Dreams in Blog - THE MUSIC OF LIFE

18/Feb/2010

THE MUSIC OF LIFE

Posted by : Prof. Stefano D'Anna

The MUSIC of LIFE

You are the song you sing. Your music shapes your existence and anything you see, touch and
feel. There is a human mass that sings a chant of sorrow and projects a world on the edge of a
precipice. There are individuals who sing a chant of love and victory. The vastness of their music
shapes destinies and societies, and profoundly affects the roots of the human spirit.

Brueghel Jan, the elder: The sense of hearing 

Are you ready to conduct a very interesting experiment? Can you accept being both
the scientist of this experiment and at the same time the guinea pig? Well! Just pick
out one of your days. Select any day of your life. Look carefully through it. Explore
any detail of it. Notice the words you say. Classify them. Single out those you say
more often… Scan the feelings you experience. Classify them. Single out the most
frequent ones… Look at your thoughts. Classify them. Single out the most persistent
ones, those that appear with a higher frequency. Just as one cell, the smallest unit
of life, contains the biological information of your entire organism, so, if your search
is sincere and you really want to know about yourself, any one of your days can tell
you all about you. That tiny segment of your existence is the epitome, the very
synthesis of your life and knows your destiny, buried under thick layers of lies. It is
like having the Delphic Oracle at hand. At your disposal. When you want it, if you
want it. 

  

We are monotonous beings

In all likelihood, such a search will make us realize that our words, thoughts, and
feelings, are recurring; we just repeat them mechanically, day after day, over and
over. We may discover that as a whole we are a quite monotonous being. Pick out
the physical sensations you experience in a day. If you pay a bit of attention, you will
realise that there is nothing new in what you sense. Moreover this search will make
us aware of our mechanical nature. It will take our breath away at the terrifying
discovery that our ‘machine’ is already programmed to feel those sensations, to
experience those emotions, to have those thoughts, to pronounce those words. Like
a musical instrument that vibrates at a given frequency, and can emit only that
sound, we are occupying only a very narrow bandwidth in the infinity of possible
keys, vibrations, and sounds. 

  

What song are you singing? 

You will realise that every day you sing the same song and that the external world,
what you call reality, does nothing but obey to that rhythm, that sound, that vibration.
A man's reality, his ability to do and therefore to have, his degree of happiness as
well as his financial destiny, perfectly corresponds to his ‘rate of vibration’. The world
is more or less narrow, more or less large according to the wideness of our song.
"What song are you singing?" is the same as questioning yourself about your
destiny. When you are able to listen to it, when you are more careful with the notes
you utter, you will be able to notice it’s mono-tony. If you will realize this, then you
will also find the will and the ability to widen the narrow pentagram in which you are
living. Like a piano, that with respect to other instruments has such a breadth of
octaves to occupy two pentagrams, so there are men who have a wider expressive
range than do others. There exist men who play music that spans three, four, five
pentagrams… because their "dream" is too wide to be contained in the narrow
bandwidth that suffices for the rest of mankind. Two men conduct business between
them because of a fusion of rhythms, a consistency of sounds… an harmony. And a
firm takes over another firm for the width of its music; a civilisation conquers another
civilisation and absorbs it for the vastness of its chant, the width of octaves, the
quality of sounds, the richness, and the power of its music.

It is easier to move a mountain 

Notice how difficult it is to change even a single word of your everyday vocabulary,
an accent, a pet phrase; notice the impossibility of changing an attitude, a reaction,
of breaking a routine, of going outside of the mechanical repetitiveness of gestures,
or of sounds. Just imagine what it could mean to transform a thought, to change an
emotion… Notice inside you the impossibility of catching a new idea, to accept it…
to dive into the invisible, to think something original, to dream something apparently
impossible… to play a single note outside of the pentagram in which you were
driven to live. You will realise that it is easier to move a mountain.

Every intentional effort, even the smallest, made to modify a repetitive action, a
mechanical reaction or to break a habit, is a victory over our monotony, the tripping
up of repetitive habits and recurrences of our life.

 You will realise that the aging, the process of progressive stiffening of your life
started long ago, and though you may be young, soon you will no longer be able to
reverse it. Rich men and tramps, politicians and employees, Nobel prize winners
and ordinary people - everyone carries around his own song. Everybody is locked in
self-created prisons of roles, sealed in bubbles of negative emotions, embalmed in
their own habits. The greater part of mankind obeys a programme set at birth,
reaffirmed in childhood by parents who can do nothing but transmit the song which
they in their turn received from their parents; and reinforced in schools and
universities where they learn a hypnotic music taught by bad musicians, tedious
teachers, and prophets of misfortune. Throughout the millennia, the traditions of
wisdom have devised and transmitted every kind of ‘trick’ to contrast with the rigidity
and repetitiveness towards which men inevitably tend. Genuflections towards Mecca
five times a day, the fasting ritual of Ramadan in the ninth month of the Islamic lunar
year; indeed, the current rituals of every religious tradition, could all be characterized
as ‘tripping’ mechanical behaviours. Their function is to nourish mankind’s drowsy
intelligence and latent understanding, by the interruption of routine; pushing men to
deviate from the rut of deep-rooted habits. 

