“You are everything, up to the seventh heaven” (Original title: “Tu sei tutto, fino al settimo cielo”) is a literary and metaphysical journey that overwhelms and drags the reader into a whirlwind of images until the final apotheosis.
Professor in languages, the author Alberto Sighele “plays” from the first paragraph with the opposites, the “you” and the “everything”, “the beginning and the end”, an adrenaline-pumping journey in which we are guided by examples and images as in a video clip, where the accompanying music is the very sound of the words.
(In the photo: Alberto Sighele, author of “You are everything up to seventh heaven” / “Tu sei tutto, fino al settimo cielo” and the artistic and life partner Roza Yurchenko)
Like the leaf that collaborates within the crown or the root, which in the whole of the root system nourishes and supports the aerial and mirror part of the tree, if each of us is a single unit in itself, it will never be alone if we relate to the next:
“No one is alone, if he is one with the universe.” (1st c.)
The engine, thrust and glue of everything is Love:
“The one was one, but he did not know about himself […] Then came the two, you, the wave, the breath, the cradle, the meeting, and while I see you and touch you, here I understand who I am . […] In you I see me and this symmetry is my soul.
[…] But the important thing is how many times you turn to look at me, to tell me in the secret of your mind: love. And then I will feel a thrill […] and I will understand, in the silence that will descend between us, that this is a beginning. ” (2nd c.)
[…] And we leave, accepting the impetuousness of the volcano that I love you
[…] and if everything is love, and the universe is alive, not only my body, even every people … If the earth is also a living being and every galaxy, let me take you with me. Because there is a place, and it is the body, where the heart, full of the cosmos, […] reverberates in everything, the love that moves the sun and the other stars. ” (7th c.)
And the quote to Dante Alighieri, on the 700th anniversary of his death, is not limited to the theme of love, but takes up the image of the vortex that descends into the bowels and rises to the divine and then returns to Earth with an acquired awareness of self.
In an eclectic and profane key, the repeated use of numerology is taken up both in a structural key (the text unfolds in seven stanzas of seven lines marked by seven accents), which is perhaps a symbolic reminiscence of the author’s theological studies.
The one in the first song is the individual, who through love becomes the creator of creation in all its meanings (creation as an act, creation of life, generator of a timeline that is his but also shared by others and therefore of time, etc.) and therefore it is divine like its Creator.
But it is also provocatively the sense of smell, which vertically perceives and sends information to the language and brain, the seat of thought and mystical tension to the seven traditionally understood as a symbol of human perfection.
“To Dante’s nose I bow and to his divine sense”
Because if the person we love represents number two
“… everyone, in the two, understands himself, we are mirrors”
the three narrated in the third canto represents the multiplicity of others from us, which requires responsibility because “… every action is the cause of an effect”, be it the cause of the rise of a tyrant, of racism or the unconscious expansion of the coronavirus pandemic.
As in Dante, the number three indicates perfection but also the absolute opposite, it is the diaphragm, which separates the thoracic cavity from the abdominal one, it is the center of the struggle between the individual choice of good and evil.
The four of the fourth canto from the Middle Ages indicates the moral perfection towards which to strive, in a continuous search upwards like the king of Corinth Sisyphus, who regains the ancient Greek meaning Σίσυφος (Sísyphos) “wise man” and in his cycle it represents the renewal of the sun as of the four seasons, of life.
“… Your faith moves mountains. […] Sisyphus, you are the tree of life […] In the seventh heaven of your rush of sap. Here your nature as a tree of knowledge triumphs […] start again, rise again, blossom in your enthusiastic rush of life ”.
And if doing what one exists for falls within the Nature of Sisyphus, of things (eg the heart with its four ventricles beats because it is its nature) and of each of us, then “Happiness is the ease of being, of weave your existence. And then the question that commands your happiness is who you are. “.
In the Pythagorean number five of the fifth canto there is perfect union, the balance given by the achievement of self-awareness with the drive to make desire “the engine of consciousness”.
And balance is beauty understood as Venus – woman, opposite and complement of man, harmony that generates divine love (it is the Tiferet (תפארת) of the tree of life) and physical in the perfect symmetry of forms, it is the number six.
