“Do you know why the moon looks different tonight? Because it has an elliptical orbit and tonight it is closer. It seems bigger. It’s beautiful, right?” They are on a small terrace of a man between strawberries and chillies with the moon as abat jour. I look at him in the dim light and wonder if he is referring to the moon or something else. I don’t ask him. I want to enjoy uncertainty. I watch him secretly and realize that he never “talks” to me. He tells me all his day, but not for conversation. He takes me with him in his days. He never feels obliged to fill my silence. And if I tell him something and he doesn’t know what to say, he stays silent. He doesn’t feel the obligation to answer me.
Speaking is a strange form of being for humans. It can reveal, it can hide, it can be used to heal or to hurt. It can approach or distance. But we forget that it is not the only thing that exists to communicate.
I think of the sensational headlines in the newspapers and then if you read the article you realize that it has no content. I think of the words of politicians so empty, so liar. Even worse I think of the social media where myriad words are thrown into a strange nothingness where nobody listens. I almost feel that they are sentences shot at others, against everyone, against the world. At this time we talk too much, we yell too much, we make too much noise.
I remember the lockdown of 2020. That silence in the streets when meeting was a luxury we did not have and a phone call with a friend was a precious opportunity and maybe we chose the words more carefully. We took the time to really talk. Maybe many were distressed by that silence that could not be filled with bullshit.
Now I can think of all those children who talk late. Those we care about and take to the speech therapist and then to the psychotherapist. Perhaps instead, in all the noise of the world, they are waiting to hear a sound. As a psychiatrist I should say that talking is really complicated and those children have had trouble turning their mouth from something that takes material milk from the outside to put it inside them, into something that can get out of them, Towards the outside, something much less material: the sound of their voice. Perhaps correct answer, formally elegant, yet tonight is not enough for me. What if there was (also) a rejection inside that silence? The refusal to participate unnecessarily in the noise of the world. Or perhaps more, there is the claim that we can understand each other even without talking. Perhaps within the human voice, within every human voice and within the many different languages of the world there is something very special. Perhaps we should be more careful not to waste it.
A voice makes me go back among strawberries and chillies: “Do you want milk and mint?”. “Yes”. I don’t say “Thank you” as they taught me. That polite “thank you”. Tonight there is no need.
Gioia Piazzi
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