Dying lightly

Sunday, August 29, 2004

Dying lightly

Boingboing already posted a partial translation into English of this, but the Italian daily La Repubblica has a larger extract, and I thought I owed it to Enzo Baldoni to translate it, since that was what we both did. Translators are people who build bridges, so what better homage than translating this cheerful and lucid acceptance of death without bitterness.

“Of course, I’m certainly immortal, but if through any mistake of the Creator should it happen one day that I might die - and event I maintain the most serene and cheerful of dispositions for - these are the instructions for my funeral. For a start, when (and if) I should die, I hope it happens quickly, a nice plane crash, say, or a shipwreck. A car accident would be OK too, or better still in my bed, of a stroke. Immediately after my death I want to be cremated. Then my ashes should be dispersed. At sea, I’d say. But it’s up to you, after all what the fuck will I care at that point. Careful of the wind direction or we’ll up like the Great Lebowski.

[...]
Present should be all the friends reachable through email, blog and whatever other devilry technology will be able to come up with in the next hundred years. For no longer than thirty minutes, my wife, children, siblings and closest friends should draw a brief picture of me. Some word must not be uttered: pain, loss, unfillable void, loving father, model husband, valley of tears, we’ll never forget him, inconsolable, the world is a little colder, it’s always the best that go, and all euphemisms like he’s passed on, he’s disappeared, he left us.

[...]
I want champagne corks popping off, Guido [his son] with his accordion and his band playing De Andrè, especially La Città Vecchia and Il Testamento [the will] (when they’ll be opening mine people won’t laugh nearly so much, alas). Stefano on his monocycle juggling flaming torches, Gabriella[his daughter] with her clown’s nose. The Zapatistas’ band, the trumpeter playing through his balaclava. A woman playing the Birmanian harp. Twelve Timorese dancers covering my urn with colored drapes. Women dressed in strong colors, people laughing and telling dirty jokes. All the women I’ve been with in my life, yes, all three of them please. Rivers of wine, prosecco and spumante. Let each pour a few drops of wine on my urn, hey folks, I’m the one paying for it after all, don’t keep it all for yourself. A huge porchetta, sausages, devilled chickens and lasagne. I wouldn’t mind at all if new romances were born there. A quick one on some out-of-sight nook, I wouldn’t consider it an insult to death, but an offering to life.”

And for contrast - after the best Italians can get, the worst: Vittorio Feltri, the director of far-right daily Libero:


The pacifict with the kalashnikov by Vittorio Feltri

Examined cynically, that is with lucidity, Enzo Baldoni's misadventure strays into the territory of Italian Comedy. We wrote this yesterady already: a man his age, with wife and two children, would have done better to take advice from Alpitour [a famous and cheap Italian package travel company] than from Diario [the weekly Enzo Baldoni was working for], about the locality of his holidays, extreme or not (is that how they call them?). Obviously, as any good amateur in journalism, he preferred giving in to the impulse of his unhealthy passions for Iraq rather than listening to common sense. Everybody does as he pleases. And if it pleased him to risk snuffing it with the ambition of reaching the status of a caricature of the special correpondant, perhaps dreaming to be a Oriano Fallaci or an Ettore Mo, there's not much to object to. A lot to object to would there be to the fact that it's now up to the Italian State to pluck him from his troubles [using a Milanese expression meaning "plague"]. All right. Let's not look too closely at how much money will have to be spent to bring him back home, this asshole who's a lot like those guys who, during the weekend, don a mimetic and play the little soldier in the bushes of Varesotto.


This was before Enzo Baldoni's death. Afterwards, Feltri had to say that "the terrorists had no scruples killing him despite the fact that he was a friend of theirs" [since he was a pacifist]. He also whined about the fact that people now are "lynching" his paper.

For context, Enzo Baldoni had worked as freelance for many years, publishing on La Repubblica, Linus, Diario and many other papers. He interviewed Marcos before he was famouse and Xanana Gusmao when he was still in exile. Vittorio Feltri has been expelled years ago from the Order of Journalists.

