Patient Wolves Manifest
The zeitgeist prompts us to come together to reaffirm the obvious - and in fact - even the less obvious problems that have become more pressing and more obscure.
The primary sense of the mammal homo sapiens is the sense of sight. It seeks to represent what it sees in itself, in others and in the world around it since the Palaeolithic. Yet, this urgent need to communicate has declined in several ways.
One of these ways to communicate has been through photography, at least in the last two centuries. Photography is a kind of universally accepted form of language, a language that is understandable to all, but producible by anyone. We use this language, we produce it and we are nourished by it.
And we appreciate that so many people produce it and are being nourished by it.
We speak through this language and we wish to keep doing so. Photography is born of an encounter. A meeting between two or more people, but also a meeting between one person and a place, an object or something else entirely.
This gathering should be free of some form of enforcement or external conditions. This encounter should be based on the consent and desire to communicate - being able to freely communicate what we are experiencing; being able to document our encounters.
No one can be forced to produce or use all the results. But at the same time, people have the right, by mutual agreement, to meet and to freely produce. It is essential that all the results produced will be free from judgment.
We are talking about a kind of judgement close to universal ‘moral rules,’ a sort of single thought.
Patient Wolves shuns this ‘Single Thought’ ‘dogma’ and ‘truths’.
The intention of the author is inviolable for us. The relationships with the interlocutors is equal. The subject is free to communicate in the broadest sense of the word. The author talks about themselves through the subject and the subject talks about themselves through the author. Together, they talk about the human encounter, an event that comes in a specific time and place,
suspended. This event fascinates us and drags us out of the everyday. It is an event that makes us alive.
This is meant to be a cultural act. It is meant to be a response to the growing contemporary obscurantism - an increasingly threatening wave crushing upon all of us.
Society have provided us with social networks which serve as extensions of our communication skills. But they gradually turned this into a place ruled by ‘moral law’, so we rejected it instead.
It appears the message they wish to convey is: it is only possible to be worthy and dignified if you conform to their expectations. Because it is they who ultimately establish who you ‘need’ to be to be considered worthy and valid.
They impose this, such as through modern excommunication. We have two possible answers to this problem:
To succumb with fear to the consequences of rampant ‘right-thinking’ and maybe safeguard ourselves this way.
Or, to unbaptize ourselves from these imposed social constraints and make the taboo a natural language.
We can choose to self-excommunicate ourselves, to react against obscurantism, to ‘return to sender’ this soft Dark Ages. We can choose to be free to communicate and to meet people like us who wish to continue this dialogue without submitting passively to a single mindset.
There is a profound difference between letting people be free to do something or do nothing driven by their own critical thought, and forcing people to do what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’, dictated by a dogma.
Morality is not universal. This is because of culture, of the historic moment, because of where we are, where we are born and where we live.
Imposing a moral, self-proclaimed universal is a mere act of coercion. An act of violence.
In contrast, the primary sense of the mammal canis lupis is the sense of smell. It sees through nose more than its sight. It lives the reality in front of it,
free of morals, without trying to represent itself, but just living. It has developed a language to communicate with its pack, avoiding internal clashes. It possesses extreme patience. Contrary to popular thinking, the hierarchical structure of wolves is a matriarchal structure. The female wolf decides in an indirect way the activities of the wolf pack. The male wolf is synergistic with her. The safest place for a wolf pup is its mother’s mouth. Our term “in bocca al lupo” - “in the mouth of the wolf” - means this: “best of luck”.
And yet, we as a society have always identified evil in the wolf. Perhaps precisely because a patient and synergistic matriarchal structure is what they most hate.
Instead, we should value synergy, patience and communication. That is why we deeply love this metaphor of the wolf.
If you find yourself in what has been said here, you too could be similar...a patient wolf.