The form and the content don’t matter if you are spending a minute of the world that suddenly beats in your temples. What can be done, other than retain its transience and allow oneself to be enveloped by it? It never occurs to anyone to look at the clock at a moment like this, because one is fused with that time that, in slow motion, appears inside our launched chronology.
Lonely hotel in a mountain pass. Autumn. Twilight. Fire on. Our crucial moments are shaped by a sudden breath that, without knowing how, becomes an unforgettable jiffy. Although it is difficult to admit it and give them the floor, biographies are divided by those accidents that, at first insignificant, slowly transform into lasting monuments. Perhaps for this reason Mahler insisted that tradition is not “traditional”, since it does not consist so much in the cult of ashes as in the transmission of fire.
Surely we regret some impulsive moments in which we did not know how to stop ourselves. Those few moments where we lost the breath of a crucial period that rarely knocks twice on the door hurt us even more. Due to the habit of unhealthy security, we were not able to enter on that occasion, in an unrepeatable opportunity that destiny offered us. What would our life have been like later if we had attended to that slight and unexpected signal? One afternoon we found John Cage on the Gran Via. That attractive woman alone on the beach, whom we only dared to look askance at.
Powerless culture before the moment
The prudent civic education that we receive, added to this last interdependence, digital and collectivist, where nobody wants to take a step without consulting the opinion of others, have turned us into a lineage whose nerves are deactivated for the spontaneity of what happens out of protocols. We have managed to embody a culture impotent before the moment, in the pulse of an unforeseen time. But the moment is where you decide, where you feel and think.
And this deactivation occurs by virtue of our training, in long-range chronology, in the security of size and the shared spectacle. The short-termism of our communication is misleading, since it is at the service of a general strategy of calculation and reserve. Consumer instantaneity has the function of deactivating precisely the instant, that flashing fragment of time where everything that is going to be lasting happens.
There is another way of living, a line of shadow that lives on in us, however clandestine it may currently be. It was called love fati and it consisted of paying attention to the signs, to the silent path of a real desire. To return to this path, it would be necessary to match events, sometimes very discreet, becoming children of their contingency. It would be necessary to accept the spatial erosion that time produces on us.
Complaining produces occasional attention from others
There can be nothing wrong with it that occurssaid a wise soccer coach. An error, a baseness or a cowardice that we were capable of wanting in your sign, are something else. It’s a bit of what we sometimes call a second chance, like a second power of consciousness. It is the infinity that is experienced in one go, the eternity that occurs in a moment.
Paralyzed as we are by the alliance between narcissistic isolation and the din of communication, some urgent courses of deformation that allow us to put our thoughts at the level of what happened, of the irregularity that surrounds us. Creating is, in fact, leave be to the singularity of what has been lived, to put the head at the level of the senses. It is a immediacy ethicsa moral commitment to the inhumanity of living that consists in assuming the unexpected, wanting its infinite causality. Complaining produces occasional attention from others. However, the task of surviving consists of assuming alone some signals whose need is so deep that they must seem, at first, unpredictable and rather humiliating.
