Mind(less) Space(s)?

The identity of a people and of a civilisation is reflected in what has
been created by the mind – in what is known as 'culture’. If this
identity is threatened with extinction, cultural life grows
correspondingly more intense, more important, until cultural life
itself becomes the living value around which all people rally.
Milan Kundera

Ooooo Caaaaaaaaa-naaa-daa!…When winter darkness comes and restless minds hibernate hockey’n’pizza-loving demons tend to spread. And all they try to get is… pizza’n’coke (it’s not a joke): for breakfast, lunch and dinner, anxiously waiting for a winner. Had this been there, in prince Dracula’s Transylvania, now in Romania, no one would wonder. But we are here’n’now and yet somehow we do ponder how on these islands of mindless silence an 'irony [can be] a form of violence’. Silent night, hockey night, when restless minds fight for a bite, a pizza bite?

My Italian teacher, a truly Renaissance matron, used to tell me how much she loved pizza and hated postcards from Rome. She finds them utterly offensive for they show 'too many churches on the horizon’. My German teacher, a truly liberated Nazi and a closet admirer of virtual reality, used to tell me how much he loved pizza and hated Nietzsche. He finds Nietzsche’s ideas confusing and offensive for they 'have eliminated quite a number of churches from the horizon while also increasing the number of horizons’. My Canadian teacher, a truly open-minded politologist (still in love with the Soviet Union’s democratic traditions), used to tell me how much she loved pizza and hated the Americans. She finds 'American horizons’ non-existent, and it is 'impossible to build even one church without a horizon’. Finally, my Hungarian teacher, a true Communist revolutionary, used to tell me how much he loved pizza and hated Soviet tanks rolling by his church. He considered that 'dialectically insane and aestethically violent’. Ironically, horizons did not worry him at all.

No matter where you are: on a cold-stricken Victoria Island, located uninterestingly on Ottawa river, in no-man’s-land between Québec and Ontario (where a single party has just gorged itself on an even larger chunk of the national pizza pie); on the war’n’peace-torn northern Island [sic!](where golden fish’n’chips – not pizza – have dominated the mind(less) space for centuries); or on a now so distant Island of newly-wed 'n’nearly-dead (fish?), have no doubt Signor’ Grant, this is the moment to start lamenting (and longing) for those romantically incorrect mind(less) space(s) of Napoli and Capri when/where not so long ago in a maple-leafless setting pizza-making excercises would inspire rather than offend, to sing yet another serenade… Then/there was the mind time/space to imagine. Now is the mind time/space to (re)imagine. Now is the mind time/space to love pizza. And the moon is full once again.