The Waiting
The sleep of reason generates monsters (Francisco de Goya)
"But I wanted to tell you how I left the body for the first time... there is a very ancient occult doctrine, as old as the human lineage, which has been handed down orally until today, in fact few know it. It teaches us how to go beyond the threshold [...]
I went through a thicket, along a smooth white path, my feet had no perception of the ground, and if I wanted to touch the trees and bushes around, I couldn't grasp their surfaces. [...] The outlines of the things I perceived seemed soft [...]. Young, featherless birds with round, irreverent eyes, plump and swollen like fattening geese, were perched in an enormous nest and squawked at me, a young roe deer still unable to stand on its legs yet as fat and large as an adult animal, sat lazily in the moss and turned its heavy head towards me... There was a toad-like indolence in every creature I happened to see.
Little by little I realized where I was: in a country, as true and real as our world and yet only a reverberation of it, the realm of ghostly doubles that feed on the substance of their original Earth forms, doubles that prey on them to feed themselves until they transform into monsters, the more they pine in vain hope and in the expectation of happiness and joy. [...]
I continued my journey and arrived in a crowded city. I had met many people on Earth, and I remembered their numerous failed hopes and how, from year to year, they walked more and more stooped and yet they did not want to tear from their hearts the vampire, that demonic Self, which devours life and time. . [...]
With horror I realized that my whole life had consisted of every possible form of waiting and only waiting, a sort of perpetual bleeding, and that all the time I had left to feel it was only hours. What I had until then considered the essence of my life exploded in front of me like a soap bubble...
I tell you, everything they do on Earth always involves a new expectation and a new hope, all of creation is impregnated with the pestiferous breath of the dying of a newborn present. Who has never felt that unnerving exhaustion that overtakes us when we sit in the waiting room of a doctor, a lawyer, an office? ... What we call life is the waiting room of death. Then, I suddenly realized what time is and that we ourselves are forms made of time, bodies that seem like matter and are nothing more than a clot of time. And our progressive withering to the grave, spent in waiting and hoping, what else is it if not a continuous becoming time, just as ice subjected to heat sizzles and becomes water again!
When this awareness awoke in me I saw a tremor shake the figure of my double and anguish troubled his face. Then I knew what I had to do: fight to the death with those ghosts who suck everything out of us like vampires!
Oh, they know very well why they must remain invisible to men and hide from their gaze, these parasites of our life; even the devil's greatest meanness is to act as if he didn't exist. And since then I have eliminated the concepts of waiting and hope from my existence forever!
You become here on Earth like an automaton, an apparent dead person! Don't try to pick an inviting fruit if even the slightest expectation is connected to this gesture, don't do anything, and everything, once ripe, will fall into your lap. At first it is like wandering through desolate deserts, often for long periods, but suddenly it will become clear around you and you will see all things, both the good and the bad, in a new, unexpected light. Then there will no longer be something important and something futile, everything that happens will be both important and futile at the same time and at this point you will be made immune to the blood of the dragon and will be able to say of yourself: I will sail in the shoreless sea of eternal life raising a sail as white as snow!"
- Fragments from the story "Johann Hermann Obereit's visit to the land of time suckers" by Gustav Meyrink -
This passage by the fantastic writer, as well as great occultist and exotresite Gustav Mayrink ( >>> ), fits very well with the image of this elegant and beautiful lady who seems suspended in time, eternally waiting. This portrait of the author is also very suggestive (historical photo taken from the web, author unknown).
Photographing is always a means to explore and investigate the world inside and outside of us: the external world, i.e. the subjects, and the internal world, i.e. the photographer and his soul, his sensations and his visions, and the combination of this particular photograph with these words, apparently a little sinister and cryptic, introduces us to a somewhat alternative reading of the reality that surrounds us, stimulates us to reflect and investigate, at least this is my intent, and also the meaning of my photograph.
I am increasingly convinced that we are all victims of a great misunderstanding, or rather of a great deception, and this deception has been subtly installed right in our heads, in our minds, through the manipulation of language.
With the invention of two words like Reality and Fantasy, two terms of measurement are arbitrarily defined by which we judge our experience in the world as plausible or implausible, above all we judge the experiences that are handed down to us by others as history or as myths or legends.
It's as if we looked at the world through a grid, a polarizing filter to stay in photographic jargon: some things pass and we define them as real, others do not pass through the grid, because we are used, programmed, to only see what passes through the grid , we are programmed to see (recognize) only patterns, everything that does not fit into the mental pattern we have in our head, it is as if we do not see it, even though we have it physically before our eyes.
So in a nutshell, what is labeled as fantasy or fantastic story, or myth or legend, is not perceived as a possible reality but only as an ephemeral invention of a playful nature, on the contrary, what is labeled as reality takes on a concrete value on which organize our daily life, that is, it takes on the rank of truth.
But... because there is always a but... what if they had deceived us, inverting the true meaning of the terms? A simple but very effective linguistic game with which to discredit the truth by passing it off as fantasy, and instead give credit and authority to an arbitrarily invented reading of the world, calling it reality, complete with academic and scientific institutions that support its cult....? And what if some particularly skilled writers and artists had exploited this grid to send us messages that would otherwise have been censored or ridiculed, overcoming the grid only thanks to the external guise of a "fictional story"? It would be a great trick: to fool the enemy with his own weapons!
It's just a hypothesis of mine, an extravagant hypothesis, which however has been swirling around in my head for some time and finds an ancient reverberation in the sibylline words of Heraclitus: "thanks to its incredibleness, the truth escapes knowledge"... nice dilemma on which meditate!