'E castagnelle

'E castagnelle are castanets, the wooden ones you hold in your hand that keep the beat in the tammurriata folk dance. Thirty-six is sound, rhythm, the joy you make together with others: not the celebration itself — that’s twenty — but the rhythm that keeps it going. In a city where people sing in the street, a number like this was bound to exist. In dreams, thirty-six shows up when something is in time. A day when everything went smoothly, a collaboration where you understood each other instantly, a period when you found your stride again. And, the other way around, when the rhythm broke: the thing that goes in fits and starts, the conversation that never gets going. The images that lead here have the noise of the neighborhood. The castanets. Flirting. News, which spreads in a flash, with voices overlapping and everyone adding their own bit. And the journey, which has its own pace and rhythm too. If thirty-six has come up in your dream, there was rhythm in it. The Smorfia doesn’t promise anything and doesn’t prescribe anything: it points out that in the dream you told something was playing — and that you noticed, because otherwise you wouldn’t be here telling it.