The daily and the extraordinary.
I think that normally, these two terms are in absolute contrast.
The first is considered as an annoying hurdle, a daily grind.
When you wake in the morning you have to get dressed,
put on your shoes, brush your teeth, go out;
everyday things, so boring, so repetitive.
On the other hand,
the second term is about no limits, linked with freedom – the extraordinary.
The extraordinary soars freely in the air, we could say.
And sometimes, it reaches the sky.
The daily is banal, the extraordinary is sublime, an unique event.
Before I said that even some universities
have lectures on what an event is,
obviously, thinking of themselves as God, that creates events from lightening…
For those who believe in God, is God, For those who don’t, it’s nature.
They are more or less equal.
I believe the opposite,
The path to the extraordinary, since we all tend towards it, to beauty…
I heard before about “the beauty of chemistry,”
and I remember from my studying with Geymonat
of all the mathematicians he spoke of
that, when faced with explanatory formulas at the same explanatory level
as mathematical problems, of mathematical analysis, used to say,
“Which one do you choose?” “The most beautiful one.”
And this is one of the reasons
why perhaps we talk more with the Polytechnic Institute
than with humanist scientists;
not all of them, as some are very talented, but normally, well …
The road to the extraordinary goes through continuos research,
research that sinks into the ordinary, into the daily.
The harshness of the real, the ruggedness of the real,
the untameable nature of the daily,
that is the challenging starting point to make sense
of that unpronounceable world that is “complexity.”
Complexity and extraordinary bound together to kill the daily,
killing it, let me say without demagogy, in politics,
but also killing it in daily language.
So, in my opinion,
returning the importance of the everyday as an element,
as research ground is one of the most important things.
Let me give you an example that is neither moralistic nor pietistic.
Call them attacks, call them attacks on human life,
with the shipwrecked, thousands of people; they are absolutely extraordinary facts.
But in some way,
judging them from differing personal viewpoints,
we accept them, we suffer and accept them,
we take them as fact, an extraordinary fact.
But something happens, I don’t know if it happens to you too,
but I’ve seen it happen with other people, not just me,
so it’s not just that I am hypersensitive, or mad, or particularly pietistic:
the hardest thing is when instead of seeing a thousand dead bodies
you see a shoe, or a wet toy on the beach, to get even more rhetorical.
Why? Or on the motorway, has that ever happened to you?
Unfortunately I have seen some accidents,
and you say, “It’s extraordinary,” in many aspects it is sensational,
but then you get a lump in your throat
when you see a shoe on the road,
a shoe lost by the victim.
I drive a motorbike so I am always concerned about this.
There is the exceptional fact,
but that shoe also shows you the everyday aspect;
and that is what gets to you,
it triggers an emotional mechanism
that is completely removed from the extraordinariness, instead,
that is attributed to the big tragic event
also with condemnation of course.
And there is another fact: I don’t know if you have noticed how
when you hear the news of massacres, great disasters,
thousands of deaths, and then, you find that they were only 500,
this has thus been declassified from extraordinary to merely news,
and so, it is communicated as news.
And the news is to use– — news which is fine by me
is needed to keep us up to date with what’s going on,
but often, it is the news itself that kills and conceals reality
I remember as a child I watched the wars in Vietnam:
– It was at the time it was going on, I was 13-14 years old –
there was so much news around that
I had no idea of what was going on,
and I defy anyone to demonstrate the contrary of what is happening now.
In fact, news which is a downgrading of the extraordinary,
now extraordinary because the news is now shouted out,
reveals how information expresses the insignificance
of the word “currently.”
Spregelburd gave us a beautiful expression
that I will quote later, briefly regarding a show.
He is an Argentine playwright
who, in presenting the text that we then put to the stage, “Panico,”
write a note saying how topicality is history’s younger sillier daughter.
I find this a wonderful definition.
What does the everyday have to do with the extraordinary?
Well, because we are moved by both sides,
except here there is no demagogy; I have often wondered this myself,
I have heard some phrases expressed on the surface,
above ground, in civilization.
Then I wondered, with neither political nor moralistic judgement,
would these words have the same meaning on the underground,
when the everyday is made up of very concrete facts,
of people banging into you, of smells, of faces?
Could they be pronounced? And I decided that they couldn’t.
So, perhaps what happens in concealment, which is the object of the research,
tells you more than what you can actually see.
And when the extraordinary also replaces what appears
reality disappears, every research element disappears,
what unites us, and I will come back this.
Science and theater share this very basis of continual research,
an infinite research into reality, but the reality is the everyday.
I believe also that fascinating things that I heard before
about chemistry play – and play is a very heavy word –
with the everyday, intended as a reality that is difficult to reduce
to a single explicative model, but with the everyday.
Theater and science share a research into reality,
that which daily finds itself opposing abstract simplifications, consolations,
certainties that crumble.
References to walls are too obvious, but it goes beyond that;
it is a mental form of approach,
which is why we haven’t simply created theater shows on science.
We have done very little,
we have welcomed some beautiful shows on the biographies of great scientists,
or on moral facts that implied a moral judgement – Oppenheimer –
but what we would have done after, and we did it also with the Polytechnic
was to investigate the common language between theater and science,
and surprise ourselves first and then others,
that there was a common approach to reality
which kept our feet firmly placed
– and I will tell you why I use the word feet –
in daily life.
If we forget about the everyday, there is no research.
There is a wonderful thing that the person who spoke before me said about chemistry,
there is a small variant
when I was at MIT, after we did Infinities with the Polytechnic Institute.
