Tag Archives: borges

Links, Curiosities & Mixed Wonders – 11

As the old saying goes, “Never read Bizzarro Bazar while preparing dinner”.

  • A virtual version of the Library of Babel imagined by Borges has been online for some time now. Wandering around the hexagones and going through random books is a dizzying experience — there are volumes which contain your name, but also everything you’ve done today or you will do tomorrow; but to fully grasp the immense scope of the project, this analysis by Virio Guido Stipa is absolutely excellent [Italian language only].
  • F.A.Q.: what is one of the most disgusting things that could happen during decomposition? If you have to ask, you probably don’t know adipocere. Keep up with this Atlas Obscura article.
  • Did we need H. R. Giger to design the Alien egg? No, it would have been enough to look at this nice little mushroom called Clathrus archeri.

  • Remember my Museum of Failure? Here’s a recent addition: Caproni’s Transaereo. Featuring eight engines and three sets of triple wings, for a total of nine wings, it was designed to transport up to 100 passengers over the Atlantic ocean. It flew only two times, on February 12 and March 4 1921, taking off from Lake Maggiore. It plummeted into the water at the end of the second flight, suffering serious damages and thus ending the ambitious tests.

The dream

The reality

  • New Year’s resolution: finding a patron who will hire me as a decorative garden hermit. I’ve already got the beard.
  • Italian newspaper Repubblica published a nice video on the Neapolitan tradition of femminielli — an incredible popular strategy to elaborate and accept diversity by making it “theatrical”. But then again, as Orson Welles put it, “Italy is the home of 50 million actors, and the only bad ones are on the stage“.
  • In 1671, Dutch writer Arnoldus Montanus wrote a book entitled “The New and Unknown World: or Description of America and the Southland, Containing the Origin of the Americans and South-landers, remarkable voyages thither, Quality of the Shores, Islands, Cities, Fortresses, Towns, Temples, Mountains, Sources, Rivers, Houses, the nature of Beasts, Trees, Plants and foreign Crops, Religion and Manners, Miraculous Occurrences, Old and New Wars: Adorned with Illustrations drawn from the life in America, and described by Arnoldus Montanus”.
    The printed title was so long that, clearly, no space was left for a small caveat: the fact that good old Arnoldus had never actually left Europe his entire life. And, to be fair, the illustrations kind of gave it away:

  • A moment of absolute wonder:

  • The cave in the above picture is not a natural cave. It was bored using a beam of pressurized water. For what purpose?
    Welcome to the world of illegal mammoth hunters.

  • Mentalfloss published an article that would have been perfect in my series of posts called “A Love that Would Not Die” (here, here and, in English, this last one): the story of a Missouri widow who installed a small window on her husband’s grave so she could keep watching his face.
  • In Varanasi the smoke of cremations never ceases; tourists take pictures, enraptured by this deep spiritual experience. But someone has a different view on things: Gagan Chaudhary, one of the “untouchables” who are in charge of the funeral pires. Alcohol and ganja, to which he’s been addicted since he was thirteen, allow him not to faint from the smell; his legs are devastated with wounds and scars; his life was spent amidst abuse, violence and horrible visions. He recounts his experience in a touching article on LiveMint: “I’ve seen bodies where the skin has been ripped apart; I’ve seen bodies with tongues hanging out and blood flowing from orifices. […] I’ve seen bodies cut up and stitched back to a whole. I’ve seen headless corpses; I’ve seen bodies covered with scars. And I’ve burnt them all.“

  • Balthus is back in the news, on the account of an online petition to remove (or at least contextualize, as it was subsequently declared, to adjust the tone) one of his works exhibited at New York MET. Once again the shadow of pedophilia haunts his paintings: an occasion to reflect on the role of art (is it pure signifier, or should we evaluate it from an ethical perspective?); and to reread the article I devoted to this thorny issue a couple of years ago.
  • WoodSwimmer is an incredible stop-motion video. Brett Foxwell produced it by cutting logs and pieces of wood in thin slices, and progressively scanning these sections. In his words, “a straightforward technique but one which is brutally tedious to complete“.

  • The tool in the following picture is a head clamp. In Victorian times it was used to secure the back of the neck of a subject in photographic sessions, during long exposure times.
    You already figured out where we’re going: in post mortem pictures this was used to fix bodies into natural poses, as if they were still alive, right?
    Well, not quite. Time for a bit of debunking on post mortem photography.

This image comes from an article entitled The Truth About Post Mortem Photography. Never write anything beginning with “The Truth About”.

  • During the last 59 years, Jim “Antlerman” Phillips has been scouring the hills of Montana looking for elk, deer or antelope antlers. He now has a collection of more than 16.000 pieces. (Thanks, Riccardo!)

