The wall collapsed in Berlin

 

https://www.amazon.it/dp/B07H44DYF7

 

Come on! Laissez faire, laissez passer! 

Today is not time

To arrest people anymore!

Don’t you know is November the 9th 1989?

Today there is not time

To stop goods anymore!

Come on!

Only one thousand dollars

Will cost you

A plenty full track!

At 9 past 21 p.m.

The wall is falling down!

Laissez faire, laissez passer!

There are bound to be changes

For our lives further on!

It’s crashing down

Together with our illusions

Their false promises

The wrong secular hope!

Come on!

The wall is not hiding anymore

The totems of progress!

Let’s go worshipping

The glittering gods

Bounding ahead

Memorie di scuola - Volume Secondo

Io credo che ogni generazione subisca le influenze del suo tempo e dell’ambiente in cui cresce e matura le sue esperienze. Queste influenze, a metà con i caratteri biologici iscritti nel nostro DNA, determinano gli eventi della nostra vita; o ciò che noi chiamiamo destino.

Io  appartengo a una generazione che ha vissuto su un piano strettamente spirituale, filosofico e culturale, la grande stagione della rivoluzione del 1968,  mentre sul piano materiale ha subito, sempre negli anni sessanta, l’influenza del boom economico.

Ma al contrario di ciò che è successo in altri paesi europei e negli Stati Uniti, in Italia il ’68 non è durato soltanto  una stagione. 

In Francia, ad esempio, il  movimento ‘ 68 si spense, ironia della sorte, l'anno seguente, in coincidenza con la caduta politica di De Gaulle; in Gran Bretagna le classi politiche dirigenti, con i Lords in testa, memori di quanto successo ai nobili  nel 1798 e nel 1848, preferirono cedere alcuni privilegi e fare delle concessioni, al fine di perpetuare le loro rendite parassitarie; e così accadde anche in altri paesi europei di più antico lignaggio. 

L’ Italia, che aveva compiuto da poco i suoi 100 anni di unità politica, reagì diversamente e le cose presero un’altra piega. Non saprei dire il perché e questa, in fondo, non è neppure la sede adatta per fare un’analisi di quei motivi.

Posso e debbo dire però che il movimento rivoluzionario italiano del '68 si trascinò per almeno un altro decennio.

In questo lasso di tempo non tutti quelli che avevano conosciuto il ’68 proseguirono a fare i rivoluzionari. Anzi, una buona parte dei giovani rampanti ribelli, finita la frenesia che elettrizzava l’aria in quel magico anno, finirono per cedere alle sirene del boom economico e del consumismo che ne era derivato.

Gli altri, quelli che la ribellione ce l’avevano nel sangue, proseguirono ancora per qualche anno, senza mollare di un solo centimetro nei confronti del potere formalista e borghese al quale avevano dichiarato guerra . Ma una parte di loro si accorse presto che si trattava di una battaglia persa in partenza e, a un certo punto, abbandonarono il campo cercando di dimenticare la delusione della cocente sconfitta,  chi alla ricerca di una carriera alternativa, chi nei tortuosi sentieri della droga, chi fuggendo lontano.

Soltanto gli irriducibili restarono sul campo e imbracciando le armi vere combatterono  la loro rivoluzione fatta di illusioni e di teorie astratte, elaborate da filosofi sognatori,  frutto di pensieri malati, fondate sul nulla. Tanto ciò è vero che il loro assunto di base, la dittatura del proletariato, mancò proprio di quello che doveva essere l’autore principale e l’interprete della vittoriosa e gloriosa rivoluzione: il proletariato.

In  nome di queste teorie astruse, questi intellettuali malati di megalomania e di protagonismo storico (compagni che sbagliano, li chiamò troppo benevolmente qualcuno),  disseminarono il terrore per tutta l’Italia, proclamando in deliranti comunicati l’avvento di improbabili vittorie e chiamando alla rivolta un popolo inesistente e comunque indisponibile a seguirli in quella strada insanguinata di autentica violenza intrisa di vani sogni e deliquio.

E finirono per divenire gli zimbelli di quei capitalisti e imperialisti tanto odiati, come avvenne nella triste vicenda di Aldo Moro, ucciso dalle Brigate Rosse che conclusero la loro ingloriosa carriera dando  compimento a un disegno criminale,  che proprio i servizi segreti deviati italoamericani,  avevano ordito in odio al presidente della Democrazia Cristiana, reo soltanto di essere un politico intelligente e coraggioso, che aveva compreso che l’Italia poteva salvarsi spezzando l’accerchiamento in cui i  sovietici e gli americani avevano intrappolato la sua amata patria.

