venerdì 27 aprile 2007

ARTISTIC NARRATION

O navis, referent in mare ti novi
Fluctus. O quid agis! Fortiter occup
Portum.
( Oh ship, the floods carry you again to the sea.
Oh what action you do take!
You battle to reach the port)

And so Horace writes: the ship is therefore used as a metaphor solely for a society, threatened internally or externally.
The poet Audin, in his essay “The Enchafed Flood” tells us: When society is in a state of equilibrium, the appropriated image is the city, or a garden. This is the place where people want to be and should be.
In regards to the sea, the classic authors would agree with Marianna Moore:

IT IS A PART OF HUMAN NATURE TO BE IN THE CENTER OF SOMETHING; IN THE SEA, HOWEVER,
ONE CANNOT BE IN THE CENTER.

The journey of the two protagonists through the sea is therefore a necessary evil; a crossing of all that is foreign and divisive. Neither Odysseus nor Jason travels the sea for the love of the voyage: Odysseus is attempting to return to his native land following a long war; Jason is trying to capture the golden fleece in a faraway country: it is therefore a practical necessity that drives them. It is in this necessity, however, that the story arises, a tale that transforms the concrete aspects of their lives into universal symbols of mankind.

The ship that deliberately chooses high waters is the symbol of a state of disorder, the ship of fools, as is told in Barclay’s version of Brandt’s “ Narrenschiff”:


JUST AS THE MIRROR REFLECTS
THE FORM AND SHAPE OF THE HUMAN FACE
IN THIS MANNER, UPON OUR SHIP IS WRITTEN
THE FORM AND SHAPE OF ITS MISCONDUCT.

What a ship is this, belonging to the two proprietors, with its strange accoutrements; it is a great vessel.
This is the ship of fools.
It lacks a proper captain- storms, rocks, shipwrecks await it, everything must be destroyed as it is without a good government, as is our land today.

Giuseppe (Beppe) and Yousef (the equivalent in Arabic) endure the tyrannical and forceful flood which submerges our world like a deus ex machina and leads them towards the final cata