occasionally, if we’re lucky, we can attend at “teachers-driven” lectures about a doomed attempt to persuade students to accept the tutor’s truth, who is forcing, squeezing and crumbling authors extrapolated from their context. We try to dig into the ground written words pushing them into a self-misunderstanding, disrupting and forcing to reshape themselves and to betray their own author.

Where – I wonder then – has the real question vanished? I’m searching for the man, but where is the man if the question has disappeared? Philosophy is a continuous asking, interrogation, collision, confront beyond the so-defined dogmas, that is beyond the certitudes we build around us due to a personal choice or to find a sort of comfort, but nowadays how many of us are willing to test themselves, experiencing their limits, taking the risk of getting lost along a forest? Although everyone tends to feel the elected, the demiurge of the situation, with arrogance, only few of us understand that it’s not important to know and learn something with an absolutly certainty but it’s more important searching, changing, not being static and having the courage to change our mind.

But how can anyone get surprised by anything in the very present period of time? We believe that the desensitization makes us stronger, but it makes us more schizophrenic than we are: the thrilling of emotions, the one that frees us from all these self-imposed chains made by society that builds cyborgs, is considered as something to remove from ourselves.

We can’t dream anymore: we just schematize everthing, even the feelings. We fall in love with someone by various calculations: as in a schedule, we choose our partner, according to her/his qualities without really thinking about what we’re feeling for that person. We choose our work because of money and according to the easiest way to advance along the career. We watch a movie and, instead of letting ourselves experience it, letting the heart beat following the rhythm of the sounds that floods us, listening to the flow of the film streaming in front of our sight, we ask about the meaning of the plot to understand the moral teachings, that “something” able to fix all the fruition into an interrupted and detached frame, something able to stop the film from provoking our emotions, teaching us to give an interpretation of the worlds where it is moving on (and while I’m writing this, I’m thinking, for example, of a filmmaker like David Lynch).

Art tries to rape us and we stand by impassively: nothing can touches us if it can’t hurt us physically, what an horror! (“The horror… the horror” Kurtz said at the end of the book “Heart of Darkness” by Conrad or, if you don’t know it, in the movie “Apocalypse Now” by Coppola).

We are proud to become like stones, to prove being strong in front of people eyes who, like us, are believing in the power of impassibility without the comprehension that, nowadays, the strongest person is who has got the courage to show his tears, because he frees himself from cages that make people repressed in a mental mechanism holding them in a vise and more and more leading to apparently senseless panic attacks.

We use tricks to withdraw from ourselves and to feel something we are unable to perceive anymore. We’re drugging our senses to feel us omnipotent and, at the same time, to feel that something we lost: but without heart and pain, dreams and tears… Does it make any sense that we try to exist as if we were immortal gods? Suddenly an aporia stifles us.

Some notes about the philosophy on "Parmenides" by Martin Heidegger

First posted: 12 march 2010

“Now, i will explain to you – and you’re supposed to keep listening and receive my speaking –

Which are the paths of knowledge (=the searching for the knowledge),the ones we can think of:

The first that “is”, and it’s impossible to define this “being” as non-existent

- this is the path of persuasion, because he follows the truth –

The second one that “is not” , and it’s a  necessary event that it “is not” (being non-existent).

And I will tell you that the last one is a path where nothing can be learned.

In fact, you could never learn the non –existent( what “is not”),

Being something that cannot be accomplished,

And you could never express it (by meanings) […].

Thus thinking and being is the same”.

(Excerpts by PARMENIDES’ «Fragments»)

It’s not a simple practise to make translations, “faithful, loyal”, mirroring  the original text, without altering or “corrupting” it and, in the meantime, making it suitable for a different time, context, culture, fitting it into a language, completely different than the original one.

In my opinion, the most important thing, while starting a new translation, isn’t  trying to understand the specific meaning of the word (term, idiom, etc.) we are going to translate, but searching for the inner significant concept beyond the mere literal text. So we could easily seize and “capture” the importance of those concepts, considered by a social, cultural, mental, textual point of view, focusing on the “environment” the text itself was composed in.

Let’s analyse the ancient greek word “αληθέια”: we usually translate this term with the correlative, corresponding  form “truth”. But, as the german philosopher Heidegger notices and explains in some of his essays and lessons dedicated to and entitled “Parmenides”  that  we should pay attention, keeping our intellectual efforts rooted over the initial prefix, called “alpha privative”, recalling the authentic etymology of the lemma itself.

In many modern and contemporary translation into different indo-european languages (or other families of languages), some interpreters and scholars neglect the importance of the “alpha privative”, making the text lose its original meaning, depaupering the core of the wisdom.

Heidegger suggested and offered a different type of translation, using the term “Entbergung “, in order to evoke the substantial theoretical background hidden underneath the evident textual reference; we could attempt to link the Heidegger’s translation to the concept and process of  uncovering and disclosing a concealed perennial truth. This effort oriented to the seeking of  “αληθέια” could also be connected to the process of “unveiling”; in fact, the ancient greek word “αληθέια” comes from the verb “λανθάνω”, meaning to hide, to conceal, etc. The “alpha privative” marks the effect of UN-veiling, of DIS-closing, of UN-covering the truth, a pregnant coexistence of obscure veils and shining clearing into forest “wege” (hidden paths).

