ALTAZOR PROJECT
Ars longa, vita brevis. Virgilio
The lyfe so short, the craft so long to lerne. Geoffrey Chaucer
The
dream travels over time like a parachute in the air
We
live in a world that is not very clear where it is going. Since
Dadaism, Surrealism and the hippie movement in the 20th century
brought us their playful outbrakes, as a libertarian possibility of
recovering our time and the preeminence of the moment, other ethics
and other epistemologies are being demanded from us, not to mention
the impact of the pandemic in this regard.
The ancient Greeks had
three gods of time: Cronus, who continually devours us; Aion, the god
of a life freed from Cronus, time of pleasure and desire when we want
the instant to last forever; and Kairós, fleeting, who determines
that time of the instant, the god of opportunity linked to art. In
order to temporarily detach ourselves from Cronus and be in Aion, we
need events that make the eternal appear, anti-entropically resisting
Cronus. If more than ever time appears to us today as shakespeareanly
torn, there are moments in which we dance in the uncertainty of a
beautiful contact with Kairós, with moments of a life that seems not
to die.
Borges also sang of the diversity and depth of any given
instant in which the elusive Kairós allows us to experience eternity
while it lasts, from Aión to Vinicius de Moraes. To achieve that
other relationship with time it is necessary to achieve another
relationship with the world and with death. If the lover is lost in
time, his or her will is the last step. Cronus is the opposite of
love and it is necessary to always be ready to resist that god and
his entropy. Evolution is that resistance. If fleeing Cronus is
ultimately impossible, it is not impossible to temporarily escape
from him and go through valuable experiences that disorient or
distract him.
In a world that has become a huge market of
invaluable offers, we desire everything, we want to experience
everything, and in that departure of desire we are often not aware of
the place and moment we inhabit and, therefore, we do not even live
it because our mind is somewhere else: behind, because one does not
understand what quickly happened, or forward, because one fears what
will quickly come. And suspecting that we do not control or know
ourselves, and unable to accept it, we often lose time, life and its
very meaning in the deserts of a cultivated anxiety.
That is
where Altazor, that inspiring poem by Vicente Huidobro from which we
take the name for this project, arrives to remind us of the parachute
journey of a being that breaks the ties of reality, transforming it.
He falls in a parachute and, meanwhile, writes his poem. Just like
Altazor, our goal is to remind ourselves of the possibility of a more
poetic life and help you make your own life a work of art, filling it
with meaning, with value, until our brief journey in this world
ends.
If we are falling, we can do it differently, poetically and
valuably. Altazor falls with his eyes open shaking nothingness,
bringing the climate of passion to its darkness, reminding us that we
are all sewn to the same star, by the same music, in the same sky. As
Altazor, we propose here to remind you of the possibility of more
elevated lives and invite you to fall from a higher place. His
parachute wants to become a pararise to flourish in the heights of
emptiness.
The participants of our activities, altazors of all
spaces and ages, are the hope. We just need to get them to
collaborate with each other.
The Altazor
Project
aims at helping us to live more poetic lives and invites us to add
value to our lives, to fall poetically into other spaces, with other
conversations, with other words, while we build meaning.
Where
and with whom do we do it?
We will do it in a special place:
planet Earth. The center will be everywhere and nowhere. Life is fall
and, not to forget, movement. We will do it with altazors from all
over the planet.
How
will we do it?
The Altazor Project is proposed as a
warm environment to meet for reflection, research and production on
what makes our lives more meaningful in the world. In this search we
will promote coordination between people and communities around the
planet.
Training, research and personal and
institutional assistance will be central objectives of the
Altazor Project. If the open possibility of encountering a horizon of
hope continues to exist in the world, it is good to remember what
we live for and the urgency of an international movement in this
sense.
Such values of poetic significance must be exercised on
our knowledge and practices, and work with at least three dimensions
of values closely articulated with each other: a sensitive
dimension, a cognitive dimension and a practical
dimension, in order to enhance throughout our lives a culture that is
not indifferent, a culture that is capable of knowing what it is
talking about (hence also the need for intercultural competencies),
and a culture committed to action on those things to which it is
sensitive and knows.
Sensitivity is an essential component
of moral life: there is no moral conscience that is not moved or
turned enthusiastic or indignant. But this sensitivity must be
educated and call for reflection on those emotions and feelings, the
elucidation of their motives, their identification, their putting
into words and their discussion. The formation of moral judgment must
allow us to understand and discuss the moral choices that each
person encounters in their lives.
