“The schools swam, marshaled and patrolled. They turned as a unit and dived as a unit. In their millions they followed a pattern minute as to direction and depth and speed (…) We cannot conceive of this intricacy until we are able to think of the school as an animal itself (…) And this larger animal, the school, seems to have a nature and drive and ends of its own. (…) If we can think in this way, it will not seem so unbelievable that every fish heads in the same direction, that the water interval between fish and fish is identical with all the units, and that it seems to be directed by a school intelligence”. It is the pack mentality, masterfully described by John Steinbeck in one of his lesser-known books The Log from the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics). It is the account of the scientific explorations carried out on a fishing boat together with his marine biologist friend Ed Ricketts.
It was Steinbeck himself, however, who had us used to dealing with characters who are the very opposite of the mainstream: disrupters of the social order who are indifferent to the ordinary way of life, and even to economic success. Unique individuals, resistant to convention, aristocratically contemptuous of norms, who are self-reliant monads in both thought and action. This is because even the most strict and compelling of pack mentality and the most deeply rooted collective unconscious cannot prevent those illuminating forms of betrayal capable of pointing out new ways, in opposition to the uniforme attitude of the masses.
Today’s society tends to exclude everything that is not the norm, what does not become a commodity, or what is not for sale, as Guy Debord would say. We have removed from our communities the emotional or psychological manifestations that we do not consider normal, and codified an idea of normality that is narrow to everyone. We are ready to censor the aspect of us that is not appealing to the outside world, or even functional, perhaps to an algorithm, forgetting that authentic freedom can only be a form of action, free of all these endless and eternally proliferating superstructures.
We are sometimes reminded of this by certain heretical and rebellious individuals, incapable of assimilation and restraint, who can hardly be redeemed. They are the outsiders, almost ‘primitive’ human beings in their social indifference. Like the runaways from the family, the church, the school, the nation or the party, who, according to Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, overcome the hierarchies of meaning and the paths already marked out, to reach different statuses of unfolding multiplicity, horizons of pure intensity stripped of all forms. Like Peter Grimes, the protagonist of Benjamin Britten’s opera, who in his opposition, which is also physical, to the inscrutable multitude, will eventually lose, yet still indicating a chance to a different possibility of existence.
Paolo Cairoli – Director of “Calibano”
Calibano is the new magazine of the Rome Opera House. Created as a space for in-depth analysis and debate around topical issues raised from the performances on the theater’s program and realized in collaboration with the publishing house effequ, the editorial project involves, every four months, the publication and distribution in Italian bookstores of a monographic volume dedicated to an opera title and a related theme, through the commissioning of essays, short stories and reviews by authoritative signatures.
You can buy Calibano on the effequ website at this link, in bookstores and at the Rome Opera House shop.
The illustrations in this issue were made by Emilia Trevisani
The cover is a collage by Giuliano Paolini (Photo Ⓒ Luca Vianello, Torino / Courtesy Fondazione Giulio e Anna Paolini, Torino / Ⓒ Giulio Paolini)