Like a jammed gramophone

There are grandiose musicians, visionary individuals who sweep through the
pentagrams of existence, who create and catch their music from immensity, from
above, and there is a human mass resigned to their sad and flickering existence,
men and women similar to a jammed gramophone repeating their whining, mournful
theme learned since childhood and never modified. Their life is an elementary, basic
song played by pressing few keys with just a finger. If we bothered to pay the
slightest attention to our movements, we would discover how mechanical and
repetitive our lives are. Every morning we set out with scrupulous rigour on a series
of actions which are always the same: we get out of bed with the same foot, we start
shaving from the same side, we clean our teeth repeating the same number of
movements, in the same fashion, and always with the same facial expression. We
have settled habits; we express received ideas with the same gestures, words and
inflections we have always used. Even our emotions are predictable, like
conditioned reflexes of the soul. In the ordinary man, the will is buried. His behaviour
is the reflection of a mechanical intelligence and could be studied more profitably by
sciences like ethology or robotics than by psychology. Once he has understood this,
a man can have no other aim in life but to escape from this narrow bandwidth where
all mankind is kept prisoner - to escape from his own music's monotony and poverty.
There is no greater project, no holier war than contrasting one’s limits and raising
one’s own chant. The cast out of Eden of Adam and Eve, the original sin, the
paradise lost doesn’t occur once upon a time but every moment that humanity raises
a chant of fear and sorrow and keeps singing it over and over. The world is such
because you are such. 

Change your music

This hellish song springing from a black hole in man’s soul, accounts for the all the
conflicts, poverty, criminality and any moral and material disease of the planet,
including humanity’s millenary curse of aging, getting sick and dying. If you want to
change your reality, change your music, and devote yourself to widening your
‘dream’. The dream is the most real thing there is. It is the dream that creates reality.
And only the dream can rescue us out of this tight position of Being, out of our
chant's monotony that becomes pain in our bodies, fear in our feelings and doubt in
our minds. One day our being will be so wide to be able to listen not only to our, but
also to others' songs… the sounds others utter… the profoundness and the height of
their octaves… their notes' colour, timbre, rhythm. When we are ready to stand up to
the responsibility of this truth, we will find out that humanity thinks and feels
negatively; it sings a song of misfortune, of sorrow, of doubt and fear. The whole
world is in your head, like the music you play, the song you sing inside. And your
fate is recorded like in the grooves of an LP. 

Dream a beautiful dream

If you study yourself, if you observe yourself, you will know more about yourself and
day-by-day you will be able to broaden your dream, creating and singing a new
melody. Every day you will realize more and more that ‘the dream’ is more real than
our illusion of acting in life. Through dreaming you will create relationships, solve
problems, and enter inaccessible worlds. You will learn how to dive into the invisible.
Reality will follow, and will take the shape and dimension of your dream. Knowing
ourselves is discovering that man is alone in the universe, solely responsible for
anything happening to him. Life is as you dream it. Your song shapes your
existence. You can live in paradise or in hell. It is up to you. Have the courage to
dream a beautiful dream. Have the courage to sing a unique melody, outside of the
chorus, like a solitary bird. Be an individual and conquer all that is possible to
conquer… inside your head.

Dreams in Blog - SOLITUDE

04/Jan/2010

SOLITUDE

Posted by : Prof. Stefano D'Anna

TEMPO January 2010 Article By Stefano E. D’Anna

The characteristics of the solitary bird are fivefold: 

First, it flies towards the highest point 
Second, it does not tolerate companions 
Third, it aims its beak to the sky 
Fourth, it has no definite colour 
Fifth, it sings most sweetly.

SOLITUDE
Close your eyes and feel your presence, enjoy your own company. 
Search for solitude. This is the way a leader builds his integrity and
acquires power.

We all tasted immortality. It was during the physical gestation, when for
nine months (but in fact for an endless time) we have been aquatic,
dreaming beings, floating in the amniotic liquid. And while for zoological
beings this is the only gestation, necessary and sufficient ‘to come to
this world’, for human beings this physical gestation is followed by an
age of development, a sort of long psychological gestation, which
continues until the age of 18-20. Therefore the news I am giving to the
Dreams in Blog - The way of Icarus
28/Sep/2009

The way of Icarus

Posted by : Stefano E. D’Anna

 
Dedalos and Icaros

Problems are everywhere. And the solutions?

The way of Icarus

Prof. Stefano E D’Anna

Humanity is enclosed in a labyrinth, languishing since time immemorial

in a prison of repetitiveness without ever finding a solution to its age-old
problems. The possible way out comes from the myth of Daedalus
which recalls the condition of man imprisoned by his own creation. The
solution is the problem seen from the top. The way of Icarus. 

Minos closed all the doors to us

However, he could not close the sky...
 

The progeny of Sisyphus

The myth of Daedalus, the man imprisoned in the labyrinth, his own
creation, is the oldest myth that our civilization recalls. Its origin is lost in
the mists of time. In the western culture there is no prototypical idea
more emblematic of our own condition.

Humanity is enclosed in a labyrinth. It languishes since time immemorial

in a prison of repetitiveness without ever finding a solution to its age-old
problems. The calamities and global challenges we have to face are
innumerable and grave: from world pollution to the poverty of countries,
from the death of a child every seven seconds due to hunger to the
thousand conflicts and hatred between countries and different ethnic
groups. The domineering characteristic of man’s problematic reality
seems to be its unsolvability. Everyone is searching for solutions. Men,
governments, civilizations would like to know the way out of this
labyrinth, to possess Ariadne’s thread and the wings of Icarus.

In the sphere of research conducted on leadership and of the studies on

the decision-making process done in the Institute of Entrepreneurial
Psychology of the European School of Economics, we asked ourselves
why humanity’s problems are not only unresolved but with time they
have become more acute. Even the phenomenon of famine in the world
has worsened. Though we possess the most advanced means and
techniques, paradoxically, we are now producing less food for the third
world then forty years ago.

We are the descendents of Sisyphus, condemned to the same torment.

Since millennia we push uphill our problems as heavy huge stones, to
then see them rolling down to the bottom before reaching the top. And to
start again, endlessly. We shift our problems to another place or
pospone them to another time and then we call this solution. We were
inadequate in the Stone Age when we could only count on our bare
hands and we still are now in this digital era with atomic energy and
internet. It is time to identify the reason of our powerlessness.

