My mother was a fashion designer and always wanted to work but she lived in a country where men didn't want her to work. Men thought her fantasy was evil.
he wanted to dress black women in a country where they always wore dark colors and black. She fought to bring color to a sad country full of people who always judged her.
But she continued to create, she was always there for all those women who wanted to be not only dressed but also listened to. But men judged her badly because she put strange ideas of freedom to those women who were often treated badly by their husbands. I'm talking about a small town that wasn't as modern as it is today.
Those were bad times for women, and men expected women to all stay home and have children.
My mother had received the gift of creativity and she would design her own dress patterns in order to bring some happiness into the lives of those sad people.
But everyone made war on her and so when she met my father she was forced to leave her country because she understood that it was very difficult to destroy a tradition that had been going on for many years.
She was sad about her choice, which my father had requested, but she always went back to her country and took an interest in those women. She was a kind of fairy who wore beautiful things, who listened, who did magic with clothes and everyone loved her.
She passed on this creativity to me but I live in a country now where women only think about money, where they never smile and where they only think about buying dark and black clothes and I can't do anything because I'm judged and criticized and I feel very uncomfortable because i don't do the same things they do and i don't have any friends and i only listen to my cats.
What is the use of so much imagination if you can't give it to anyone? What is the use of creating so many things if I then have to keep them locked up in the attic?
Many parents think that being "friends with their children" is the right solution and instead they do nothing but spoil their children, give them everything, always justify them and even attack the teachers when they take them back. Parents need to be parents again!
The disaster happened from the moment parents lost their authority.
They have to say NO and not always buy things for their children, don't always give them everything, because they spoil and destroy them in this way, thinking that filling them with things is good.
Instead they destroy them by giving away items and clothes. Children have to earn their own things and learn to manage themselves too.
Mothers need to stop cleaning, washing and cooking for their children. They have to let them learn to do things and not do them for them! Mothers, start saying NO. It's the NOs that make you grow and you don't always satisfy all your children's wishes because you destroy them by giving them everything.
ildren need precise rules and not to have rooms full of things and clothes.
They will kick, they will get angry, they will yell at you that you are not good parents but let them cool off because this is the right way to educate them, that is by saying NO!
And they will learn to earn things little by little, over time, and not to have everything right away.
They will learn that in life they can and must go it alone and must know how to manage themselves, both with money and with their belongings.
Say NO and let them learn to live for real and rely on their own abilities. You are not always protecting, justifying and spoiling them. They have to take flight and the more you do all things for them the more they will feel bad in today's world.
I saw you again and I didn’t come to meet you. You were my best friend and now I don’t even know who you are anymore, I don’t know what you do, I don’t know if you’re engaged, I don’t know if you cry, I don’t know if you and your mother have made peace. We said goodbye in silence, when I greeted you I knew it would be for the last time. Nobody, you know, has ever said goodbye to me without my knowing it before, maybe I pretended not to, but I knew very well when the end had begun. It was with you when I told you that I had met a man and in the following months I have not cried for any quarrel I had with him. I didn’t call you to tell you he was a jerk, as he usually did. When you asked me how he was doing with him, I replied that it was okay, that for once, I had nothing to tell. I didn’t have the classic stories from “he didn’t call me and then I didn’t call him either and now we haven’t heard from each other for days”. It’s okay, I told you. It’s not possible, you replied. You believed that my good was also fiction, that I was lying to myself, that it was not me and I agreed with you “you will see that one day we would be here talking about it, about yet another man with mental disorders that I had”. But the days turn into months. And the months became twelve. And in that year I changed, changed for him you insinuated, my red hair had become blonde, my clothes were completely different. And instead, if we were still friends, you would have had proof of how wrong you were. You would have seen me buy six bottles