Rome burns

“Rome is burning,” I thought as I lit a cigarette. Not because it really burned, but because something inside me—perhaps the old customs, perhaps the rituals that sustained us—seemed to be slowly burning away. Customs, without context, become obsolete, and lose their validity, and are transformed into pagan liturgies, into prayers in the air, and they pile up, and are piled up in scraps and scraps that are of no use. The customs are the echo of what we used to do, Chinese shadows cast on peeling walls. And among the customs that are lost, there are memories that scratch the mind; like seeing someone remove an earring or comb their hair with a brush, seeing a nose wrinkle or a suppressed smile after a bad joke. Things, freed from the gaze of others, lose meaning.

Suddenly it becomes urgent to dampen the echo, to fill the air with something – anything – and make it occupy as much space as possible. I always tried to live, like Flaubert, in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit breaks against its walls and is bringing it down. And perhaps it is inevitable: towers, like customs, also burn. After all, memory is a minefield of memories, songs and loves stripped of subject matter that take on a life of their own. The rest remains the same – same furniture, same faces – in this geometry altered by absence, but everything seems out of place.