By Simone Bandini
“Demandez à un crapaud ce que c’est que la beauté : il vous répondra que c’est sa crapaude avec deux gros yeux ronds sortant de sa petite tête… Interrogez le diable il vous dira que le beau est une paire de cornes, quatre griffes et une queue”.
Voltaire, Dictionnaire Philosophique (1764)
The ancients knew this.
The natural order of things must not be broken.
Man has always sought in nature that horizontal balance, of orientation and action, which the vertical possibilities of his own thought preclude.
In the very etymology of the word ‘de-generation’, an axiological historical and cultural judgment of merit clearly shines through, without a shadow of a doubt. Let’s also say it clearly: a negative evaluation, of estrangement and loss – since it concerns the distance from an ideal and natural condition of origins. A ‘right’ condition that traces the border between the classical and the modern era: from the man with a centre, identity and belonging, to the ‘de-centred’ man, far from his essence.
This attribute of adherence and fidelity to nature – with its instinct of ‘generation’ which is its primordial law – is therefore the ‘function of gender’: masculine and feminine, martial and venereal (in the sacred and non-medical sense of the term!) .
The ‘confusion of genres’, or rather the conspicuous and slavish affirmation of certain political, cultural and especially artistic fringes – linked to the lower commercial world of entertainment (entertainment in the albionic version, c’est a dire more appropriate) – finds in contexts further away from nature, in fact, its crowning glory: in that urban, metropolitan and universal-like thought, de-generated and de-natured, which runs rampant in our cities and which stupefies most with a deadly deception: the patina of modernity, in a synthesis of freedom and intelligence which, sadly, are nothing more than a fake and apparently harmless transgression, with potentially lethal ethical and moral outcomes (sic!). To have an immediate empirical demonstration, it is sufficient to glance at the folklore, alas often psychopathological, of our highly civilized, fluid and futuristic, magnificent and progressive ‘new generations’.
Let no one be offended! Let’s move on to ethology, if only to lighten the subject, taking a cue from the behaviour of some varieties of birds which, in recent decades, have become urbanized and massified, we could say – with a ‘leap of species’ – ‘homologated’. I am referring, for example, to passerines such as starlings, or to the wood pigeons of the columbidae family – migratory birds that once sighted and hunted on the Apennine passes, such as mythical, elusive and legendary creatures, which today crowd stupidly into parks and city gardens as prey to a spell, also sold to the existential logic of urban utility. Do we want to talk about the very green parakeets that surprise the little families with alien and tropical melodies? Or perhaps the seagulls hovering ominously over landfills, forgetful of their pride – do you remember Coleridge’s ballad? Finally, what about the lost cunning and dexterity of a blackbird that cackles, alone and desolate, plucked and albino, between SUVs and Chinese small cars that whiz by – instead of singing in the evening in the silence of the ditches.
Today, with much greater reasons – from urban overpopulation to pollution, from the ethical and moral indistinctness to the confusion of genres – we return to nature to rediscover this lost balance. Don’t you feel this urgency? To escape these real metastases of modernity?
So, don’t you hear this inner voice within you, this call from the woods and forests?
Take it as a ‘flower of goodness’ that I offer you: return to the countryside, to nature, return to yourself, to your centre. Rebel against those who no longer want you to be just good savages – but also and especially useful idiots. Don’t be the singers of your own silly, not even more decadent, mediocrity. To be decadent it is necessary to fall: therefore, if not a high position, at least an upright posture is assumed.
Not recommended listening, Rosa Chemical, “Made in Italy”