The problem seen from the top

ESE works on the hypothesis that the problem and solution are not
opposites but they are in fact the elements of the same reality. If we
were able to rise into our being, if we were able to rise above ordinary
vision we would realize that the solution is not divided from the problem.
They are the same thing. The only difference is the levels on which they
stand.

The solution is the problem seen from the top. This vision is what
distinguishes a leader.

The discovery is revealing itself to be of huge practical value in the

preparation of a new generation of leaders, visionary men, pragmatic
dreamers that do not believe in the search for an external solution but in
their very own capabilities.

‘It is your vision, it is your pace that creates the path. A leader does not
need to choose a direction because he is the direction, the inventor of
the dream that is unfolding itself and that takes on the appearance of
reality’ (from The School for Gods)

These men know that what other commonly call problems are in reality
solutions in disguise. There is always a solution, it comes together with
the problem, it is one with it, but to reach it we must overcome our
conflictual psychology, must get over lower worlds where any reality
cannot but take on problematic forms. Only through passing time, we
can identify the solution where before we only saw the problem.

Waiting for Godot

Man searches outside himself. He runs around and looses breath all his
life following external solutions that with time transform themselves in
problems and in this way a ceaseless perverse cycle is formed. For an
unhappy destiny, we will never know that outside ourselves there is
nothing and no one that can help us out. As the characters in the
tragicomedy of Samuel Beckett we will be endlessly “waiting for Godot”
(God-ot) believing in a deus ex machina that can resolve us from the
outside. Never realizing that we are the solution. Like reindeers we run
after the fragrance of musk, enraptured by that essence without ever
discovering that it is not out of us, but secreted by our own glands.

Man searches for freedom, happiness, love, he searches outside

himself but the journey of the “prodigal sun” is not external…it is an
internal adventure; it is the journey of man returning to the unity of his
being.

Man ceaselessly tries to regain his integrity, a state of completeness,

of interior unity but nothing seems capable to bring him back to his
paradise lost.

The Art of Decision Making

All organizations, and companies especially, live as arks scourged by an

ocean of problems. Their life could be defined as a set of intervals of
apparent success from one crisis to another until the last one, which will
mark its decline and consequently its death. Organizations, aware of
their fragility and vulnerability, are continuously searching solutions and
looking for the best way to take the right decision under various
circumstances. Decision-making and problem solving techniques were
formed due to the need to have guidelines to follow when it is time for
taking a decision, a ritual to follow that can appease this exhausting,
stressful condition of continued uncertainties. There is no executive
education programme or master in Business Administration and neither
a very least certificate in management that does not provide the
teaching of decision-making with relative curriculum, books and exam.
The goal of these courses is to equip the manager with a variety of
techniques to render him able to identify possible solutions and be able
to weigh disadvantages, limits, strengths and weaknesses attached to
them.

Gut-Feeling. The Decision-Making Instinct

From Harvard down, from the colleges of the American heavy league to
the eighteen noblest British universities of the Russel Group, in the
academic and scientific circles the world over we find that the
domineering conviction is that the solution is external to ourselves. If we
only knew how to handle, if we had the right  techniques, everyone
could discover the way out, the solution; become a decision-maker,
a leader.This belief in choosing the right solution between all possible
solutions is just as incorrect as it is undisputed. The reality is that if we
abandon the academic towers of ivory and we poke our noses outside
the classrooms, we discover that decision in modern contexts, in the
background of high competition are taken in a completely different way.
Outside of routine decisions on simple questions that can return to the
discretion of an employee, for the vaster and more complicated
questions, and in general for the decision making processes of complex
systems where the variables are innumerable like in the case of big
multinationals, the only solution is instinct. In fact, the journal Business
2.0 has recently entitled an article on the argument with the significant
title: Think with your guts. The invitation to managers to think with their
‘guts’  announces the revolution in the way of viewing leadership and in
the preparation of a responsible governing class, a decisional
aristocracy. And while all universities in the world still believe in
techniques and mental approaches to the “problem solving” and are in
fact intellectual gyms, there is a need for new schools and universities of
being, capable of preparing decision-makers, pragmatic visionaries,
equipped with an intelligence of the heart and of new senses: a sixth
sense, intuition, and a seventh sense, ‘dreaming’.

‘A man pointed towards the top, impeccably aimed at his improvement,

can find solutions for situations that appear without a way out, transform
adversities into events of  superior order’.

The Decision of Washington

Towards the end of 1776, veteran of a series of conflicts: Harlem

Heights, White Planes, collimating in the abandon of New York, the
American army is adrift, exhausted, deprived of everything. Followed by
20.000 ‘red jackets’ rested and well equipped. Washington tries to flee
towards the south, toward New Jersey. His goal is to save his young
soldiers that would have been otherwise hanged or executed as rebels.
The English did not take prisoners, as they did not see them as
enemies. On the eve of Xmas Washington arrives on the banks of
Delaware, he takes over all the boats that he can find and he crosses
the river hoping that it will not freeze completely and that it will slow
down his followers. He manages to transport all his soldiers but once on
the other side he receives bad news: Trenton, one of the last bulwarks
still in the hands of the patriots has been taken by the army of German
mercenaries at the service of the English. Five hundred patriots have
been executed. At that point, with a decision that was anything but
rational and that will go down in history, George Washington re-crosses
the river and attacks Trenton on Christmas Day. The conquest took just
one hour and was done without the use of guns as they were without
ammunitions. It is the beginning of what then be called ‘Christmas
Campaign’ that overturned the destiny of the war until the Victory of
Yorktown and the birth of the United States of America.

Before any solution comes our change

Who knows how to produce intentionally in himself the smallest rise in

his being can move mountains and projects himself like a giant in the
external world.

