EVERYTHING N FIRE

It's true I often burned my paintings, notebooks, books, I burned to forget that I was an artist. To forget the power to create from nothing. It was exhilarating, demeaning, tiring, it was destructive to me too. But my life was fire, fire lit every day. Now there is not even the ash left. I have burned souls, I have burned whole nights, burned words and loves. All together incinerated in a moment of sublime beauty. The green fire.
My green fire guided me. It was night, it was day and for me it was always life. But it doesn't burn forever. Eventually we turn off.
Eventually the coal becomes blacker. Very black. You find it in the walls, inside your inner walls, and you always get dirty every color you try to trace on your door. But Black crosses the threshold, reaches you, takes everything, burns you completely.

She was the one in the photo, holding a bouquet of flowers and a red hen’s crest on her head. It was she who acted among the frightened girls. Hamlet hadn’t hesitated either in his gestures or in his voice. And she continued to play a role that was not hers: the good girl who goes out of her way to meet her father’s expectations. A studious pupil, a caring daughter. Never any drift or dangerous friendship. Never any friends who are too annoying or a boyfriend who is too jealous. Never any of that. Only music and art, mixed with the tears that often bathed his pillow. He loved his mom and dad. He went out of his way to make them happy. And her little sister also loved and often played with her and never teased her. Growing up he had kept that naive and innocent look, that beautiful vivacity of one who has not known evil. Yet Hamlet knew evil from an early age, when a man took her innocence. Her nightmares were frequent and she did not know who that man was and she could never see his face. Maybe it was the shadow that appeared in her paintings or maybe she lived next to it without knowing that her executioner was the one who fed her. The executioner was always present. The executioner who had destroyed her at the age of 4.

The needs of an artist are different from all those of others. Of course an artist eats, sleeps, goes to the bathroom. He may have things and people he cares a lot about. May have interests and hobbies. But one thing distinguishes him profoundly from all other people: the need for stimulation. An artist feeds his art from himself and from what he sees, knows and experiences. Visual, mental and empirical stimuli are deeply necessary for every artist because in the absence of these his creative lymph dries up. In fact, if an artist is not put in the conditions of being able to have these stimuli that satisfy his needs, he will slowly fade away. His imagination, not being nourished, will become dry and will find it difficult to give him the input for artistic creation. Just as an animal dies in its instincts if placed inside a cage, an artist dies in his creative life if he is put in conditions that are not favorable to the expression of his artistic talent. Fantasy is like a plant and must be fed with the water of stimuli. If these are lacking, the substance for dreams is missing. It lacks the energy itself to create other dreams and other works. So for this reason it is sometimes said that an artist cannot live life like the others and the same things that others are enough cannot be enough for him.