a strange way of putting the question of good and evil

 --- Perhaps my purpose is to emphasize that I have always been crazy from the beginning (I said); since early childhood, no shock has served to make me saner. The boy, abandoned from an early age, gave incontestable proof of his bad instincts, even stealing from the family of the caretaker who looked after his farm. Scolded by distant relatives, the boy persevered, stealing and pillaging more and more and, as if that were not enough, harassing the daughters of the country folk. Even with money, he preferred to live in apparent poverty, wandering on horseback along the country roads and committing petty thefts, fornicating with maids and betraying each of his relatives. Nothing was able to discourage his zeal for crime. It is at this moment that (it seems) he realizes that the worst crime of all was not to commit Evil, but to manifest it publicly. This is where he becomes a writer and a poet in fact (.) ------, I said, laughing at Liz's amorphous expression, because my words sparked sparks in her state of tension. Her fixed eyes sought in me something that would expose the scarlet lining of gabardine, the satin murmur of my voice. The slight tremor that ran through her shoulders also longed for that gust of wind in her ideas; for the preparatory game in which, recognizing herself in me after a certain approach, she would realize herself completely in my thought. But the novelty and the astonishing interest that the subject aroused in the deepest part of your being were the product of my intellectual vampirism, rather than of an authentic passion. ------ I think you have never spelled out your thoughts more clearly (she said); and, on the other hand, you have never trusted so much in this kind of discreet rapture, provided by the chance to paint the genesis of horror with such complacency, even revealing the "humor" with which you carry out the task, by invoking your childhood. The insistent repetition, both in you and in your work, is the procedure by which you distance your readers and yourself from the normal paths, in an artistic "parti-pris" of pure disgust for normality. Even laughing all the time, you are incapable of refusing the contagion of the bitterest spiritual demands, which free the spirit from the temptation of repose. A phantasmatic fury of nullification, of denial of the values ​​most attractive to society, gives the renewed painting of the same situations in your work a kind of completion. And the account of all these defilements generates a diabolical confusion in the public, just like the typical “comédien”, saving the narrative from the quagmire of ordinary thought, transforming it into an immense alternative avenue to it. His writings, many of them monstrous, are an extremely favorable starting point for his performance.

***

Suddenly the boy becomes a "scapigliati", then an out-of-control clown, and little by little there is nothing left in his life but action. Very rough treatment dedicates his life to him, and for a long time he is only able to see things with a peculiar hardness of heart. Almost like a "criminal", deliberately removing from himself all the ordinary arrangements of life and lame excuses, until he brutally simplifies everything and everyone. Or as Mr. Bertold Brecht would say: "Erst kommt das Fressen, und dann kommt die Moral". But that is almost presumption. Aristotle also said something like this: "First food, then Morals ---- You are what you eat". Aristotle, and not Bruce Lee, as is believed today. It is said that before he died, Plato gathered his disciples at the Academy to speak to them about the “Good”, the most intimate and obscure core of his doctrine, which he had never addressed explicitly. At the Exedra, none other than Speusippus, Xenocrates, Aristotle and Philip of Opposite were present. Expectation and nervousness. But when the Master began to speak, it became clear that he would only deal with questions of mathematics, geometry, lines and numbers, surfaces and movements of the stars, and, finally, the idea that Good was only the One. Not even Aristotle knew what to think. However, this is how Plato, who had always taught his disciples to be suspicious of the thematic treatment of problems, and who reserved a prominent place for fiction and myth in his writings, became himself an enigma and a myth. Today I understand perfectly why Humanity marks certain people with the sign of mystery. And the fact that they are enigmatic leaves such people with idiosyncrasies, amidst experiences of the "deforming" type, which give them, little by little, mastery and power, making them rise from passivity to action, from the formless and chaotic to the clear figure, or even from indecisive poetry to sumptuous and decisive prose. With their works, such individuals achieve a complete self-detoxification (.) -----, she said. Correspondences, of course: the term "deforming" indicated the changes that could be operated between the different lines, but, as in almost all the nomenclature of our New York Hades, it sounded like an extremely "loaded" term, in her mouth. ----- Of course I was deformed (I said) and a little obsessed too (.) Note that I am always talking about cursed poets, irresponsible adventurers, originality and dramatic individualities, cathartic possessions and psychodramas, epiphanies and hierophanies, and about the theatricality in famous people, from politics to art, of the forms taken by the spiritual efforts of each one, in his own personal struggle