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ORPHEUS

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Matteo Magnabosco

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V. MODERN MIND

OPERA

BRIDGES

 

Modern demands if not yet a definition, at least a description, a useful one for the context we are writing in, which it may reveals itself along the way. For now, the address of the Letter echoes for me with these questions: 

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How to penetrate future?

How to inject in the present time a thread, an idea taken and re-born from the Archive that will infiltrate and effect permanently the future from now on?

 

According to the way my research developed till now, two shores demands now to be bridged together to try to answer these questions. Bridge intended not only as relation of connection, but also as relation of fundament between these two following shores:

 

the one mentioned above, as floated up from a new emergence of the Archive:

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Is there an absolutely comprehensive understanding?

Is there an overall including and coherently describing image that doesn't allow any particular manifestation to be left behind or be necessarily excluded?

 

and the one shared as the Orpheus presentation, that can also be described as:

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Why is Orpheus´s Love relevant for the Modern Mind?

Why and how can Opera still be alive and talk to Modernity?

 

If the intention is to understand bridge as fundament and to direct first the focus towards the second shore mentioned, a question arises: Where do the fundaments of Opera lay?

Searching for an answer to this question I decided to look first in history when Opera was conceived, to understand better what Opera is, or was thought to be.

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We are in Firenze, Tuscany. End of the 15th century. At the court of Giovanni Maria de´ Bardi, Count of Vernio. Man of army, composer, poet, member of Accademia della Crusca, the first society in Italy that studied Italian language, in order to bring it to clear shape and preserve it. Count de´ Bardi was patron of the philosophical circle of musicians named Camerata de´ Bardi. 

During their meetings, their conversions and discussions gravitated around these two questions : What is, at our time, the stand of music?

What is the music we want to compose and ear from now on?

Performing by it an act of suspension and departure from their own context of time, to take that distance, without losing contact, that could simply make them reflect upon the material of their investigations: Music.

 

 

Here first affections of modern might emerge.

As future perspective to the present moment they were, we are.

As continuation from the actual stand of things, as consequential direction of our present attention, a linear future perspective.

As permanent: if there is a difference, a change created within, how to make this change genetically belonging to the apparat of our evolving investigation?

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More and perhaps most relevant aspect in this reflective act, looking for new trajectories, is the resonance it creates in the scenario discovered so far by Lab Event and principles. Analogies are apparently and essentially visible. So here we are, where they were.

In forms and not only. Forms of the Research´s construct. Forms of experiencing the Research.

From Music to Mind. In forms and not only. Yet essentially bound, in a comprehensively and enwidening common nature.

HYBRIS

BEYOND

 

Vincenzo Galilei was a member of Camerata de´ Bardi.

He discovered three unknown Greek hymns dedicated respectively to:

Muse, Sun and Nemesis.

 

When we will enter our research into the actual play of Orpheus, as the Opera piece composed by Monteverdi describes it, we will understand that asking ourselves what are the factors that brought to the origin of Opera and what are the forces that come at play in the story of Orpheus, means to observe at the same point, just from two different converging perspectives. 

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The figure of Nemesis deserves a moment of attention and together with it, Hybris, the reason that brings Nemesis to act. To give more consistency and malleability to the arch on which this writing is extending, critical will be to elaborate and expand previous constructs of meaning. When the soil of completeness was touched at the beginning, measure came into play. Understanding Hybris as daring beyond measure is plugging into a material which was already shared and now demands to lay continuously underneath. Approaching Hybris under these terms and with these created memories, to integrate and organically proceed. 

The multiplicity of natural phenomena as most essential characteristic of existence is based on the unstoppable iteration between one and diversification. Layers of this generative process are growing upon each other and holding themselves together in always different manifestations.

The sense of completeness is exhausted by this recurrent generating and transforming ways of appearances, while the grain of incompleteness is only to be intercepted by human beholding; maybe because laid within the nature of this beholding, as if the only aspect not yet complete of this creation would be the manual of instructions for navigation. 

One and many ones. So identical, yet so different. 

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How to dare to deal with them?

From where to begin to deal with them?

How far to dare?

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A unit of measure and a set of measurements need to be introduced.

According to the ancient Greek Cosmos, ruled by gods defined measurements, when humans manifested Hybris, behaving despite gods’ regulations, Nemesis intervened and enacted retribution, re-establishing a sense of order from the effects of actions based on an overseen, but set unit of measurement. Human behaviour and divine system of rules came into a clash.

Gods empowered Nemesis to dictate the way humans will come to a closer understanding of what are the principles that lay beyond divine establishment of proportions.

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The story of Prometheus depicted by the tragedian Aeschylus is the most significant, for his time and a far further future, representation of these separated und apparently uneven forces coming at play. Prometheus, generated by gods and in love with humans, recognized by Zeus as of a perspicacious intelligence, is invited from him to solve and give formulation to the dilemma: what is the difference between divine and human nature? 

Prometheus presents a concrete configuration to his respond, sacrificing a bovine and separating the lacerated components of the killed animal. On one side, the flesh with the fell as involucre, on the other side, the bones wrapped into the fat. Prometheus is not defining which part represents what, between sublime or terrestrial nature. As if his action would pose now in front of Zeus a consequent moment of interrogation and suspension upon the matter Zeus wanted to bring clarification into.

Prometheus dares to provoke Zeus intelligence, while Zeus is fully aware of the ambiguity carried by the symbolic separation and arrangement of the animal parts. 

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Where does this ambiguity lay?

What to choose, if we could step in Zeus position?

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The unattractive fell filled by juicy flesh. The shiny, succulent fat filled by dry, hard bones.

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Which direction to take?

On which sense to base the decision?

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Following the senses of body as appetite instincts, warmth necessities, survival needs or contemplating a less material signification and looking for further meanings behind these elements, for how they are separated and brought together?

