House on the lock

By Andrea Calo'

Book Description

Wisdom is enclosed in the heart of each one of us. Serves only courage to bring it out.

Look inside; question your own conscience to have the hidden secrets held therein emerge. This is the key to understanding ourselves and the entire world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BadPress
• Release date: Jul 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781507147665

Book preview

NOVEL

House on the lock - Introspection

First Edition – July 2016

Original title: La casa sulla chiusa – Immagini di vita interiore

First Edition – September 2012 – Lulu Edizioni

© Copyright 2012 – Andrea Calò

@ e-mail: [e-mail]

ISBN: 978-1-326-73545-6

Andrea Calò

House on the lock

۩

Introspection

LULU Editions 2016

To my young sister Elena,

that for the absurd desire of Life

has never received a copy of this book

from my hands, to read it,

but she lives so deeply inside in my heart

to have been able to write it

acting through my hands.

[Elena Calò, May 1st, 1985 – September 25th, 2011]

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Writing a book is like going on a trip. You pack the bags, start from a precise point and proceed trying to reach the end point, the desired goal. But as sometimes happens during a trip, the pitfalls, mistakes, fears and contingencies are there ready to surprise us, to halt us, sometimes to the point of making us give up on continuing. With the help of people around us or of those encountered along the way, you can work it out, sometimes easily, sometimes with extreme difficulty; but no one ever sits on the mistake, so as not to lose the investment made. During this trip I had several people at my side, all urged and encouraged me to continue the journey, to realize the dream I had kept in a drawer for many years, allowing me to completely open myself to it, to my project.

Thanks to my wife Sonia who most of all believed in me, always, for the patient proofreading she engaged in from the early stages during the preparation of this text. Without her, this book would not exist today.

Thanks to my brother-in-law Enzo, for accompanying me in pleasing discussions on the topics covered in the book and for giving me a piece of his paper for it to become a section of this discussion: his clarity of thought has often guided me in helping to unravel the tangle.

Thanks to my parents, who gave me life, who brought me up and educated me, allowing all of this to become a reality.

And last but not least, thanks to you, Elena, for having educated my heart and guided my mind throughout this process: here there is really a large part of you.

CHAPTER 1

Every free spirit has within itself dreams and follies.

[Anonymous]

I always wondered how many blades of grass could be counted on a square meter of land. A simple question, but the answer is not insignificant. Too many variables to consider: which field is part of the piece of land, which grass grows there, the variety of species present, the type of land and so on. These are only some of the many possible questions. Therefore, I have always shunned any attempt to study the topic, convincing myself that, in the end, it was not so important to deal with them. Not being able to classify my life in any way, I filed everything under ‘Useless Knowledge’. It would be nice to be able to know everything about everything! But it would also be dangerous and, for my part, I would find myself completely uncertain at the mercy of every situation in my life. With too many variables available to me, all my eventual choices would find their opposite plausible and measurable, slowing my decision-making process and leaving me in any case doubtful in the end that I had made the right choice. It would extinguish instinct in favor of reason, not always recognized as the best tool to overcome every situation in life and capable of leading to the correct choices. The meaning of what is right, then, is entirely relative and linked to people, the experiences of these, the historical past. And it is unfortunately, without any distinction, forced by the fashions dictated by the community, social and by Religions, without. People are formed who fit a ‘system’, when it should be the exact opposite. I would live my life as a small man at the center of a fence, and tied to it with lots of rubber bands. I might move within the space assigned to me but I could never go beyond, constantly dragged into the middle of each of my attempts to look or try to experience ‘over’ the border. So now I choose to dedicate my neurons to the really important things in life. What are the really important things? Here’s another entirely relative concept, bound as it is to personal priorities, to stimuli, feelings, emotions of each of us. The brain is easily able to be intoxicated. When it reaches its limit, it is imperative for us to stop and look within, rediscover and question our mind without worrying too much about the past that led us to this point, to draw our future near with serenity. Change route, if necessary, and clean it well. No need to advance too far with thoughts and projects, because too many events are beyond our control, they make fun of us and those that are not in the least predictable in the moment you are looking at and they speak to us. They belong to the sphere of the unknown. Need to change! I not only refer to a superficial cosmetic change, I am speaking about a profound action, radical and immediate, able to dig into the deepest bowels of our humanity, where the truest part of us dwells, where the human meets the divine in all its forms and labels. Clear everything and start from scratch, this is the challenge. But it is as simple as guessing the exact number of blades of grass contained in a square meter of land in a field.

