19-9-1994
Every morning, from the early days of December, the three Magi moved a few centimeters along the narrow gravel path that we had collected from the sea.
Before leaving for work, my father would take on, under my admiring supervision, the task of advancing them towards their goal of reaching the manger on Christmas Day, the 25th.
Interestingly, the first Magi was always kneeling throughout this journey as he was designed to worship the manger, which never struck me as odd, since that's how I first saw him. Meanwhile, we monitored the growth of the lentils we had planted in tall narrow glass jars to represent the vegetation of Bethlehem. This annually recurring ritual, conducted on a low bookshelf in the home's foyer, was my initiation into experiencing the absurd. It wasn't the fantastical fairy tale that we reminisce and color like a dream, but the existing falsehood. The belief in the logically nonexistent and its integration into the process of life.
I'm not sure my father ever realized how important it was for me, for him, for the world, that the Magi needed to advance a little each morning, in between morning coffee and work at the office. Yet, we repeated it every year. Perhaps in the early years as play, then out of habit, as something natural and essential. Then we stopped. And the fairy tale left our daily life. The absurd was set aside as useless. The typological ritual remained, if at all, for more established and accepted things. I often wondered how to bring back, how we could reintroduce, the fairy tale, the absurd, and the ritual into our daily life. Not as an exception, nor as an escape, but as a natural and necessary part of life.
As a symbolic recognition of all that we sense without understanding. Like the daily morning kiss or the goodnight before sleep.
Perhaps Art is what connects us with the other side of logic—with the absurd—with the other side of the visible—with the invisible, with the other side of the utilitarian—with the ceremonial and endless repetition of a process.
Maybe Art is the continuation of the fairy tale, and we treat it with the seriousness and necessity that we faced it in our childhood.
Perhaps that's why Art is not merely pleasure, education, knowledge, or an interpretive tool, but only one (and possibly not the only) way to maintain in our lives the unseen side of things, in which we momentarily ceased to believe when we left our childhood room.
Plato Rivellis