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Zeus decides to welcome Prometheus invitation to play with the question he posed originally.

While seeing the ambiguity, Zeus perceives as primary important the act of daring, more than the possibility of revealing an answer to his original dilemma. He performs as if he would know that under the fell the flesh is hidden and decides to choose the attractive appearance of fat, knowing that only bones are covered by it. Following, Zeus will perform as if dramatically outraged, but only with the purpose of serving upon this indignation the costs humans will carry because of Prometheus daring beyond the will and invitation of the god to discover a common ground of understanding upon the contrasting natures of divine and terrestrial. Costs that morally can be understood as punishment, but more coherently to the settings of this writing, as re-establishment of the sense of measure according to Zeus units and proportions. Fire will be taken away from humans as counterbalance to unconsidered Prometheus acts, caused by the sparkle of his playful and insightfully differentiating intelligence.

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Is Zeus indignation justified and how to understand his calculated reaction? If his intentions were of comparison and maybe narrowing the poles of two far dimensions of existence, why to enact a clear division as soon as Prometheus re-launch in concrete forms the dilemma he posed, understanding as too much his playfulness with abstract elements Zeus more concretely referred to?

Did Prometheus dare beyond measure, just by representing the impossibility of solving the dilemma through the ambiguity that appearances can manifest? 

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VI. TIME AHEAD

The American writer Mary Shelley, during Romanticism, re-writes this tale in a modern fashion in the novel that goes under the title “Frankenstein, or the modern Prometheus”.

Dr. Frankenstein intends to fully participate of divine capabilities of creation and embarks the quest of assembling and bringing to life an alive being, human like modelled.

During the narration, Shelley lets unnatural, superior principles be generated by human invested abilities, overwhelmed by hubris-triggered intentions, and she injects seeds of the most valuable human virtues, divinely inspired, in monstrous forms and the most decadent and self-annihilating germs, in the more natural and human like forms, yet originally inspired by supranatural motivations.

When the unthinkable challenge is achieved and in the moment life appears in front of Frankenstein, in the forms he accurately composed together, fear obscures his vision.

This becoming reality of a perfectly mastered biological engine, in flesh and bones in front of him, now independent by the craftmanship he performed in assembling the separate pieces, casts a long shadow upon his creator. The urge of escaping from this darkness occurs.

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Why appearance and essence are so controversially combined together? 

Why the creation enacted by Frankenstein is of a monstrous appearance? Because the pieces it is made of are unaesthetically sewed to unity? Because of the exhumation of the parts it is composed by and therefore, it still carrying a sense of decadence towards death, or still appearing horribly dead? Because death is terrifying?

Or why death can be terrifying?

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The fact Mary Shelley re-called the core of Aeschylus representation from the Archive and re-elaborated in so a tightly interlayered dramaturgy and yet deeply poetical writing, speaks for this in spite of gods attitude, beyond measure, as genetically belonging to human nature and in favor of intense reflective forces that can be generated by a personal, yet anchored, full immersive dive into a material that is brought back to life from a shelf of the universal library.

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Aeschylus´s characterization of Prometheus is to be referred at certain degrees also to the myth of Orpheus belonging to Greek tradition and to Monteverdi's Opera version.

Further in time, determinant elaborations of Aeschylus drama, as Don Giovanni's play by W.A. Mozart and Rigoletto by G. Verdi, are basing on this dramaturgical model, where the protagonist is crossing over a defined measure, their very intriguing interpretations and manipulations.

The title of Mozart's Opera piece is followed by these words referring to the main character:

Il dissoluto punito, the punished dissolute. Nothing more explicitly related to the matter these lines have been riding on so far. To focus more closely on it, will bring elements for a later examination of Monteverdi´s elaboration of Aeschylus’s material.

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On which ground is Don Giovanni dissolving his sense of measure?

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Willing to conquer and assemble the richest representation for love, Don Giovanni takes every chance to seduce and literally collect the most various and diverse, fugitive love experiences with any woman he encounters on his path.

On his, otherwise, so undetermined path. Nothing else he cares about. Navigation is only subjected to this directionality. There is the concrete possibility, as life laid it under Don Giovanni's feet in terms of time and affordability, and the most natural talent, injected in his veins, for this massive and compact alignment between the very personal and the most ideal to match and come to play. Don Giovanni signs on it and makes it become a full engagement to his quest. Each of these women becomes star, for a moment, and precious key, for ever, in the enfoldment of the widest and most condensed constellation of love he can envisions. Wide because of the so diverse forms for love possibly appearing in front of his eyes and because each one of these women triggers in a different way the attraction and sense of spiritual erection Don Giovanni is moved by, the moment he comes in touch with them.

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It is very easy when it comes with such an imponent dramaturgical and musical force, to get carried by words, while writing about this tale. The piece materializes itself immediately in the writer's ears and eyes, as soon as it is simply mentioned as object of thoughts.

It is required  to see more clearly the coordinates of his actions.

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There is a deliberate openness to any kind of form. The arbitrary is not an element coming at play. This gives already to love a magnitude which is incomparable to any other scenario for human actionability. As the most obsessed and obeying serve of love, Don Giovanni transforms, by every seduction, his very personal image of love, iteratively and within a no-end perspective. The more of the diversity he will collect, the closer the approximation to the all comprehensive picture will become.

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Nothing can stand on his way and interfere with his intents.

Undiscussable clarity against any terms of objection. Unremovable will against any form of obstacle. To procure death, in order to preserve his vision coming to life, is taken in account by him and the moment this necessity occurs, because a paternal instinct stands between him and the object of his love, a shadowy force will run from that moment on the side of Don Giovanni´s unstoppable endeavoring. Demons of death will interfere with the persecution of his will and take him closer and closer to a inevitably difference-making confrontation.

