Stay Past

The cliff seemed to be bottomless,
the sea like a black vortex below us.
A calling to a portal
that promised we really could go far.
When words create our futures,
the world often just wants us to stay past.

We want to slow it down
and will it to be silent,
but strangely we end up shouting
and going fast.

That's when we just chose love 
and all the things so possible down this black cliff.
That's when we held our hands and jumped together.
A fifty dollars note was blown towards the stairs.

Those moments of declaration
are when we start becoming something else,
perhaps just genial invention,
a Saturday sunflower down at the market,
a minute of pause whilst waiting at the station.

(Piero Bassu, November 2012)

Sunsets and Dawns

A quick trip to Europe. November 2012.

I left Sydney during an early summer evening, at dusk, the sky alight with bright reds and deep blues, the sea manacing and rough  under the last sun rays. How can Australia be so immense and restless at the same time is still somewhat of a mystery to me.

A day later I am landing into Rome on a light blue winter dawn, the Mediterrenean quiet and silent underneath me, the green and white of the Appennines on one side, fluffy patches of fog covering parts of the valleys below like blanket. It is the 9th of November. Barack Obama has been elected again as the USA president a couple of days ago.

Italy looks like such a beautiful place from up here, it is almost impossible to imagine what a troubled country it is, how its former glory is nothing but a story far away in the distance. On the contrary, it feels like Australia's story is being written now, its twists and turns so unpredictable, its sense of possibility alive.

Never like this time the small magic spell that is coming back home has hit me, a strange feeling of travelling through space, time, seasons and lives.

Off the Escalator

When my colleague Lucy kept insisting I'd do the Landmark Forum, after a quick Google search and the word cult popping up on my screen I decided it would be a marvellous idea to check this out for myself.

Lucy kept telling me she was 'committed' I'd do it - which back then sounded like a strange turn of phrases. I told myself that I signed up for it more to get her off my case than anything else.

'It will be good' I said 'to take a couple of days off and reassess', whatever that meant. I was quite clear that my career needed reassessing, but I did not really know what that entailed.

I kept telling my dear ones that at work I felt like I was 'stuck on an escalator' - I was going up but I felt like I was not the one in control. I had this feeling that I was meant to do something else. I felt like something that was not doing what that something was meant to do.

'I will come out of this with a couple of good pointers' I thought. I was ready to go in, learn a couple of things and then use them in my life to do what I did, just better.

The Landmark Forum gave me something completely different. I did not 'learn' anything as such, but I saw things that until now had been outside my view. Once they came in view, they did not need to be learnt - they were just there. A bit like riding a bike - until you know how to do it you cannot even phantom how it all works, but once you learn, that's it - you can just do it always.

Things came into my view that made me realise that it is not just the things that are burdening us that limit us and our happiness. Even the things that we are amazing at have already defined what we will be for the rest of our life - like a golden cage that we are not aware to be trapped in. Here was my 'escalator'.

And not only did I see this, but I could also understand how I have ended up in that golden cage and why - just by trying to do more and better - really did not do anything in the way of freeing me.

All this came to view and suddenly I was not the guy in the cage. I was an observer of that guy. I was looking at him. And as an observer I could go to that cage and just open it. Unsurprisingly it was not locked - I had never realised the door was open either.

I am not going to try to summarise what and how this path works, because I could not do it justice. In practice it is an intense three days sitting in a room with people you have never met and with organisers that are ever so keen about punctuality and that seem to be very committed for you to 'get it'. You don't take notes, there is no mention of any religious or otherwise belief system, you do not learn anything (like you did at school), you don't have to say a word if you wish so. You just sit there and allow yourself to be led down a path.

What I will say is that it was through this path that I realised that the key to 'reinvent' ourselves is not trying to do more, less or different from what we have always done - to try to resolve all the things that make us upset. This is quite simply because that upset exists still now everytime we try to get rid of it through these 'better, less, more or different'. That upset is the comparison term that we keep bringing up over and over again.

And the way to reivent ourselves is not either allowing the strengths that we have got to predifine what we are and what we are going to be. 

Reinvention comes from a place where all these things are just that- things. These things are there and we can look at them without having 'to be' them. And if we are not them then we can be something else - something different, something we could never have imagined we could be.