of shower gel with the smell he hates, because it doesn’t matter, I like them. You would have seen me save money for a tattoo that he didn’t call too good. You would have known that when he told me he prefers blond I went to get myself a copper red tint. You would have known that I have a skirt that he defines as an old woman. I have always remained of the opinion that the best shopping you can do is with a friend. You never understood that he would never take your place. You did not understand that if they had asked me which “forever” I believed, I would have answered, without a doubt, between two friends and not between two boyfriends. I really believed in it when I told you that I wanted to share a house with you, so similar to me. And a thousand times I told you that if you wanted to talk over a coffee, Saturday would never be sacred to me. I would never have been the one of “I can’t on Saturdays” but “now we organize ourselves”. We had been friends for ten years and no man would ever replace that friendship. But you decided it wasn’t true and I have too much dignity to beg for love and friendship from a person who doesn’t want me anymore. And so gradually, our conversations became colder, almost circumstantial. I never looked for you and you did the same to me. The worst of clichés. But I don’t forget and I will never be mad at you. I will be nostalgic. There have been too many good things between us to make me angry. There are calls that lasted hours, I was on my cell phone, I hate it, so much alone with you. There have been whole afternoons at the Castello Sforzesco, walking through the park in autumn, not knowing how to dress in spring, complaining about the heat and then watching the snow. For years, many years. I saw you cut your long hair into short and then regret it. I felt you tired with a job that took you all day and I was close to you when you were without a job and you felt sad. I saw you in love with a wrong man and I didn’t tell you anything, I waited for you to notice. I would have been there. We spent the New Year in a taxi because, as usual, we had made up our minds on what to do at the last minute. We spent another New Year among the people and the following New Year instead at your house watching movies. You were there when they told me on the phone that my fears were correct and that he was cheating on me. You saw me change, not a man, you saw me completely lost after my first relationship and then you saw me completely lucid and merciless at the umpteenth relationship gone bad. You were there with me in the disco and you were there when our evenings became quieter and the evening ended with an aperitif and it was no longer going on all night. It was you, not a man. No boyfriend would take your place. I didn’t come to meet you because I didn’t want to destroy what was left of you.
Prof: I'll ask you a question: why do you think humans are often led to suicide?
X: because it has too many problems.
Prof: and why do you think he has these problems?
Me: because of the company.
Prof: how sorry?
Me: the company. In my opinion this is the cause of all the losses that have occurred in recent years.
Prof: and here you are wrong. Take a person with depression for example, he kills himself because it is the depression that leads him to do this.
Me: yes ok, here we are, but before thinking about depression, wouldn't it be appropriate to think about the causes of all this?
X: in what sense?
Me: have you ever wondered why a person often resorts to suicide? Take this person suffering from depression for example: at first he had a good job, a house, a wife, children, everything in short. One day he is summoned by the director of the company where he works to inform him that due to various problems, unfortunately, layoffs are underway and among these there is also his name. Initially, the man remains a little upset but in the end he thinks that in one way or another he will find another job to feed his children. So he strives to find it. A day goes by and nothing.
Two days and nothing.
Three, nothing.
Four, nothing.
A month goes by and still nothing.
Children need things for school. The clothes for the holidays, because you know, we are boys.
The refrigerator is empty.
The bills are payable.
And that's where the real problems begin. The wife has her own needs. Children are teased at school because of their clothes, their worn out pens.
At that point, man feels a prisoner of hunger, of the desire for money, of the fear of a still uncertain tomorrow.
The wife leaves him.
The money isn't there yet.
There is no light at home, no water, no electricity.
The children do not speak to him. Friends despise him or at least treat him as if he were junk.
The man is alone.
He drinks.
It gets drunk.
He's out of money.
Society doesn't help him.
Friends don't care.
The children hate him because it is only because of him that they are targeted by their peers.
He falls into depression, a severe depression.
Is tired.
Alone.
Weak.
He kills himself.
This is what society is. We are society and if today the word "society" is synonymous with "suicide" the fault is ours alone.