How I Survived After Clarion

In the summer of 2003 I went to Clarion West. It was the best time of my life. In the winter of 2003 I had a severe depressive episode and went very close to taking my own life. In the spring of 2004 I began writing again.

My bout of depression, for several reasons, was by far the most serious I’ve heard about - going into major depression is not usual after Clarion - but my predicament was not unique. Most of us went through some kind or another of what my fellow Clarionite Gabe Morgan called Post-Clarion Stress Syndrome.

Clarion is an extremely stressful experience. I wasn’t aware of it at the time, I was even a bit scornful about all these talks of how stressful, how hard, how taxing Clarion was. I had been under a not negligible amount of stress for the year and a half preceding Clarion, on account of my job (I was, perhaps will be again, a professional fiction translator) – something that contributed among other things to the gravity of my subsequent fall – and Clarion itself seemed, by comparison, loads of fun. I hadn’t realized that just because you’re having fun doesn’t mean that you can’t be under a lot of pressure. Having the time of your life by itself , not counting what happens when you have to go home, can be extremely hard.

But let’s concentrate on what happened to me after I stopped having fun.

My position was, if not unique, peculiar among Clarionites because I was a foreigner (well, I still am, of course). English is not my native language, and I didn’t reside in an English-speaking country. I come from a different culture, so along with all the rest, I was in for culture shock. Not at Clarion... when I got back. When I landed back in Milan and looked around, in the most scorching summer Italy has known so far, a shiver went through me. I felt like I was on an alien planet. If there was a bright and lively centre of the universe, I was in the place furthest from it. This was a large part of my Post-Clarion syndrome.

Another stress factor was the fact that for the six weeks of Clarion we had been spoiled, pampered brats. Our needs were, for our mums Leslie and Neile, of supreme importance. Our sleep was sacred (apart from the racket across the street, but that’s another story). Ailments and discomforts were taken seriously. Conflicts were dealt with. Paperclips were provided. At the parties, we were the stars. At the readings, we were sitting in the first row. We got to stand up and be applauded.

Clarion is a hothouse, and rightly so. You are treated like the privileged guy you are, and it’s implied you’re going to give back lots to the SF community, because the SF community gives you lots more than can be paid by your tuition fee.

Then the six weeks end. Reams of scrap paper are recycled. You leave. The others dissolve into a cloud of electrons. You go back home and you’re nothing and no-one. You’ve been to what? What is it, a kind of school? Did you win something? It’s that thing about Star Trek, right?

Rapid wilting of hothouse flowers suddenly exposed to January snow.

This is all the more true if you live far from the fandom network. In large cities, especially cities like Seattle, Minneapolis, New York, where fandom is thriving and you may even have a Clarion mate practically next door, it is possible to resort to the network. But if you’re in the sticks, all your achievements and pains are suddenly worth or a weight for you and you alone. I went back to Padua, Italy. A country where Science Fiction is basically dead and fantasy doesn’t thrive either.

I would probably have been able to brave the slump, and the culture shock, quite well if it hadn’t been for other factors. One is personal and particular but one is very Clarionite – I was one of my year’s Clarion divorces.

They tell me the Clarion breakup is often a result of a Clarion hookup. In my case it wasn’t so. I wasn’t married but I was certainly sure I was going to be in a short time. My partner had joined me at the end of Clarion and the plan was to tour the USA together. As soon as I saw him I knew that, no matter how much I loved him, our life together was over. Clarion changes you, and the rest of your life sometimes doesn’t change accordingly. We went through the motion of a happy holiday anyway, were even happy together for the last time, then we came back home and he took a plane back to his home town and I haven’t seen him since.

The advice I would almost feel like giving people about the Clarion divorce is: don’t. Don’t take life-altering decisions in the aftermath of six weeks of intense stress, at a moment when you are high on exhilaration and exhaustion. Wait to go back to your normal life, to your routine. Settle down, get over the slump, get over the mourning for the separation and loss of leaving Clarion, and then decide.

