To Free Ourselves of our Senses to Understand the World

by Silvia Colombini

Spirituality, music, words in the voice of Jimmy Villotti.

Marco Villotti, known as Jimmy, class of 1944, well-known musician, author in recent years, is an artist able to express his original vision of the world not only in his works, but also in front of a glass of wine. Jimmy takes our magazine in his hands, turns the pages and begins to talk.
"There is another way of seeing that is not the one that we know. Sometimes I think that what I see is not true because it is only the correspondence with others that make it real. I spend a lot of time in the countryside and often on sunny days, I just sit there and close my eyes. And then, in that darkness, are appearing all those colours. First a striking white, which then turns to orange, red, indigo, and back to white again.
The sensation that I get is one of shielded sensibility because with my eyes closed I perceive sensations that I don't see. It is blissful. The sun is the testimony of divinity accessible to all, it disappears each day to come back the day after and when you look at it you can't see anything else. Maybe blissful things do not have outlines. This summer I met an important professor specialized in cognition, and he explained to me that we often act according to our intuition, that there exists a perception even if we don't see it distinctly. We live in our imagination, and so often we anticipate things before seeing them."
Jimmy keeps talking, his words envelop you, to be close to him is like being in front of a fireplace, his voice is so warm, intense and soft.
"Vedere Oltre. To me, it means to entrust hope. In life, we cannot anticipate anything. Will makes things happen. The case is transcendent, he decides, the cause is instead human. You make you own choices and make the cause your own. I believe that we should learn to lack something because our vital completeness limits us to the senses. On the contrary, to see things differently, we really shouldsucceed in freeing ourselves of our senses and entrust something that is spiritual, which can be defined like hope. To see things differently is an extension that helps you learn things that are not received in a sensory way. How to come back to cognitive essentials where the views are upturned to be estranged from current thinking. When we are submerged in the totality of senses, we are subdued by them and it is impossible to find authentic responses. We should try to cancel everything and, at that point, the parameters of our feelings would change. The authentic spirituality is torn away from sensorial relationships and I believe that only this spirituality can help us address our inner anxieties."
Villotti is the living proof that the most pleasant things are unexpected and he is a continuous surprise. We were supposed to talk about his albums, his books, and, instead, with only our magazine in his hands, he was able to free our thoughts and transport us with him to discover a new way to feel life. It is now time to go and first we want to know something about his work. "Music is my commitment and my occupation. As such it does not have any characteristics of blessedness. It is my work, that's all. I was not born with talent. I had to sweat it, to study, to get involved. This is why I hate music. I do not feel happiness when I play music. Lucky, the one who does. It is different for me when I write. I am primitive about writing. I write as I speak, babbling, while I know music because I have studied it during forty years. Writing for me is pure instinct."
He smiles, shakes my hand, and I lose him in the dark of the evening. As he says, in the end, we see only what we want to see, and so we are free to imagine that there are many like him.