Prof: exactly
Every time I find myself in a new place or even if I just wander around I start to scan the places and imagine what it would be like to live there as a bum. So I look for corners to shelter, where I could escape the elements, ways to get food, money or clothes, possible companies and I analyze, weighing how hard it can be, I study the movements of those who already lead this life. I have lived in Palermo for most of my life, it is a city full of people, sunny for most of the year, one of the most trampled by tourists in the world, perfect for life as a stray. And vagrants (it’s not a sarcastic joke) is full of them. I have lived for quite some time near the BALLARÒ market district so I have really seen many, many, everyone has their own style, everyone has their habits, each their dignity and even the pet can vary, too in Milan, in the Cenisio area, a vagabond had a beautiful rooster as a pet, enviably kept, well fed, beautiful shiny, proud, you went shopping and found him in front of the supermarket wandering with his head held high. Seeing some of them made your heart cry, while others, it seems ugly to say, made you hate the life of a privileged student. There were days that I met one under the house, he was always on the bench and sometimes I stopped to exchange a few words and he spoke in dialect and I gave him my best drawings because they were more precious to me than money. Then sometimes I would bring him some hot food cooked by me, typical things of my country. He was fine, calm, serene, he talked about math and plants and he knew about it and I went to the Ethiopian shop on the corner and bought him some colorful blankets, some sweaters and some flowers because I wanted to cheer him up. He didn’t want to live in the dorm. A wandering woman, on the other hand, was sad, she was always sleeping at the station, alone, downcast, I think she was actually a woman who had lost her job and always carried a suitcase with her, with everything she owned inside I suppose. I saw her every morning and I very much hoped she would get away from there, I was afraid they would beat her. When I saw her sleeping, I left her a plastic container with hot food. I had a house, or rather a room, tiny but for me it was a lot. I led a life where the only time I expected was the night to study in silence. I didn’t know who ate and dressed in style and I wondered what it would be like to take courage in both hands and stop the life that I had never wanted, not even imagined and give up everything, be left with nothing.
I don’t know if any of you have a chest or trunk where you keep your memories. Sometimes the door of the past opens and many things related to our childhood come out. I opened the trunk of my memory and what I found is beautiful. My grandmother had this trunk, which was actually a chest, which served as a coat rack and bag storage, on which we children sat and imagined driving a carriage, complete with a simulation of the noise of the horses’ hooves, beating the timed heels on dark wooden board. This trunk, however, escaped its textbook location because it was in the corridor and did nothing but feed our curiosity as city children looking for new pastimes with which to pleasantly fill the long afternoons spent at grandmother’s house, slippers with heels and television on those TV programs that she called “useless things”. Although curious, we were not used to approaching the trunk in the corridor too frequently because we felt a sort of awe, most likely infused us by our parents, since inside there were “grandmother’s things that if you touch them she realizes and gets angry “. But one day I took courage and asked my grandmother to show me what was hidden in the trunk. She opened it and in the midst of letters, my grandfather’s military clothes, old newspapers and strange objects, photos of her past came out. I looked at that world in black and white and I wondered what colors the clothes and eyes of those people who unconsciously stared at me immortal from the photo cards had had. I asked my grandmother for the names of multitudes of objects unknown to me, information on their function, on what they had done, if the iron was really as comfortable as it seemed from the relaxed expression of a relative portrayed in the moment of starching a shirt. squares with an indecipherable color. And my grandmother promptly answered all my questions, standing, elbows resting on a round table now full of photographs; she seemed younger to me and it was easy for me to see in her the signs of that girl who survived the war.
I was an artist, in my past, I abandoned everything. I am Italian and Italy is the cradle of art but we modern artists have no value and are not considered. Art is dead, it is not even sold in thrift stores. Nobody wants art and books. It is a company that has lost its sense of beauty. I also created jewels, bags, all sewn only with needle and thread, all ecological to the maximum, but nobody wants objects and things not signed by famous people. I hate this destructive society, I hate living in this place where art is deemed useless. Art is completely useless. (!?) There is a paradox in this statement that crosses different aspects of living. From the point of view of economic logic, art has no value (… and be careful not to confuse the accidental usefulness of the work of art), and it is for this reason that the evaluation of the work of art is almost entrusted to discretion. of the operators of the sector, which in any case has no practical basis except in the research paths that distinguish it. This is the difficulty of the artist when he tries to quantify the value of his own art, confused between the value of his own creative force and the product of this work, finally also unwittingly resorting to recognizing the canons of the art system. For these reasons, the artist’s image is often distorted and associated with bizarre behavior and in any case of economic unreliability. The artist is often torn between the need to express all his expressive / artistic potential and that of obtaining a sufficient livelihood income anyway. The problem is that the two are complementary and it follows that chasing the first solution leads to distancing from the other. However, although art does not correspond to an economic value, it still has an exchange value and the person is often the bearer and component of it. Dressing in fashion is an example of enjoying art. Before stating that art is useless, the person will have to stop and explain why he wears colorful clothes instead of being satisfied with the simple usefulness of clothing. Art does not bring practical improvements. However, it influences the psychophysical state of the person and therefore indirectly becomes the bearer of well-being. This is partly associated with the value of art. The contradiction arises from the fact that art is the expression of the gratuitousness of feelings, while its commodification is a mask placed at a later time that can hide its origin.