At this turning point of Heidegger’s argumentation there are four points to underline and consider regarding this greek term:

1. Something “UNveiled” is given (as a precondition): if something “UNveiled” does exist, then there must be something “veiled”, but we are not allowed or supposed to know. Here the “Unveiled” is something to be preserved, as an occult covering of an original truth.

2. Coming back to the “alpha privative“,  we have to notice how the Un-veiling here is meant as an entity that can delete, cover or wipe out what is veiled, Un-disclosing it, or, in a paradox, it could even mean that the veiled doesn’t properly exist, but it’s the correlative side of the metamorphosis of the UN-veiling, that necessitates the veiled content .

3. So it’s originated a conflict, that is present and active in the essence of truth. According to sections of western modern philosophy based upon post-aristotelian rationalism, the annihilation of the veiled content is inconceivable, because the “nihil”, the void are included among the categorizing divisions of the negative topics.

Heavily conditioned by our scientific network of dogmas, we often forget that our western viewpoints are just a way to ponder over subjects . There are different perspectives, such as the eastern wisdom, taught by other philosophies, masters, forms of knowledge. For example, Schopenhauer tried to bring some studies about eastern traditions to the west, enlightening nineteenth century philosophers. He explained that a common human being could reach an ideal condition – called “Nirvana” – revolting against the “Wille”, the omnipresent “Will” that rules the events of human existence and dominates our fates. Through the fighting against this “Wille” we could proceed towards an alternative state of being, symbolized by the “void”. This sort of vacuity is not blamed as a negative condition, according to Schopenhauer tought. (It’s most of the western philosophical tradition that stigmatizes this “Void” as a totally negative degeneration).

The “Un-covering” has nothing to do with the systematic axioms of Hegel’s philosophy. German philosophical “idealism“ has elaborated a scheme to classify their conclusions. We find the triad structured by thesis, anti-thesis, synthesis. Other thinkers seem to match their reflections with Descartes’ studies. Here everything is subjected to the strict “law” of the so-called “Cogito ergo sum“. This “Cogito” is the divine self-awareness, so the divine transcendence of God states its perennial, immortal existence by accomplishing the act of thinking itself. Thinking is the logical dogma that justifies the existence of a divine God that declares its own power. This opposition between the mundane and the transcendent, between the augustinian “civitas dei“ and “civitas mundi”, between the perfection of the self proclaming god and the transitory human existence, between the “res cogitans” (god itself) and the “res extensa” (= reality, the world, the existence) is deeply confuted by Heidegger. He disagrees with Descartes about the Subject separated from the Object. The Subject is the “Dasein”, that is the human existing across time and space, and this Subject, when starts to care about an authentical type of existence, should attempt to listen to the “Being” itself, the UN-veiled “αληθέια”. This is the peculiar path an authentic human being should follow.

(“The concept of a self-aware Subjectivity, sure of its «ens» -entity- , doesn’t belong to the spirit of ancient greek philosophy. But it’s surely true that in the modern essence of the «subjectivity of the spirit» – that, if considered in a correct way, has nothing to do with the subjectiveness – is evoked the sound of the changed essence of greek αληθέια“)

4. “No other echoing resembles to the original echoing. The initial beginning is directed only towards the initial beginning. One isn’t the same as the other. And nevertheless both are the Same (Das Selbe), even when they seem to separate one from the other into the unmatchable divergent” (Taken from “Heidegger’s Parmenides”).

Here Heidegger means to refer to Parmenides toughts, quoted in the fragments i transcribed in the incipit. Reading both these philosophers we can notice how they state that, even if the veiled and the UN-veiled are separate and divided, nevertheless they merge and they are interconnected because they can exist only if they share a mutual relation

We all know that the light is opposed to the obscure darkness. They are two opposite poles, two different concepts and experiences. So we distinguish them and we think they are not compatible or specular. But ancient greeks (and most of eastern wisdoms and knowledges) explain that the shining light and the abyssal obscurity shouldn’t be differentiated. The “αληθέια” is a “coincidentia oppositorum”, not a dogma.

The morbid jelly of Italian country: vile corruption, ethics-annihilating viruses and the shining paradigm of the classic greek-roman Titans

First posted: 24  february 2010

Today some people said me that I tend to despise Italian culture and to sign the praises of the foreign one. They also try to point how, instead of the outlanders, we have got a direct descent of the great Roman empire.

Probably when I speak I can give the wrong idea that I’ve got this “forma mentis” but, if I have to be honest, what I despise is the present Italian society, certanly not the ancient, quite another thing.

My answer to this appointment, therefore, was: “I’ve got nothing against ancient cultures, neither Latin nor Greek, which I love, but, in Italy, we don’t know them well and, very often, people abroad is more interested in a specific way about them and they’re able to drain from and actualize the teachings including them in their society. Do you want to talk, I don’t know, for example, about Seneca, Petronius or Cicero or any other Latin author?”.

Currently the grammar high school is scorned and offended because it’s judged like an environment where people study the “dead languades”, or with a terminal illness. I wonder, then, why, for example, Nietzsche or Heiddeger have taken inspiration by the Greek language and culture if it was so senseless as it seems to italian people.

