Progress and Peace, what a strange relationship: a forced coexistence due to a lack of space.
He’s a freelancer, chained to himself, she’s an housewife and, most of all, a mom.
He come back home tired, dragging himself and leave his dirty clothes on the floor, as if the nakedness of that parquet could frightened and pitied him – and so his lack of order become a shining act of humanity.
And a sock changes its essence, turning into a fine kashmir scarf, wrapped around a child neck; a child who had to fend for himself too often: two small and awkward arms trying to defeat the cold Baltic winds of solitude.
She undresses that same parquet with the grace of a woman who slowly slips her dress, gifting you with the shapes of her body. The rumble it produces is deafening like a shield that falls at the feet of the warrior, revealing to the candles the legacies of an eternal battle.
He, an insect trapped in a confier amber, able to radiate the whole world while staying still, fossilized in an unconscious melanconia. His unacceptable paralysis forces you to the illusion of some brief convulsions mirage, hiding the awareness of his limits. Immersed in the fog, she plows through the sea, closing her eyelids to protect her lovely irises, where the waters of the Black Sea collide with the Baltic Sea ones, creating an invisible and harmonious border entropy.
He pushes, she calls. Two needed cosmic forces: shoulders of Atlas able to support the insecure and shy steps of a small growing world. Capable of an aberrant deaf-blindness, he only lead his relationships in to the tactile one, sometimes exaggerating the tone of his caresses as she reveals at first glance the tricks of her magic love show.
Peace and Progress, living in a stone house, sharing the vision of a reportage. He lies on the armchair next to the stairs, not being confused by the metallic voices coming out from the tv screen, as ghost of another reality: his sitting pose is kind of submissive but do not scratch his hegemonic aura, warmed up by the golden sizzle of the fireplace.
She has to cove the friable skin of her hands with white cotton gloves, while she arms herself with needle and thread to stretch the weft of an embroidery – as a Penelope, waiting for her Ulysses to return.
He is Ulysses, He is Poseidon, He is Alcinoo, He is the Suitors, He, once got back on a new ship, is ready to live the final chapter of the book.
And here he is, dressed in rags for a last time, drawing the bow and covering the soil of Ithaca with the blood of his mistakes. Changed his clothes and resumed their love, Progress and Peace will be ready to give life to Development and Concord: brothers destined to watch eachother’s backs in the murky game of history.
By Antonio Floriani