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Will this stand in front of the divergence for life or

for death, re-establish his sense of measure?

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If, after procuring death, he might face himself, with his own life, the possibility of complete dissolution of forms, will his contract to the love mission change his characters and find a new definition, considering a more composed, contained attitude to measure?

No. Aeschylus's promethean spirit at his highest.

Holding death's hand firmly as pledge for willing to listen what's death's matter of argumentation against him, his body will only shake because of the unbearable freeze it is invaded by the moment he comes in touch with the marmoreal constitution of his opponent, or life saver.

The deeply unmovable decision by Don Giovanni will provoke demons’ extreme reaction, Nemesis depictions, predicting that in the realm of death there will what to be horrified by and extinguish any sense of measure, according now to death's annihilating set of measurement and not to Don Giovanni´s constantly dissolutive attraction towards reaching beyond measure.

Da qual tremore insolito

Sento assalir gli spiriti!

Donde escono quei vortici pien d´orror?

 

Tutto a tue colpe è poco!

Vieni, c´è un mal peggior!

What´s the trembling fear

now assailing my soul!

Where do those flames of horror come from?

No horror was too dreadful for your behaviour!

Come, there is worse to be terrified by!

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“PARI SIAMO…

IO HO LA LINGUA

ED EGLI HA LA SPADA.”

 

“WE ARE THE SAME…

ME, WITH MY TONGUE

AND HIM, WITH HIS SWORD.”

 

From Rigoletto by G.Verdi

 

In Rigoletto´s play, if considered after the description of Don Giovanni´s set of Drama, more complexity comes to act..

Two characters are now embodying the deliberate act of walking over the line: the first one to introduce, because by immediate impressions more resonating with Don Giovanni´s figure, is the duke of Mantua, effortlessly propending to love adventures, but in no terms basing his unregulated pleasures on an ideal and existential vision. The limit of measure he is trans-passing is set as a line that remains unknown to his naïve, mundane, libertine attitude towards love. There are no demands of sense making put on himself, besides the futile, isolated, yet recurrent consummation of love attraction; and apparently no costs for his actions. Blind to the overall becoming of the events, he will be played by rules, serve the threads are tightening the drama to its escalation and resolution, but he will not, with his determinate will, play upon rules: only as a permanent, non-intended wind, he will affect the scene.

The second and main character, Rigoletto, fool at the court of the duke of Mantua, who is taking on his deformed shoulders the duty of speaking without any reserves all possible truths occurring from his kaleidoscopic point of view on events. Don Giovanni´s most intimate motions of spirit coming to life in a so diverse physical definition and immersed in a more complex and less indeterminate frame of circumstances. The innate, natural talent, as for Don Giovanni was the ability to seduce and conquer all possible love´s truthful appearances, for Rigoletto is to let the diversity of unspeakable stands become hearable and possible objects for dealing towards a more comprehensive truth. In terms of this range of facets, scanned by his eyes and sharpened by his freedom to speak and ability to compose ambiguously his words, yet so reasonably undisputable, measure is overcome.

As in Shelley´s romance, the unpleasant appearance embodying the most raffinate and elevating virtues is a matter of facts. The properties of less superficial layers of insight are fatally confined in semblances that can only provoke the most irrevocable reaction of not intending to behold.

In Rigoletto, the same contrasting elements of characterization are the trigger of his misfortune.

The rejection towards deformity of shapes. The impracticable ground where his so non-univocal, formless views, invested by the most disparate forms, yet consistent and sharp descriptions of simultaneous, but interfering reflections upon the same object, take place.

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After the scenarios and characters of the story are introduced, the drama enflames in the moment Rigoletto dears to utter his thoughts in defection of a courtesan and his daughter, who could not be preserved by the abusing forces motivating duke´s attraction towards her.

Monterone, this courtesan, will inflict Rigoletto the burden of a spell, as a reminder and measuring parameter to his overseen step beyond limit. At this instance, because of a human invocation, forces of an unhuman nature are participating in the scene. Rigoletto, along the play, will not only experience himself what it means for a father to behold the endeavouring instincts motivating the duke´s attraction towards his secretly kept daughter, but he will also face the opposite prediction of his plan to revenge against his regnant repugnant actions.

Revenge is in our context to be understood as, taking Nemesis attributes upon one self and enabling human to act as unhuman, because inspired by or aspiring to divine nature.

The contrasting resolution of facts at the end of the play and the unspeakably destructive sense of vulnerability Rigoletto is invaded by, is grounded on the impulsive, self-descriptive love his daughter feels toward the duke. I dare to translate her feelings in these words: “I am as unlimited as the attraction this love make me become, in spite of my father´s and life´s restrictions.”

She expands herself, embarking a Don Giovanni´s quest in the moment she touches the limit this love is taking her. A chorus of demons, disposing divine regulations, will drag Don Giovanni into an irresistibly terrifying dissolution; not his ultimately daring intents, but anhelation of being, as not in any form existing, is the sense of dissolution, upon which unhuman forces are manifesting a sense of measure, according to a different scale. Gilda´s most intimate demons will set death in form of sacrifice, as solution to her daring love, duke´s blind and dispersive eagerness and Rigoletto´s outwards directed foolishness.

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How all would have gone, if Rigoletto would have become a fool of himself?

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CLOWNS

DEUS

 

As a chain of reactions, starting from Prometheus as depicted by Aeschylus, walking through Shelley´s romance of Frankenstein, passing by Don Giovanni and the triadic representation of Hybris in Rigoletto´s play, it is of reasonable meaning to reach Pagliacci Opera piece by R. Leoncavallo. The dualism appearance-essence is like the contrasting one present in Shelley´s and Rigoletto´s dramas.

In Leoncavallo´s piece, the first dramaturgical action taking place is a meta-action.