Perhaps it is the study in our schools based purely on learning mnemonic versions of the translations done in classes (or clearly copied/pasted from the Internet) and, later, attached to the tests without an explanation about the text (I would say the exegesis or contextualizing but they’re teminologies unknown by the teachers themselves)?

It looks like that we don’t understand what exactly the ancient cultures offer, and continue to teach, showing how to live in an ideal way, and I’m not surprised that this point is completely misunderstood by Italian people.

I have noticed that some people get really annoyed while hearing around (in people talking) about how our country, considered as a formal “society” (what a significant word… how many euphemisms i am using here! I wonder why…), is going to fall into complete ruination (such as being corrupted by an  infectious disease orby the typical “bacillus” currupting and spoiling books pages…) and about how we are currently deeply criticized by foreign countries, blaming the collapse of our ethics, for example: we give up realizing (and getting aware of) where we are gradually directing our steps (in a sort of no mans lands, where “licet” and not “licet” are the same, where there is no difference between morality and immoral acts, between ethics or illicit behaviours), and we are unable to realize that just because we ourselves are made of “debris and ignorance” (please try to feel the sound of the spelling in my original language, italian, “we are made of “macerie e ignoranza”, translated into italian… isn’t it like the sound of ruination itself?).

Fed up by television programs (just like chickens being stuffed) and sparkles, fragments  taken from italian news (daily “chronicles” contained in the most common and sold newspapers), we tend to miss all the real facts happening around the world, being news from the outer world something “missing” in our major newspapares and tv programs (there is an italian journalist, who has written a very significant and important boom about that, entitled “La scomparsa dei fatti”, “The vanishing of the news and facts”, translated by me; this journalist’s name is Marco Travaglio, a master of true journalism). We happen (sometimes) to hear or read about the news and facts coming from all over the world, but those news are reported manipulated or filtered by the “Big Brother” of our news agencies, so most of the news are altered and reported with no accuracy or precision.

Coming back to an old problem, already discussed by me (forgive my self-quoting hypertrophy), I am wondering about how many persons really know english language here in Italy… and I am wondering whether people educated in english, here in Italy, are used to reading english newspapers (or listening to their tv news broadcasting) or not.

Some days ago I bumped into an article reporting that Beppe Grillo (an italian famous comedian and a blogger whose mission is to divulge the most important facts and news without altering or censoring them) has been invited to Oxford university to “lecture” in comunication, diffusion of culture, the media, the italian problems and contradictions, about the “humus” surrounding our country. Apart from the fact that the italian embassy tried to diffuse some information against the reputation of this person (who is honest, sincere and guided by common sense), trying to make him appear less reliable and authoritative, they also quoted some of the comedian-blogger most famous opinions and words, blaming him for being a “dangerous” paradigm of an “anti-politicians” provocative troubles maker (accusing him of being a sort of professional “provocateur”). Some sentecnes and words of this famous comedian-blogger talk about how many italians, while living in foreign countries, are sure that they don’t want to come back to Italy, looking things from another point of view, from another alternative perspective, conscious of the faults and problems stuck and attached to the social/political pattern of our society and country. According to Beppe Grillo’s recurrent critical opinion, some italian, living in foreign countries, feel like “exiled” human beings, clinged to the “kindness of strangers” while being welcomed by foreign countries. Many italians cannot stand anymore the endemic state of corruption of our country, often hurt and “slaved” by criminal organizations (mafia, camorra, ’ndrangheta, etc.) and by illegals acts committed by the political bureau. (I think you all can recall the so-called “Tangentopoli”- the crisis of italian political/social system due to the curruptions and financial crimes, called  polis, city, of the bribes-that culminated into a series of trials directed by the famous Milano’s pool, whose members were for example Francesco Saverio Borrelli, Antonio Di Pietro, Davigo, Colombo, etc.

So after the eclipse of common sense,of rational thinking,of critical toughts many italians are sinking into the aberration of the nonsense, symbolized by the gossip news, by the lacking of true informations, by the meaningless and pathetic reference to our latin (greek) roots and traditions, as if italian people were all fond of learning about our cultural origins, as if our cultural traditions (the greek-roman source of knowledge) could be learned by osmosis or treasured into ourselves just like a sort of genetic “acquisition”.

Straw dogs? Few simple steps to put a correct imprinting over the owners…

I was eight years old and I was walking with my loved dog taking him on a leash; I remember the paralyzing fear at the time when I saw an alsatian coming towards me and the terror when my dog, getting rid of the collar, attacked it to defend me and and ruling the situation, I screamed but and none came or appeared.

I lived in a rural village where nobody, even now, has learned not to let their dogs free on the street.

Today owners are forced by the law to put an underskin microchip in the neck of their animals, cats, dogs, horses and so on.

This thing, in theory, should prevent the owners from abandoning their pets but it’s useless: if the animal gets out of its residence region (sometimes even out of the province) the signal doesn’t work anymore being out of range (this means that if, unfortunately, we lose the dog away from home, so we won’t find him, being unable to catch the signal emissions).

Apart from this digression on missing/abandoning animals (unfortunately an usual thing in Italy), the real focus of the discussion would be the use of muzzle.

