As I can imagine happened to many of you, when I was a teenager, with my curiosity I always was going to visit various types of workshops and craftsman’s shops, from the cobbler to the framing-shop, from the plumber to the tinker, the car electrician, body-maker, joiner, carpenter, welder, blacksmith, turner, grinder, polisher, chrome-plater ..…and I would find all possible excuses to have the opportunity to look at the tools and equipment, feel the smell of the worked metal, of the wood, of the glues and solvents, of the gases and the gasoline, and I was amazed to see those guys, all in blue, brown or gray overalls with famous brand names written in color on the breast and I was attracted by all those drawers with the wrenches, the drills, the milling cutters and the calipers, by the tins of motor oil and the ‘prussian blue’ on the face plate and that very beautiful thing the clock of the micrometer, attracted by their hard worn but precise and skilful hands able to insert a nut with washer in unreachable places by writhing around like they were doing yoga between the axle-shafts and differential, cylinder heads and carburettors of cars with the leaf springs and the drum brakes without brake booster.

Ah yes! The mechanics’ machine places were more interesting to me than the bars; then the workshops for motorbikes with the disassembled heads on the bench and the oven-painted colored signs and the calendars of women on the walls, so that I would never have gone home and I always tried to make myself useful by handing over a wrench or finding a fallen sphere on the floor stuck between the historic dirt of the motors, and afterward at home in the most improbable places like the storage room or the courtyard I tried to do anything that resembled what I had seen, taking in hand anything I could find to dismantle with the excuse of repairing it or buying a motor for few lira from the scrap iron dealer and I looked at it inside without having any idea what I could find, and meanwhile a motorbike would pass by and I would turn to watch it and hear how it went, how it was driven, how fast the piston and the valves turned, the noise of the gas release and the unique sound of the full cast that left in my ears a clear memory that would later be imitated with my bike as a grownup, with my friends and later my girlfriend on the back that changed all the parameters except for the love of the speed, the curves, and the relationship between me and her, the bike.


I don't know how it all happened, who and what I have to thank beyond all those I’ve already mentioned and many others who taught me without even knowing it, I became very capable in putting together all those parts of steel and aluminum that make a motorbike run and when you’ve finished you try it out and can hear it breathe, and it flies out from the curves, and then you stop it under the shade of an oak to let it cool down and have a cigarette, and when you look at it, you feel satisfied: it’s a condition in which a certain flicker of the person happens, giving rise to a lack of words that in its own way is like a satori (the Zen occurrence that we Westerners could try to translate with unsuitable terms like illumination, revelation, intuition…), a suspension of the language that in Zen thinking views haiku as "the literary appearance of a practice dedicated to disconcert, to deplete, to drain the irrepressible chattering of the soul" (R.Barthes, The Empire of Signs).

The restoration of a motorbike cannot be described only with the technical language and terms of the operations with tolerances and degrees and coupling tightening, for this there are a lot of technical manuals and documents especially for the mechanic; it is a practice made up of ways and times in the socialization of the work and the experience that involves and intimately regards all those who participate in it, saying and doing parts to complete an equilibrium of emptiness and fullness with their imagination, which is not easy to find in harmony and therefore creating a result that is the imagined play to be looked at with the silence of love and for this I believe that some brief thoughts and Zen haiku could help to search for the style of a work based on passion. (B.C.)