by Prof. Antonio Mercurio
First part
THE SONG OF COSMO-ART
THE SONG OF THE ULYSSEANS
AND THE SONG OF PLANET EARTH
SEARCHING FOR UNKNOWN WORLDS
AND OF PARALLEL, INFINITE UNIVERSES
I want to sing of Cosmo-Art and I want to sing the song of the pact of friendship between myself and all of those who want to become artists of their lives and artists of the life of the universe.
I want to sing the creation of a new artistic movement based on the organismic principle and on the goal of creating secondary beauty.[1]
I want to sing the Cosmo-Art movement and its offspring the Ulysseans, those who, beyond wanting to recover enjoyment of primary beauty, want to dedicate their lives to researching secondary beauty, to become capable of navigating from one universe to another in endless enjoyment. [2]
I want to sing the lives of those who are dissatisfied with the soul they received at birth, and want to make a soul that is immortal not only for themselves, but also for the entire universe that contains them. [3]
I want to sing the lives of those who, even though they are aware of the indispensable richness that love knows how to give, also know that love alone is often impotent if it is not united with strength, wisdom and art. [4].
I want to sing the birthing of a new time where it is possible to affirm that pain is necessary for creating and is no longer a form of expiation, and it is necessary for learning how to give oneself a life form that is stronger than death. [5]
I want to sing the possibility that while in pain I can gather the synthesis of all the pain of the world and all of your pain so we can together become capable of transforming ourselves and pain with Cosmo-Art, in the choral song of a new and unknown type of beauty that only human beings can create, and to make it such that no one’s pain on this earth has been in vain.[6]
I want to sing the birth of a new time in which it is possible to affirm that everyone, absolutely everyone, is endowed with creative artistic power and where it is possible that the life of human beings and the life of the universe become a work of art that is even bigger and even greater than all the works of art created up until now, because this is what we have decided to do to respond to the goal of Life. [7]
I want to sing the birth of a new time for the Orient and the Occident, where the only possible horizon is no longer the immobile return to the beatitude of the One, nor is it the return to dissolving into Nirvana or the return to this planet earth for a continual purification that leaves the world on this side and the world on the other side unchanged from what they were before, but instead is the return to Ithaca where everything is new and everything is different from what it was before. [8]
I want to sing the “mad flight” of those who at death want to go beyond the space-time of this universe and enter into the space-time of all the possible universes, according to the myth of Ulysses and the myth of Cosmo-Art. [9]
I want to sing the return of the Ulysseans to a new Ithaca, that signals a break with the past time and with every-day time and instead gives rise to the creation of an infinite time: the time of secondary beauty, beauty that never dies, beauty that knows how to navigate beyond this time and this space in another time and another space, where there no longer is pain and there is no longer death but there is Life that flies happily from one universe to another and I am one with it.[10]
I want to sing Life that so dearly wants to go beyond the cycle of death-rebirth, with which it eternally reproduces itself in billions and billions of forms, each one different but each one subject to death, and wants instead to conquer a life form that is both immortal and eternal and not just eternal or not just immortal, each one separate from the other and opposed to the other, and dispenses to me and you the gift of an immense artistic power so it can accomplish this. [11]
I want to sing the ability to transform my life and the ability that you can transform yours in a unified and unifying energy field, which is rich and dense of the energies of truth, freedom, love and secondary beauty, and which is capable of attracting to itself many, many people, like what happens to the great works of art of every kind. [12]
I want to sing the possibility that many people unknown to each other can transform themselves, just as one time the unicellular organisms transformed themselves and gave rise to the unstoppable growth of multicellular beings, and become the living cells of a single living organism, starting with those who today make up the body of the SUR and ending with those who want to create a united body of planet earth and a united body of this universe together with that of all the other universes where it is possible to navigate with the creation of secondary beauty. [13]
I want to sing the power of life that knows how to evolve, beginning with human beings that are mortal, and that can create a superior life form that is immortal.
I want to sing the power of art that knows how to evolve and how to create a type of artistic energy, which is immensely more powerful than atomic energy, and that is capable of giving human beings and the universe the immortal life that human beings have always imagined and dreamed about since the era of Gilgamesh, and that up until today have not been able to accomplish.
I want to sing the journey of art and of all the artists through the history of art throughout planet earth who, concentrated in their powerful efforts to celebrate primary beauty, have given their lives so as to prepare the way for the search for and the creation of secondary beauty. None of them knew from the first day what they had to do to create a work of art. They placed themselves before the mystery of art with an iron internal and external discipline, with their passionate study of the masters that came before them, with the humility and passion of those who incessantly try and try again until they are capable of wresting the secrets hidden within matter and spirit so they could make the miracle of the work of art appear. [14]
To them I express all my gratitude for the immense gift they have given us and I build my own faith in being able to create a superior art form on their example, certain that just as they made the impossible possible we, too, can do the same in this new challenge that Life is calling us to undertake.
And, finally, I want to sing the beautiful song of all those (almost one hundred fifty people who came from all over Italy) who signed this manifesto at the end of the Cosmo-Art Laboratory, on November 29, 1998, and who expressed with their own personal song the wishes, dreams and hopes that they want to accomplish through their participation in the artistic movement of Cosmo-Art.
Antonio Mercurio
[1] See The Ulysseans
[2] See The Odyssey
[3] See the movie Scent of a Woman
[4] See the movie Scent of a Woman
[5] See the movie The Shawshank Redemption
[6] See the movie Forrest Gump
[7] See the movie Don Juan de Marco
[8] See the Odyssey
[9] See the Odyssey
[10] See the movie Don Juan de Marco
[11] See the Odyssey
[12] See the movie Don Juan de Marco
[13] See the movie The Shawshank Redemption
[14] See the movie Shine
* This paper was presented in Frascati, Italy, on December 8, 1988, at the 1st National Symposium on Personalistic Anthropology and Sophia-Art. It was later presented in video form in French and Italian at the II International Congress of the Sophia University of Rome in Paris, in July 1988. This is the first time the text with commentary has been published.