But I won’t give this advice in the end. After long internal debate I think that, sometimes, people need a push. Maybe I needed one, to get out of a relationship that wasn’t bad enough to be broken up as it needed to be. Being in a moment of flux and crisis, having to face loss anyway, helped me take what was probably a wise decision that I would, otherwise, have delayed indefinitely.

But if you end up being a Clarion divorce, and if there’s no compensating hookup, do expect to go through the wasteland. There is no skirting around it.

So now, a few words about going through the wasteland – a few words about depression.

Feeling heartbroken and bereft is not pathological. Especially if you’ve got a huge stressor to justify it, like divorce, or Clarion, or both. But it can devolve into depression and depression has to be cured. Depression can be cured. The tell-tales are widely known but I’ll recap them briefly:

feelings of sadness and dejection
feelings of hopelessness, radical and unrelenting pessimism (this is probably the most important signal)
feelings of worthlessness, guilt or inferiority
loss of interest for activities or other things that used to give pleasure in the past
loss of interest or inability to perform everyday tasks
loss of sleep or increased sleep
feeling always tired
loss of libido
suicidal thoughts or ideation, including masked suicidal thoughts or behaviour like reckless driving, dangerous behaviour, etc.
loss of appetite

Almost everybody goes through some or all of these at some time or other in life, but if you experience most of these and they persist for more than two weeks, you’re likely depressed. Now depression can lift of its own, but you don’t want to wait for this, for several reasons. The first one is that nobody will award you any points for your stoicism, and there are good and efficient treatments for it; the second is that depression has quite a high mortality rate – that is, people who have it tend to kill themselves. Depression is a serious condition, a dangerous one. It is not a moral fault. It is not a character fault. It’s an illness, it’s a way certain brains have of dealing with stress, it’s got nothing to do with how brave, strong, worthy or nice you are. If you develop it, it’s because your brain has taken a pathological path to deal with stress. You’ve got to help it, just as you’d help your body deal with diabetes with insulin, or deal with an infection with antibiotics.

In dealing with depression, you will not be alone, no matter how strong and clear the impression that you are will be. Something that must always be remembered is that depression skews your perceptions. You will have strong, crushing feelings that all is vain, all is ugly, all is hopeless, that nobody loves you, nobody cares for you, and that life isn’t worth living. You may believe that you have lost the will or ability to write. And you will feel a soul-crushing loneliness. This is all an artefact of depression. You are not hopeless, you are not faulty, you are not alone.

Depression, as a friend told me, works like this: your brain has some feelings, generally of a very negative nature. It then searches for a reason to feel them. If it doesn’t find any factual reasons, and the feelings persist, it seizes on inexistent or irrelevant facts and constructs a pathological but very convincing case out of them. It is very important not to lose sight of the fact that what seems very convincing under the influence of the illness is not necessarily true.

I have, for example, throughout my illness, been consistently helped by several people who have devoted time and attention to my condition, some of them my Clarion mates, some of them unrelated to Clarion. They have listened day in day out to my pain and fear, and never stinted on reassurance, reason, company, and love. They sent me cards and little gifts, they chatted with me, they emailed me, they phoned me, they showed up at my house to sleep overnight on the day I felt most dejected and close to the edge. This did help me – I probably would have killed myself if they hadn’t been there – but throughout the episode my most crushing, painful feeling was of loneliness. I felt absolutely alone and bereft of hope. But, having been depressed in the past (and thanks to the generosity and patience of the above-mentioned people) I knew the feeling was just a feeling, and would disappear with the illness.

Clarion itself is a great resource in times of trouble. It is an incredibly bonding experience and there is not one, not one of my Clarion mates I did not miss, I did not feel close to, I did not love. Not even the ones I argued with passionately during Clarion (or indeed afterwards). This is a common experience and a resource that is there for most people who go through it.
My Clarion mates were probably the most decisive in helping me survive until I got better. Some people broke under the strain – two of the people I cared for and counted upon most ended up shoving me away. One probably did it believing it was good for me. The other did it because he couldn’t take it any longer. This will happen to anybody going through a serious crisis; some people will stay and some won’t. Some people will help and some won’t be able to. It is useless and unfair to hold it against them: it is not an easy task.

