Munin may be a crow flying high in the sky, but he is still a creature of this earth.
I cannot avoid to witness what happened these days in Italy, and describe how did I take part in these wordly matters.
I could write a brief summary of what happened.
Thursday 23rd: second general assembly. We overcrowd the classroom and so we move outside. Many speeches, my first speech, exchange of contacts, freedom of thought. Success. We organize a sit-in for tuesday.
Tuesday 28th: sit-in in front of the presidency while the Accademy Senate is reuniting. It is a stand-in for we are in great number. The senate is scared by our presence outside and waits to begin. We enter the building and overcrowd the stairs and halls, hanging our banners with the motto "We don't pay your crisis".*
Then we leave. Stared by a bunch of rightwings and catholics, we march in great numbers. This is the moment the organizers have been waiting for; using the strength of numbers, the march brings us a few meters later to an empty classroom that we fill. It looked spontaneous but it was not.
More speeches, more decisions. A friend of mine, with her not-self-indulgent line is not clapped by the audience - all the other speeches were usually accompanied by exaggerate applauses and banging on tables.
The most demagogic vote: "Do you want to squat this place?". The shouting and banging on the tables in taken as a unanimous agreement; though I saw that for every person shouting there was one smiling or clearly disapproving.
A teacher is sent there to convince us to evacuate the room. He fails. I spend the night inside; the "rettore", the big chief of university, calls the police. They didn't come.
Wednesday 29th: Morning reunion, with teachers, researchers, students, everybody but the Rettore.
15:00 Open air lecture: we don't have funds? well, we'll learn on the squares! A wonderful lecture on the 133 law, the theory of democracy, the fall of democracy.
17:00 Assembly at Palazzo Ugolini with teachers and students of Filosofia, Lettere, Lingue, Storia. Good words from the teachers, who denounce how this society is trying to avoid falling using scapegoats. The positive assembly has to be cut short: a mass reunion comes!
19:00 For some reason, though we marched allthogether, many many people who were in Palazzo Ugolini get lost and won't come to Scienze della Comunicazione.
More speeches, a big panel with the articles of the law 133 that we are fighting against - to fight disinformation. Everything seems crystal clear, equal and free. We share drinks and food.
Then it happens. A tall man with a stylish hat, who has been to almost all the events, takes the mic. He proposes, instead of another squatting of the same space, that is illegal...
He is interrupted. Angry shouts from the "leaders" - the lads and lass that have been more or less leading the whole thing, without ever calling themselves leaders - shout at him, surround him, until he resings the mic and exits the assembly.
With my friends I leave the assembly to eat. There is another "vote". A party against the law is decreed by the leaders. Few people are there squatting, but many come from the streets - we occupied without even closing doors... - looking for "the party". A DJ comes, with speakers and vinyls and everything. Everybody smokes weed, everybody. But not even alltogether.
I know that feasting is important as politics, that after the battle soldiers need to meet and relax around the fire. But this was different. It wasn't for our students. It was like the nearest disco, with drinks, with pushers, people from outside, not students, friends using the classroom as a bar.
Angry and disappointed, I go back home, alone.
This is very briefly what happened.
How come this country has fallen so down? How comes that extreme right-wing squads are allowed to beat up students on the streets, while the police watches and laughs?
And why this is nothing new, for those who studied italian history?
It would be long to discuss the fall of this country, especially for those who aren't keen on its history.
The teacher on Wednesday said that the fall of our democracy is dependant on these three main causes:
- Globalisation
- Crisis of communication
- Complexity of our society
Globalisation is a generic word and I don't like it much. But it is clear that, if decades ago, the economy of a country was about its natural resources and how they were used,
nowadays it is much more about what the others have. And how much does it cost. Clearly internal politics has less powere than before and little awareness.
Complex society: nowadays more people believe themselves to be minorities, than in the "mainstream". Migrations, religions, ideals mixed, without always bringing tolerance.
If "once upon a time" we were all italians - or somethingelsians, for what matters - and peasants, now we slaughter each other because we are italians, rumenians, emo, nazi, punk and soforth.
Nobody seems to respect minorities, such as homosexuals, few seems to understand how our society works, and notice that we are just using minorities as scapegoats.
But minorities get very angry, and they may know how to build bombs.
Crisis of communication: as a wannabe-linguist, I have to give a major space to this subject. And this is why the name of this post is
Linguistics and Rebellion.
We have the misconception that people in old times were ugly and stupid. They were not more stupid than we are.
When studying old english, I came to know words, that couldn't be translated in modern english. Words that were different shades of existence, that represented beings
that crawl between reality and the realm of ghosts. Creatures and feelings that could be hardly described. Like "dawn-sorrow".
People used to speak like that in old times. Some of these words I could not translate, but feel inside myself. Some I couldn't, and I felt I had lost a part of my soul and heart that my ancestors had.
With those words perhaps they could understand animals and talk to their gods. Our languages have lost that. Our souls have lost that.
I may be a tree-hugger, but I am not one of those "relic-huggers", those who believe that all the problems come from our society, because in the middle ages they had none.
That is just nonsense. Nowadays literacy and culture is more widespread than in the middle ages. Period.
Nonetheless, I believe languages have been collapsing with time.
In italy we believe we are safe from this: we are the descendant of the latins, the people of "Sermo Maiorum"* and the "creators of culture" (and thus forgetting about the greeks).
But we are inside this collapse as everybody else.
Modern italian still officially has complicated tenses. But how many, among you, actually uses them? Linguistics is descriptive.
Let's not hide behind books: our language is what we say, and we have lost the congiuntivo! And many past tenses. And why do I always need to put a picture in my posts to have people reading them?
But we still have all those latin-looking words that make us feel intelligient. Such as "fisiologico, transitorio, imperscrutabile, ineluttabile (forgive me ***, I am not accusing you!)".
And these words are always used in the wrong context to make things unclear, to confuse, with no real meaning but embellish other uglier words such as "war".
Make a serious research on TV speech and you will notice. when a language loses its capacity of giving a clear message, language is dead. Being language the most important interaction among men, when we lose it, we are back to the caves.
Language is being compressed. Again, check TV. Interviews that used to last for 5 minutes on the radio, now last 30 seconds on TV.
Language is slower than this change though, so in this compression, part of the message was destroyed. Lost.
What could have been a speech, is now a slogan. A slogan involves no thinking. A slogan can be opposed only by "fuck you" or violence.
We speak over each other, interrupting - if this may not be true in Finland yet, it clearly is here - thus losing contact, losing meaning.
The fall of democracy can only be accompanied by the fall of freedom of speech.
Somebody said once, that shouting, speaking, interrupting, arguing, is vital. It is not. Denying somebody his time to speak is dictatorship. Dictatorship is death.
Our languages are collapsing, some slower, some faster. English is so deep in this collapse that some varietes and dialects of english barely make any distinction between past, present and future.
All the adverbs became "Totally", awesome became awful.
To all of you: Save yourself, save your language! Take your time to speak! Do not use labels to refer to things, explain yourself without shouting slogans!
English and Italian versions of this post are not exact translations.
* Sermo Maiorum= language of the ancients/masters
