The Unicorn Writer ☁

We Are Shaping Our New World

We are the future. Not everything is sorrow. It’s up to us to pay attention to the suffering. But we must be a positive renewal.

The newspapers have never been so interesting. Tens of articles per day, a powerful mix of curious, disturbing and hopeful. And one hundred more qualifiers.

The pandemic has a huge positive side.

Actual World has everything you ever imagined experiencing through speculative fiction or movies, hoping reality won’t kill you.

Apart from overcoming our fears, what artists were aiming to deliver was insight, even wisdom. Direct experience is superior. While before we thought to know, now we know. And in hard times, tough people arise as our First-world grandparents could tell us after living a war.

“The Chinese use two brush strokes to write the word ‘crisis.’ One brush stroke stands for danger; the other for opportunity. In a crisis, be aware of the danger. But recognize the opportunity.”―John F. Kennedy

I’m an attentive consumer of written news, because on newspapers journalists dig deeper, while I don’t watch television — and Facebook is a social network: my mind rejects the concept it informs me.

Who wrote fiction for many years as I did, and read newspapers since decades, felt an excitement of sort in the flow of actual articles. Quarantine gave me time to read tons of pieces from many prestigious newspapers online for free — in Italian, Spanish and English.

Am I insane?

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

I know you could think I am selfish, or cold-hearted in front of so much suffering. But the truth is I am in this with you. I’m not saved. The virus can infect me and I’m not immortal. I’m not old, but I’m almost 50.

Am I reckless, so?

Well, I have my fears — my wife knows it well, and my friends who haven’t been allowed yet in our home too. I prefer to define myself wary — again, my kind wife would say chicken.

So, no. I’m not insane and I’m not reckless.

Believe me, all the suffering makes me sick. I hate the Establishment kidding with people’s lives. I hate to see how economic comes first and how we’re going back to pollute the World again. I hate violence on black people — as much as the fact US crisis doesn’t talk of the bigger picture: discrimination, which is the mother of racism and has many colors, many religions, many cultures. We as a species have many wrong beliefs.

But like any other human, I have my survival mechanisms, and see the positive side in the news is one of them.

As a speculative fiction writer, I wonder about many things. And I’m not alone, judging by Blade Runner, the Matrix, V for Vengeance and many other artistic speculations on worrying topics. Being interested doesn’t mean being insensitive. As much as excitement doesn’t mean joy.

If we wanted to know what a pandemic is, here we are. If we wanted to see what happens to the World when we stop, here we are. If we wanted to see how the Establishment and the System handle a global, devastating and unavoidable crisis… here we are.

Yes, here we are, facing our present. And even if the excitement is stained by sorrow and bruised by sadness, expressing itself in a weird silent way — because no one goes around giving high-five to anyone — we are witnessing historical times.

Me, you, everybody can speculate. We have a tremendous amount of reality to read. As a novelist, you can understand how these days are stimulating my creative mind.

On the other hand, I wasn’t so happy of what was going on before.

And you?

A positive reaction is mandatory

“With no positivity, there is no hope; with no negativity, there is no improvement.” ― Criss Jami

The premise is that I’m an Italian living in Spain. We’ve been at the center of the storm for weeks. So, I know. I’m sorry and my heart is aching.

The paradigm has been flipped upside down. It’s not a matter of fearing anymore, but of feeling. That’s why my unstoppable, creative mind tells me now I know how it is, whilst my soul prompts me to react.

No more speculation, just facts.

Here in Barcelona we’re not out. We are in the middle of the “desescalada” (scaling down) after almost 3 months of quarantine.

I won’t ever forget one day, when we cleaned our garden at home. It was a sunny, springy day. Afterwards my wife, our six years daughter and me, we ate outside, birds were singing in the air, and I could hear no traffic sound.

It was almost 40 days I wasn’t going out. For a minute, I stopped and listened. It was so weird.

It was like being in a feverish-dream, because restricted, twisted, with an invisible killer surrounding us. And yet, sunny, shiny and smelling good, with that wondrous silence. In awe, I thought: “Wow…”

It didn’t last.

They call it “the new real”

I beg your pardon: I think it’s a stupid definition. It seems a reality evolution to me. We are still on Earth; we are still the homo sapiens sapiens.

A pandemic won’t erase who I am or who you are.

Why do we have to be so poetic to avoid the truth? Are responsibilities too heavy to bear? As a writer, I’m accustomed not to lie to myself, otherwise the reader’s reaction is to spit on my written pages and throw the book into the trashcan.