That’s all for now: I shall leave you with a festive bone GIF, and remind you that if you run out of ideas for Christmas presents, maybe a little colorful book about the quirky side of Paris could do the trick.

Philipp Wiechern, Boneflacke Collection, 2012.

The Grim Reaper at the Chessboard

Few games lend themselves to philosophical metaphors like the game of chess.
The two armies, one dark and one bright, have been battling each other for millennia in endless struggle. An abstract fight of mathematical perfection, as mankind’s “terrible love of war” is inscribed within an orthogonal grid which is only superficially reassuring.
The chessboard hides in fact an impossible combinatory vertigo, an infinity of variations. One should not be fooled by the apparent simplicity of the scheme (the estimate of all possible games is a staggering number), and remember that famous Pharaoh who, upon accepting to pay a grain of wheat on the first square and to double the number of grains on the following squares, found himself ruined.

The battle of 32 pieces on the 64 squares inspired, aside from the obvious martial allegories, several poems tracing the analogy between the chessboard and the Universe itself, and between the pawns and human condition.
The most ancient and famous is one of Omar Khayyám‘s quatrains:

Tis all a Chequer-board of nights and days
Where Destiny with men for Pieces plays:
Hither and thither moves, and mates, and slays,
And one by one back in the closet lays.

This idea of God moving men over the chessboard as he pleases might look somewhat disquieting, but Jorge Luis Borges multiplied it into an infinite regress, asking if God himself might be an unknowing piece on a larger chessboard:

Weakling king,  slanting bishop, relentless
Queen, direct rook and cunning pawn
Seek and wage their armed battle
Across the black and white of the field.

They know not that the player’s notorious
Hand governs their destiny,
They know not that a rigor adamantine
Subjects their will and rules their day.

The player also is a prisoner
(The saying  is Omar’s) of another board
Of black nights and of white days.

God moves the player, and he, the piece.
Which god behind God begets the plot
Of dust and time and dream and agonies?

This cosmic game is of course all about free will, but is also part of the wider context of memento mori and of Death being  the Great Leveler. Whether we are Kings or Bishops, rooks or simple pawns; whether we fight for the White or Black side; whether our army wins or loses — the true outcome of the battle is already set. We will all end up being put back in the box with all other pieces, down in “time’s common grave“.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Death many times sat at the chessboard before Man.

In the oldest representations, the skeleton was depicted as cruel and dangerous, ready to violently clutch the unsuspecting bystander; but by the late Middle Ages, with the birth of the Danse Macabre (and possibly with the influence of the haunting but not malevolent Breton figure of Ankou) the skeleton had become unarmed and peaceful, even prone to dancing, in a carnival feast which, while reminding the viewer of his inevitable fate, also had an exorcistic quality.

That Death might be willing to allow Man a game of chess, therefore, is connected with a more positive idea in respect to previous iconographic themes (Triumph of Death, Last Judgement, the Three Kings, etc.). But it goes further than that: the very fact that the Reaper could now be challenged, suggests the beginning of Renaissance thought.

In fact, in depictions of Death playing chess, just like in the Danse Macabre, there are no

allusions or symbols directly pointing to the apocalyptic presence of religion, nor to the necessity of its rituals; for instance, there are no elements suggesting the need of receiving, in the final act, the extreme confort of a priest or the absolution as a viaticum for the next world, which would stress the feeling of impotence of man. Portrayed in the Danse Macabre is a man who sees himself as a part of the world, who acknowledges his being the maker of change in personal and social reality, who is inscribed in historical perspective.

(A. Tanfoglio, Lo spettacolo della morte… Quaderni di estetica e mimesi del bello nell’arte macabra in Europa, Vol. 4, 1985)

The man making his moves against Death was no more a Medieval man, but a modern one.
Later on, the Devil himself was destined to be beat at the game: according to the legend, Sixteenth Century chess master Paolo Boi from Syracuse played a game against a mysterious stranger, who left horrified when on the chessboard the pieces formed the shape of a cross…

But what is probably the most interesting episode happened in recent times, in 1985.
A Dr. Wolfgang Eisenbeiss and an aquaintance decided to arrange a very peculiar match: it was to be played between two great chess masters, one living and one dead.
The execution of the game would be made possible thanks to Robert Rollans, a “trustworthy” medium with no knowledge of chess (so as not to influence the outcome).
The odd party soon found a living player who was willing to try the experiment, chess grandmaster Viktor Korchnoi; contacting the challenger proved to be a little more difficult, but on June 15 the spirit of Géza Maróczy, who had died more than 30 years before on May 29, 1951, agreed to pick up the challenge.
Comunicating the moves between the two adversaries, through the psychic’s automatic writing, also took more time than expected. The game lasted 7 years and 8 months, until the Maróczy’s ghost eventually gave up, after 47 moves.

