Economics, talent of thinking

‘Prometheus chained’[1] at Siracusa.

Gods are going on a blind track, in the foreground of the very special staging by Federica Parolini for ‘Prometheus chained’, by Aeschylous, 2023 Theater Season – Siracusa, ‘Greek Theater’.

Maybe also Prometheus the Titan thought – the solid and very capable Alessandro Albertin[2] on the stage - that gods lack sense of humour.

“It was all a hustle and bustle without light of mind”, Prometheus loudly reproaches to the audience from the top of the rocky and desolate Scythia, here a menacing but secluded silo-tower to which he has been chained.

When the humans were allowed, as a matter of facts, to to be in the presence of the gods Prometheus liked to challenge the intelligence of the greatest among gods : let Zeus first choose which part he preferred keeping for himself of the just sacrificed ox! And Zeus at once took the one that looked best packaged, but that instead had been filled with waste… So humans kept the best part.

Men too shrewd for the gods Prometheus demiurge was forging indeed, and Zeus took from humans their memory of the spark that can repeat the fire, spread evil in the world through the weak Pandora and condemned Prometheus to chains, prey to an insatiable rapacious bird.

“I will tell, not to humiliate human beings, but to fully reveal the affection that dictated those gifts to me. Even before me they looked[3], and it was blind watching; they heard sounds, and it was not hearing… Mine was, for the good of humans – open throats the hero goes on from the distant tower - the idea of the calculus, first fruit of wit, and mine was the signs system, Memory of the world, fertile mother of Muses.”[4]

The entrance of the insane Iò, de-mented virgin who allowed to be transformed into a ‘cow’ from Hera Zeus’ worthy wife, only confirms the imputability of delegating one’s memory to others, which immediately passes into a dead-end enslavement : but Prometheus[5] already knows about the following vicissitudes of the troubled Iò, as by only chance she will become progenitor of those Ionic people who, with their uprising, will get help from Athens until they break free from Persian rule, and of Heracles who, finally grateful to Prometheus will set free him, by just shooting a single arrow on the insatiable vulture.

That only human question of ‘time’, to which Prometheus refers in the exceptional monologue which is fulcrum of the text, it’s actually the question of ‘work’ that the thousands gifts from the Titan sterilized and emptied of energy, because everyone’s memory cannot do its part.

Surprisingly co-attributable with Zeus for naiveness of gods and to their own detriment, Prometheus introduced laziness among humans, as a very serious factor of unpredictable costs, and in many forms indeed.

Was this perhaps the long-awaited secret from Zeus which Prometheus hadn’t time to reveal ?

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – July 27, 2023

[1] ‘Prometheus chained’ 2023 Theater Season ‘Greek Theater’ Siracusa www.indafondazione.org Direction : Leo Muscato; Translation : Roberto Vecchioni; Scenes : Federica Parolini; Costumes: Silvia Aymonimo; Coreographies : Nicole Kehrberger; Music: Ernani Maletta; Choir leader : Francesca Della Monica; Responsabile del coro : Elena Polic Greco; Main interpreters : Alessandro Albertin, Deniz Ozdogan, Michele Cipriani, Alfonso Veneroso, Pasquale di Filippo, Silvia Valenti, Davide Paganini; with the participation of the Students girls of the ‘Accademia d’Arte del Dramma Antico’ of Siracusa.

[2] Alessandro Albertin is a professional actor and a very trained cyclist : born at Padua in 1972, he graduated in 1999 at the Scuola d’Arte Drammatica ‘Paolo Grassi’ of Milan. He worked with Virginio Gazzolo, Gianrico Tedeschi, Ugo Pagliai, Paola Gassmann, Gigi Proietti (‘Romeo and Giulietta’, 2003), Franco Branciaroli (‘Endgame’ 2005), Alessandro Gassmann, Damiano Michieletto (‘The fan’, 2012). He is author of some dramatic texts that he is bringing successfully on the stage for ‘Spazio Mio Teatro’ of Milan : ‘Lo Sbarco in Normandia, i segreti di una vittoria’; ‘Marco Pantani, il campione fuori norma’; ‘Perlasca. Il coraggio di dire no’.

