B.islacco is an adjective that has always been nice to me.
Today it is not used so much but when I was a child only listening to the word put me in a good mood.
I know well that sometimes the term is used in a pejorative sense but me I have always associated it with the unexpected happy, the unexpected, the amusing surprise.
Try to remove from this world everything that is leaping, bizarre, eccentric, unpredictable, original, beaten up, stoned, weird, weird, extravagant, absurd, weird, weird, capricious, whimsical, particular, sui generis, crazy, crazy, deranged, nutty, nailed, beaten up, played, deranged, flash, insane. What are we left with? A tomb order.
Fulvio Scaparro
My grandmother was English. I didn’t know her, but it came to me through my father the irresistible temptation to see what’s behind an orderly society that is attentive to appearances, to play with anything stiff, overly formal, blocked. With him I often played with words.
Limericks, nonsense, calembours, not very popular in Italy, are nonsense that children like. THE children want safety, they love rituals, they do not tolerate the loss of loved ones, objects, animals, atmospheres, smells, flavors that identify their environment. But yet, are weird by nature and they have fun like crazy to shuffle the cards, to mess up every form of order and then rediscover, reassemble, the picture of their certainties.
The limericks, as you know for sure, they are compositions in five lines in kissed rhyme (AA BB).
In the first verse the protagonist is introduced (a human being, an animal, an object…). In the second verse, which rhymes with the first, it explains what the protagonist does, thinks and feels.
The third and fourth lines, in rhyme with each other, illustrate what happens.
The fifth and last verse takes up the first almost entirely and closes the limerick.
For example, if you want to limerick the word ‘weird’, you could write something like this:
And there was a rather odd Cossack
who wore no heeled boots
and failing the horse to spur
in war on foot he had to go.
A real setback for a Cossack.
But indulge yourself and you will do something better.
Going back in time up to the second post-war period, I have a vivid and festive image of the gods comics by Jacovitti, weird the author and weird his characters: Pippo, Palla and Pertica and their dog Tom, Cip the Arcipoliziotto (with the dog Kilometro) with Gallina and Zagar, Giorgio Giorgio Detto Giorgio, Mrs. Charlemagne, the terrible old lady with a devastating uppercut …, all signed with a fish bone and seasoned with an unlikely quantity of sliced or otherwise started salami. This last feature in a period when food was not abundant added water to the mouth of the little reader entranced by the total unpredictability of the characters. A total enjoyment.
I read a lot, books and comics, but I still didn’t appreciate them mysterious wonders of the twisted and upside-down worlds of Alice that my father, as a good Englishman, considered – as I consider him today – a masterpiece of universal weird literature.
Thinking back to me as a small and avid reader of the past, I understand why I was equally attracted to Jacovitti and Lazzarillo de Tormes, from Stevenson or Conrad and from Jerome Klapka Jerome or Mark Twain, from Tartarin of Tarascon and, later, from Monsieur Hulot. Today I wonder if a story, a novel, a film, a work of art capable of really exist capture attention without something ‘wrong’, which “does not go its way”, “Bizarre”, unexpected, unusual, out of place or at least out of the usual place.
One of the first games that appear in childhood is hide and seek. Already in the arms of the mother, the little one of a few months observes with curiosity, tension and apprehension the father who peeps out behind his mother’s shoulders and then disappears and reappears immediately afterwards. When the father’s face reappears, the little one smiles in relief. And he wants to repeat the game over and over again: tension and relaxation, concern for the disappearance and joy for the finding. The pleasure of life does not lie in the absence of tension or in continuous stress, but in the alternation of these experiences, in movement, in conflict and not in war. One recommendation: no sadisms, do not push the disappearance beyond the limits of the child’s bearable tension. It’s a pleasant workout. For the definitive disappearances he will have a life to train and there is no need to forge ahead.
Excellent results, always without exceeding the child’s tolerability limits, are obtained with the changes in facial expression, with those of voice, with the full body mimicry, in short, with everything we have available to surprise, without frightening, girls and boys. It is an enjoyable game of momentary loss of normal references followed by the recovery of the ‘safe base’, known and reassuring. In this way you get used to appreciating the well-known without losing the desire to do some forays into the unusual.