Intervening on our being, on the quality of our thoughts, our ways of

feeling, to circumscribe negative emotions- starving some while
nourishing others, not only do we modify our aptitude and therefore our
way of reacting to the events that come from the external world, but it is
also changes the very nature of events that follow one the other, day
after day.

Only a man capable of betting everything on himself, only a man that

‘wants’, that asks and tries to change with all his forces, can make it.
And even if to the eyes of ordinary humanity he appears to be a
daredevil, a person that lives riskily or even as a hell-bent, a man
guided by integrity and seriousness is constantly accompanied by this
‘sense of salvation. Only he knows that in reality is not risking anything.
In business, as in any undertakings that appear as reckless, he who has
this certainty cannot be attacked, cannot fail. Whatever he touches
grows richer and multiplies; under any circumstance, even the most
desperate, he always finds a solution. He is always successful because
he himself is the solution.

To Decide

The very etymology of the word ‘decide’ has something mysterious to it.
If we take the root, caedere, to fall down, to be knocked down, or if
instead prevails the element cida, which means to eliminate, whichever
the case, we hear in it a terrible warning. That human feature which we
proudly consider our noblest ability, indissolubly tied to our free will, in
reality hides our fall, our ruin. One of the most diffused prejudices, and
in truth the architrave on which the common description of the world lies
on, is that there are objective decisions that any of us could take
provided we had all the necessary information and all the decision-
making techniques to assess, read and weigh them out.  In truth, the
most extraordinary thing to discover about decisions and decision-
making processes is that good decisions, objective and valid in
absolute, do not exist.

Solutions are as good as the individual that takes them.

America would not be here and it would have been impossible even to
imagine its existence for centuries if the certainty in the greatest and
most wonderful of all miscalculations did not support Christopher
Columbus who until his death remained convinced that he had
discovered the route to the Indies. The American Indians still carry the
legacy of this erroneous certainty registered forever in their names.

In the world of events, in the realm of opposites, you cannot encounter

solutions. Solutions are not on the same plane of the problems.

Solutions come from above and not in time! We have to know how to
enter into the world of solutions. When you rise your being all that
looked blurry becomes clear and the apparent problems that
seemed unconquerable mountains reveal themselves to be nothing
more than light protrusions, humps on which to step on and go further.

Change Your Dream first, Reality Will Follow

For millennia, nothing has happened. The planetary problems from

poverty to crime, from conflicts to war are the same as always, now in
the Digital Era as in the Stone Age. Yet we delude ourselves that we are
in fact improving.

‘To improve’ is the password for those who want to leave everything as
it is, who indulge in a way of thinking that is obsolete and deprived of
vitality. Believing that the world can be improved from the outside is the
conviction of an fideistic, old humanity that does not have the strength to
face the evil at its root. We need a revolution of our way of thinking. An
overturn. In order to change reality we need to change the dream.
Only the individual can accomplish this. Time bends and so does man;
and all the civilizations he has created bend and break down with a
cyclical procession that always brings them to the starting point of their
past whilst they have the illusion that they are going towards the future.

The solution, in the life of a man as in the history of a civilization, is

never in time but in a ‘vertical time’, in a time without time, in the raising
of the quality of thinking that can only happen in this instant.

Only being able to manage the hanging instant between nothingness

and eternity will humanity be able to mould its destiny, create events of
a superior order.

The Greeks dreamed cities where architecture, theatre, music, sport,

everything was at the service of being, of its elevation towards the world
of ideas, of solutions. Especially in the classic time of Greek civilization,
always with the aim of entering areas of greater freedom where the
individual is the solution, invented universities, created Schools of
thought around a teacher. Not by chance, these schools were located in
enchanting places chosen for the magic of their legendary history, near
rivers and sources of water. The Academy was near the Cefis river, the
Lyceum, east of Athens, was where the waters of Eridanus touched it
lightly and Cinosarge, where the cinic Antistene taught , was created
near the Illisso river, south of Athens. Water not only symbolized life and
knowledge but it was used for ablutions. In these schools, the culture of
the body and spirit were the two inseparable faces of the same reality. If
we would know how to give centrality to man, how to put him back to the
top of any priority, at the centre of attention, we could start healing
humanity, individual by individual, one by one, cell by cell.

ESE is only the emerging, visible top of the iceberg, an example that we
can make it, that we accomplish this task. Classic culture, the search for
truth, self-knowledge can and must live in contemporary with modernity,
with internationality, with pragmatism that the new challenges ask for, in
politics as in economics, to the young governing class, to the decision-
makers of the future. Our culture must re-establish education, re-create
schools and universities of being. We have to return to our roots, we
must go back to that wisdom, that love for beauty and for truth  and for
that knowledge of oneself which is the solution.

‘We have regressed from the wonderful project of the Academy and the
Plato’s dream. The universities of the future will do what they do not
currently do: teach the art of ‘self-discovery’.

Every student is a light that is waiting to be turned on in order to

disperse obscurity- said Ben Okrri, a Nigerian poet and writer, ex
alumnus of Cambridge, concluding an historical conference organized in
London by ‘The Times’ by the title: What are universities for?

From the School for Gods by Stefano E D’Anna

Become the solution…inside! - commanded the Dreamer - Outside this

there is no problem to fix, nor is there any villain to defend from or any
enemy to fight. To give an answer to the world you have to become the
solution… Enter in sincerity, simplicity, lightness of your being…. If you
are able to see the ‘game’ from the top you will discover that for an man
of integrity the solution always comes before the problem.

When you meet difficult situations rub your hands and rejoice because it
is the very reason why you are here for. When you see a problem
coming down the road, say to yourself: I was waiting for you. I have
been training for you all my life.

