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During 2002, I was going through the crisis of my divorce. My life was not only in chaos emotionally, but also at work, financially and administratively. In short, a gigantic uncertainty about my future. In those days, while recovering my strength thanks to the hospitality of a good Italian friend, I tried to recapitulate the facts, or at least identify them and put them in order, to make an analysis, and hopefully come to some honest conclusion. What was clearly presented in my mind over and over again is the beginning and the end. How it started and how it ended. Then I would go into the intermediate events and all their causal relationship. How did it happen?.... and in this questioning, I noticed a man lighting his brand new cigarette, and how gradually, one puff after the other, led to its extinction.
Without looking for it, I found a parallel and an analogy. Smoking was a metaphor for an ‘experience’. To smoke a cigar was to go through an experience. From the enthusiasm of its beginning that fills everything, passing through its part until seeing how it is exhausted and consumed with each inhalation, and how the twilight end approaches with resignation.
Each experience is a cigar that is smoked. Therefore, a pilgrim who passes through a forest of cigars is an individual who goes through (smokes) numerous life experiences chained one to the other. The smoke of the cigars is the result of their combustion, they are question marks, that is to say, they are the uncertainty of ignoring or not knowing where one or another outcome will lead me.
There are nine cigars on this journey. Cigar number ten corresponds to the last experience, the experience of death. And this last experience is carried by the pilgrim on his staff. In numerology the number 10 represents the cycle of minimum steps or stages necessary before repeating the cycle. The cycle is of course, the ‘eternal return’, the aesthetic experience, which leads the subject to enter the Dionysian plane, and then return to the Apollonian plane, but transformed. This repetition is always the same but always different. Not only is it paradoxical, but it is schematised in a spiral. Thus, the pilgrim's head is a tornado, a cyclone, a hurricane.
When one enters a whirlwind, when life experience becomes a whirlwind, causal relationships become uncontrollable, hence unpredictable. The parameters in social relations interact just as in a Complex System model, as if to say, in a open-loop.
Cigars have credit card numbers on the filters or mouthpieces, each one of them takes toll, and at the same time as it is in their nature their destiny to be consumed, they are thus assimilated into the system of consumption.
The snake symbolises the treacherous reaction, the force of self-sabotage, that self-destructive tanathos impulse. Friend of failure, and the great enemy of the ‘conato’ or the drive to achieve desires, goals, objectives and purposes. This snake that grows into a giant... and accompanies the subject wherever it goes. The snake is so integrated that it looks like a hat, one of his clothes.
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