INSITE Journal_03 Vital Forms

To do something—Mircea Eliade would say—is to “know the magic formula that allows you to ‘invent’ it or to ‘make it appear’ spontaneously.” Forms take time to become physical and real. They appear first in the imagination. Taking raw matter and turning it into a shape or figure is one of the instinctive activities of human beings. We could even say that it is the first attempt to mold our own personal world—an action that channels and absorbs our primal impulses and energies. Even so, simple figures do not belong to the social realm until they metamorphose into vital forms; that is, when they are useful and significant, once we attribute to them qualities, designate them with names, and finally posit them inside a symbolic system of value and desire. Roland Barthes asked, “What is the characteristic of myth? To transform a meaning into form,” since “every object in the world can pass from a closed, silent existence to an oral state, open to appropriation by society.”