Making it with life
and death.
Remarks on Thanatos
and Eros and Desiring
Production
There is no work that does not return against its author: the poem crushes the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action.
The poetics of space is made of corridors, stairs, balconies, rooms, gardens, edges, corners, squares, cabinets, streets, desks, bedrooms, drawers, avenues, sandy shores, groves, safes, attics, basements, miniatures, windows. So is the poetics of time.
More than twenty years later I returned to a place where I was happy. I was somehow apprehensive with Pavese's famous warning but I soon realized that there was no reason for that. There is one thing Pavese missed out: whoever returns to a place where was happy is no longer the same person who was happy in that place. The person who was happy does not match the person who returns, the first is not yet what will become after having been it there, the second is no longer what he was. As Heráclito would say, we are and we are not and even the water where we bathe once more is no longer the same where we bathed before, which makes one return to the river as if it was the first time. Therefore, there is no repetition neither as a tragedy first nor as a farce afterwards. Just a new chapter in a story that ends only when the water of the river dissolves once and for all in the immense ocean.
One must be careful when talking about manipulation. There is the manipulator and the manipulated, yes. But it is also necessary to understand the situations in which the manipulated wishes being it. The manipulated is not always led to think what the manipulator wants him to think. What can happen first is that the manipulator says what the manipulated wants to hear, meaning that he too has hands [manus] that shape the manipulator's speech itself, and his way, becomes a manipulator himself too.
The world rises or dies according to the predominance of Love or Discord. Many years ago, I heard an astrophysicist say, a Nobel Prize I think, that the great dream of any scientist is one day to be able to express the complexity of the universe in a formula so simple that it can be printed on a beach T-shirt. The quest for this radical simplicity leads me to the disconcerting simplicity with which the pre-Socratic philosophers expressed themselves, like Empedocles, the author of this sentence. Such a simplicity so odd and distant according to current scientific and philosophical standards but reminding that archaic lucidity that only children and poets are privileged to achieve.
A great consolation about death the classics gave us is to know that we will all be equal when deceased and there won’t be some more equal than others as in real socialism. Rich and poor, gallant and tattered, beautiful and ugly, intelligent and indigent, WASP's and immigrants, all that no longer makes sense. At the beginning of Zeus’ kingdom, the living were judged by the living to decide who would go to the Isles of the Blessed or to Tartarus. Zeus considered that no one should be judged wearing clothes and ornaments in order not to become more or less seductive before the judge, going even further, arguing that someone's soul should be judged, when not in a body whose beauty or ugliness can condition the process. That’s why they are judged only after death. Death is neither real socialism nor unreal socialism. It is the purest and most genuine socialism. The unique, but not insignificant, inconvenience is that no dead person knows about it.
When walking around in a cemetery, our relationship with people who died 50 or 60 years ago is not the same as with someone who died six days, weeks or months ago. It's normal. It’s normal because we project our time in the time of the deceased. Going through the grave of someone who died 60 years ago is like going through someone who died within his/her own death. A person who died a few days or years ago remains alive and despite being dead that person lived a life that partially coincided with ours. However, this emotional discrimination towards the deceased as if there were dead people who deserve our compassion more than others who touch us in a different way is unfair. Unfair because there is no time in death.
Time, the years, months, weeks, days, hours or minutes matter is part of life and not of death. Death is temporally formless, a kind of hole in which there is only an eternity and where there is no difference between 2500 years and a single minute. Our remembrance of someone who died two days ago is naturally different from our memory of the person who died 2500 years ago, in the same way that her life has nothing to do with the life of the first. Memory and life are made of time, but in that hole without time that is death there is neither far nor near, there is no past, present or future, there is not too much or too little. When we walk through a cemetery, its surface remains a surface shaped by the consciousness of the living, who aware of time, are placing the dead on the calendar. In dark, silent and oceanic depths of death they are always arriving as if they had always lived there.
Making it with life
and death.