At the beginning, many said it was surreal, but for me it was real — and it still is. Absurd enough, my speculative fiction writer’s mind pretends pragmatism, reading reality for what it is. I only write with imagination.

“Be objective, fly high,” my inner voice commands. That’s the core of the game, if you want to play by the rules and deliver some fun to readers.

“Losing your head in a crisis is a good way to become the crisis.”―C.J. Redwine

So, I don’t know your eyes, but mine are wide shut.

Today, “surreal” implies another meaning. It feels so now that in Europe we’re elbowing our way to the streets — not me. What I witness seems wrong. Children with masks. Previously desert woods now crowded by people. 2 meters distance, a very confused measure randomly applied from half a meter to changing your path.

We are still confused, we still need to adapt.

Deep within your soul you feel that the wave of change hit hard. They were telling me “it’s surreal” when we were in quarantine, but from my point of view it was just boring — deadly for few among us, unfortunately.

When we’ll be all out in the streets again, vaccinated, pushing the economic parameters for the sake of who knows who, what will people say? That we’re back to the old real?

“Forget the past, dear,” tells me Miss Awareness. “Even if it won’t change a lot, but it will, don’t look outside. The new real is inside of you.”

Curious and disturbing.

As the newspapers

“The good news is you survived. The bad news is you’re hurt and no one can heal you but yourself.” ― Clementine von Radics

Are you feeling weird when out in the streets? If so, we’re in two.

That’s why I’m reading a lot, differentiating the sources: to understand what’s going on inside of me, as it feels weird. It’s not facts, it’s me. As always, it’s not what happens, is how you react to it.

Before Wuhan, I went back to write an old Fantasy novel left in the middle of the first draft years ago. It talks of a world struck by a global crisis which led to an unstoppable decadence and, at some point, hit by a pandemic.

Isn’t it bizarre? Damn no, it’s amazing! Now I know how to better it.

That’s the excitement I’m talking about. That novel idea comes from the pain caused by our species missing too many opportunities to change the course of its history. It talks of a decadence, because I saw and still see decadence in our times.

It was born to have hope and stay positive. Eventually, to give hope to the reader.

And now I see a genuine chance to change reality.

For Italian news I read many online newspapers and the institutional RaiNews24.it. For Spain and Latin America I read ElPais.es. For English news I have no preferences, as I follow tweets by trusted thinkers which are leading me everywhere, to US, Canadian, Australian, UK articles — NYTimes.com is my reference, anyway, but don’t put me in any political side, please. Because I have no side.

What attracts me is the topic and the perspective, not the source.

At first, worrying news

“One reason that cats are happier than people is that they have no newspapers.” ― Gwendolyn Brooks

I began there, possibly you began there too. With an epidemic becoming a pandemic running towards you, we were all reading the same worrying news.

I was fearing for myself and my beloved ones. Who didn’t?

I looked at the European phantom towns pictures. It all seemed so distant, because I wasn’t going out. The United States desert highways taken from above followed those shots. My impression was to watch a documentary, showing what we’d leave behind by disappearing: asphalt, concrete towers of nothing.

Without life, our cities are ashes.

Meanwhile, satellite images showed the low CO2 emissions consequences and how the pollution almost disappeared in a few weeks from the most polluted area of United Europe, the crowded northern plain of Italy — the Po Valley.

I smiled seeing airplanes traffic trajectories disappear from radars. But that smile disappeared in front of the advance of the economic paralysis. It wasn’t me: I was working and still I am. It was the neighbor.

How fragile has become our life balance?

Then there was the politics

“Reader, suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of Congress. But I repeat myself.” ― Mark Twain

Part of my sadness is the many responses to the pandemic by the Establishment. Politicians underlined their incompetence all around the World with idiotic decisions, falling back to citizenship control; alarming laws; awful, even stupid reactions and silly communication.

And yet, in such a mess surfaced the confirmation that a suitable way exists in politics. Today the good example is shining brighter than ever. I’d say Canada in the Americas. New Zealand on the other side of the World. Portugal in Europe.

I have rewarded my feverish search for positive signs.

Scroll down those long online newspapers

“Sometimes it’s not news; it’s just too much information.” ― Janet Hill

Positive politics was just the beginning.

If you leave yourself pass the first meter of online newspaper scrolling, so if you let yourself free of the sorrow of the daily news items specific to the pandemic — the dead, the virus symptoms, the hospitals, the vaccine, the politicians’ words, the extraordinary laws — you fill yourself with the most interesting articles you read in decades, filled with wonder, hope and visions of the future.

You think another World is possible, if you do it.

