http://english.aljazeera.net/programmes/general/2010/10/2010101113656323582.html
Boy this is some good stuff. Hard beauty. The secrete to neo-realism is it has no metaphorical dimension---it just IS. I sure would like to write like this video looks.
Some thoughts. The sound of the chisel driven into the mineral casement, contains the promise of a tiny motherlode breaking off. You can hear it ready to break loose. When it breaks, that is all there is to job satisfaction.
I am afraid nobody who hasn't worked at this level of struggle actually understands its great burden and great release. Kill yourself, but you get to the end of the day.
Of course the miner should leave his wife alone and draw his own damned bath, wash his filth away and return to her, with love and care, and the terrible rough touch that makes a man's hands incapable of love because they cause pain and not pleasure. I used to use a women's hand lotion, but it was not strong enough. You have to touch through cloth or hair because your hands are calloused, cracked, course, and have no beauty left to give. As such a life takes its course, your soul becomes like your body and hands and has such roughness, it is barely capable of friendship, let alone love of the kind that might be needed and enjoyed. I have to say only older women have the ability to see this struggle in themselves and in men. It is completely not available to the young.
Perhaps that explains the love of animals, like the baby goat in the household scene. I think we forget, now I tread on threatened ground, that women too, in their child baring, the roughness of that, and its tremendous obligation that weighs heavy on the soul undergo a similar rude transformation.
We are the beasts of burden, of reproduction and work, my hands and bitter soul resemble the cracked hoofs of horses and cattle, the pussy is the organ of reproduction worked to death to produce labor---and for what? God damned capital---fuck you. The great sadness of men and women is to watch their children go---and be destroyed.
Salud,
CG
ps. I want to write something in honor of the public health nurse. We were bantering about down at University and Sixth. What a pleasure. She was certainly no less political than any political you ever met. We enjoyed out time, she handing me form after form, me filling them out. I got two shots...what a fucking treasure that was. So I go to the billing lady, a heavy set black woman with pink eye glasses. Love those pink glasses, I said, she smiled one of those miracle smiles, and I followed with, you mean you enter these forms in the computer? Total cynicism, yes dear. The comedy of the real.