Dear Director, how long does the feeling of horror last? If yesterday a few hours after the disclosure, there were opinion leaders of various kinds who were divided on the photos of civilians who died in Ukraine, I asked myself: how long does the horror last? And does anyone still really feel it? Or does it evaporate? Maybe it happens because, as Marlon Brando (Commander Kurtz) said in Apocalypse Now, horror you have to befriend or else it is the worst of enemies? Is there no escape from this, which has been repeated in so many places in recent years? Is there no escape from the horror and its futility?
Tormenting questions. But in fact, it would be terrible if even this horror tormented us a little and that was it and it became only matter on the part of one or the other to continue the dead chatter, the empty analyzes, the playing of the parts. Either the horror becomes my moral problem, or, as Fr. Giussani sensed in the face of similar images, it does not last and desolately serves no purpose. The horror is felt, but it is as if it did not graft itself in us, if it did not become fuel in the engine of our freedom. In that freedom which alone, if set in motion, is a true sign of life, as opposed to death chatter. Freedom which by its nature is not having people and material goods available, but above all it is the energy that makes you available to others, to life, to social weaving. And therefore it is she, the true freedom, the opposite and not the reason for the war, the abuse of power, the bias. If we let this horror open the way to our freedom, and not only to opinions, if in short, if we made of that indignation not an outward feeling that can even be flaunted as a weapon, but our moral problem, a problem of our freedom, here now , today and tomorrow, then, we would really feel all the tears and swords of horror in front of these bodies and whenever we are not available, that is free, in the name of an interest, a faction. And instead how much dead stuff poured on these poor dead!
Pasolini, much celebrated this year by those he could not bear, identified abstraction as an evil of our age. Abstraction is the disease that eliminates the weight of things, makes them intangible. It is the disease of the mind that presumes to fix the world and its roughness with some slogan or with “good feelings”. This force of abstraction has worked powerfully over these decades. He subtracted substance from what we still call reality, with a word that however seems reduced to a conflict of interpretations. But those poor dead, God bless them, they are there. Real. They accuse their killers. But that’s not enough. They call us by name.