The soul broke away from the exhausted Body and set out on a journey.
She had promised herself: she had to seek and find an emotion; he had to find a way to imprison her and bring her as a gift to the Body: it was the only way to be able to save his life.
That Body for years, for decades, had been nourishing itself only on what reason, beyond any doubt, handed it over. The lymph that once flowed in his veins had run aground. Under the diaphanous skin those streams could still be glimpsed but, now like wadi, they were now only mute witnesses of what once flowed there: they were memories. Every day that Body was increasingly defining itself as the marble masterpiece of a divine sculptor. A sculptor who was allowed by the gods to use the whiter marble metamorphosed into Lydia.
An emotion, lifeblood, would have saved his life. He set out on a journey, walking for days and days, trampling the mud of volcanic paths, crossing fiery tongues in the desert, floating on huge water lilies to reach the most extreme places, where the poet had never arrived. One day, having reached the edge of the forest, after lingering on that edge, she entered it cautiously. She soon found herself surrounded by innumerable plants, with a whitish trunk and bare branches. There were no leaves, around him he had only petrified trunks, gaunt, sometimes majestic and other slender. He listened but did not perceive any form of life.
No sighs. No breath.
Each step was hard for her, the ground more slippery than the surface of a frozen lake. With difficulty and not without danger he managed to cross it and at sunset as he was leaving it he saw a small slender leaf on a branch. He looked at her in amazement, a shiver of emotion seized her: she recognized a birch leaf, trapped in a drop of ice crystal. He turned one last time towards the forest and understood: there were hundreds of frozen birch trees. A wonderful sight was projected on his eyes. The incident light of the sunset struck the birches, the trunks and the branches and these, like hundreds of prisms, refracted it, flooding the sky with superb colors. She was captivated by such beauty, so much so that she forgot the sacredness of her own research. He noticed it and just thinking back to the Body he detached the leaf, took it with him and went on.
Time went by relentlessly, she did not feel tired, and she walked for many more days until she reached a series of plateaus where thousands of years earlier mighty Cyclops had terraced the mountainside and glimpsed vast pools of light. As he proceeded in the ascent he found himself crossing ponds of crimson red, fuchsia and plum, falun and mauve complexions, lying alongside ultramarine water, cornflower and denim, sugar paper and of aquamarine and other ponds glistening with green moss, celadon, lime pulp and chartreuse. Enthusiastic, she looked around for someone who shared the wonder. She found herself alone once again. That beauty did not impregnate anything: no form of life could be glimpsed. He gathered the salts from each of those pools of light and went on.
But time was now a tyrant, soon he would have to return and rejoin the Corps. On the way back he faced the latest quest, the ultimate challenge. He walked on paths just traced by the lava, and entered the fetid humors of the Earth, sulphurous miasmas, until he reached the crater of the volcano. He arrived there, exhausted, in the evening, when the light of the last day was leaving him. He heard a deep roar rising from the belly of the volcano, an increasingly thunderous noise, a series of roars that generated a terrifying spectacle. Fountains of lava hundreds of meters high opened to his gaze, incandescent lapilli and ash gathered in leaden clouds pregnant with fire and lava, fluid lava that flowed everywhere. It was useless to look for life in such a place, he only had time to steal some fire from the volcano and fled.
He was aware that he had failed in the mission.
He came back.
He deposited in front of the Body of water, the salts and the fire. And the leaf. That small, insignificant, alchemist's crucible could have worked the miracle. That miracle that every plant was able to reproduce for millions of years. He looked at the leaf with hope, he trusted her and suddenly the magic came true: on its leaf he saw small, microscopic whitish crystals. He collected the sugar and gave it to the Body. There was a jolt of the limbs, a barely perceptible jolt. But nothing more. The life of the Body was now a breath and within that breath the soul thought it heard a sentence.
"Who are you?"
The soul realized that the Body now needed only a grace, a divine favor. He answered.
I am Channah. Channah.
Something indefinite seemed to change the marble, something imperceptible seemed to flow back into the veins.
A name.
An emotion.
Thesis
The Greek world was conceived as closed and ordered, a reflection of reason and arranged by a divine principle.
Christian dogma has inherited it and plagiarized it for its own ends.
In one way or another the meaning has always been clear: to preserve authority and power.
Let us think of the word desire: "we desire a woman or an object".
Etymologically, "desire" comes from the Latin de sidere, which suggests that it comes from the root "star".
When we say "it is a disaster", we must not forget that its original meaning is that the stars or planets are no longer harmoniously conducted.
And in fact, even in the seventeenth century, the appearance of a comet, a misaligned celestial body, which disturbed the order of the sky, its incorruptibility and perfection, was interpreted as a sign of doom.
The tool through which, for millennia, authority tends to preserve this status quo can only be reason.
Authority must convince man that being rational is the meaning of his personal action.
Of course, if I want to investigate nature I can only be rational, but the study of human nature and its presence in society presupposes something else!
What did Plato write in Phaedrus?
The virtuous white horse tends to the "bread of angels" and the black one, which symbolizes the passions, discards the chariot towards earthly pleasures.
The charioteer, rationality, must govern the passions.
And it does so through rule, jurisdiction, religious belief (Christian morality).
But why? For who?
For my own good or to guarantee authority?
So everything in human nature that tends to oppose rationality must be opposed because, at the limit, it could subvert community and society.
But are we sure that to be virtuous I have to follow this dogma?
"Reason must be a slave to the passions, it must serve them and obey them" (D. Hume)
Antithesis
The reason is concreteness, it is the mathematics that intervenes to measure the space between the passions and the people or objects on which their effect impacts. Even a minimum space activates an alarm bell, it is the STOP signal in front of the limit of a possible balance break. If we can go further, reason says so. Rationality must therefore govern the passions, but for whom? Not necessarily and only for the individual good.
"Man is a social animal" wrote Aristotle and Darwin defined "sympathy" the ability to enter into relationship with other living beings. To govern also derives from the Greek verb kubernáo: to hold the rudder. Reason therefore holds the rudder, keeps the course of human life when it is overwhelmed by the storm of passions.
Synthesis
Between two celestial bodies there is an equilibrium point where the respective forces of gravity cancel out.
Contrary to what one might think, this equilibrium point does not coincide with the midpoint of their distance but, being proportional to their gravity force, it will be closer to the body with less mass.
Defining this minimum space, this field of existence, where the passions can move freely, without suffering the gravity of reason or paradoxically without reason feeling its slave, is not simple and above all it is not given once and for all.
Considering reason as a moderate or mild passion, as Hume writes, turns out to be only a philosophical artifice, which certainly does not help to understand how the will should proceed.
However, in order not to remain bogged down in a question that is certainly not only philosophical, we could imagine that passion should have a non-secondary role in the young person, on pain of not discovering and living one's human nature to the full and beyond a certain age, not denying it. , but relegate it to a closed space, a virtual bubble, where our avatars can, shared simple linguistic rules, express it and draw emotions that are the spice of life.
Bibliography
Long life of Marianna Ucrìa Dacia Maraini 1990 Rizzoli
* Waking up like a late rose after decades of sleep.
Philosophical works. Vol. 1: Treatise on human nature David Hume 2008 Laterza Edition