I asked, “So, how can you gather so many scientists
who work in different fields, in interdisciplinary ways?”
He said, “We have only a table.
And when we eat, we return to our everyday lives
and talk about things we don’t know not what we know.”
In conferences, we sell things we know.
Theater, in many ways, is just a table where we are cheeky enough
not to understand but to watch, and hear, and say.
And to share, of course, we all know that, but we also share at the cinema.
I go back to the everyday; the everyday rebels against short cuts,
it surprises us, offends certainty, because certainty is always arrogant,
touches on topicality – that I was talking about earlier –
the detail, as I wrote in those notes that you asked me for,
makes the world, everyday relationships,
– because there is no ‘a single everyday’ but many ‘everydays’:
the shoe that you see on the motorway belonged to someone,
it wasn’t an abstract shoe, it wasn’t part of the accident;
someone was wearing it, someone who had a life.
The everydays are the terrain of reality and obstinate research
that go below the surface,
what unite us all: us, theater actors and you, scientific researchers.
Science and theater share a reading of reality
with the continual research of fragments.
That is one thing – I don’t have enough time to tell you all about these things.
I explained it earlier.
I am not for commemoration,
but how can we not remember Ronconi’s work,
what connected me to him for 35 years?
He has always talked of fragments that everyone takes home with him
to then reconstruct as part of his own everyday life.
And it’s not that he leaves knowing more, he leaves with even more questions to ask.
If we ask more questions than we have answers,
perhaps we would all be scientists;
scientists of life, as well,
and of the sciences that regulate social life;
we don’t do it anymore.
Programming the extraordinary –
the event being studied is as far from life as we can understand.
It is extraordinary stupidity towards reality that escapes,
it is the death of human curiosity.
Curiosity – another element that unites us.
Morin has come to see us many times; recently, at 95 years of age,
he said, “We should look at the world
with the eyes of a child and the responsibility of an adult.”
I believe that this unites scientists,
I saw before that those talking had fun,
watched through the eyes of a child and with the responsibility of an adult.
Theater does the same thing,
that is why the Polytechnic Institute and Il Piccolo have united.
In the everyday, we can see the signs,
stimuli to gather improbable relationships:
when they asked us to collaborate in celebrating the 150th anniversary,
I – having always desired to be a titler,
I would love that job –
suggested, “150 years of impossible, improbable research;”
because the improbable could become, certain is dead.
So this unites, but it should also be in the everyday,
it should call the everyday into account.
And here I get to what we have done together, Infinities:
five paradoxes on the infinite,
that obviously dealt with an absolutely extraordinary question,
almost unutterable, almost unpronounceable for those who aren’t mathematicians,
who treat infinity as a number,
but for everyone else, infinity is unpronounceable.
We expected to have 400-500 spectators;
they were five paradoxes on the infinite,
we started with Hilbert, Kant, time travel.
40,000 people came.
But do you know what was the extraordinary thing?
Not so much the extraordinary content of the infinite,
but the meeting between the infinite and people’s everyday lives.
This transformed that thing into an extraordinary thing,
because people were leaving–
I remember that De Maio’s son – De Maio was Rector at the time –
came up to me, gave me a hug, and told me, “I owe you so much.”
“Adriano, we did this show together.”
“No, because my 14-year old son said thank you to me for the first time.”
And the fathers amongst you know what that means.
And the extraordinary became that,
not the extraordinary content of the infinite.
This is why I am a great supporter of the everyday.
Recently, “Elvira” has been playing on the stage of the Teatro Grassi;
“Elvira” is a play directed by Toni Servillo.
“Elvira” are the seven lessons that Jouvet took with Claudia,
his student,
the school student of the Paris Conservatory,
to interpret such a mysterious character
as Elvira, in Molière’s “Don Juan.”
There is a sensational passage:
to arrive at the sublime, she has to follow many roads,
extraordinary roads, of talent, of cleverness, ostentation, skill;
and Jouvet/Servillo says, “No, it’s not that.
it is the fatigue you have to put into it, it is feeling.”
Do you know what happens at a certain point?
Claudia removes her shows
and runs barefoot on the stage, she enters the stage.
When her bare feet touch the stage floor,
she starts on the road of the sublime, of the Don Juan’s mystery.
Behind me there is an image
with which I conclude this inconsiderate consideration
on the everyday and on the extraordinary:
this is “Panico,” the show I spoke of earlier,
Spregelburd’s text whose theme
was an absolutely extraordinary thing:
the interpretation of reality as a diagonal line in time and space.
But it is nothing like a sci-fi film, it is more contemporary,
in the sense that the concept of time and space doesn’t change
only for the researchers but also in daily life;
change, globalization, all these things that we have heard talk of.
It was a great success,
it was called “Panic”, and it obviously it wasn’t a great portent,
it was an incredible success and everyone wrote,
even the critics, and even us talking with Ronconi,
we said, “Of course”
– you see that the stage is set diagonally, don’t you? –
“Because it is the scenic representation of the diagonality of life,
of the diagonality of the contemporary, of transversality,
this term is also used in science as well.
We were absolutely, honestly convinced.
A couple of weeks went by,
and speaking with Ronconi – we used to talk a lot, and we worked;
sorry, we talked little but worked lots –
we said to each other, “Well, you see? You see that they understood this.”
He made a confession, and these are my final words,
“Yes it is true, it represented that, the diagonality of knowledge, of reality,
but do you know why I made the stage diagonal?
Because I was fed up
that Teatro Strehler spectators could not see the actors’ feet.”
Thank you.
(Applause)
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