Monday, February 5, 2007
Thursday, January 11, 2007
Syllabus Lit Ital 143
LT IT 143 MAJOR ITALIAN AUTHORS: PIER PAOLO PASOLINI
Pasquale Verdicchio Office: Lt Bldg. 3340 T/Th 9:30-10:50
Thirty years after his murder Pier Paolo Pasolini still stands as one of the most controversial and influential intellectuals of the 20th century. As a most important social activist Pasolini’s Marxism, Catholicism and homosexuality became irritants for purists in each community and for antagonists beyond them. This course will give us the opportunity to consider Pasolini’s films, essays, poetry and prose as both historical documents and in a contemporary context. Among other things we will view films such as Accatone and read from the essay collection Scritti Corsari and Empirisom eretico.
Week 1
TUES Introduction
THURS from La voce di Pasolini: pg. 11-22; 35; 39-42
Week 2
TUES “We are all in danger” & “Censoring the body of Ideology” from www.gennariello.blogspot.com
THURS “Prefazione” a Lettere luterane di A. Berardinelli + “Nuove questioni linguistiche” in Empirisom eretico pg. 5-24.
Week 3 First 2 page write-up due.
TUES “Nuove questioni linguistiche” + Appendice pg. 24–50.
THURS “Dal laboratorio” pg. 51-77.
Week 4
TUES “Il cinema di poesia” pg. 167-187.
THURS “Il cinema di poesia” pg. 167-187.
Week 5 Second write-up due.
TUES Film
THURS Film Midterm Quiz
Week 6
TUES “I giovani infelici” from Lettere luterane pg.5-12
THURS “Gennariello” Paragrafo primo, secondo e terzo.
Week 7 Third write-up due.
TUES Paragrafo quarto, La prima lezione…, Pargrafo sesto.
THURS Siamo due estranei, Com’è mutato il linguaggio…, Bologna…
Week 8
TUES I ragazzi sono…, Vivono…, Siamo belli…, Le madonne…
THURS FILM
Week 9 Fourth write-up due.
TUES Lettere luterane, “Abiuria alla trilogia”
THURS Presentazioni
Week 10
TUES Presentazioni
THURS Presentazioni
Grade breakdown: Four 2 page write-ups @ 15% = 60% Presentazione 15% Quiz 15%
Attendance/participation 10%
Pasquale Verdicchio Office: Lt Bldg. 3340 T/Th 9:30-10:50
Thirty years after his murder Pier Paolo Pasolini still stands as one of the most controversial and influential intellectuals of the 20th century. As a most important social activist Pasolini’s Marxism, Catholicism and homosexuality became irritants for purists in each community and for antagonists beyond them. This course will give us the opportunity to consider Pasolini’s films, essays, poetry and prose as both historical documents and in a contemporary context. Among other things we will view films such as Accatone and read from the essay collection Scritti Corsari and Empirisom eretico.
Week 1
TUES Introduction
THURS from La voce di Pasolini: pg. 11-22; 35; 39-42
Week 2
TUES “We are all in danger” & “Censoring the body of Ideology” from www.gennariello.blogspot.com
THURS “Prefazione” a Lettere luterane di A. Berardinelli + “Nuove questioni linguistiche” in Empirisom eretico pg. 5-24.
Week 3 First 2 page write-up due.
TUES “Nuove questioni linguistiche” + Appendice pg. 24–50.
THURS “Dal laboratorio” pg. 51-77.
Week 4
TUES “Il cinema di poesia” pg. 167-187.
THURS “Il cinema di poesia” pg. 167-187.
Week 5 Second write-up due.
TUES Film
THURS Film Midterm Quiz
Week 6
TUES “I giovani infelici” from Lettere luterane pg.5-12
THURS “Gennariello” Paragrafo primo, secondo e terzo.
Week 7 Third write-up due.
TUES Paragrafo quarto, La prima lezione…, Pargrafo sesto.
THURS Siamo due estranei, Com’è mutato il linguaggio…, Bologna…
Week 8
TUES I ragazzi sono…, Vivono…, Siamo belli…, Le madonne…
THURS FILM
Week 9 Fourth write-up due.
