"The genius of the heart", the third title of Aura Christi to be translated into Italian, after “ The sphere of cold. From hell with love" and after " Orbit of the god" (translation by Stefan Damian and Francesco Corsi), is a title with a Nietzschean echo. In fact, there is an almost aphoristic style of the great philosopher and an underlying reference to the depths of life where the soul perceives abysmal pain, but, in these abysses, it also finds an opportunity to mysteriously grasp the first fruits and the blazing joys of lights and visions. Only the genius of the heart can rise above the decline of the particular, to open up to the joy of being. With these autobiographical lyrics, the poet marks three stages in her life that are articulated in the experience of dialogue of pain and love and then resolved into a special joy.

In addition to philosophical and literary references, thinking of a “genius of the heart” is also a question of contemporary significance if we consider that recent scientific discoveries have identified a correlation between the mind and the heart. The heart is not a "headless pump", but lives a two-way correspondence with our brain.. And it is also an autobiographical experience in living love as a dimension of painful knowledge, through a poem that is also profound philosophical knowledge. Confirming what the ancients said, the heart feels, the heart is the seat of suffering, of emotions, of the more subtle and poetic sides of living existence.
The life of poetry is the metaphor and the metaphor of the heart is a metaphor of flesh and blood. It is no coincidence that mystics and poets find their center in the dimension of the heart.

Remembering comes from “Re-cor-dare”, to give back to the heart. The mind has settled what the heart has felt and the places, the situations of life, are like Proust's madeleines and make us return to our hearts the emotions we have experienced. Memories, live in the memory which is the basis of the development of every intellect and of humanity itself. Genius cannot be alien to the heart. "What should I do, oh genius, with my heart?": The poet wonders if her painful mystical feeling belongs to a universal intelligence. If even the stones love and feel, if a candle can feel something for the candle next to it as if it were a lover. What is the soul? What is the heart? An eternal riverbed where silence coincides with a word that has no end… A biblical ruah, a breath that gives life and that hovers above the waters?

In the genius of the heart, in addition to the deep feeling for life, there is insight, a noetic act that cannot be separated from study. A sort of Leopardian labor limae, where the "culture" requires us to ‘’colere’’, to cultivate, chisel every aspect of being, gently collecting it in our soul.

The apostles, the sea, the ribs and the sternum are in a whole of listening, already written, in a time that has already come and yet has to come, overcoming every contradiction.

The contradiction between life and death marks a tragic one that finds Nietzschean superabundance of being in the game that becomes song: "everything is like in a divine game, where I know and you know I know, you know and I know you know: everything what touches the god within me around me - sings and sings ... "

And here too Aura is contemporary because it seems to move between the two giants of contemporary thought, between Nietzsche's child and Heidegger's Gesang ist dasein.
"The vault is curved into the breastbone", love gathers the whole of love in the physical pain of the chest. A pain like a disease that only the love of the beloved could have cured. And then the poet would like to escape from her body, to pray God that he keeps that chalice away from her, because it has become the temple of a song that does not belong to her. And "you are like wood", like stone or like the sea after the storm that nothing can move from the condition of a peace that has become the inertia of noon. Sun that burns everything in a stillness that seems to be a sunset, because in this shock, words fail and sleepless nights arrive, in which the fever of insomnia makes you tremble in solitude. Then the void, the fullness of the cosmos seems to have given way to the void. But reason dictates “don't lose your head”: “We are never alone, a monk tells me. We are never alone, the leaf, the noon, the gravel echoes in chorus ”. There is again a song of the being that rises from the place of silence, in which the blinding and pure sun of the afternoon shows small things like the gravel of the garden and the leaves that widen the soul towards the fullness of being. And here, once again, in the "genius of the heart" it is as if one lived the systole and diastole of the dialogue between full and empty, one consubstantial with the other. In fact, in the quiet, the echo remains. The tree, a symbol of life, cannot soar towards the sky towards which the branches tend, because it is anchored to the roots. The poet understands that to cross the border she must cross the threshold of suffering and die, in order to disperse, like salt in the sea. And in the diastole systole of the heart, he returns to the starting point, among the rubble, while the song of the poem continues to shout about "how my world is extinguished". But prayer lifts the soul and then the words of Thales echo, that death does not exist and those of Jesus Christ, both derided, because it was necessary for it to be so. Each must follow his course, his god who requires him to be faithful to what he feels and what the genius of his heart knows.
“I sing, cradle, cry, conjure the sea, the white water lilies. Grass and wind are like impossible loves. I sing my heart, the living thought of my death. "

And poetry, which is a constant song, would like to become a spell so that the saying of Saint Augustine "Love and you will be loved" can move mountains and seas.

Francesco Corsi