Everyone wants to be happy, but in order to reach such a condition – wrote Jean-Jacques Rousseau – one must begin by understanding what is meant by happiness. Mankind has always concentrated its efforts to grasp it and rarely succeeds, but one like Simone Cristicchi – one of the most popular Italian songwriters, writers and actors and already winner of the Sanremo Festival in 2007 with “I’ll give you a rose” – tried to explain it in a special journey trying to grasp it both in the charm of great ideas and in the wonder of small what’s this. The result is “HappyNext”, a book just published by La Nave di Teseo which is part of a larger project together with a theatrical show and a documentary film by Andrea Cocchi that reflects the work done in the volume. He who staged, among many others, the unforgettable and innovative show Mental health center, dedicated to psychiatric patients, for this book he created a path between anecdotes, stories and interviews with little-known but absolutely surprising characters who accompany us in the discovery of the deep meaning of this research for each of us. “In doing so – he tells us – I was inspired by Pasolini’s“ Comizi d’amore ”, I recovered the formula of the traveler-explorer-cartographer who goes to collect testimonies along the way. The nice thing about the documentary and also the book was to diversify the audience of the interviewees. I went from scientists to philosophers, from elementary school children to cloistered nuns, trying to have a vision as varied as possible of this word ”. “Perhaps it is not happiness that we lack – he adds – but a scientific, philosophical or spiritual method to reach it, or healthy eyes to recognize it”.
How is such a book born?
It arises from the need to review the priorities of my life and to want to rewrite a new dictionary of words that are close to my heart and that can become receptacles to draw from in times of need. It was born two years before the lockdown. The first ‘fight’ was with happiness, a fairly equivocal word, but fundamental for every human being.
It is also very difficult to define.
Yes. At the end of this research I discovered that there is no happiness, but there are at least seven billion different types, one for each of us human beings on Earth. All this is amazing, because in front of important words like this one, one brings out one’s essence and uniqueness. Each of us is something unique and unrepeatable. On happiness, no one has ever given an equal answer.
To reach it and define it, he refers to seven words that outline a path – his – in which he makes us participate. Each of these words needs the other and together they form, I quote, “the scaffolding of the man I would like to be”.
It is a vademecum that I wanted to write for myself when I need to find the center. The words are: attention, slowness, humility, change, memory, talent, us. Each of these magnificent seven, save me.
In this period, then, similar words have even more importance.
Sure, I agree. There are seven words that have a particular value and that belong to each of us, they contain fundamental themes in any time and age. The pandemic has helped everyone to review their lives, not to do trivial things. Then there is also in us that other part less attentive and less inclined to research that cannot wait to return to their own personal hell.
What has the pandemic taught you?
That I was leading a life that wasn’t right. He taught me to refocus the rhythm. I lived a very hectic life around Italy, between 90 and 120 performances a year. This stop was a blessing for me: I went back to writing unreleased songs that came out like water from the tap. He then taught me to take care of myself and my time and to have confirmation that art does not help to die: it is the true nourishment of the soul.
We can already imagine her answer, but it is impossible not to ask her what she thinks of closed museums such as cinemas and theaters.
Closed art is the symptom of a great myopia on the part of the institutions, because they relegate culture to something superfluous. You can’t live if you don’t feed on art. Closing cinemas and theaters was the wrong attitude. There is a safety issue that concerns them and that means that if you go to the theater or the cinema, given the distances between one armchair and another, you will not be infected, while you will have a greater chance in other places, for example in the shopping centers. I don’t know if there was a direction behind all this, I don’t want to be a conspiracy theorist, but I certainly didn’t like Conte’s words when he talked about art and actors as people who entertain people. I shy away from this definition.
Which one do you prefer?
For me, art must be a thorn in my side, it must be a continuous questioning and questioning others. The theater is perhaps the only place, together with cinemas, where a community can come together to put itself in front of a mirror. The arrival of Draghi gave us hope, because he wanted to reopen them, but then everything was wrecked. I am an artist and in my small way there are about ten families who live thanks to what I do, from the lighting technician to the set designer to the production assistant: all of them live with my shows and my concerts. Now that I’m not there, how do you do it? I didn’t get any help from the state and all my technical staff are in dramatic conditions, also because a year has passed.
A change is needed, to use one of the seven words he was talking about. If it could, what would it change?
One of the things that I would change immediately is without a doubt the condition that children are experiencing in our country. I have two who, like many others, are forced to teach at a distance, to stand in front of computers for five hours, a huge mistake because children cannot be treated like farmed chickens. There are other ways and solutions to be able to do culture and teach, other ways to give lessons, but the DAD was chosen the absolute worst. Children do not have to serve any crime and yet they are treated as if that were the case. Now we are in spring, it is starting to get hot, there are many parks and green areas even within the metropolis: why not take them to teach there? It is those who govern us and decide that they should do something to do so to improve this situation, certainly not us.
What do you mean when you use this other word that you like so much: “we”?
“We” is the metaphor of happiness. When I say how the world should go, I always use the metaphor of the symphony orchestra where every instrument, even the humblest like the triangle, has its importance and has the same value as the first violin. Each instrument puts its own note and follows its own score, but all together are at the service of harmony. This is a bit like how the world should work where everyone, from the humblest to the most important, should feel the responsibility for this interrelation. I am convinced that our every action, our every word as well as our every choice, daily or political, can influence the environment that surrounds us, the small portion of land that has been entrusted to us. Waking up with this awareness makes me happy.
What is your idea of us Italians?
I am an incurable optimist and unfortunately I tend to see the beauty of those around me: a wonderful humanity that exists and resists. My spirit leads me to highlight the good and beautiful parts of our society and with this book I think I have done so by collecting interviews with extraordinary characters little known by the general public but who deserve to be heard, from Don Luigi Verdi to Guidalberto Bormolini, from Marco Guzzi to Giulio Mogol, Franco Arminio and many others.
Hers is a spirit that really leads her, as she sings in ‘Take care of me’, to “Don’t try to make sense of everything, because everything makes sense”?
That’s it. Sometimes we waste years of our life looking for a meaning to a certain event that happens, but in reality then we realize that everything is as if it finds its place in the mosaic, that everything is transformed and becomes a design that we might not have expected. at the beginning but which is consistent with what we are now.
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