CHAPTER 1

Wide awake in the dead of night, I call an avatar who does notanswer. Genet was right: we converse with the dead. We writefor the dead in the theatre of memory, the soul's irrelevantdomain. For the dead I lie awake at night, for a handful ofsardonic shadows on the shores of the River Styx. For a mirage,for a dream I dream up this wounded speech in the dark.

Awake at night, I stare at the ceiling and dig up a primalverse: The triumphant athlete defeated his opponents at Olympiaand was then floored by the gaze of a young woman – read longago to my father who was alive then, and who, alive, smiledthe smile of the accomplice.

I remember the dream I just had: walking up and upthrough Trastevere in a heart-drenching drizzle, then gettinglost in Piazzale Garibaldi, insolent with the vanity of victoryand with a lover's despairing graffiti on the wall. I was goingover in my head what I'd say to you, Life is but a shudder ofeyelids do you agree? You'd understand. Summer would comeback on earth.

Is this what insomnia is, not leaning on anything?Insomnia as the cure from metaphysical slumber, from theplacebo of theories and the credulity of action, from thevanity of happiness and the alleged superiority of ataraxia.Before it became a drawback, philosophy was this for meonce: refusal to rely on anodynes, not wanting to sleep on it.

Awake at night, loitering with intent in the land of theshadows, I seriously consider if I should rent a semi-detachedin hell: is this what insomnia is?

* * *

My partner is asleep beside me. From love we learn duplicity.After all, loyalty belongs to patriots, to those who trade theblessed earth for a nasty soil, and brandish in a rowdy wind-fadedbanners made with the discarded shirts of some richbastard. They love their soil, patriots: hear them splutteringtheir drunken tunes to Gaia, foolish goddess, benignTheilardian and Lovelockian organism magically rising oneday (so they say) from her stony slumber, opening herself upat last to Spirit after centuries of ethnic cleansings, wars, gangrapes and shallow graves offered to the volcanic sun of thefuture.

Gaia? No thanks. Mother Earth love? Fuck off. The earth isvertigo, wide expanse scattered with exiles, fateful locuswhere you can't build a dwelling, let alone call anything mine– the blue planet whose strange sweetness tricks the blood andevery summer makes us sick with yearning.

I turn the pillow. Sleep has vanished. At dawn I will hurlmy body into a ravine.

* * *

It's All Saints' night, before the dawn of the Day of the Dead.Darkness came down on our privileged hemisphere, ourvision darkened by pain, by a heartache that dissolves thehuman face into a virtual avatar. I am thirsty, thirsty forsummer springs. In the thick suburban silence where slumberweaves the dense chimeras of progress and history for the solebenefit of sleepers, I drag my feet, looking for a glass of water.

I remember it now: I had set myself the task of telling whatI had learned, of clarifying sotto voce at the edge of a bed thecompendium of my traveling years, an abstract of fictionalphilosophy woven between theory and biography. Maybethat's what I'll do. The night is long. I'll do it in our VulgarLatin, I'll do it in this rented tongue, stepmother tongue,forgotten tongue. I'll do it in this Madonna/whore tongue,plum juice dripping from dark skin, a fruit worshipped tosilent ecstasy. I'll give it a try, just to kill time: it will be thedistillation of the error that was this wayward life; a bundle offragments between despair and the vain hope of the worldbecoming a musical room, as envisioned by that young roguefrom Charleville.

A great part of my sleepwalking compendium will be meretheory, I'm afraid. Yet theory is for me play, not foundation:maybe a dance, interrupted by your handwritten words, theonly ones in this electronic liaison: I'd like to be alone with you,shrouded in silence here and now ... as slipping slowly underwater ...the sound of your voice is supreme. I was touched, andforgave the cheap mysticism in that 'here and now' and inthat exaggerated 'supreme' I fastidiously perceived theruinous fall that always follows the hyperboles of love. Ianswered as a scheming schoolboy: your bite on my lower lip,the brush of a flower.

I'm thirsty. My chest aches. I'm thirsty for summer springs.I remember it well now: it's a daring feat for a client of mineto simply get out of the house and drag himself to the park inthe pale sun and remain there seated on a bench to observethe to and fro of the cheerful shipwrecked in the quiet desperationof a London afternoon.

Never before had I been met at the airport by someoneholding a sign with my name on it. Didn't notice at first. Wenthere and there, shocked by the heat. Then with our greetingwe reassembled an androgynous creature. My friend Stephentold me months later that on his arrival in Korea he too hadbeen met by a woman whom he later married and with whomhe lives after thirty years.

* * *

Last Wednesday in a crowded tube at six in the afternoon inthe belly of my city I already seemed not to feel anymore thepain that made its home in my chest (how could we, darling, andwhy?). I am grateful to work, I am thankful to Ananke goddessof necessity whom Freud believed antithetical to Eros and thepleasure principle. I perceive in my love of work the scent ofsalvation, a hope born out of the union of love and necessity,Eros and Ananke, pleasure and reality. Or you can make artout of life, summoning private, transient deities to yourrescue: young Mahler, whose piece in D minor for stringquartet mercifully filters in my memory; Oscar Wilde, becauselike him we all are brokenhearted clowns.

Transferred from one prison to another on 13th November1895, and kept there waiting at the central platform atClapham Junction (where I find myself every Wednesday onmy way to work), Wilde was handcuffed and in tatters, poorOscar, brought there suddenly from the infirmary andwithout warning. When people saw him, they just laughed,and when they recognized him, they laughed louder. Fromtwo to half past two he was held there waiting for a train nextto two policemen.

* * *

Wide awake in the dead of night I prostrate one hundred andeight times towards the East, to Quan-Yin who aids seatravellers in the storm, appears as a maiden to those thirsty forlove and also as sister death to terminal patients inovercrowded hospital corridors. I prostrate to the South to mydead parents who conceived me on a night in June (fatal,hermaphrodite month, month of Hermes and Aphrodite).

I prostrate to friends and foes of my hometown, to pastloves of whom I ask forgiveness for having thought that thislast craze was a first love. I prostrate to you, dream creaturewhose teachings now obscured by pain, I will no doubtdecode one day. It doesn't matter if it'll be too late, if a crueltwist will have had the upper hand, as in a badly writtennovel. You see, monsieur Genet, just like you I converse withthe dead, I call them to behold this fragile life exposed to thevagaries of fate, since there never ever was on the blue planeta more diaphanous existence than the life of philosophers ...

* * *

At times I find solace in the melancholy of absence. The heartdecelerates after the fury and the heat.

And how strange that everyone, from self-righteousblasphemers to court poets, all grow silent when they...