Inconclusive Rhapsody

by Pier Luigi Tazzi

South is this nadir into the object-hood into which the object-hood of desire(s) sinks. To be where you are. To wish to be elsewhere is just a fancy, a hint of nostalgia for something that was never there, an exhausting daydream

For a very long time this schema had been valid to fix and measure the position of a vision or a point of view and of an individual stance or of a cultural object as a projection of the latter, at least within the context of Western culture.

This schema is derived from these other ones, largely known and accepted even beyond Western culture:

The schema can be more analytically drawn like this:

I think it worked until the beginning of the 1990s.

 

In the course of that decade everything changed. The world changed.

 

That ‘thing’ that the Western culture had been thinking on was there, outside the closed room of control, the safe and protected room of measurements and observations, out “in the storms of spring”  (R.M. Rilke), in the regio exteriores, that thing was thought to be ‘real’ and ‘reality’ doesn’t change in itself but just in its appearances. ‘Reality’ stays firm in its own being, and being is reality. Becoming is changing, in opposition to the permanence of being.

 

But in the end it didn’t work like that.

 

They came to the estuary where the big river meets the ocean and the next tide washed them away. Floating wrecks, like “bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind/ That blows before and after time,” (T.S. Eliot).  Scattered fragments of a glorious story.

No schema, neither the old one, drawn above, nor a new one to come in the next future, could contain them, or even give them a form.

“Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, /…/ To the last syllable of recorded time;” (W. Shakespeare).

 

From the nadir of time and the world, the others came bumping to the stiff surface of the Superflat.

 

It was neither an invasion, nor an irresistible conquest, nor an expansion, nor an extension. It was, it is, a Here we are.

 

Thus there is no more necessity to fix you own position: you are nowhere. Erewhon.

 

Probably South is this nadir into the object-hood of which desire(s) sinks. To be where you are. To wish to be elsewhere is just a fancy, a hint of nostalgia for something that was never there, an exhausting daydream.

 

Afternoons with no escape. Pan the god of high noon. Panic.

An empty marketplace you may cross at your own risk.

Heath. Sensually damp. Erotically dry. Belly power.

Visions at noon. Mirages. Fata morgana.  Hallucinations.

Night falls immediately after the sun sets. Lonely nights. Not every dawn has been so cool. An iron ring around your head is growing and tightening. No questions. Any questions are likely to sound stupid. Some infrequent answers to unrequested demands.

The mild and blurred splendour of distant horizons.

 

South as a disease, and never as a sin. Vices fade away and are never replaced by virtues.

 

Death in the Afternoon [Yo] and spirits in the night. Phantasmata (φαντάσματα). Djinn (جن). Pee (ผี). La forêt sacrée. The endless desert. A solitary beach on an unknown island. Soyez amoureuses, vous serez heureuses (P. Gauguin). La Maison du Plaisir.

Silent and black. Noisy and glittering. Busy and empty. Lush and waste.

Crossings. Solo crossings across the sea of indifference.

And needs, more than desires.