Remarks on Thanatos
and Eros and Desiring
Production
There is no work that does not return against its author: the poem crushes the poet, the system the philosopher, the event the man of action.
The poetics of space is made of corridors, stairs, balconies, rooms, gardens, edges, corners, squares, cabinets, streets, desks, bedrooms, drawers, avenues, sandy shores, groves, safes, attics, basements, miniatures, windows. So is the poetics of time.
More than twenty years later I returned to a place where I was happy. I was somehow apprehensive with Pavese's famous warning but I soon realized that there was no reason for that. There is one thing Pavese missed out: whoever returns to a place where was happy is no longer the same person who was happy in that place. The person who was happy does not match the person who returns, the first is not yet what will become after having been it there, the second is no longer what he was. As Heráclito would say, we are and we are not and even the water where we bathe once more is no longer the same where we bathed before, which makes one return to the river as if it was the first time. Therefore, there is no repetition neither as a tragedy first nor as a farce afterwards. Just a new chapter in a story that ends only when the water of the river dissolves once and for all in the immense ocean.
One must be careful when talking about manipulation. There is the manipulator and the manipulated, yes. But it is also necessary to understand the situations in which the manipulated wishes being it. The manipulated is not always led to think what the manipulator wants him to think. What can happen first is that the manipulator says what the manipulated wants to hear, meaning that he too has hands [manus] that shape the manipulator's speech itself, and his way, becomes a manipulator himself too.
The world rises or dies according to the predominance of Love or Discord. Many years ago, I heard an astrophysicist say, a Nobel Prize I think, that the great dream of any scientist is one day to be able to express the complexity of the universe in a formula so simple that it can be printed on a beach T-shirt. The quest for this radical simplicity leads me to the disconcerting simplicity with which the pre-Socratic philosophers expressed themselves, like Empedocles, the author of this sentence. Such a simplicity so odd and distant according to current scientific and philosophical standards but reminding that archaic lucidity that only children and poets are privileged to achieve.
A great consolation about death the classics gave us is to know that we will all be equal when deceased and there won’t be some more equal than others as in real socialism. Rich and poor, gallant and tattered, beautiful and ugly, intelligent and indigent, WASP's and immigrants, all that no longer makes sense. At the beginning of Zeus’ kingdom, the living were judged by the living to decide who would go to the Isles of the Blessed or to Tartarus. Zeus considered that no one should be judged wearing clothes and ornaments in order not to become more or less seductive before the judge, going even further, arguing that someone's soul should be judged, when not in a body whose beauty or ugliness can condition the process. That’s why they are judged only after death. Death is neither real socialism nor unreal socialism. It is the purest and most genuine socialism. The unique, but not insignificant, inconvenience is that no dead person knows about it.
When walking around in a cemetery, our relationship with people who died 50 or 60 years ago is not the same as with someone who died six days, weeks or months ago. It's normal. It’s normal because we project our time in the time of the deceased. Going through the grave of someone who died 60 years ago is like going through someone who died within his/her own death. A person who died a few days or years ago remains alive and despite being dead that person lived a life that partially coincided with ours. However, this emotional discrimination towards the deceased as if there were dead people who deserve our compassion more than others who touch us in a different way is unfair. Unfair because there is no time in death.
Time, the years, months, weeks, days, hours or minutes matter is part of life and not of death. Death is temporally formless, a kind of hole in which there is only an eternity and where there is no difference between 2500 years and a single minute. Our remembrance of someone who died two days ago is naturally different from our memory of the person who died 2500 years ago, in the same way that her life has nothing to do with the life of the first. Memory and life are made of time, but in that hole without time that is death there is neither far nor near, there is no past, present or future, there is not too much or too little. When we walk through a cemetery, its surface remains a surface shaped by the consciousness of the living, who aware of time, are placing the dead on the calendar. In dark, silent and oceanic depths of death they are always arriving as if they had always lived there.
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