How will you communicate?
The pandemic has arrived and swept away appearance: it has conclusively proved it a fake. In fact, we don’t need to appear anymore, assuming we ever did. What we need now is to learn again how to tell stories, how to tell about ourselves, not in the moment, but in history.
Up to last February, communication was obsessively centred on our need to appear, to be liked, to outwardly shine, to attract. With the advent of a society of images and social media, communication had become a spasmodic research for illusory perfection, for split fragments of happiness, not so much to share as to show off. We had all been pushed to follow certain rules, to conform to a flat and two-dimensional version of ourselves, to simplify ourselves hiding behind our image, to showcase ourselves as objects. Conversely, we had been driven to distrust or even attack who’s perceived as “different”, who didn’t follow those rules, those algorithms.
Literature has always taught me, though, that it’s what’s different that saves and frees us, not what’s identical.
The unexpected encounter with a stranger in a novel, like in reality, is the force that sweeps us off our feet, that takes us beyond the confines of our life, to experiment with others. Not from the outside, judging an appearance, relying on an image, but rather from the inside, from the thoughts, emotions, secrets of someone who is, first of all, a story to tell.
That’s it, we are stories. And the extremely consumerist society we have been living in and we can’t live in anymore had tried to make us forget what, for me, remains the true nature of communication. To seriously communicate we can’t compete or fight with our appearances. We take a picture of ourselves in a certain light, we quickly type an insult online, but this way we’re not really saying anything about reality or ourselves. We are not participating in the community, we are not encountering, we are not trying to understand and question our time. We are only unlearning to speak, plummeting into loneliness.
Before the pandemic, we thought we were communicating a lot, whereas we were actually thrashing through an impoverished, trite, banal and extremely violent language. Then, all of a sudden, we found ourselves confined to our homes, we were forced to abandon every habit and certainty, we were lost for words, and in that emptiness we realized how much we needed them. Honest words, able to honour reality. New words leading us towards an unknown future.
In such a difficult historical moment, in which all the old rules seem not to work anymore, it’s also worth dismissing the rule of appearance, of prejudice and of commercialisation as pivotal elements of communication. May each life be narrated like a novel instead. May every word convey the indefinable complexity of the individual, avoiding the numbers with which we have been taught to assign value. Let’s learn again to use words to question and not to simplify, to create community and not controversy. May the internet become a means serving reality, rather than appearance. Communicating something means tearing it away from silence, making it exist, honouring it. Communicating therefore has a fundamental ethical value, and the power to affect our awareness, our behaviours. Let’s take the time to listen to others, to leaf through the vocabulary to find the exact words that don’t betray, but instead keep safe the story of the individual, of the place, of the reality we want to tell. To take care of it, to face it and, right now, to imagine the new world we will inhabit.