We must realize that all man have in themselves all the power to turn
things around.

Dreams in Blog - PINOCCHIO: The

universal parable of man's destiny
19/Aug/2009

PINOCCHIO: The universal parable of man's destiny

Posted by : Stefano E. D’Anna

 
Pinocchio by Enrico Mazzanti (1852-1910) - the first illustrator
(1883) of Le avventure di Pinocchio. Storia di un burattino - colored
by Daniel DONNA

 
 It is time for the world to reflect on Pinocchio's fable and discover it as  the
ferociously ironic caricature of an untruthful mankind, tyrannically moved by invisible
external strings.

A mystical text disguised as a fable

 
PINOCCHIO:
THE UNIVERSAL PARABLE 
OF MAN’S DESTINY 
By  Stefano E. D’Anna

Behind its ironic and easy-going tones and its didacticisms, the puppet is actually
the ferociously ironic caricature of an untruthful mankind, tyrannically moved by
strings of casualness, negative emotions and the unhappiness of an inescapable
fate. Hidden under the surface of this fable, there lies the biggest and boldest
mystical text of all world literature: man’s initiatory trip from puppet, prey to its
instincts, to a real man endowed with will. As a matter of fact, Pinocchio is the most
widely read book after the Bible and the Koran.

A mystical text disguised as a fable

Although universal literature, from Aristofane to Beckett, is full of great novelists,

perhaps there has never been one as intelligent, ironic or secluded as Carlo
Lorenzini, alias Collodi. It is true. We are a touchy and violent species. Over the
centuries, whoever had to reveal some unpleasant truths or break some deeply-
rooted prejudices, had to take some timely precautions. When Copernicus, for
instance, wrote the “De Revolutionibus” in which he exposed his revolutionary
discovery he took two precautions: a) he dedicated his work to the Pope, b) as a
security measure, he published his book after his death! Lorenzini also had to
disguise the most terrible secret as a fable and pass for an author of nursery stories
rather than one of the most scholarly anthropologists of our nature and human
ethnology. One day a wiser, more aware mankind will recognize him as the man
who knew how to pleasantly show us the cruel and terrible truth: humanity is made
up of millions of puppets; we are bio-chemical marionettes, driven by invisible
threads; we are incurable liars. Above all, he will be appreciated because he told us
the truth and made us laugh at the misfortunes of the poor puppet, without having
his book condemned at the stake. We are incapable of seeing how Pinocchio’s
toughness and untruthful nature, along with his irresponsibility are the psychological
stigmata of the sapiens species and the very roots of all our misfortunes. The
abandonment of his puppet dress and his transformation into a child is not a
melancholic passage to normality or a cruel flight from the spell of childhood with its
unbounded vitality. 

Moon-men, Sun-men 

What a misunderstanding! In actual fact, Collodi presents us with the horror of a

puppet-like sub-human “moon-man” who is influenced by everyone and everything.
They are zombies who, through misadventure, sorrow, antagonism and
disappointment, will one day enter a real humanity, “sun-men” who are proactive,
responsible and shine in their own light. 
By paraphrasing Caligula's words to his ministers - by analogy - we could say: if
Pinocchio is a puppet then we are men. But if Pinocchio is a man, then we are still
men with a primitive conscious - larvae encased in their pods, waiting to break out
and evolve. 

A riddle to solve 

There is an air of mystery about Pinocchio’s story, a riddle we would like to solve.
Why did a writer such as Carlo Lorenzini, who throughout his carrier never rose
above a Thouar or a Dazzi, suddenly produce an immortal story, an objective tale
and a world-class masterpiece that had the unfathomable depth of an evangelical
parable. How is it possible that a fable hastily cobbled together, perhaps reluctantly,
with no clear plan, by a man who was probably defeated by personal and political
disappointments could be considered an echo of a universal message and the mirror
of all mankind? It’s a worrying thought. Why didn’t he sign it with his real name, like
his other works, instead of choosing to use a “nom de plume”?
 

Wood shavings of our soul 

These two questions can be made into one, in that there’s an explanation or better
still an hypothesis that answers both of them. The hypothesis is that the text is both
inspired and the result of a brainwave. The adventures of Pinocchio, the most widely
read children’s book which has been translated throughout the world, in the guise of
a children’s tale, conceals the greatest and most daring mystical text of all world
literature.
In actual fact what we see in Pinocchio are the wood shavings of our lost soul. This
explains why when we read Pinocchio the text appears to be real while the author
remains an unnecessary hypothesis. His existence is superfluous like in the Old
Testament and the Gospels. There’re holy books, but not holy authors. Carlo
Lorenzini didn’t feel like signing a universal story, that was written in Heaven, it only
had to be written down. 

The awful secret 

Benedetto Croce once wrote that “the wood which Pinocchio is carved in is that of
mankind”. Out of all the fables ever written, Pinocchio is perhaps the most
comprehensive and the most painfully truthful. It comfortably belongs to the “black
fable” genre of Orwell and its ruthlessness is only be equalled by “Animal Farm”. It’s
the transparent filter of a humanity cast adrift, that lives in fear and ignorance of its
own identity. The tale of Pinocchio’s adventures belongs to the art of mysteries: the
art of revealing by concealing. The secret which has been under the noses of
millions throughout the world for more than a century is awful. Pinocchio is the mirror
image of a bio-chemical puppet which has become man as we know him to be. We
are reluctant to recognise ourselves in the grotesque image of Collodi’s character,
we loathe the idea of identifying ourselves with a speaking piece of wood, apparently
alive, but in actual fact driven by external forces and terrible invisible strings. In the
mirror we can see Pinocchio’s image, the embarrassing appendix of an informant,
but just like Narcissus we refuse to recognise ourselves in that imagined reflection -
we cannot see the woodenness of his being, his chronic and incurable deceit or his
disloyalty. 

