RECANATI – “Grumo di donna” arrives at the Piccola Libreria delle Marche in Recanati on Wednesday 19 June at 6pm, presentation of the book (Maurizio Vitri Editore), Recommendation Award at the International City of Sarzana Competition, by Francesca Francinella; criminologist Margherita Carlini talks with the author. Free admission.
How can a life be said to be fulfilled? Finished? Completed? We are each inside our own personal cave. Sitting in front of shadows that we believe to be reality. Conditioned, we believe we are free, animals condemned to the finite, projected to the infinite. Messianic aporia which, those who have the grace to experience it, whether pernicious, nagging or mellifluous, do not overlook. “Woman’s Lump” is the story of this aporia. Of an unconscious feeling experienced deeply; a search for Happiness through the ferocious, admittedly impossible, attempt to achieve adherence between self-awareness and one’s own fulfillment. The human being, to draw on Frankl, seeks the Meaning, the meaning which alone guarantees the overcoming of one’s personal concentration camp. In the unfolding of her life, this woman, like many others, witnesses a materialization of the incurable contradiction between wanting to be free and knowing that one is perpetually conditioned even in that same will. Self-awareness expands nature, the physis that the human being can experience and expands it fearfully. In the conversation with ourselves we are able to feel, objectifying it, the human nature imbued with mortality… wonderful illusion of feeding ourselves in such privilege as if it guaranteed an evolutionary leap and made us Lords. But this woman gives up on deceiving herself as a master. In the constant effort to draw on the courage of awareness and the simultaneous incessant temptation of fearfulness, of ignoring, she materializes the Lump, a concrete synthesis of the aporia in which we are all born, in which we all breathe.
The lump is existential malaise in a pill. Resistant to any medicalization, anxiety cannot be treated, it cannot be cured; it is cultivated, understood, accepted or ignored. This woman discovers herself incapable of either path and, unexpectedly, produces a harsh summary of anxiety that cracks the glass of everyday life. The awareness of becoming is a guarantee of melancholy understood here, with Borgna, as a “painful human experience that borders on the unspeakable: there are not many words that can express the elusive and mysterious sense of what happens in it… in it we grasp the ambiguities and twilight lights of the human condition distracted from the unproblematic nature of everyday life and confronted with the ultimate questions of existence: anguish and desperation, the body and the silence of the body, the word and the absence of the word, time and space, death and dying, the presence and absence of God.” Here then is that restlessness does not translate life as in poetry, it does not lead to illness as in psychiatry, it does not outline art or stage an otherworldly religion. In the ordinariness of this woman’s life, in her sort of social normopathy, the evil of living does not spread but is concentrated. An existence in the balance, a conscience poised on a fixed point of uneasiness. Will it be possible to dissolve it? And how? The only certainty that this life passes down to us is the ferocious need to know ourselves as human beings, to ask ourselves, to know ourselves; equipped with the language of a thought which in the “meta” dimension only allows us to be aware of our own conditioning. The path left by Spinoza in the gloss of his “Ethics” shows us: the ignorant, in addition to being disturbed in many ways by external causes and never being in possession of true tranquility of mind, also lives almost unaware of himself and of God and things and as soon as he ceases to suffer, he also ceases to be. On the contrary, the wise man, since he is considered as such, is hardly disturbed in his soul; but he is aware of himself and of God and of things with a certain eternal necessity, and never ceases to be; but he is always in possession of tranquility of mind. The way I have shown to lead to this, although it appears very difficult, can nevertheless be found. And on the other hand it must be difficult, which is found so rarely. How could it happen, in fact, that, if salvation was within reach and could be found without great effort, it was overlooked by almost everyone? But all excellent things are as difficult as they are rare.” Well this woman becomes an emblem of the many human lives left unfinished, abortions along the way. She is neither wise nor ignorant. Aware and lost.
Francesca Francinella was born in Recanati in 1972, she graduated with honors in Philosophy at the University of Macerata with a thesis on Groddeck, visionary forerunner of Psychosomatics. She obtained a master’s degree in “Counseling and coaching skills. Her training and experiential path of effective communication in professional and organizational contexts” at the University of Urbino and she graduated in “Practical Philosopher” at the Parresia Biennial School accredited by Aicofi (Italian Association of Philosophical Consultancy). You currently practice as a Philosophical Consultant. You have always been interested in writing. “Grumo di donna” is her work which earned her the Report Award at the Città di Sarzana International Competition 2023.
Psychologist, psychotherapist and forensic criminologist, Margherita Carlini was part, as an expert, of the “Cold Case” team within the Rome Police Headquarters. Since 2008 you have been dealing with male violence against women, both as a psychologist at the Ancona Cav and training manager, and as manager of a local help desk and an anti-stalking help desk. Trainer at national level of operators who in various capacities interface with women victims of violence (FFOO, social workers, health workers, psychologists, lawyers, magistrates), she is an expert in risk assessment and structuring of protection plans for women and minor victims of domestic violence.
