Gravità

Dreams are one of the most tangible proofs of the fact that our bodies (minds included) do not have any need for ‘us’ in order to exist.

It is now widely accepted that the illusion of an identity (of a ‘soul’, as somebody would say according to old paradigms) is nothing but an auxiliary technology which evolved in our species in order to optimise the capacity for simulation of the external environment, in such a way as to be able to act in it with improved efficiency and creativity, by operating ‘conscious choices’, which in fact, seem to be limited to a mere veto power on what the subconscious has to offer.

NB: Just for convenience I’m using here the dichotomy conscious/subconscious, in that the so-called ‘conscious’ is only a neurological juice as much as ‘subconscious’ is.

The ‘I’ is only a cerebral function of perception which makes us intimately feel the experience of ‘being’. Of every thought that we have, be it large or small, important or irrelevant, we only become (sometimes) aware after this has been formed in the deepest cognitive organs that make up the mind. This takes place on the basis of computational calculations that analyse external input and match them to the needs of our organism, informing ‘us’, when necessary, of whatever has been computed with about half-second delay (a typical example of this is the time it takes us to become aware that we are touching a very hot surface. Our fingers move away before we know we are getting burnt).
The name we are given at birth, together with centuries of flawed comprehension of cerebral mechanisms and above all the faculty of memory all contribute to reinforce that impression and that sense of unity and individuality and that captivating cinematographic narrative that made us foolishly think for many years, that we are ghosts entrapped in a few pounds of meat rather than continuous succession of mental states and variously rearranged synapses. It is difficult to determine precisely which of these mental states can be defined as ‘conscious’. For the majority of the time our brain functions autonomously carrying out routine operations that do no require any decision on our behalf. Like any other living species we scratch, groom, chew on our fingernails, fiddle distractedly with whatever we have in our hands, we assume a thousand postures, forms, attitudes and we continuously make thousands of large and small movements without even realising it. Our bodies manage fine even without our help in deciding when the time has come to wake up from sleep, to get an erection, to pick our noses, when to smile, react to an offence, to glance away, to hit the breaks or accelerator of a car, to put food in your mouth, play video games and so on.
It’s all happening in our absence except for a few minor cases where a bit of our collaboration is required in order to take creative decisions which are open to more than one solution, such as choosing the most concise and efficient way to formulate the sentence I’m writing (at the same moment as my body is carrying out a series of routine functions that I would struggle to list: snapping and drumming my fingers, passing my hands through my hair, coughing, trying to ignore the noise of my room mate’s snoring) while I’m writing the mental organ in charge of the production of meaning suggests to my ‘conscious’ - through the interface of linguistic symbols – solutions to express the concepts that are relevant for the mental states that are configured internally.
The function ‘conscious’ merely has the task of blocking the unsuitable solutions and allowing the suitable ones to pass, on the grounds of what I perceive to be more coherent within the context of the reality show that the memory of my past mental states makes me experience.
In Gravita I chose to describe a dream because of all the cognitive processes that happen in our absence it is the most fascinating and mysterious, perhaps because of the way the brain works during sleep re-elaborating bits and pieces of experience, projecting them onto the cinema screen that during waking hours is reserved for the projections of input that reaches us through senses and memory. The fascinating fact about dreams is that they are allow you to live on that screen situations and emotions disconnected from reality, but with the same sense of reality probably due to the fact that the mental software managing the simulation of reality is the same that – when activated – manages the simulation of dreams. The inspiration for the song came to me when one day a friend of mine told me that if I hadn’t been so self-conscious I could have been able to hover and walk in the air without even realising it. This metaphor accurately describes the inhibiting power of consciousness, which often prevents us from expressing ourselves in a satisfactory way, erecting unnecessary barriers. In these cases our organism would not only be able to manage without us, but would probably be better off without us. Revisiting and expanding the idea of being able to defeat physical forces such as gravity during unconscious moments, I composed a song that describes the mind’s trajectory from the deepest phases of sleep, where the unconscious is the only voice, (speaking in an oneiric language endowed with an obscure syntax and logic), to the more agitated REM phase in which you are more involved, up to the final awakening, when sometimes it is possible to experience that sort of frustration linked to the sudden return to a reality dominated by inflexible physical limitations and choking mental inhibitions.