Blinded by Silence - Laner Cassar

The image of the housebound “flaneur/stroller” cast adrift from his familiar surrounding after the Huassmannisation of Paris, is given fictional form in Xavier de Maistre,” Voyage Autour de ma Chambre/ Voyage Around My Room” (1794/1984) as well as in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel The image of the housebound “flaneur/stroller” cast adrift from his familiar surrounding after the Huassmannisation of Paris, is given fictional form in Xavier de Maistre,” Voyage Autour de ma Chambre/ Voyage Around My Room” (1794/1984) as well as in Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel “A Rebours/Against Nature” (1884) with its central protagonist Duc Jean Floressas des Esseintes. Moreover, the French poet Arthur Rimbaud coined the verb robinsonner (meaning to travel mentally) in recognition of this very activity, and it becomes very difficult to distinguish between the figure of the flaneuand the mental or stationary traveller. Both De Maistre’s imprisonment and Rimbaud’s exile to France have been crucial towards their great literary imaginative achievements.  The image of the housebound flaneu has made a come-back in the times of Covid-19, as we are locked from apocalyptic visions of ghost towns. The opportunity is ours to make the best of this confinement and as we are made to sit longer with ourselves. Confinement can be experienced as a prison or as an oasis of creativity. While harder for extroverts, everyone is being called to reflect as the world turns silent.

Images of pregnant silence emerge from several artists throughout the centuries. Hammersh?i’s paintings offer us a curious warmth. The spaces are uncluttered and eloquent; perhaps the meditative state of mind we all desire we could access, from time to time. Hammersh?i’s paintings propose a beauty approached through silence, whilst also suggestive of the vain hope of entering into that silence without disturbing it. Likewise, the art of Vermeer and more recently that of Hopper.

Today we are called to forgo our escapist fantasies of returning to a familiar normality as we binge on Netflix, social media and take away meals and to embrace a true imagination of our inner emotions, of staying with our emotions, rather than distracting and suppressing them, of welcoming whatever comes no matter how difficult and uncomfortable it may be. We are being invited to develop and nurture our own imagination, to learn to adapt and to adjust from our set routines, and to develop an inner psychological intimacy which helps us re-visit what is the purpose and meaning of our life as we find ourselves locked in our own Jungian Bollingen tower. We are being stopped to listen more to ourselves, to the aching needs of a suffering and unequal world and an abandoned climate which is showing us its teeth. We are called inward to travel mentally, to reverie and like Persephone to re-imagine and not to be seduced by our quick Demetrian exit strategies which will leave us in an even worse situation than the one we were already in. The choice of our inner and outer re-enchantment is ours.

# divedeepwithin project #Inner Psychological Intimacy in the times of COVID-19.