The theatrical dimension reflects upon itself and the figure of a clown, straight descendance of a fool, and enables the expansion of the play above itself, anticipating this interdependence between in and out of play, setting it from the beginning already as a reference for the understanding of the later enfoldments on stage. The same figure, first presenting itself as out of place, or before placement, in his extreme lucidity of thoughts and intentions, talking from the extra-ordinary level of the play reflecting upon itself, takes, soon after, the shapes of a deformed man, playing as a clown, driven by sentiments of love towards a woman, belonging to the same company of actors he is performing with. Initially, spontaneously warm and fragile feelings, later, when she will only prove her persistent inability to make sense of his unproportionate lineaments of body, these attitudes in him for manifesting love become possessive and brutally impulsive. Since he cannot transform his physicality, this passage to a more bestial behaviour serves her the chance to understand more coherently the appearance he is made of by nature. According to the power he has to define the forms of his feelings in relation to circumstances, he can also perform instinctive and possessive manners.

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What takes Pagliacci close to Aeschylean Prometheus?

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The clown is daring beyond the coherency, set from his beholders, between his body and his feelings. The woman is daring beyond her impossibility to make sense of this incoherency, laughing at his intimate and fervent intents towards her. 

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What brings Pagliacci on the same sequence of Rigoletto,

but with distinctive properties?

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An answer can be entered by the following question: what will be the consequences of the initial stands of happenings in Pagliacci´s play, as just described, and of the clown´s machinery of enacting revenge towards her, as Nemesis empowered ability?

It will be a series of conflicts that will preserve the clown self from any repercussion, as puppet master pulling the threads of his fictional characters. While being in the play, but not being touched by it, he defines a meta-position for himself: the emotions he was influenced by become the actions he now undertakes as deep influencer of the play. The displacement announced in the prologue finds its location in the escalating dramatical happening and also describes itself as gravitation point beyond stage that can attract the scenarios towards an intended direction.

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VII. PARLAR CONTANDO 

FOREWORD:

ALTALENA

SPITZ

What is the delicate, fragile ground we might step on, while bridging between so apparently far landscapes and how to take care of our walking on this mirroring surfaces?

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Is there any treasure discovered, by walking these distances and willing to accommodate their natural, spontaneous attraction towards each other, letting them come more closely together?

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An altalena allows to encompass distances while the spitz, pivoting point, holds and sustains the swings, reaching, elevating to an upper perspective.

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Laying the map as an open book, a descriptive, narrative self.

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Flipping the pages of an open book runs under the same principle of the altalena, only reversed in terms of up-down coordinates, enhancing the same intention of elevating by grounding into the anchor that holds and drift our reading deeper along the pages, behind the written words.

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The only contraindication, while taking care of our walk along distances,

is to lose contact with the self that encompasses the landscapes.

A possibly discovered treasure is to materialize this self.

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Vincenzo Galilei writes Dialogo della Musica antica e della moderna, where he defines the modern music, ahead of his time, projected into the future, assuming these freshly discovered Greek hymns as models and basing it on the principle of intelligibility of the words.

 

If we stay for a moment with the word intelligibility, better to set its meaning as 

to become one with the intelligence, intending it, in the context of Camerata de´Bardi, not only as words weaved together by an intelligence intercepted and brought into a score by the composer´s hands, but also and maybe mostly, as an invitation to let the audience become one with the intelligence that takes shape while music and words are performed on stage.

Galilei operates therefore a unification between music and words, bringing the singing and the lyrics in tight relation with each other, as music spoken by words or in words understood singing. Furthermore, letting the singing being expressed by only one voice, the so-called canto ad una voce, as the path for the performer and the audience in the direction of experiencing the intelligence, this new music intended to announce more impactfully its transformative aim.

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Which intelligence lays behind and within it?

 

Interrogative point which goes closely together with the question of the origin of Opera.

More space will be given to this realm soon. Through the introduction of the next member of this philosophical circle of musicians, we will find more elements and means to launch further this research and describe the ground from where to look at this question.

 

Jacopo Peri describes the path on the way towards this unification as melodia del cantare , melody of singing and armonia del parlare ordinario, harmony of ordinary speaking. Very accurately he gives also more formal indications relating the way these intentions could be performed, in order to announce more evidently the new meaning assigned to the manifestation of singing:  lentezza sospesa del canto, suspended slowness of singing and speditezza del parlare, quickness of speaking.

 

In this investigative circle, the researchers held two apparently very contrasting scenarios as background for their elaborations and they weaved them together so tightly and transparently that they determinate essentially the manifestation of Opera in their visions and soon after on the actual stage: 

 

the love and veneration towards the ancient Greek world, based on archaeological funds and interpretative assumptions, but more inherently to be intended as a fruit of their imagination influenced by an element of idealisation in it, meaning that, not only they played with these concrete traces of this ancient civilization according to their pleasure, but also to their purposes;

 

“Sí come io non ardirei affermare questo essere 

il canto nelle greche favole, cosí ho creduto esser quello che solo possa donarcisi dalla nostra musica, per accomodarsi alla nostra favella.” J. Peri

“As I would not dare to affirm that was the way they have been singing in ancient Greek pieces, so I believe that is the only way our music can appear, to accommodate our understanding.

 

the sperimentalism, vero-similarity without abstraction. With the words of Peri:

 

“…ognuno con la sua voce e l’intonazione esatta delle sue parole…”

“…each of us with his own voice and the exact intonation of his words… 

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MATTER OF

SIGHT

 

It sounds almost contrasting and resisting the more common way to refer to Opera as almost sacred tradition. Indeed based on sperimentalism and still at our days in experimentation.

The fruits of this process, looking for a spontaneously composed musical language, throughout the most diverse elaborations from where Opera sprouted, might seem now opaque, heavy, passed. Let´s try to cover as much range as possible in the diversity of approaches that might deliver this impression. 

