An Aside on Ficino
Some Things about Ficino, Part 2/5
An Aside on Ficino
The Magnanimous Detective
A Subversion
An Arrest
Before going further, it should be said that when Ficino paused, for example, in conversation or while giving a lecture, his ideas did not fall in on themselves, there was no recursive self-self dialogue/monologue going on within him, he was only pausing because the sentence he was in the middle of saying required it or because he had to take a breath or because someone interrupted him, or some other thing. He did not double things inside himself into a tension that might later find undesirable expression. Nor did he go along in life like a sleepwalker. He was perfectly aware of himself, via everything else—that is, people and things—around him, but also how he felt, his thoughts, but the friction between his mind and his soul was minimal. The input and output channels, so to speak, flowed normally, and he didn’t have the problem, so common in others, of crossing these channels, of rerouting his own output back into the input channel, muddling the flow of information, power, energy, feeling, perception, thought, intuition, understanding, apperception, construction: whatever. Ficino was a measured person. He drank the right amount of alcohol, inhaled the right amount of smoke from a reasonable number of cigarettes (which he never bought but always accepted from others, as though unburdening them of something, for he never asked for a cigarette; people offered them up to him regularly), ate good food and enjoyed all of it well, or well enough. He didn’t wear or need glasses, no, as has been mentioned. And even though his brown hair was thin and it was possible that when he got older he might go bald, this never occurred to him as a problem. He was not a man who wore hats. His name was Italian, but he didn’t look particularly Italian. Whatever color suit you’re picturing that Ficino wore is correct, so long as that color is brown, the color of his hair. But often, he merely wore black pants and a tucked collared shirt, black shoes, and sometimes a sweatshirt, even if it was warm outside just then, on that day.
“Some Things about Ficino”, first published by Punt Volat, 2024.