Christmas 2022

“Love is torn from us with the same argument with which everything is torn from us: in the name of freedom. When capitalism promises freedom it ends up systematically throwing us into the most absolute abandonment." These are the words of Manuel Cruz, a Spanish philosopher, who struck me a lot and who gave me food for thought this year; while outside it is Christmas Eve and the entire city has poured into the streets in search of the latest purchase, I write an appeal to you who do not remain indifferent. To you who despite all the signals coming from a world now in pieces still believe that it is possible to change it. To you who love. Because loving is probably the most revolutionary gesture I know to fight everything that transforms feelings into goods, making them susceptible to obsolescence, transience and banality. It is the gesture of the artist, who does not carry out his work in the fleeting time of a romantic infatuation, but in the long time of planning, of the gestation of his own vision and knows that his project is able to last forever if it remains faithful to his intuition. In a world where all the actions we perform must have a personal, possibly economic, utility, I think such love is anachronistic enough and dysfunctional enough to disorientate those who come across it: dangerous revolutions could arise that we feel we need to save the world and ourselves, to rethink the human being as an end (“never as a means” Kant).

I therefore want to wish you to love more and stronger, to make sure that the purpose of your life is not you, but the project, the person, the vision you have chosen; despite any commercial advertising you come across today and every day of the year that tells you exactly the opposite.

“Verbum caro factum est” some believer will recite today. The Christmas I like to celebrate is this, a thought word that becomes concrete action, a text that transforms into a show, a project that becomes reality. Even though I haven’t slept for five years because I became a father and would often sell my children for a few hours of sleep, I am witnessing the miracle of a project that becomes flesh and blood. It is an example, perhaps the easiest to understand, of creativity; the artist is not just a stroke of genius, but everything that follows that fleeting intuition to achieve the goal of growing and nourishing his own project: commitment, effort, responsibility and sleepless nights. I think that those who are not able to love like this cannot generate anything; his proposal is, in the luckiest of hypotheses, a freak show, which the market will use for that fleeting time in which an infatuation lasts and then throw him into solitude. “Love is not necessary, it is a feeling that becomes necessary and essential thanks to a process that is in our hands. Its final fate depends on us. It is not about replacing destiny with chance, but with the task”, it is always Manuel Cruz and I add that today we are not celebrating a magic that solves the problems of the world, but the responsibility of an entire humanity that has the task of changing the world in the name of an ancient intuition, in search of that thing “invisible to the eyes” that manages to bring together matter and the insensitive universe (Little Prince). “When you love you are in rhythm with the universe” says Massimo Gramellini interpreting Plato, you dance on life and you understand that love is the only reason why it is worth existing. By loving we become creators and creative because we are able to connect our spirit, what we feel and that does not have a precise name, with the concrete things of this world. We are thus able to give life to our intuitions. The true transgression in a materialistic world is spirituality and I wish that this Christmas is for you an opportunity to dance in rhythm with the universe. Merry Christmas.