[And can't get no] Satisfaction
The stories we have told ourselves for millennia are a slow therapy that allows us to be who we are.
PalmWe live under the tyranny of weak passions, rationalized and cataloged so they don't seem so frightening. We must be assertive, adaptable, and slightly happy individuals. Docile workers, subservient citizens. Despite the motivational phrases, the lists of unbearable advice on how to become functional individuals, and the commonplaces dressed up as quick psychology available to everyone, we struggle to achieve fulfillment; we are dissatisfied beings.
'Sick Animals' is perhaps the most accurate definition of the human condition, Nietzsche's feu, in the 19th century. Sick with uncertainty and reason. We are the unfinished animal, hostage to excessive passions, because we are woven by time and by others. A student this week reminded me of Caspar David Friedrich's painting, Walking on a Sea of Clouds. It is perhaps the most accurate image of our condition: exiles from paradise, contemplators of the abyss, sometimes precious, sometimes terrible, always beyond our reach.
A contagious fever has spread, in classrooms, on social media, even among friends or lovers: we must learn to manage emotions, to tame ourselves within, because being servile is the only way to endure our times. We try to fit into a hostile present that prevents us from having decent housing, condemns us to a planet in ruins, to blatant misogyny, forces us to witness the genocide of the Palestinian people, compels us to see massacres, wars, hunger, human beings who lose their lives every moment because of capital. An intolerable list of miseries that we accept with a fairground stoicism that is not stoic.
Artistic manifestation
Nietzsche, in 1872, explains the origin of Greek tragedy as an artistic manifestation, arguing that in tragedies we find a fusion of two vital principles present in human beings: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. On the one hand, order, appearance, luminosity, language, reason; on the other, chaos, instinct, intoxication, ferocious passions, night. Nietzsche makes a diagnosis and critique of Western culture that shoots an arrow into the heart of today: excessive rationalism erases excess and breaks the fragile balance that makes us human.
Deep feelings are not transferable to language; we are inhabited by the irrational, the chaotic element that always remains alien to order. And renouncing our part ofhubrisIn the profound complexity of passions, in a kind of homogenization of affections, it fosters indifference, apathy, a chronic dissatisfaction that drives the wheels of consumption and self-help. Apollo cannot live without Dionysus; suppressing our moments of night is a mutilation. Reason makes us sick by not knowing how to conjugate itself with excess.
Who knows if the only way for us sick animals to learn to live lies in the midst of cinema, literature, and artistic manifestations that become a sentimental education. The stories we have told ourselves for millennia are a slow therapy that allows us to be what we are, between Apollo's clearing and Dionysus's forest. Maria-Mercè Marçal, Virginia Woolf, Alejandra Pizarnik, Patti Smith, Céline Sciamma are the exponents of a sentimental education that may not help us manage emotions, but will allow us to take care of our fragility, suffering, the unclassifiable depths that are entirely ours. Nietzsche points out that artistic creation is the highest task of human beings, precisely because it is the only one that can approach the unfathomable passions. In the pages of Grammar of fantasyRodari aims to teach us how to invent stories, not because we're all artists, but because no one is a slave. Perhaps we should make room for the art of invention, so that fantasy can cure us of self-help and we can shout out our dissatisfaction and want to imagine another world together, to make it possible.