Ma per rendere onore all’altra America, quella dei poeti della beat generation e dei figli dei fiori, vorrei  evidenziare come le   radici della grande rivoluzione del 1968 affondino anche in quel grande paese e in quegli intellettuali,  poeti e sognatori che, anziché perseguire la violenza, propugnarono una rivoluzione pacifica che alla violenza del potere di Washington oppose il profumo e la bellezza dei fiori di San Francisco.

Siamo debitori di  quei  pensatori americani che con le loro immaginifiche visioni hanno inneggiato a un mondo di pace e fratellanza, a una società che ripudiasse la guerra, a un consorzio umano universale che congiungesse la saggezza  millenaria  dell’oriente con l’organizzazione tecnologica dell’occidente, in un progetto di condivisione delle risorse umane e delle ricchezze della terra che ripudiasse ogni egoismo, ogni prevaricazione nazionalitaria e populista, oggi, purtroppo tornate di moda. 

E in questo mio inno di grazie non posso e non voglio tralasciare neanche gli intellettuali europei come Jean Paul Sartre, Herbert Marcuse, Bertrand Russell, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley e tanti altri che qui mi scuso di dimenticare.

continua...

Leggi il  testo integrale del primo volume di "Memorie di scuola" di Ignazio Salvatore Basile,  acquistando on line(c/o Mondadori store, Feltrinelli, IBS, Libreria Universitaria, Amazon ecc.) oppure in libreria il volume edito da Youcanprint ISBN 9788827845486. Il romanzo è disponibile anche in formato e-book nel sito della casa tramite il link sottostante.

https://www.youcanprint.it/biografia-e-autobiografia-generale/memorie-di-scuola-9788827845486.html

London for ever - 34

 I try to totally concentrate on the discussion.

I say that I no longer I’m expecting  anything good from Italian politicians, after just over a century of mismanagement, since  political unity, which has not followed any social unity. Touching obviously dear themes to Giampiero.

“Italy is a bad mosaic of peoples with too many problems to be treated with the same medicine” – he replies to me – “ Only  the worker’s movement can succeed uniting  these different people, giving them a strong  identity to  join together like the fingers of a hand!! "- he concludes closing his right hand in a tight fist.

I tell him that I do not  longer believe in the workers' movement;  neither I  longer believe in the model of state organization inherited by the French Revolution, with tired rites of indirect representative democracy ...

- "You're wrong to take the French Revolution as a point of reference. The real, unique revolution from which the talk is, is the revolution ......... "

-" Revolution? On Saturday night all the serious speeches are banned, "- Michelle says cheerfully -" “Look at what Marcus gave me! "- she says  showing  us a black ball she holds between her  index and the thumb. "" Do you want to roll it? "She turns to me.

- "No, I think I’ll do it" - offers Giampiero promptly. - By the way, who was that guy? "He continues with indifferent air, while already manages  with some cigarette’s  papers  beneath the table in order to arm a joint for the Michelle’s smoke.

- "He's a good customer of mines," replies Michelle, with a strange  air. "He comes from Rotterdam, but he is living from  many years here in London. I met him at Camden Lock where he handles an "stall" of second hand clothing with some of his English members. He’s a bit crazy or at least an original one: he's always stoned as hell, morning to night, because, he says, he believes in smoking, as a flag of peace and brotherhood among young people! "

- "Bullshit," said Giampiero in a caustic tone, "I've met smokers who were total assholes, and I'm not even okay with all the big business that's made of smoke ..."

- "Well, as long as it remains illegal, trade is lucrative; Especially for big dealers who do not even pay taxes on it; It would be enough to legalize it. It almost seems that politicians are afraid of the spread of smoke ...... "- I say to dampen the tone of the discussion between the two.

- "But they do not seem to have the same approach to heroine," Giampiero says, remembering perhaps the lost friends on that street. - " Do you know Michelle what Pino writes from Italy? When the social tension grows, in Italy smoke disappears from the streets and only heroin is found, do you know? But nobody seems to get  to point out that with the heroine they just want to destroy us? Do you light it up? "He asks me in a more relaxed tone, asking me to light the  joint up.

- "It's up to Michelle, really," I say, passing by, after burning its  tip with the lighter.

Martine in the meantime asks Michelle if she understands the topic of the discussion and, after explaining it, says that many rock motion representatives have been mysteriously torn from heroin and thrown down the names of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison.

she also adds that she is concerned about the apparently very close relationship between rock movement, music, artists, fans and drugs, all the drugs, from the lightest to the heaviest and most dangerous ones.

