through europe

 

 

There was a time, approximately twenty years ago, when topics like exile and escape were addressed in generous and original ways in the Italian culture. There was the cinema of Gabriele Salvatores (Mediterraneo, Marrakech Express) "dedicated to all those who are running away", and that of Mario Martone (Death of A Neapolitan Mathematician,War Theatre), filled with characters defeated by life. There were bands like 99 Posse, Almamegretta, Daniele Sepe & Rote Jazz Fraktion who celebrated the roots of militant anti-fascism, while suggesting desertion from Western society. And then, the nomadic literature of Pino Cacucci (Puerto Escondido), the anti-militarist comics of Sergio Bonelli (Tex, Dylan Dog) and Hugo Pratt (Corto Maltese) and overall in any field of the arts you could feel the influence of post-1977 counter-culture. In very different ways, those voices were describing a generation unwilling to enter ‘capitalist’ adulthood and to finally become ‘bourgeois’. They were talking about virile friendship, human cowardice, disgust for the so called ‘return of the Private’ (or ‘Reflux’) of the 1980s.

 

The Other

 

At the basis of our relationship with the Other, according to Emmanuel Levinas and to Judaeo-Christian religion, is the injunction ‘Thou shalt not kill.’

Upon encountering the Other – any human other – his/her face communicates to us something that far exceeds the limits of our rational understanding. Through his/her face, the Other reveals him/herself as an abyss of infinite mystery, and as the place in which God shows Himself as the essence of Otherness. Such an encounter comes as a trauma to the person who is faced by the Other. The Other forces us to accept that our dreams of individual autonomy were always ill-founded, and that we always carry within ourselves an infinite responsibility towards the Other-God – a responsibility that haunts us forever, to the point of being a true persecution. We are ruptured inside by the presence and the demands of the Other, yet we cannot fully comprehend him/her. We are bound to the Other, yet this burden is always excessively heavy for us to carry. The injunction ‘though shalt not kill’ reveals our most immediate reaction in the face of the revolution that the Other brings into our lives: our desire to kill the Other, so to free ourselves from our responsibility towards him/her and to be able to pursue our dreams of perfect autonomy.

 

Fleeing

 

As my troops push their assault forward, the phalanx of the Seleucids opens its ranks. It is a matter of seconds. My camera angle is low, close to the back of my soldiers, and when the elephants charge I am as taken aback as my men. It’s pure chaos. I pull back my camera angle towards the sky, where us Gods belong. I order the shaken Triarii cohort to fall on the right side of the elephants and to attack them from the flanks. A red square framing a white flag starts flashing next to their insignia. In vain, I order them again to flank the elephants. It’s too late. They have lost their cold Roman composure. They are fleeing, oblivious to the world and to the orders of their God.

 

I watch them running through the pixelated foliage of a nearby forest. I am no longer able to click on them to select the survivors. I forget the rest of the battle, still raging on the dry planes of inner Anatolia, and I lower my camera angle to follow the flight of my men.

They failed me, when all they were for was to obey me. What are they feeling right now?

Looking at their square calves propelling their run towards the end of the screen, I realize the truth.

They fear and tremble, but they have never been more true to me than now.

 

If you take a city such as Salonika or Smyrna, you will find there five or six communities each of which has its own memories and which have almost nothing in common. Yet the essence of a nation is that all individuals have many things in common; and also that they have forgotten many things. No French citizen knows whether he is a Burgundian, an Alan, a Taifale, or a Visigoth, yet every French citizen has to have forgotten the massacre of Saint Bartholomew,’ or the massacres that took place in the Midi in the thirteenth century. There are not ten families in France that can supply proof of their Frankish origin, and any such proof would anyway be essentially flawed, as a consequence of countless unknown alliances, which are liable to disrupt any genealogical system.(1)
Ernest Renan, lecture given at the Sorbonne, 1882.

This is an idea inspired by a comment about Cairo’s City of the Dead as a place where the spiritual goal is to celebrate the absence of judgment, which is to be left for God(2) and in many other people’s case in God’s absence. The City of the Dead reveals more than a vernacularized classification of death or the cultural appreciation of idol worship - regardless of being urban or rural. It is also a place of mutual habitation between the living and the dead where people live, cleaning the family house: the Leichenhauser. That habitation is mirrored, anchored, by the collective memories of people and amnesia, trauma and other emotions. This text is nothing but an attempt to try and encourage an aspiration and joy towards an abandonment of judgementalism in social spaces without discussing participation or religion. The migrancy of people from the countryside to a necropolis might not be borne out of a desire to participate but socio-political pragmatism, or human despair- and motives that are also prone to migrate and change.