This “supernatural” game shows that the symbolic value of chess survived through the centuries.
One of the most ancient games is still providing inspiration for human creativity, from literature (Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass was built upon a chess enigma) to painting, from sculpture to modern so-called mysteries (how could chess not play a part in Rennes-le-Château mythology?).
From time to time, the 64 squares have been used as an emblem of seduction and flirtation, of political challenges, or of the great battle between the White and the Black, a battle going on within ourselves, on the chessboard of our soul.

It is ultimately an ambiguous, dual fascination.
The chessboard provides a finite, clear, rationalist battlefield. It shows life as a series of strategical decisions, of rules and predictable movements. We fancy a game with intrinsic accuracy and logic.
And yet every game is uncertain, and there’s always the possibility that the true “endgame” will suddenly catch us off guard, as it did with the Pharaoh:

CLOV (fixed gaze, tonelessly):
Finished, it’s finished, nearly finished, it must be nearly finished.
 (Pause.)
Grain upon grain, one by one, and one day, suddenly, there’s a heap, a little heap, the impossible heap.

(Thanks, Mauro!)

Special: Claudio Romo

claudio1

On April the 4th, inside the Modo Infoshop bookshop in Bologna I have had the pleasure to meet Chilean artist Claudio Andrés Salvador Francisco Romo Torres, to help him present his latest illustrated book A Journey in the Phantasmagorical Garden of Apparitio Albinus in front of a crowd of his fans.

I don’t want to go into much detail about his work, because he himself will talk about it in the next paragraphs. I would only like to add one small personal note. In my life I’ve been lucky enough to know, to various degrees of intimacy, several writers, filmmakers, actors, illustrators: some of them were my personal heroes. And while it’s true that the creator is always a bit poorer than his creation (no one is flawless), I noticed the most visionary and original artists often show unexpected kindness, reserve, gentleness. Claudio is the kind of person who is almost embarassed when he’s the center of attention, and his immense imagination can only be guessed behind his electric, enthusiast, childlike glance. He is the kind of person who, after the presentation of his book, asks the audience permission to take a selfie with them, because “none of my friends or students back home will ever believe all this has really happened“.
I think men like him are more precious than yet another maudit.

What follows is the transcription of our chat.

alebrijido

We’re here today with Claudio Romo (I can never remember his impossibly long full name), to talk about his latest work A Journey in the Phantasmagorical Garden of Apparitio Albinus, a book I particularly love because it offers a kind of mixture of very different worlds: ingredients like time travel, giant jellyfish, flashes of alchemy, flying telepathic cities and countless creatures and monsters with all-too-human characteristics. And rather like Calvino’s Invisible Cities, this garden is a kind of place within the mind, within the soul… and just like the soul, the mind is a mysterious and complicated place, not infrequently with perverse overtones. A place where literary and artistic references intermix and intertwine.
From an artistic viewpoint, this work certainly brings to mind Roland Topor’s film Fantastic Planet, although filtered by a Latin American sensibility steeped in pre-Columbian iconography. On the other hand, certain illustrations vividly evoke Hieronymus Bosch, with their swarming jumble of tiny physically and anatomically deformed mutant creatures. Then there are the literary references: impossible not to think of Borges and his Book Of Imaginary Beings, but also the end of his Library of Babel; and certain encounters and copulations between mutant bodies evoke the Burroughs of Naked Lunch, whereas this work’s finale evokes ‘real’ alchemical procedures, with the Emerald Tablet of Hermes and its famous phrase “That which is below is like that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing”. At the end of the book it is revealed that the garden is as infinite as the cosmos, but also that it is connected to an infinite number of other infinities, not only his personal garden but also mine and yours. In a sense, the universe which emerges is an interpenetration of marvels in which it is highly difficult to grasp where reality finishes and imagination begins, because fantasy too can be extremely concrete. It’s as though Claudio was acting as a kind of map-maker of his mental ecosystem, doing so with the zest of a biologist, an ethnologist and an entomologist, studying and describing all the details and behaviour of the fauna inhabiting it. From this point of view, the first question I’d like to ask concerns precisely reality and imagination. How do they interact, for you? For many artists this dichotomy is important, and the way they deal with it helps us to understand more about their art.