It is at least partially the
result of being taught the different forms of moral reasoning, the
outcome of being put in a position to argue and deliberate about the
complexity of these problems and to justify our moral choices. But
the development of moral judgment appeals in a privileged way to the
capacities for analysis, discussion, exchange, and confrontation of
different points of view in problematic situations. And it demands a
capacity for attention, particularly to the work of language
in all written and oral expressions. However, we are carrying out
little of all this in our education and in our cultural and political
life, in which those who do not even know how to express themselves
orally or in writing are no exception. A world that cannot even
express itself adequately and that mutilates its languages, a culture
that does not know what it is talking about, is a guarantee of
deterioration.
We will be creating cognitive conflicts, breaking
conceptual schemes and sowing concerns, epistemological doubts and
intellectual curiosity.
In order to do this, we will work on the
Altazor Project with literary and artistic expressions, we
will remember and study some great names of the artistic and
intellectual lives and moral commitment through reading, writing and
conversation policies. It is urgent to learn have to have better
conversations as if we were dancing, recovering the magic of words
and the art of listening.
Actors to get
involved
International cooperation agencies and foundations;
cultural, educational and scientific institutions; companies and
research centers, media, theaters, museums, music festivals and
citizens in general.
Altazor Project
Stations
Borges: The value of languages, poetic life, writing
and reading
Vinicius: Love as a value and the sentimental
education
Chaplin: Humor as a value in social life
Orpheus: The
value of music and the arts of listening. The value of song and
dance.
Pessoa: The journey and self-knowledge as value
Darwin:
The value of our biology and the conversation with other
species
Russell: The value of thought
Camus: The value of
responsibility
Cervantes: The value of ambiguity
Sagan:
Curiosity as a value
Da Vinci: Polymathy as a value
Hoganbiiki:
The value of empathy
Rimbaud: The value of enthusiasm
Kafka:
The value of waiting and the unexpected
Socrates: The values of
dialogue and humility
Confucius: The value of honesty
Martin
Luther King: Equality as a value
Simone Weil: Justice as a
value
Hannah Arendt: Freedom as a value
Gandhi: Peace as a
value
Seminars (online or in-person)
Permanent: “Value, poetic life and meaning”
Occasional: “Rhetoric and meaning”, “The poetic sense of tango”
Play: “Mr.
Altazor”
Institutional and personal consulting
services
Write to alfajoraltazor@gmail.com
Digital
instruments
Website, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Blog,
email, newsletter, YouTube channel.
For
a poetic citizenship
What we will
call “poetic citizenship” implies an ability to transform
ourselves that we tend to forget. It is built from its exercise, it
implies a “power to make” in the contextual conditions in which
we ourselves are immersed, within the framework of our
relationships, our social capital, our values and our participation
in the construction of our home, city, country, planet: the place
where we are, from our own language to our imagination. There are
many common cultural practices in life from which we become citizens
and which require a critical attitude. Multiple discourses pass
through us, which is why it is important to generate an
anti-disciplinary space for different dialogues, for the construction
of a poetic consciousness of one's own citizenship and its
labyrinths, which also, in the case of today's teenagers and young
people, means capturing the values that are displayed in their unique
ways of relating in the attempt to achieve significance, a poetic
value for their lives. It is about, as the avant-gardes
aimed at, making of one's life a work
of art or, in a nostalgic epic variant, to become the heroes of our
own lives. We can do something more with them. Because there is
another voice within us beyond “the sound and the fury” that
Faulkner portrayed. Tomorrow burns us and we find ourselves caged in
old institutions. Values, then, are the support of a life that moves
us to another place, that excites us, that generates meaning for us.
We
are imagination, desire and memory, tears in the face of beauty,
laughter facing nothingness itself, the courage of commitment and the
ability to dream of penetrating reality. If we are going to die, let
us leave poetic moments, valuable facts. Let's be what we are going
to leave.
We need to have new meanings for the words and voices
of the world. If we can only fall, let us do so with courage and
values, in a poetic parachute, enriching the instant in which we are
in this world.
The
Altazor
Project
will then propose an exercise in exploration and revelation of
ourselves, putting the different spheres of the universe in concert.