Summer beginnings

Almost gently the Sydney summer is taking over the blue skied Spring we have just had. It is 2012 and a man has just beaten the sound barrier whilst sky diving.
The city seems abuzz with people out and about, exercising for summer, sipping coffees in the numerous city cafes' and generally enjoying that feeling of energetic transition towards the most active time of the year. The queues at gelateria Messina are getting longer and longer. Rooftop bars are being chosen over pubs.

Whilst temperatures are still seldom going above 25 degrees, the sun seems more vigorous and determined every day. The Australian sun beats down like it means it. Bondi and all the other beaches are getting busier and posier. The grass is greener and men walk around without wearing suit jackets.
Walking to work in this beautiful atmosphere is amazing, though staying in the office gets harder! Even the CBD seems brighter and less soulless.

I am very much looking forward to this summer. If what they say is true - ie. that la ninha has finally retired for the time being - we should have a scorcher of a time. Like last year we are preparing to receive a number of guests, and now that we have been around for almost two years, we are in place to show them Sydney more confidently. The first on the list are John & Sharon.

Mad Hatters

Last night, as part of Rachel's birthday celebrations, we went to this themed Mad Hatters thing in Waterloo, Sydney. It was held in a warehouse space converted into a pop up restaurant.

The room was cool and eclectically decorated with old TVs, chandeliers, candles, tea cups of all sorts and bits and bobs. This was a pre booked event, so you just turned up and end up sharing two long tables with strangers. Out party consisted of six people. The organiser (the Mad Hatter) worked the room, offering friendly banter, prosecco and wacky canapes, including beetroot candyfloss and parmisan popcorn.

The three course meal (with matching wines) was as wacky, the slowly cooked beef cheek standing out as the best bit.  We spent the evening drinking wine and talking no sense.

All in all it was a lot of fun. It is great to see that Sydney can offer these type of things and events. It made me think of London, of a night in 2010 spent in pop-up restaurant that reproduced a small town street. It also made me think of my last Mad Hatters party, for Laura's hen night in London. Back then I wore bunny ears, this time I was a pilot.

White pages

When I was ten I decided I wanted to be a writer.

There is no particular reason why that happened - I remember looking at the white pages of a note book and thinking that I really felt like filling those pages. It was a mixture of excitement and sadness - because I remember thinking that those white pages were waiting to fulfill their destiny. Though I suspected my output might not be the best those pages could do, I still felt that doing nothing was wrong.

The first thing I wrote was a fantasy story. The baddie was called Singer- after my mother's sawing machine. It is the usual hero tale (the hero was called Erik, with a K) with a twist: at the end you realised that the quest Erik has completed to allegedly kill Singer was actually designed to free Singer from his prison - genius. At the end Erik realises that all the people he has eliminated on his way had been good guys trying to stop him from doing the wrong thing.

I wrote my first poem when I was 13. It was an atrocious mess called 'Life' (La vita). For some reason I shared it with my Religion teacher at school - a priest whose name escapes me now. Don Something.
He never commented on it.

Other gems include the short book written by my late good friend Misael and I. It was called 'Perhaps' (Forse) and it was the story of a group of friends that grow up together and then meet again as adults. It is meant to be a delightful weekend in a cottage in the middle of the Italian mountains. Unfortunately one of them is totally nuts and tries to kill them all off. It was actually a good story, and I quite liked the way it highlighted the fact that sometimes when you share something really intense with someone the price to pay for that sense of belonging and closeness can be quite ugly.

It is only when I started studying modern Italian literature at school (Ungaretti, Montale, etc) that I felt compelled to take my writing hobby more seriously. It occurred to me that poetry could do something very special: it could take pictures with words. Like good pictures it required some sort of structure, tone, harmony. The Italian language offers a number of poetical structures, which all fall under the discipline of rhetoric. I immediately liked the way you could use number of syllables, rhymes and other stuff to create that tone and musicality to accompany the 'picture'.   Rhetoric can then be seen as a medium rather than an old fashioned tradition. It is the instrument that created the music to accompany the picture.

And like good picture the best bits are the ones that are not immediately evident when you look at them. They just 'become' in the eye of the observer, telling them all those things that exist behind the surface.
It is the same of looking at a painting and feeling a certain way even though you don't know why.
I like writing poems where all the verses are visual snaps that tell stories that words cannot tell. Somebody who wrote a review on a poem of mine once said something nice, she said that my verses defy the boundaries of  tradition. I had not quite realised until I read that review that that was I had been trying to do without knowing.

