Bianca and the Garden

They can cut all the flowers, but they can’t stop the spring.

– Pablo Neruda

 

Bianca was eternal, as well as the Garden. It was growing up with her and never getting old. Bianca was falling asleep by late autumn and waking up by spring. Her bedroom was caverns made out of branches, her pillows were little bears and her lullaby was October’s winds. And although Bianca loved the Garden and the Garden loved her even more, with every passing century, millennium, age and year, Bianca was starting to feel the emptiness, which created in her tiny heart a huge hole through and through. She was walking around with it, looking for a drop of blood, which could resurface from the sorrowful body. The space in her heart was becoming her own black hole, although the Garden was supposed never to recognize such an evil. The hole was sucking her out from the inside of her, trying to steal the lion’s share of her beauty.

A day came when, while walking lonesomely between the oak trees, Bianca found out what has engraved the solitude in her heart. She was the only one of her kind. She was the only one and dying. A creature, called for the eternity, has disregarded its’ role and started to die by driving in itself the daggers as in a dream. And although she kept on looking, in her world there were no others like her – there were no those who could understand her poems, listen to her playing, answer the questions, sing to her, console her and help to find the way. She had dogs, bears, wolves, and fish, she had ducks, goats, tigers and hinds, but no animal could have her. As well as all of the flowers, fruit, rivers, meadows, the neverending trees, trees, trees and forests with the sun penetrating beneath the separated crowns that she was almost unable to discern. They were further and further every day.

Bianca, realizing her misfortune, lost the joy of eternity and the dream in the beauty, lied down among flowers, turned her eye to the sky, as it is a habit of the ones who seek, and breathed her last breath as terrible as an earthquake.

This tiny creature, more fragile than anyone living on our earth and our moon, gave away the eternity by destroying the Garden. She did not know that although she does not see the love, the love was surrounding her since she was born by caressing her and letting her live with the beauty. The love was waking up with her every year, giving her shelter, flowers, and animals, taking care of her. And it was the love that she was supposed to look for there, where the emptiness started growing, because even if Bianca was despairing it, it was with her, waking up the skylarks and putting to sleep the bats.

As well as we who lose our sight in the brilliance and give up on a pile of flowers.

Werifesteria – (v) to wander longingly through the forest in search of mystery.

The unexpected is always the best

The unexpected is always the best. But there is, in this wide world, one thing which disturbs our esthesis of beauty – the obviousness of it. If everywhere we go we hear about the beauty of something, we start to doubt its’ existence. If everyone says it is beautiful, can it be real? Because the beautiful, seems to be in the clutches of a mystery. This is a story of how I understood that beauty can be just obvious and there’s nothing wrong with it.

As we look at the history of aesthetics, it seems that there are some indisputable beautiful forms. We might find out that none of the poems, paintings and music pieces was able to bring us closer to the true meaning of beauty which is impossible to describe in any human language. Well, maybe the French and their belles infideles would achieve the most in this task, but would it be able, to tell the truth – one of the main ingredients of beauty?

Inherently likely we appreciate this, what’s unusual. As we travel with our fingers on the map of Europe, we know that the obligatory thing to see is the Eiffel Tower. I will not adjudicate if this building is beautiful or not, but in Paris, there’s another place that everyone has to visit – The Cathedral of Notre Dame. From Paris, we can easily manage to get to Milan. It seems that these two cities have quite a lot in common – they share the love to fashion, richness and croissants (or, as we like to say it here in Milan – le brioche). They also have two very characteristic cathedrals. The counterpart of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is Santa Maria Nascente or The Duomo of Milan. The Duomo is two centuries younger than Notre Dame. Raised for the glory of God but also for the glory of a man.

Duke Gian Galeazzo Visconti, the initiator of the construction of Duomo, was a man of culture, politics and law. Even though the nowadays people would like to call him egocentric (and even if this human weakness would be the main reason of the construction of Duomo), the final effect definitely doesn’t make you think about the worldliness of the intentions of the duke.

But let’s let Gian rest in peace and look at the work of art which main attempt is to express the greatness of God. The building, if I can even use this word to describe it, lies in the city center, in its’ unconquered heart. The Duomo’s countless sculptures scratch the sky, undercutting its’ abdomen and over and over bring closer to each other this what’s human and this what’s divine. When you see the cathedral for the first time, you can fall for this ethereal feeling. The cathedral overwhelms the soul and it’s the first sign that we came to meet something situated high above the reality. If you spend in the city enough time, you start to feel kind of commitment to the view of the cathedral. Sometimes you can not even realise that you’re going there and suddenly find yourself at the stairs of its’ white, pink, orange, grey, blue marm – after all, it’s made out of a unique bullion, the marm of Candoglia, which color changes depending on the angle of incidence of the Sun.

It’s not the only way the Cathedral is so close to the Sun. Milan is crossed by the meridian, which is reflected in the flooring by a golden line. There’s a hole in the vault through which the sunlight falls on this line and in this way we can determine the highest position of the Sun – the noon. We can only get closer and closer to the divine, which Lady is La Madonnina, as the Milaneses call St. Mary, the highest among all the sculptures, raised on the top of the cathedral. To these days there’s the law which permits to build an edifice higher than the crown of 12 stars that weave Milan’s sky.

In Milan, even if it’s raining and Duomo is bathed in greyness, the netherworld is calling us. But not this dark and humid one, through which we used to travel with Charon. Today still, since the time of, nomen omen, Edict of Milan, we can travel to the luminosity. You can just pass through the threshold of one of the greatest miracles we are the ancestors of as long as we seek for beauty. Nobody will put coins on our eyes anymore and Antigone will not insist on burying our remains. We just need to do as the Visconti duke wished – to love his city and the masterpiece that he made in the name of the eternity.