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A statement could be: if you like museums with archaeological founding of collapsed civilizations, then we might like Opera as well, as made by pieces exposed behind a vitrine or curtain, protected and isolated. Is it an assumption we want to take in consideration?

If yes, I would contradict myself with the purpose of this writing in the frame of what the Lab Proposition is launching in relation to the meaning of Archive.

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Where does this impression lay then? Is it Opera itself carrying these affections on its shoulders, as genetically belonging, because so deeply rooted into an organism constructed and designed on fossilized discoveries and therefore, inevitably announcing its fate in friction to the unstoppable splintering of modern times? Is it the unprepared spectator, no matter from which era, that does not find the tools to unhook what lays behind this performative representation and let Opera fall into a dusty formation of passed memories?

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May these questions dissolve by following the next steps of laying the research at your sight.

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VIII. CULTIVATING SEEDS OF RE-ACTION

There is an immutable present time that accompany the origin of Opera and its evolution, that delivers its horizon to eternity, but never assigning it a dimension out of time.

If we follow these lines, we step already towards its deeper origin which is to be found in the theatrical form of Tragedy as it was conceived in the ancient Greek world and how it sprouted from questions that looked towards an absolute comprehensive description of existence.

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Here we also foggily see, in this call for the absolute, the reverberances of the shores we intend to bridge together. Let´s still remind us that we departed from Opera and we are still looking over the water with lenses which are accordingly build to the realm we moved our first steps from. Sharpening the lenses along the research will allow us to reach a clearer description of the realm its expecting us on the other side.

I take in this direction the chance to enfold an understanding upon Tragedy driven from inspirational readings of literature, focusing on few relevant passages extracted from them and sharing intuitions and reflections, with the aim of giving more concreteness to the construction of the bridge.

 

From Chaos as unlimited space, untighten still from any relation to inherent order, where the most diverse forces come to interaction, the Greek world started first to literally invent and apply a map of orientation upon it called Mythos, a sense-making reaction to an extra-ordinary presence of Existence.

 

Already in this sentence many terms call for definition.

Some will be not yet touched. Some will be assumed as intuitively given or relatively to others.

Let's begin considering: unlimited, space, existence. 

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To jump from this location of the ancient Greek Universe, to the beginning of the 19th Century would give us more raffinate means to operate this extraction or assignment of meaning. To define them by this catapulting act over historical contexts is a very delicate and fragile strategy but making more sense in terms of Letter to the modern mind.

The suggestion is, instead of describing the considered words through the eyes of ancient Greeks, which can only become an exciting retrospective play of projecting over the past modern idealizations upon it, or through the lenses of modern logical standing points, more anchored in the present time, to seek for a fertile negotiation, between what these words can still evoke at our time, coming as fruits of significant deepening and iterations along history, and how they have been unlocked in the field of mathematics.

What I see coming to happen is the echoing between what mathematical insights in their preciseness of language and crystallin visualizations depict and the forces that motivated the mythological spaces to take their forms and blew meaning to their narrations.

Relating to the sight of the bridge, what´s coming to light is also the sharpening of the lenses to reach over the river´s side.


 

UNLIMITED,

ITERATIVELY

ANEW GENERATING

 

The question about the fundaments of mathematics accompanies the most significant developments of this science since any kind of computational elaboration was ever conceived.

By associating objects of daily use to marks and signs, with the intention of setting a distinction between them, an incredibly wide step in terms of abstraction was taken, within the most quotidian and pragmatic actions of organizing and keeping account.

The relevant configuration of asking, if and how accessible, or possibly formulated, the question of fundaments is, while operating in forms of numbers and their basic, practical relations, is finding its more approximate resolution along its evolution over centuries and only in the moment mathematics is deliberately and significantly reflecting upon itself, this configuration takes a critical demarcation. Operating on the elements that seemed to be the fundaments of mathematics was an achievement of mythological degrees, where a look towards a wider sense of existence is finding its orientation and coordinates for becoming a deliberate act.

In the primitive state, while defining differences between the knots on a rope and tightening them after each other to distinct separate days, these units for accounting time, from being the same, because all naturally following the cycles of light and darkness, yet different along the wider arch of continuously proceeding days, they are brought a newly together, as the same, in abstraction, now all of them identified as numbers, yet differently represented through symbols, so that the original objects are now existing as elements of a nature that only deals in terms of visualization and order. Differentiating and simultaneously unifying through the abstraction.

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What is given as so understandable by its use, might not be so comprehensible by itself.

As if the moment a functionality is defined, also an aspect of the nature is lighted.

It seems so immediate to know how to operate with numbers in their basic forms, that this efficiency creates usually around them a close circuit in terms of their definition, shifting constantly the attention towards their practical meanings.

To ask what the nature of numbers is, is leading abstraction capabilities to an extremely wider level, that for many centuries this question was even dis-considered by mathematicians themselves. 

In the description of the primitive habit of keeping track on ropes of past days, the words associating, continuous, following and order were used. All terms that have a correspondence in mathematical language. Intuitively and unacquainted with specific terminology, these words may evoke a sense of infinite. Referring to counting, the endless perspective, open ahead, while proceeding in terms of quantities, is revealed and ready to be subjected to any form of deformations in understanding, as long as it serves and finds its justification in practice.

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Reflecting on what the term infinite means mathematically, the question on the fundaments of this science started to be answered. This passage doesn´t seem to make the challenge easier when it comes to the nature of numbers.

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If it is so innate to be able to operate endless counting,

why it becomes so slippery to deal with infinite in its most natural form?

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When tools were created, also infinite could be elegantly and effortlessly domesticated. Basically, a machinery that explicates in mathematical terms the common meaning that we assign to the words associating, continuous, following and order, mentioned before.