TUES Lettere luterane, “Abiuria alla trilogia”
THURS Presentazioni
Week 10
TUES Presentazioni
THURS Presentazioni
Grade breakdown: Four 2 page write-ups @ 15% = 60% Presentazione 15% Quiz 15%
Attendance/participation 10%
Tuesday, January 9, 2007
PASOLINI'S LAST INTERVIEW
WE ARE ALL IN DANGER
The last interview with Pier Paolo Pasolini
By Furio Colombo
This interview took place on Saturday, November 1, 1975, between four and six in the evening, a few hours before Pasolini’s assassination. I want to emphasize that the title as it appears was his, and not of my own making. As a matter of fact, at the end of the conversation, which, as in the past found us on opposite sides of certain points, I asked him if he wanted to give me a title for the interview. He thought about it a while, said it was not important, changed topic, and then something brought us back to the subject that had emerged time and again in the answers that follow. “Here is the seed, the sense of everything – he said – You don’t even know who, right at this moment, might be thinking of killing you. Use this as a title, if you like: ‘Because, we are all in danger’.”
FC: Pasolini, in your articles and in your writings you have given various accounts of what you detest. You have carried out a solitary struggle against so many things: institutions, trends, people, and power. So as to make things easier I will refer to it all as the “situation”, by which you know that I mean the whole of which you generally battle. Let me propose one objection. The “situation”, with all its evils as you describe it, also contains all that makes Pasolini possible. What I mean is that, even with all your talent and merit, your tools are provided by the “situation”: publishing, cinema, organization, even objects. Let’s say that yours is a magic thought. One little gesture and everything that you detest disappears. What about you, then, would you not be left all alone and without any of the tools you need? I mean, the means or tools of expression, I mean…
PPP: I understand. But I not only attempt to achieve that magic thought process, I believe in it. Not as a way to mediate with the world, but because I know that by constantly hitting the same nail on the head one can possibly make a whole house fall down. We find a small example of this among the Radical Party, a motley crew who is able to influence the whole country. You know that I don’t always agree with them, but I am about to leave right now for their conference. Most of all, it’s history that gives us the best example. Contestation has always been and essential act. Saints, hermits and intellectuals, those few who have made history, are the ones who have said “no”, not the courtesans and Cardinals’ assistants. So as to be meaningful, contestation must be large, major and total, “absurd” and not in good sense. It cannot merely be on this or that point. Eichmann had a good lot of good sense. What was he lacking then? He did not say “no” right away, at the beginning, when he was a mere administrator, a bureaucrat. He might have said to some of his friends “I don’t really like Himmler”. He might have whispered something, the way it’s done in publishing firms, newspaper office, in sub-government, in the newsrooms. Or he might even have objected to the fact that some train had stopped once a day for the deported to do their business, for bread and water, when two stops might have been more practical and economic. But he never stopped the machine. And so, there are three arguments to make here: what is what you call the “situation, why should we halt it or destroy it, and how?
FC: Well, describe the “situation” then. You know very well that your observations and your language are like the sun shining through the dust. It’s a beautiful image, but things are sometimes a little unclear.