Carried away by enthusiasm, the idea is that something gets shaken
and new possibilities for perception are created, leaving ourselves
towards a beyond, to other lands, other skies, other truths that are
found in the wind and in the stars, in other species, in what flees
or sings, in an attempt to translate the beautiful or sublime through
a sacred rhythm.
The Altazor
Project
thus aims at bringing together the fragments of a broken world and
invite us on a journey through landscapes, people and events full of
value, expressing the desire for a different reality. Important
values have lived a clandestine and diminished life in a Cartesian
world. Their exile is more terrifying every day. There is nostalgia
in them in a world that has lost its meaning and wanders without
direction. But the Altazor
Project
will not seek to refer to reality, it hopes to recreate it, penetrate
it, and work in the area of the sacred, returning to water the world
of dreams.
Values are present in
us as a yearning for what we desire: another body next to ours,
another being, another life. Beyond, outside of ourselves, among the
trembling trees, something sings in an instant of heroism in which
time stops flowing, like when we are paralyzed in front of a
beautiful smile that makes us reborn.
Founding the Altazor
Project these days is a provocation, a challenge to the world, an
activity that can be harmless or dangerous. For many, perhaps today
values do not enlighten them, much less entertain them, in times when
everything seems to have to be entertainment and value seems to have
no value. Despite this, the Altazor Project comes to challenge
us with the courage that the hour requires. If what happens will not
be real for many as it cannot be easily reduced to a commodity, for
others this fantastic dimension will become a reality of greater
value. For those who feel mutilated in their existence, exiled in
their kingdom, the Altazor Project comes to give them
shelter.
The romantics, but also the surrealists, sought to
transform life and operate a revolution by inviting us to make of our
own lives a work of art. If meaning has stopped illuminating the
world, we turn around an absence. And in that rotation the Altazor
Project will try to shed flickering lights.
While we face,
isolated, the future, we share a feeling of uncertainty with all
human beings in a present of a fixed, floating and endless zoom, and
we feel that a shapeless future asks for values so that we do not
give up so easily in the face of the night of time and of the times,
a question about meaning, a search that allows us to reunite what has
been separated: us.
In our days, a disenchanted and painful world
of multitudes undergoing psychotherapies in which they learn to
preserve themselves from others, to fulfill themselves personally
rather than to commit themselves to a group or social institution,
has mortally threatened any possibility for the resurrection of a
convivial “us”. We must therefore establish new formats to
coexist and live with others when we are most educated for life and
happiness without the other.
Day
by day we struggle to survive alienated within an anomic society
without diminishing the customary humiliations we suffer. Our society
has long entered a period of instability and threat but since we
cannot bear too much reality, we flee towards the closest and most
legitimized fictions. Without a doubt, the fiction of the “I” and
its power is not the least among them.
Like never before, many
people find themselves alone, isolated, even by their own choice,
which not only does not contribute but collaborates with the picture.
Loneliness in times of individualistic utopias is one of the great
social problems of our time. Emile Durkheim already pointed out in
the 19th century that some of the serious social problems we suffer
were due to the deterioration of group life. The French philosophers,
he claimed, had exalted a “science of the self” rather than a
philosophy of the social man, of the “us.” Without authority,
without effective moral or legal controls, only an overflow of
selfishness would have unfolded since then. Today we see how cultural
transformations have weakened an image of the “us” that allows us
to establish bonds of trust and social cooperation, and we see even
day after day the difficulty of politics in generating shared
meanings in that sense.
These are times when some of the most
precious aspects of the human condition are at risk, announcing an
inhospitable landscape. That's why it's so hard to feel at home. And
if we continue to be encouraged - as is the case - to empower
ourselves individually and increase our personal capacity for
influence as a privileged way of building our identity, belittling
our condition and potential as social beings, it will not be possible
to live without fear and at peace with ourselves and with the
rest.
In a world in which interest had become the god of humanity,
demanding the sacrifice of morality, it was the responsibility of the
sociologist - according to Durkheim - to study how the sanctification
of these private interests was accompanied by a degradation of public
morality. When only individual appetites remained, we would be faced
with a society that would inevitably bring a high proportion of
crimes and suicides due to its bourgeois search for “happiness.”
Violent deaths were inevitable in a sickly acquisitive society
tainted with individualism.
