The Jolly Roger

She was the cannibal of the seas ... she floated immune in the horror of her name.
She was wrapped in the blanchet of night, through which no sound from her coul have reached the shore.

Dedicato a Teresa, accompagnata oggi pomeriggio all‘ultima dimora.

(from Wilde)
A week later, I’m transferred here. Three more months go over and my mother dies. No one knew how deeply I loved and honoured her. Her death was terrible to me; but I once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and my shame. She and my father had bequeathed a name they had made noble and honoured, not merely in literature, art, archaeology and science, but in the public history of my own country, in its evolution as a nation. I had disgraced that name eternally. I had made it a low byword among low people. I had dragged it through the very mire. I had given it to brutes that they might make it brutal, and to fools that they might turn it into a synonym for folly. What I suffered then, and still suffer, is non for pen to write or paper to record. My wife, always kind and gentle to me, rather than I should hear the news from indifferent lips, travelled, ill as she was, all the way from Genoa to England to break to me herself the tidings of so irreparable, so irremediable , a loss. Messages of sympathy reached me from all who had still affection for me. Even people who had not known me personally, hearing that a new sorrow had broken into my life, wrote to ask that some expression of their condolence should be conveyed to me …

From my best writer

... Suffering is one very long moment. We cannot divide it by seasons. We can only record its moods and chronicle their return. With us time itself does not progress. It revolves. It seems to circle round one centre of pain. The paralysing immobility of a life every circumstance of which is regulated after an unchangeable pattern, so that we eat and drink and lie down and pray, or kneel at least for prayer, according to the inflexible law of an iron formula: this immobile quality, that makes each dreadful day in the very minutest detail like its brother, seems to communicate itself to those external forces the very essence of whose existence is ceaseless change. Of seed-time or harvest, of the reapers bending over the corn or the grape gatherers threading through the vines, of the grass of the orchard made white with broken blossoms or strewn with fallen fruit: of these we know nothing and can know nothing.
For us there is only one season, the season of sorrow. The very sun and moon seem taken from us. Outside, the day may be blue and gold, but the light that creeps down throug the thickly muffled glass of the small ironbarred window beneath which one sits is grey and niggard. It is always twilight in one's cell, as it is always twilight in one's heart. And in the sphere of thought, no less than in the sphere of time, motion is no more. The thing that you personally have long ago forgotten, or can easily forget, is happening to me now, and will happen to me again tomorrow. Remember this, and you will be able to understand a little of why I'm writing, and in this manner writing...
(to be continued)
From "DE PROFUNDIS", by Oscar Wilde

L'arzillo fabbro

Il fabbro di Udine
Un anziano fabbro di Udine
con olio tiene lustra la sua incudine,
la mostra a scolaresche in moltitudine,
quell'arzillo fabbro di Udine.

benvenuti

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