“Mystics” (Part 1.) (by Erminia Passannanti)

Always caught in the brutal agony of my two uncles as outside or beyond the
paternal house and its frail borders always looking for more than a mirror
to the extent to find in front of myself someone else this maybe seeming an
odd search which temporarily proves something against my will or against a
global tendency towards the innate as in the game often played with your
knees down on the warm stone of the baker shop’s threshold in a sunny day
and in a small village up the white mountains while your mother is waiting
for the fragrant bread to be wrapped in a fine paper as fawn as your skin
in summer and a voice is telling you “you do not want to do this, you do
not want to do this” not always insurgent as the gush of water spilling
from a little iron fountain not always delighted in the multiple moralities
I use to prove that I am right and where of course notable and essential
exceptions are made like the bee penetrating a cabbage.

I did not want to do it matter of fact it happened to my life as a life
given
for no particular reason and under no obligation as I told my father
adding thank you papa’ for being born and certainly I meant it in
differential superimpositions of reverences so to sweat and mimic his body
odours his way of moving his hands resulting in me being quite a man and
yet suffering female desires inflicted upon my history as a sword however I
am using these words to describe how from being veiled truth discloses
itself as gently as a woman would do standing in front of her beloved in an
dimmed room quite ashamed of her meagre chances and of the very little
worth one has for the other person after all in those components of ecstasy
when a double-voiced educated young scholar comes by you and seats down on
that old stone threshold talking to both of us of his transient status and
you nod and your mother nods and whispers with lips tight you do not do
this, you – do – not – do – this.

When I recall these fractions of my past I feel all pervaded by pure joy
and it would not seem productive to me to stay still so I dance and sing
and celebrate the vision
Which is a gift of the memory making us experience our life two three ten
times just by dashing into the creamy vertigo of remembrances a discipline
which was taught to me in one of those late September afternoons by Tommaso
d’Aquino and San Francesco d’Assisi, each of them being brother to one of
my parents and an ultimate measure of the unfathomable emotion that makes
one feel lost every time one smells traces of coffee in the breath of a
male a thing that in terms of religious tradition can gives the exact
measure of the technicality needed for the self-reflexive identification
of one’s soul with those of the good people.


Always caught in the constellation of the admittedly rare stars of my
ancestors I just wished to consider in a concise fashion which were the
circumstance that made me mystic.

yes, fair enough, but I had a friend who had cancer, you see. at the age of
thirty she had already had her left breast removed.

our instinct weighs us down and it is like walking about carrying in your
arms a lead ball. there is no assumption you can make on the moral
integrity of these two relatives of yours. they are both guests of country
nursing homes, now. Imagine them as exhausted candles. Remember: they used
to wipe their mouths up before they spoke to you.
each time they spoke to you.