Meanwhile the "joint" goes turning around. The dense buzz in the room is interrupted by laughs and laughter, while a thick smoke hood comes from the floor below to the ceiling, becoming more and more condensed.

While the concert had resumed its rhythm, with some skillful voice variation of the solo voice, I  suddenly realized that my throat is dry and my mouth mingled to the point that almost I cannot speak, while at the same time I notice that our beers were still intact on the table in front of us.

I drink directly from the bottle a long haul of Carlsberg Special Brew. I feel that cool liquid in my mouth, coming down my throat, I mentally follow its way  to the stomach and from there spreading with heat; I think of small rivers when they enter the streams and lakes; from  the great rivers that are slow but inesorable in the seas and seas all connected to the oceans, as a single large stream of energy, wrapped in impenetrable cosmic synergies;  even the conductors of our blood, from the smallest vessels to the largest arteries, converge into a single center; and if our bodies have been pulsating in the air for millennia, interacting through immaterial life-force contacts, sometimes conflicting and opposed but always guided in one direction; if our brain contains our present together with the past, and who knows, perhaps even in the future, then where is the center of the universe? The pulsating heart of humanity? The center of Everything Buddha was looking for in the tortuous paths of the mind?

Was this what my brothers were looking for, fleeing the materialties of the West, on the uncertain paths of the East? But why look for it with the deception of acids, with the illusion of opium? Why with the heroine? And if the East, for millennia has absorbed the devastating blow of opium, the most inexperienced and weak civilization of the West, will survive the shots of its most hallucinating and deadly essences?

Take me away, friends, but guide me, do not miss me, love me, as a father loves his prodding son, because I want a dream of sweet awakening, a hope that leads to truth, a journey that has its return to the origin of life .

34...to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 10

Other street vendors were the papers sellers.  They also came almost exclusively from East London but it was very rare to find young people among them. They worked outdoors all year long, occupying the corners at the exit of the most important metropolitan stations, using some of the simple metallic box inside which the newspapers were and, sometimes,  a table with metal chair, and from there emitted some incomprehensible sounds that merged with the drafters  coming from the bowels of the earth, through the infinite meanders of the subway; and in those sounds one could no longer recognize the names of the heads of the daily newspapers Evening Standard and the Evening News, which they pronounced in a short,  deformed by habit, similar to the rattle of a wounded beast, to attract the  attention of the distracted and hurried passengers in transit to the entrances of underground tunnels. The Evening News was actually just an imitation of the most famous Evening Standard. The latter was published in multiple editions from seven a.m. until late at night, with a frequency between  two and three hours. From one issue to the other, only the first page was changed in order to attract the readers to brilliant news. It was distributed to such vendors with a truly fantastic delivery network.

The delivers came in black-yellow van, and from there, with the engine still on, without descending from the van,  they flown the  newspapers packages.

The Evening Standard did not have a precise political physiognomy (at least not in the sense that we Italians give it to this expression) and perhaps it alternated its ideology tuning  with the political parties ruling  the largest London administrative body: "The Great London Council ".

All those vendors gave me a strange impression: that they had always done  that job. Not only for the wheeze voice that characterized them, but also for their very dirty clothing. The skin of their face looked   dark, almost dirty, because of the exposure to the unhealthy air.

 It also seemed to me that they felt  always cold, even in the summer, as if in their bones it was penetrated the humidity and the chilling breath of the freezing drafts coming from the Tube.

 They wore gloved handcuffs in order to easily grab money and newspapers and warmed up with a tea-milk cup they bought take away from the nearest snack bar.

Despite  of their appearance, which in the days of intense fog blended with the surrounding landscape, becoming a characteristic element, like the red royal columns of the Royal Mail, the telephone booths and the black cabs, the sensations they conveyed were, however positive.

 I do not say they were cheerful, but may be jovial. A serene and resigned joviality, as if the diffusion of the events, from London and the whole world, contained in their newspapers, made them impermeable to emotions, placing them above the human events, as if they were impartial messengers  from the underground’s gods.

When passing by, where I was working, they never lacked to nod at me with  sympathy, at the same time giving making a sound which wanted to be  an "are you all right " but one could only hear a  hiss, like the wind that had entered into their bodies, consisting of three, perhaps only two syllables, veiled, almost died  in the throat.

10. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 9

9.

One of them, who used to work in the ice cream sell, was Bob, who had made me an instructor, a few years earlier, in the short period of previous work placement: in particular cleaning and maintenance of the machine, and preparing ice creams and ice drinks.