Also there reading voltage it lies precisely in the expectation, in the fear, in the hope, in the trepidation of running into a trap, a trap, an apparition, a variant of which we know nothing but which we will inevitably have to encounter, even if for a moment, a flash. Good reading, at the beginning with the intervention of an adult who is not bored, keeps us alert, fights our laziness. It introduces us to life that is never quiet and safe and must be traveled carefully, as sure as we are that the script of our existence changes constantly, for better or for worse.
Children love rituals, it is true. They need security. They want to hear the story repeated, already crooked, in exactly the same way, to relive the pleasure experienced in the previous evenings, when an adult gave the little one his precious time to travel together in the same soap bubble. But it is also true that children love surprises. If only to relive, I repeat, the pleasure of returning to the reassuring world of rituality, of the repetitive. They love the symmetrical but get excited if they can make a detour into the asymmetrical. In this way, they learn to love the symmetrical and the asymmetrical, the ritual and the irrational, the old and the new.
In every well-told story, the narrator and the listener find themselves together inside the same soap bubble, whose fragility they conventionally pretend to ignore, and while it lasts … they enjoy it all. A conscious suspension of disbelief, therefore: “Any fool can easily realize that on the stage where a comedy is being performed no real action takes place, but there are only actors: watching a show with this attitude is, however, just foolish, because it prevents one from immersing oneself in the story presented. Once disbelief is suspended, however, we can live the story as ‘real’, draw vivid feelings, important experiences “ (Samuel Taylor Coleridge).
Neither children nor artists need these recommendations. By nature they are extraordinarily sensitive to what cannot be seen with the naked eye, to what exists between light and shadow, between wakefulness and sleep, between heaven and earth. They are beings on the border between the very long past of their species and the new world into which they have been catapulted.
A good storyteller believes what he tells. The Irish poet Yeats, born in a land that is a forge of fairy tales and whose work is imbued with fairy tale material, he truly believed “in the world of fairy tales and in fairies and … he told seriously that he was carried in the air by fairies for four miles …”. Madness, you may say, but the charm and enchantment do not come from reason or irrationality, but from the spaces left free by both.
A character from one of my books (Old Lions and their irresistible alliance with the young, Milan, Rizzoli, 2003) an old madman, great storyteller, replied to those who called him a liar: “Today more than ever there is a need for those who, like us, believe unreservedly in the stories they tell. Many tell tales, lies, half-truths. They are the liars, individuals who lie and exploit their lies to their own advantage and to the detriment of others.
We do not. We don’t lie. We are inside the stories we tell, we live in them and we are inhabited by them, we get excited while we tell them, we are completely sincere when we give life to amazing events with words. Was Tartarin of Tarascon a liar? Or the unhappy Don Quixote? Or our beloved Münchhausen? “
We aspire to an orderly and reassuring world but we live in a world that every day, to put it mildly, comes across as senseless, messy and worrying.
We believe that the order can be found by eliminating the gimmick. We got the wrong target. It is not the odd, the bizarre, the unpredictable, our enemy. The enemy is rigidity, immobility, fanaticism, the cemetery order. The geezer helps us move, not to freeze, to look at the other side of the coin, the other side of the moon, in other words a get to know and get to know us better.
After all, as Elia Wiesel says, God loves men because he loves stories. And we men tell and we tell each other many to convince ourselves that this life is worth living. Without this ability to insert everything that happens to us in a narrative plot, the impact with reality would be unsustainable. For this reason God, or whoever for him, has made us quack and, consequently, producers of stories. Because every story is movement, and every movement is adventure, and every adventure is unpredictable.
We are weird inside.
(The first version of this intervention was presented in Genoa on 23 March 2007 at Quantestorie conference).
Previous episodes:
All lined up for three. The false and dangerous harmony of conformity
About Santa and the adults who never lie.
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