First of all, I’d like to thank Ivan, because he has presented a good reading of my book.
I have always thought that no author is autonomous, we all depend on someone, come from someone, we have an inheritance transmitted not through a bloodline but through a spiritual or conceptual bond, an inheritance received from birth through culture. Borges is my point of departure, the alchemical inscription, the science fiction, fantastical literature, popular literature… all these elements contribute to my work. When I construct these stories I am assembling a collage, a structure, in order to create parallel realities.
So, to answer Ivan’s question, I think that reality is something constructed by language, and so the dichotomy between reality and imagination doesn’t exist, because human beings inhabit language and language is a permanent and delirious construction.
I detest it when people talk about the reality of nature, or static nature. For me, reality is a permanent construction and language is the instrument which generates this construction.
This is why I take as models people like Borges, Bioy Casares, Athanasius Kircher (a Jesuit alchemist named as maestro of a hundred arts who created the first anatomical theatre and built a wunderkammer)… people who from very different backgrounds have constructed different realities.

ginoide

hornos
In this sense, the interesting thing is that the drawings and stories of Apparitio Albinus remind us of – or have a layer, we might say, that makes them resemble – the travel journals of explorers of long ago. Albinus could almost be a Marco Polo visiting a faraway land, where the image he paints is similar to a mediaeval bestiary, in which animals were not described in a realistic way, but according to their symbolic function… for example the lion was represented as an honest animal who never slept, because he was supposed to echo the figure of Christ… actually, Claudio’s animals frequently assume poses exactly like those seen in mediaeval bestiaries. There is also a gaze, a way of observing, that has something childish about it, a gaze always eager to marvel, to look for magic in the interconnection between different things, and I’d like to ask you if this child exists inside you, and how much freedom you allow him in your creative process.

When I first began creating books, I concentrated solely on the engravings, and technically engraving was extremely powerful for me. I was orthodox in my practice, but the great thing about the graphic novel is that its public is adult but also infantile, and the thing that interests me above all is showing and helping children understand that reality is soft.
The first book I made on this subject is called The Album Of Imprudent Flora, a kind of bestiary conceived and created to attract children and lead them towards science, botany, the marvel of nature… not as something static, but as something mobile. For example I described trees which held Portuguese populations that had got lost searching for the Antarctic: then they had become tiny through having eaten Lilliputian strawberries, and when they died they returned to a special place called Portugal… and then there were also plants which fed on fear and which induced the spirits on Saturn to commit suicide and the spirits on Mars to kill… and then die. I created a series of characters and plants whose purpose was to fascinate children. There was a flower that had a piece of ectoplasm inside its pistil, and if you put a mouse in front of that flower the pistil turned into a piece of cheese, and when the mouse ate the cheese the plant ate the mouse… after which, if a cat came by, the pistil turned into a mouse, and so on. The idea was to create a kaleidoscope of plants and flowers.
There was another plant which I named after an aunt of mine, extremely ugly, and in honour of her I gave this plant the ability to transform itself constantly: by day it was transfigured, and in certain moments it had a colloidal materiality, while in others it had a geometric structure… an absolutely mutant flower. This is all rather monstrous, but also fascinating, which is why I called the book “the imprudent flora”, because it went beyond the bounds of nature. Basically I think that when I draw I do it for children, in order to build up a way of interpreting reality in a broad and rich kind of way.

maquina_crononautica

automata_jerizaro
This corporal fluidity is also visible in this latest book, but there’s another aspect that I also find interesting, and this is the inversions that Claudio likes to create. For example, Lazarus is not resurrected, he ends up transformed into ghost by the phantasmagorical machine; we get warrior automatons which reject violence and turn into pacifists and deserters, and then again, in one of my favourite chapters, there is a time machine, built to transport us into the future, which actually does the opposite, because it transports the future into our present – a future we’d never have wanted to see, because what appears in the present is the corpses we will become. It seems that irony is clearly important in your universe, and I’d like to you tell us about that.

That’s a good question. I’m glad you asked me, there are two wonderful themes involved.
One is the theme of the ghost, because for the phantasmagorical machine I based the idea on an Argentinian author called Bioy Casares and his The Invention of Morel. In that story, Morel is a scientist who falls in love with Faustina, and since she doesn’t love him, he invents a machine which will absorb her spirit, record it, and later, in a phantasmagorical island, reproduce it eternally… but the machine turns out to kill the people it has filmed, and so Morel commits suicide by filming himself together with Faustine, thus ending up on this island where every day the same scene is repeated, featuring these two ghosts. But the story really begins when another man arrives on the island, falls in love with the ghost of Faustine, learns to work the machine and then films himself while Faustine is gazing at the sea. So he too commits suicide in order to remain in the paradise of Faustine’s consciousness.
This is a hallucinatory theme, and I was fascinated by the desire of a man who kills himself in order to inhabit the consciousness of the woman he loves, even though the woman in question is actually a ghost!
And the other question… on irony. Most of the machines I construct in the book are fatuous failures and mistakes: those who want to change time end up meeting themselves as corpses, those who want to invent a machine for becoming immortal drop dead instantly and end up in an eternal limbo… I like talking about ghosts but also about failed adventures, as metaphors for life, because in real life every adventure is a failure… except for this journey to Italy, which has turned out to absolutely wonderful!

