Memory Art and the News.

The Italian press is in a state of agitation these days over a measure by which the Italian government, led by Giorgia Meloni's neo-fascist party, trumpets the cutting of the levy imposed on cars of less than 80 Kwh. The debate seems purpose-built to polarise along the customary scheme of adherence or repulsion, encouraging the confrontation of factions according to a dynamic of the squadrist sort: whoever is not with me must unequivocally be against me. The usual kitten politics, nothing new under the sun.

In these notes we shall show how one may resort to the mnemonic keys proper to the ancient ars reminiscendi in order to elude (or circumvent) the conditioning imposed by the agenda setting of the media, reducing the information drawn from the press to its lowest terms without relapsing into populist oversimplification: any clavis magna whatsoever would serve the purpose, and in our case we shall start from one of the most popular and widespread nowadays, the major and minor arcana of the Tarot. Mind you, not in order to divine who knows what mantic, charlatan prophecy fit for a funfair, but in order to model the content of the articles by reducing them to a few salient images of memory, archetypal ideas dense with meaning, semantic attractors.

We shall proceed one step at a time, then: the press and the trumpeters of social media relay the image of the autarkic little blonde doll, at the unsteady and blustering helm of the country, announcing the abolition of one of the taxes most hated by Italians, the car tax. To reduce this imago mentis to its lowest terms, we may resort to the card of the Empress, as the symbol of a woman in a pre-eminent position, displaying two coins in the palm of one hand (it is a decidedly modest cut, let us agree on that). Beside the throne, the arcanum of Judgement, that is, an angel, messenger of heaven, sounding the trumpet, a metaphor for the relentless media campaign to spread news of the measure as widely as possible.

Beneath the Empress we shall place a doubling of the Chariot, an arcanum that can symbolise both a military pomp, a triumph, and well-being, feasting, wealth: ships, trains, articulated lorries laden with goods that come to unload every day in the great shopping centres as in the small shops of the village, merchandise and sundries, goods of the first, second, third and fourth necessity, or more prosaically our own cars, the ones onto which we load our shopping bags, all of them manifestations compatible with the symbolism of the Chariot.

The two coins mentioned above, the ones we cannot quite tell from which Chariot they are subtracted and into which Chariot they are meant to be poured, in truth do not belong to the sunlit sovereign, but in the last analysis to the citizen who voted for her (and to the one who took good care not to), in the form of private property on the one hand and of the public budget on the other: in practice we have two chariots, both belonging to the citizenry, from one of which the doll with the iron fist withdraws some two billion three hundred million euro, in order to compensate the driver of the second chariot (that of the regional budget) for the revenue not collected from unpaid car taxes. The people's money, in short, simply passing from one pocket to the other: questioned about the coverage foreseen for the abolition of the car tax, the queen of heaven was unable to give convincing explanations, and this is no small problem, since it is not clear whether she intends to take it from the PNRR, or from schools, from healthcare, from pensions. Which services, that is, we shall have to give up in order to afford not paying the car tax.

At this point comes the most entertaining part of the mnemonic seal, the Wheel of Fortune that stands out in all its power behind the effigy of the dark monarch: the suspension of the hated levy is not, at present, structural, but appears to be envisaged for the year 2027 alone, after which the wheel will find itself to have completed a full turn and the bag of gold coins will end up falling back into the chariot of the public budget all the same.

An ephemeral measure, then, promises notwithstanding; some have asked why the abolition of the state's protection racket on the automobile should be limited to next year alone, and the answer was not slow in presenting itself to many: 2027 is the year of the general election, in case anyone had forgotten. Behind the wheel, therefore, one seems to make out in the distance the arcanum of a Tower falling to the ground, struck down by adverse fate, symbolising the throne that wobbles beneath the backside of the Lycaonian and vampiric Balilla in a skirt.

Thus the media narrative stands simplified. Empress, Two of Coins, Judgement, Chariot, King of Coins, Wheel, Tower, recombined in our minds into a composite arcanum representing the most profoundly archetypal aspects of the news item, dismantle the pomp of the hired heralds who crawl at the feet of the unstable, bug-eyed despot. Extreme synthesis by means of these metaphors allows us to memorise the structures of the imaginary underlying the propagandistic contrivance, so that we may recognise its recurrent schemes in future too, each time they present themselves anew: to simplify, in order to understand complexity.

When people ask me what I mean by inner revolution, this, then, is one of the possible answers: were a critical mass of citizens to be initiated into this mnemopoietic practice, it would be capable of raising a shock wave, favouring a change, an inner subversion that would then manifest itself in the phenomenal world in the form of a collective development at once sudden, sustainable and profound. An inner revolution that becomes an outer revolution, and a bloodless one.