The snare

Who knows if Collodi, wherever he may be, is laughing or crying at the millions of
readers, the countless generations of children around the world who are rocked to
sleep by the enchanted words and images of his fable, without even knowing its real
nature: a dark and pitiless parable of the human condition. However from the very
beginning, the storyteller Collodi, warns us that a snare awaits us and that we will
uncover the deception only when it is too late - once we have crossed the threshold
of the promised fairy-tale world that opens with the fateful words: “once upon a
time…” 
It is as if Lorenzini was compelled to warn us against his own deception, bound to an
unlikely deontology, that takes us back to Cat and the Fox.
Once we’ve crossed the threshold of the nursery tale, the tacit agreement with the
reader is immediately upset and we find ourselves in the presence of a gruesome
fable, with its ruthless and sublime irony. Reading it, the book opens up a
threatening, splendid and ephemeral world that begins with a disturbing absence.
There is not a King. The place of the King figure has been taken by the mass which
is a joyfully plebeian crowd. The eternal dialectics between mass and individual,
between destination and destiny, emerge and this tears our world apart. 

The victim is always guilty 

Pinocchio is any piece of wood that belongs to the pile. It is stuff that is destined to
be destroyed and burnt, but it also longs to live. In this transformation the
antagonists, represented by the Cat and the Fox have a providential, religious,
ideological and theological nature.
The world is a mirror. Through its events and in its symbolic language that are made
up of circumstances and meetings, it constantly gives out signals, clues and
indications. If Pinocchio ( the ordinary human being ) could read them , he would not
be so busy sabotaging his own being, he would not make the wrong choice at the
crossroads of life and neither would he reject experience, in specious collaboration
with error and misunderstanding.
The Cat, cruel and simple and the Fox, ironic and savage are two poetic criminal
figures. The characters in Pinocchio’s world are nothing other than projections of our
imagination, figures that thanks to our strong belief in them, have ended up by
haunting our world. The Cat and the Fox stand out more than all the others, with
their physical deformities, a symbol of a putrid conscience that is disguised with
cunning.

A strict deontology compels them to warn the victim with a thousand signals,
contradictions and slips. In short they can rob someone who is determined to be
robbed. This is why, one day, in all the law courts of an advanced humanity, we shall
read in very large letters: “the victim is always guilty”.

The gospel according to Pinocchio

The initial idea, the suspicion that this story conceals a parable of human destiny, a
gospel, a timeless Bible is reinforced and gains ground bit by bit as we continue to
read. Mastro Ciliegia, a carpenter, is the first character to appear. The father figure
is called Geppetto, a nickname for Giuseppe. Geppetto is not a carpenter but he has
tools to cut wood. It is more than a coincidence. As we continue we discover the
story has an inexhaustible number of symbols, riddles and allegories, and that under
the wrinkled and tough exterior, the most famous puppet conceals the man in search
of himself. What a conjurer and an illusionist Lorenzini-Collodi is to conceal the truth
under everyone’s nose. Pinocchio is born from a carpenter called Giuseppe or
Geppetto. On top of this, he has a yellow wig on his head, that looks like a poor and
hot “polenta”, it is true, but it is also similar to the golden colour of an aureole.
Therefore… why did we not understand that… Pinocchio is… is…
Any piece of wood, a man of the crowd, the real KING-individual, becomes real. The
magical project of our advancement is encapsulated in that fable like a gospel about
the transformation of a puppet into a real man, of a being without will driven by
strings of fortuity and mechanisation, into a free man who is the master of his
destiny. 

The birth of Pinocchio 

Pinocchio is a fairy-tale character, like other magical figures, he comes into the
world in one of those dark periods, into one of those infernal circles. Like Jesus
Christ, who comes into the world in a shed looked after by animal warmth, Pinocchio
is born into misery, surrounded by misfortune, “on a bad night in winter” ( my old
book of Pinocchio, an edition of 1958, says: “a hellishly bad night”) amid thunder and
lightening. So we have another clue that shows that the fable, in the guise of a
popular picaresque story, is actually an initiatory journey, that begins with our
coming into the world, into this “valley of tears”. The symbolism is just too obvious.
In our societies, so-called civil societies, life begins according to one of the most
brutal rituals.

Welcome to hell

Childbirth is painful, we are welcomed by the operating theatre’s blinding lights, by

the doctors’ excited voices and by our mother’s screams, then we are spanked and
put down on a cold surface, so we can say that from the very beginning everything
appears as though we were truly “welcomed to hell”. It does not take much for the
child to accept the discipline of the masters of misfortune or the instructions that will
convince him that he has arrived on a dark planet where you are born to die and you
live to suffer. In a world that is a “valley of tears”. In fact, our first sensation on being
born is that of a terrible fear of suffocating, of being overwhelmed and dying. From
then on everything that appears familiar to us has this sweetish taste of fear.

The imprinting of pain

This is how we - who for nine months of growth ( but in actual fact for an age) have
been aquatic creatures, kings of a universe that is lukewarm, dimly-lighted, silent
and liquid - meet fear as our first feeling and from that moment on, like the imprinting
of a goose, we follow her as if she were our real procreator. Fear and pain soon limit
the possibilities in a man’s life; an unreal hypnotic space, in which a man feels safe
as if between the huge walls of a bunker that is half refuge and half prison. 
The whole life of an ordinary man seems to be controlled by this first moment, by the
experience of that liquid fire that he has felt enter his lungs in that terrifying passage
from aquatic being to an air-breathing creature.
Like the salmon that goes against the river’s current to return to where it was it was
born, we have a long journey to make to overcome the trauma created at our birth
and make our way home again in search of a lost paradise.

