This is what I'd like to say...

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling in the sky the message He is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.


Funeral blues by W.H. Auden

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Fermate tutti gli orologi, staccate la cornetta,
date al cane un osso succulento prima che si metta
ad abbaiare, zittite i pianoforti e al cupo segnale
del tamburo portate fuori il feretro, parta il funerale.

Alti gli aeroplani s’avvitino con voce di sconforto
scarabocchiando in cielo la notizia: E’ Morto.
Mettete un nastro nero al collo bianco d’ogni piccione,
fate indossare ai vigili guanti neri di cotone.

Era il mio nord, il mio sud, il mio ovest, il mio est,
la mia settimana di lavoro e il mio giorno di festa,
il mio meriggio, la mia notte, la mia parola, il mio canto.
Sbagliai a pensare eterno quest’amore – ora so quanto.

Le stelle non servono più: spegnetele una a una;
smontate il sole e imballate la luna;
strappate le selve e scolate tutto il mare.
Nessun piacere potrà mai tornare.


Blues in memoriam di W. H. Auden
(traduzione di Nicola Gardini)

Gone to find Gaddafi.

The world has gone crazy.

People are rioting in London. People are dying in Syria. The Nigerians and the Tunisians are busy stabbing each other outside my windows and the Italian militaries are now a permanent fixture on the streets here. Someone I know is lying in a military hospital in Afghanistan, daily reporting to me about the wounded that have been brought in.

And a friend told me: "I'm going to war. I have to go find Gaddafi before he comes and finds us". What do you say to a man who knows he is going to war?

The immigrant omnibus

There is quite a nice park on the other side of the city and next to the park there is a little gelateria, Vaniglia, with the best gelato that can be found here. I had two more bus tickets left so I decided to head that way to enjoy the sunny day outside.

Somewhere along the way two guys got on the bus but refused to pay the bus fare. The bus driver asked them to leave the bus, which they wouldn't do. After some arguing one of the guys started to get quite heated so the bus driver decided to calm the situation a little and continued driving, but the guy would not calm down. At this point the other passengers started to tell him to shut his mouth, which just aggravated him even further. These two guys were black, and I'm sure you can imagine how the argument went. The passengers were telling the aggressive guy "if you live in our country you have to follow our rules" - which is fair enough - to which the guy said they were Italian. Of course this provoked someone to say "yeah, you look so Italian too". This went on for a good ten, fifteen minutes, and at some point it really looked as though the aggressive guy was ready stab someone on the bus, he was running back and forth picking a fight and shouting.

To cut the long story short, eventually the police arrived, at which point the culprit had already left the scene and his friend, who most of this time had stayed quiet only occasionally defending his friend, but always in a civilised and calm manner. The police searched him and took him away. The aggressive guy got away with it, and I know it because I later saw him in the park.

I wanted to defend the friend, the guy who stayed calm, because at the end of the day he hadn't done anything else wrong apart from not having a ticket. It was hardly worth being taken away in a police car. But he was black and regardless of his words or the way he said them, he was guilty by proxy.

But here is the twist: as I looked around the bus, I saw one Asian woman, commenting to the woman in front of her (from some East-European country) how the guys got what they deserved. I saw three black women, one wearing a traditional African costume and speaking French (I will not start guessing which ex-colony she was from because my African knowledge is not quite up to scratch), and the two others dressed in a western way. There was also a woman who spoke Italian with a heavy Russian accent, she was the one telling the boys they were "not welcome in our country" if they couldn't respect the rules. And then there were two Italian men, two old Italian women, and me.

Even with my rusty maths skills I can tell that the majority of the passengers were immigrants. And they were very keen to tell these guys they didn't have a right to be there. At one point the more quiet guy, who spoke perfect Italian, unlike the Russian lady, said "do you think I would want to be there if I could have stayed in my own country?". The old Italian man told the young man he was not welcome and no one wanted him here because apparently they it was obvious he was not a good person. I wonder how this was obvious. The guy was dressed smartly and spoke in a very educated way. Don't white Italian boys ever travel without a bus ticket? I can assure you: they do.

Who's country is this in the end? We, the other immigrants, are prejudiced even though also we have come here probably in search of a better life, whether it be because there is an economic, cultural or political crisis in our home countries.

I agree, if you live in a country you have to follow the rules, but I can't help but feel bad for the guy in the white t-shirt. It seemed to me that the main reason he got dragged into this mess was that he knew the other man, and that he was black.

The beauty of the belly button.