PPP: I thank you for the sun image, but expect much less than that. All I want is that you look around and take notice of the tragedy. What is the tragedy? It’s that there are no longer any human beings; there are only some strange machines that bump up against each other. And we intellectuals look at old train schedules and say: “strange, shouldn’t these train run by there. How come they crashed like that? Either the engineer has lost his mind, or he is a criminal. Or, even better, it’s all a conspiracy.” We are particularly pleased with conspiracies because the relieve us of the weight of having to deal with the truth head on. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if, while we are here talking, someone in the basement were making plans to kill us? It’s easy, it’s simple, and it’s the resistance. We might lose a few friends, but then we’ll gather our forces and wipe them out. A little for us, a little for them, don’t you think? And I know that when they show Paris is burning on TV everyone sits there with tears in their eyes, wishing only that history would repeat itself, but clean and beautiful. The effect of time is that it washes thing clean, like the walls of house in the rain. It’s simple, I’m on this side, and you’re on the other. Let’s not joke about the blood, the pain, the work that people then too paid with so as to “have a choice”. When one keeps one’s face flat against that hour, that minute in history, choice is always a tragedy. But let’s admit it, it was easier then. With courage and conscience, a normal man can always reject a Fascist of Salò or a Nazi of the SS, even from his interior life (where the revolution always begins). But today it’s different. Someone might come walking toward you dressed like a friend, very friendly and polite, but he is a “collaborator” (let’s say for a TV station). The reasoning goes that first of all he needs to make a living somehow, and then because it’s not like he’s hurting anyone. Another one, or others, the groups, comes toward you aggressively with their ideological blackmail, the admonitions, their sermons, and their anathemas that are also threats. They march with flags and slogans, but what separates them from “power”?
FC: Well, what is power in your opinion? Where is it? How does one cause it to reveal itself?
PPP: Power is an educational system that divides us into subjects and subjected. Nevertheless, it is an educational system that forms us all, from the so-called ruling class all the way down to the poorest of us. That’s why everyone wants the same things and everyone acts in the same way. If I have access to an administrative council or a Stock Market maneuver, that’s what I use. Otherwise I use a crowbar. And when I use a crowbar I’ll use whatever means to get what I want.
Why do I want it? Because I’ve been told that it is a virtue to have it. I am merely exercising my virtue-rights. I am a murderer but I am a good person.
FC: You have been accused of not being able to make political or ideological distinctions. It is said that you have lost the ability of differentiating the sign of the deep difference that there is between Fascists and non-Fascists, among the new generations for example.
PPP: That’s what I was talking about when I mentioned the train schedules before. Have you ever seen those marionettes that make children laugh so much because their body faces one direction while their heads face another? I think Totò was quite adept at such a trick. Well, that’s how I see that wonderful troop of intellectuals, sociologists, experts and journalists with the most noble of intentions. Things happen here, and their heads are turned in the opposite direction. I’m not saying that there is no Fascism. What I’m saying is: don’t talk to me of the sea while we are in the mountains. This is a different landscape. There is a desire to kill here. And this desire ties us together as sinister brothers of the sinister failure of an entire social system. I too would like it if it were easy to isolate the black sheep. I too see the black sheep. I see quite a lot of them. I see all of them. That’s the problem, as I said to Moravia: given the life I lead, I pay a price…it’s like a descent into hell. But when I come back – if I come back – I’ve seen other things, more things. I’m not asking you to believe me. I’m saying that you always find yourselves changing topic so as to avoid facing the truth.
FC: And what is the truth?
PPP: I’m sorry I used that word. What I wanted to say was “evidence”. Let me reorder things. First tragedy: a common education, obligatory and wrong that pushes us all into the same arena of having to have everything at all costs. In this arena we are pushed along like some strange and dark army in which some carry cannons and other carry crowbars. Therefore, the first classical division is to “stay with the weak”. But what I say is that, in a certain sense, everyone is weak, because everyone is a victim. And everyone is guilty, because everyone is ready to play the murderous game of possession. We have learned to have, possess and destroy.
FC: Let me go back to the first question then. You magically abolish everything. But you live from books, and you need intelligent people who read…educated consumers of an intellectual product. You are a filmmaker and, as such, you need large venues (you are very successful, and are “consumed” avidly by your public) but also an extensive technical, managerial and industrial machine that is in the midst of it all. If you remove all of this, with a sort of magical paleo-catholic and neo-chinese monasticism, what’s left?
PPP: Everything. I am what is left, being alive, being in the world, a place to see, work and understand. There are hundreds of ways to tell the stories, to listen to the languages, to reproduce dialects, to make puppetry. The others are left with much more. They can keep pace with me, cultured like me or ignorant like me. The world becomes bigger, everything is ours and there is no need to use the Stock Market, the administrative council or the crowbar to plunder. You see, in the world that we dreamed about (let me repeat myself: reading old train schedules from either a year or thirty years ago) there was the awful landlord in a top hat and dollars pouring out of his pockets, and the emaciated widow and her children who begged for mercy, as in Brecht’s beautiful world.
