Tsunami
Sometimes it is enough to know how to look.
Sometimes the signs are all there.
Sometimes it is enough to not remain dazzled by the glitter of the shells on the bottom.
The tsunami is a strange phenomenon. It is perhaps the most predictable in the world. An earthquake moves thousands of tons of water. A wall of energy slowly moves toward the coast. The sea level drops by several meters.
It would be so easy to notice and take refuge in the mountains, in the shelter, to understand how to resist the impact of the wave. Yet the disappearing water attracts the curious. Everyone has her own profit to seek in the sands of the bottom. Everyone has a pearl that dazzles him. Until the water arrives and sweeps everything away.
Here, we cannot ignore that the water will arrive. A wall of water. The signs are clear. Around us, the sea has dried up, withdrawn, run away – like the rats of Hamelin – behind the pipers of television and consumption. Only relics of the past emerge, ghosts from other eras for which to make sad apologies. What are the treasures that keep us from taking shelter, that won’t let us question ourselves deeply about how to resist the tsunami, that draw us toward drowning?
The self-referential procession? The site that reassembles the different spirits and ideas of an opposition to this world – which in reality has no possible synthesis on the irresolvable issue of refusal or acceptance of authority? The necessity induced by survival? Passion for our favorite surrogate activity? We care too much for our skin to really stake our lives on it. And, so doing, we find that our hands are to cold to truly caress joy.
We’re losing time. We are playing in the mud of the soft bottom. Feral silence will be the thing that accompanies us into eternity.
Or else. The flight to the heights of thought and action. This is what could save our Life. This is what could lie in ambush for the death they offer us. We live in a disturbing era, but we are not touched by it. We are still indeed submerged in the flow of news that drags our sensibilities far from shore, away from us.
When the water is at its lowest, the wave will hit us.
Nuclear war, material domination, ecological disaster. And this on a global level. In Italy, the civil war between nationalist neo-fascism (today one would say sovereignist) and the eco-fascism of digitization and widespread social control. And the spaces for an autonomous intervention?
Yes, of course. Theoretically, they are there. But we have to understand that we can no longer fool ourselves about what we have. What we hold in our hands, what we care about, are bottle bottoms smoothed by the sea that re-emerge in the sunlight as the water falls. We get used to misery and mediocrity, we’ve given way to self-pity. But if those flashes were truly fragments of other thought, how long would we wait to abandon ourselve to quality?