Some great teachers have helped me along the way, like Gabriella. Beside being a great teacher she is also a successful writer. She always believed I could do well, and pushed me by introducing me to some great writers, taking me to Rome on a TV show and other ways. She was very disappointed when she found out I was to become a mathematician.

My greatest inspirations include Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, The Great Gatsby and Eugenio Montale's Ossi di Seppia. All of them share an anachronistic view of the world which I have found compelling. The opening line of Mrs. Dalloway to to date to me is one of the greatest strokes of genius.

Over the years I have written a few things. My prose has ranged from amateurish to ok to crap (of note my first English novel- The Categorical Imperative- none of my friends managed to read more than a few pages and to be honest I cannot really blame them).

However, my poetry has done well. I started writing poetry regularly in May 1997. I know it because my first 'new gen' poem was called 'May'. Since then, for a few years, I wrote a lot. It was my way to say things I did not want to talk about.
My mother - or shall I say my agent- kept finding stuff I had written and entering poetry contests for me.

The poem that got me most recognition was Amico Re (King Friend), The title comes from a note my school mate wrote on my year book in 1999. The poem is about the end of boarding school, and the final acts of all the dramas that took place on the Rilke path. I won quite a few first prizes in national contests with that poem - the funny thing being that none of the judges, and perhaps myself included - really know what those verses really mean.

Traffic Lights

If they asked me what I do not enjoy about living in Sydney, I kid you not one of the first things that would come to mind is 'crossing the road'. I am not sure how this all came to be, but it feels to me that traffic lights in Sydney have been designed to play with your mind and turn pedestrians into lunatic freaks. I have slowly become one of them. And here is why.

Firstly, it takes about the time that it took for the Ice Age to melt away for the sign to turn green in some roads. Crossing places like William Street, Oxford Street, or some specific parts of George Street in the CBD might well mean that your commute is increased by 10 minutes. The people that trail these paths often learn this very quickly, so it is not unusual to see people running like crazy in their suits or heels not to miss the chance to cross some of these roads. This is not an exaggeration:  at 8am Sydney is a city of people running to cross the road before the light goes red! If they don't is because either they are tourist or the road they are trying to cross is an 'easy one'.

If you add to this one of the most significant legacies of the massive Italian immigration waves to Australia in the 50s-70s i.e. bad driving and speeding at people crossing the road, you can see how  things can go mental. This lethal cocktail means that near misses are part of the daily commuting experience.

Secondly, the light does not turn green unless someone pushes the button. It is an unspoken contract that the pedestrian closest to the light should take care of this ever so important task. Failure to do so might result in another geological wait at the crossing. Most of the times people know this and they do press that damn thing - a few times for good measure. But if they don't, oh boy, you see rage washing over people's faces. Even the yummy mummy might go insane. When this happens, people make their way to the light and start pushing like there is not tomorrow, as loud as they can, possibly making eye contact with the impostor. Sometimes I fear they might push the lazy fellow commute under the bus to teach them a lesson (not that I ever felt that way...).

I could write a book on the typologies of people that do not push. Luckily studies have shown that only 1 in 250 people belong to this category. It is a serious sociological phenomenon. But let me say one thing: you know who you are non pushers! So do we. There is so much forgiving one can manage on Monday morning under the rain, especially is one is crap at umbrella management (i.e. that skill of buying, keeping, not losing and remembering to take an umbrella when it is raining outside).

Thirdly, in numerous cases there is a massive lag between the pedestrian light going red and the corresponding traffic light going green. I am not talking two seconds. I am talking thirty. The worst offender in my experience is the crossing William/Palmer. As soon as the pedestrian light goes green it starts flashing red. If you do not know any better you would not believe that you still have three minutes to cross. And if you do not know this, you have about 5 minutes to wait before you can cross again. Come on guys, get your alignment right!! Most Sydneysiders have learnt that crossing the road is an art where you need to take into account both pedestrian and traffic lights, and then  make a judgement call on whether any Italian descendant will try to run you over in between.

Finally, there are the anomalies. These are the pedestrian lights that do not follow any rule. My favourite is Pitt and King in the CBD, where the light goes red, green then within a second red and then green again. I have given up understanding why - and I am not complaining: that is an easy road to cross.