symposium on love by guggenheim public |
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symposium contributions forum info italiano english |
Inizierò questa
riflessione attorno all'amore senza troppi autocontrolli ... Vorrei dare vita
ad una forma che ancora non conosco.... in un modo, diciamo, consapevolmente
oracolare. Sandra Caroldi |
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symposium contributions forum info italiano english |
I shall begin
this reflection on love without too much self-restraint. I wish I could
give life to a form I don't yet know in a way, let's say, a consciously
oracular way. Love is an abstract idea, open to any vision, like everything else, but it is even more so because it is conceptually without limits. It contains all, strives to absorb all. Love is a fundamental idea and therefore extremely generative. Everything can be love or become it. Love absorbs its opposite, justifies it. With its creative energy love is embodied in all things: Begets them. By doing so it puts them at a distance, parts from them, leaving in each emanated entity the longing for a reuniting. Necessity becomes event, launching an endless series of other events solidly interconnected, out of which even hatred, in all of its countless combinations, is born. Love is in time. Although preceding it, it becomes temporal nell'ente and nell'esserci. When l'esserci becomes being love achieves transcendency, but that it not its aim. L'esserci does not have other aims than an inconceivable reunion with what begot it. I can conceive of a rebirth only in terms of a liberation from enti as reference, foundation. The only possible reference is the indifferentiated whereby I am inexplicably contained and sustained. By now we know there are no answers, nor even adequate questions. There are just a series of temporary, and always highly contextualized (conditioned) interrogations allowing us unstable directions. Living without precise references is an arduous task, but not an impossible one. We didnít learn to face aperto. They raised us giving us replies. But if those replies don't satisfy us, if for us truth does not only lie in what works, if we don't like seeing the world reduced to the mondo a fondo a disposizione...perhaps we can encounter the idea of love. I believe that love as a principle of integration, as a way of life, is both an unaware experience and a choice... Origin from which we depart to then return. When love is a returning it becomes aware. In love we know what there is to know about essere al mondo avendo un mondo. If I am a maker (artist) of my world, as contemporary thought has led me to believe, if beyond conditioning, my gaze, even in its gettatezza, is what determines the visionÖI want my world to be a world begotten in love. I choose "love" as the foundation for action. Thus I am in the dimension of ethics. Thus I think socratically, in harmony with the bios that tends toward balance, toward so-called happiness, that virtue is knowing and that in the way of life according to love all the virtues are expressed. I think of love as a producer of virtue. But if virtue is knowing, who is the one who knows?...and what does he know? Even these questions lead to new questions... Usually it is the context that defines the specific anthropological characteristics to be called virtue. Yet if the man who hates with the greatest determination can be held the most virtuous, in a context that makes hatred central, I can at least say I wouldnít wish to live in such a context. If I can get away, I will..and not only, but I'm also prepared to struggle to create other contexts...where it would be possible to work in the direction that to me seems right: one where there is eros. Eros. There's another word that opens up chasms and lends itself to several interpretations! To me Eros suggests the vision of the Greek world and brings me back to Plato, who presents it, celebrates it, describes it, analyzes it, resolves it in the "Symposium". When that work is mentioned, usually we mostly recall the story of Aristophanes, who tells about the punishment Zeus inflicted on men, when he thus decreed: " I shall cut each one of them in two, and on the one hand they will be weaker, and on the other they will be more useful to us, increasing their number... and consequently to that punishment ...once their primitive nature had been cut in two, each half longing for the lost half that had been his, joined with it..." So we turn to the Symposium to point out the incompleteness of human nature and the consequent longing for the other, in love. No one mentions the real message of that initiatory work: the message that love is generation. So it does not arise from incompleteness, but from excess. To be within love is to be pregnant, in body and soul, and being pregnant, wanting to bring to light, to give birth...and to do so in beauty and goodness. In the beautiful body, in beautiful bodies, in beautiful souls, better if joined with a beautiful body, in that which is beautiful in ways of life and in laws, to finally attain the idea of beauty itself, that makes life worth living. "...not weighed down by human flesh and colors and many other mortal follies, but in itself, beauty divine in its simplicity..." That which illuminates, freeing from the primitive "erotics" relationships with the world and leads to true excellence. Socrates displays to us a highly sublimated eros, turning his back on irresistible Alcibiades, and leaving him as though bitten by a snake, falls asleep. But is Socrates really asleep? We know by Alcibiades himself that Socrates doesnít have to sleep like other mortals. Maybe he can't! Socrates also was bitten...and his snake is called "reason". He who wanted to embody virtue, succeeding even in defying death, hides a great vice. The vice of forced thought. Now since after all love is dream above all, I should wonder: "How can he dream, he who was bitten by reason?" Nietzsche, in "The Birth of Tragedy", tells us that when Socrates is dreaming, he hears a divine voice, probably Dionysus', that suggests he devote himself to music. But he doesnít follow that advice, and believes that his philosophizing is the supreme musical art. His optimizing dialectic with the whip of syllogisms makes music and poetry flee...sends art and truth far away...and doing so moves away from love too. Those traps Socrates set, I believe they surpassed in efficiency the wildest expectations. Now all of us, who inhabit the twilight earth, if we want to speak of love, as Anita invites us to do, we must free ourselves of the vice of over-defining, of over-closing... must ask ourselves how long, every day, we cast off and let ourselves drift, towards uncolonized territories of calculating thought. At night, when we abandon ourselves to sleep, do we take leave of a time rhythmed only by projection, or have we also allowed eros to lead us where desire rules? If eros arises from pulsions and is begotten in logos...it is in loss, in forgetfulness that bends to pulsion and finds its nutrition. That is why I chose to drift freely around love and sought to preserve the immediacy and the arbitrariness of love and of what might still make it possible...
Sandra Caroldi |
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