Eight years after Los Angeles (Viena Edicions, 2015), which explores the modern architecture of the rich people of this city – illustrated with oil paintings by Joan Longas –, Ernest Farrés Junyent (Igualada, 1967) publishes a book that he himself assumes It is the opposite of that, the other side of the same coin: Franciscanismes (Stonberg), based on the life experience of Saint Francis of Assisi.
“I have not tried to write a new biography of Francis of Assisi, countless books have already been written, countless movies have been filmed and even countless paintings have been painted about him. His life, however, served me to exemplify an alternative worldview to the prevailing model of life at this time, which he would define in three words: a materialist, nihilistic and Cartesian society. To achieve this, he opposes “to this model of dominant society a totally subversive model” based on forty poems, 17 of which are simply titled Franciscanisme and another six Parabola, “to avoid starting to put different titles or numbers to reiterate the same thing.” , I opted for the solution that seemed cleanest to me.”
The starting point of the book was reading the study that G.K. Chesterton dedicated to the saint and the subsequent reflection on how today “we live neither in the now nor in the yesterday, we live in the future, in a future converted into an abstraction that creates expectations that inevitably lead to the frustration and unhappiness that are so common. in our lives". From the radicalism of Saint Francis he draws lessons for the modern world, “because we live in an apparently democratic, apparently free, apparently open world, and we are surely immersed in one of the most obscurantist eras and societies in history. In the Middle Ages, humans had a fairly clear position in the world through myths, legends, and symbology. Later, the Renaissance marks a turning point in a completely different society, but what we have gained on the one hand we have lost on the other." For Farrés “we are all completely remote-controlled, there is a society that works because we are all slaves, in one order or another. There have been figures like Francisco, but also Gandhi or Jesus Christ, who proposed getting rid of the conventions of each moment and left a mark.”
“Mircea Eliade – continues Farrés – said, almost a hundred years ago, that “there is no completely sincere human act that is not ridiculous, and he defended that we imitate what is ridiculous because in this way we came closer to living sincere and real. Faced with that, what there is is the society of imposture made of conventions, appearances, prejudices, dogmas, falsehoods, that we all assume to live in society, a bit like the idea of the social contract in which we are all hypocrites. and we show our apparent life to be able to live with each other. The moment a person breaks all these conventions and is truly sincere, society calls him ridiculous. Saint Francis of Assisi is a clear example of a human being who, around the year 1200, was born into a wealthy family, and because of his impulsiveness and his outlandish ideas, he decided to break with everything. He breaks up with his father, he breaks up with society, he ruins everything. He gets rid of everything that he considers superfluous, of everything that he considers banal and useless, of appearances, of masks, of conventions, to show himself to the world with his absolute nakedness, physical and figurative. For the poet, “in the end what remains throughout history are the quixotic enterprises of people who broke with all the molds of their time and opted for dramatic sincerity.”
Although it talks about a Catholic saint, it is not a religious book: "My vision is not religious, but I will not say that I make a secular or atheist approach, not at all, I have simply tried to make a personal approach." And it is still even allowed to put, as a collage, a fragment of a poem by Charles Bukowski about the Los Angeles library fire, so that “the poems also have a projection today”, and also, of course it seemed to him “ provocative".
And does Ernest Farrés lead by example and dispense with everything that is superfluous? “Evolutionarily I am trending towards this direction year after year. Naturally, I will never do like Saint Francis or ruin everything, that is not my intention at this moment, today. But it is true that I have seen over the years that by letting go, disappropriating many things, you can be happier and you can find your balance point more easily. Now, I'm like anyone else. We are within the consumer society. We are a number. We are all remote controlled and they send us all into the same abyss. I still haven't found a way to get rid of my cell phone, for example, even though I have gotten rid of other things, even illusions. How many vain illusions have we had throughout our lives, that we will do this and that, and we want to get here and there. And it's legitimate, but there also comes a point where you say... well, maybe it's not necessary."
Catalan version, here