FC: Are you saying that you miss that world?
PPP: No! My nostalgia is for those poor and real people who struggled to defeat the landlord without becoming that landlord. Since they were excluded from everything, they remained uncolonized. I am afraid of these Black revolutionaries who are the same as their landlords, equally criminal, who want everything at any cost. This gloomy ostentation toward total violence makes it hard to distinguish to which “side” one belongs. Whoever might be taken to an Emergency Ward close to death is probably more interested in what the doctors have to tell him about his chances of living than what the police might have to say about the mechanism of the crime. Be assured that I am neither condemning intentions nor am I interested in the chain of cause and effect: them first, him first, or who is the primary guilty party. I think we have defined what you called the “situation”. It’s like it rains in the city and the gutters are backed up. The water rises, but the water is innocent, it’s rainwater. It has neither the fury of sea, nor the rage of river current. But, for some reason, it rises instead of falling. It’s the same water of so many adolescent poems and of the cutesy songs like “singing in the rain”. But it rises and it drowns you. If that’s where we are, I say let’s not waste time placing nametags here and there. Let’s see then how we can unplug this tub before we all drown.
FC: And to get there you would want everyone to be ignorant and happy little unschooled shepherds?
PPP: Put in those terms it would be absurd. But the educational system as it is cannot but produce desperate gladiators. The masses are growing, as is desperation and rage. Let’s say that I’ve flung a boutade (but I don’t think so), what else can you come up with? Of course I lament a pure revolution led by oppressed peoples whose only goal is to free themselves and run their own lives. Of course I try to imagine that such a moment might still be possible in Italian and world history. The best of what I imagine might even inspire one of my future poems. But not what I know and what I see. I want to say it plain and clear: I go down into hell and I see things that do not disturb the peace of others. But be careful. Hell is rising toward the rest of you. It’s true that it dreams its own uniform and its own justification (sometimes). But it’s also true that its desire, its need to hit back, to assault, to kill, is strong and wide-ranging. The private and risky experience of those who have touched “the violent life” will not be available for long. Don’t be fooled. And you are, along with the educational system, television, the your pacifying newspapers, the great keepers of this horrendous order founded on the concept of possession and the idea of destruction. Luckily, you seem to be happy when you can tag a murder with its own beautiful description. This to me is just another one of mass culture’s operations. Since we can’t prevent certain things from happening, we find peace in constructing shelves where to keep them.
FC: But to abolish also means to create, unless you too are a destroyer. What happens to the books, for example? I certainly don’t want to be one of those people who is anguished by the loss of culture more than for people. But these people saved in your vision of a different world can no longer be primitive (an accusation often leveled at you) and if we don’t want to repress “more advanced”…
PPP: Which makes me cringe.
FC: If we don’t want to fall back on commonplaces, there must be some sort of clue. For example, in science fiction, as in Nazism, book burning is always the first step in the massacres. Once you’ve shut down the schools, and abolished television, how do you animate your world?
PPP: I think I already covered this with Moravia. Closing or abolishing in my language means, “to change”. But change in a drastic and desperate manner such as the situation dictates. What really prevents a real dialogue with Moravia, but more so with Firpo, for example, is that somehow we are not seeing the same scene, we don’t know the same people, and that we do not hear the same voices. For you and them, things happen when it’s news, beautifully written, formatted, cut and titled. But what’s underneath it all? What is missing is a surgeon who has the courage to examine the tissue and declare: gentlemen, this is cancer, and it is not benign. What is cancer? It’s something that changes all the cells, which causes them to grow in a haphazard manner, outside of any previous logic. Is a cancer patient who dreams the same healthy body that he had before nostalgic, even if before he was stupid and unlucky? Before the cancer, I mean. First of all one would have to make quite an effort to re-establish the same image. I listen to all the politicians and their little formulas, and it drives me insane. They don’t seem to know what country they are talking about; they are as distant as the Moon. And the same goes for the writers, sociologists and experts of all sorts.
