Quello che il bruco chiama fine del mondo, il resto del mondo chiama farfalla
(Lao Tse)
Cos’hanno in comune le privazioni imposte da una grave malattia invalidante e quelle derivanti dalla carcerazione, tanto più quando ingiusta? Per le malattie mi riferisco, in particolare, a quelle gravissime patologie che coinvolgono il sistema neuromuscolare, come la sclerosi laterale amiotrofica, oppure ai gravi traumatismi cranio-encefalici e alla sindrome locked-in (che significa per l’appunto “incarcerato”): tutte situazioni nelle quali l’esito finale, anche grazie alla avanzata tecnologia medica, è che il carceriere ha gettato la chiave e il destiny is to remain prisoners of their bodies for the rest of life.
And again: how can we continue to explore the category as possible if the possibility of experience are to be drastically reduced?
These questions I jumped to mind while reading a good job a few years ago by Susanna Terracini, mathematics, which retrieves the letters he wrote Ernesto Rossi, the first by fascist prison and then from the border, and recalled the meeting, still in prison with Vittorio Foa, an economist, but most noble father's left of the 900 (and a bit 'below). It also contained a nice interview at the same Foa.
Ernesto Rossi, anti-fascist secular fondatore di Giustizia e Libertà, viene condannato, in ragione delle sue idee, a vent’anni di carcere dal Tribunale speciale fascista; di questi, complessivamente, nove li trascorre effettivamente in prigione e quattro al confino. Lungo tutti questi lunghi anni Rossi “inganna” il tempo non solo nell’incessante organizzazione di tentativi di evasione, ma soprattutto nel costante esercizio della matematica, attività intellettuale di astrazione per eccellenza. E, appare evidente, lo fa non come pura coltivazione di una passione individuale, ma come affermazione di continuità di sé, della propria identità e della dignità di persona.
Senza scomodare l’esperienza di un Primo Levi nel campo di sterminio, also the human story of Ernesto Rossi, certainly less extreme, suggests that a person is first and foremost that if allowed to grow their own search for meaning and expose it to the comparison with the "other".
early as 1931, the prison in Piacenza, Rossi get chalk and blackboard and falls, in fact, in the grouping, along with an unlikely army of railroad workers and peasants, anarchists and communists, all is not always "head ends" from the point of view of the intellectual level. But who cares, passion and creativity of sharing in the exercise of mathematics reveals the extraordinary power of their collective artistic gesture. And while this is surprising, because there is apparently nothing more logical and rigorous, and, I would probably think, hard of mathematical method.
Rossi also read Poincaré, the French mathematician and philosopher who formulated the famous "conjecture", mathematical problem of extraordinary complexity, and had to wait more than a century to be demonstrated. And I can think of a more reckless approach that I read about Poincare conjecture that linked her to the assumptions of the mathematical structure of the universe, making it conceptually tamed something otherwise uncontrollable by the human mind: the same structure over and yet at the same time infinite is found, surprisingly, in the architecture of Dante's Paradiso. Here: deprived of freedom, the highest point in the history of twenty years, theorized that there were anti-fascists of "infinitesimals of different orders, which tend to zero as soon as one of the other". Fantastic.
Regina Coeli, after yet another transfer based on the umpteenth floor of evasion failed, Smith resumed with their new friends in the front row and later Richard Bauer Vittorio Foa, working on trifles as the theory of congruences, theory of determinants , linear equations and calculus. The fury with which this handful of anti-fascists try again you can put in writing the mathematical passages in the absolute prohibition of it, gives the idea of \u200b\u200ba genuine struggle for survival: a seizure of any "weapon" was followed by a new invention. From soap to match sticks of wood mixed with wax, from chips of lead in the railings of the chalk of the wick candles, anything can substitute for pen and ink.
And then I thought how difficult it is to continue to receive person in the fullness of relationship with others, when less freedom of movement, freedom to choose their partners and to communicate with them. And here is the idea of \u200b\u200breckless parallelism paralysis of freedom during a physical restraint imposed by power is not dissimilar to the bottom of what happens when nature is to impose the limitations of a motor paralysis that forces the body into a prison without bars.
