Article by Maria Giulia Marini, Health and Wellbeing Area, Scientific Director, Epidemiologist and Counselor, President of EUNAMES, the European Narrative Medicine Society, and Editor-in-Chief of the journal “Chronicles of Narrative Medicine“.
To write about the word spirit in five hundred words seems almost an act of desecration. It means confining it within a narrow space, when spirit, by its very nature, should fly as lightly as air. It is invisible and dwells precisely in the air, through which it spreads. Spiritus derives from the Latin spirare: to blow, to breathe. Yet I also like to evoke the word aroma, which is equally inseparable from the air, because fragrance exists only by diffusing through it. I believe that spirit and aroma are related, and that in the ancient Greek ἀήρ (aḗr), air, one can already hear the echo of ἄρωμα (árōma), fragrance. The two words seem to call out to one another, because essences have no weight: they move through space without imposing themselves, invisible yet present. So it is with spirit: we perceive it without being able to grasp it; it reaches us without occupying space, like a breath, like an aroma.
For this reason, spirit has to do with lightness, with that invisible force that is the opposite of gravity. Gravity makes things fall to the ground; it renders them inert, perhaps dead, lifeless. Spirit, by contrast, animates them, lifts them up and restores energy to what had seemed motionless.
What does all this have to do with narrative medicine? It has everything to do with it, because when narrative succeeds in giving us meaning and, at last, a name, it brings together the fragments of the past, allows us to glimpse a horizon in the present and enables us to imagine a future. A future in which concrete and oil will have become obsolete tools, because humanity will have understood that, by overheating the planet, it does nothing but distance itself from both itself and others, losing the very human contact that keeps us alive.
Narrative frees us from leaden weight. It passes through the hard rock of facts, even the most terrible events that can occur, and restores meaning to things. To give meaning does not mean to justify, but to understand: to understand the profound ignorance of the human brain, which perceives reality only in fragments because our neurons are unable to frame the big picture. The ancients, and believers to this day, entrust this overall vision to God, to omniscience. Without that certainty, all we can do is accept our limitations and continue to search, study, listen and tell stories, in the hope that, by understanding a little more each day, we may also learn to live a little more fully.
Narrative brings about an alchemical transformation. It passes through the lead of pain and heavy matter and transfigures it into the lightest of gold, almost intangible, like the winged sandals of Hermes, capable of rising above the earth. From post-traumatic stress disorder to post-traumatic growth. Spirit, then, is the continual search for underlying causes; it is a sense of time; it is the gentle comfort of healing through words.
Calvino is the master of lightness. I would like the spirit we are about to encounter in this issue to be precisely this: an airy source, a view from above, the lightest brush of contact, a word scented with aromas dissolving into the air of this absurd, overheated summer.
Perhaps this is precisely what narrative medicine does. It passes through the fire of experience, even when that fire is the fire of pain, and distils its essence, just as happens with the leaves and petals of the lemon tree: living, green matter that heat does not destroy but releases, surrendering its aroma, its spirit, its energy to the air. What was heavy becomes light; what was body becomes air; what was matter becomes essence. This is how perfumes are distilled and, perhaps, how our stories are distilled as well. Narrative does not invent spirit: it distils it. When all that is superfluous has evaporated, only the essence remains in the air—invisible yet present—which we call spirit.