the first time I saw peter pan, the Disney cartoon, I didn't like it. it seemed to me insanely useless, a jumble of senseless dream skits: children flying, a villain who is bad because yes, and peter who doesn't know what he is, where he comes from and why he always smiles or almost.
but I don't live on the island that doesn't exist; and I grow up, and so it happens that I meet peter again and this time I see him differently. this time I see beyond his smile, indeed this time that smile looks more like a grin.
already because now I read peter pan as the "lost" son of a distracted mother who becomes the child who does not grow. all children grow up, except one, peter.
the story starts from an industrial London. a dark and famous city, where wendy and her little brothers live. it is a London with the first hospitals, where children were hospitalized and tried to cure them. so if a child was sick, his mother would take him to the hospital, she had no other choice to protect the child she loved.
it was however a big step forward, compared to a rural society, when the care was at home and many children died, all in their bed.
however, it was a time when there was no telephone and distances were not cleared with a couple of subway stops. the mother took the little patient to the ward, put him in the room, prepared him and made him wear pajamas.
then she put the dress and the shoes in a small closet. in the evening, she gave him a kiss and then went home. every Sunday she went to see him, hoping he was well. and maybe one Sunday they would leave the hospital together.
but there were also bad Sundays.
when a mother would come home bringing back only her son's dresses and shoes. of her child who died, who knows, a day or two ago. not in his cot, but on a stretcher
in limbo between one Sunday and another. Alone.
that's who peter pan is, with his suit made of autumn leaves and cobwebs, and who are his lost children. they are the children whose mothers were only able to get back clothes and shoes.
And the figure of this peter who has as a smile "a row of pearls" made exclusively of milk teeth becomes a sad image. pearls that should fall but tragically never fall.
And then it is no longer a coincidence that there is wendy to embody what the lost children have always sought. to be the projection of their mother. his is the voice that tells bedtime stories or consoles peter by singing him a lullaby, a motherly voice.
Wendy and the siblings, however, eventually return home, in their pajamas, just as they left their bed.
It will be a coincidence, but they remain in pajamas for the whole story, just as if they were wearing a uniform for little patients in the wards of a hospital. but at the end of the story they leave the Neverland.
They go home, to their home. they are not lost.
and peter pan remains confined in a useless limbo, with his eternal smile.
But maybe I just misinterpreted.
Ah, I forgot, a little curiosity: the author, sir james matthew barrie, on his death bequeathed the rights of the work to the great ormond street hospital in london, a pediatric hospital located in bloomsbury a few steps from where it is wendy's house was imagined.
Anyway maybe I just misinterpreted.
or maybe not.
In the middle of Kensington Gardens, next to Hyde Park in London, is a beautiful bronze statue of none other than Peter Pan. The work was created by sculptor George Frampton, and was installed on May 1, 1912. As the Times announced that day, “today there will be a surprise waiting for the children who will go to Kensington Gardens to feed the ducks. of the Serpentine ". A 6-year-old boy, Michael Llewelyn Davies, chosen and photographed by Sir James Matthew Barrie, the author of the famous fable who still has lost none of its charm, was used as a model to create the sculpture. It was Barrie who wanted that statue, and he wanted it exactly where in Kensington Gardens he had imagined that Peter Pan had come into the world. Well, once the opera was inaugurated, in the midst of the many amazed and happy children of this new "guest" in their playground, Barrie, looking perplexed, exclaimed: "Do not show the demon that is in Peter". How did you say, sir? Peter Pan? Demon? Two words that really cannot be more antithetical. Or rather, this is what led us to believe the fable that Walt Disney so kindly fictionalized and covered in honey, because the true story of Peter Pan and the true character of Peter Pan are drenched in drama, cynicism and anger.