The desperate attempt of a patient who can only move your eyes more, in search of itself does not cancel within the boundaries of disability, I get equally strong effort of the prisoner of a totalitarian regime to maintain its integrity in the hands of others without alienating . Tell
Foa: in prison, trying to get the
horizons because the open prison is an instrument with il quale, tenendoti chiuso, si cerca di limitare la tua stessa mente, inchiodarla al presente, a quella astratta aridità che ha la vita in una cella. Noi eravamo impediti di scrivere. Non potevamo scrivere a nessun altro che a padre e madre, una volta alla settimana. Non potevamo sentire musica di nessun tipo. Non p otevamo nemmeno cantare nulla. Si cercava di limitare la nostra stessa mente e indubbiamente la Matematica per me ha avuto questa capacità: di rompere la chiusura e di arrivare a qualcos’altro. Ancora recentemente, parlando di queste cose con un amico, ricordavo che durante tutti gli anni del carcere non ho mai letto delle poesie e spiegavo come questa mancanza abbia impoverito la mia vita, non solo allora ma anche dopo. E lui I said: "It is true, but you have studied mathematics!" And it's true. Studying Mathematics suddenly allowed to go out in a field where your persecutor is not entered - this field did not interest him - in which you could move at ease, without which he knew or cared about what you were doing. The same words could be uttered by a dystrophy or a patient with ALS, if they refer to frequently, acquired habit of writing poems, memoirs, short stories and novels ever written before. The caterpillar is free from the Diving Bell sublimating himself, erecting defenses of self-alienation and building bridges to communicate with others. To put it Foa: exit in an area where your persecutor, disease, ubiquitous and pervasive in its objective view of annihilation, can not enter. It becomes really a matter of life or death leads to fear, not just a respiratory crisis, the block of its common eye. At each stop of ADSL and any failure of the personal computer is attacked by anxiety that compose, write and communicate can not be denied forever.
The eruption of a catastrophic illness poses dramatically at the same occurred with the knowledge, the crux of identity and self-image is lost. Out is one with the refusal to identify with the disease itself, with the recovery self as a person through their mental faculties intact, the discovery of undiscovered talents, passion towards areas of intellectual creativity and commitment which, surprisingly, we find ourselves not only to entrust the direction of a new experience, but in this case, a new phase in his life.
D
isse Cesarina Vighy, became a writer only after falling ill with ALS: write and write with ease and happiness never felt before: I almost forgot to resist the challenge to pour in my book what I happened in the life of beautiful and ugly, and I go by the disease as a ghost through walls, making fun of those who stop before a closed door. I have something better to do, I said, get my life that seemed broken in two, before his illness and after his illness. Only now I discovered that you can also stay "inside", taking advantage of that poisoned gift that we have done: keep the m body polishes, perhaps more polished than before, until the end. Via his pajamas, bathing or washing themselves, dressing themselves or dress: it is a journey that awaits us, however long or short as necessary. The miracles we do them.
The sense of the struggle against segregation in the prison that may look like that being waged against the seizure of the body, and is still Foa to make it clear: I would say that is
una cosa un po' analoga ad una lotta sociale o politica. Uno pensa che una lotta sociale o politica serva a cambiare qualcosa. Però serve anche in sé. Il lottare cambia te stesso nel momento in cui lotti, non soltanto pensando ai risultati di questa lotta. A me pareva allora che il calcolo matematico, che può servire a tante cose, serviva a noi che lo facevamo. Il fatto di calcolare è in se stesso un fatto di emancipazione .
Per una volta, non è la libertà ad essere terapeutica, ma è la cura di sé che rende liberi.
Bibliografia utile:
Susanna Terracini - Matematica e liberazione, in Lettera matematica n.60/2006, pp. 39-50
Donal O’Shea – La congettura di Poincarè - BUR, 2008
Jean-Dominique Bauby - Lo scafandro e la farfalla - Ponte alle grazie, 1997
Cesarina Vighy – L’ultima estate - Fazi, 2009
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