The number seven of the seventh poem reminds us that it is in the mind that everything is reunited:
“The fontanelles […] They are those openings in your skull
Through which the divinity in you descended from the stars, the cosmos
The pinnacle of self-realization is that you come back all up “
it is the center of a constant physical and metaphysical flow, a meeting place and choice of the possibilities of Man, vices and virtues, in its positive value, a symbol of awareness.
From the meeting of the numbers three (center of the personal struggle between good and evil) and seven (awareness) a spiral is generated, a propulsive force to desire both material (in the purely physical sense of lovers) and spiritual in the highest reunion at number ten, symbol of perfection from Pythagoras (tetractys) to Dante to Catholicism in the merciful encounter of God (the Trinity) with Man (completeness: 7 deadly sins and cardinal virtues, 7 senses, 7 colors primaries perceived in the light and the whole tones in the musical scale, seventh day of rest from Creation …) in a whole that is “one”.
“The senses are seven, five to feel, the sixth to intuit,
seven is already over. “
“There are ten fingers, life.
But three and seven is the screwing […] Matter and spirit. “
“Dante it is good to thank him, however, for the three which is divine,
divine until seven “
The number eight also comes into play unconsciously from the beginning: although the author declares the volume to consist of seven stanzas of seven lines with seven accents, it is evident that the introduction becomes a song in its own right, the eighth, in its own right once structured as the songs officially declared.
The eight is a number divisible into two even and equal digits (4 + 4) further subdivided into equivalent parts of 2, already by Pythagoras it was indicated as an example of equality and fairness, hence the pagan revival in the tarot with the arcane of the Justice; in geometry it represents the octagon or eight-pointed star (symbol of the active form, the masculine principle) contained in a hexagon (symbol of the passive form, the feminine principle), in Christianity it indicates eternal life through the Resurrection of Christ in primis and of Man then.
The number “eight” is therefore the symbol of infinite cosmic balance, like the tension between the two male and female elements which is a double vortex of matter and spirituality.
“Eight is eternal, we are already immortal, you and I in the self.”
Against fanaticism:
“The imperial cross or half moon is evil. The inside that went outside,
he wants to command reality with fear and power from the outside. This is hell “(1st c.)
and discrimination:
“The dress makes the fiction, the social function, the power, the fear, the prison.
It is an instrument of oppression “(2nd c.)
“China […] I disdain it for what it has done to Tibet and internal dissent”
“I do not accept the state secret on the pandemic”
“From the knee on the neck to the negro […] the police of easy violence.” (3rd c.)
“Putin spits poison from the blowpipe of power, hisses lies.
He kills opponents, blackmails. ” (7th c.)
the balance intervenes: the dictator becomes aware of the strength of the crowd, the violent can be stopped by the collective conscience and Justice, the fear of a virus is overcome by the rediscovery of the sense of community, the bonds of appearance crumble in the face of simplicity of self-giving, fanaticisms can be fought with philosophy, Yin and Yang, the free realization that only in equilibrium there is love and life, and that death is a lie in the infinite regenerative movement of Universe:
“The only capital, conscience, in the free market”
“We are / part of the consciousness it creates
[…] And the universal consciousness with me, in me,
around and through me, he creates, in continuous creation, the dance
of the realization. ” (5th c.)
“Everything is love, harmony, symmetry, reciprocity of opposites” (6th c.)
“The initial goal is in meditation, then you will see it
operate in concrete facts. ” (1st c.)
Through meditation we come to the awareness that the Universe pursues its equilibrium, we are part of it and we mutually act in this circular system through desire, which is generated in the heart and pushes to action (the vortex). And only if the desire conforms to the universal balance, that is love, does it lead to the realization of oneself and one’s neighbor.