[3] ‘L’acquisizione del fuoco’, S.Freud (1931), Translation by Giacomo B. Contri (1985), pro-manuscripto.

[4] ‘Prometeo incatenato’, Eschilo / Garzanti Editore SpA 2022, Translation by Ezio Savino with parallel text; pp. : 38-39

[5] Prometheus is ‘the one who thinks first’ and maybe too soon, as well as Epimetheus his brother is ‘the one who thinks later’, that is too late.

https://www.tutorsalus.net/index.php/en/economia-1-talento-di-pensiero-2/492-constructive-solutions

In the picture : brick prototypes for the Children’s Hospital at Entebbe, 35 km. from Kampala. Following the building tradition of the soil ‘pisè’ in Sub-Saharan Africa, the new Children’s Hospital of ‘Emergency’ www.emergency.it was built at Entebbe, in local soil bricks integrated with reinforcing and waterproofing substances, thanks to a collaboration with Politecnico of Milan. The Hospital, which is a pole of excellence among the most important in a large area and has been designed by Renzo Piano together with ‘TAMassociati’, today is able to offer free specialist assistance to children who need surgeries with advanced techniques and qualified personnel// ’Behind the impossible’, www.buromilan.com ‘Design Week’ Milan - April 17-23, 2023/ ‘Fuori salone’ www.fuorisalone.it

What is behind the feasibility of a building ?

‘Behind the impossible’ is an attractive title for this ‘Fuori Salone’ by BUROMILAN[1], well visited during the ‘Design Week’ in Milan : a non-celebratory valuation of one’s thinking at work, starting from an intuition – or already a partnership of thinking – able to deal  with the feasibility of different non oppositive competences.

Technical experience is at the origin of the intuition itself that will prove to be a projects : already the experience of the art workshop – not isolated, but capable of co-presence and union – of our very rich Middle Age and that generated the today’s Academies Polytechnics Factories.

However there is an oneiric experience – never forgotten, also when not translated in words – since one’s birth which entrusts to the sleep the ri-proposition of that irreplaceable journey towards life that every newborn goes on, and of the hurdles up to the solutions encountered and crossed to get to be born. From there first, from this ignored thinking which even resurfaces without fanfare, a skill passes – or not, and then we stay in the darkness of psychic poverty –  that we reductively call ‘technical’, to connect forms materials structures to make them livable places up to the cities of man.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – June 3, 2023

[1] Milan Ingegneria Spa.

Trainings before the competition/ Milano, Arena Civica and Palazzina Appiani – ‘Walk and Middle Distance Night’ April 29-30, 2023.

“As a matter of facts when the reality principle comes into the pleasure principle, it doesn’t mean the dismissal of the pleasure principle, but a better safeguard of it.”[2]

What does bring in the reality principle to the point of requiring a subject – and a child mainly – to be represented so he, or she, can invest psychically in it ? “There is a subject for unconscious…”[3], that’s true.

There is, on one side, the subject of the imagination that – neurotic – averts from reality and in the only comforting capacity may even continue an unfulfilled destiny.

However, on the other side, the lack of fulfillment itself increases – for another subject – the importance of the reality and of the psychical work, which is quite different from the psychical imagination or fantasy.

Here it is the springing, and here it is one’s disposition to ‘springingness’, that cannot be prescribed because it follows an individual judgement of productivity – or unproductiveness – of a specific psychical investment.

It is, as a matter of facts, an experience of analytical work the ‘economical psychic occurrence’ about which Freud specifically noted in 1911, and furtherly then in the following years and works. 

Not fantasy or imagination, not behaviour : rather an individual evaluation, hardly amenable to removal, since the removal actually proved its flop.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio - May 16, 2023

[1] I owe this article to the term ‘saltità’ (I translated with ‘springingness’), as coined by the psychoanalyst and University professor Giuseppe Oreste Pozzi in his intervention to the presentation of the book ‘Generazione DAD. Scuole, politica e psicoanalisi’, at care of Irene d’Elia (Pequod editore, 2022) at the ‘Biblioteca Nazionale Braidense’ in Milan, last April 29, 2023.