demiurdo_y_humunculos

jardin_final
A few days ago, on Facebook, I saw a fragment of a conversation in which you, Claudio, argued that the drawing and the word are not really so different, that the apparent distance between logos and image is fictional, which is why you use both things to express your meaning. You use them like two parallel rail tracks, in the same way, and this is also evident through the way that in your books the texts too have a painterly visual shape, and if it weren’t for the pristine paper of this edition, we might think we were looking at a fantastical encyclopedia from two or three centuries ago.
So, I wanted to ask a last question on this subject, perhaps the most banal question, which resembles the one always asked of songwriter-singers (which comes first, the words or the music?)… but do your visions emerge firstly from the drawing paper and only later do you form a kind of explicative text? Or do they emerge as stories from the beginning?

If I had to define myself, I’d say I was a drawing animal. All the books I have created were planned and drawn firstly, and the conceptual idea was generated by the image. Because I’m not really a writer, I never have been. I didn’t want to write this book either, only to draw it, but Lina [the editor] forced me to write it! I said to her, Lina, I have a friend who is fantastic with words, and she replied in a dictatorial tone: I’m not interested. I want you to write it. And today I’m grateful to her for that.
I always start from the drawing, always, always…

cover_apparitio_uk alta

The English version of Claudio Romo’s new book can be purchased here.

Scherzi della memoria

Il modo in cui il nostro cervello registra e rielabora i ricordi è ancora in gran parte sconosciuto alla scienza. Vi sono però alcuni casi estremi che potrebbero aiutare gli studiosi a comprendere i confini della nostra memoria: come ricordiamo, e come dimentichiamo.

La sindrome di Susac è stata scoperta negli anni ’70 dall’omonimo medico; si tratta di un disordine cerebrale che colpisce le donne fra i 18 e i 40 anni, e presenta molti segni clinici distintivi – ma fra tutti il più peculiare è la perdita della memoria a lungo termine. Chi è affetto da questa sindrome ricorda quasi esclusivamente ciò che gli è accaduto nelle 24 ore precedenti. Immaginate cosa significhi avere dimenticato dove eravate e cosa avete fatto la settimana scorsa, tre mesi fa, tre anni fa; risvegliarvi ogni mattina non sapendo se siete laureati, o fidanzati, o addirittura sposati… se è Natale, se vostra nonna è viva o morta, e via dicendo. Come dare un senso alla vostra persona, alla vostra identità?

È quello che accade a circa 250 persone in tutto il mondo. La sindrome arriva all’improvvio e in genere si manifesta con attacchi ricorrenti che durano più o meno da quindici mesi a 5 anni. Come si presenta se ne va, senza preavviso. Non sono segnalati casi mortali, ma su un terzo dei pazienti restano postumi sensoriali e neurologici di gravità variabile.

Jess Lydon, 19 anni, inglese, soffre della sindrome da qualche tempo. Rinchiusa in un infinito presente, non può ricordarsi nemmeno se ha già mangiato. Non osa avventurarsi fuori di casa, per paura di dimenticare la strada del ritorno; ma continua a pettinarsi e curarsi, perché «quando questo disastro sarà passato voglio che la vita mi trovi in ordine». La sindrome provoca anche stati confusionali e Jess è di tanto in tanto preda di terrori e convinzioni paranoiche e irreali – crede che dei chirurghi l’abbiano operata, lasciando una scarpa nel suo stomaco, o che la sua casa sia in realtà un ospedale psichiatrico. I neurologi non conoscono ancora le cause della sindrome, né sanno esattamente come curarla: si procede a tentoni, cercando di arginare le crisi, ma nessun farmaco si è rivelato efficace fino ad ora. Si sa soltanto che Jess guarirà prima o poi, anche se la perdita di udito e di vista potrebbe rimanere permanente.

