I have always asked myself what works I would make if faced by the Apocalypse. A multitude of extraordinary effects ought to be there. And so should the desperation that implausibility makes true. I would run naked, as in Gothic frescoes, or sit down to sob that during my lifetime I had not understood the main point of the question. Every so often we experience, for a few moments and almost by chance, the absolute. I always immediately ask myself where my passion for relativity comes from, for something that forms the details of existence and is so closely tied to life, no one excluded.
This is a reflection on the imbalance of the world, this fleeting world, in which humanity lives.
In me is born the resolute decision to follow just a few things, outside time, that relate to those living now or who have already lived. A few questions: the reason for existence, its end, evil, injustice, pain. Just a few questions. They are not infinite.
I ask myself if we will be judged on these themes in the terrible super circuit of the Apocalypse, a judgement biased towards the absolute substance of values, or if we can also be justified by our tiniest and temporal faithfulness: to the family, our hometown, condominium meetings. I do not intend to be light-heartedly rhetorical. The totality of a moral and spiritual life, art included, is part of a closely-woven network of details.
I ask myself if the imbalances that leap to the eye are the result of basic freedom or of slavery, of a prevailing destiny that, for better or worse, determines us.
During such mental crossroads I am forced to oppose a Jansenist tendency: I cannot manage to believe in the complete freedom of an individual. I can take accept, though through a leap of faith, that such a freedom really does exist and that humanity is wholly responsible for the moral fabric of its life. The scenario remains the same. In the face of the eternal inevitability of nothingness or of God, great passions reveal the dramatic inconsistency of existence, the childishness of those who founder in it.
Pain has become a globe, like the earth.
Tenderness has been shattered.
I would have liked to have been a Theban monk. I wasn't one. I would have liked to die in a thousand reasonable ways. I am still alive, and I can still be moved even by the naked umbilicus of girls who blow themselves up. I feel affectionate suffering for the old man who, with his plaits and hat, prays and sways in the temporary absence of God.
You can see that experience plays its careful part and definitively checkmates hopes.
The sense of the world is transformed into a feeling of torment. Almost like a recorded tape.
Is this an answer? Certainly, but not a wholly reasonable one.
I feel compassion, not simply depression, for those who die, are killed, or go to die for reasons dictated by others.
The world's constructions have iron bonds and, with missionary engineering, build an unmotivated building. It is tragic to replace God with yourself. His awesomeness is to be feared. The proofs of pain, temporality, mutations, death as a metaphysical need outside time.
War defends, or wants to honour, noble causes but only constructs terrifying conclusions for the present and the future. It depends on insignificant but no less absolute deaths.
The work I erected was meant to say something.
It is the surrender of judgement. Of mine at least.
It increases my inability to understand.
Even those I love or, out of familiarity, approve of.
And when it comes down to it, history, to which I have always paid attention as an indicative sketch of a meaning common to humanity, shadows included, strangles conscience in a noose of amazement and disgust.
It is stupid. It was stupid.
Perhaps it has no reason to exist.
This is my formal surrender.
A white flag.
Perhaps a certain amount of surrendering might reveal a new, alternative, peace.
19-09-2002