the original plot and characters are far from fairytale, so much so that Barrie's book was originally intended for an adult audience. In the first and second edition, published respectively in 1902 (titled The White Bird and part of an anthology of short stories) and in 1906 (this time in an independent version and under the title of Peter Pan in the Kensington Gardens), the story takes place precisely at the Kensington Gardens, within which Barrie imagined the existence of a lake with the so-called Bird Island in the middle (archetype of the subsequent Neverland), ruled by King Solomon to whom prayers were addressed by women who wished to have a child. He, in response, sent small sparrows to their homes, which over time would turn into real children, after a period of indefinite length in which they live in a sort of intersection, in appearance and characteristics, between a bird and a human.
Among these, was also sent little Peter, who however, after just seven days in his new home, returned back to the island, more by instinct than anything else. Once again in front of King Solomon, he was punished by it and condemned to remain forever in that sort of hybrid state between a child and a bird, and unable to return to his home. But Peter manages to escape and go back to his mother, to find her, however, already with another child and totally forget about him. Peter then resigns himself to living his existence in Kensington Gardens, surrounded by fantastic creatures and other sparrows-children in the same situation as him. The addition of the name "Pan" is due to the instrument, the pan flute, which he would have started to play.
The image we all have of the mocking, rebellious but basically good and simple Peter Pan is the opposite of what Barrie had initially thought. Peter is a slave to a merciless and cruel destiny, which, relying on the natural curiosity and recklessness typical of children, condemns him to a life without primary affections, to be forgotten by his mother and severely punished by a sort of king-tyrant who condemns him. without the possibility of appeal. The resulting character is an aggressive and angry half-child for this doom, which makes him cynical and unable to look beyond his own interests. A tragic, almost heartbreaking figure, with an intricate psychology and who lives a Dionysian life with the exclusive desire to escape from the harsh reality of the facts: he has been completely abandoned.
Even now women are victims of a system that oppresses them. War is one of the many means by which the oppression of women takes place who are considered spoils, slaughter fodder, their abused bodies. This violence has no limits, it is the worst form that exists. Women who see their freedom canceled. Useless years of study. Unit sacrifices. Useless jobs. Useless clothes. Any free choices that women have made until now are useless. The war - and the men who fly it - have taken it all. They steal and erase female freedom. Men who have the power to annihilate women, their stories, their choices. The influence men have on women's lives is frightening. They are the masters and exercise this power of life or death with extreme wickedness. They are women whose life is over. Many will be sold. They will be given in marriage by little girls. They won't go home. They will end up in prostitution. They will be forced into the worst violence. And they will have to undergo everything in silence, in the blackest terror, without any hope.
I am furious because now I am sitting on my beautiful sofa writing a stupid papyrus which is useless, which will not help any woman. I'm furious because I can't save any woman with words. Because using a fucking keyboard is useless. And while I choose which stupid shirt to wear, a hundred other women will suffer and die because others will choose for them.
A strong thought full of pain and hope goes to Afghan women with the hope that one day the world will accept all of us women as an integral part and not as a category to be oppressed.
Germaine Greer wrote: "Women have only a small idea of how much men hate them."
