The light calmness
Walking by the lake, before a timid winter sun eclipses, eastern and western ideas meet themselves, and the image becomes mirror of the Will. In my last work I tried to bring together philosophy and photography, Western and Eastern thought.
Staying out of time, playing with the world and with time like an innocent child – to cite an image of Heraclitus – it’s a form of suspension. We get satisfacted by our questions, not by the answers. The “clear view”, the buddhist ming, is achieved when you stop looking for it. The Consciousness waits, quiet and watchful: it continuously listens to the world, ready to say “yes!” and “no” to events and things. It does not try to make the world satisfy only individual needs. The Poiesis, the production of the answers to the needs, and the real creativity, never starts from what is not, but always transforms what is.
There is a term that connects East and West. Gelassenheit. You can translate it with serenity or calmness, but its historical significance, from the medieval mystic Meister Eckhart is “abandon”: let us rocking on the water, anchored to our center but always ready to set the sail.
Especially today, as Heidegger warned decades ago, our consciousness can not keep up the speed of technology (things, the production, the power: think about how we are increasingly dependent by technology objects in our daily life). We must accept the objects in our life, but always ready to let ’em go, since they’re not real needs, they’re non-essential, they’re never absolute.
But calmness is even our daily surrender to the End, the acceptance of death as expiration is congenital to inhalation. It invites us to re-discover the pleasure and the light that resides in the smallest thing, that makes our “being in the world” a unique experience.
