Walking the Way of Blindness

Alessandro Bergonzoni

Ask and they will ask, knock and they will knock, open and they will open, ring and they will ring. The time has come to change, to heal, to embrace. That moment, however, nobody seems to pick it up. The moment can come as a storm in a calm sky, an accident, an impairment. You can no longer have one life, be only healthy, a woman, a man… OK but I can’t, I can’t… Who is this Finn preventing us from doing so? I spent my life studying and doing my work. I spent my life A: now you have to go through life B, life C, D, E … two, three blocks from here. How many blocks are there? Who pays the due distances? Does this ability have anything to do with disabilities? We talk about super ability, hyper ability, tolerability, malleability, compatibility, bis ability. It is the end of a way, not the world. It is the strength of ideas not brute force, especially in this perennial war where even those who have no mouths left even to eat are armed to the teeth. Tears? Capital fully paid up. Crying over spilt milk: we don’t change the cows! I call it dance of the moment, contemporary art. We must put our hands on our hips and ask ourselves: is this life? Can one be respected even if someone’s life does not correspond, just because they do not know any other normality than their own? A change of dimension is called for. A quantum leap: the quantum of quanta, the quantum of creatures. I am launching a tender offer: I am afraid. I ask to exercise the craft of caring for those who are on a bed and do not read as we do, but read far beyond, those who do not speak, but tell of those who can return even if not as before but do return. Those who govern us have a duty to take charge of the many people who can no longer live as they always have but must and want to live even more than ever. Crossing the evil, not the sea, the lesser evil: there is no longer a lesser evil, he has turned 18, he has come of age. And a form of love certainly but also re-evolution: to feel certain spaces, certain gestures, glances, absences and essences! It is a line of no end, art, arts and universes beyond politics! Left, right, centre, the issue is mainly low, high: do we act vertically, no longer just horizontally? Some of the good comes from the bad, we touch the bottom and sink to new depths. 

Alessandro Bergonzoni - Picture

We can operate, we are workers, operatives and also the work itself, living, masterpieces that must be protected, defended, valued and esteemed as sacred. New men I see none, only old, fearful, unaware souls! Fear of losing consensus, non-existent, they are “paralyzed.” Omit, omit sounds like a verb: omit! (Forget, omit!) Every day, we vote: when we look at a person with disabilities, when we exchange love or sex for possession, or say thankfully it didn’t happen to me believing it doesn’t affect us. It is a poetic theme; ethics come later. We went through the motions: if I am silent, I consent, if I am silent I allow and connect (how many men have gone to dust that we have not yet read … let us think about them before we turn the page). As I like to think it is also about beauty which is of three types: high beams, low beams, in position: so, let’s have it, let’s make a difference. Believers, non-believers, observers, observed, visually impaired or overseen (who has fewer “senses,” who has lost sensitivity, tact, a sense of the whole universe?) Let us think before we stigmatize! What about the unbelievers, or those who are not believed? And all those who are invisible? This is the required vision, not division or tele-vision… It takes a lot of courage: well, let beauty give it to us, not fear take it away.

 

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