About the importance
of this initiative and the pandemic
We need to formulate the
value bases of a new world, of being, for the first time in history,
citizens of the world. With the pandemic, the era of universality and
planetary sentiment began. It is the opportunity for a new
cosmopolitanism to begin. Promoting values in this sense should not
only not be discarded as an approach to public policies but we
consider it essential. There is no prospect of overcoming the
weakness of the planet without encouraging the emergence of
socio-evaluative forces with sufficient power to go in this direction
and the conviction that only by generating solid alliances of poetic
significance will it be possible to generate sufficient power to
overcome social anomie.
From a culture of simulation to a culture
of meaning and value, that would be the path to follow. And on that
path, the Altazor Project invites you to re-enter history when
it seems as if we could no longer give, as if we were exhausted, as
if everything were a step into the abyss. Parachute travel requires
us to live as if the ideal were a reality. Because a world without a
moral course and without cultivating values of poetic significance is
the best guarantee for its destruction.
The narrative of our
brains is incessantly searching for and creating meaning. In addition
to being captives of old institutions, we are in some way prisoners
of the cultural trace stored in them and we need to create another
trace, leave another trace. Questions about truth, the beautiful and
the good are entangled in our neural circuits and have to do with
their history. Moral intuitions are already there but learning
modifies the synaptic connections between neurons and their
intensity. And, contrary to what prejudice indicates, and beyond
cultural prisons, neurobiology reveals that our brain is
fundamentally what we make of it. We are entering an era in which the
molecular biology of cognition and emotions can pave the way to
improve human communication in times when everything is changing
rapidly. And more than ever we need beings who try higher forms of
life. Our history is full of examples of those who felt foreign to
their land, idealists that were uncomfortable in the face of cynicism
and resentment. The value of the example is fundamental. There will
be no other world if we do not manage to enrich our vision, we
marginalize those who promote it and we unhealthily conform to those
who servilely flatter and mistreat us, pay us and charge us, seduce
us and reject us, accommodate us and make us uncomfortable, in times
of moral harassment.
We live in a time of great corruption in
political life and cynicism towards ethical idealism is an
understandable reaction to the tragic way in which ideals were
destroyed by many political leaders. But if Aristotle was right
stating that we become virtuous by practicing virtue, we need
societies in which people are encouraged to act virtuously. Unlike
the Hobessian view in which violence becomes a culture on which
identities are built, whose explanation is articulated on the
resource to conflict as the only origin and constant, we need to
create a cooperative social scenario with emphasis on empathy as a
driving force of individual action. A careful attitude, with
its limitations and weaknesses, can therefore be the path to take
responsibility for another way of being in the world that helps us
see and hear each other as part of a shared identity, and to envision
other possibilities for our planet.
We face the beautiful
challenge of pulling ourselves together and encouraging virtuous
behavior. And in order to do that we then look for what Bateson
called the pattern that connects the world. We are fiercely
cosmopolitan. Kant thought that we were going to be condemned to a
solidarity of destinies and the pandemic was no poor sign in this
regard. Very bad things can have very good consequences and, who
knows, if we do something more and differently, the world could
become a more dignified and beautiful parachute journey.
Funding
sources
Annual membership: allows access to all activities,
newsletter and full connection with all members. Payment by
CBU/Mercado Pago/Paypal
Individual registrations for courses,
classes, conferences, online and in-person activities
National and
international research grants
Institutional and personal
consulting and assistance services
Contributions from foundations
and international cooperation agencies
Marketing of the Altazor
alfajor (“caramel
cookie”) and the Altazor
boardgame
Income
from merchandising.
Income from advertising, sponsorships,
foundations, patrons.
Equipment
Multi-anti-disciplinary
and multi-age, willing to change the way we think/design the world.
This requires philopolymaths who fulfill the following
functions:
Director, Assistants, Social Media Manager, Flights
Monger, Skydiver, Administrator and Accounting Advisor, Head of
Advertising, Web Designer, Merchandiser, Legal Advisor, Alfajores
Manufacturer (for the “Altazor” caramel cookie that will come
with a poetic line inside), Main Altazores (unpaid supervised
volunteering - coordinates and organizes local activities for all
altazors: Altazor Mayor of Berlin, Altazor Mayor of San Pablo, etc.
They must organize a minimum of one activity per month), Altazores
(annual membership payment) and Colibríes (free basic members, with
limited access to certain events and basic information. They can pay
for the rest of the activities, with limited connection and without
newsletter/magazine “The polymath”)