He wasn’t  very tall (you would say surely more than five feet but less then six, with light hair, combed with a line-centered brush;  his eyes were green colored and very  moving on the features of the face, made a bit irregular by two slightly pronounced upper incisors.

 At the left lobe, with a lot of naturalness, he carried a small round gold earring, fashion, which on our country  was still beyond to come. His clothing was both simple and well-groomed. Particular attention, however, he showed on  the shoes and the t-shirts, on which, usually stood out of immeasurable, numerous gold chains, different in appearance and size, as our women do when they wore  the  ancient folk costumes.

Bob was definitely nice. Very uneasy, he was always around in the nearby shops, he was a jumper, or a grocer's colleague. In his "pitch", which was usually the most profitable, he had during the high season one or more aides on whom he uploaded, in a casual and good manner, most of the workload. When it happened to be in distribution, at peak times, sometimes he was bizarre.

Once, for instance, there was an  orderly and long queue of customers waiting to be served at  the ice cream machine,  up to the outside edge of the sidewalk.

Suddenly Bob said  he had to go and make a  phone call. And so saying, he showed customers a ten-penny coin, holding it high between the thumb and index finger of the left hand and hissing, with the upper lip slightly curled on the teeth, in a string of  glottis shots : "I'll be back in a minute!”.

After he had  disappeared into the store I tried to do my best on serving the customers. When he was back, seeing so many people still queuing,  he asked me kindly,

to set aside, tracing  a semicircle with his left forearm and grabbed a dozen cones, he was able to fill them all by turning his hand skillfully under the ice cream faucet, simultaneously driving the lever with his right hand, and while I was struggling to get ice cream in both my hands, to distribute them, the customers, cheered him up with admiration.  And it seemed that these customers had the magnitude, because there were more and more behind them, and Bob's show was repeated until the machine could keep on refrigerating.

But when he stayed away for a longer time he used to ask me, with a significant gesture of the index rubbed on her thumb, if

I had any  banknotes, which he called in his funny slang “wonga”.

It was at that time of my first novitiate in London that I started to love the English.

 If he did not have customers, he read the newspaper: The Sun, the Daily Mirror and, above all, the Evening Standard, a London daily newspaper that published everything about horse racing, the other sporting events of the day, as well as some local, political issues and seldom  internationals.

He did not read much concentrated or for a long time, since he looked up from time to time to whistle or recall the attention of some glamorous girl of passage, on the goodness of whose forms we did not always agree, and if I tried to drag him to comment on some political news or abroad eco-social argument, its responses were always superficial, albeit not evasive.

At first I noticed a certain surprise in his eyes when listening carefully to my reasoning, and I did not know how to interpret it.

As time went by, I realized that it must appear unusual and even bizarre to him  that an Italian  ice-cream seller , wanted  to deal with arguments that not even the English and the Londoners , like he was, would to be  interested on.

 So, though seen as a sort of  phenomenon, a bit funny and original, I realized that his attitude towards me went gradually changing, from the initial snobbery and indifference into a cordial, sincere sympathy  that I was not able to turn into a deeper friendship, perhaps also because of my immaturity and insecurity.

Bob and the other dealers, including his two brothers and a sister, had left the school shortly after they had solved their attendance obligations; indeed, many even before that term.

Rebellious and refractory to the harsh rules of the English teachers, they preferred the free life of the street; without hierarchical supervisors invading or rebuking and  without any form of obligation (it was not rare he changed bad  words with some overly demanding or unfortunate customer).

 And with a great pay over the average earnings of workers and employees.

9. to be continued... 

Memoirs of London - 8

But if Soho is the pulsating heart of London's by night,  tourism is the real great business  in the  rest of the West End: a huge shopping mall and amenities in whose veins runs an infinite river of people, motorized and money which draws a continuous replacement of new life from the invisible arteries of the immense underground subway of the London metropolis.

The presence of this mass of metropolitan plankton had allowed in those streets the emergence of a varied fauna of sellers, including the fruit ‘s stalls, which were set mostly along Oxford Street.

Their fruit, so beautiful and flashy to look fake, stood out more for quality and shape than for quantity.

The "fruit'stallers" actually sold to the passers-by, usual to quick "lunch-time", or to occasional tourists, Californian a red apple, a greenish South African "Granny Smith"  or even a Sicilian grapefruit, a banana or, perhaps, to the most sophisticated, an avogadro cut in two halves, provided with salt and plastic spoon.  While the few housewives or restaurateurs in the area, found in the nearby Berwick street market cheaper prices and better choices.

