About Cups and What Springs from Translation.

Giorgio Morandi, Natura Morta 1948

Some days ago, I was scrolling through the Ikea app looking for cups worthy of substituting the ones I had – with deeply worrying and hopefully not premonitory consistency – shattered on my kitchen floor over the past two dopey mornings.

Boring days go by. The existence of my purchase, which – as you do – I totally erased, presented itself to me through the ring of the kind but unknowingly loud portier interrupting my still July-like and unresponsible sleep – it’s already September – by handing me the forgotten Ikea box. Only now, sympathetically staring at my barely functional self, did he understand that his daily task shocked me like a cold 4:AM shower. Still yawning, I mechanically set those new cups of mine on the kitchen shelf. There, they remain untouched, soulless, awaiting to prove their worth by quenching my caffeine thirst.

I recently thought of them and the box they came in – warning me of the fragility of its guts which they in fact seemed to lack, for they were purposefully selected to be immune from my carelessness – as I was strolling down the vanguard-filled rooms of the ‘900 Museum, which I visited to welcome myself back to the foggy city – it’s a myth, I cannot recall a single truly foggy morning.

Routinely, I end up stopping upon Giorgio Morandi’s still lives, hoping this time they will reveal some truth I felt they still withheld from me. As my sight readjusts to normality after tiring itself by trying to recompose shapes of knights and drinkers Boccioni shattered on the floor just like I did to my cups, I start losing hope. Every time I stare at those damn paintings a wet-wooded and feeble flame of anger starts burning in my chest. I cannot for the life of me figure out how, in the overwhelming and numbing excess of interlude-like studies of oranges and flowers and cups and bottles museum halls overflow with, well those, consistently and inexplicably, incite dormient tears to try and make their way out my repressing eyes. I tell myself that maybe this time it was happening only because Dylan hoarsely but gently sang of how in museum walls infinity goes up on trial, which played in my ears as I subconsciously dove into that brown and bright and immense yet flat kitchen. The anger is soon forgotten.

Something and nothing, camera roll

A couple of minutes go by, maybe more as Johanna and her Visions are now long gone, and I, still wondering why, start walking out the room, ready to leave those paintings behind. But this time, maybe, trying to greedily satiate my doubts, I linger on those annoying wall-printed-paragraphs where critics pick tidy, well-informed and frustratingly fitting words about whatever hangs on the wall, that I stubbornly avoid to protect my own dumb, incomplete, and not quite right nor unique opinions. Anyway, I see a quote from Carrà who somehow – I hope not effortlessly – formulated this concise thought on how Morandi’s vases were in fact timidly radiating a sense of concealed intimacy. I admit defeat, recognizing that was the true shape of the previously clouded and scattered thoughts I had been unable to defog on my own.  

On my way back home, this is all I can think about. I guess I never ignored that one could feel such a strong connection to an object, as I myself had a couple that, paired so inextricably with images and sounds and places from the past, I would never bring myself to leave behind. But of the cups and bottles on Morandi’s kitchen table, or better, of their material and existing form, I could not care less, let alone feel that intimate bond Carrà was rambling on about. I never held them once. In my mind, the borders of their shape were already blurry. Now walking faster, I grumpily jump to the conclusion that they most likely did not serve any purpose so essential as to deserve the privilege of immortality they were bestowed with.

Yet not even twenty minutes before, their Translation into oily brushstrokes was so undeniably, inexplicably and paradoxically warm to me. Was it just a trick of Morandi’s trade, or somehow a deep ontological truth about all objects that I was just too distracted and shallow to unearth?

I am now holding the keys of my house, so close to peace and yet still accompanied by this gusty storm of nonsense looming above my head. Perplexed by how my brain is uncontrollably coming up with all this, my sane self finally utters “please stop philosophizing about a bunch of cups you are going insane,” and yet I have to see it for myself. I anxiously walk into the kitchen, afraid of what I could soon be feeling. As I open the drawer, a forgotten and soothing wave of silence washes the noise away:

The cups still look insignificant.