Night is the immediate form of experience that the living have of darkness and which, unlike other creatures, man has filled with a deep symbolic value to express the side of ancestral restlessness of existence. In contrast to the day, it is the metaphor of the Dionysian part of reality. The words of Genesis “God saw that the light was good and started to divide the light from the darkness” gave form in the conscience to the conflict between good and evil. It is also the expression of the indomitable part of the psyche that Freud described as the ungovernable antithesis of rationality that Jung called shadow.

But beside the Luciferian images, there are other symbolic features, no less powerful, where the night becomes space-time for the intimacy of thoughts and for the wonder of the cosmos. It is then possible to realize that night and day do not live only in acontrasting relationship but they weave a dialogue which, like a heartbeat, is the essence of life, generative movement and the principle of cooperation.

It is the poets of gestures and words who are able to break the narrowness of the obvious that remind us of what we have overlooked in order to exorcise the anxiety of darkness. For this we must be grateful to the alienating images such as the one that gives the title to the personal exhibition of Riccardo Biavati for Gulliverarte, Dove dorme la notte (Where the night sleeps). It breathes a sense of calm and attention, a sigh of ‘at last’ to dissolve tension and you can imagine that the darkness of night, instead of evoking obscurity with all its pitfalls, is magically transformed into a dark red dress that day wears to go out in the evening.

At night you feel and think differently, the wheezing of the day becomes breath and the gaze that slips into the shadow sees what is invisible in the dazzling light of day. The night, in the words of Borges, suppresses the idle details and reveals the essential. It is perhaps in this that its mystery consists: instead of preventing sight, it makes it more acute.

And the nocturnal raptors are mysterious, with an elegant posture and silent flight, wonderful creatures like the small owl that the ancient peoples have consecrated to Athena, the goddess of wisdom, ‘with its bright eyes’, able to penetrate the darkness. The owl has the task of translating into intelligible words for reasoning, the dark signs of a world in motion. The night, therefore, is a time of vigil for those poets of gestures and words, like Biavati, and for philosophers.

In common, they have the feeling of amazement, of thauma which is both wonder and respect, With different languages, both remind us that, no matter how deep sensitivity and love for knowledge are, much remains to be discovered and known. Leopardi, the poet-philosopher, par excellence, to a moon shining in the night sky, addresses his surrendered song: “How deep in thought you are, you perhaps mean to live on earth”.

These are words that invite us to give life to the nocturnal part that lives in us, poetic and reflective, to move us and to continue our search. 

MARTA MANCINI