Existence is sometimes the difficult art of walking in balance on a suspended thread between art and life.
Art lives on the same road as life but in a more secret place. On the top floor of a somewhat hidden apartment building. Art is a lonely room in the attic of a rented apartment.
Life, on the other hand, takes up a much larger space across the street. It is the colossal film where the struggle for survival takes place. It is the market square where men and women sell the fruit of their labor. It’s the chaotic office where everyone says hello and works together but nobody really knows each other.
But what happened to all those faces, those faces you met along the way, who wanted to be poets, and who all ended up being something else? Why has nothing more been heard about them? They are the lost poets. They got lost across the street.
Sometimes it can happen that someone visits the art room. But the room in which the Art lives is an empty room, and one immediately wonders why I should go and spend time there. Why get away from the market, all those rumors and, and the blue sky to go and stay in a small empty room?
Life and art are the two dimensions of existence that accompany us every day. But few are aware of the existence of art. Most people live existence across the street, never crossing. On the other side to everything he needs: the post office, the supermarket, the bar to play cards with friends.
The chatter, the smiles, the hustle and bustle of the street, the merchants selling, the customers looking for a bargain. The rich and the poor. Politicians and craftsmen. The teachers and the disciples. The events that fade, the story that remains. There is everything in life. But sometimes this all means nothing.
You meet a lot of people in life, but sometimes you don’t know why. You find a lot of things in life, but there are days when you wonder what they are for.
Many may not know how to find these answers, or maybe they live peacefully without these questions ever knocking on their door. But if you really are among the less fortunate, to find the answers you have to cross the street, find that block of flats, and go up to the top floor, in the art room.
But what’s in that room? That empty and lonely room that few believe it is necessary to enter?
In the art room there is life observing itself. In the art room there is the fourth dimension, where all the people, things and events that happen on the other side of the street coexist together in all the centuries of human history, coexist in all possible epochs. And in the art room there is a window from which you can see everything that exists in the street, the market, the offices, the bar, the post office, the people walking up and down the sidewalks.
The art room is the refuge from the background noise of life. In the art room there is no wealth of life. There is only a void that means nothing. But from that void every now and then something comes out that means everything.
In the art room, the arrogance and violence that almost killed you make you smile lightly. The problem that haunts you becomes only the face of a grotesque mask.
Life and art live on the same street, very close, but in very different places, but they need each other. Art needs boring work, bills to pay, beach holidays and Christmas lunch. Because it is with these apparently insignificant and repetitive experiences that it can take flight to the fourth dimension.
Life doesn’t necessarily need art. But without crossing the road to learn about art, she risks remaining arid and a prisoner of herself, becoming overbearing and blind. Not to understand each other at all.
You can also not cross the street, you can also never visit the Art room, in that forgotten attic. With the conviction that up there there is nothing interesting about all that life offers you every day across the street.
But if anyone tries, they might change their minds. I didn’t think, I never would have thought that. Inside that room is the whole street, the whole city, the whole world. Whole worlds. The time spent in that forgotten room was the best time of my life.
Notes for the film “The lost poet”, Fabio Del Greco.
