The Planet made with Fear

@ director
“Hitler got it all wrong: if he had lived now he would have sent the Germans with their large boats to invade the world and nobody would have been able to stop them, because, well, there are humanitarian reasons.” This is fear, no, it is terror. The murder of Vittorio Arrigoni is terror and it is terror when diplomacy prostitutes ‘humanity’ with the law of the strongest.

"Vittorio Arrigoni", picture taken from the
facebook account

I have recently reminded of this a patient of mine who suffers from panic attacks: he could tenderly appeal to his own humanity, feel it as a value, let it, as well as the medications, protect him, while a hormonal storm was going through his body, but without causing damage. Yes, our fear can protect us from fear, when the events outdo reality, and then the panic stops hurting us, rather, it stops altogether. Just this year it is 30 years that I’ve been treating patients with panic attacks and I know that the reassurance “nothing more serious can happen to you” or more dreadful than what is already happening, when you are caught by panic, is of no use to calm you down. It is useful at the beginning, to clear the head from the confusion between physical and psychological, but when you then need to work them together (because nothing is only physical or only psychological), even ‘panic’ is useful to overcome panic. Then the conscience of values above our contingencies and our ritual worries acts as a ‘hook’ to which we can strongly hang our ‘salvation’. It takes us back to the awareness, beyond existence, to be beings who imperfectly attribute sense, but who, nevertheless, have the possibility of making mistakes and therefore learning.
A great man used to state (though I am not fond of quotations) that other people’s mistakes are useful to us because we could not learn everything from the ones we commit in our own limited existence... A nice definition that reassures on the issue of mistake, pushing the pedal towards responsibility, rather than ‘fault’.

Vittorio can save a patient (provided that they wish it) from a panic attack, from a hypochondriac thought, just when he, the volunteer, is choking for real, probably bound by a metal tie, in an abandoned room in Gaza. His life, his passion, made of the same catecholamines running abundantly in someone taken by panic, lead us to think, to feel in ourselves disapproval, no... anger and outrage, and then finally sorrow, instead of fear. It does not all happen just because we think about it, just because we read, moved, a newspaper article, but it happens more quietly, if our soul is nourished by events beyond the boundaries of our own walls. It is an internal ‘birth’, which from inside makes you feel free from fear, but able to experience it, if it is human. Inhuman are some deaths and tragedies, inhuman is the panic if its cradle is a civilisation with blinkers, which invents a thousand contraptions to photograph the world without really ‘reflecting’ it.

In the last few years, on the web and in TV programmes, I have often heard saying that “with the economic crisis the statistics of panic attacks has rocketed”, then it was the earthquake in L’Aquila, then the murders of Sarah and of Yara... Let me be ironic about the sharp scientific sense of those who use this information to ‘induce’ to crime... We know that a significant number of accidents in the air can raise the levels of fear to fly, that the climate of uncertainty terrorism has culturally created has a deep impact on our security, outside, but also internally. We do not need that professional skill that jackals have selected for biological survival to survive in us as well, preying on those who have already been preyed on: the information that uses itself to survive, through tragedy or fear. This is not ethical and it does not help those who suffer from ‘fear’.

In our brave theatre, but full of fear, we are aware that we have represented, in three different editions, The Kamikaze and that we have recorded it, while in Gaza and in Israel people were dying for real. We know that we have staged Bluebeard, while two young promising women were having their lives violated. The awareness and the reflection protect you form the deception of history, of the dictator, of the professional, of yourself. One can fight with values, without shooting, without arbitrary boundaries (when ideological ones, whether they rise or fall), against indifference, clichés, and comfortable armchairs, until an unfounded terror comes over us, unfortunately, and induces us to fight pointlessly against ourselves. What am I saying? It is intellectually honest to recognise that the failed integration between personal and social values, in culture as in the individual, may lead to our body and our mind working in haphazard ways, ways that are not useful to our own existence or to that of others.
Thank you, Vittorio.

Thanks to Emiliana Bianchi (Scotland,) for her translation