Little Red Book (Libercolo Rosso)

Preface

If there were a premise to do for this Little Red Book it would be that everything written here had not been thought to be delivered, as it is happening now, written black and red on white, just right now and from now on.

To write, by itself, it doesn't mean to be a writer exactly as writing poems doesn't make you a poet. Neither publish a poem book makes you such a writer or a poet, definitely.

So, someone's going to ask himself why from a set of scribbled pages I finally decided to create a book and to do this after almost a couple of decades.

This is a good question, and basically I think there's more than an answer, as usual, but the first one is that I have answered to some kind of "call" that when it comes out you can't ignore, at a certain point of your life there comes a tremble at your back, and you are given such a push that you can't resist and you are almost obliged to it, and that's it.

We can call it a sort of "Hero's Journey" or more easily the need of giving a concrete state to something that has always have been besides me, "a silent earing ear", daring to mention myself, that I have given a voice just not to let it lay as a voiceless cry in the emptiness of a drawer.

And this also because the book of life that you write down day by day doesn't always report bright pages,... so to leave a track of yourself, behind you, in front of you, is one of the main cause that make life worth to live. So to make the story of a single man everybody's story is one of the best way of doing it.

By the way, casually, I am also mentioning one of the Dalai Lama's most famous sentences just read, that, about Western people asserts that : .... he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived."

If of this famous sentence we, as western human being, can't avoid the first part due to a inner omnipotence sense that we are no longer able to uproot from inside, at least I would like to remediate to the second part, with a personal contribution that could become "universal".

And talking about the universal, I have to remind a moment, and this had been the first time that I seriously thought that I wasn't writing just myself but I could have some kind of audience outside my room, it happened in the year 2000, at the cinema, watching the movie "American Beauty" at that time only nominated for Oscar, during a scene where one of the movie character was shooting for a long time a crumpled paper tossed by the wind, I was shaken by a shiver down my spine, by getting aware about the analogy between this scene and "Borsa Sgualcita" (Crumpled bag), written some time before, as usual result of an uncontrollable internal impulse to which I could not be able to resist. Analogy, not in terms of content or metaphor, but it evoked the vision in writing it and then read it again evoked in. It was a shock, that apparently did not lead to anything concrete until a short time ago. I do not think it's a problem. 14 years have passed for us but, poetry does not suffer time (at least less than that how we suffer it) and then a century does not move much, and I do not feel any regret because at the time, and, unconsciously, I had not realized that I had already written a book and I was already writing a second one.

Trilogy: it is something that has always fascinated me... from Aeschylus to Dante, from Lucas to Kieslowski, or Mozart to Verdi, literature, cinema, music and all kind of artistic expression, the set of three works is an expressive model that has always given me a feeling of completeness and achievement of the goal that the individual works are unable to give. The analogy with Lucas, that is, not to start from the beginning but from an other point of the story and the three colors of Kieslowski made the rest. And the colors are nothing but the diaries covers colors I used to write at various times. Red writings belong to the de-decade 1995-2005, although almost all from 1998-2000.

Quotes, excitations....: the former are often crippled and used for the purpose of the text, the latter are being part of everyone's life and they could not help but fall between the lines of these writings.

Inspirations: I believe that each of us is the result of experiences made by getting in touch with several different artistic worlds that I got in contact with in my lifetime.

So I could not avoid to be inspired by innumerable sources that carried me away, most of the times unconsciously, if not in the shape, surely for how a certain phrase had been expressed exactly that way.

I can cite three undoubted sources of inspiration among all; Montale, Leopardi and D'Annunzio, that are the most influential, but there are several others others that, and this is perhaps the most interesting aspect, neither I have full consciousness.

About the style:

I don't think to follow a determined style and metrics. It changes from time to time, as of what I feel and want to express and the only common factor is an insatiable appetite of leveraging the ambiguous meanings of words and the almost infinite intersections that can be created with.

All in all I've always thought that the world is split between some people who ask themselves questions and someone else asking why others make themselves questions, and I have to admit, I have always been hoping to belong to the former

Wish you a pleasant reading journey...