LUIGI CASSINELLI DOCUMENTARIAN
SHOT ON FILM, NO RETOUCHING, NO AI
Polyphemus' monstrous selfishness is innate. Empathy has been blinded since birth because the creature only sees through one eye. Homer's monster has been designed to perform the ultimate fanatic.
In the quest for truth, the epic duel between Odysseus and Polyphemus speaks to me as the human struggle between freedom and fanaticism. Odysseus desires to know and seeks to learn from his wrongs. Polyphemus' nature is destructive; the creature lives to hurt and tear apart to feed his obsession. He doesn't question the rights and wrongs of his actions, for he follows the cult of narcissistic absolute power: 'I hurt, therefore I am.'
My assessment is that we all face choices at each breath. If we choose fanaticism, we flip into monsters in a blink. By refusing one eye, we relinquish perspective, depth, right and left views. It all starts when our heart falls for egotism and narcissism. In that space, we become indifferent to the search for truth and we fabricate truth. We build fables, fantasies, online virtual 'relationships,' theories, plots, ideologies, and we treat them as real. On that path, while facing reality we only see what we want to see; we let our mind become prisoner of obsessions and feel only what is convenient and serves the current one. Cowardly, we disregard what we actually do and our focus is for our intentions only.
In and out of photography, I also learned that earning truth means facing and connecting to the whole orchestra of sorrow woven in the human condition. Stress, betrayal, disappointment, and grief are in permanent union with beauty, bliss, freedom, and the inestimable feeling of being alive. I won't fully earn truth without accepting how life unfolds. This is why I see truth as a practice, rather than a judgment. When I ignored empathy and compassion, I chose to close one eye and built my own no way out cave. I can only blame myself, not the gods. I value my ur-photographs precisely because they are permanent fossils of the history I experienced. They help me to ground my mind with my choices, rather than my interpretations.
Facing choices, at times I had the courage to practice honesty. I truly felt how nothing is better than being yourself. Other times, I mingled with denial. Why? I am a human, a living struggle of contradictions, and in the name of justice I did the unjust. I feared fear, forgetful of how important fear is. Denial is the enemy hiding in the cave. Denial froze the continuity of my quest, not fear. When courage and grit revive, I find again the enduring path, my persistent search for truth.
In 2022, back to New York City, I witness this grand stage. I see it ready for the play 'The Greatest Narcissus.'
I wonder about the truth endured in and out the cells of these giants towers. The stark contrast between swank wealth and the despair I see all around demands questioning. There are thinkers who blame 'The System,' the current Babel engineered by master manipulators. Usually, it turns out these thinkers advertise other versions of the system; the newest vogue is the illusion of achieving justice with new pronouns and neo-Jacobins. Other thinkers see humans as psychological machines in constant need of guidance. They usually offer practices restraining their patients from 'unhealthy' patterns. The terms 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' are still under investigation. In the meantime, the practice of consumerism is thriving.
My instinct points to what actually drives our hearts. If all we practice is the experience of the selfie, then no wonder the greatest narcissists are kings. The ones who play the role of 'master manipulators' have a point: absolute authority is always demanded, never imposed. Livestock will always graze on a blend of cowardice and illusion of control. Fact is that we all own a relevant share of responsibility for our condition. We have a choice. We can go to the mall and buy the web of deceits, or not. We can be servants, rejoicing in pleasing egotism, or not. We can play with marketing's toys, or not. Surely, accusing someone of manipulative conduct while enjoying the products of his or her manipulation is blunt hypocrisy.
The backstage reveals that we all have vulnerabilities; the grander show we display, the deeper they are. Nothing is more appalling to megalomaniacs 'master manipulators' than to simply unveil their actual minuscule prominence. Without attention, their egos deflate fast. We can choose to abandon them in their empty castles. We know how to live along with suffering. They don’t; they’ll go mad.
While drafting this comment to my photograph, I find out Arthur Miller was born on this day, in 1915. Thank you for your wisdom, Arthur Miller.
New York, October 17, 2022.
‘My argument with so much of psychoanalysis is the preconception that suffering is a mistake, or a sign of weakness, or a sign even of illness, when in fact possibly the greatest truths we know have come out of people's suffering; that the problem is not to undo suffering or to wipe it off the face of the earth but to make it inform our lives, instead of trying to cure ourselves of it constantly and avoid it, and avoid anything but that lobotomized sense of what they call "happiness." There's too much of an attempt, it seems to me, to think in terms of controlling Man, rather than freeing him. Of defining him rather than letting him go. It's part of the whole ideology of this age, which is power-mad.’
Arthur Miller, 1963 interview, as used in The Century of the Self (2002).