Now, I believe it.

We cannot imagine all the consequences of what’s going on. But we’re trying and thinkers are showing us incredible possibilities. There’s an overall effort to react positively and shape something good from all the bad.

Tens of interviews on our future to philosophers, writers, economists, researchers, psychologists, artists, doctors, engineers, teachers… thoughtful messages, thousands of experts painting heterogeneous scenarios with many surprising ideas with an extraordinary amount of details.

Wasn’t it already an ongoing trend, was it? Well, it wasn’t so strong, ever present and insistent.

Above all, a lot fewer people were listening.

For example, on a global level, the research World is cooperating, even if at the same time laboratories are at war for being the first in finding a vaccine.

I perceive a hidden earthquake. The old logics at stake menacing the new ones, with the latter conquering the World with the power of exceptional circumstances.

It is of this week, in fact, European Countries signed for a UE vaccine and 400 millions of doses which will be distributed to all of us Europeans citizens — they say by the end of the year.

No more war between UE partners: we’ll fight it together.

A powerful mix of weird and unusual

“I’d rather be a little weird than all boring.” ― Rebecca McKinsey

Funny details emerged, like the millions of people buying toilet papers in Europe. Humor has never made me laugh so much. Sign it is useful, if someone doubted it.

Even the terrible politics facts are positive, if you look at them from another perspective. For the first time in human history, the bigheads of the Establishment appeared for what they are altogether: unprepared, ignorants, arrogant, unable to manage anything, neither their mouths. It is positive, because the World is watching them and listening to them.

We are paying attention. And that’s good, even if I often imagined our entire species tearing its hair.

That’s where responsibility can be hard to bear: we voted for them. Yes? Thanks to whoever or whatever you please, we now have the evidences of their moral stature.

Will we vote thinking more the next time? There’s hope — even if we must create valuable alternatives most times, I know. I believe outsiders will come.

Every day it’s a surprise. As said, if we wanted to see how it is, here we are, ladies and gentlemen. What nowadays arises is thinkers, because BS are useless when times are so dramatic. If you play with people’s life, they think.

We are all in. We are all thinking. The political shock has just begun.

Thinkers.

“Ten ways to die for a fool; a thousand ways to live for a thinker.” ― VKBoy

ElPais.es produced an intriguing interview to 75 personalities, asking to predict our future (in Spanish).

The home office topic. The global cooperation. Education. All the incredible articles on the environment, packed with solutions and the huge hope for a real mentality switch concerning Climate Change. The list is so long I must skip it. Read National Geographic, visit Green Economy websites to read and wonder.

Meanwhile, what I thought it would happen is happening. At least, it begins what I expected. The World is tired and act as one more than in the past.

You can see it with the anti-racism protesters all around the globe. The utopia of a global society remains an utopia, but we moved one significant step towards it.

There’s so much going on! And it’s normal. If we consider a crisis as an opportunity, an unprecedented triple crisis — economic, health, politics — is a triple opportunity.

Add to it the bigger layer of actual times, the environmental crisis of the Global Warming, which envelope Earth and it’s worsening, because Paris Climate Agreement was a failure.

And now?

All this is crazy.

The outcome will be a tremendous change.

“It is only when the mind is free from the old that it meets everything anew, and in that there is joy.” ― Krishnamurti

Am I the only one seeing it as extremely inspiring?

Don’t you think there’s more hope, now?

As human beings, we are in a mighty flow. Not everything is sorrow. And we need to think as a global society. Each one of us can do grand things. You can do grand things, if you trust that from all this bad can come a lot of good.

Times are changing, and we are the change.

As a writer, I’m invested of a responsibility. If you’re a writer, so do you. But it invests every one of us as readers of another, even more important responsibility.

We must inform ourselves. We must study. We must learn for the less ignorant we are, the more we can accomplish as a global society. The less we empower the Establishment to lead our lives, the more we’ll be able to select it and change it forever.

The challenges we have ahead are so many I cannot count them. And as always happens in exceptional times, we humans are finding unexpected resources and solutions.

We are a devastating species which has come to a crossroads. I hope most of us will choose to evolve.

What makes all this exceptional is that we were and are interconnected. We’ve never been as near as now to be a global society, because now we know what globalization is and can cause.

It’s amazing as a single animal swimming in crystal clear water is showing your world has ended. Illusions exploded in thousands of pieces as a glass hit by a hammer.

What remains is the reality.

It’s not new, it’s the only thing we ever had.

We are already shaping our future. It’s up to us to pay attention to the suffering. But we must be a positive renewal.