The Beauty Arrow
This is first and foremost a spiritual exercise.
Again in the zone of influence, that of comfortable silence, the region of two. The other and me: the other, the same. But back then, on the front where we were –alone, facing each other in a duel–, withdrawing was not for me an act of individuation, but rather evoking –catching– a past presence, whatever, in its call to oneself. That general subject (no longer the model, that is, someone with a name) offered his privacy before the camera, exposed his secret to everyone, including myself, who was pulling out that retreat to himself from which the man in front of me it was prey. Witness of his passion, I moved around that multiform pose, that undulating shadow that could only be someone if it was for others, for me and for others, for all of us who would later see his portrait.
This is a ritual without defined practices, without method, without instances. But I am the medium, and the guardian of the emblems. The model appropriated the significant element with the impassivity of the Master. I saw what came out of their eyes more than what they absorbed; I gazed at the pinpoint ray of his gaze, which was aligned straight with the reed. What I managed to glimpse, what the model showed me, was only a segment of an infinite succession of wood, in which equidistant knots marked the frequency and length of each perfection of the spirit upwards. The Spirit, already incorporated into the figure of the model, emerged from the cane field, a triumphant tiger between ascending drives, overcoming obstacles. From his advance he extracted the part, the substantial bamboo that is the conquest and his memory, his eternal testimony.
(Truth, which is reached by Beauty, is above. And the model went up in front of the camera, aligned with the disciplined wood. The spirit grows straight, with a natural and perfect, ascending impulse. Seeks the sky . Counts the knots, measures their shapes. Each knot is the end of one growth and the beginning of another. Each knot is a notch in its heart. It will transform matter into an arrow of war that will fly until it reaches what it pursues.)
The other, myself. That display of strength that moved in poses before me, in the solitude of the set, undoubtedly sought to transcend its expression there, but also in the images. The portrait, in addition to calling its subject in absentia, had to with that presence demonstrate its argument, its coherence, its usefulness. To be a possible flag, although only to mark a path, that of the return to the Principles, the return to the kingdom of ignorance. Young, but bloodless, the Spirit possessed the model's flesh, contorting it to the physical harmony of the pose, with which it represented before the camera, confusingly, each one of the cardinal virtues. At least it is what I wanted to believe at that time, because there was an air in the figure of man, the manifestation of a feeling of duty that conditioned his dignity and imposed it there along with the various forms of prudence, temperance, courage and justice. Think as you should, say how you feel, act as you want, he forced me to remember. I saw the angry youth turned against all the old age of this world, I saw the haughty gesture and the motto of freedom in his eyes.
I was left with the igneous Beauty, which also lit the bamboo wood, so that the crackle of the splinters would drive away bad influences. What use would Beauty be for, with the Spirit already configured, implanted there in its representation of what man should be in this world? I remembered again: Beauty is a source of delight, but not an end in itself; it is a call to action. The function of beauty is to attract us, not to itself, but to that which is beautiful. Beauty can be felt, but the affinity of beauty is with cognition. Beauty is that aspect of the truth that draws us towards the truth.
A bamboo arrow that rises unceasingly upwards towards the sky.
Black Days, White Nights
At this moment in which I advance towards the center, the other, the model, waits restlessly and resigned my predigitation, the beginning of the ceremony. He does not look at me in the eye, he watches the movement of the camera between my hands, as if he was just discovering the reason that brings us together. In that unbalanced duel I raise a hand to ask for calm and to start the ritual, to that necromancy that is the act of portraying. Already a sorcerer, and without needing to know anything about the model –not even its name–, I am about to wait, to see the spoils of the imposture fall. I stand still while I watch how the rigidity of the pose vanishes in the other, how the gestures and the learned grimaces become hindered. I give myself to the invocation of the subject, to the call of what does not yet exist but that will die in my hands. Facing each other, we accept with the exercise of the portrait the search for what has to come back to itself again and again in photography.
Already before the Spirit, and safe from any civil identity, I set out to explore the manifestation. I did it then, as the executioner of the subject, and I do it now, when I contemplate the eternalized effigy on the screen. It was not a common event what was presented to the camera, a model in front of a chessboard, the pieces in disarray. The representation did not correspond to the common order of events, although it did not cease to be an event. I refuse, as I did then, to the sacralization of the facts, that old superstition. This does not mean denying what happens, or how it happens. I refuse to lose sight of the reason for what is happening, its usefulness. Sensitive to the emotional discharge that events produce in us, we only awkwardly recognize that series of feelings that surround the event like a cloud of electrons. The rest is collision of values, of negative or positive charges. An ethical dilemma. But to place ourselves beyond good and evil, to understand, or rather to contemplate, seems to require a great deal of intellectual effort. Better let ourselves be enveloped by the sensations, that heat that emanates from the decorative. Let's avoid the unease that a symbol could provoke in us, that trip to primitive ignorance, beyond all morality.
The Spirit made himself comfortable at the head of the table. Constituted as Il Capotavola, he bent over the pieces and undid with a lost movement of his hand the conflagration set on the arcidriche *. I remembered at that moment that fashion went through the session as an incident –although I also knew that the aesthetic event would occur as an accident–; that gesture, the pieces scattered at once, could be the possible effect of any expressive force that was revealed through the model and the objects in front of me; but this would only exhaust the description of the gesture as if it were a fact, and not as an argument: that Fashion, its essence and its declarations, is marked, subjected by an infinite conflict, common to the human value dilemma. Arranged on the table, the cosmic representation of sixty-four lockers vibrated under the chin of the model: her palms turned upwards, in an attitude of frank demonstration, would have served my understanding better. He incarnated the Spirit and showed the symbol with a cursory ritual, with economy of elements, signifying he too sitting there, in a trance, elevated above an undone scheme through which he presented his power, his mastery of the material world and of one of their representations. His demonstration required me to be a spectator, while understanding the meaning of the entire ritual could only be achieved from the outside.
The play of light and shadow, the binary and continuous confrontation of opposites in Fashion was exposed on the table and forced me to locate myself on the periphery, closer to a stage that was prolonged and that at the same time moved me away. At the far end of the long table, a breath swept away the strategies, the intrigues, the strenuous protection efforts, the iron hierarchies, the sacrifice, the desire to conquer. That violent blast decomposed the mechanism that regulates Fashion, and that orders desires and values, that is, only its show, what those of us in front of the stage can see, and from anywhere in the Theater. Its deep essence, its ideal, its reason for being configure the expressive substance of a possible, individual, unique and different language for each one of us as actors. But from afar what is seen is a Byzantine dispute between what is right and what is wrong; we only witness, again and again, year after year, the circular cult of the fact and the object, the delight in their positive, harmonized ethics.
Respecting the laws of the cardinal plane to which it belongs, the Spirit imprisons between its fingers the self-proclaimed owner of destinies and wills.
