Thinking as a partner

To benefit from one’s calling [1] / 31.

Therefore it is the perception iself that can be suspended, slowed down, even inhibited.

It occurs that everyone decides something even before it, having reached one’s brain, becomes a sensation : this is already a sanction to reality, and it makes memory of liking and acceptance (of unliking and rejection only if preceded by acceptance).

It is a crossroads that one’s thinking places, even a newborn is able to place it : should we blame him, or her ?

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – March 26, 2024

[1] www.tutorsalus.net/index.php/en/pensare-da-partner-2/358-psychoanalyst-and-profession-1

Original painting by Gianni Russomando[1]

To benefit from one’s calling [2] / 30.

“… the body, and above all its surface, is a place where external and internal perceptions can be generated simultaneously… By psychophysiology has been thoroughly illustrated the method by which, from the world of perceptions emerges the perception of one’s own body… ‘I’ is a corporeal entity first of all, not only a superficial entity, but also the projection of a surface.”[3]

In the perception of reality there is an assessment, because there is raw material that reality offers, and there is one's work. To the same work one’s thinking will come again to observe it, measure it, overcome it whenever one's making the reality usable requires it : here also lies that primary assessment, positive in that it is posited, which from the moment he, or she, is born processes, starting from a physiological synaesthesia[4], and then refine it into a perceptive differentiation, or suspend it, or inhibit it, without ever canceling it.

It is again an individual work the one that is necessary to a newborn for a progressive perceptive differentiation : as a matter of fact, they are subsequent progresses - or goals -  not pre-established phases from which one's work can never be erased. Any reactive formation hinders, without ever canceling however, the work that one’s thinking can draw on at every moment of life.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – March 17, 2024

[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] www.tutorsalus.net/index.php/en/pensare-da-partner-2/358-psychoanalyst-and-profession-1

[3] ‘L’Io e l’Es’, S.Freud (1923) in OSF Vol.9 Bollati Boringhieri, p.488

[4] The presence of a neonatal synaesthesia seems today to leave no doubt, thanks also to an active university research : see for example ‘Preverbal infants’ sensitivity to synaesthetic cross-modality correspondences’, by P. Walker, J. G. Bremner and others (2010 January) in ‘National Library of Medicine’.

Screenshot shared with ‘Don Carlo’ by Giuseppe Verdi (March 11, 1867 first ever in Paris) : the opera was broadcast live by ‘RAI Cultura’ from the ‘Teatro alla Scala’ in Milan, last December 7, 2023. Director Riccardo Chailly, stage direction by Lluìs Pasqual.

The frame resumes here, from Act III, one of the rarest scenes brightened at the sun, beyond the bars : ‘Don Carlo’, Infant of Spain and heir to the throne, decides to trust Rodrigo, Marquis of Posa.

“Everything will have to be silent… to exalt faith” is the despotism formula of all times, which Giuseppe Verdi makes the Grand Inquisitor pronounce, the ‘blind nonagenarian’ as set out in the libretto[1] of his own ‘Don Carlos’, but also the ghostly voice of an undying progenitor, at the end of a complex work, but not for this less interesting.

The dreadful formula of overbearing is here historically dated – we are in 16th century Spain which sends Flemish heretics to the stake – but ready to re-emerge with any outfit, from time to time over the centuries and to this day, to obtain subordinate. It’s rarest – but possible[2] - to meet rulers in History, capable of recognizing the terrible mistake, that is applied everywhere and unfortunately until the closest personal and family relationships.

An intelligent direction rightly imposes a studied, convincing backdrop of bars locked for a dark time, an elegant and impenetrable gate, plunged in a continuous resentment which only the rendez-vous between Don Carlos and Rodrigo gets to colour, the two confess mutual trust in the uncertainties of History : “Carlos, you can, you can trust me”. The glimmer of space is minimal but reasonable in the widespread obtuseness that holds repetition in its grip : “oppressed the heart, it has no strength”.

Without ever naming it, as a matter of fact Verdi was able to focus on the ever current – and violed – ‘sovereignty’ : powerful when it comes to build despite obstacles and fragilities, impotent when it arrogates all arrogance with its cruelties.

Voices and words that in this opera unfold and through each other, keep that glimmer to a minimum which only music, very very solid, does not close, not even in front of the blinding magnificence of the ‘retablo’, the grand architectural altarpiece of Spanish cathedrals : an inexplicable, rapid, undeniable glimmer. The high skies of the beautiful Spain we know, are here psychically abolished.

It’s just a chance, this opera, not obvious at all.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – January 14, 2024

[1] François-Joseph Méry and Camille Du Locle are the authors of the ‘libretto’, then translated by Achille De Lauzières and Angelo Zanardini for the first Italian play at Bologna, on October 27, 1867. Giuseppe Verdi (1813 – 1901), one of the greatest musicians and composers in the world, was also – and not only in Italy – one of the most popular and known author in the historical period that preceded the unification of Italy : his music still maintains a strong appeal to constitutive alliances in Europe.

[2] Pope John Paul II in 2000, intervening with a letter on the occasion of the publication of the Acts of the International Symposium of the Inquisition, held in Vatican in 1998. Furthermore, towards Nazism, the Chancellor Willy Brandt (1970) https://ilbassoadige.it/2020/09/30/quando-willy-brandt-si-inginocchio-per-rendere-omaggio-ai-caduti-del-nazismo/ And recently, the Chancellor Angela Merkel  (2019) https://www.repubblica.it/esteri/2019/12/06/news/germania_angela_merkel_auschwitz-birkenau-300873897/

Original painting by Gianni Russomando[2]

To benefit from one’s calling[3]/29.

Sublimation, having removed one’s thinking from unconscious which is “memory of a law of the body not inaccessible to consciousness”[4] thus makes useless the creation of “a second half”[5] when similar ‘occurs’ partner, i.e. source of benefit.

Thinking the uselessness of partners, is thinking hate, envy, denying profit after having acknowledged – then a desire ‘against[6] - and it is the most subtle threat to one’s thinking, and one’s default.

Marina Bilotta Membretti / Cernusco sul Naviglio – December 9, 2023

[1] “ ‘Erubescimus sine lege loquentes’, motto of XIInd century Bolognese ‘Studium’ : let’s blush when we speak without law (law of motion of our body).” Cited from : ‘Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico’, Giacomo B. Contri / SIC Edizioni (1998) – ‘Un’essenza assurda : La sessualità, Il sesso’, pg. 134

[2] 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.”

[3] www.tutorsalus.net/index.php/en/pensare-da-partner-2/358-psychoanalyst-and-profession-1

[4] ‘Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico’, Giacomo B. Contri / SIC Edizioni (1998), pg.93 nota 17

[5] ‘Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico’, Giacomo B. Contri / SIC Edizioni (1998), pg. 190

[6] ‘Il pensiero di natura. Dalla psicoanalisi al pensiero giuridico’, Giacomo B. Contri / SIC Edizioni (1998), pg. 143