I realize that a lot of dog owners are opposed to the use of this rash medium, because they often think that their dog is a “good guy”, but if the size of the animal is around twenty pounds, I think most owners would be better use this mean, the muzzle. It’s my personal advice, based on common sense.

I don’t think that a pedigree make a dog good or bad but the important thing in the education of the animals are their masters’ behaviour: each animal, like every living thing, has got its own character and its education could be established according to its character, this doesn’t mean that it’s born good or bad but that in some cases we need a steady hand and maybe in another situation it is better to be sweet and calm with it.

A lot of people, here, think that their dog an evident symbol showing a sort of social status position (a strange kind of hierarchy of conventional symbols of mass deception) so this “men’s friend” become a sort of tool to distinguish themselves from the others: they don’t learn to know it and so, “once upon a time” a lovely dog rebels against strangers or against its own master.

Some time ago I remember that I was impressed to see and a sweet Saint Bernard changing the eyes’ expression, at the moment that the hand of his master was touching  his head, I had the impression to see a flash of hatred for that man and, so, I asked him if this big puppy had bitten someone in the past: sure it did it! It bit the hand of its master (probably as a warning, otherwise some suture points couldn’t be enough).

One of my dogs, for example, “hates” children: they did so many tricks on her, with the silent complicity of their parents who looked at me astonished when I asked them to move away from the fence because my dog could bite, that I never bring her near a baby and I also pay attention when I walk with her on the street (always and strictly on leash) because she could bite someone without fear (I think it can be considered a natural reaction of her, feeling the instinct to bite naughty kids, but the rational and strict control of the owners must be vigilant over their pets, in order to guide them and limit their inner instincts).

"Blue" a movie by Derek Jarman

First posted: 08 January 2010

For accustomed to believing in image,

an absolute idea of value,

his world had forgotten the command of essence:

thou shall not create unto thyself any graven Image,

although you know the task is to fill the empty page.

From the bottom of your heart,

pray to be released from image.

A lot of people, speaking about a film, tend to create some categories in which they can place it. The category that I avoid in every way is: “I don’t understand it, ergo I don’t like it” where people place the filmmakers that I love.

This speech comes from my “need” of or, I might say, pleasure in talking about a movie, beyond all these useless classes, using it as a launch pad for a less fatuous conversation.

A film, in my opinion, is beautiful when it can impress me, inspiring in me some impressions: it doesn’t matter whether those that feelings are or not likeable, enjoyable or not. Beside that, I think that the most beautiful and interesting thing is being involved, such as being “pulled” ahead along a inner mental “path”, by the film (a sort of streaming images thrilling our icastic-vertigo): let oneself go skip technical “factors” or or the simple logical comprehension of it… just watch it!

I remember my urging “need” to stop a movie (“unsatisfied”… by something unexplicable…), “No country for Old men” by Coen brothers, due to the tension that I felt, or the psychological nausea created by some scenes of “Antichrist” by Lars Von Trier, or even the rapture I feel every time I contemplate a film by Tarkovsky, or the fear created by “Shining” by Kubrick in which the image and the editing prepare us for what we’ll see but the soundtrack make us fall, suddenly, into a silent terror.

About that, I could present, like an exemplary “pillar” and artistic counterpart of this concept(contained in my article and discussed here from a personal point of view) “Blue” by Derek Jarman.

This movie hasn’t got images, the viewer can only watch a blue screen, symbol and allegory of the beginning and the end of a show, followed by some voices, sounds and songs: all that a blind man can “see”.

The director, through the film, tells us about his dawnfall (his physical and psychological crisis) because of the HIV contraction (commonly know as AIDS). Following, with our closed eyes, this voice, that speaks about himself, through small scraps of memory, taking us through a blindness course and, later struggling, feeling deep sorrow and “agonia”, against the “lithania” of death itself, it pushes us to taste the dramatic, abissal event of the incoming collapse of life forms, tough suggesting a slight sense of infinity, of unending sorrow culminating into the appalling breath of new life (blossoming over the ashes and after the massacre of the ego, of the human psyche, of the mundane body).

The movie is punctuated, tickled (as in a Schopenhauer/Leopardi’s “pendulum” of the life cycle, rounding the edges of the extreme emotional, existential poles of our “dasein”), obsessed by the blue colour, the chromatic scale of every deep blue, static and dynamic, brilliant and pale, clean and rough… this “absorbing” blue palette, gamma is the stage of similarities, conflicts, introspections. (Is the so-called Yves Klein “blue” a sort of specular alter ego of Jarman’s blue…?). The same image is denied because it “is a prison of the soul, your heredity, your education, your vices and aspirations, your qualities, your psychological world” leaving us in an empty incomplete ocean of unlimited opportunities.

Short Circuit

First posted: 30 december 2009

I was sure to live in the new century, after the end of the twentieth, the era where technologies should be our daily routine and our own “food”, the time when all of us can get used to managing innovations, present and upcoming.

