Altazor Project

 

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”)