 

SPACE

CONVERGENCE

FRAGMENTATIONS

 

Holding on this ride across unlimited, once the arithmetic scenario served as ground for entering a more primitive, yet already so abstract degree of infinte, now it takes a curve through the field of geometry, as a ramp to land back with more resolution on the constellation of numbers.

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By walking on a road, it is possible to count every taken step and describe a measurement of the distance covered along the way. This walk involves together with the perspective of the subject, the more objective one, which belongs to the landscape that gives ground and surrounds the walker. In a sense, according to the consistency of writing, it means to accompany Gauss on its measurements along mountains and rivers. A fictional way to proceed that can serve the purpose of defining space.

The distances covered can be related and represented in form of proportions. Only by using the natural numbers applied by our counting, we can embrace a more raffinate resolution of the wide scape of what are accounted as numbers, introducing the ones generated by any kind of undertaken or possibly foreseen proportion between the ones representing steps.

As a combinatory play, rolling two dies of infinite facets and reporting all possible couples of results. Each of these pairs, in terms of distance covered, will represent segments of our homogeneous cycling proceeding with steps of unitary size. 

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Still walking blindly immersed with the subjective point of view.

If the perspective of observation is shifted to the landscape and road, there is a sense of continuous and infinite that overcome all the most fractured and microscopical fragmentations revealed by the yet unlimited enfoldments of combinatory results.

How to embrace it from the subjective point of view?

With an element of finiteness and the structure of a convergence.

Leaving the idyllic scenario of hiking through valleys and mountains and displaying the etherical one of numbers, it is of a pivoting effect the decision of introducing a pre-term to limit, extremity.

When limit could lightly flee into limitless, extremity, by projecting far, still set a range of consideration. Each step is a measurement that partly, relatively describes  the distance and the unit of measurement. All possible segments of covered and possibly predicted distances, reduced to this unit, maintain the same density of occurrence. Therefore, focusing on the numerical interval between zero and one is a condensed representation of all possible incidents while rolling the naturally infinite dies. Extremities are set and the limitless sense is dressed by a more accessible vest.

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When the subject begins to think objectively, this question may arise: is it possible to represent by this structure of fragmentation any given minimal spot that the arch of the walker step could cover? May any infinitesimal small split of rain drop, that falls in between the traces left by the shoes, find its identifying coordinates on the system of segmentations?

Geometrically speaking, already if the zero-to-one segment, unit of the walking and simultaneously overall perspective, is bend together in the perfect form a circle and the radius is delineated, a proportion comes to emergence that flees all constructively predictable results of the combinatory segments. Indeed, this relation between the contour of the circle and the radius is reoccurring as the same without exceptions, no matter what is the size of the unit, and there fore deserves to be symbolized by the unique and outstanding sign π. 

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By not doing more than bending upon itself the unitary segment, the comprehensiveness of limitless proportions, fragmentations finds its innate contradiction. Only by setting extremities and tilting to convergence this overall mistakable comprehensiveness, a ground will be found upon which it is possible to walk more peacefully, with less indulgence.


 

EXISTENCE

SILENCE OF SEMANTIC

DANCE OF RELATIONS

 

If by Mythos we mean word, we can firstly understand it as an attempt to put order, as words do with letters and intend to do with the meanings they are accompanied by. A sense of order in terms of wordly narrated is generated, so that the relation between humans and universe, in which they find themselves as existing, is based on the tell of a story.

Existence by itself comes with order, in a state of Chaos, without meaning by it, impossibly readable in its manifestations, but intending the unlimited Whole, iteratively anew generated.

Humans felt the necessity to start, in their fashion, to pull threads that could give more resolution to the universal picture in its limitlessness, which they were to some degrees partaking and willing to act in, according to their needs of survival and therefore enabling manipulation upon their environment. 

Their intention was to assign meanings to the existence as they perceived it and reflected through the words of Mythos: a semantic invention. Words as carriers of an applied meaning.

Let´s consider an alternative to this craftmanship.

Instead of a semantic injection, a structural contemplation.

Meanings at side. Leaving only the forms of articulation of these words.

On the other side of the mirror, living from the forms of articulation of Chaos.

Extracting from Chaos to find forms of relation. With Chaos. Among its forms of becoming.

This is what is meant by existence as silence of semantic – dance of relations.

Mathematics will travel through this realm it in an accurate and depictive way.

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While Gauss was pulling the threads, letting traditional geometry of flat surfaces decline, as innate and only description of space, his procedures began to awake together with this revelation also the intuition that other models for understanding where existence takes place whispered their legitimacy to be taken in consideration.

The confrontation with the curved surface of Earth, from being and obstacle towards the demonstration of a celebrated perspective, became the leverage upon which to depart towards the so called non-Euclidean geometries. This non, firstly, only accommodates the sense of non-flat, welcoming the circle, or other geometrical construction from the Euclidean repertoire of shapes, become references and grounds for new spatial models; and also leaving the possibility open that not all or not only Euclidean assumptions are coming at play.

Nothing new was invented, only discovered and intended, adjusted to the well-known.

The set of tools and configurations, collected and developed by Euclid, designed properties of a dress that now asked for their capability to be assigned, worn by different bodies than a thin, flat one.

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Was it there, in this necessity and demand for flexibility of structures, the possibility to bend what was previously straight and sharply angled into, for example, a surface completely smooth and round, where edges disappears?

 

To bend only, meaning to use what was already laid as a consolidate architecture and to let the different body definitions, surfaces, measurements adjust their coordinates to cohere with the already designed. If, after this adaptation of the original model, a specular, tight one-on-one relation could be set between the previously settled and the secondarily re-defined and adjusted, then the legitimacy to exist and the validity of the contents for these new dresses for the body of space could be accepted. So it was.

