During my last year of elementary school, while I was coming to terms with the new experience of living only with my mother, which was both a relief and a fright, I came to develop a strange obsession with that side of the globe that only looks blue, the Pacific Ocean. The fact that you can turn the globe around and if you look at it from the right angle you do not see any trace of dry land seemed ominous. I came to think of it as two different planets oddly glued together, one with a gaseous atmosphere and solid landmasses, inhabited by all sorts of land animals and plants, and natural living habitat where humans and their civilization evolved. On the other side a liquid world, populated by life long before our dried land had seen anything but barren rock, with strange creatures of the deep. I was especially fascinated by the liminal zone that separates these two worlds and by the human civilization that developed in this thin boundary: the sparse islands of Oceania. I spent most of that year reading all I could find about the civilizations of Melanesia, Micronesia, and Polynesia, their ethnic and linguistic groups, their artifacts, their gods. I read all I could also about the oceans, about the great whales, the dolphins and the experiments that have been carried out to probe their intelligence and language, the songs of the humpback whales.
I spent those last five months of the first of many school cycles writing on the typewriter, which now only had to be shared with another user, a long text that collected all my musings and findings about the Oceanic culture and my own personal cult of the sea and of the effects on the human mind of its close proximity. I presented my text at the final examination day, much to everybody's puzzlement. There was nothing at all in the school curriculum that resembled what I had produced: if pupils were supposed to know what the Pacific Ocean is and be able to locate it on the map that was about all there was to it. I did not care, I never cared much about school and curricula, I was in the process of discovering a world, and what is it all to that?
My mother's family was made of coastal dwellers, akin to fisherfolks and sailors, but their sea was the tame Mediterranean of the Greek myths, of Sirens and Cyclops. If our narrow stretch of water that separates Europe from Africa had managed to produce so much in the minds of men, what might an ocean stretching half a planet wide have done to the inhabitants of its scattered islands? Why the ocean meant so much to me at that stage can be widely speculated upon, a collective archetype of the unconscious, a pungent metaphor of the world divided, a faraway civilization as another form of escapism into the distant worlds of science fiction? All may well be, but none will do justice entirely to the feeling of awe and marvel that Oceania inspired me. When in much more recent times I ended up taking frequent trips to Australia and visit personally the collections of Oceanic art, and see the Pacific Ocean stretching away from its shores, that early fascination lingered on in my mind, guiding me towards this or that artifact, buzzing with words and images, digging up old and half forgotten knowledge.