FC: Why do you think that some things are so much evident for you?
PPP: I don’t want to talk about myself any more. Maybe I’ve said too much already. Everyone knows that I pay for my experiences in person. But there are also my books and my films. Maybe I’m wrong, but I’ll keep on saying that we are all in danger.
FC: Pasolini, if that’s how you see life – I don’t know if you will accept this question – how do you hope to avoid the risk and danger involved?
It’s late, Pasolini did not turn on any lights and it’s become hard to take notes. We look over what I’ve written. Then he asks me to leave the questions with him.
PPP: There are some statements that seem a little too absolute. Let me think about it, let me look them over. And give me the time to come up with a concluding remark. I have something in mind for your question. I find it easier to write than to talk. I’ll give you the notes that I’ll add on tomorrow morning.
The next day, Sunday, Pasolini’s body was in the morgue of the Rome police station.
Monday, January 8, 2007
Fragment to Death
I come to you and return to you,
sentiment born of light, of heat,
baptized when the beginning was joy,
recognized in Pier Paolo
at the origin of a craving epopeia:
I have walked in the light of history,
but, my being was always heroic
under your dominion, intimate thought.
Every real act of the world, of history,
coagulated in the stream of light,
in the atrocious distrust of your flame:
and it was wholly verified within it,
losing its life in order to regain it:
and life was real only if beautiful ...
The fury of confession first,
then the fury of clarity:
it was from you that it was born,
hypocrite, obscure sentiment! And now,
let them accuse my every passion,
let them sling mud, call me deformed, impure,
obsessed, amateur, perjurer:
you isolate me, you give me the certainty of life:
I am in the pyre, I play the card of fire,
and I win, this little immense good
I have, I win this infinite,
miserable compassion of mine
that makes even righteous ire my friend:
I can do so, because I have suffered you so!
I return to you, like an emigrant
returns to his country and re-discovers it:
I have done well (with my intellect)
and I am happy, just like
I used to be, destitute as always.
A black rage of poetry in my chest.
A crazy young man’s old age.
Once your joy was confused
with terror, it’s true, and now
almost with other joy,
livid, arid: my disappointed passion.
You really frighten me now,
because you are really close, included
in my state of rage, of obscure
fame, in the anxiety of a newly born creature.
I am sane, if you like,
the neurosis branches out beside me,
exhaustion desiccates me, but
it does not have me: at my side
the last light of youth laughs.
At this point, I have had all that I wanted:
I have actually even gone beyond
certain hopes the world had: emptied,
there you are, inside of me,
filling my time and all times.
I have been rational and I have been
irrational: to the very end.
And now ... ah, the desert deafened
by the wind, the stupendous and other-worldly
sun of Africa that illuminates the world.
Africa! My one and only
alternative ...........................................
.............................................................
(1960)
sentiment born of light, of heat,
baptized when the beginning was joy,
recognized in Pier Paolo
at the origin of a craving epopeia:
I have walked in the light of history,
but, my being was always heroic
under your dominion, intimate thought.
Every real act of the world, of history,
coagulated in the stream of light,
in the atrocious distrust of your flame:
and it was wholly verified within it,
losing its life in order to regain it:
and life was real only if beautiful ...
The fury of confession first,
then the fury of clarity:
it was from you that it was born,
hypocrite, obscure sentiment! And now,
let them accuse my every passion,
let them sling mud, call me deformed, impure,
obsessed, amateur, perjurer:
you isolate me, you give me the certainty of life:
I am in the pyre, I play the card of fire,
and I win, this little immense good
I have, I win this infinite,
miserable compassion of mine
that makes even righteous ire my friend:
I can do so, because I have suffered you so!
I return to you, like an emigrant
returns to his country and re-discovers it:
I have done well (with my intellect)
and I am happy, just like
I used to be, destitute as always.
A black rage of poetry in my chest.