I’m looking around, lost…

We’re just entered into a university class where we have to follow a lesson about HTML codes and so we need to use computers. A young girl, that I know (she’s about twenty years old), comes near a pc station, she looks at the computer screen and she decides to move into another place, changing her seat and position. I asked her why she had changed her mind so she replied: “The computer doesn’t work”. I said that it was just turned off but she didn’t try to turn it on, she changed her position and she was happy.
This is just one among a lot of examples that I have noticed over the years.
We are all convinced that young people passively accept all the technologies and that they interact more easily than older people, but I’m not entirely sure.

I think that the predisposition and the inclination to learn how to use technologies could be an individual frame of mind rather than a matter of ages: Michelangelo Antonioni, a famous italian filmmaker, when he was old, loved and tried to explore, new technologies concerning the new frontiers of innovation and progress in the movie realization, industry, production; he seemed to be interested in that, feeling the same pleasure and excitement of a child while playing with snowballs in his early years.

Perhaps the main problem is not technology, but it’s the difficulty in understanding it, and I’ll try to explain it in a better way: today, our society “teaches” us to seek immediacy, we haven’t got time to lose in the effort to understand how something works, we should cope with factual things, with situations, etc. achieving our goals with personal skills (acquired and improved by studying, learning and analyzing all that we need), because, unless we try to do that, we could fail, trapped(like “innocent”, unaware, dull victims) of time passing by and of oblivion, burdening our capacity to link our actions to reason and common sense (with a grain of salt, we should say). Or should we fall into the collapse of thinking and logical tought?
For this reason, every time that the majority of people, both young and old (and, believe me, they’re more than you can imagine), should approach some new technological inventions they’ve got only two choices: they can avoid the “obstacle” prentending not to see it or they can take the instruction manual and try to understand (with a dramatic sensation of hard working) where is the start button that, (that is usually placed just under their fingers moving all around,directionless), but this last solution is the least popular and potentially it’s taken only when they’re forced by circumstances.

Everything is becoming a waste of time, we try to run so fast that a flow freezes our thought, fantasy, or relief, swallowing us and, in this way, making us “neurotic”.
In this way, even the technology that, on a theory level, should help us to lower the intensity of stress becomes our worst enemy but, also, becomes a status symbol, a sort of password or “passpartout” to be given infinite access to the “empire” of a “new eden” where just wealthy persons could afford to own technologies, thus feeling the power of social differences, discriminations, classes discrepancies: how many people, for example, buy a Mac laptop without having any idea about how to use all its potential only because it’s a trendy and “cool” thing?

2009: a railways Odyssey with Trenitalia

First posted: 24 december 2009

I don’t know why but whenever I travel by Trenitalia (the railway major company of Italy) something strange happens to me and, then, I need to write a short article about this “wondefull” company.
I’ve spent Seventy minutes waiting for “Frecciarossa” (the highest speed train here), in december, and this long waiting time in Bologna station (the city where i live at present) couldn’t even be compared with my arrival (by train) at Milan’s.

Obviously, I lost the coincidence (another quick train) to go to Genoa (my final destination). By chance there were two other train types (an intercity and a regional one): I started running, in a rush, (and I’d better inform you that the station itself was so crowded that sometimes I had the impression of a “procession” being the only one way to walk around through the hectic and nervous persons, move and reach the first available train) to take the first of them but it was blocked on the railways with 45 minutes late. The hilarious excuse, invented by the staff, was: “We couldn’t find the engine” … I suppose maybe someone had taken it putting it in his pocket and bringing it at home by mistake: after all, it’s so little that losing it is a normal event.
Before “throwing” myself into a regional train, which stopped in Genoa Principe (only 10 minutes late), I tried to ask the staff how to redeem the amount of money difference I lost (regarsing my original ticket) due to the huge delay forcing me to take another type of train, much cheaper than the previous one (thus wanting to receive a refund as soon as possible, after all the issues and problems I had to face during my travel, a sort of improvised odyssey through the italian disfunctional railways system). I asked it a group of five people about it; who they were chatting in front of the train that i was going to take: they looked at me without answering.
Then I found a guard who, to get rid of me, told me: “It’s better for you to take the regional train because we had to cancel the intercity departure, I don’t know anything about your ticket”.

When I arrived in Genoa Principe, I asked the information staff how to get refunded. Now I shall tell you something: here in Italy ordinary staff (in offices, customers services, public places, etc.) is often unkind, superficial, lazy… This time i met the so called “Kindness of strangers” (in this case, the behaviour of the staff lady), apart from the fact that there was no kindness at all. This time, the staff (“embodied” by that lady) was even worse than other times; she was totally distant, cold and For example, that predictable and boring lady kept repeating me (in a sort of hypnotic lullaby, as if she could use just two/three words to explain such a complicated and difficult situation where customers were totally disappointed by the italian railways system and paid services had been a failure without any apparent reasonable excuse) random sentences, involving the fact that extraordinary events (is winter snowing an extraordinary event in a civilized western country?) had caused all the problems and I couldn’t even hope for a refund.