[2] ‘Precisazioni sui due principi dell’accadere psichico’, (1911) S. Freud in OSF VOL. 6 Bollati Boringhieri 2012, p.458

[3] Cited from the intervention of professor Giuseppe Oreste Pozzi.

Original painting by Gianni Russomando.[1]

It’s an affection, imputable then : the affection of whom – if swindled – doesn’t disown satisfaction.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – March 14, 2023

[1] Gianni Russomando, biographical note : “I’m born in Vercelli (1956), graduated at the ‘Istituto di Belle Arti di Vercelli’, I describe myself as an ‘amanuense’ (medieval hand-painter) and far from expositions and competitions.”

Edina Altara (1898-1983) was born in Sassari where her talent in drawing very soon made itself known : she participated in 1917 to an exhibition of Art in Turin and her collage, titled ‘Jesus salvadelu’ was acquired by king Vittorio Emanuele III (still today the work can be found in Rome, at the Loggia d’Onore in Quirinale). At first she devoted herself to drawing for ceramic productions (plates, saucers, tiles then framed as in the above picture), in 1934 she went to Milan to collaborate with fashion sketches at the magazine ‘Grazia’, and in 1942 also at the magazine ‘Bellezza’ edited by Giò Ponti, as well as ‘Stile’ and ‘Domus’ and up to collaborations for the furniture of five Italian ocean liners. She was fashion illustrator for the magazine ‘Rakam’, for ‘Il Giornalino della Domenica’ – a publication of ‘Domenica del Corriere’ dedicated to teenagers – for various advertisements (cosmetics, beauty products) and illustrator of novels on magazines. Two exhibitions in the last months did show a few of her most beautiful works : ‘Edina Altara. La mia Sardegna’ at the ’Art Port Gallery’ at Olbia, and ‘Edina Altara. Mondi di carta’ at the ‘Galleria Siotto’at Cagliari.

“The coordinating role assumed by the tailor towards different artisans employed in the making of a garment helps to better define the contours of the craft performed by this craftsman who, according the legislator, was the main originator of novelties.”[1]

Individual competence is science of thinking, or unconscious, to whom conscience begins to address respectfully. 

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – February 24, 2023

[1] ‘L’arte del sarto nel Medioevo’, by Elisa Tosi Brandi 2017 Soc. editrice ‘il Mulino’, p.48

Original painting by Gianni Russomando.[1]

“On one hand we have evidence that also a subtle and difficult intellectual work, which normally requires rigorous meditation, can be done preconsciously without coming to consciousness. There is no doubt on such cases : they occur for example when sleeping. A subject can be found himself, or herself catching, soon after waking up, the solution to a difficult problem, mathematical or whatever else, to which during all the day he, or she, was in vain applying.”[2]

“What makes some cognitive operations more difficult and hard than others ? What achievements should we acquire with the currency of attention ? …Today we have tentative answers to those questions.”[3]

Freud sensed that any ‘perception’ – not only phisical, strictly speaking - is the result of an individual ‘assessment’[4]  which doesn’t need conscience to go to goal : even, the presence of conscience can prevent thought from grasping those experiential perceptions which are indispensable to intellectual synthesis.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – February 15, 2023

[1] Gianni Russomando, biographical note : “I’m born in Vercelli (1956), graduated at the ‘Istituto di Belle Arti di Vercelli’, I describe myself as an ‘amanuense’ (medieval hand-painter) and far from expositions and competitions.”

[2] ‘L’Io e l’Es’, S. Freud (1922) in ‘OSF – Vol.IX’, Bollati Boringhieri 2020 p.489

[3] ‘Pensieri lenti e veloci’, D. Kahneman (2011) – Mondadori Libri SpA 2022, p.46

[4] “It is the concept of the law of the motion of body named ‘drive’, where the source of satisfaction is an Other one (i.e. an external subject). Memory is one of the species of thinking.”, ‘Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico’, Giacomo B. Contri – SIC Edizioni 1998, p.85 Nota 7.