Anyone Knows Any Better
A deep thinker
exhales the smoke
from an unfiltered cigarette
I ask for their numbers
the women laugh at me
they whisper I walk away
escapades and epilogues
she lives there in a cloud
me ne frega un cazzo
enter the marketplace
secrets from her secrets
an itch that picks the heart
my dear friend Steiner
takes his children’s life
says bye-bye paparazzi
the house was bombed
like the way we ran away
and the debts we never repaid.
© 2014 Rob Schackne
Photograph: Arturo Zavattini /Solares Fondazione delle Arti (1960)
Film buffs will recall these lines of Steiner's:
ReplyDelete"Sometimes at night the darkness and silence weighs upon me. Peace frightens me; perhaps I fear it most of all. I feel it is only a façade hiding the face of hell. I think, `What is in store for my children tomorrow?' `The world will be wonderful,' they say. But from whose viewpoint? If one phone call could announce the end of everything? We need to live in a state of suspended animation like a work of art, in a state of enchantment. We have to succeed in loving so greatly that we live outside of time, detached."
Steiner is usually described as a weak intellectual, someone afraid of his convictions. Realistically of course, he is, as Fellini puts it, the very worst villain. I would however place him with Camus' anti-heroes, those who have far too much faith in their convictions, whose moral universe is without hope, whose despair over the human condition impels them towards nihilism -- and where the detachment leads not to love but to murder and suicide.
Only my opinion.