Mystery is not bound to any of its manifestations. No particular love exhausts love itself. The existentiating force travels between existents, each time becoming faithful to its new form just before abandoning it. Existence migrates through the forms of language like a stranger in and to the world – God’s archetypical symbol, the model of a saintly life. Any migrant knows that each particular place on the atlas or in history harbours its own destiny, broadcasting its own melody. Moving between these forms is precisely how existence, the fundamental migrant, performs its own dance. No practices has a closer relationship than migrating with a second figure of thought, that has been so instrumental to our existential sailing: ‘talent’. A talented migrant is able to integrate themselves into their new home to the point of vanishing, while at the same time remaining alien to any form of reduction to social norms, however novel, advanced or hospitable they may be. A talented migrant vanishes in order to remain a foreigner, since foreignness is the point of equilibrium between subjection and autonomy, necessity and freedom, paranoia and panic. But the task of remaining a foreigner requires constant and careful negotiation of the demands issued by a migrant’s new home and by their own uprootedness – a ‘great game’ of diplomacy between their armies of paranoia and panic. Here lies talent in its essence, in the ability to combine the two polar forces ruling over worldly enterprises: determinism and chaos. Talent is a manifestation of what is symbolically described as ‘grace’: the force capable of diverting the flow of existence (or its manifestation) away from one destiny, towards another destiny – and again.
—Federico Campagna, “Destiny, talent and fortune”
