Moments of intuition
I’m Giancarlo Oancia: a theoretical physicist, a disillusioned dreamer and a keen photographer. I believe in the power of stories, and I look for them constantly. This space reflects my inner world, and as such it has neither order nor purpose.
I was certain that physics could offer an objective, definitive perspective on reality. But I was probably wrong. Science, like art, is only a reflection of the insatiable, rambling but exhilarating human search.
I am my ideas.
I cannot change; I can only be reborn.
For a time gone by, that cannot come back.
For a place lost, that you cannot find again.
For a feeling once strong, that you cannot remember.
More than a century has passed. But we are still here. Our dreams, still the same. Our way of looking at the world, fundamentally identical.
It is the dream that binds us.
Without someone to listen to you, you have never spoken.
Without your ideas being considered, you have never thought.
Without a voice to listen to, you are no longer able to hear.
Solitude erodes you slowly, while slowly you go unnoticed. Existence fades into presence. Presence is gradually ignored, and then forgotten.
You are no more.
I rise again from the rubble, but what has become of me?
My identity has shattered.
Perhaps I cannot get my being back. Perhaps I can only be reborn.
It is in that thread suspended between Heaven and Earth that thoughts live.
We hope that there is something greater.
We hope because something incorruptible, perfect, exists.
It is a God, a Reason, a Symmetry.
It doesn't matter. It is there.
The non-places of adolescence have a sweet taste.
Time had a different value. It wasn't a resource. We didn't even think about it.
A full day, and it was already dark. And we could start over, lightly, because nothing tormented us.
We live on the run.
We chase ambitions. We plan the future without living the present. We focus on a goal and stop seeing everything else.
But meanwhile the world keeps becoming, people pass by, and chances don't come round again
We are running from ourselves, and so we are fleeting.
Forgotten people in a blanket of fog.
They come back in dreams, bringing unease.
If everyone leaves, what is left of me?
A fleeting presence. A companion for an instant? Or just a person, who crosses my path now, and in a moment no longer?
Stimuli pass before us so quickly that perhaps we don't even notice.
So I wonder where the meaning of things lies: in greatness? In change?
I don't think so. Perhaps only in the courage to live life, in the courage to face that change, in the first instance.
And perhaps, perhaps true greatness lies in the relations between things, not in the things themselves. It isn't intrinsic; it comes only second to an intuition, a realisation.
But among these thoughts, which will perhaps pass, transient, one impression remains, and stays with me: the energy, your energy, the enthusiasm, your enthusiasm.
This meeting of ours is transient too, but an idea, an intuition — that stays alive, forever.
For a long time I have wondered whether science and art might have something in common.
I never understood what pushed me to think about it, nor the sense of that pull, nor the bitterness that came from the missing answer. And yet, as a child I would lie on the damp grass and watch the vault of the sky with innocent eyes. Wonder, fear, satisfaction, dismay. I couldn't look away, and I felt lost; I felt myself falling into the void even though I lay still on perfectly flat ground; I couldn't focus my thoughts even though nothing outside was interfering. And yet, perhaps the whole Universe was interfering. In the precise instant when I let myself get lost in this process and stopped insisting on controlling it, I felt I had understood something.
As if the whole Universe had gathered into a single instant of life.
Art I have never fully understood. Living as individuals, how can we presume to understand what someone else meant? Empathy brings us closer, but it doesn't let us overlap. It is too ambitious a claim, and perhaps a foolish one. And yet, when something strikes me, it goes all the way through. I am convinced that I live emotions that are primordial, fundamental, innate. Our perception changes over the course of history. The same work will surely be perceived differently in different contexts. But something is common to every context in every age, and it lies in that feeling you have, petrified, standing before a work.
As if the whole of Humanity had gathered into a single instant of life.
Science held these impressions together and gave them a name: intuition. I have come to understand that the scientific process is not a road towards objective, definitive knowledge. We describe the World through our senses and our instruments, and so every theory is only the reflection of a personal perception. At the end of the run there is no final truth left, but a sequence of intuitions. Instants, with no precise place in time, in which we picture the abstract. Blurred moments in which we understand.
With intuition we are able to live a thousand worlds in a single instant of life.
And perhaps this is the key to understanding the deep bond between art and science. It is not something external and unchanging; it is our own inner nature. Our capacity to intuit. And by intuiting, to understand. This process has neither origin nor end. Inexorably it repeats, and leaves us confused but struck.
In the end, what is it that we want to understand?
We are driven to search, unstoppably. It is a need.
The wonder is in finding, without knowing what we were looking for.
And in searching, we dig inside ourselves.
I watch myself from outside, and watching myself I hate myself.
I am still on the second floor, and I no longer have the courage to go down. I'm afraid of what I might find.
I stay there, unchanging.