The Pinocchios of Johannesburg

There are other elements in the story that constantly draw a parallel, there is an
analogical connection between Pinocchio’s adventures and our life. Pinocchio
always has a thousand good intentions, he sets out with a kind of touching naivety,
but then, he always diverts from his course so as to follow the easiest route, namely
to lie whilst hoping to get off scot-free. He gets so used to lying that he is no longer
able to see the difference between true and false, right and wrong. We’re like this.
Official reports and media news are full of good intentions and are as unreal as
Pinocchio’s. We’ve heard world leaders say these things, decade after decade, from
Rio to Johannesburg. They are like the puppet on his first day at school, making
false plans/promises about brotherhood and voicing concerns for the unfortunate,
poor, starving and oppressed of the world. 

The animal that lies 

Pinocchio’s story reveals our weaknesses and our hypocrisy, which are still hidden
even from ourselves, so used are we to the dynamics of falsehood. We tell lies to
everyone around us because we think about our own personal interest. However,
even worse than that, we lie to ourselves, every minute of every hour of every day of
our life, climbing up castles of prejudices and illusions. Collodi’s invention of
Pinocchio’s nose, brings an embarrassing discovery to our notice, he reveals our
most disturbing psychological feature: the tendency to lie, first to ourselves, and then
to others. 
This is the point: we can get away scot-free with others, but we shall never be able
to escape unscathed when confronted with our own conscience; this is a part of us
that reads our inner self, and we are aware of it, so for us, there is no peace, no rest,
just endless torment. 
The cornerstone of research carried out by The European School of Economics, of
which the Department of Sociology is a part, is the study of the individual and the
discipline of self-observation or the study of ourselves.
The central element of this work is the study of lying.
Falsehood is a permanent state of the being, in which man has been “educated”
throughout his life.
Man is a liar and only lies to himself. Poverty, war and sickness, which are part of
the world’s events, are only the consequence of an inner struggle created by our
lying that has enveloped us since birth, and the execution of a precise and
monotonous script that we’ve brilliantly interpreted. The lie has become flesh. To
leave the lie means to observe it and consequently to eradicate it.
I would like to thank all the students of the European School of Economics, who
have “reread ” “The Adventures of Pinocchio” with me and have contributed by
giving deeper interpretations of this never ending story. Among the many works I
have chosen:

Irene Licia Melloni - ESE Genova 

Pinocchio is the story of an esoteric life of an initiatory completion which clearly

evokes that jewel of the late Roman period, Apuleio’s “Metamorphosis“ where the
individual, starting from the most inert and decaying matter, comes through
difficulties, tests and suffering of every kind to finally experience catharsis and
recognition of his dignity and redeeming destiny. 
The metaphysical-eschatological interpretation of the fable that originates from the
old myth (Iside and Osiride, Attis and Cibele) and is then modified by the Judaic-
Christian tradition ( Job and the whale, the resurrection of Lazarus and the story of
Jesus), shows us how faith (Geppetto), wisdom (the speaking cricket and the blue
fair), the experience through evil (the Cat and the Fox, and the Fire-eater), the
knowledge of the ephemeral pleasure of the world (the Toyland), the fraternal and
filial pietas (Lucignolo and again Geppetto), death ( passing through the whale’s
miasmatic stomach) and in the end takes the weak and sinful man, formerly a
puppet that is prey to its own instincts, to the recognition of faith and life. This is
where Pinocchio’s journey ends, the puppet and the man in search of himself, and
due to the many ups and downs, he becomes conscious and this is an eternal
metaphor for Man’s journey through Life. 
Pinocchio: a universal parable of human nature - Valeria Basso - ESE New
York 

