…it is a question of survival
in the endless seas
of our consciousness
to raise up islands
from the wreckage of our thoughts –
in connection,
but in resistance too.
The islands within us is a metaphor for those territories of the spirit that every person seeks and creates within themselves. In contemporary psychology and art, these are the zones of “inner emigration” – the places we withdraw to when the world becomes too loud or too demanding.
This is territory not intended for “mass bathing”– here, the writing on the shore is more an attempt at rescue. In these hidden corners, the tides are a purgatory: they carry away everything written on the sand, and it ceases to be merely an action, becoming instead an ontological condition, or a presence of the self in its purest, most stripped-back form. The erasure of the letters by the waves is not loss but a form of metaphysical acceptance – there and then, you return your thought to the infinity from which it came, and through this you accept your solitude.
As Maurice Blanchot writes in one of his essays, “essential solitude” is not the condition of a person who is alone, but the condition of the creative act itself. This is the moment in which the author ceases to be “I” and becomes “nobody”, so that the work may be born. Just as close is the poet John Keats’s philosophical concept of negative capability – the artist’s capacity to dwell in uncertainty and doubt by surrendering to them. Or, put differently: to let yourself sink, in order to discover that islands accumulate precisely in resistance to that sinking. To let yourself sink, however, presupposes a body free to disappear. Maggie Nelson writes:
‘You’re the only one who knows when you’re using things to protect yourself and keep your ego together, and when you’re opening and letting things fall apart, letting the world come as it is – working with it rather than struggling against it.’
The island, in fact, is sovereign territory for the vulnerable body; a refuge from the labels and the weight of society. The archive of consciousness accumulates and is kept, in order to become self-expression, and to be named art. Once it has appeared, the work ceases to be a window onto the maker’s thoughts and becomes, instead, a mirror for whoever contemplates it. Meaning is no longer enclosed within the object but is born in the empty space between it and the viewer. In an environment oversaturated with ready-made answers, contemplation becomes a personal choice to remain alone with oneself, in the midst of the horizon. This is the starting point of the search – a conscious act of resistance against excess noise from without, and above all against the noise within ourselves.