The clouds were caressing the crest of the mountains helped by the orange wind that was swung by the first lights of the day. The rocks began to be clothed by the scarlet blanket woven by the passing of the sunrise trough the clouds. The valley was waiting for its warm wake up in a pleasant doze. All the creatures, even the trees, were still confusing fiction with reality, waiting for the lucidity of the sunshine that covers all the irrational holes in the supposed rational reality. His hands were stroking the little scars in the rock, taking care of them, taking care of himself. In every new movement he was making deals with the new scars, introducing his fingers in their world and trying to be a nice host that, although, was bothering the rock when the arms of Helios hadn't already heated the ancient skin of the mountain. The hands, the feet and the scars in the skin. Long time ago he had understood than that he which clung wasn't a simple and inert rock. In his mind, the boundaries between the object and subject had disappeared, little by little, since the long excursions with that teacher in his childhood. After that, he was never the same. He was always misunderstood and treated like a mystic that had been irradiated by the false enlightenment of the, always misapprehending, eastern religions. The sun started to bath all the valley and it began to fell, in the middle of the warming sun, in the cold rationalism about the boundaries between the possible and the impossible. The blind lucidity of the sun not only affected the sleepy valley, also affected him. Or it. With the earlier faint rays of light he, it or they, was or were confusing the limits between the rock and the hand, the valley and the mountain, the air and the lungs, the death and the life. The mantle of sun extended in the valley began to heat he rocky wall also. He felt the difference. The wall was reflecting the lucidity of the sun in his face. The scars began to warm up and started to flowing out trough them all the rational questions that tie the humans in the comfortable place of the stability where, without any risk, they can live peacefully but they can't explore the boundaries of their psychological, moral and physical landscapes. He, finally, experienced the border between the object and subject looking below his feet. It was there, so far, the sunny valley. He began to breath faster and faster and his body started to distinguished from the impassive wall trembling like a scared man in front of his last heartbeat. His foot slipped and an agonizing scream came out of his throat. The scars disappeared. The hands, the feet and the cracks in the wall. He pressed his fingers into the crack and kept his body glued to the rocks. “Relax! I'm here!” The voice of his companion confirmed his wake up of the illusion. His own appearance that he felt more deeply than the reality defined by the agreement of those who are supposed to understand the land that they step.
His companion. His life in the hands of his mate, a few meters below him, hanging in the middle of the abyss. He breathed deeply and looked at him and at the rope. A line between two men, a relation where the lie means death and where without confidence the rope gets rotten and anticipates the bath in Styx. He remembered his teacher. The same line, the same ethical commitment, the same confidence, only few years ago. Without his teacher, surely, he wouldn't be hanged in the wall, exploring all the limits between he and the mountain, the humans and the nature.
He was only a child living in the suburb of a big city trying to grow up in the middle of a steel and cement jungle. When he met for the first time with his teacher he was earning some money in the fastest way in those times: burning the countryside near the suburb to create more space to build new infrastructures to the city. Earning black and fast money expanding the frontiers of his steel and cement jail. That teacher. Always talking about the Ancient Greece, talking about dead people while his lessons were plenty of live. The professor knew that those children were full of life and he knew how to take the raw material. Once he rode a note in the wallet of his professor: “I mean that they should not play life , or study it merely, while the community supports them at this expensive game, but earnestly live it from the beginning to end. How could youths better learn to live than by at once trying the experiment of living? I think this would exercise their minds as much as mathematics”. It was from a very clever man from America that live two years in some hut near a lake. His professor always was talking about him. Every weekend the teacher found the way to bring all his students to the mountains and then, in the middle of the nature, something began to change. In that moment he didn't recognized what but, in the middle of the wall, he understood everything. All the αίσθάνομαι1, all the feelings and all the perceptions of the humans, trough the πάθος -the suffering- conditions their character: the ἦθος. He remember the words of his teacher when they were in the mountains, “suffer in the landscape and suffer the landscape to change ourselves”. But all those excursions wasn't a one-way path, the teacher always closed the circle. The ἦθος, also trough the suffering -the πάθος- conditions the kind of relation with our environment, the kind of our feelings and perceptions. The character conditions our, in the words of the teacher, αίσθάνομαι.
Was a great strategy by the hand of the professor. The aesthetics conditions the character, the ethics, trough the suffering. When the students suffered the aesthetic input from the landscape they change, step by step, their characters. There was infallible. The new character was rooted in the aesthetic feeling from the landscape. Forged in the suffering, the landscape now was part of the character of the students. This new ἦθος, mediated by the suffer, would establish a new way to feel the landscape. The ethics conditions the aesthetics. They, now, were part of the landscape and the landscape was part of them. The burning ashes of the countryside were, now, burning ashes of himself. Definitely the boundary between the subject and object was destroyed. “The landscape could change our character in the same way as a common human relation”, these words from the professor were carved with a hammer in the brain of him. And this change, as his teacher taught him, occurs more easily with the suffering in the landscape. The nature can't change anything on us if we don't interact with her. And was in a kind of special interaction where he discovered the most powerful changes: in the directly way to the sky in the middle of a wall. Where the relation with the landscape purify the relation between humans maybe, he thought, for the interest to stay alive. The purity is established in the middle of the dirty. Anyway, the abyss lime all the remaining and let the essence: πάθος. The suffering.
Now he could understand the words of his teacher: “The difference between aesthetics and taste its made from some guys that try to avoid the unique universal true saying that is some common beauty for all the humans”. Pain, suffer, pathetic that conditions the ethic. Ethic that conditions the way of suffer, the way of feel the pain, the way of being pathetic. There's only one universal true for all the humans: the suffering.
- Come on! What're you doing!
The voice of his partner stopped his thoughts. He drew a smile in his face, looked at the sunny valley and stare at the distant peaks.
- πάθος! Is the only way!
- What're you saying! Stop your bullshit and climb!
- You're right! Let's go back to the action, the only way to establish a fertile relation with the landscape!
- What the fuck?
- Nothing, I'm only hungry!
- Oh, look that! Even the mystic needs some real food!
- Man I never see anything more real and more nutritive than πάθος! I'm hungry of life and all that it entails! I'll be like the mountains! Imperishable in their destruction! That is nothing more than kind of construction! Altough, yeah, what the fuck! For sure I'll apreciate a big peace of our cake in the summit and a big shot of ice wine!
- So, shut up and let's go man!
1From which is derived αίσθητικός, aesthetic, sensitive.