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From this stand of things, an innumerable account of non-Euclidean geometries can be abstracted and grow from Euclid´s germs. His geometry, as mentioned at the beginning of this research, was always and only meant to describe plain figures. Gauss moved his steps into, through space; he immersed himself, with all is accounted knowledge upon straight measurements, into an ideally described scene, as three-dimensional, but only representable, also ideally, in two dimensions, just with the magic of perspective applied to it.

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Now the question left open previously becomes deciding and fundamental for all what was enfold related non-Euclidean configurations: is it the geometry of perspective in any relation to the geometry of plain surfaces? Yes, and as far it was with the ones generated from the Euclidean one, because as much as a sphere appears less practicable as a cube at enough large scale they practically work the same.

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Where to direct our eyes then, if the concrete body of geographies is not so determinant or essential anymore?

 

The one-on-one tight relation become the focus, as if matters would be held together by a very unmaterial thread that ground their existence, as a specular reflection, as identification under this relation could base the demonstration of existence.

One-on-one means exactly that both elements are consequence of each other, therefore they can be considered the same under the relation set between them, a mirror that let them identify mutually in each other. The logical term for being consequence is deduction.

This relation becomes the matter of mathematics. 

 

Plato´s overviewing perspective serves now to articulate and create more space within this entanglement. The principle upon which the definitions of philosophy and mathematics were presented in his Academia is related to the stand taken in front of the ground elements of these investigations and the consequential decision-making moment generated; apparently, a methodological aspect, more properly, touching their contents.

When mathematics was assuming undeniable bricks in order to construct building of meaning, and operating on from them, philosophy was departing towards more undoubtful elements that could give foundation to its original bricks. Both holding in their hand the leverage of intuition, one was assuming that a base was found and set, the other was not to be yet satisfied by the depth of the ground. Dia is a preposition from Greek language that accommodates together these diverging paths and unifies the directions originated by standing in front of, against the fundaments.

Against without any meaning of aversion or competitiveness, only adding to the standing point an attitude of iteration. This confrontation mode is capsuled in the dia form that set a coordinate of departure. Plato will call the philosophical method of seeking further in depth, dialectic, assigning much value to the scenario of opening a discussion and being able to investigate by spoken words, and will refer to the mathematical one of extracting, enfolding from set fundaments, dianoia, where noia, in the context set so far, is the intuitive capability noein, at its sharpest reaching towards the intelligible nous, where subject and object of intuition are meeting ontologically.

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IX. ?

DUBBIO MA TRISTO PRESENTIMENTO

RISVEGLIA IN ME QUEST´UOMO ARCANO!

TENTA OBLIARLO…

DOUBTFUL BUT DOLEFUL PRESENTIMENT

AWAKES IN ME THIS ARCANE HUMAN!

ATTEMPT TO BRING IT TO OBLIVION…

 

From Il Trovatore, by G.Verdi

 

The urge of absolute comprehensiveness was not considered yet in their attempts of sense making with the words of Mythos. When this necessity appeared and assumptions of a totally different range could be made, we already can begin to recognize the gens of which Tragedy is made of. Within the intent of bringing more light into the unlimited repertoire of appearances, light that could maybe even see beyond them, a sense of Sorrow emerged, literally perceived, and that the Tragedy explains. Beginning to unfold more precisely these lines, I first wish to underline that by totally different range we exactly mean Totality of Phenomena.

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How to arrive there and behold it?

By shifting the target of our sense-making attempt towards the undoubtable and completely evident by itself, that is potentially, at any time and at any place, accessible in its wholeness.

The Whole and the Evident become the same, both as trajectories and aims of penetrating Existence. Why was Mythos not enough anymore after this shift?

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Two points are determinant in taking a ride to answer this question and that texture wise brings us few inches closer to the other shore: Mythos cannot demonstrate its legitimacy, its undoubtful and unattackable fundament for existing; in the Chaos of Mythos there is no criteria that tells what does not belong to its limitlessness, therefore not yet to intend as a wholeness. 

Demonstrating and criteria of belonging, peculiarly and distinctively arising from the mathematical background of the ancient Greek world, in contact with medio-oriental wisdoms and their more technically advanced knowledge.

For the first time with Thales of Miletus demonstration is a mean for truthful value of statements, conceived within his researches into geometrical fields.

Definition by criteria is the beginning of any diversification from a multiplicity, especially if it shows its tendency to a potential infinite and therefore only at some degrees intuitively reachable. 

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Staying with these means of extraction, this ride takes us to the next determinant consequence or statement by ancient Greeks, as a respond to the necessity of an absolute comprehensiveness: Whole comes with Nothing. 

They chose to set this model of representation which might include contradictions and therefore bring to an uncoherent view. A sense of Hybris is still present, although Gods are already far from the picture described in the last passages. Why and for what to reach to the absolute?

There is no criticism in this question, only spirit of investigation.

Undoubtful, unattackable, completely evident. That far, to let such a Truth appear?

What if truth lays simply in the coherency between limited elements? How to cohere the Whole?

Because it is not an aim of pragmatism that fired the engine of this new way of standing and looking into the Universe, but a motivation towards erection and higher participation in the spirit of the Universe. No matter what it might encounter, in terms of conflicts in understanding and contradictions, this maximally enlarged perspective, obstacles may become means of deeper penetration

 

PERFORMING

THE ABSENCE

 

Following this path, in counterpoint to the sense the word Whole is evoking in its clearness and wideness, the emergence of a limit appears, for the Whole to coexist next to the Nothing. Now, if we recall Chaos into the play of Whole, as limitless space that accommodates all forces, and we go so far with our beholding that we can also recognize, directly or indirectly, partly or a priori, a possible order in it, as ensemble of rules, laws that determinate the appearance of Chaos, then we can talk of shapes that existence moulds together and vanishes, following these regulating principles. Therefore, Nothing is shapeless.

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How to deal with Shapelessness?

What does it mean for humans to become shapeless in this chaotic, ruled Space?