Limited education, prohibition of certain types of clothing, restrictions on freedom of movement. To fall under the control of the Taliban again means this for Afghan women, who have taken to the streets to oppose the advance of Islamic fundamentalists. In the days when the foreign armed forces left the country, they marched along the city streets in the north and center of Afghanistan carrying rifles. The most popular demonstration in Ghor, where hundreds of women, marching with weapons along the streets of the center, chanted slogans against the Taliban. “There were some women who just wanted to inspire the security forces, only symbolically. But many others were ready to go to the battlefields, ”said Halima Parastish, head of the women’s leadership in Ghor, in the statement reported by the Guardian. “I and some other women – she added – we told the governor, about a month ago, that we are ready to go to fight”. “I don’t want the country to be under the control of people who treat women the way they do. We took up arms to show that if we have to fight we will do it, ”a reporter later declared.It is not obvious to say that war, like evil, only brings out the worst in people, capable of showing their true nature without hesitation, in a state of suspended judgment. The strongest oppress the weakest, it has always been like that. And in the whirlwind of clichés, one from last August 15th echoes more than the others. With the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban, women are in grave danger. Everything that the Afghan women are or have conquered is raided day after day, in an all-encompassing process of depersonalization; they are objects for man’s use and consumption, they must satisfy their pleasures and to define them as sexual.It is not obvious to say that war, like evil, only brings out the worst in people, capable of showing their true nature without hesitation, in a state of suspended judgment. The strongest oppress the weakest, it has always been like that. And in the whirlwind of clichés, one from last August 15th echoes more than the others. With the takeover of Kabul by the Taliban, women are in grave danger. Everything that the Afghan women are or have conquered is raided day after day, in an all-encompassing process of depersonalization; they are objects for man’s use and consumption, they must satisfy their pleasures and to define them as sexual.Islamists have given “numerous warnings”: women and their families are threatened with death or torture if they go to work. The fighters do not warn twice, they go directly to action, staining even the most wicked acts such as necrophilia. All this seems to be confirmed by the warlords’ order to hunt girls aged 12 and over to make them sex prisoners, after the surrender of the Afghan government and the abandonment of the last US military troops. Rape, in reality, could only be the beginning of a long hell. Then, after the sexual violence, the same can be sold or sold as part of some commercial negotiation, such as weapons or drugs. Omar Sadr, who is a professor of politics at the American University of Afghanistan (no one knows how much …) argues that “the Taliban fighters feel authorized to do all this on the basis of their rigid interpretation of Islam, which sees women as kaniz », that is as a commodity.
“Be the anomaly. The aberration. The error. The inconvenience. The diversity. The indecipherable data. Let them shake their uniformed heads while watching you. Let them be ashamed of you. Let them be embarrassed. Let them get angry. They will insult you. You let them do it. Let them make fun of you. Let them point you. Let them laugh. Resist their mockery. Be their victim, their laughing stock. Be a resounding failure in their eyes. A tiger does not lose sleep by caring for what sheep think. Go on. Be the scar on their way of seeing things and their normality. They will hate you. They will fear you. They will want to be like you ”.Resilience is the strength of people who, despite being injured, consider themselves not victims but users of their own resources and are preparing to recover the resources necessary to face the future with planning hope. The word resilience (from the Latin resiliere, to bounce) in physics indicates the property of materials to return to their original shape after having suffered a blow. In sociology and psychology it highlights the human capacity to overcome the difficulties of life with elasticity, vitality, energy, ingenuity. Resilience is the ability to face risk factors, to get up after a crisis, stronger and more ingenious than before: it is the ability to overcome the injustices of life without succumbing.Do you know what the truth is? That people fight only for themselves. Yet the best wars are those that are fought for others, because there is the strength of an ideal, pure, and not of interest. No one fought for me. I never understood what it meant to be strong, until I was left alone and now that I’m fighting the world I don’t need a hand from anyone, because the best enemy is someone I trust, but he will be the first to hit me from behind . So I realized being strong alone is the only solution.
The studies I have done
they will make you believe
that are all the grades taken at school,
I am the exam given
the debt to mathematics, the outdated thesis,
you will think I am the degree title
completed
the friends I've had
three little freedoms of my childhood
they'll make you think they know
where i come from, what have i done,
the fatal mistakes that I carry with me
and what rebellions
my ideal is composed
the car I drive
the clothes I choose
the premises in which I enter,
you will think they are excellent clues
to get to intuit
who I am
you will believe
that I am the flaws of my zodiac sign,
that besides the cheekbones, it also has all the qualities of my mother,
and that I think it
like the music I listen to
when heartbroken
I practice solitude in the bedroom
but what you glimpse of me
it is homeopathy of my experience
is a distillation of your imagination,
a tiny span of my infinity
served on the table of your little judgment
I am
everything
that you still can't see.
THE PRODIGY OF IDEAS 