St. Augustine as a hinge between the sacred and the myth. Among these carvings, the work of Seneca remains the foundation of a journey between the Cross and St. Paul. An ontology that penetrates the metaphysics of the soul.
<< Our soul is crossed by sediments of centuries, the roots are bigger than the branches that see the light >>. Sediments of centuries. Maria Zambrano is this philosophy that tells not what it has collected from the West but from the Orient that cannot be seen but heard. The philosophy of the method or the method of philosophy. A dualism that Maria Zambrano has often faced. Leaving the imperfect in the provisional. The thought of Zambrano, not accepting logic, never intended philosophy as an academy or as a scientific dictation. The dawn is a metaphor that finds, in every night of thought, the light that binds hope to grace. Time and the perception of death are unique journeys into the metaphysics of the soul.
Thought is always beyond history. We must rely on memory in order not to die of nostalgia.
Are we Greek or are we deeply connected to Greekness? In «The Agony of Europe» Maria Zambrano wrote: «The Greek had no vocation for life; he had it for reason, for beauty, for things that would reach their being only in a place that is neither life nor death, but immortality. And therefore the Greeks discovered immortality, which has more clarity and form in them than anywhere else. And this discovery and strengthening reveals their positive and creative genius: feeling horror both for life and for death – that’s what pessimism is – they discovered immortality, a kind of backworld, they discovered being, a being that is in certain way contrary to life. All vitalistic peoples or cultures rejected the idea of being, and could never have discovered it; because being is beyond life and death, like reason, like the pure beauty of which their marbles send us the reflection ».
The profound Greekness is in that dwelling the time of nostalgia that crosses all the indelible memories that are the journey that remains. All that remains is all that cannot be forgotten. We don’t forget what we don’t want to forget. But what does not yield to oblivion within us. Accidentally.
Greece is also this profound destiny. A destiny that upsets and involves how poets trace silences, solitudes and inheritances. The exile and the end are viaticum of experience between the mortal gaze and eternity grasped as a metaphor in the diabolical that dominates in the mortality of bodies.
One can be absent and this absence is an inevitable detachment that binds suffering to pain, distance to indifference. We need to get out of the difference of the indifferent to spaginate the dream from reality. We remain real until the death of the real. Then something else will happen. What will it ever be? << The knowledge of the things of life is the result of long sufferings, of long observation, which suddenly condenses into an instant of lucid vision. This knowledge is revealed behind an extreme event, an absolute fact, such as the death of someone, illness or the loss of a love >>.
Maria Zambrano recovers the fading into philosophy and makes the poetic the myth of the assiduous capacity of the will linked to the mystery. But the journey can take place along two paths. Indifference and patience without ever forgetting that the game of life and death is an inevitable contradiction. Indifference teaches us not to die dead. To live distant in distance and patience. To welcome the mask is to mirror oneself in the absurd and in the inevitable, especially when exile becomes the illuminating thought of the theater that is in us.
Poetry, philosophy and logos. Three principles but a unique turning point in the Zambranian idea. I read: «The idea of nature and the logos correspond, reveal themselves and abandon each other at the same time. Objective vision and speech are the same in different orders. And by virtue of this the ineffable, never completely defeated in poetry, will make its appearance, as if the silence, crushed by the word, pushed by it towards the world of shadows, appears asking to be brought to light, to live the life of expression. But the expression of the inexpressible cannot be given except by establishing a relationship, the relationship that the hermetic mask and the sacred mask configures: participation >>.
Participation shouldn’t make us indifferent. But we must be to return to exile the freedom to tear the veil at the limit – the border. Maria Zambrano is beyond if the beyond is knowing the persuasions and the knowledge of suffering. The vision of suffering remains fundamental in Maria Zambrano’s life. A philosopher who dedicates dawn and silence to myth.
Are we Greek or are we just linked to Greekness? Maria Zambrano combines being Greek with being linked to a profound Greekness by inhabiting the thought of the Mediterranean. The Mediterranean is the time of memory but it is above all the “divine thought” in a “light of the forest” that is the necessary of the inevitable of the mystery in the myth. Lost in mystery and mystery found. A teaching that comes from poetry, from the poet. << poet is lost in the light, wandering in beauty, poor for excess, insane for too much reason, sinner in a state of grace >>.
Maria Zambrano was born in 1904 in Vélez – Malaga and died in Madrid, after a 45-year exile, in Madrid in 1991. An exile that became a journey lived by looking in the subsoil of demons for philosophy in poetry and fading as eternal infinity. Our steps are made of eternals dissolved and become infinite. We are heirs but also transcribers of wandering souls in conscious unconscious thought. We are Greeks and that’s not enough. We are deeply Homeric and it is not enough. We are permanent Ulyssism. We are inside that ulissism which is a permanent narration of the island and exile. We do not remain inhabitants of history. We are instead housing at the time. Inhabitants of avoidable history but never of an inevitable time.
Maria Zambrano. Philosophy as a spirituality in the time of existence – Paese Italia Press