The most important thing, and the one that is hard to believe, is that one day you will realize all of a sudden that a feeling of grace has taken hold of you again: that once you were lost, and now you are found. One day – that may come quicker because of medication, therapy, help, or the natural lifting of the veil – you will realize that the dreadful loneliness was being far from yourself. That the reason nothing and nobody seemed sufficient company was because it was you yourself missing. Missing but not gone: and you will wake up one day and every piece will be there, and the disorder won’t be chaos any longer, and you will spend a happy weekend all alone with your words, and you won’t miss something vital any longer. And new words will come back. You will realize that even brief notes scribbled in notebook are not as bad, as useless as they seemed at the time you were writing them. You will go back to life. Even collecting rejection slips has its own perverse charm.

It gets better.

Really. It does.

What America means to me

1. Unshakable beliefs

The thing about America and torture and the whole bloody mess that Iraq has become, in Europe, is that nobody is surprised. A few die-hard americanophiles are hurt, but in general, the revelation that Americans have been torturing people out of need or pleasure isn't very shocking news to Europeans.

Actually, what I have seen discussed with disquieting frequency on mailing lists and newsgroups, is the possibility that the Nick Berg beheading footage were fake. The theory bandied about is that Nick Berg has actually been beheaded by Americans in Abu Grahib. This completely wacky theory - together with the ones that the Twin Towers attack was really the doing of some shady American agency - is actually considered by intelligent and educated people. It is based on so much pure bollocks that I am actually at a loss as how to counter it: the "evidence" is based on things like a fuzzy blob being likened to another fuzzy blob in the photos of Abu Grahib as proof that there is, in the Nick Berg video, a "typical American Forces beret". Another "proof" is that the white plastic garden chair Nick Berg was seated on look an awful lot like the white plastic garden chairs seen in the Abu Grahib photos... and in my own lawn, I might add.

What this latest conspiracy theory shows, disquietingly and, for me, maddeningly, is that people here are prepared to believe the most atrocious things on the flimsiest evidence, as long as they indict America of some Bad Stuff. Trying to counter the wackiest examples by pointing out that there is, actually, quite a lot of Bad Stuff that's historically attested and it should perhaps be wisest to base one's assessment of a country on that (including the fact that it was brought to light by, lookie here, other Americans) is useless.

The sad fact is that people are prepared to believe wacky theories because they hate the USA. They hold unshakable beliefs about it that no mere fact can dislodge. The terrifying but perhaps not surprising thing is that many of these "facts" are no more or less than buying the neocon or right-wing version of something. Example - many Europeans believe that the war on Iraq has its cause in the Twin Towers attack. They then proceed to point out that 5,000 civilian deaths are bad enough, without adding some several thousands civilian deaths in Afghanistan or Iraq on top of them. No amount of evidence can convince them that the war on Iraq was planned long before 9/11. This is not surprising because Europeans, especially those without a good linguistic skill, do not read American or English blogs and news, and have been missing out on lots of clues consequently.

For much the same reasons, Europeans believe that Americans are far more right-wing than they are, and that they are far more ignorant and less educated than Europeans. They attribute to the Americans in general a total lack of subtlety and political savvy, and no amount of pointing out exceptions can convince them. They will listen to Chomsky and Vidal, or have seen Michael Moore's documentaries, but they come out of such contact with the American liberal thought with the unshakable conviction that it's an isolated minority. They never pause to think that liberal, subtle, educated thought is a minority position in pretty much the whole world - and this is particularly puzzling in my compatriots, who have, after all, witnessed the landslide electoral victory of such a champion of educated political subtlety as Silvio Berlusconi (who last week attributed the attack on the Twin Towers to his personal obsession - the "communists").

Since it's not a problem for conspiracy theorists to believe mutually contradictory things, Europeans - and I mean particular individual Europeans I know - are fully ready to believe that Americans are ignorant clumsy idiots and that there are infinitely wily American agencies that will do things like bring down that bastion of anti-establishment thought, the Cantor-Fitzgerald offices, in pursuing their shady ends.

