We live in socio-cultural contexts increasingly dilated in spatial and temporal parameters in which the concept of “hic et nunc” (1) is constantly overwhelmed by the need to go further. To pursue a constant and pervasive idea of “feasibility”.

Sometimes, willing and available to market time and space believing we can have a wider range of possibilities, which do not always coincide with an equal number of opportunities.

All this happens at the expense of increasingly narrower perimeters and contents, increasingly small, within which the “here and now” assumes connotations of an elusive present. Quick in appearing and becoming confused in subsequent ones. Without asking for anything. Without leaving anything.

Ideologies and empathy develop and evaporate in the short term renouncing, fragile, the re-construction of an identity structure that we are slowly leaving behind.

Nothing, at this point, takes on a more concrete outline of a real and available interdisciplinary dialogue between the parties. Between what we are experiencing and what we have already experienced. Between what we are and what we have been, willing to evolve with synergistic understanding in what we really want to be.

Hence the need to explore the concept of memory as a starting point, as the source of a range of future identity constructs through which it’s better understood the meaning of a past telling more about ourselves than we are willing to do.

Memory, as the result of a sum of “presents” in continuous and inexhaustible becoming, represents the opportunity for sharing and remembering within a generational perspective increasingly more and more involved in international large-scale contexts.

“The helplessness to be after being”. (2)

The Lebanese-French intellectual and journalist Samir Kassir defines Arab unhappiness by summarizing, in an ever more distinct way, the focus of a general malaise as a manifest of an identity crisis that permeates people and peoples in relation to the absence of memories and/or the non-recognition of the same.

To resist, to maintain a principle of reality and identity, it therefore becomes necessary to re-acquire one’s own memories and those universally given, as a result of a profound and empathetic structured investigation with the aim of positively projecting into the future through a genuine excess of the ideological and temporal concept of border.

Le Rétrécissement De L’espace Vécu

Hommage à Samir Kassir et Ludwig Binswanger (2)-(3)

They tell   

About Creatures with unknown features,

Swarming in the fleeting nights of Beirut.

They feed on dust and salt, corrupting the bowels

With grammatical residues and astral decompositions.

They chase the slow flow of the tides

   Traveling

         – Backwards – across the borders of a land

            Now abandoned by the ancient masters.

They are wandering around, the Creatures,

Among the white alcoves of frightened virgins

Freeing themselves from a bleak and uncertain future.

They go around. And stop.

In the historical uncertainty of worn sheets

   Unfolding

         – With instinctive ferocity –

            A desire for immortality.

(1) From Latin. The imperative motto for the satisfaction of desire.

     “I need it, Here and Now”

(2) Samir Kassir, “Thoughts on the Arab Malaise, Being Arab”

(3) Ludwig Binswanger, “The case Suzanne Urban, History of schizophrenia”

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Jennifer Francesca Sciuchetti is an italian poet, writer, visual artist and physician based in Tuscany. She studied Medecine with Specialization in Cardiac Surgery and Gerontology, currently Specializing in Psychotherapy. Her poems, fictions and essays have appeared in The Aleph Review, The New River Press Book, Slanted House Zine, Rx Magazine, and When They Start To Love You As A Machine You Should Run (edited by Heathcote Ruthven). She has also served as a fiction editor for The Cadillac Literary Magazine. Her chapbook of poems, Trattasi di Misera Carne, is a poetry collection focused on growth, identity evolution and body language.

Photo: Enrique Ortega Miranda