Last year of high school. Theses in preparation. The science professor says that the chosen topic is a bit banal, because many people choose it:
“Travel as a metaphor for life”
A bit obvious, but there will be a reason why so many choose it at that age. A little’ because one trip, school, is about to end and another is about to begin.
A bit’ because, in those years, in addition to wondering how to connect physics and art, there were many questions about oneself and who one was or could become …and looking around, at the masculine proposed by culture, at the masculine read in the news and seen at home, there was the fear of not being able to choose.
A journey that explodes at puberty… hands growing, hairs sprouting, voices changing. One also wondered inside what was changing and maturing.
And amidst all those changes, physical and otherwise, there was Dante, the jellyfish raft, the journey into the unconscious, the moon landing, and then the most classic of all: the Odyssey.
Travel as a metaphor for life.
… which even today is a slalom between Scylla and Charybdis, between old ideologies and performative males.
“Boys don’t cry” sing The Cure, they wage war.
“Men don’t change” echoes Mia Martini
And not even the epic helps.
Ulysses enters by deception. It hides the death (of the other) in a gift. Like the schizoid does. Create one’ expectation and then destroy the vitality of the other.
And the Trojan, who depressively does not see “the inside” and the intent of the gift, loses his own life (lity).
The disappointment of the raped man makes him believe that the affection and trust towards others, which the schizoid has lost, are a weakness and not his own humanity.
Damn, living as Achaeus or perishing as Trojan? That was the question.
And reading stories like this, one wondered if it was just mythology or a real destiny.
That Schopenhauer was right? life is a pendulum that oscillates between pain (depression) and boredom (anaffectivity).
In the original story there is no repentance, no realization. Deception won him the war. The clever male is alive, the one he trusted is dead. It’s the usual law of the most..cold.
But Western thought has been in crisis for some time, thankfully. And so are his stories.
There is a growing demand, especially among the younger generations, to abandon old ideologies for something healthy.
Today Ulysses’ cunning would not be a value.
It would be like remotely operated drones chasing and killing civilians in the streets. Like toy mines that maim children.
But it is essential to recognize what is ideological from what is mental illness. To fight one and cure the other, distinguishing both from what is human reality.
And seeing Nolan’s film, beyond personal taste and accuracy, an interesting aspect is the guilt over the consequence of one’s own idea.
“We left him a gift, a peace offering, which they brought home. We have violated everything sacred between people”
As if, now, there could finally be a different thought.
With the search for a different masculine.
As if now, that cunning that is anaffectivity could belong to the past and was no longer seen as human reality.
And the journey of the man (and the high school student) was not only to return to Ithaca, but to find himself, stripping himself of the habit of old ideologies and healing a thought that fell ill under the weight of those ideas. Rediscovering the affectivity of that internal irrational world that existed before one’s war with the other, where the Trojan, the woman, the immigrant, that is, the “different from me”, was a human being like me, where a human relationship reigned and not the law of the coldest.
But waiting for this new world, which is slow to arrive, old monsters creep in that seem to bring us an apparent democratic gift, and even if we see it, even if we pass the Cyclops, creating one “second eye” that sees inside the “belly” of the other, the risk is that indifference will make the ground fertile for violent ideas that struggle to die.
Maybe today seeing, it’s not enough anymore.
Because you can hear a song in the distance that seemed dead:
“ we should protect and not criminalize our model: that of “Mediterranean patriarchy”, aimed at emphasizing specificities and the formation of strong males, capable of mastering emotions and passions, protecting women and offering themselves for the construction and defense of society.” (from the National Future program)
Again the idea of emotions and passions as something ugly to contain with reason. The cold male who saves himself from the affections that are dangerous. A Schizoid Factory
Raised with the shame of crying in public.
But the male has the affections since birth, it is his reality and it is not violent it is human. Violent is if he gets sick.
Then in addition to two eyes to see, you need a mouth to say no.
“What happens, the evil that befalls everyone, the possible good that a heroic act (of universal value) can generate is not so much due to the initiative of a few who operate, but to the indifference, absenteeism of the many. What happens doesn’t happen so much because some want it to happen, but because the mass of men abdicate their will, let it happen, let the knots clump that only the sword can then cut, let the laws promulgate that only revolt will then repeal, let the men rise to power that only a mutiny can then overthrow.” (A. Gramsci, I hate the indifferent)
Gianluca Ambrosini
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