Ancora più strana è l’opposta malattia di cui soffre l’americana Jill Price: come il Funes del celebre racconto di Borges, Jill non riesce a dimenticare. Ricorda esattamente quasi tutti i giorni della sua vita, da quando aveva 11 anni. È in grado di dire in che giorno e a che ora un determinato episodio di Dallas è andato in onda 20 anni fa, e anche cosa stava facendo lei in quel momento, se pioveva, se era un lunedì o un martedì, com’era vestito suo fratello, e via dicendo.

Quello che potrebbe sembrare un dono invidiabile, com’è facilmente intuibile, risulta essere nella realtà una vera e propria disgrazia. È la nostra capacità di dimenticare che ci permette di superare i problemi e metabolizzare il passato. Jill non può fare né l’una né l’altra cosa: ricorda esattamente tutte le volte in cui la madre l’ha rimproverata quando aveva 15 anni, sente ancora le precise parole così come sono state pronunciate, e ovviamente non può fare a meno di ripassare nella sua testa tutti i momenti drammatici della sua vita, primo fra tutti la morte dell’unico amore della sua vita, vittima di un infarto due anni fa. Il tormento di non riuscire a disfarsi del passato e voltare pagina è ciò che l’ha spinta a sottoporsi a innumerevoli esami e a divenire un caso clinico celebre, nella speranza di poter trovare una cura e finalmente archiviare le sue memorie senza doverle rivivere costantemente.

La sua sindrome si chiama ipertimesia, e la particolarità di questa affezione è che concerne principalmente la memoria autobiografica; questo significa che, paradossalmente, Jill ha difficoltà a memorizzare qualcosa volontariamente – l’enorme flusso di ricordi relativi alla sua vita e alle sue esperienze le impedisce di dare buoni risultati nei test di memoria. La sindrome ha alcuni punti di contatto con l’autismo e la sindrome dei savant, per quanto riguarda la calendarizzazione ossessiva che permette di ricordarsi data e ora di ogni evento; ma le scansioni cerebrali di Jill hanno mostrato anche una maggiore estensione dell’area normalmente associata con il comportamento maniaco-compulsivo, come se la sindrome potesse essere una sorta di ossessione non rivolta ad oggetti concreti, ma ai ricordi stessi, “collezionati” in maniera incontrollabile.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=SoxsMMV538U]

Tutti impariamo dal passato, e facciamo le nostre previsioni sulla base delle esperienze precedenti; la capacità di ricordare, e di dimenticare, forgia gran parte delle nostre azioni, e in definitiva sta alla base di chi siamo o pensiamo di essere. Eppure la nostra memoria è forse un equilibrio più delicato e misterioso di quello che sembrerebbe, una selezione e rielaborazione continua con cui la nostra mente “decide” a quali avvenimenti far spazio e quali accantonare, cosa è degno di essere ricordato e cosa possiamo, o dobbiamo, lasciare andare.

E anche cosa tutti noi possiamo immaginare di aver vissuto, “ricordando” eventi mai accaduti… ma questa è un’altra storia, ancora più affascinante, di cui parleremo certamente in futuro.

Interconnessioni

Jorge Louis Borges, contemplando il suo bastone da passeggio in lacca cinese, scriveva queste parole:

“Lo guardo. Penso all’artigiano che lavorò il bambù e lo piegò affinché la mia mano destra potesse stringerlo bene nel pugno.
Non so se vive ancora o è morto.
Non so se è taoista o buddista o se interroga il libro dei sessantaquattro esagrammi.
Non ci vedremo mai.
È sperduto tra novecentotrenta milioni.
Qualcosa, tuttavia, ci lega.
Non è impossibile che Qualcuno abbia premeditato questo vincolo.
Non è impossibile che l’universo necessiti di questo vincolo.”

(da La cifra, 1981)

Ad ogni causa corrisponde un effetto, certo. Ma la causalità va inserita in una visione più ampia e complessa: quella delle interconnessioni, delle interdipendenze. Ce lo dicono da centinaia d’anni poeti, mistici, visionari – e dal secolo scorso anche fisici e scienziati: nulla esiste per conto proprio, ma ogni cosa è legata alle altre, anche le più remote, le più lontane o antiche. Così la vostra vita (e intendo proprio la vostra giornata di oggi!) è influenzata ovviamente da come vi svegliate, ma anche dal modo in cui la luce filtra dalla finestra, dalle nuvole nel cielo e dal rumore che proviene dalla strada; cosa più difficile da afferrare, la vostra potrebbe essere una buona o una cattiva giornata a seconda se una pecora, in un villaggio del Messico, stia calpestando o meno una violetta. E ancora: la vostra giornata è influenzata da Scipione che sconfigge Annibale, dal buon funzionamento della ghigliottina in una calda mattina di fine ‘700, e in definitiva da ogni uomo o donna o animale che sia comparso ed abbia agito sulla Terra. Ogni minima cosa accaduta vi ha portato fin qui, e contribuisce a farvi sentire come vi sentite ora.