The skies of Burgundy have a special light and their color envelops and captivates, even when the weather is bad. If you stop and lie down on the ground to admire them looking upwards, these skies will fall on you and surround you, making you levitate. You don’t perceive boundaries; you can lose yourself totally and release the most varied thoughts. And just where the sky gives space to the valley it unfolds a mosaic of multicolored plots of land, ranging from the pale yellow of ripe wheat to the deep green of the topmost vine leaves. Here and there are grafted the dark marks of the tall trees, further stained by the shadows they produce with their thick foliage. All this is drawn on a soft, to the sight, undulating terrain, sometimes flat and others kindly laid on gracious high ground where the inevitable castle rises. At the foot of the heights of the small medieval villages with their churches, the adjoining cemetery and irrigation channels complete the beautiful bucolic picture. And the image of a time is now part of a distant past; so far away that in most cases it cannot be fully or completely understood. The narrow streets and dirt roads deep in the countryside trace similar paths made by drawing freehand. They form a perfect plot, able to connect all villages to the others, like a giant spider web. The rural houses are typically made of stone, are like the nodes of this canvas, mark the reference points for travelers intrigued by the simplicity of a reality of life that still exists in this silent countryside. Majestic in their vastness, with the typical beauty of French buildings of the twentieth century, because of the stone they are made from, for their continually vibrant colors, because of the shaded wide doors and windows in wood and wrought iron, regularly refreshed with varnish and enamel paint in pastel shades. Many of these buildings are home to thriving species of ivy, climbing to the top of the typically pointed roofs on which sprout the gifts of skylights. I imagine the panorama that can be seen from up there, as the last image in the evening before going to sleep or at the first gentle awakening the next morning. The branches that follow the profile of the walls sometimes brushing the windows; are twisted tight around the many chimneys in the hot season and then leave them in the winter, when the fireplaces are lit. Where the ivy does not cover the walls, fresh stains of compact moss complement the natural painting of the facades facing north, as if they were raw cloth patches sewn on an old crumpled dress. In many others, colorful blooming of roses, cyclamen, wisteria and jasmine stands proudly by a bed of grass, red poppies and thick clumps of lavender. Wild herbs, however, cured and scented complete the image of simple, but at the same time, relaxing, cool gardens. Horses and oxen are left free in the fields, stay far from the sheep and goats that prefer to gather in groups and spend time resting in place, eating a sprig of fresh grass once in a while. If we stop to look at them closely, they respond with slow and sleepy eyes, half-closed and with minimal movement, bored, totally unconcerned by the external presence, with no warning of any risk or imminent danger. Certainly, their order is no different from that of the others kept closed in huts and narrow fences, but undoubtedly the quality of their existence cannot be minimally compared to that of their closed in likenesses. For this reason, according to many, their meat is good. Time seems to slow down as well as the rhythms of life and emotions. Everything stretches out everything opens. Awareness of your problems dissolves and you focus on what is empty, almost unreal in a material world. I stop to look at a field that pushes the eye to the visible limits; I see the horizon. I cannot go beyond with the senses because the eye will not let me, but my mind exceeds the limit in an instant by painting in before me the intangible image of the continuation of this landscape. I feel so small in the midst of this vastness, but perceive an unending sense of security and inner fulfillment, a feeling that I have rarely felt before in my life.

I chose to spend a few days in Burgundy to relax with my wife and forget the noise of city living for a while. It’s all so different here. In the city every now and then the desire for detachment comes over me. The everyday places annoy me like the most irritating itch, people do not satisfy me much and I am overcome by a desire for insolation: as if the only possible reconciliation can only come from the absence of city noise and of its inhabitants. Often I feel, in these moments, like focusing on the small details of a landscape: the start of a climb in the mountains, the window of a house that overlooks a lawn, a bench placed next to a country fountain. I feel that there noise is transformed into sound, combines and integrates