I was a child when I first read Pinocchio, and I did not like it, what is more: it upset
me. The happy ending where the puppet becomes a boy didn’t even soothe my
anxieties. The images of this piece of wood and its adventures, were too vivid and
remained etched in my memory for years afterwards like a nightmare. In my opinion
Fellini himself would have wanted to make his movie interpretation of the story
appear like a nightmare. As far as I know, Pinocchio is not one of the most popular
fables amongst children. And amongst the adults? I read it again a short time ago
and the feeling I had as a child doesn’t seem to have gone away. Even other adults
who read it are often crossed by a shadow. Nevertheless Pinocchio, the most widely
read book and translated throughout the world, is considered a point of reference
and fascination. How is it possible? Why do we feel drawn to the story of the puppet,
even though it scares us a little at the same time? The answer is because human
nature, as complicated as it is, is bewitched by itself; we are all a little narcissistic
and egocentric, we like to look at ourselves in the mirror and see our reflection even
when we are unaware of what we are looking at? Because we deceive and we are
deceived like Pinocchio, we fall to earth and run away with him, we live by our wits
and by subterfuge and our life is full of whims and lies, just like our hero.
There is an invisible but inseparable thread that connects us to the puppet. We too
are often at the mercy of the waves, in danger of being swallowed by the jaws of a
shark, though we often put ourselves in that position. A man’s life is continually
spent in the vague search of a bit of serenity and clarity, peppered with false moves
and failed attempts to return to the correct path. The puppet, apparently without
strings, is whimsical, stubborn (he is made of a hard wood) insecure, arrogant,
unwilling and a liar: often his attitude, his lies and his stubbornness irritates us and
gets on our nerves; at those moments we even hope something bad might happen
to him. But then, suddenly, when Pinocchio is in danger we feel sorry for him, and
we subject ourselves to all kinds of torment until he is safe. Why? Why can we never
condemn him deep down? Because, like him, we are weathervanes battered by the
wind, and if we sentenced the puppet with a guilty verdict it would be like throwing
ourselves into an abyss. What we cannot stand in others, is just the unconscious
reflex of what we cannot stand in our own, but self-love tells us that it is easier to
unload our accusations on to someone else whilst all the time believing ourselves to
be perfect.
Pinocchio too, always professes himself to be a “very very good and wise fellow”.
Pinocchio has to struggle to free the good boy buried inside him. What he has to do
is go on a journey of redemption: as a matter of fact, the moment he comes alive in
the hands of Geppetto, he starts to play his nasty tricks that soon put him to flight.
This is the moment of separation, of falling into temptation (he seems to see Adam
and Eve in the Garden of Eden): Pinocchio loses his innocence and exchanges it for
a double-edged weapon of falsehood (again like Adam and Eve). From then on,
Pinocchio starts his journey along the slippery road that leads to perdition…
Wherever he goes, whatever he does, Pinocchio is always arm in arm with death:
along the way there is always someone who dies or is on the verge of dying. Death
is such a recurrent theme in the fable, that it almost becomes an obsession though it
is made less dramatic by Collodi’s sarcastic quips. An unusual fixation for a nursery
tale… We are unwilling to identify with Pinocchio because the truth is difficult to
accept. However, whether we like it or not, our unconscious is attracted by him.
Whether it is hate or love, condemnation or pity that moves us, his story does not
leave us indifferent. And it is precisely this we have to analyse without letting it slip
through our fingers. Because there lies the secret about who we are.
Pinocchio would not be able to extricate himself from his condition and complete his
journey to redemption, if the superior influences of the Fair and the Cricket had not
watched over him - though they pay a dear price for their protection. However it is
also true that he is not saved by means of deus ex machine. It would be a
disappointing solution. Pinocchio makes it because of his own merits, taking all the
time he needs to open his eyes and prove his new self; we also have to know that
we can make it on our own, that life is not decided by fate and that we are our
destiny.
In the beginning Collodi gave his story a tragic ending by having Pinocchio hanged
from a tree. However the public did not like this, so he was forced to change it, by
having the puppet become a boy. With any other kind of ending, Pinocchio would
not have had the popularity it enjoys today. It would have been lost a long time ago.
Of course, we cannot say whether the author liked the revised ending or not. But we
like it like this, because we have to believe that also our own fable can end well and
that we too can change from puppets into real men. 

Laura Dipterans - ESE Lucca 

There are several themes in Collodi’s fable: freedom, family, loneliness, fear,
courage, cunning, love, sorrow, fiction, deception… and death which is also a
continual theme. Death hovers over the whole story. Pinocchio runs the risk of being
burnt, fried, drowned, hanged, starved and even eaten by a whale shark. In Chapter
17 we can even find a symbol of earthly death: the coffin. Despite all the ups and
downs everything ends with the puppet becoming a child made of flesh and bones.
Tomorrow is October 11 and so go and see the latest production from Oscar
Roberto, enjoy the film with its wonderful show of lights, colours, special effects and
scenery… and when you come out why not ask the Fair with deep-blue hair to turn
yourselves from Pinocchios into sincere and “benign” children? Enjoy the film!
The king and the puppet - Andrea Franzi - ESE Genova 

Pinocchio’s fable conveys a very important concept about the life of the ordinary
man; he is up to his neck in a sea that conceals his life from him, there he hides and
lies to the world, unaware of how irresponsible he is. The puppet represents the
stereotype of man’s daily attempt to sabotage reality, he tries to divert the river of his
uncertainties, but is compelled to bend under the unavoidable rush of water that
drags him to the end of his journey of self-destruction. Pinocchio cannot hide from
the world, he cannot lie in silence, and man for his part, lives out his sad fable with
the woody heart of a puppet, dirtied by the terrible destiny of mediocrity that awaits
him. 

Chiara Pasquali - ESE Bologna

From my point of view, Pinocchio is not a negative character. It is true, he is a liar,

but this is because of his desire to live and experience the joys of the world, rather
than gain any personal advantage by tricking people. Pinocchio starts off as a piece
of wood that has never lived or felt joy. He is thrown into a world he knows nothing
about, but everything about it fills him with enthusiasm. Pinocchio can speak as a
piece of wood, even before he takes on the semblances of a human in the hands of
Geppetto. He is already keen to move before he gets legs and becomes a real
human. All this is because Pinocchio wants to live and is eager to throw himself into
the world like a real child without a past. Many literary critics have compared his
mistakes with those of a child and his story with the end of childhood. Pinocchio
encounters a series of tempting symbols (Lucignolo, the Cat and the Fox) who lead
him away from the right path, causing him to make mistakes, lie, and to be recalled
by his teachers. This situation goes on up until an important event takes place: the
sight of the Fair’s grave. Like many stories about great men and great heroes, an
impulse comes from inside, from the person’s being that carries Pinocchio aloft and
makes him become human. It is true that Pinocchio is saved by the Fair, but in my
opinion the Fair is not an external character but Pinocchio’s destiny, she is his future
and is the sign of what he was created for. Our character was born to be something
better than what we see of him on his first adventures. However to improve, he first
has to lie, suffer and pay a moral price for his mistakes. He has to have a difficult
past and see the Fair die, and at the same time be free of her so he can become a
real human and guide himself. 
Milka Platan - ESE Lucca

There are so many puppets in the world and even more donkeys, but Pinocchio is
still considered a fable set in a magical world far form reality. Pinocchio’s story, in
actual fact, touches the real essence of the human condition. A man’s existence,
from birth to death, is very often like that of a puppet who never becomes the man
he wants to be. From one futile desire to another, man goes on living as though
dozing, which prevents him from opening his eyes and awakening so as to become
a real man. The path towards change needs discipline and good will. One has to
accept the truth and become aware of our condition as nothing other than a
programmed robot, that acts, feels and thinks like all the others. Those who think
like the others will share the same destiny as the others.