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1992-09-02
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TITLE:THE QUEST FOR ME by MACNO
PALETTE:0223 0dcd 06ba 0ace
BRUSH:01
THE QUEST FOR ME
by Macno
For a life I've looked for myself.
When I was young everything seemed already planned for me.
Childhood, studies, work. Some powerful and friendly hands were preparing
everything for me, I had just to follow the path.
When I was at the university, I thought that I had reached a good knowledge of
the world, of life, of human relations.
I had definitely known that what I was, how I was, was just the result of the
experiences of my life. I was the mirror of my life, of my society of my
culture. I thought that I could start to see things in a different way, more
detached, clearer, closer to reality, to their essence.
I had a rational mind, not violent or evil.
I already knew what I could expect from my life, I admired the guys who had the
guts to travel around the world, but I thought that my life had to stop in a
normal town, doing a normal work and cultivating my hobbies and my mind.
I was sure that I could find myself and the meaning of my existence in a normal
life of a normal civilized guy.
The world was something fixed and planned, there wasn't the need to cross it all
to discover it, I didn't need to go to India to find myself, as a friend of mine
used to tell me.
The studies finished, I had to face life in its hard side, the mindless times
were over. I looked for a work for two years. There was the crisis, they told
me, it's difficult for everybody to find a work.
The life of an unemployed was empty, I were losing the friends of the university
and the juvenile hobbies, I was losing social contacts and hopes.
Then my mother died, she was the one who was keeping the things to go in the
proper way, my father had died some years before. I was alone, with a brother
distant in the space and in the mind.
I decided to leave, to give up with the world which had fed me since my birth, I
decided to live what I had seen on movies or listened from the stories of known
people.
I had to leave Italy, to leave the country which was still my cradle at 25
years.
I decided to kill my previous life and to build a totally new one, in the hands
of fate, without any certainty, without any home.
From zero to the arms of the world.
I travelled to Scandinavia, I thought that that was my dream world, the people
are more honest, the society better, the culture sober. I stood there for two
years, working in many different places but without really knowing what poverty
means, I still had the money I took with me from Italy.
Then something happened, I realized that after all there wasn't much difference,
I still had to fight for money to survive, that wasn't a thing I liked.
I went to India, the dream country of the hippies of the sixties, I thought that
there had to be a reason for that.
I stopped there for ten years, ten long years in a inferno of different people.
There is something completely crazy in India, something that escapes from the
mentality of the western man, of which I had always the roots.
It's a mixture of cultures, people and religions of different types, it's so
full of contradictions. For ten years I tried to find the peace of my mind but I
had only obtained misery, violence and a daily battle for everything. I saw
people dying for starvation there, I saw brains completely destroyed by drugs,
the same drugs which had to open your mind, according to some badly informed
hippie.
I lived for ten years without a real home, I travelled from place to place, till
I realized that I had to change my life again. To go back to the kind of life
which was devised for me, to my occidental roots.
I reached the United States of America after a long painful travel by boat.
Finally I was there, in the heart of the "civilized" world, in the arms of the
world. I was 39 and I had changed much. I was no more the young student who
believed in reason and didn't like violence.
I had killed a man in India, I had had to fight, to battle, to see blood
flowing. The world had made this of me.
I went to the west coast, where the sun could shine high in summer. I started
to work as a waiter, it was a decent job and it allowed me to stay in the same
place for some time.
I stood there for eight years. I had found an humble home, I had
found a work and I thought that this was just a momentary thing. I thought that
I had just to collect some money in order to keep on travelling, to look for
other places where I could finally find myself, where I could give a meaning, a
sense to my existence.
But I was tired, I was tired of travelling, of looking for a bed, a piece of
bread, an half job. Eight years. Eight years delaying a decision that seemed
too hard to take, eight years waiting for what, inside me, I already knew.
Eight years thinking about future projects without living the present, without
living at all. Right in the heart of the world.
I decided to go home. To come to my real, only, unique home. The place where I
was born, the place that unconsciously had always filled my mind since the first
day I left it.
I came back to Italy.
It was much worse than when I left it, it had pollution, crime, corruption.
The same persons were changed at my eyes. They were detached and alien, they
didn't seem my own patriots.
I was already on the decaying half of my life, I had left behind me youth and
hopes, my eyes could just see the things of the present, the future was just a
grey polluted fog.
I went to my hometown, I can hardly explain the sensations I had seeing it
again, walking in the street where I lived for 25 years, trying to recognize the
buildings that had built my childhood, the signs of my times.
Sad and sweet nostalgic tears were filling my eyes while thousands of different
memories, which I believed lost forever, came back to my mind, while I was
trying to see past, distant, lost, known faces in the eyes of the persons
walking by.
I went to the cemetery. It was changed, it was different, I tried to look for
the tomb of my mother, to find the sign of my presence in these lands.
I walked for hours, looking tomb after tomb, I felt the sun leaving my shoulders
and when I was compelled to leave the graveyard a huge, unsustainable sensation
of emptiness came down on me.
I was there, while the evening of a summer day was accompanying romantic
couples, walking in a park without understanding.
While the moon was facing pale and indifferent the events of life, I realized
finally what I had done. My utter mistake.
I had tried to find myself travelling around the world, I had tried to cut the
ties with my past and I had found that they were the only ones that had built a
major part of my same personality and that could give a sense to it.
I had decided to change my life too late, when the hands of my roots had already
moulded my mind, for a life I looked around the world for what I could find only
in the places where I was born.
I was made there, there I had to find myself.