Sticky night leaving sweat prints on sheets. Your body is impressing. Two in this bed, but too hot for any touching. Roll aside (squish squish popping bugs from a past show), a truce now. I need to restore my energy, to breath, refresh. A warning sprayed on a mattress in the street says:
Xchange what is chased
in favour of a cleaner environment for me and my guests. I show through the tidiness of a parlour that I am not an infectious carrier, a trojan horse, I have my shit together. My bedroom in the meanwhile, that’s another story – are you open minded behind closed doors?
Parasites draw the line between what’s the inside and the outside: a sieve hinders their siege. And we saved enough to buy an ergonomic tool, a prototype. Make ourselves a present that is so new that can’t be a trickster. It’s Clavileño, a flying wooden horse (lacking any detail, but we see a horse, a pin on its forehead). Close your eyes Sancho we are taking off. It’s full and thick and carries no secret. Welcome to a show of the 60s, a second wave and the so interesting so appealing domesticity. However, here’s the hoover, smash yourself. Woooooooooooooooooooooooosh. And you are either sucked gone into hyperspace Sanxo or else stuck in a HEPA filter. There’s your truce, celebrated by a gift too big to fit the doorway. Mistrusted warnings (Cassandra, Laocoon). Then be the doorway removed, then the ceiling, and wall by wall the house is gone. The house that’s the past and the future has finally left room for this present.
Beware of hollow things Chacho. Trust the full and not what’s holey.
If my memory does not deceive me, I have read in Virgil of the Palladium of Troy, a wooden horse the Greeks offered to the goddess Pallas, which was big with armed knights, who were afterwards the destruction of Troy; so it would be as well to see, first of all, what Clavileno has in his stomach.”
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, vol 2, chapt 41
Do you remember the Bidone Aspiratutto? I asked RM about it too, out of curiosity. While DIYing our family house at the lakes, I played with it while my grandfather, father and mother handled cement, electrical cables, shelves and tiles. Designed by Milanese Francesco Trabucco for Alfatec in 1974, it aspired to be the ultimate vacuum cleaner, and cool too, like certain contemporary Dysons. It was a tautology on wheels: a bin of sheet metal painted in military green, with the label (capacity, voltage, Made in Italy) turned into a stencilled logo, as if it was an army jeep, although in M*A*S*H version. A tank ready to annihilate the planet’s dust with its flexible cannon, a macho-ironic object that bypassed gender divisions, but not class divisions (worker/housewife). Certain patterns we introject, even without wanting to.
To dust I am allergic. Domestic dust is made up by half of human organic matter (hair and especially skin, on which dermatophagoides mites feed, thousands per gram, especially in beds), and then of animals and plants, and minerals, and even meteorite fragments. We breathe and ingest past eras and bodies throughout our lives. Our own bodies constantly crumble, recompose and evaporate, although we prefer to ignore the porosity (from poros, passage, orifice) of all boundaries. RM tells me that bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) use vacuum cleaners to travel, propagating from one office or apartment to another as they are cleaned up by domestic pieceworkers. Industrial vacuum cleaners, which promise the aseptic gift of cleanliness, are their Trojan horses: they become carriers of invisible Others, whose guests we become. In the dark, we dread their arrival, like nightmares (from lat. incubare “to lie on, to brood over”). Even the bugs and viruses that infest our computers use Trojans to enter, grow and multiply, invading the fictitious and sacred space of privacy. Many compartmentalizations between inside and outside are illusions, and it is salubrious for them to flake, like our skin, inhabited by the dermal microbiota (mites, mycetes, bacteria and viruses), the commensal that helps us get rid of dead cells: the higher the biodiversity, the fewer the pathogens. The gut microbiota (bacteria, viruses, fungi, protozoa), which makes up about 1 kg of our weight, regulates the production of neurotransmitters such as dopamine and serotonin, which in turn preside over memory, attention, pleasure, sleep, mood, empathy, creativity. The exchange of microbes between mother and newborn during birth and breastfeeding boosts their immune defenses. We are plural ecosystems and symbionts. Cleaning and cleansing, obsessively, does not protect us from complexity.
“The concept of “dirty,” like other emotionally significant abstractions with which it is connected – sex, birth, nourishment, death – has a history inextricably linked with changes in family life, in cultural representations of bodies and regulation of sex, and in organisation of work. Dirt is not a scientific fact, but a principle means to arrange cultures.” (Phyllis Palmer, Domesticity and Dirt, 1989)
The impossibility of setting barriers breeds invasion anxieties, ridden by those who preach demagogical repulisti (Latin, Psalms 42:2: quare me repulisti? “why have you rejected me?”), as clean-ups are called in Italian. Blindfolded, Sancho and Don Quixote are made to climb onto a winged horse of planks and convinced they can fly. In Folie et Déraison, Michel Foucault says that the madman is “kept at the point of passage. He is put in the interior of the exterior, and inversely. A highly symbolic position, which will doubtless remain his until our own day, if we are willing to admit that what was formerly a visible fortress of order has now become the castle of our conscience.” Clavilegno reminded me of Marco Cavallo. It’s a good story, I’ll tell it on the fly. In 1972, the patients of the psychiatric hospital in Trieste (then headed by Franco Basaglia) wrote a letter to the Province to request that the horse Marco, too old to still drag the cart for garbage and laundry, be saved from slaughter and retired within the facility, at the expense and care of the residents. The request was granted and an idea was born: that of a workshop developed by artist Vittorio Basaglia, Franco’s cousin, together with the residents, to create a Trojan horse capable of containing everyone’s dreams. In March 1973, in order to let the equestrian sculpture made of wood and papier-mâché, four meters tall, painted blue and mounted on wheels, move out of the room where it was built, a large window and a lintel were broken down. Through the breach, Marco Cavallo entered the city, bringing with it a great feast of bodies and their exit from the enclosure.