First reading: Where he imagines (reflections on Rapsodi, Aedi, Iperuranio and Blue Notes)
I am certainly not a historian of philosophy nor an expert on Plato and I love philosophy as anyone who has chosen the artistic mirror of his life, a mirror that knows how to give balance and knows no falls and, if anything, pushes the observation of the Self in the History of Ideas , in the History of the whole Humanity.
This is why I feel free to travel in the Free Text of Stefano Cazzato without any limit even to a first reading, "Open Work" that can not lead me to the expansion of my freedom of interpretation, one of many possible and, I believe and I hope, acceptable .
"A Platonic story": Stefano Cazzato certainly does not lack the ability of the linguistic game, the love for the aphorism, the disenchanted vision of the epistemological charade and, above all, the love for that expert Game that travels in the memory of who knows how to make culture with the noble sense of lightness.
A Platonic story or a History of Love (Eros and not Thanatos) sublimated to reach Upper Love (Art, Moral, Science, Spirit)? I do not believe. A Platonic story that lives on reflections rather than material practices; a written and unwritten history, a story made up of stories that refer to other stories, all being stories of history.
But what is this history in the context of mere philosophical study? It is "a real monograph on Plato", says Giuseppe Cappello in his very fine reading of Nostro, "a book that more than a philosophy, in fact, gives us back, as Plato wanted, and even more his teacher Socrates, a philosophizing "It's true, it's like that; but I do not tell the author's pages, and for this I apologize, as what the pages give to my request to evoke, more in the Pathos than in the Logos, the images of my Ego, my interests, my passions, of my memories, just because - as it was said - this history of hyperdialogues is a story on which "to reason together" with the love of those who "love the philosopher and follow the knowledge of not knowing" and that "should not ask very much to himself, no more than he himself thinks he can give ", as Our observer (pp. 23 and 135).
Well, clarified the preliminary circumstances, the Ion of Plato treats among other things the figure of the Rapsodo, the interpreter of the interpreter, the medium that draws from the Hyperuranium and launches among the people, completely satisfied with its translation into an accessible language to the Humans the Epic, the Lyric, the Elegia, since the Rhapsod, unlike the Aedo, simply repeated what had been transmitted to him by previous generations.
Others, however, think that even the Rhapsodies intervened on the traditional repertoire, perhaps enriching it. For example, it is thought that they are due to the composition of certain Homeric hymns, which in the recitation preceded certain parts of the real poems. We feel a certain disappointment about this distinction: who sings the tradition sings the world, who inspires emotions in the listener is artist, and who is the link between the world of ideas and the ground to hear is a hypothesis to be dissent, unless the Metaphysics it does not become Physics based on which assumption I really could not say.
So much so. The golden age of the Rapsodi is probably between the fifth and fourth centuries BC, when they were widespread and they participated in games and public parties, where they stood out for their stentorian voice and garish clothing and competed against each other to win prizes vital to their livelihood. The Rapsodi were able to arouse emotions in those who listened to them putting a passion that could bring them closer to modern actors, modern musicians, improvisers of the Notes that have translated cultural heritage from one generation to another. And when we talk about improvisation, what is more coherent and current than music, regardless of genres, certainly .. but how can we not quote the Jazz that improvisation has made a harmonious landscape of a (if we want platonic) anthropological, aesthetic, moral ?
Although the Rapsodi were judged with contempt by the educated class (but their level was anyway higher than that of the Homeric actor) and considered unreliable, their activity continued for a long time, reaching up to the III century AD, that is almost at the end of it was pagan. From then onwards, interpreters of the Peruranio became the prophets and then the singers of the new age, the troubadours, the singers of Islamic Spain and then the baroque poets and courtesans of the 18th century, the romanian stalellators in the Lungotevere of the Pope and " the lemon fronds "Neapolitan of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, until you get to the improvisation of the song of the Gospel and the Spiritual, the Blues and the popular Jewish song Kletzmer, Tango and many singer-songwriters from the 60s onwards.
In such a multi-layered book that so much has metatextual readings, we are all free to imagine the melodies of our Stories in a Myth of the Cave in which we discover the reality of the things that surround us and see man as no longer prisoner of opinion, turning instead to the Light of the Stars and the Moon, coming to see, as Plato wanted, the Idea of Good in itself. And we musicophile readers never forget this lesson, because Music, as Nietzsche had to say, has an irreplaceable role in Civilization.
What is Stefano Cazzato's Communication System? We think we will meet him in the philosopher - jazzman Charles Mingus:
"Making complicated what is simple is trivial; transforming what is complicated into something simple, incredibly simple: this is creativity. "
A Platonic History, in fact. A story that the end teacher and sharp writer tells how the words were Border Notes that live in that collective imagination that does without the excessively accommodating to really include the Forms of Life, according to easy or even less easy choices, such as we always need to know.
Fabrizio Ciccarelli