In squares, subway tunnels, avenues and alleys in every corner of the world the same sentence is heard: "Child, stay still!".
Clarification: what you hear is "the staging" of that ancestral voice. I speak of the living statues.
Those sculptures of human flesh are true representations of the mandate. Nothing is more still than a statue: to be made of stone - marble and almost dead - and cover the emotions behind the corresponding outfit. These street art manifestations display a wide and varied gallery of characters that never runs out of creativity..
It is a job like others, which requires craft, art, patience, concentration, various materials and the instability of earning a livelihood according to the walker or vertiginous walker who passes by his creations. Some leave some coins and ask for a photo, others do not even register that there is a person there ...
I will take that image so popular in each city as a metaphor: it seems that these subjects have sometimes heard from the mouth of their elders that they stay still, that they do not climb trees or that they stop the vital impulse of the movement. I read that informal work of men and women from so many parts of the world as a meta-message: we all hear from our families some "you will be this or that", "do not do what we expect of you", "we need you to do this task", "is your role to continue your grandfather's mission ... ".
We can accept it without displaying any personal freedom, or we can comply without opposing it and assume the mandate as a responsibility that leaves no room for criticism. We can also say yes in the middle, for example: to do what we would like a profession - music - a weekend hobby, because from Monday to Friday it is time to run the factory that the patriarch of the clan set up and continues in his descendants.
Franz Kafka is another good example: the author of Metamorphosis he was forced by his father to work in his trade and study law, when he wanted to be a writer.
Throughout life we live stages of submission and docility, sometimes we even die trying, to please others, or we get the inner strength to decide to be “self-sustaining”: a fashionable word to express that it is not necessary to submit to the will of others to be loved.
We can also rebel, leave everything, leave home and - many times, as punishments for disobedience - pay with the body, frustration, illness or exile, the fact of having chosen a life free of ties..
I maintain that we are, we do, we choose, we work within a structure that is built from the ancestral voice: completing an unfinished task, repairing the action of the ancestors, replicating a family situation, healing a mandate, repeating a destiny, copying a model, a script, a pattern of the tribe to which we belong.
When, walking through the city itself or any other city in the world, we come across the living statues, we can see the messages of the clan: frozen people representing a make-up expression, that are transformed into mortar molded with a desire for verisimilitude using fabrics or paints that imitate gold, silver, copper, various colors on the skin, giving the impression of being made of wood, rock, metal, a mass of rags; that use hidden mechanical devices to give the illusory idea of wind, or that the character is in the air, or that he is held on a thread ...
Kings, trapeze artists, dancers, chess players, warriors, robots: something equates them despite their different costumes, their immobile attitudes or their aesthetic achievements. They are all mute. They are statues. They show their stone essence. They have no voice.
The metaphor that this street show gives us is very rich: we can hear the rumors (of the ancestors on the edge of the cradle), voices that have been cornered in the role played by these artists. Workers like so many others: merchants, teachers, doctors or lawyers. In many vocations (remember that this word derives from the Latin verb vocare, “Called”) resounds that voice-command that we received from before we were born: in every family there is an expectation reserved for future members who join a tree that has been standing for decades, centuries.
You don't have to be as bold as those artists who come out every morning with boxes of shoe polish, gadgets, accessories, and a platform on which to install their statue. You don't need all that paraphernalia: when we “dress up” as policemen, psychologists, athletes, teachers, journalists, painters, nurses, architects, midwives, carpenters, designers or drivers. We do not always carry out imposed tasks, luckily we are redefining what to be, who to be along the way. But many times we blindly respond to the ancestral mandate: We believe we choose what to do / be and-nevertheless- we are mute, frozen like living statues fulfilling assigned roles so that the memory of the clan continues to be sustained.
If there was a lot of pain in the family, we need doctors. If we suffer lack of justice, lawyers. If we perceive a lack of basic rights -education, food, shelter- we will appoint teachers, cooks, masons throughout the generations ... Or we will settle in the group like Quixote, Batman, Joan of Arc ... Or self-sacrificing mother, capricious girl, male Donjuanesco, I-can't-I-can't-sister, or older daughter-can-do-everything ... The roles are infinite but in every family, each of its members is assigned the one who "plays".
The living statues function as a formidable symbol because they are there, in view and they provide us with a mirror to think about our mask (another interesting word: from the Greek, it means “in front of the face”) to face the world. Character is just that, a grimace that is superimposed on the true face. Thus, it is paradoxical that "person" is assimilated to "human being", but entering these depths would give for other reflections ...
Thinking-us, reviewing attitudes, vocations, ways of functioning in daily life, family, professional is part of psychogenealogy: that line of psychoanalysis that investigates genealogical trees because it assumes that, just as each subject has their personal unconscious, there is a familiar unconscious that governs each clan.
Become aware to decide conscientiously. It is not a play on words: it implies de-programming the commands we receive, learning to recognize them, knowing that nothing is registered once and for all, that we have the freedom to choose following the call of a voice superior to that of any ancestor. : one's own voice, which must always be more powerful than the "voice of blood".
The neurosciences, so in vogue, encourage us in this task to develop neural plasticity. From the transgenerational psychology We add the importance of accessing the toxic secrets kept for years in the sealed mouths of those who agreed to silence for false family fidelity.
With an open mind, a determined heart and the ability to rethink those naturalized behaviors - which really work as prosthetics- we can remove emotional blocks, free ourselves from those “family resemblance” fillers, heal allergies, phobias or psychological ailments.
Analyze the family tree, detect the mandates and expectations of our elders, reveal secrets (unjust inheritances, unfinished duels, abortions, wars, badly buried dead, etc.) DOES NOT imply disloyalty to the clan, betrayal of blood or ingratitude to everything received ...
De-programming is doing what gives us true identity, without masks, without statue mute, without stone freezing; feel genuinely, freely, choose without guilt, learn to “recycle” (another way of adhering to the theory of resilience) and be reborn as many times as necessary.
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