THE MAGICIAN’S BREATHE
Once upon a time an ancient agreement of solidarity has linked humans with plants forever. They collaborate for their reciprocal surviving, exchanging doses of vital chemical substances. The communication happens through breathing. Through nebulas of air, the lymph.
There is a melancholic attitude in the simple action of breathing.
This story is placed in an old glass house [the London Kew Garden?].
A thin structure of white iron sustains the glass and organizes the warm light that comes from the top into the inside. The light is sparkling around in a multitude of dewdrops.
Here, layers of vegetation create a trilling landscape of vivid, fresh leaves. Between them, a constellation of glass bubbles occupy the core of the space, set down on the floor or suspended in the air. They are chemical instruments prepared for a mysterious experiment.
Each glass has openings and inlets that look like small mouths waiting for food. Inside, lit by the light, plants with big leaves find a place.
The man appears, from behind. He is old and he is wearing a blue shirt. His hands are big. Experienced. It seems they can tell many stories.
The man moves slowly in the space that is familiar to him. The shots are on the details, on the man’s movements (not on his face and expression), or on the plants all around, which seem to be observing.
The light is warm and expands the forms and the colors.
The man gets closer to the glass bubbles. He reaches one of the pipes with his mouth and starts breathing. Now the exchange between the human and the plants is made clear. The communication is happening.
The images are on the man’s mouth, nose, on his skin, on the air that solidifies on the glass surface, on the steam that fills the bubble, on the plants, which disappear behind a cloud of blurring, on the leaves, that wave for the air movement. It is a vibrating and humid vision.
It seems like the man is speaking to the plants, as if they have a secret relation, as if they share a mysterious code of chemistry and thermodynamics.
After some breathes, delicate floral drawings manifest on the man’s hands. They are like tattoos that grow with the breathing. The drawing fills the hands, it goes on the arm and disappears under the shirt. It shows again under the man’s neck, around the ears, which becomes full of plants and leaves.
The man starts sweating and all his body is now full of tiny water drops, like dew, like the steam on the glass surface.
He leaves the bubble and goes to his worktable, where a set of old technical equipment is located. Glass and brass tools and measure devices and proper scientific apparatus.
He takes an odd pair of tweezers and moves them to his arm, which is covered by shining water drops. The man grabs one of them with the points of his strange instrument. But, unexpectedly, the liquid surface resists to the pressure of the tweezers. It shines in the humid atmosphere. It is a diamond!
The man takes the gleaming stone from his arm and carries it to his desk, leaving it at a specific point. Here a huge drawing of lines and formulas seem to describe a phenomena and its trajectories. It is a white drawing on a blackboard that awakens images of maps of constellations, a complex diagram of physics, geometry and mathematics.
The man goes with his pincers to recover the other crystals and put them on the drawing as if they have a meaning in the drawing itself. The crystals shine between the lines and the numbers.
These crystals are proof of a mysterious transformation. Through breathing, the body seems to respond to laws of mathematics, physic, geology and medicine. This follows the idea that humans share with plants and mountains the same natural rules.
The old man, the magician, lives with the plants and feeds them, as well as they feed him. They share the same space, in a symposium of air and water.
He is the miner of his own body, as if it is a cavern.
Breathes (as well as emotions and memories) are like shining substances that vibrate in the core of our body and move to the periphery to be expelled, to be secreted in precious materials.