Vi sembra che stiamo esagerando? Facciamo allora un esempio.

Fabio è un ragazzo di quindici anni, e sfogliando un libro d’arte si imbatte per la prima volta nella sua vita in un quadro splendido: si tratta dell’ Urlo di Munch. Il cielo dai colori apocalittici e la figura sgomenta in primo piano lo colpiscono profondamente, toccano una parte di lui che sta appena nascendo. Immediatamente, Fabio sente un’affinità con quel dipinto, che gli sembra racchiudere tutta la paura, l’insicurezza e l’orrore che l’universo gli ispira.


In un’altra parte del mondo, Margot sta completando la lettura di Frankenstein di Mary Shelley. Margot è romantica, ma è ugualmente attratta dalla scienza. Il libro sembra riassumere le sue due passioni, e la tragica storia del mostro riportato in vita con parti di cadavere la affascina. Margot è rapita dalle sue fantasticherie.

Sono due esperienze comuni, e senza una evidente correlazione. Eppure, per quanto sembri assurdo, ciò che oggi provano Fabio e Margot è strettamente collegato a due vulcani, ubicati in una remota parte del pianeta, in Indonesia: il vulcano Tambora e il vulcano Krakatoa.

Nell’aprile del 1815 il vulcano Tambora esplose con una furia talmente devastante da riempire l’atmosfera terrestre di cenere e polveri sottili per i quattro anni a seguire: l’eruzione fu 52.000 volte più potente della bomba di Hiroshima. Si stima che, a livello globale, questa catastrofe costò la vita a più di 60.000 persone. La cenere sparata nell’atmosfera causò cambiamenti climatici drammatici, e il 1816 venne ricordato come l’ “anno senza estate“: anche in Europa la luce del sole non riuscì a scaldare le messi; piogge, gelo e carestie si prolungarono per tutto l’anno. Proprio a causa di queste condizioni climatiche avverse, un gruppo di poeti romantici si ritirò in una villa, a Ginevra, dove si sfidarono l’un l’altro a scrivere la più paurosa storia del terrore. In questa sessione di scrittura creativa, nata proprio dalle intemperie causate dal vulcano, vide la luce il romanzo Frankenstein ad opera della signora Shelley, moglie del più celebre poeta inglese Percey Shelley. Quanto questo romanzo abbia influito sulla cultura occidentale è noto.

Il 27 agosto 1883, il vulcano Krakatoa (poco distante dal Tambora) eruttò con un’energia equivalente a 500 megatoni, provocando il suono più forte mai udito sul pianeta, un boato che arrivò a quasi 5000 km di distanza. L’esplosione ridusse in cenere l’isola sulla quale sorgeva il vulcano e scatenò un’onda di maremoto alta 40 metri, che correva alla velocità di 1120 km/h. Morirono più di 36.000 persone, e fu riportata la presenza di gruppi di scheletri umani vaganti alla deriva per l’oceano indiano su zattere di pomice vulcanica, e finiti sulle coste orientali dell’Africa fino a un anno dopo l’eruzione.
A causa delle particelle di cenere emesse nell’aria, la Luna mantenne per anni un colore bluastro.

L’eruzione generò anche tramonti spettacolari in tutto il mondo per diversi mesi successivi, a causa del fatto che la luce solare si rifletteva sulle particelle di polvere sospese nell’aria, eruttate dal vulcano nell’atmosfera. L’artista inglese William Ashcroft realizzò centinaia di schizzi a colori dei tramonti rossi intorno al mondo (generati dal Krakatoa) negli anni successivi all’eruzione.

Nel 2004 alcuni ricercatori supposero che il cielo color rosso sangue del famoso quadro di Edvard Munch L’urlo, realizzato nel 1893, sia in realtà una riproduzione accurata del cielo norvegese dopo l’eruzione.

Così, senza eruzioni in Indonesia, niente Urlo, niente Frankenstein.

Attenti, perché la vertigine è a pochi passi. Quante altre, minuscole, impercettibili interconnessioni sfuggono al nostro occhio? Quante delle nostre scelte sono condizionate da eventi del passato, o da situazioni che logicamente riterremmo lontane da noi? La nostra mente è davvero razionale e a “tenuta stagna”, oppure le decisioni che prende sono continuamente influenzate dal mondo in cui è immersa? Il passato è veramente passato o vive ancora oggi al nostro fianco?

In un paesino del Messico, una pecora ha calpestato una violetta: ora sta a voi.

