MY MEETING / 1

A Place It Takes You to in Yourself
The Irish journalist explains why the Meeting never ceases to attract him, and tells how this year’s experience–as curator of an exhibit on rock ‘n’ roll– was “inhabited by something....”

“The infinite” is, of course, another way of saying “God”–a manner of speaking that seeks to avoid shortcuts, and insists on placing everything, including God, into the realm of reason.
But it is more than this (if anything can be said to be more than this, which perhaps is not possible). “The infinite” is also a material concept, even a positivistic one. It belongs also to the realm of our everyday attempts to summon up things and concepts that we have no hope of understanding but that, nevertheless, we must include in our efforts at calculating the measure of ourselves in reality.

The infinite and my mother. Fr. Giussani taught us not to separate these two ways of understanding reality, but to place them in a continuum, noting the gap between. Sometimes, in ways that can seem–depending on your disposition, mood, the quality of the light–to derive from metaphysics or mechanics, it appears that he wanted to help us “explain” things better, but also to see the extent to which our attempts at explanation were destined to fail. Between the two approaches to the idea of infinity, there opened up a stretch of space, which seemed somehow more measureable for being observed, even if it wasn’t. Thus, we were enabled to look more squarely at the Mystery, as though it had at least–at last–been located for us to look at. And in this space we saw a version of ourselves.This is one of the things the Meeting always does for me: it subjects me to a process whereby everything is rendered amenable to what seems to be a singular form of reasoning. In the juxtapositioning of ostensibly incongruous elements, an unexpected course is set in motion. And, strangely, this remains “unexpected,” no matter how many times you experience it. You can hope it is going to happen, you can speculate as to whether it is going to happen again, but you cannot deliver it to yourself. It “happens” to you, and becomes a happening that takes you over in a way that nothing else can. It changes you–from the way you have been fashioned in everyday culture–and in doing so always takes you by surprise, making visible the possibility of a regeneration of the subject, which, rediscovering everything, is bowled over as if for the first time. This, really, is the seductiveness of the Meeting–not its constituent elements but the unfamiliar yet recognizable place it takes you to in yourself. The title of the Meeting always conveys this, each year taking a different angle on the same theme. At the start of the Meeting, the title always appears to be an interesting abstraction but, by the end, it has become axiomatic because of the change that has occurred. Many things have been “explained” and yet nothing has been resolved.  This year’s title, “By Nature, Man is Relation to the Infinite,” was no exception. We did not come to “understand” infinity any better, but became more at home in it, and more certain that it was our home.
Coloring in the space between the demonstrably finite and theological parts of the great human questions, I have decided, is yet another way of stating Giussani’s mission. Hence, Dostoevsky, and the wonderful exhibition that delved into the use of icons and symbols in his works, drawing our attention to the vastness of his vision as a witness to the Mystery. Here we saw that art is really the exercising of the relationship with the infinite, the attempt to “fill in” that space between what man “knows” and what he feels his purpose to be–the work of wondering. I had a special reason to contemplate these aspects this year, because my mother had become very ill at the end of July and, for a time, it seemed that I might not be able to travel to Rimini at all. This rendered the questions more urgent, making infinity more tangible as a place that it is possible to reach and a journey it is possible to make. The experience of the Meeting had begun for me somewhat earlier this year, because of my involvement as curator in the exhibition, “3 Chords and a Longing for the Truth–Rock ‘n’ Roll as a Quest for Infinity.” The process of putting the exhibition together had been a strange, uplifting, but sometimes stressful experience. From the beginning of this adventure, right to the moment I left the Meeting midway through, I was conscious, in particular, of the presence of one particular “ghost”: that of Vaclav Havel, the writer and former Czech president who died late last year. As a great lover of rock ‘n’ roll, he would have understood the purpose of our exhibition perhaps more clearly than we did.

Havel’s collage. Several times previously, with friends who were intimately involved in the organization of the Meeting, I had explored the possibility of bringing Havel to the Meeting, but several times it had proved impossible. Now, as we went about crystallizing the idea of the exhibition, he seemed to be present in a strange and unexpected way. He was to feature in the exhibition, as the instrument of the “Velvet Revolution” that could be traced back to the 1970s imprisonment of the Czech rock band The Plastic People of the Universe. But, more crucially, the “method” of the exhibition was one I had “learned” in part from the structure of his final book, To the Castle and Back, a striking mixture of interview material done in collaboration with a journalist, memos from President Havel to his officials, and linking passages written specifically for the book. Havel explained: “One of the ways to touch on the hidden fabric of life is the collage, the combining of things that, on the surface, are unrelated, in such a way that they ultimately tell us more about the connections between them and their real meaning than any mechanical chronology could, or any other ordering principle that suppresses accident.”
This became our “method” in a project that seemed to offer limitless material and a myriad of contradictions. Much of the “content” of our exhibition resided not so much in the contents themselves as in the life they acquired together. (This is, of course, the “method” of the Meeting as well.)
As in everything, we had to begin the preparation of our exhibition in the finite, bringing together snatches of insight and half-understanding in the hope that, in their proximity, an ignition of sorts might occur. What we sought was not to “say” something but to create a “happening” to enable others to hear something we could not say. For this, something else needed to manifest itself, and this we had no control over. All we could do was place the elements that suggested themselves alongside one another. In the end, the “something else” arrived to inhabit the space of the exhibition. I know this because people told me they had encountered something there, but also because, upon arriving the day before the start of the Meeting, I too encountered something that I had not been aware of generating. I too was surprised by what we had been preparing.
So, the infinite is not merely a theory: you have to live it, because this is where true life is. Giussani’s challenge, as expressed in the title of the Meeting, is something to be put to the test, so as to judge if it is really true or just something that sounds interesting. I thought of Havel also during the exhibit’s keynote speech, when Javier Prades quoted the Spanish sculptor Eduardo Chillida: “The horizon is the homeland of all men.” The idea that the horizon is our homeland becomes infinitely powerful in a culture that pretends the horizon is simply a line that puts shape on what we have limited ourselves to inhabiting. Chillida’s thought draws us to that line, but still places a boundary on us, acknowledging a “spiritual” reality but not yet a transcendent one. Giussani whispers that the horizon can be a limit or a threshold and invites us to stretch our gazes across it. In the stretching forward, we glimpse in ourselves what life is.