Let them touch and see if they can find weapons on me.
I believe in love as the most wonderful experience of existence, and generator of every happiness: and in corresponded love as happiness itself. But I haven’t been educated for it, neither for happiness, neither for pleasure. Because I’ve been badly warned about giving up and that joyful abandon that it’s supposed to be. Then, every day, still, it’s an arduous conquest, a transgression, a disobedience to myself, an obstinacy, the laborious task to unlearn what’ve been learnt, the disrespect to that first and fatal commandment, that judgment by you can win or lose, love or be loved, kill or die. Therefore, life haven’t made me harder, that’s my best achieve. Let them touch me and see if they can find weapons on me. I leave them aside, if I ever had one or I still have, any weapon to become dread, to submit, to accumulate, to be powerful, to claim victory in an under weapons world, where happiness could be bought with a credit card. I don’t want brilliancy can cost my happiness, neither happiness could suppose to be negation or blindness. But it’s not so easy for me. It’s hard for me to live against time, with the sensation of being a witness of a giant and historical lack of tact; of a monstrous deviation, so irrational like the neutron’s bomb. I don’t understand the world. I think it’s like Serrat says, that it fell in the hands of some mad ones with ID’s. I feel foreign to the disaster, but also, I feel I’m in the middle of it. My life is just an instant in the ocean of time and it’s like I would like that instant to be serene and deep in the middle of a deafening discotheque or a definitive holocaust close to burst out. It vexes me the degradation of life, the idiocy of stupidity, the triumph of preponderance and ostentation, the wild dehumanization from the powerful ones, the acceptance and eulogy to the “Everyone for himself”, the practice and preachment to disaffection and hysteria. It tears my heart out that collective silliness, the idealization to the superfluous, the assassination of innocence, the suicidal carelessness of the little that our best goal deserves, the ignorance or forgetfulness of our own condition. It touched me that not very long time ago, Sagan, the cosmologist, in a long article, written from a point of view lost in the infinite of space, from where the world can be seen as a pitiful little ball, finished his speech saying: “Kiss your children”. Let’s listen to these men, let’s follow them, let’s read the poets; let’s not allow the mystery of our existence make us to stop tremble, because it’s the highest cost we can pay for our nonsense and our omnipotence. A tree’s life deserves our devotion and our biggest enjoyment. Under the pleasurable protection of its shadow, caressed by the warmth of sunlight and cuddled by the magic sound and the uniqueness of its foliage, dandled by the wind’s invisible hand, we’ll be safe from alienation and orphanage; only when we can be able to appreciate that glory, till we can be able to do it, and recognize in that glory our biggest richness. Shall death not hurt us in life, shall ferocity will not reach our souls, shall nothing screw our good fortune to be awake, shall a caress pierce us like a joyful radian arrow.
Let’s kiss the ones we love. LET’S LOVE EACH OTHER.
******* From Lito Vitale: Juntando Almas (1993)