The "London Fruits Sellers Company" (from which these particular fruit sellers were dependent) was certainly a company with all right papers: municipal marketing permissions; Public land occupation license; Health insurance card and even regular and substantial payments to the Great State Partner: the voracious Fiscal of the Crown.

The corporate summit was almost entirely made up of Jewish, eternal and skilled financiers, always looking for investments and profits, while the organization on the field, so to say, was in the hands of the English.

The  vendors all came from the neighborhood "East London", a city in the city, the ultimate London, for those who were legitimately and authentically Londoners.

The concentration in  the east of the Thames of the descendants of the ancient inhabitants of Londinium had gone along with the expansion of the English capital.

Pushed away to east by the enlargement of the ancient core of the city (as well as from Holborn, Seven Dials e Covent Garden), due to become in the centuries the wealthy square mile, evicted off the west to make space to rich and profiting buildings, the poorest people of London found shelter more and more to the East side of the town, merging with the offspring of the Huguenots, the Jews, the Romani and the already settled poorest English  people and so moving to  Clerkenwell, Finsbury, Shoreditch, Wapping, Limehouse, Hoxton, Stepney, Bethnal Green, Whitechapel, Shadwell, Aldgate, Millwall, Hackney, Rotherhithe, Mile End e Bow which  all became another London, the only real and original one, in contrast to London’s rich and tourists.

And while Harrod's, Selfridges, Marks and Spencer and the largest London banks were located where once they lived, they found refuge in the East End, far from the chaotic and polluted New Frontier. And when they crossed that invisible curtain that protected them to the east, they entered the "Town" or the “City”, but London was already behind. 

Bulwark and  symbol of the identity of this people was, still at that time,  the Cokney.

It is a real English dialect, though it has lexical borrowings from Yiddish,  and a distinctive accent that features T- glottalisation, a loss of dental fricatives and diphthong alterations.
This slang, which is said to bear more than one trace of early English London speech, acts as a linguistic element of group identification where the East Londoners find  their emotionally primary language, a true mother tongue.
 The other  English find it  very funny, a bit like it happens to the  Italians  when they hear  the colorful Roman dialect of certain comedians, from Ettore Petrolini onwards. Also in my company were several of these "East Londoners". 

8. to be continued...

Memoirs of London - 2

The next Monday I started working for Emilio’s Pizza Factory. The factory was set in Farringdon, East London, somewhere in Smithfield Rd, if I’m not wrong. We made packaged pizzas for big markets, Sainsbury, Tesco, things like that, if you know what I mean. The staff was all made by a small group of Egyptian Copts, a bunch of Italian guys, an old Portuguese named Pinto (who was often kidding the Egyptians in a mixed of Portuguese and   English but  spoken  with marked Iberian pronunciation ) and a retired old Easter Londoner, who was able to mark with  three or four fucking  a speech of five or six words. It was him that I first started with my job that Monday of August 1977. Our duty was to cut the cheddar cheese (which took the place of Italian soft mozzarella in packaged pizzas, and not only, as I quickly learned in London) and send it upstairs, through the lift.

-“ Fuck you, and fucking shut, ‘you know, the fucking door!” he used to shout from

underground space, in order to call the elevator and send the cheese up.

The cheese was kept in a large fridge, down there. Old Jim (that was his name) didn’t allow me to get in the fridge. He did, all the time. It was stocked in big packages of fifty pounds. We were busy on cutting them, by means of wooden handles sharp iron,  on strict, long  slices to be shred in the electric grater before to be sent upstairs on big plastic hampers.

Upstairs there was the production chain.

In a large electric mixer they put flour, yeast, salt and water. After an hour and a half the kneading was ready. Then it had to be pressed to obtain a plain leaf from which they made a circles of five inches diameter. With a trolley they had taken and put in the oven for about ten, fifteen minutes. With the same trolleys, after the baking,  a boy took them

on the assembly chain where the round pizza was flavored with tomatoes juice, cheese and some spices ( besides the plain pizza, we made mushroom and yellow or red pepper’s). In the end we put a brown preservative powder (the only ingredient we avoid when, at lunch time, we made our own pizzas). Finally they were wrapped in cellophane with the seller’s mark, and good appetite.

We went on that way from height  a.m. till 4 p.m..

At that time I had a thick beard and I talked to none, a part those few words with Jim, needed for unroll the work.

When later, I made friendship with the Italian colleagues, they  confess had thought I was a sort of fugitive man, hiding himself to escape from someone or something.

As a matter of fact I was just escaping from myself, and  I was too shy and insecure to make friendship easily.

After a couple of months I asked the boss to go upstairs and he wanted to please me.

2.     To be continued…