A crazy young man’s old age.
Once your joy was confused
with terror, it’s true, and now
almost with other joy,
livid, arid: my disappointed passion.
You really frighten me now,
because you are really close, included
in my state of rage, of obscure
fame, in the anxiety of a newly born creature.
I am sane, if you like,
the neurosis branches out beside me,
exhaustion desiccates me, but
it does not have me: at my side
the last light of youth laughs.
At this point, I have had all that I wanted:
I have actually even gone beyond
certain hopes the world had: emptied,
there you are, inside of me,
filling my time and all times.
I have been rational and I have been
irrational: to the very end.
And now ... ah, the desert deafened
by the wind, the stupendous and other-worldly
sun of Africa that illuminates the world.
Africa! My one and only
alternative ...........................................
.............................................................
(1960)
The Death of Realism (1960)
Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears!
I am here to bury Italian realism
not to pay it respects. What ails a style
often survives it, but the good is
often buried with its memory.
And so it will be with realism.
The elect Cassola vivaciously certifies
that it was ambitious: if it were so
this would be a great demerit, equaling as such
its end. If he might concede it
- and Cassola is a respectable writer:
all neo-purists are respectable writers -
I have come here to address the death
of Italian realism: its style was mixed,
difficult, vulgar ... But Cassola believes
that it was ambitious: and Cassola
is a respectable writer ... That style
gave language an infinite number of words,
that filled the senile emptiness of Erario
with new contributions to reality: was this maybe
the ambition of Italian realism?
It expressed the pain of the proletariat,
weeping with its tears: I would say that,
on the contrary, ambitious are those who
extinguish and humble themselves in the lyricism
of internal prose, of white socialism ...
But Cassola says that it was ambitious:
and Cassola is a respectable writer.
You all know how that style
born to express reality
rejected every official honour:
was this ambition? But Cassola says so:
and certainly Cassola is a respectable writer.
Oh, I am not here to disagree with Cassola,
but to say that which I know.
You all loved that style back in the days of hope:
and not without reason.
What reason keeps you now from mourning it?
Ah, Reason! lost again in the obscure
meandering of irrationality! Evasion,
reduction, stylistic choice: all acts
of surrender before reaction!
Excuse me ... my heart is there, in the casket,
with that style ... I would like to be quiet, that’s all.
Only yesterday, the vulgar dialogue
of mimetic and objective style
- the great ideology of the real -
astonished you ... And now there it is,
on the ground: and no-one now feels
so unworthy as to give it respect.
If I were to try to make you feel unworthy,
gentlemen, I would be doing a wrong
to Cassola and the other neo-purists,
all of whom, we know, are respectable writers.
No, I do not want to wrong them: better,
to wrong the one that was killed, me,
you, rather than upset
all these respectable writers.
But I have jotted down some notes on that style:
you may consider it a will.
If you really knew it - and wanted in fact
to finally understand it - you would kneel down
to kiss this corpse, wound by wound,
and dip your handkerchiefs in its blood!
But I worry about telling you of the value it holds:
maybe it’s best that you did not know
how much that style really expressed!
You are not made of wood, you are not made of stone:
you are men: and as men,
finally knowing what Realism was,
what it sought to be,
even if babelic and mimetic,
might anger you, you might even call for
a revolution ... It may be best if you did not know that
that style wanted to give you to history:
because if you did know you might burn down
your State and your Church ...
Ah, maybe I should not have given in and talked!
It is a disservice I do to respectable writers who,
with articles, conferences, and investigations
ended up restoring the language
and obtained that which they had wanted:
to reduce it to the grayness of the State.
But, if you wish to gather here,
around this corpse, I might dare describe it
to your eyes as they did not see ...
And, if you have tears, shed them!
You all know the form taken
by that great, if still uncertain, ideology.
I remember the first days
it came into use, still in the light of
the Resistance. Fascism had been won,
it seemed that Capital had also been defeated.
Instead, this form slashed by Tomasi’s knife,
then there was the angry tear of
the neo-experimentalists, then Cassola’s
cutting blow - who was a friend.