As a continuation of my confused ramblings about democracy, my little head decided to look for unifying factors between us humans, rather than those that keep us apart. And what popped into my mind? We all have a belly button. Napa in Finnish. What a nice word, napa! Much nicer than navel or umbilicus in English. I would like to do some navel gazing now.

We all have one, generally speaking. We all at least have had one at one point in our life. It's something we expect to see if we see someone's exposed midriff. In fact, it is one of those things we don't much notice normally, but I am pretty sure if someone didn't have one we would be likely to do a double take. I back this statement up by the fact that the model Karolina Kurkova's lack of traditional belly button has been the subject of much speculation. On top of that they have actually had to photoshop a belly button onto her belly in fashion shoot photos (to avoid some people being horrified, I assume). Recently they have also published a study concerning Belly Button Biodiversity. This study found that there is a whole new world to explore in our belly buttons. So to speak. Not to mention the discussions on whether an inny or an outy is better, if cropped tops exposing our navels are indecent, belly piercings or belly dancing. There is much more to the belly button than meets the eye.

Some of us tend to do too much navel gazing, some of us probably don't do enough of it. The fact remains that no matter what colour, religion, cultural background or race you represent, at one point in your life you have had - and chances are you still have - a belly button. And this is just one, relatively insignificant part of your body which didn't serve any real purpose after your birth. At least it was quite insignificant until they found a whole zoo of interesting new bacteria living there.

Just consider this: we could spend more time looking for similarities, gazing into each other's navels if you wish, and less time looking for the differences. Isn't it quite wonderful how many things we people have in common?

Image: Ambro / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Democrazy

In the past couple of weeks, already much before the events in Norway, I more than once found myself asking my students whether or not Italy is a democracy. The response: invariably "no". This left me thinking.

What is democracy? This is how Merriam-Webster defines it: 

"Democracy a : government by the people; especially : rule of the majority b : a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections".

Officially and on the surface Italy was still a democracy the last time I checked - granted that was probably around the time I was still studying for my A-levels. I think most of us consider Europe pretty democratic, and even Italy has the typical signs: a constitution which in theory guarantees people equal rights, freedom of speech, elections and multiple parties to choose from etc. Some would also add, that there must be open and unbiased media.

We all know about a certain man's connections with the Italian media, what many of you probably don't know is that in Italy the TV channels have been divided among political groups. Basically one channel traditionally represents the right wing view, one the left wing and then one is for the centre and so forth. We can of course discuss whether this system works or not, but the benefit of it is that at least people can, in theory, get information presented from different points of view. However, the head of the local public broadcasting company RAI is chosen by the Prime Minister, who, as it happens, is also a major owner of the private TV. You see the problem? Needless to mention that this said man also controls a large lump of the newspapers.

Elections in Italy are free - to an extent. The parties choose who they want to put on their list and apparently, this is what I have been told and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, the parties are reluctant to add for example young people on the lists, thus the country is mostly represented by old dinosaurs who tend to be (personal opinion again!) much more interested in protecting their own interests.

So is democracy when a group of old men decide to pay themselves a huge salary while the rest of the country is struggling? If that is not democracy, why are the Italian people not resisting it more than they are? Well, that's opening a whole new can of worms.. Or is it democracy when a person decides that his beliefs are better than someone else's and kills close to a hundred people? Surely this is putting yourself above democracy. Acting like the rules, that the majority have accepted, do not apply to you because in your opinion the majority is wrong. Italy has big issues, but so do the rest of us.

It looks to me as though democracy in Europe is having to redefine and readjust. I have always considered democracy to be one of those things that Europe has been and should be at the forefront of. The question on everyone's lips now is: how far can you take your democratic freedom of speech? How far are you allowed to go? And who decides where the lines are drawn? Certainly people who decide that their holy mission of defending pan-European and Christian values justifies the killing other people are not flying the flag of democracy very high, but neither are the dinosaurs protecting their own tails (and wallets).

In the general elections in Finland this year the winners was undoubtedly the right wing. This made many people very unhappy, but the fact remains, that this is how a part of the nation voted. We may not like it, but the people had the freedom to vote as they wanted and this was the result. We can't ignore or annul the vote, that's not how democracy works.

I know this post is a jumble of this and that, but it pretty much represents what is going on in my head in regards to this topic. I just have a feeling something is off but I can't put my finger on it, or maybe I do not consider myself high and mighty enough to try to do so.

Image: Idea go / FreeDigitalPhotos.net