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Rating: I have loved Franco Battiato since I was a boy.
Back then, I was fascinated by the lyrics of his songs, even when I couldn’t grasp their deeper meaning.
I hadn’t read Captains Courageous by Joseph Rudyard Kipling, so I didn’t know Harvey, the young son of an American magnate who fell overboard and was subsequently rescued (physically and spiritually) by the We’re Here, a simple fishing boat.
Nor was I aware of Matteo Ricci, the Italian Jesuit mathematician who, by immersing himself in the customs and traditions of Ming dynasty China, managed to gain the favor of the Chinese court, carry out his missionary work, and introduce Euclidean geometry to China for the first time.
Seeking a permanent center of gravity is about finding inner balance during the whirlwind journey of life.
Some do so like an old Breton woman or sly Macedonian smugglers.
Those who don’t undertake this search will have a journey without a destination, like Sal and Dean, protagonists of the autobiographical novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac, written in a stream of consciousness style by the author on a roll of fax paper, in a state of psychic automatism similar to the journey of his characters.
“We have to go and not stop until we get there”
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know, but we have to go”
According to George Gurdjieff, Battiato’s spiritual master, human beings live in a state of wakeful sleep, completely dominated by their psychic automatisms.
“In reality, people are carried away by their thoughts. They walk down the streets not realizing they have a body, they avoid cars because our motor center is more awake than our sleep; therefore, it doesn’t let us have accidents. They don’t remember what they said a few moments before. We live absolutely in sleep. We’re not able to focus on our bodies, on what goes in and what goes out. To control thoughts. We have so many flaws. We cannot tolerate criticism. It’s a truly disheartening fragility.” F. B.
The song Permanent Center of Gravity is a metaphorical introduction to Gurdjieff’s Fourth Way teaching, which Pёtr Demianovič Ouspensky, in The Psychology of Man’s Possible Evolution, describes as: “This teaching divides man into seven categories. Man no. 4 differs from man no. 1, 2, and 3 in terms of self-knowledge, understanding of his situation, and having achieved a permanent center of gravity.”
It is a cyclic meditation path that elevates the soul, over and over again, in a scale contemplating the physical body, the astral body, the mental body, and finally, the causal body.
“Forms and reality are one and the same, but they exist in different dimensions. The real is not influenced by the material of my thought and cannot absorb it. Reality is on another level. Yet the material of my thoughts absorbs the real and constructs illusions based on forms. The form acts as a veil that hides reality. When I do not perceive my own reality, I can only believe in this illusion and call it ‘I’. However, the illusion is only a mirage that dissolves as soon as silence is established. I must see the space between thoughts, an emptiness that is reality, and I need to stay in this space as long as possible. Then another kind of thought appears, clear and intelligent, a thought from another level, another dimension.” Jeanne de Salzmann
The voice of the master, the title of the album in which Permanent Center of Gravity is included, is that of conscience that grants awareness, as hoped for in the cultural revolution attempted on the streets of Beijing in May 1919, which indicated educational enrichment as the path to the rebirth of social consciousness. A revolution that couldn’t take root even in Europe, amid the ripping tensions of the post-war crisis during the Red Biennium of 1919-1920.
Moreover, not being able to tolerate Russian choirs, phoney rock music, Italian new wave, English free jazz punk equates to conceiving the necessity of a universal language, a minimum common decoder necessary for the establishment of a new state, for building dialogue, and for reflection.
An old Breton woman
with a hat and an umbrella made of rice paper and bamboo.
Courageous captains,
crafty Macedonian smugglers.
Euclidean Jesuits
dressed like bonzes to enter the court of the emperors
of the Ming dynasty.
I search for a permanent center of gravity
that will never make me change my mind about things about people
I would need...
Over and over again
On the streets of Beijing
it was the days of May between us joking while gathering nettles.
I can’t stand Russian choirs
phony rock music, Italian new wave, English free jazz punk.
Not even black African.
I search for a permanent center of gravity
that will never make me change my mind about things about people
I would need...
Over and over again
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