NON È ANCORA NATO

A young woman and a story from engrave. Engrave in memory or re-create in imagination. Before her eyes a painting and her father, a man in his sixties and sixty years of a man who has had temporary amnesia and lives in an RV. In between seven years of distance. And an age of resentment. It is the lonely voice of the young woman to etch, to compose the dialogue, to foreshadowing, the memory of a lived experience or just the illusion that one day everything can really happen. An original text, even if someone, with the care of the gaze, might perceive in the watermark a distorted and distant echo coming from the old Sophoclean Oedipus to Colonus: the hero of ill fortune, the "supplicant who brings salvation" cast out and cursed who wanders blind and wandering accompanied by his daughter Antigone.

A story from decode, from recompose with objects in the distance in the surreal hatching of the dream. An underground story from bring to light.

Only at the end does one come out into the open. Out in the open of a sacred forest that is not a forest, but a suburban park and sacred has perhaps only its abandonment.

And as in Bergman's "Place of Strawberries," the mirror of memory becomes an experience of authenticity in which reconciliation occurs through unthought-of and unsuitable ways. Forgiveness. Forgiving oneself. Being born. Sunset. In the West.

Caroline Baglioni, Michelangelo Bellani

He is not yet born is a contemporary story. Verisimilar though perhaps not entirely realistic. Not entirely, insofar as theater can trade off relevance, true-similarity, for imagination.

It is a story that reflects on forgiveness. To forgive is to forgive someone else, but in a sense, if not primarily, to forgive oneself. Giving to oneself a way out, a chance for redemption from a condition of suffering. In our story, forgiveness is about that of a daughter toward her father or that of a father and daughter toward their own existence.

Psychoanalytically forgiving may mean getting rid of guilt. What guilt? In the time of father evaporation, children do not have the chance of generational confrontation. Fathers of an old age that apparently does not age, sons are simply peers. (Oedipus's daughters are also his sisters.) For the father in our story, too, as for the old Sophoclean hero, it is a matter of surviving completely unencumbered by a universal order of meaning. But does not every son more or less consciously demand this sense? What the daughter does not forgive her father, then, is not that he did not love her, but that he failed to give order to the chaos. The paradox of this age seems to be all here: "My father, he is not yet born."

If this, then, seems to be the universal condition of man, mutual forgiveness is the only possible salvation. 'Sacred' from this point of view is the open space of an authenticity, of a nameless feeling. A dimension that as Kierkegaard reminds us goes beyond all ethical questions since it is beyond true and false, as well as beyond good and evil: it is a space of love.

Michelangelo Bellani