I had paid and bought the tickets through on-line services and payment options so that “smart and professional” lady told me that for on-line services there are particular options making the refund really complicated to achieve. Well, in this contemporary era of new techs her lacking of professional skills and partial knowledge sounded really incredible and awful to me. She tried to persuade me that on-line services are considered to be an alternative way of payments so I had to apply for a special procedure to get my refund. Well, I tought, hasn’t the railways system and company received my REAL money through online payment? Are online billings and services virtual and holographic? Isn’t real money sent through those types of payments? I was furious and also very tired… so I gave up for the moment.
Later I checked, just to know, if I could do it (the procedure to get the refund) but it was impossible: the company site requires the ticket’s PNR (the code of the on-line tickets) but its program is automatic (it’s a browser page ruled by internal hidden codes of selection about who deserve or not the refund).

The apotheosis came when I had to take a train to come back to Milan (to take a “coincidence” to Venice) and Trenitalia guaranteed that all their trains during the afternoon were on time and regularly scheduled  but, “magically”, they cancelled the train for Milan of the 16.10.
I decided to travel back the day after, in the morning and, obviously, the information staff said to me again to ask for the refund with the on-line procedures, so I did it immediately.

But, surprise! The internet site didn’t accept the refund request about the cancelled train and, of course, it retains 20% out of the other ticket price amount (like the legal contract of the company said but in that case, because of the snow problems, the CEO of Trenitalia communicated (while being interviewed at a prime time news tv broadcasting) that the company was planning to refund all the customers.
So, I decided to write a letter to the complaints: they replied me assuring and confirming that they would refund that all the tickets without the deduction in my credit card but I haven’t got any money til now.

A final advice to all the users who buy tickets on-line through Trenitalia: If you are not sure that you can leave or you already know that there will be problems related to delays and connections you’d better opt for the for the traditional regular ticket (bought by the station offices).

Humanistic VS Science

First posted: 15 december 2009

“Once upon a time”, classical and scientific studies (that is to say, humanistics and experimental/research theories taught in science-oriented colleges and universities) were a single “entity”, interrelated and feeding one another in a mutual need and support, and they completed one another.
Today I was speaking to some university students involved in a scientific “branch” and I’ve, sadly, learned, instead, that they think as scientific and classical studies being two differents “worlds” without connections.

In my opinion, studying the most significant authors (that could be considered as paradigms and models of wisdom and knowledge) of the past and of our present, I think that writers and scientists, who represent humanistic and scientific fields, are more than “workers” in a specific context and with a particular background, both sharing the same creative view and “artistic” frame of mind that sustain their inclinations to develop their skills, intellectual and professional. So art itself is the invisible common source they take inspiration from: without this little spark of imagination or irrationality/rationality it wouldn’t be possible any progress, discovery, research (generally speaking).
Now, instead, people who study the “the objective, material substance of nature” desperately need to separate (“a priori”) themselves from who is interested in classical studies, usually asserting (as a logical kind of excuse and explanation) their “truth” by referring to conventions and rules (or so called “dogmatic principles”, that couldn’t be subverted or criticized) that other thinkers (the philosophers and humanistics experts being their primary target to “defeat”) are unable to understand or to keep in their behaviours, methods, theories.

To offer a summary of the speech (that i heard from those students i met): “Scientists are the only one to be able to seize the deep hidden meaning of nature, earth, universe, human mind etc. owning the “key” to unlock the mysteries of human knowledge, on the contrary, people who prefer classical studies live in their own world created by themselves, that is not considered to be true or important by science addicted and fanatics (not the skilled, expert, professional scientists)”. Others say: “Your studies are «hollow» meaningless, you’re bound to statements that tomorrow could change and, so, everything you’re perceiving as real will crumble”. So, at the end, the “scientist” students (as they define themselves, clinging to a definition – science experts or researchers – that doesn’t suit them, that will never be their hand in glove or cup of tea, being something they won’t ever reach) accuse humanists to be “anarchicals” and to live their life in a bad way because they ask too many questions without an answer, while the other ones accuse them to be dull.

The most absurd thing I heard was that mathematics cannot be considered a sciences, I mean that, in their opinion, the mother of science today isn’t considered like that because it’s too much involved with philosophy.

Because of this type of mentality we’ll disconnect this two branches of knowledge in suck a strong way to cause an hole: we’ll create “workers” (I mean, brainless operators of automated, mechanical acts, such as robots, rings of an endless chain of programmed actions they have to perform, complete) of science that apply rules without creating or seeking new ones and artists without creativity because they’re too fond of their non-existent existential problems in order to become famous without hard work or efforts (because, let’s confess it, the majority of students of classic studies, in Italy, don’t like studying or they use only their memory without comprehension of the text to get good marks from the teachers).

In the italian society, the classic studies are perceived as unnecessary and they tend to diguise themselves as science. We don’t understand, in this way, how many both “branches” of studies, although looking as opposite poles, are necessary to the human being: otherwise why do novels, videogames, movies (and so on) exist? How could we cope with (trying to stand it) the stress of our society if humanistics subjects and studies were considered to be just pointless hobbies or void occupations (for lazy, “timekiller” persons), failing to understand their therapeutical benefit in restoring our inner mental balance and emotional structure?
Is relaxing (by enjoying humanistics and art) forbidden in our society? Should we give up feeding our brains with the powerful combination and alchemy of humanistics and science tasted together?