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Death, as absolute Shapelessness remains unseen. Absence is.

By this vision of Absence, Sorrow emerges, to be only understood along this ride as breathless, or, in contraposition, as existential voiceless scream towards Absence and the sensitive effect that the echo of it can take in this absent Space.

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This is the same sense that is carried all along the most different manifestations of Opera and the same one that in some degrees accompanies the descendance of this ancient trial of sense-making into a new definition of the playground upon which these chaotic forces are coming to interact. Meaning by descendance that blending shine of a fundamental contradiction, which provoked the Sorrow: in the moment absoluteness is assumed and a criterion is set to determine what does not belong to it, there is no coherency that can be coupled with it; in the moment coherency is assumed and it can be demonstrate what belongs or not to the scenario of an understanding towards absolute, there is no absoluteness that can be reached.

 

This impossibility of coexistence between these two terms, principles was there from the origin of the most adventurous abstract thinking upon Universe and that Opera made become of flesh and sighs, represented as fights for power and conquers of lovers, expressing this unsolved unsettlement in the language of music and singing, involving humans to partake in it from the deepest their breath could reach into their viscera. 

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Descendance that only will touch its peak in the moment mathematics, throughout its history and developments, will start to take care of it, its own very specific way, in its essential and structural components.

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Arriving and yet hinting only to this step, the other shore shows more attributes and maybe fog starts to be dispersed. On this landscape we will return, as more paint brushes needs to be drawn in order to understand where the lines of this research wish to aim. The bridge better to build it coming alternately from both sides and finding the way to reach to middle at a similar distance from the shores, simply for a matter of balance and survival. 

 

When the first entanglement between mathematical thinking and philosophical  aspirations was treated under the light of platonic insight, the word dianoia made its appearance. As from nous and noein, an intuitive understanding of higher spheres, dianoia was named as the mathematical approach while dealing with its fundamental elements, posing the questions: what are the demonstrations of maths dealing with? what are the faculties for reaching and assembling in demonstrations the basics components of maths?

 

Previously it was described, what the preposition dia can offer in terms of understanding possible purposes of philosophical investigations and how along the mathematical developments, deduction, consequence became the genus, the matter of research.

It is now of decisive relevancy to pause and vivisection the possible meanings can be extracted and constructed from this Greek word, noia, while walking the landscapes of tragedy, together with the crucial affection in the platonic context of dealing with mathematics.

Along these spaces of absence and echoes of a screaming sorrow have been crossed, where tragedy made herself sensible and of a terrifying presence. 

Fearing the absence, leads to an expression that first was mentioned under the manifestations of sounds and, if by humans, of voice, as a reaction, attempting to fill the empty space just entered.

Under the visual representation, the moment an empty space is crossed, appearing as such maybe only because undefined in its darkness for the eyes, the first reaction of the body is not to move from the coordinates zero where it finds itself the moment the nothing, first as non-visible, is enquired. The no-action mode as reflection to the absence, to the no-space, no-essence in front. From this condition of complete freeze, the body takes it further into an inner movement, which produces sound wise the outering of the shock-sensation mentioned before through the voice, towards a scream, still hearable at some extends and with ultrasonic insight in the Opera singing. When any situation becomes terrifying the human system, based on surviving principles, goes into inhibiting any kind of actions. Only overcoming the state of fear allows more movability.

The consequence of sorrow in front of absence, is winning its more precise reasons to be, when noia is introduced: the sensation of crossing the border between the persistent attracting force of existence and the absorbing absence, vanishing into nothing. Noia as impossibility to act upon something which reveals itself as continuously dissolving in front of our eyes, becomes sorrow in its more instantaneous and physical manifestations.

When this border between generation and de-generation is experienced, noia is infiltrating the being of humans. It is not a straight jump from warm to freezing water, it is a gradual trans-passing that pervades and inherently belong each moment of existence. 

 

Anche il dolore che nasce dalla noia

e dal sentimento della vanità delle cose

è più tollerabile assai che la stessa noia.

Giacomo Leopardi

 

The expressive, yet essential image of screaming and simultaneously the raffinate art Opera singing, direct themselves towards the unperceivable space, where, in front of shapelessness, they are not anymore describable only in terms of a reaction, but already, clearly and first as a rejection, as if only the untouchable vibrations of sound can interfere with the undetectable appearance of the darkness and can protect the anew essentially defined protagonist of life, from being absorbed into dissolution.

Considering it in the context of a subject to object relation, this rejection wins its meaning.

Shifting the context, by bending the relation towards the object upon the subject himself, the physical sensation of absence standing in front of the body, who is beholding it, becomes the existential sensation of being the body without which any absence could be perceived and the absence out of which everybody might be made in its more substantial layers.

Where to base absence, from which this sound is originated from?

Maybe on a hole, where space is suspended and completely undetermined; where time is suspended. Where only a nostalgic sense of what was before so firmly appearing, might exist.

Or a taste of black bitterness, as a corrosive liquid ingested by the eyes and demolishing to dust the materials from which existence is attempting to sustain itself on a sense-making ground.

Together with a sleepery coherency, it seems entering the domain of the absurd. And it does. Therefore, it can be called a native domain upon which being is grounded. 

From the absence to sorrow, to a call for reaction against this sense of absence.

But if we enter more the lineaments of this segment, we see underlaying this sense of absurd, non-sense in its totality and undefeatable appearance. If there is nothing, there is nothing out of which something that could make sense, or we could make sense of. There is nothing we can referee ourselves to, but yet and indeed the sense, in its intuitive and sensible aspects, of existing is still there. So, we can referee to ourselves only and constantly.

This vacuum or impression, which deeply impresses, pervades our sense of being.

Facing on one side the emptiness on the other side the complexity of being.

A friction that brings to noia and a sense of absurd, while making sense out of the nothing. 

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