La biblioteca delle meraviglie – VI

Lawrence Weschler

IL GABINETTO DELLE MERAVIGLIE DI MR. WILSON

(1999, Adelphi)

Questo libro parla di un museo scientifico davvero straordinario, un museo che potrebbe sembrare impossibile se non esistesse veramente: si tratta del Museum Of Jurassic Technology, ubicato a Los Angeles e diretto dall’enigmatico e geniale Mr. Wilson del titolo. Quest’ultimo ha creato e mantiene in vita una delle più sconcertanti esposizioni al mondo. La peculiarità del museo, che illustra diverse scoperte scientifiche poco note e dettaglia teorie dimenticate, strambe o fantasiose, non sta tanto nel materiale che propone, quanto piuttosto nel fatto che il visitatore non può mai sapere se quello che sta vedendo è realtà o invenzione. Facciamo un esempio: nella collezione permanente del museo è narrata con dovizia di particolari la strana storia del Deprong Mori, un pipistrello sudamericano che sembra abbia l’abilità di passare attraverso le pareti delle capanne e attraverso il legno, e dei tentativi fatti per catturarlo. Allo stesso modo, viene illustrata la formica del Camerun denominata Megolaponera foetens, il cui cervello viene talvolta controllato da una spora fungina che la “costringe” ad arrampicarsi sugli alberi più alti della foresta e infine le fa esplodere la testa. Una di queste due storie è basata su fatti scientifici comprovati, l’altra no. Eppure sono esposte fianco a fianco, senza che il pubblico possa distinguere i fatti inventati da quelli reali.

Vi domanderete, ma che razza di museo scientifico è? Qual è lo scopo?

Beh, di certo non avrete risposte da Mr. Wilson, che se ne starà beffardo a guardarvi dal suo bancone all’entrata. Il museo include aneddoti veritieri e notizie false, teorie certe e dati contraffatti, eppure il tutto è presentato con rigore scientifico e con la classica didattica “alta” ma divulgativa tipica di un museo di scienze. Ci sono addirittura le audioguide, con la seria e pacata voce di una professionista che spiega gli oggetti nelle varie sale. Eppure, alla fine, il terreno vi mancherà sotto ai piedi… e forse è proprio quello lo scopo segreto di Mr. Wilson.

Lo splendido libro di Weschler ci accompagna fra le varie sale del museo, raccontandoci qualcosa di più sul suo misterioso creatore, e spiegandoci perché questo strano connubio di verità e falsità ha tanto affascinato ed entusiasmato allo stesso modo la comunità scientifica (che vi ha visto una rappresentazione dell’incertezza del lavoro del ricercatore) e il mondo dell’arte: il museo è in definitiva una vera e propria installazione artistica permanente, che affronta il metodo scientifico e la stranezza del mondo con bizzarro senso dello humor.

André Pieyre De Mandiargues

MUSEO NERO

(1997, EST Saggiatore)

All’interno di questa nostra rubrica dedicata ai consigli di lettura non abbiamo ancora presentato alcun libro di narrativa. Sopperiamo a questa mancanza con Museo nero, capolavoro poco conosciuto in Italia, il cui sottotitolo è “L’invasione della realtà da parte del meraviglioso”. L’autore è il grande A.P. De Mandiargues, morto nel 1991, scrittore e poeta francese vicino ai surrealisti. Questo libro è una buona introduzione ai temi e ai fantasmi che popolano il mondo altamente erotico e crudele di Mandiargues, influenzato da Sade ma venato da un fiume sotterraneo di allegorie fantastiche e macabre. Ciò che colpisce maggiormente è la stupefacente abilità stilistica nelle descrizioni, che riescono a cogliere i minimi dettagli della scena e a colorarli di accenti misteriosi, come se ogni particolare fosse espressione di un complesso piano metaforico che costituisce la rete nascosta della realtà. Il mito e l’archetipo sono evidenti in ogni racconto, e Museo nero è essenzialmente un’iniziazione ai segreti del mostruoso. L’erotismo per Mandiargues è sempre un momento di crudele discesa negli abissi del nostro stesso significato: abbandono, dolorosa illuminazione, perdita di ogni maschera sociale, scoperta dell’animalità, liberazione e condanna al tempo stesso. Museo nero è un’esplorazione di quegli strappi e buchi che si aprono talvolta nel “panorama tracciato dai nostri sensi”, e che lasciano intravvedere ciò che sta sotto – la nostra vera, misteriosa e spesso mostruosa natura. Apre la raccolta il sublime Il sangue dell’agnello, adattato per il cinema da Walerian Borowczyk (un altro autore di cui parleremo sicuramente).