Acéphale

Young Girl Meditating with Lotus Flower in Her Palm, sculpture in black stone, 10th–11th century A.D., State Museum, Lucknow.
This image – statue on red background – is the cover of the Adelphi edition of the book Ardor by Roberto Calasso.

Perhaps not many people will recall the following sensations – one can only speak for oneself – but to someone they will surely sound familiar and they will not require much attention. The latter may be able to skip some words and perhaps, as they skim through the lines, they will smile, pleased to know in advance how the paragraph will end. The former, however, are luckier: they are those who still know how to talk with accuracy and who hardly get lost in the mist of their thoughts. Generally, the latter envy the former. They would like to have the same elegance in the way they express themselves, the same promptness in their reactions, the same effortless care in the choice of the words. Instead, they often babble, and they end up feeling defective, as if the most distinctive faculties of human race, the use of words, was wasted on them.

Very few people are still worthy of such envy since an increasingly approximate, random and careless way of using language has spread globally. One always uses the same formulas to say the same things, and the attention that determines the accuracy has become a rather rare phenomenon. But sometimes you find yourself listening to someone capable of making the language sound as it should, and that is a truly hypnotic experience. This seduction does not differ from that of the gestures of certain bodies, that move as classical statues would move if they were made of flesh and covered with white skin –– by calculating the weight of each limb and always maintaining control, as if there was no weight to be held.

There are essentially two types of causes that led to this general disregard for words. The first are to be found in the bureaucratic uniformity, in the standardized registers of politics and education, in the monotony of mass media and so on. The latter are those that the readers of the second kind will recognize, because they will have encountered them already in the intimacy of their mind.

It happens, in the attempt to formulate a logical argument of any kind, to catch a glimpse of ‘flashes that are like ideas’, in the words of Valery.¹ Ideas that, however, insofar as shiny, are never completely reachable. They do not surrender, and when one tries to get closer they flee rapidly, leaving an immense expanse of fog behind. The places of the mind cover with something confused or diffuse. Some ideas are no longer visible, some others multiply, disappear and reappear elsewhere, making it difficult to establish an order, to calculate distances and choose the one on which to focus first. The thought ends up in a vertigo, a sense of incompleteness similar to the feeling you have when you eat so much and so fast that you don’t immediately feel satiated and one stomach corner seems to remain unconquered. Most people simply say: ‘my head is going to explode!’

Then one forgets – some readers will know – and when facing the same constellation for the second time, one is forced to walk down the same path and return to the same dead desert. The same uncertainty reflects into the spoken words: an “ehm” of variable duration for each expanse of fog. Unable to stand their babbling and their inaccuracies, some people choose to speak as little as possible and, instead, to write.

This does not necessarily mean that writing resolves the problem. But it is certainly true that it allows a slower digestion, a dedication more dilated over time. The writer grants himself the luxury to walk back and retrace the logical connections without getting lost, because the words on the page always follow one another. There is a consequentiality, almost or perhaps totally physical, that forces you to choose and direct your attention unequivocally.

In an effort to make your language adhere to reality, it can be useful to try to forget the thinking and, as a schoolboy who has been given a task, devote one’s concentration to the mere description of what is observed.

Describe a cat:

As if we could forget to think or trust the term “unequivocally” at all.

By isolating and focusing your attention you end up losing it again. To combat the obsession with the whole, with the relationship between the chosen topic and all its variations in time and space, you try to narrow the field down and then divide it into more limited fields and divide again and so on. As through a crystal, you are now observing from all sides: you get sucked into the detail of the detail of detail until your words start to deform what you see. You are caught by a new dizziness: the same way in which you got lost in the infinitely vast, one can lose your way in the infinitely small. You cannot grasp the inner turmoil feeding the flame and you cannot believe the invariance of the crystal –– yet even from these two objects it is almost impossible to look away.⁴

It is said that the head of certain Vedic wise men blew when facing sacrificial unsolvable riddles.

They were major philosophical questions, going far beyond the eight-legged cat problem.

In front of a headless statue, I wonder whether I would collect and analyse each fragment, freezing the explosion as in a kind of axonometric drawing, or whether I would stay still and wait for the body to move with the same wisdom, without breaking the black stone.

1. Paul Valéry, Monsieur Teste, 1926.
2. The meaning of this sentence gets lost in the translation. In French “wires” is “fils”: ‘Il a des poils sous le nez, aussi raides que des fils de fer. C’est pour ça qu’il est dans l’ordre des “filines”’.
3. Assignment written by a 9 year-old kid, quoted by Georges Ravon in Le Figaro, 6th May 1952.
4. The images of the crystal and the fire are taken from Italo Calvino’s 6 Memos for The Next Millenium (1988).