Why am I ranting about this in English?

I guess I have some sort of confession to make.

2. Confession

I have been one of the people irrationally irked by America. I mean, being very fluent in English and having lots of friends in the blogosphere, as well as having had a few selected and much loved American friends, I have always been aware that the popular picture was, to be kind, skewed. And I used to become pretty incensed at people having a go at Americana in general and at the supposed general characteristics of the American people in particular. I could be scathing about Americans, but nobody else should dare.

But still, I was irrationally irked by the USA. I wasn't too anxious to go there, and the accent got on my nerves. I remember sitting in Schipol airport waiting for my flight to Washington, my second time in the USA, and being irritated by random snippets of accent drifting my way. Irrational as it is, I guess the continental discourse on the USA influenced me, no matter that I knew how ignorant and misinformed it was. This is the awesome power of prejudice, it gets you even if you know better.

It took me about two months to be assimilated. I can pinpoint the moment of complete assimilation when, around the beginning of November, I realized I had ceased noticing American flags. This was a sort of scary moment. But maybe the first twinges of assimilation had come when I heard the third wave of Europeans make the same remarks to the Americans about the things that freaked them out. The Americans happening by at that particular moment were far more gracious about it than I felt like being. The third wave of Europeans - embodied, as it happened, by my soon to be ex partner - were unfairly subjected to my ire, seeing as I had said just the same things when I had first got there.

3. Things that freak Europeans out: flags

I don't know if Americans consciously notice them, I guess not. But Europeans do notice them - with a start. And it's a continuos starting amounting to Tourettic moments. They're bloody everywhere. You can't turn your head without spotting one. And believe me, until you get used to them, it freaks you out.

It's very hard to explain exactly why. I mean, one could go on for a long time about nationalism being sort of associated with your neighbours coming over the border to hit you with big sticks since time immemorial, but that wouldn't convey the deep-seated reaction of your average European to a flag.

So I'll recount the following anecdote.

We were driving down from Seattle to San Francisco, spotting flags here and there and the occasional bellicose hand-written sign, which my soon to be ex partner would photograph. We stopped at one coffee shop in Eureka, which had all the trappings of an obviously wishy-washy bleedin-heart liberal establishment, complete with rainbow-colored kite and general post-hippy ambience. And a good enough mocha to induce even my soon to be ex partner - who could spot a less than completely orthodox espresso at forty paces - to admit that, seen as a chocolate with coffee in it and whipped cream on top, it wasn't half bad. Provided one didn't think of it as coffee.
At one point my soon to be ex partner freezes, his gaze aimed past my shoulder, and stammers: "Wha-what is that?"
I turn and read the large sticker that I had already noticed on the coffee-shop's glass door: fluidly waving star-and-stripes, fiercely-looking eagle, and the caption "Peace is Patriotic".
"It means they're left-wing," I supply.
"But-but-but." He looks at me with the air of somebody caught in a world-upturning case of being smacked between the eyes by cultural relativism. "But the flag!"

Lest somebody think that I'm being unfairly hard on my ex, I did my share of flag-boggling during my first weeks in the US, and was repeatedly ready to share such bogglement with any handy American. They were very gracious about them.

4. Things that freak Europeans out: tips

Because you mostly don't tip in Europe. Oh, well, you do in case of particularly outstanding service, but it's very, very rare. I guess lots of Europeans tourists don't tip out of perfect and innocent ignorance of the custom, and are therefore a lot less liked overseas than American tourists (who, probably, tip out of sheer force of habit and not knowing it's not required) are in Europe. If you're even marginally clued, they would have told you that tipping in America is required, because waiters and staff will depend on that to reach a decent wage. This means that every time you add in the tip, you're reminded that some poor bloke's making the rent depend in part on how generous you feel. It's not a welcome feeling. It's also inconvenient to calculate the right amount every time, partly because nobody gives you real rules about it. Is it 15%? 20%? Used to be 15% but now is 20? Leaving 20% will be too much? Leaving 15% will be too little? What if you don't have the change? Will I be thought a miser? Clueless? Too generous?

