More than silence, there has been muteness around here. Since the first days of January, the overload of information and misinformation, and back and forth, has been so fast that it’s taken me all these months to write again. There’s been a lack of time, that fallacy of modernity, that you can always find a hole, a small moment, just a quick coffee, it doesn’t change anything, come on. Sometimes you just can’t. If you want to do something, you must do it with all your might! It would be nice if it were still possible to make these kinds of assertions in the contemporary world we live in.

So, after four months of silence, what motivated me to write? Well, between tasks and little tasks, I found myself following a bee with my gaze. What glory! Anyone who is afraid of bees and immediately starts fussing is doubly mistaken. Firstly, because most of the time people take bees for wasps. This is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Anyone who knows the difference does. A bee really has nothing to do with a wasp. A wasp walks in additives, is slender and long-limbed, yellow in colour, and – the part that matters – carnivorous. All it takes is one piece of protein stuck in the middle of two slices of bread on the beach and you can’t get any more peace. The wasp is fast and persistent, and it happens to sting you without any pangs of conscience if you set your sights on it. So, secondly: just give it the slice of ham and it’ll leave you alone. Wasps are an evil relative of bees. The difference can be seen in their flight. While a wasp zigzags along straight lines at breathtaking speeds, a bee takes a slow, forward-looking route, as calmly as if it were packing itself at the same time. Bees have more hair, are rounder and darker. They’re sweet – and they’re vegetarians. But they’re also a pain in the arse. If you decide to annoy them and shake them and drive them away, they’re capable of going kamikaze and sacrificing their lives by giving you a good sting. Bees only do this as a last resort. They don’t really care about us at all. They are, to paraphrase a beekeeper, one of the most evolved societies we can have the honour of knowing. It sounds like an unshakeable prediction. But it is. It’s worth reading more about it. Or, in an environmentally friendly way, why not have some hives and learn empirically?

I was looking at the bee and thinking 1) that where I was a sign of fresh air, because bees don’t go about their routes without looking for the good stuff; 2) that the bee was looking for a new route inside my house, although I suspected, as it turned out, that it didn’t find what it needed; 3) that the bee has a beautiful way of life, because it has the luxury of taking its time to look for what it needs, with all its waddling and leisurely flying. It was this last point that I ended up dwelling on. I found myself contemplating the bee, thinking about its rhythm of life, and deciding to stop my tasks and chores and just watch it until there was an outcome. An outcome that would be dictated by the bee, not by me. Eventually, just as it entered, it left. It didn’t even try to approach me.

The luxury of contemplation, which is becoming more and more important these days, goes hand in hand with the luxury of silence. And anyone who appreciates and cherishes silence necessarily contributes to silence. The self-proclaimed absence of sound, or the strong presence that something mute can have, is what I’d like to get at. A few days ago, I was reminded of Morandi. And today, with the bee, I’m reminded of Morandi again. I was reminded of Morandi a few days ago because sometimes, but rarely, I come across carelessly placed objects that remind me of his pictorial compositions. This was the case a few days ago. I saw a set of bottles. I can’t say they were ordinary because many were made of Murano glass and were simply decorated, but they were displayed on a shelf as if they were waiting for their turn. Their turn to be eternalised in a composition by Morandi. In silence, they watched everything that went on in front of them. The conversations and dances, the details and micro-expressions. The silence of objects sometimes says more than human actions. This seemed to be the case with these bottles that looked like paintings by Morandi.

Giorgio Morandi has a peculiar history. It is said that he rarely left the house and that both he and his sisters lived with their mother until she passed away. Morandi painted still lifes, and seeing Cézanne’s paintings had a strong impact on his production. He was unshakeable, in the sense that, unlike the rebellious times in which he lived, he remained firmly dedicated to his still lifes. The objects didn’t vary that much, nor did the colour palette, which was light, in pastel tones, levelled out, without major contrasts. Sometimes a shadow appears to indicate the incidence of light. But even the light is calm, even and uniform. These are calming paintings. They seem to eternalise a moment that can last for seconds, minutes, hours or months. The objects depicted, usually bottles, jars, and ceramic vases, are timeless. They can pinpoint a specific moment from the 1940s-50s – when the painter’s production was more constant – as can the bottles I saw a few weeks ago. Giorgio Morandi’s paintings have this power: they change over time. The passing of the hours of light stops, contemplation reveals itself. We only know more about Morandi because this was his plan for decades. A labourious, repetitive job, but never the same. The compositions changed, like someone deciding to make a new combination with the same variables. You can see the same glass bottle in one painting in the foreground, in another in the background. But it’s understandable why these banal objects were his favourite subject. Is there anything more beautiful than renewing our fascination with what surrounds us daily? And how can the luminous disposition of each day reveal a new chromatic condition? Morandi teaches us to contemplate. In the most trivial things, in objects that are already cracked, but which populate our daily lives, in the affection of their daily coexistence. It doesn’t take much to get carried away by the wobbling rhythm of a bee. Morandi shows us that. He decided to leave us the tranquillity of silence, in the objects that observe us every day. And with that, he imposes his vision of muteness. Like the bee, Morandi followed his slow, prospective, self-packaging path. He didn’t go for the immediate, he took his time, assertively revealing the beauty of the trivial in everyday life. We must learn from bees and Morandi. I just hope it doesn’t take another four months.