English

« There are fires in the human soul that shine only when one feels them at the edge of the abyss. It is only by falling that one sees what burns within us.»

Heinrich von Kleist, The Prince of Homburg

– Look! Beneath an absent moon, the story unfolding in this theater is fascinating. It opens, far beyond itself, a deep furrow in the precarious balance of our lives. It is not a children’s tale; one could say, with a certain emphasis, that it is a hermeneutic myth. The “theater that burns” is not a mere setting: it is the staging of truth itself, a truth that burns. Yet it is not only a destructive fire. It is an initiatory fire. Without destroying him, through its blinding lights, it reveals the world through ordeal. One must pass through it, take part in it. The element of fire here is not accidental: for Heraclitus, fire is the moving ground of reality, the constant exchange between the visible and the invisible. That is why emergence always retains a share of astonishment. The real, even vague and uncertain, often works beneath what we know of it, and the appearance of a thing often precedes the understanding of what made it possible.
– Yes. This theater… or should I say this belly, is not in the world. It is the world, but as a world unveiled… I should say a world emerging. It is what is called light. Like a clearing in which Being shows itself by withdrawing. And fire… fire is what opens that clearing by tearing the veils.
The two parrot companions see Pinocchio’s white finger approach the fire. Beneath the glove it is not wood, no, but something before… prior to wood. As if he saw inverted roots rising toward the sky, trembling, Pinocchio the Other probes this light with his gaze and sees as though the world had been woven from nerves.
— He touches, says one. Perhaps he feels something!
— He does not know, replies the other.
— He cannot know.
— But it will be enough.
The thread and the finger barely brushed begin to burn.
A shiver in the air.
The curtains stir. The outer fire, the ancient fire, that of the master, coils around the beams and the canvases like a voice without a tongue.
— It is now, says one.
— He enters the fire, says the other.
— He leaves the world.
But they cannot stop him. They cannot help him.
They do not even have the possibility of being heard.
Everything they say is for someone else.
And that someone was not Pinocchio, the Other.
The fire did not come from above. It does not fall like a punishment.
It rises through his fingers, like a memory.
And Pinocchio understands, without the help of a single word.
It is not the matter in him that burns, but the false.
The glove falls. The hand blackens. He does not suffer… not in the human sense.
For the pain comes from farther away… from what he must abandon as he passes through.
Everything the fire touches becomes truth.
Everything that resists is destroyed.
And at the center of this blazing theater, the little blue dog still waits for him.
Calm, as if he had known from the beginning.
The fire does not reach him.
Or rather… he is the fire.
Pinocchio understands that he is not following a guide.
He follows a fragment of his own fire, become dog so that he might approach it.
And he, the puppet returned from the dead—was he always ash?