I think everybody, at least one time in life, has been walking among things feeling them without importance, dead and dumb. Literature arises that istant. The relation between word and world could appear that istant. Whenever existence muddles us and things appear meaningless and anguish leads us to tkink life as nothing, that’s when speech in search of meaning could arrive. Western literature, like other ones, fundamentally symbolizes the bet on meaning. The meaning of world. So it’s obvious that the present crisis of western literature is due to the circulation of many words telling things are meaningless. As if words, their function and lot, were used against themselves. Then a pseudoliterature arises and a literary and philosophic critic living by non-sense. Then a funny and escapist literature arises, which gets away from sense. But it’s only a crisis. We can’t keep so much time away from the search of meaning. We use to move between damnation and grace. Literature is the bet on words able to light up the world by sense, showing us the living and eternal light of things

When it is real, literature remains in our mind, secretly modifies something even if it’s never democraticly of all; when it’s not able to, we rapidly forget it. I think that’s its role from time immemorial. To remain in our mind or to be forgotten. But in the latter case, it’s not literature. Omero, Shakespeare even nearly remain to the mass. But it’s not easy to give a sense.

There is still much to learn. Brain, world and body are united in a complex circular dance of cause and effect. If classic philosophy, nowadays thought by really few people, wondered about reasons, present philosophy takes up how things happen. I think we can’t renounce any of two perspectives, even if this direction is now going two apparently parallel lines, so that they can’t imagine to meet. But it’s evident that analitic philosophy, cognitive sciences, genetics, nanotechnologies are the running fast line, so placing us in difficulties. Let’s consider how many bioethic problems they involve. Political classes are extremely inadequate to understand and find the solutions, and in addition they will not able to stop this process, which is the vital sap of the man’s insuppressible desire to exploring and generating. The other line appears nearly still, it’s not able to walk more promptly. But it will resurrect!
One problem we nowadays have to manage is the artificial dimension of human nature. It’s a very wide subject and it regards our perceptions and daily life. So we arrive at the study of emotions and passions. Sciences of mind are now in a transition phase. The emerging of new investigation techniques like non invasive brain imaging, the study of artificial neural networks, the research about real robotics let us presage a better comprehension of complex relations among our activities, local environment and composite conformation of the sense of self. In addition. What about the meeting between who holds a millenary practice in introspectioning and who, by the most sophisticated tools of cognitive sciences, is now able to read mind? The book recently published in Italy too, Distructive Emotions, is rich of novelty and surprising facts that our educationalists, writers, politicians, philosophers simply must no longer ignore.

The reception of a text is a very complex matter, so that there is a lot of empirical research around humanistic studies with experiments, like the psychonarratology one about effects on reader of free indirect and marked direct speech. What does it happen to me when i read? Which intentions i have or not? Good question! Does it assume i examine myself while reading? A very instructive book is "Innocent eye" by Roger Shattuck that, even if within limits, deals with thisquestion. About me, i use to think i read because i look for something, that is the sense i said before. How do i look for it? Maybe, politely and willingly setting to others’ writing. Politeness and willingness! As when a friend comes to see me. Then i could even criticise him! But before all i try to empty the cup of my mind, remembering a zen aphorism. I read with innocence, trying not to remember, trying to minimize the filters i oppose to reading. Then, quitted reading, my mind will recall what assumed and compare with all i was before, all i believed to know, all i had read and written before. I beware of a reading lead by codes, convention, critic methods and literary theories. If not so, we’d be already prisoners in jail we choose. I prefer a severe and free approaching the text, i greatly rely on spontaneous nature of mind, on its capability to light up, to rid itself of superstructures, those who defend from pain. But pain is there to make us unlearn suffering.

* Emanuele Giordano spent years and worked together with the italian master and intellectual Danilo Dolci. He now takes part in debate and discussions about mind and culture, by internet too. --- all rights reserved, 13dec2003 ---