Dedicated to the humanistics lovers. In memory. R.I.P

Sex, Lies and Videotape... about a school project

First posted: 14 november 2009

Today I want to analyze the themes taken from an Audiovisual lesson. Let me explain: the idea is to create some short movies (documentaries) dedicated to the same theme, selected by the teacher, that is sexuality. In a second time, when documentaries are ready we’ll merge them together into a full lenght movie, sequenced by the streaming of each different short film thanks to the “Script Continuity”, whose goal is finding a leading main thread (I should call this project an highway to hell, considering that I decided to be part of this team and I had to develop the project helped by seven lazy persons that i didn’t know before that).

The topics created regarding the main theme are very heterogeneous such as sadomasochism, webcam virtual sex, self erotic acts, the concept of nudity, the progressive decline of the desire of elder persons (but, why should we necessarily think that at a certain age people become sexless?), the difference in the sexuality conception between Musilism and Catholics (I can’t understand this theme because each of us has got a different concept about his body; it’s not, in my opinion, a question of religious issues about faith and beliefs but it’s a physical thing), the conception of the Christian church, homosexuality, mate swappers, sex from a blind man perspective (because they think it’s interesting to compare it with our vision that it’s often supposed to be delivered and expressed through the scheme and classification of conventional images and theories, and the most degrading thing is that they want to interview him in a sexy-shop).

What did this groups miss?
I think that, to create a sort of entertaining show (where they could be the “creative gods”), they forgot the real beauty of sex, the simplicity that forms it and that my mates think as banal. We have forgotten that this simple act leads to an important consequence, our birth.
We didn’t understand the difference between sexuality and eroticism mixing them together and without knowing that the first is related to an action, an animal instinct, and the second is a purely human pleasure and rationally related to a sensual game.

The strategy of media (showing a very silly and superficial idea of sex and eroticism, in a sort of massive diffusion of a dominant, one sided vision of the subject), instead of making us like voyeurs, addicetd to prying through doors keyholes, and it helped us to forget the beauty of a simple and instinctive act: we are unable to live it in a natural way but we tend to put into homemade and quick schemes that reduce and lower the substance and meaning of the topic, being connected and linked to prestructured prejudices and presumed dogmas and models of knowledge because we have forgotten how to know ourselves and the others, suspended between a selfish “ego” and a complete neglection of others personalities, interests, needs, etc.

We fail to admit that we have just become voyeurs and “sex customers”, empty creatures totally unaware of the true nature of love, eroticism, sex, trapped in the cage made of our fears, formal doctrines and existential dilemmas.

The “status quo” that stifles my imagination

First posted: 11 november 2009

We live in a society of social climbers unable to work seriously on a project. There are only three categories of people, excluding some exceptions and those persons who are fanatically addicted to metaphysics, that is: who thinks to be a leader, who prefers to pretend to cooperate with others but, actually, is searching for an easy way to get his work done by others and and those persons who are dominated by the happening of casual events and incidents, without realizing that the day after they will need to forget the tactics and the strategies in order to survive and get a real life.
I made a wonderful experience with groups in the working activities with some mates: all the persons who wanted to work in our project with full interest about it or, just, because they were serious persons (dedicating every effort to do a good job), are ignored or pushed away by others who were just looking foward to get a good mark, underestimating the importance of team work and accurate ways of working together.
What will it happen if we keep the same behaviour in our future jobs? We have, obvioulsy, built a social structure and system full of stressed people, because they think to be oppressed by the world and because their goal is working the least they can, asking for others to do their job instead of focusing over it themselves.

The “magic” key word, here in Italy, seems to be “to committ” our own duties, efforts, hard works to others, taking advantages on honest and good persons (that are considered to be instruments chained to the will of immoral and lazy persons).
We are used to “cleaning our hands” without getting aware of our own mistakes, thus giving up doing something serious that requires and demands skills, efforts, concentration and management. Sometimes we could notice that most people happen to define some works and activities as impossible to complete, too difficult to achieve, as if those goals and works were just arcane nightmares, dark shadows of an hellish entity coming to defeat our natural defences and to subvert our inner mental balance.

Sometimes i feel that the tickling of time passing is something like an obsessive “paranoia” for some types of persons, that cannot manage to treasure the stream and fluxus of the waves of time, being overthrown by the sensation of anguish and frustration. Instead of seizing the day, they refrain from facing to face the real developing of events, missing the chance to transform their creative energy into some positive and original project.

How can we demand, therefore, to build a society where people work or, at least, live together in a constructive way if this project is tought to be impossible ” a priori”?

The unfaithful deontology of teachers

First posted: 26 october 2009

While I was speaking to a friend has risen one old school problem that, thanks to new technologies, now has more intensified: students prefer to copy during class test (assignments) rather than to learn the lesson.

This girl told me that her youngest sister is starting to believe that his mom is bad because she doesn’t help her with the solutions of the tests posted through cellular phone like the mother, teacher herself, of one of her mates does.

I remember when I was young I was astonished because of my friends’ tricks, while completing tests, and when I told my parents this they replied to be smart and tricky and to learn from my mates how to use these tricks. This view point in our parents persists during the years and it’s increasing with the a sense of protection for their children, so they tend to improvises excuses like: “Well, doing this, my son can get good marks with the minimum stress” or “Poor baby, he has got so many things to do: swimming, volleyball, football, that he hasn’t got time to study, we have to help him in some way”, and so on.

