SURRENDER
I have always wondered what works I would prepare for the coming of the Apocalypse. There would undoubtedly be a multitude of special effects. Together with the desperation that the unbelievable would turn out to be true. I would run naked as in gothic frescoes or sit sobbing because I had missed the point during the course of my life. Every now and then we experience, for a few seconds, almost by chance, the absolute. I immediately ask myself about the source of the passion for the relative, which forms the detail of our existence and ties us closely to life, no one excluded.
It is a reflection on the imbalances in the world, the brief world, in which man lives.
The result is the firm decision to follow a few elements, from another era, related to those who are present and those who came before us. A few themes of investigation: the reason for our existence, its end, evil, injustice, pain. A few questions. They are not infinite.
I wonder if we will be judged on these themes during the terrible super-loop of the Apocalypse, tending towards the absolute substance of values, or justified, even by the most miniscule and temporal acts of loyalty, family, our native city, resident’s meetings. My intent is not to slip into simple rhetoric. The combination of a moral and spiritual existence, including art, is part of a dense network of details. I wonder if the evident imbalances that leap before our eyes are supplied by a basic freedom or slavery, a prevalent destiny, which determines our future, to our joy or perdition.
At similar crossroads of the mind I must immediately contrast a Jansenist inclination: I am unable to believe in the integral freedom of the individual. I take into account, through an act of faith that this freedom truly exists and that man is entirely responsible for the moral development of his life.
The scenery does not change. Great passions, when faced with the eternal inevitability of nothingness or God denounce the dramatic inconsistency of existence, puerility for those who drown.
Pain has become a sphere, like the earth.
Tenderness has been shattered.
I would have liked to be a monk of the Thebaid. Though I was not. I would have liked to die in a thousand reasonable ways. I am still alive, and I am still touched by the image of the naked belly of girls as they leap in the air. I feel affectionate pain for the old man in his braids and hat who prays and rocks, lost in the temporary absence of God.
Experience, as we can see, when we participate with care, produces a definitive end to our expectations.
The meaning of the world is transformed into a feeling of torment. Almost a recording.
Is this an answer? Undoubtedly, though not entirely reasonable.
I feel not only depressive compassion for those who die, who are killed, or who go to die for reasons dictated by others.
The constructions of the world are strongly connected and, with missionary engineering, they erect an unjustified building. It is tragic when we subsume ourselves for God. We must fear His Terribleness. The tests of pain, of temporality, the mutations, death as a metaphysical, extra-temporal necessity.
War defends, or wishes to honour noble causes, though it creates only terrifying conclusions, for those present now and in the future. It leads to a simple death that is no less absolute.
The work I have created intends to say something about this.
It is the rendering of judgement. Of mine at any rate.
I am inundated by an inability to understand.
Even those I love and approve of by familiarity.
And History, to which I have already dedicated attention as an indicative trace of a common meaning to man, shadows included, in the end crushes awareness into a noose of stupor and loathing.
It is stupid. It was stupid.
Perhaps it has no reason to exist.
Mine is a formal surrender.
A white flag.
A certain degree of surrender can perhaps uncover new alternatives of peace.
19-09-2002