THE CARE OF WORDS

This year after the summer the sea or the mountain, returned to our cities to expect we found the countryside… It was not so much the usual rhetoric or slogans that struck me as the use of a few words that I was struck by, rather reluctantly following debates and talk shows, perhaps motivated by the obligation to try to think.

I remember that at the university they made us study a trivial experiment: two groups of guys were shown the photo that showed two crashed vehicles.

The first group was asked at what speed the cars collided, and at what speed they crashed.

All members of the second group responded at a faster rate.

Nothing shocking of course, but since the average time of attention as well as that dedicated to reflection has been very reduced, I thought it might be useful to try a little effort, keeping in mind that similar words may be able to induce different thoughts about the same reality.. 

Last May I was very impressed by the news circulated about the results of the Invalsi test according to which 51% of 15-year-olds would not be able to understand a written text (and indeed deepening I saw that it was a non-news based on a reading absolutely busted data) but it is also true that I often find myself in front of some so angry to find no other way to express themselves if not combining disasters…

“Give words to pain,” Shakespeare said…

Yeah, but he was a poet, what if some kids can’t find words?

Then the thought went to the term understanding: well not everyone will have the patience and the necessary attention to read certain texts (which you always have to see how much they care) But do politicians who pretend to complain about their alleged abstention at least try to listen to them and respond? 

And how?

I have always been fascinated by the idea that words have a different, greater force than the simple use they make of them in communication or in telling stories, the idea that they have the power to produce transformations, and that they can be the instrument, If not to change the world, at least to change people.

The problem is that great responsibilities derive from great powers, and if the ability to express itself is directly proportional to the knowledge of the facts and words to be used, it is impoverishing its quality or worse by tampering with its content that you can combine a trouble, because the limits of my language risk becoming also the limits of my world!

Limits of the conscious world, when you lose your imagination.

Limits of verbal language, when you deny that of dreams.

Some arguments are complex to think you can summarize them in two lines, but to lose the ability to argue opinions you risk not only not to understand each other more, but even to get to the clash, because who does not have the means to express judgments thinks and expresses himself only for.. pre-judgment!

You try in my work to give a name to things (an old adage says “a good vocabulary is better than many psychodrugs”) but if the choice of words and the way to tell them is almost as important as the time of use, Listen to radio and TV, it’s scary..

The great mother Russia tries to throw us back into the anguish of dying of hunger (crisis of wheat) and cold (that of gas) announcing the arrival of a global storm, America thinks of sending man to work on Mars and close the woman in the house to have children, China does not respect the Kyoto protocol on carbon dioxide emissions and in our country Meloni, which considers anorexia as a deviance and not as a mental illness, believes it can cure it with sport!

Stop the world, I want to get off said Mafalda..

Do we have the past?

It maybe.

In 1948 Orwell wrote Big Brother, in which he narrated a world divided into three great totalitarian powers.

Governed by the prevalence of propaganda over communication, impoverished by the Neolingua can reduce the ability to think, hammered by slogans such as “war is peace, freedom is slavery and ignorance is strength”, has as armed arm the Psychopolice, It literally makes disappear anyone who is even accused of deviationism, and is controlled by the Ministry of Truth, which imposes rituals such as the two-minute hatred of the enemy or compulsory gymnastics upon awakening.

In short, a place and a time in which you are perpetually at war against someone and in which everything is allowed, except to think, love and have fun, and nothing is forbidden, because there is no more written law, but in which the heroic protagonists resist and fight by exchanging letters and writing diaries, trying to guard and keep their greatest treasure.

The humanity of their thought.

Kind of like some teenagers who feel oppressed by the world?

Maybe.

After all, even for Saramago No was the first word of a necessary lexicon ideal, and I do not know to you, but to me all this can not make me think of anything but time, and the fact that words, even those that seem empty, always contain something, sometimes bitter but necessary, like medicines, sometimes sweet as sugar, but just as capable of charging.. the thoughts.

Other letters come to mind, such as those written by the prison (Gramsci) or other diaries, such as The Truce of Primo Levi, and in short, everything seems to obey the fundamental rule of boxing.

When you’re locked in the corner, at least try to protect your head.

And it is precisely as I write it that I see that after a century in Sweden the right won, that Putin recalled the reservists and the slogan chosen by Salvini is the present of the verb to believe.

Will we also obey and fight in the future?

We will see, in the meantime in Russia the protests resume (and in the forefront I think there are women) while I think of another kind of cure, the one in words.

It is only one letter, but the content sounds quite different.

Marco Randisi