Cellular phones (being forbidden during lessons) removed by teachers in classroom are a distant vision considering the fact that each student has got a minimum of four mobiles to be sure that he can use them with full access and with a good network system.

I remember that during my final test (this examination is called “Maturità” here in Italy, due to the fact that a student is supposed to be mature enough to face this exam in the best way), we couldn’t use mobiles and the traditional word of mouth (a sort of suggestions spread from students to students, in a chain) because teachers arranged our positions in a rational way, some boys thought out to put some little notes with maths’ solutions in the bathroom, hung behind the toilet: some problems started to appear when a young professor, smarter than them, made suspicious by the strange coming and going of the male students from the toilets (a sort of walkaround in crossroads), found the “hidden” place. The president of teachers’ commision warned us that he was going to nullify the tests in case that misbehaviour and malicious acts kept happening, he expressed a good telling-off blaming that unacceptable conduct but then all blew up in smoke bubbles.

Then, later on after getting the final high school degree, we choose the proper college (university) to attend at, and we are sure that teachers are more serious and firmer than the previous ones we had during high school. We think that a strict discipline should be kept and taught in order to defend the right moral conduct of students and preserve the right attitude and behaviour during tests, examinations, etc.

Then, suddenly, we get more and more aware that strict discipline and firm moral conduct are chimeras, mere illusions; in fact, during tests, and even oral examinations, many students manage to find a way to be tricky, to complete their works just by using unacceptable hints, tips, suggestions they are not allowed to follow. For example, during an italian literature and language university test (a written one) a mate of mine put some notes in her dictionary, and each of those notes contained some tips and helps about the test itself. She rewrote and copied entire parts of her class books just to be able to copy them without studying and putting efforts to get ready and well skilled for the exam.

So, we’re wondering if teachers pretend they cannot solve that issue, just because they prefer to keep their privileges, defending their positions and roles, as if correcting the mistakes, blaming the unacceptable conduct, punishing the misbehaviour and malicious acts could ruin their working position or spoil their roles. We can think that they fulfill their profession (that is teaching) in the best way they can: maybe they are just lazy, or they are just childish or indifferent when they pretend not to see and notice students that perform illegal or forbidden acts. But then, i think that each job has got its own professional deontology so teaching moral principles, correcting bad actions, requiring fair play and frank and clean acts is part of a teacher role and profession.

I’ve got some doubts about the principles of some teachers at times.

At this point I wonder if graduated persons, work and apply what they learned, thanks to copying (and, therefore, they don’t know), are really competents and well prepared for the exercise of their duties and, most important, I wonder why we still believe that italian school is one of the best in the world (this is what italian people say, but, if they can, they also send their sons to attend at a foreign university abroad) founding that we are the first who destroys the bases from the foundations.

How much time could it take to discover the usual “naughty boy” (that is proud of breaking the rules and obtaining good marks by “scamming”) in the classroom? Should we suppose that, being “naughty scammers” too many, thus we’d better close our eyes and pretend not to notice them?

The moral “decorum”, the pathological sublimation of sex

First posted: 13 october 2009

At university, i attended at a class with required presence, called: Audiovisual Laboratory.

The teacher asked us to create some documentaries about the topic of sexuality in our society, this means how sex is perceived and processed in the present.

Each student was (only in theory) free to think about some ideas, concepts, subjects, which, then, could be developed with the other students.

My first thought, about this situation, was: “We’ll «slaughter» us one by one” because unfortunately the team spirit, when the exam is based on how you create the work, disappears and leaves its place to the unbearable attempt to “emerge” above all: a bad idea if you want to work in a prolific and friendly group.

However this is another story, now, I’d like to talk about the choice of subject: the sexuality.

I was thinking about this and I found, in my library, a book by Martha C. Nussbaum (“Hiding From Humanity: Disgust, Shame, and the Law”) regarding the criminal incidents of acts against natural sexuality committed breaking the laws. When I read it I imagined a picture about all of us, in this society, hidden behing masks at the same moment that we’re ponting a man (or a woman), blaming them because they don’t conceal themselves while fulfilling and pleasing instinctual and sensual acts, not protected by fictious masks and camouflages. Sexual and erotical intimacy, coming from instinctual needs, are feared by some persons, because they are unable to cope with them in a natural way. A human being, capable of living his/her sexual needs with natural attitude and quiet mental disposition (without being affected by pathological deviances) sometimes “scares” us provoking disgust and sense of repulsion. His weaknesses and (apparent) “vices” are at large, in front of us, unmasked and frank.

We think to be different from animals because of our rationality; some of us are longing to tear away, throw out of themselves and remove all the instinctual pulsions and needs, which belong to our unconscious self, and that’s really part of us, so intrinsic and indelible.

We try to rationalize sex and instincts, to force the irrational side of our nature into something acceptable for the other people.

How many times do you think or hear someone saying: “It’s disgusting and sick”, watching a film where images recall, remind, or hide inside them something of sexual but not in an explicit way? It disgusts us, unconsciously, but we can’t realize what is really close to us:

Is it too hard to disclose our innermost desires, digging into our dephts, making it human or to understand that animal instinct belongs to our being?