Description
SICILIE
The repose of flesh in front of the greenish blue to the bluish green of the sea. I do not sleep on my back, but on my side, protecting me only those scraps of cloth that make the costume, a costume that is very close to revealing who I am, that protects from nudity, but approaches it. I sail in that state between sleep and wakefulness, lulled by the constant sound of the water, which always sends me back to somewhere else, bringing me closer to things far away. Like a ferry called Charon that has the power to bring me closer to my land and farther away at the same time. Ferry is called – “I ferry,” said Charon. Back and forth and I die every time I join the peninsula, I rise every time I join the island-Sicily yes, that’s what I’m talking about. Sicily is blue, is green, is yellow, is red Sicily is primary color. Sicily is water and fire, it is earth and sea, it is arid and wet, Sicily is oxymoronic, tautological, descending and ascending climax. Sicily is everything and the opposite of everything. Sicily dries and rehydrates.
Sicily back and forth, over water under water. Hold your breath, breathe deep. The sun in Sicily always comes out eventually: the mood is regulated by the sun’s rays, the type of sand, the height of the rocks you can dive off; it’s hard not to find a reason to laugh.
Images call up sounds: the band is always in the air, the chance to make the sounds of the earth reach high. The clouds are symptomatic: the gashes that contain the sun.
The earth is to be traversed barefoot; bare feet feeling the boiling of the sand: it is an experience that if you evoke it, you feel your feet burn; but you also remember that to heal that heat there is always seawater.
Hair, even the darkest, magically tends to blond, dries and burns, curls even the thinnest, follows the curves of the waves.
The shadows produced by that light are sharp.
Many things (the walls especially) are peeling, salt seems to have always been responsible for the peeling.
There is the pattern that boats make when they move through the sea leaving trails. They seem to leave ciphered messages to us who look out from a balcony and watch from above. They seem to invite hypnotic movement, a kind of message that can only be drawn from the surface of the sea.
Certain Sicilies are imaginary, and it is Sicily that suggests them to you; it is a bit like the question of History with a capital S and History with a lower case s: which are the stories. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the initial is really the letter S. Sicilies are born involuntarily in the Sicilian’s gut when he begins to inhabit and perceive Sicily: it has to do with the first steps, the first gestures he learns and the first words he utters: the idioms as amulets. It has to do with the island issue, which allows you to perceive yourself as isolated, and somehow this isolation enhances the possibility of inventing worlds of elsewhere, the worlds of sicilies.
The worlds of “how would you like Sicily to be,” an ongoing narrative of alternatives: less and more of the way it is. Suggestions come from the water, but also from the fire of the eruptions of the Mountain (Mother Etna, always hovering, even if you are at the other tip). The sicilies multiply when-as they often do-you have to leave it. You need sicilias to stay connected to Her, it’s like when you walk away from someone and start fantasizing about how it was, so you do with Sicily.
It would seem that to have sicilies, you have to have Sicily, and instead the opposite is perhaps true: to have Sicily, you have to have sicilies.
