Fabrizio De André
Non al denaro non all'amore né al cielo

Years pass and those phrases return, those characters settle in our memories, and every now and then we like to meet them again. Each of them owns a season of our hearts, I realize - each time a little more - that they live within us, are part of our stories. They are us, we are them. Living, mingling among the "people", we bring into the world, within our more or less broad horizons, a verb that becomes flesh in the daily gestures we perform, in the words we address, in the sensitivities we let filter through the harshness that would want to suffocate us.

The judge was a jovial presence among high school classmates. The large member and the heart too close to the unmentionable posterior gap. A deformed model in the soul, before in the body. It seemed impossible that a poet could say those things: in fact, as teenagers, it was precisely in those lexical freedoms that Faber's charm lay, the taste and search for an additional meaning lingered particularly around those titillating details. Like the whore of via del Campo, like the Gorilla. At sixteen, feeling different was primarily about understanding De André in his poetry mixed with humanity's dung. Moreover, it seemed to me that that liberation from the punishments of moralism was all we needed.

A few years later, the freedom and illusions of the university student seeped from the words of the player Jones. I didn't quite understand why, but that flute and those cadences stirred a latent nerve. A rustle of girls, a hoarse laugh. Who knows, maybe the dust and the melancholy accompanied a contradiction: the sadness and emptiness, the fields gone to seed, of someone truly free, a slave to none, yet in his own way a servant of his own freedom, of his guitar. "Playing is what you have to do your whole life."

In his making, man discovers himself a devoted servant of something or someone, indebted, entangled in dependencies of every kind, somehow in love with his own limits. The heart patient is me, it's all of us. "What do you lack to run to the meadow?" I ask myself every time I don't cross a threshold. The life narrated by the eyes is all that I punctually avoid, once an adult, conscious of myself and now able to understand, but not always to "catch my breath."

Authors like these cross our lives and must be savored over an entire existence. Each piece of poetry waits for its moment to bear fruit when it reflects upon the right experiences of our living. For years I traversed the journey between the hillside, the madman, and the blasphemer, eventually willingly reaching the psychedelic plots of the optician, but I partially neglected other moments.

Now experience is teaching me empathy towards the doctor. I no longer feel like a heart patient, I'm not afraid anymore, I've learned to catch my breath. This part of my life fits well with the will to "not betray the child for the man." My cherry trees to heal are the school children, in my heart a great desire to love, and around me colleagues who send me inconvenient clients. I hope not to end up "doctor professor swindler fraudster."