Welcome to 2023 and 10 more notes…
A two-faced poster of ideas.
There was at the bottom of the poster something that not only powerfully attracted my attention as enigmatic or contradictory, but awakened the intuition in me to propose to empower us:
“There should be new rules next week.”
For at least a month, I had been thinking about a budget-friendly gift that would contain the taste of a whole year. Ordering an original copy of that poster was out of the question because the distributor did not ship trans-oceanic. Adjusting the budget also favored the handmade, perhaps shabby, but the content here had priority over the packaging and therefore the form did not need to be sophisticated.
Creativity is Rome, which can be reached from innumerable paths. That poster was the manifesto of a beautiful relationship between a woman and the terrain of the genuine, of what is created in life, of created life. When we all live obsessed by the germ of creation, by the original, by the innovation sought, besieged and conquered, that poster seemed to want to reconcile with the world. And in that tranquility like a reader in silence, the poster, trapped.
The night before delivering the gift, like a pattern repeated many times before, I go to bed and wake up: “What if…”. And in that slice of night, like an old phone book, I search for points of contact, for which I create, I guess, addresses. I grab, without knowing where, notes from other times, from past events and I create my own list. List.
When I have four, I think that maybe it makes some sense, it’s not just rules for rules’ sake. When I carry six they become memories, which sprout in syntheses that reach words, which I observe while lying down. I don’t reach ten until the next morning, leaving a gap open for more to come after, as she would do. I finish and sign, this, here:
(1) Function is not an end, it is an option.
(2) Words should bring to us new words, more words, other words.
(3) I is We, We is It, and so It is never impersonal again.
(4) Taking responsibility is today’s greatest superpower.
(5) Patience is the ingredient with which cooking goes from feeding to nurturing.
(6) Learning transforms itself when it meets clumsiness as a trip mate.
(7) Exploration is to “around” what curiosity is to “beyond”.
(8) Honesty in self-awareness is a calmed form of love.
(9) None of the above rules, again, will be here next week.
(10) Human life, at the end, is just a matter of people around us. [Rephrase: At the end of human life, only people last].
I tried to make them all weightless. I tried to put them in order so that they would neither step on each other nor turn their backs on each other. I tried to find for them what that poster kept for me: the yearning of an indolent creativity, that does not look at itself, that knows how to handle the wait. A pulse that would let life pass through it like a mesh that condenses drops of vapor from the air, but retains nothing. That’s what it was and that’s what I wanted to give as a present.
Life is an indolent rhythm. Whatever we create in it, as long as it breathes, it will also be so. May it not obsess us.
Thank you and happy new year. :)
