dazed gaze (in the maze).
Ogni tanto mi piace scrivere direttamente in inglese. Trovo che mi consenta di esprimermi in un modo completamente diverso. I concetti non possono essere rappresentati nello stesso modo in lingue diverse. C’è poco da fare: lingue diverse sfumature diverse. Ora, proprio per il fatto che non sono né madrelingua né molto meno, proprio in questo limite espressivo trovo interessante cercare le parole e le perifrasi per esprimere i concetti. È una autolimitazione quasi calviniana, forse, una specie di lipogramma lingustico - o sempre per dirla à la Queneau - un esercizio di stile.
[With today I start a new monthly series to describe how I train for what it will be possible in what’s next. During the month of May, I’ll try to respect this discipline: I’ll force myself to extract some micro-lessons from how I — with all of you — am changing my life to make it fitter to the unknown].
It’s been two months or so since I’ve been living mostly closed into my house, without going out except to go shopping once a week. In this period I — we — have discovered that the unthinkable can be suddenly thinkable and sayable, and followed (back and forth) all the Kübler-Ross grief curve. Meanwhile, I started training for what comes up after. What comes up will be a maze, full of rules and new habits: may I become another person?
Honestly, I feel blessed for what mother nature and education gave me: a radical unfitness to schemes, an irrepressible inability to describe myself for what I am (or should be) and not for what I say or do. I feel blessed for this tragedy did not change my scope that much. I was already messed, and for this gift I feel blessed (semicit.).
I started training: all of a sudden I read, I wrote and increased my workouts literally like never before. I’ve been practicing some mild and home-made weightlifting and started to track my life with some app to count calories, steps and so on. I studied and re-opened closed fields of practice growing up even more eclectic than before.
Naked life is making us encounter a hidden part of ourselves. Diving in the unknown outside is an incredible opportunity to dig straight to the core of who we are — and who we must become. And being able to meet the unknown suspending our speculative habits can be a healing practice to learn.
Now that is time to go out in the maze of ‘real life’, I feel an urgency: change my look to what the outside actually is. As Rilke wrote in one of the Duino Elegies (The Eight Elegy):
The creature gazes into openness with all its eyes. But our eyes are as if they were reversed, and surround it, everywhere, like barriers against its free passage. We know what is outside us from the animal’s face alone: since we already turn the young child round and make it look backwards at what is settled, not that openness that is so deep in the animal’s vision. Free from death.
Our eyes can barely understand and pick up what’s outside. The outside is what surrouds us and can be seen as a subtraction and distinction of our look. That means that our look is the frame that lets the outside come in. Where. Everything cannot be known, but only recognized, not seen but revised. That’s why we don’t have to fear the unknown, we have to love it and embrace it until we become part of it. After all, if you’re reading this your’re still alive in the superunknown. And as the old Soudgarden hit sang,
If this isn’t what you see
It doesn’t make you blind
Yea, if this doesn’t make you feel
It doesn’t mean you’ve died
Training for the outside is a matter of gaze. A radical transformation of the act of looking will perform what the outside will be.
Originariamente su Medium.