At the end of the seventh canto, therefore, the author confirms his initial thesis, namely that love is the engine of the Universe and its individual parts, including the human being in his individuality, just like the man-Dante Alighieri recognized in the finale of “Paradise” (XXXIII, v. 145) that it is “the love that moves the sun and the other stars” in the perfection of the circular movement of continuous creation. Of course, although the sentiment that moves the authors leads in both cases to the improvement of oneself and neighbor, the love that moves Dante Alighieri man in the Comedy is typical of the Dolce Stil Novo, tendentially spiritual and Beatrice the idealization of the feeling, almost a Madonna to look at and not touch, that has nothing in common with the real relationship between the ancient author and his actual wife. Instead Alberto Sighele completes the circle and “returns” with flesh and blood to demonstrate that balance in life is achieved by not forgetting, indeed, always keeping in mind the relationship with the other, all the more so with our “reciprocal” which completes us. in the soul and in the body.
Infinite equilibrium cannot be separated from the first, nor can we forget the second which fully realizes it and can only make us better.
Having reached awareness, it could be said that the motto “Make love, not war” by Gershon Legman (Scranton, Pennsylvania 2.11.1917 – Opio, France 23.2.1999) summarizes in a rough way ( not petty!) the generous incitement to life of “You are everything up to seventh heaven”, a work aimed at all of us but dedicated to his wonderful companion, Roza Yurchenko, flower of his garden, root of his story, safe and branch that wraps it and accompanies it up to the “seventh heaven”.
As announced at the opening of the poem “You are everything up to seventh heaven” (Original title: “Tu sei tutto, fino al settimo cielo”) and of this analysis, the Sighelian text is a vortex that can overwhelm the quiet reader as a present-day spectator in front of the theatrical verve of the “fu” Antonio De Curtis, and only by supporting the impetuous motion of the images, sensations , quotations, re-propositions and metaphors we are introduced and led towards an awareness that is intrinsically already ours, it only needs to be rediscovered in this way “it will make us free, because everyone will find his place in it”.
“Your consciousness is the tool, and it’s all within you. Meditation action. ” (1st c.)
(Archive photo: Roza Yurchenko and Alberto Sighele, author of “You are everything up to seventh heaven” / “Tu sei tutto, fino al settimo cielo”, photographed by the artist Gentile Polo during the event dedicated to the world of women “Ali di farfalla – Butterfly wings 2021” at the Kunst Grenzen-Arte di frontiera Gallery in Roverè della Luna.)
On the other hand, the author of “You are everything up to seventh heaven” has always cultivated the word as a teacher of foreign languages, as a poet and artist of visual poetry or “phonetic painting” as he himself usually defines it. In his visual works he recovers the experiments of the Neo-avant-gardes of the twentieth century. where the verbal sign and the image interact without relationships of subordination, but merge in perfect balance: aesthetics are no longer just a parameter of the image but also of the graphic sign; while, however, the term “visual poetry” takes into consideration the senses of touch in writing and sight, Alberto Sighele takes a further step to understand the senses of taste and hearing in the work, hence his definition of “Phonetic painting”: the inconsistency of the handwriting of the letters blends with the physicality of the image (even pushed to the extreme in the generous bodies of women often taken as a motif) and acquires three-dimensional strength in the act of pronouncing phonemes (single sounds linguistic units) of the text, never ends in themselves but strictly connected to the subject expressed as a whole, in a vortex of senses whose message wants to reach the soul.
Here, then, that the research in “phonetic painting” of fusion of the senses in a relationship of harmonious balance and reciprocity, as in poetic compositions, is the coherent expression of the Sighelian message that truly in every area of life “everything is love, harmony, symmetry, reciprocity of opposites “and reacquiring this awareness can only improve the relationship with ourselves and others and lead us” to seventh heaven “.
(Text and critical analysis by Lucia Martorelli – Gentile Polo Art Studio, March 17, 2021,
for “You are everything up to seventh heaven” / “Tu sei tutto, fino al settimo cielo” by Alberto Sighele.
Reproduction, even partial, of the text is prohibited upon request and approval by Mrs. Martorelli.)
http://www.dm-paideia.org/kunst-grenzen/index.php
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC0y5LzTqbzO5awqs2Cdg3Gg
https://www.facebook.com/KunstGrenzen.Artedifrontiera/posts/269555317997139
https://www.facebook.com/KunstGrenzen.Artedifrontiera/posts/173690234250315