The essence of our time is the narrowness of the intermediate spaces and the result is the compression of life and our options. I remember reading somewhere that the secret to boxing was mastering the middle distance, a position that allows you to control the ring. There are boxers who like to go long distance, move away from the opponent, springy stride and try to land long punches, while watching the opponent. Others, on the other hand, prefer the short distance, hitting and dodging, dancing around each other and grabbing each other when a break is needed. However, the triumph always goes to the one who knows the middle distance, the point that combines the aseptic elegance of distance with the sweat and blood of forced hugs.
Well, in our life the middle distance is disappearing like in a scrapping machine in which the walls, pushed by invisible plungers, advance mercilessly. It disappears in politics, it disappears in the city, it disappears in life, it simply fades away.
A week ago I had the honor of attending one of the most beautiful academic events that the old university tradition preserves: the reading of a doctoral thesis. In the past, achieving the status of doctor allowed the person to have hopes of securing a job. This is not the case today, which is why the symbolic notoriety of this act (the usefulness of the useless in the sense of Nuccio Ordine) is even more so.
It is true that the doctoral student is no longer given an open book, nor a gold ring, nor the cap or the toque as was done in ancient times, but instead it continues to grant one of the noblest privileges in this world: the prerogative to speak freely, for praise or criticism, in any similar academic event. No one can deny your word. The freedom of expression sustained by the wisdom of a degree, an enormity of gesture compared to the barroery of current debates where any undocumented person pontificates.
This narrowing of spaces came to mind when the doctoral student, now a doctor, a brilliant geographer, Joan Checa, directed by a no less brilliant director, Professor Oriol Nel·lo, gave us the summary of what had happened in the our territories in recent times: the strong advance of the opposites, the city and the forest. We all knew that our cities have grown. It is enough to walk around our expanded outskirts. But the forest mass that surrounds us has grown with the same intensity or even more.
In a dynamic that started in the 1990s, two apparently opposing trends have occurred in Catalonia, the Valencian Country and the Balearic Islands, the area of ​​study for this thesis: the brutal expansion of artificial soil and a very strong advance of the forest mass. Between 1987 and 2011 alone, artificial land increased in this Mediterranean macro-region by 60%, from 2,005 km2 to 23,187 km2. But, at the same time, there was growth in the forest area which recovered, in just a quarter of a century, 3,490.7 km2.
Thus, the landscape of our lives begins to emerge as a world without transitions: from urban to forest without a solution of continuity, like from cold winter to torrid summer, from depression to ecstasy, from drought to flood. The symbol of our time is this vital constriction. And this means that the extremes touch materially and the virulence of the result explains the tension of this situation, in the same way that the Dantesque forest fires already occur at the gates of our cities.
I imagine the map of Europe subject to this same principle: the basic rule of geopolitics that had ensured world peace for decades was to avoid direct contact between dominant territories, with plug or transitional states that relieve the pressure exerted from the ends. Today, the trend is the opposite: the overlap of border lines and strategic limits is sought, which leads to a result in which there is no room for error. The collision, if there is one, is direct and fierce.
Checa’s thesis, never better said, can be extrapolated to our existence, to the point of forming a sign of the times. It happens in the territory, yes, but it happens in our streets, where there are no longer intermediate spaces between the different private spheres that make up urban coexistence. Public space, like agricultural space, has gradually disappeared as a category, leaving our streets and squares as the pure space of collision and overlap between the different wills and desires that each of us, individually and as group, we have
But there is still a solution for this problem: it is necessary to re-infuse power in the intermediate spaces and relevance in the middle distance as an action strategy. Last Saturday, a prominent socialist baron seemed to influence this thesis by pointing out that the two main parties in Spain are playing to pretend that there is no center. He is wrong, at least geometrically speaking: it is not about looking for a point of horizontal equidistance with respect to the supposed sword and the supposed wall, but to deepen vertically in a wedge of oxygenation and conciliation that gradually floods life. This is the middle distance, this is the intermediate space. And even if it seems naive, it requires the determination of a good boxer.
