NOTHING BUT LIES! – The Little Boat

One thing is certainly evident and the children soon realize it: reducing the story of Pinocchio to a warning against lies for fear that the nose will grow longer is not only banal, but also guilty, as it is always guilty to take possession of a part to make it the whole: in literature, as in any other cultural activity. It is a common vice to bend texts, words, characters of infinite vastness to one’s own cause and, when this operation is done skilfully, the poor text or the poor character remains caged forever.
«Pinocchio is a ferocious book, a theological book. It is the story of a creature who is born guilty and who goes through punishments, metamorphoses, apparent deaths and resurrections. The puppet must die several times to finally become human”: this is how Giorgio Manganelli defines him in his 1977 book Pinocchio, a parallel book.
Pinocchio, therefore, is not the story of a lying puppet; it’s something completely different and, now that we know his “true” story up close, we can make it the subject of dialogue and debate with young people, asking them questions, simple or complex, as always.

The first: many projects loom over the life of each of us, sometimes in conflict with each other. Do you notice it, do you feel the weight of it? The boys jump on their seats, because they clearly feel the plan of their parents who want them to do well at school: Samuele says so and all heads nod without hesitation. Often, says Isabel, even professors have plans for you, because they want you to do well in their subject, more than in others, it seems.
School comes first, as always, and then sport. Teammates sometimes have a plan for us, Lorenzo says, when they ask to play in a role or occupy a position that is not congenial to us.

And that’s fine: but, we ask, is having a plan for a boy good or bad? You who have it are easily impatient, because you only feel its weight, only its disastrous looming; but let’s try for a moment to think of a child for whom there is no planning: no one who reads his soul and his mind, no one who dreams with him, no one who notices his talent.
When no one has a plan for us, we grow like grass: free perhaps, but at the mercy of the wind and rain, of paws that can trample us, of hands that can tear us, ready to become weeds. It is good that a project exists for us; the difference, if anything, is that it is not badly imposed.
Even the Little Boat, after all, is a project that is very clear about young people and, if it works, it is only because the majority of them join it due to intuition, trust, sympathy, an ability to listen…

The second question calls into question the Jiminy Cricket: does conscience exist, do you know how to feel it? Morgana says that conscience is actually a little voice that intervenes when you are doing something and you feel that you shouldn’t do it. Adham, philosophically, reflects on the fact that when he thinks he is doing something right he never pats himself on the back saying: “well done, you are doing something right!”, while when he thinks he is doing something wrong, he immediately calls himself to order: “bad, you are doing something wrong!”
It’s true, Lorenzo concludes: we only hear the voice of conscience in negative things. It’s very true, yet conscience should be a precious voice and ally even for good! We explain to the children that attention to oneself must be exercised and cultivated in a broad and as complete way as possible: conscience must also be an awareness of goodness and if a child was able to clearly recognize his qualities and good deeds, part of the “illness” of adolescence would be cured.

In any case, the form that conscience takes is an internal voice: there must be active and attentive listening, that “desire to listen” that we know well, without which conscience can easily become a victim of our indifference or our violence. Pinocchio did not hesitate to smash poor Cricket against the wall, throwing him a hammer: how do we kill our conscience? Adham thinks it is an impossible operation – even the Cricket, after all, has resurrected in the life of his puppet, first as a shadow and then in flesh and blood -, while Morgana believes that a conscience that has long been ignored or silenced slowly stops speaking.
Death, we have seen, plays a major role in the novel, as do failure and guilt. It is the blue-haired fairy (not a good fairy!) who fights her battle with these weapons, especially that horrible sense of guilt which in the story of the puppet, as in the story of every human being, causes useless and often irreparable damage. But can we really learn from failures? And can you live guided by guilt? Emma says that an analyzed and well-managed failure can certainly bear fruit, and it’s difficult to disagree with this, while the kids are confused about the sense of guilt. They don’t yet know that it is a monster that works inside us with unprecedented ferocity and, unlike conscience, only hurts. We must learn as soon as possible to take a hammer to the sense of guilt and to beware of those who instill and feed it. The last stretch of Pinocchio’s story is dramatic: betrayal, death, defeat and then definitive victory. Why is the outcome different this time, what opens up real change?
Isabel says that everything is proceeding without those disastrous interruptions that have marked the path until then; Federica thinks that Pinocchio has understood his mistakes but her brother is not very convinced: there is something new: there is someone who is counting on him this time. Geppetto who literally weighs on his shoulders during the escape, and also his tuna friend who, following the tracks, has learned how to escape from the belly of the dogfish.

The difference in your project, dear guys, is made the moment you seriously deal with someone else’s project. Then, the house you live in, that is, the whole world, will be more beautiful and richer because when kids go from bad to good, they have the virtue of making their families take on a new and smiling appearance.-