Exegesis

The Fall of Phaeton, James Ward 1839

I’m writing this letter from a hilltop casolare in the back country above Capo Palinuro. I’ve paid the ageing farmer a king’s ransom in euros. A fat stack of cash in exchange for this shack, a single bedroom, a sink, a cast iron stove next to a generous pile of wood. I’ve used another stack of cash to purchase a 916 Spider first matriculated in the 90s. I landed at the port of Naples on a cargo ship, dispensing stacks of cash along the way to guarantee the silence of those chanced upon. The irony of entering the country of my birth as a stowaway, the country I hold a perfectly valid passport for, with no outstanding warrants or tax bills or subpoenas or alimony demands of any sort at all is not lost on me. This is somewhat the entire point of this terminal caper. It is very difficult to disappear these days. Everyone keeps such diligent records of everything. In ancient times it was sufficient to pack some unleavened bread and a stone jar of wine then walk a week perhaps murdering a couple distant acquaintances along the road and you were home free, but today there are biometrics and chipped passports and digital fingerprints should you so much as look at a screen.

Ahh screens, those distracting displays of light that allowed me to delay the inevitable process that would lead me here by a decade or two. My screen time report was embarrassing, but so was everyone else’s. It is less embarrassing to be an addict in company. Not that we did much in company besides chase the dragon together, where one set of transient friendships were entirely fungible with another, and could be summarily dispensed with simply by not turning up one day and being forgotten, which is partially why I’ve taken all these steps to disappear cleanly. I won’t be a headline in someone’s feed for 15 minutes, or provide another with the opportunity to display a cathartic display of grief of “their” loss via a poignant post remembering some contingent detail about my consumer preferences they remember.

I have a special plan, see, a 916 Spider with failing brakes, brakes I’ve given an “assist” towards that failure, to use a soccer term, that interminably boring game that people around these parts demonstrate far too much of an obsession towards. There are cliffs, you see, cliffs without guardrails thanks to Italians and their sporadic attitude to risk mitigation.

Ahh sweet risk! That is another reason for my being here and for this harebrained plan. Risk is a probability distribution, a stochastic function. I know not the hour when my lord will come… nor do I know the hour when the brakes will fail, which makes my weekly grocery shop through those winding hills a much more thrilling journey than is reasonable under normal circumstances.

Ahh Normality! something I’ve aspired to and longed for and failed miserably to achieve. I’ve come to see normality as the result of the moulding of a life during its plastic phase, from childhood into early teens. Suppose you wanted to get avant-garde with child rearing. Suppose a combination of pride, envy, self-loathing and a few other of the mortal sins equipped you with a snarling disgust of normality. Suppose you saw children primarily as blank vessels for ideological indoctrination and took it upon yourself to rid them preemptively of silly notions of this “normality” and sexual shame and a sense of place and a language. The short answer is you’ll end up with someone they like to refer to as “interesting” at dinner parties who speaks half a dozen languages and also possesses a strong desire to experience weightlessness with a convertible Alfa Romeo.

The farmer has left me freshly plucked San Marzano tomatoes, the drying vines still clinging to the ripe fruit. We chat but my money guarantees his silence and his lack of curiosity about my presence here. He possesses none of that galling and too guilt free curiosity the protestants of the colonies possess, he’s delightfully too rural and provincial for that. His main concern was that the purpose of my strange request was to write in solitude, and that there will be no possibility of me inviting a gaggle of neo-romantic libertines over, running the risk of Crowleyesque nude rituals trampling his veggie patch at night or sentimental poetry being read to his highly impressionable 40 year old nieces who’ve been eyeing me with less than disinterested gazes. Those rascals.

Sweet women! They love the absence of normality in small doses. A little bit of strange to make the bitter pill of social reproduction go down. I am pleasant man, pleasurable man, a man of pleasure ostensibly. Women love my size, my slutty lips, exotic looks, a certain bad boy vibe. I aim to please, and they leave stupendously satisfied. I love women. Men would be fun to hang with too but they’re far too stiff and stoic and too concerned with all of the trivialities of life outside the bedroom like the sports and the podcasts and the watches and am I gay if I wear perfume in the office or how can I strut without swaying my hips like a homosexual? But women, the way they dress, the way they smell, the things they talk about, the way they give themselves up to pleasure. There’s always a whoops I did it again vibe to them, and I’m often involved. So it’s a pity when they wisely decide it’s time to come back to the fold of their surly, manly men and squealing kids and untousled hair and responsibilities and grocery shopping and ironing and all of that stuff they call “real life”. Best to leave the funny man with those lips that will lead me to ruin and get back to brass tacks.

See while I prepared to go airborne with my untrusty Alfa under the Aegis of Fortuna, I am not ready just yet. I have a friend who deals in military surplus equipment. I have some accumulated technical nous and far too much time on my hands. I have acquired a fighter pilot’s ejector mechanism, with a parachute and everything. I’ve put this into the trunk of the convertible, with the rip cord tethered to an altimeter ensuring that in the event of terminal velocity the parachute will deploy rendering my lethal flight of Icarus into a somewhat innocuous glide into the bay.

See I’ve met a girl, two of them in fact, beautiful both in their own ways. They love my Alfa, and I can’t help but take them for rides through the winding hairpin turns over the turquoise expanse of the sea. The brakes are a done deal, a deal I have made with myself and the goddess. But I’m not a crazy man or a cruel man, merely a sad one, and it is this conviction of character that has inspired me to seek out my suspicious friend in order to procure the parachute and save my sweet passengers the meeting with fate, for which I realise neither am I ready, as long as those beautiful curls continue to unfurl so breezily in the wind in my zippy Alfa.