Add to this the fact that tax is usually counted in the shown price in Europe, and every bill comes with a little nasty surprise and a moral problem for us. Every time we pay a bill, there's a little hint at the state of the working person in the US. It's not probably a fair picture - but disproportionately disquieting because it forces you to take part in what is, to us, a displeasingly arbitrary system.

4. Things that annoy and puzzle Europeans: money

The smallest annoyance, all right, but a curiously abiding one. Once you get over the flags, the tips, the taxes, you still have this itch. Why oh why in a country where so many things go out of their way to make your life easier - cars with automatic transmission, motels, round-the-clock seven-days-a-week shops, large friendly directions, cat's eyes in the middle of the road, and, well, friendly natives - why has the money to be so stubbornly difficult to tell apart? If cutting it different sizes is too much effort, would it be so difficult to catch on to that stroke of genius the rest of the world has had - printing each denomination a different color?

Pointing out that the greenback is part of the national identity doesn't cut much ice with people who just switched over to the, let's face it, rather drab euro. But as dubiously attractive as the euro banknotes are, at least they're easy to tell apart!

And if having money that's rigorously all the same is that important to the national sense of identity, how come the States mint their own distinctive quarters, eh?

5. Assimilation

It might have happened around the fourth of July. I was looking at the fireworks seated between two friends, and they were mumbling disgustedly at the whole nationalistic pomp and crassness. I said joyously that I was actually enjoying the whole nationalistic trip - hey, it was so quaintly American! They both - from their quite different backgrounds - looked at me in disgust, and shook their heads. Somebody in the back kept going "Yes! Yes! YES!" at every successive bang and shower of sparks, finally erupting in a positively climatic "GOD BLESS AMERICA!" that I suspect accompanied other climatic moments in his life. My two friends were still shaking their heads.

Or it might have been when I discovered Office Depot - a country that houses such a temple to stationery can't be all bad. Or maybe when I found out that the bookstore cat was more or less mandatory for most independent bookshops. Or when I saw the Employees' Rights placard in the already mentioned Eureka cafe. Or when I had to take the final leave from the last of my Clarion mates. Or crying over email in a San Francisco Starbucks, because email wasn't the same thing, and San Francisco was so windswept and mellow outside, all soft but neat whites and deep blues, and cheap sushi.

I'd always known Americans were uncommonly nice people, but I thought the ocean acted like a sort of filter, that only the best specimens came through. Well, admittedly, I met a very intensively filtered kind of American through Clarion - the best fandom had to offer. But I guess it was enough to counter prejudice. Somehow, even the accent sounds different.

So I was assimilated. I have reflected on that since I left. I would go back to the States if I could, despite the nasty government and the appalling working conditions, and even despite the frightening lack of protection from the misfortunes of your health. And the silly lookalike money. And despite what New York smells like in high summer. It's first and foremost because of the people, of course. And because Science Fiction is still alive and kicking there, and it doesn't kick you in the shins like it does in the UK - though there's no finer kick in the shins to be had, UK contingent, let me hastily add. But maybe it's because this strange, unclear, ultimately rather unsettling feeling that the US is more real than the rest of the world. I've been thinking about this, and I have found no other better way to phrase it. Put it down to cultural imperialism. Put it down to the world becoming globalized, and my country only supplying the shoes. Put it down to our imagination being colonized. Put it down to this being the cradle of the best and of the worst - mah. That was a Canadian saying that, after all.

I am left, sadly, with a lingering antipathy for my country. Maybe because it tries to be the US and keeps missing in embarrassing ways. I have never resented copying the US, on the contrary, I've always been very irked by those that leveled "americanism" like an offense at me. But I would have liked it to be copying like Sergio Leone used to copy - with love, and ultimately being himself. Instead we get faded carbon copies of the most unfashionable stragglers of the American Right wagon. They look worse than pathetic - they look unreal.