When he extracted the sacrilegious blade,
the blood followed it,
almost as to verify that it was he, Cassola,
to strike in such a manner, without shame ...
Because, as you know, Cassola is a Socialist:
he acted from the heart of the realist idea;
and his blow was the most brutal.
Realism lowered its head in surrender
to that ungratefulness, rather than to the wound.
And, unwanted within the great stylemes,
the great hypothesis staggered exhausted.
Ah, citizens, what a fall it was!
You and I, all of us, fell:
and the stylistic reaction that now levels
everything ... You grow pale now (or do I dream):
you feel the weight of complicity
on your conscience: you are not free of grace,
even if bourgeois or with the bourgeoisie ...
Therefore, sensitive souls, tremble:
and you have only seen the wound to the form:
look here, at him, Realism - the ideological body -
wounded to the heart, his great
structural heart.
Dear friends, sweet friends ... I do not want to turn you
against the official ideology:
those who serve its restoration
in their style, they are respectable writers.
I do not know what depraved rancours lead them
to such actions ... I only know that they are proper,
and respectable: and they will certainly have
an answer for you that will justify them.
I have not come, dear friends,
with the pretext of stealing away your heart.
I am not an orator, like Cassola:
I am - as everyone knows - compromised,
by passion, with that massacred style:
and those who have given me the opportunity
to speak of him in public know it well ...
I am not Tuscan, therefore I cannot warm the blood
of those who listen with my words:
I speak as I know how: and I show you
the tormented words of realist Ideology
- poor, poor dumb-struck lips! -
leaving them to speak for me:
but if I were Cassola, and Cassola Pasolini,
now you would have before you a Pasolini
capable of sweeping you away with his words,
and of moving even the stones to tears,
in this Rome re-taken by the Pope
against a State that is pure hypocrisy.
However, even though treacherously stabbed
and now defunct, that impure Realism
- sealed with partisan blood
and the passion of Marxists -
leaves to every single individual,
“seventy-five lire” of a renewed sense
of history: it isn’t much, nothing,
compared to the millions of meta-history
and of capital: but it’s something just the same.
In addition, it leaves you Gadda’s Pasticciaccio,
stupendous prefiguration of every
creative mimetism: it also leaves you
Moravia’s good and ruthless diagnosis,
Levi’s sociological sweetness,
Bassani’s golden history, the creatures of
Arthur’s Island, the odd youngster
who hopes in a non servile future,
and a small Officina in Bologna ...
And it leaves you Calvino. His prose,
more French than Tuscan,
his inspiration, more Volterrian than
compatriot: his non-gray simplicity,
his non-tedious measure,
his non-presumptuous clarity.
His splendid love for the world
leavened and contorted by fables.
The neo-purists, the white socialists
- well regarded by the Vatican - will never
be able to deprive you of this inheritance.
The works and the acts that Realism leaves you
will survive it. Such is its power ...
But may Heaven guard against this being
a bitter Shakespearean trick on my part ...
Pier Paolo Pasolini
translated by Pasquale Verdicchio
I am here to bury Italian realism
not to pay it respects. What ails a style
often survives it, but the good is
often buried with its memory.
And so it will be with realism.
The elect Cassola vivaciously certifies
that it was ambitious: if it were so
this would be a great demerit, equaling as such
its end. If he might concede it
- and Cassola is a respectable writer:
all neo-purists are respectable writers -
I have come here to address the death
of Italian realism: its style was mixed,
difficult, vulgar ... But Cassola believes
that it was ambitious: and Cassola
is a respectable writer ... That style
gave language an infinite number of words,
that filled the senile emptiness of Erario
with new contributions to reality: was this maybe
the ambition of Italian realism?
It expressed the pain of the proletariat,
weeping with its tears: I would say that,
on the contrary, ambitious are those who
extinguish and humble themselves in the lyricism
of internal prose, of white socialism ...
But Cassola says that it was ambitious:
and Cassola is a respectable writer.
You all know how that style
born to express reality
rejected every official honour:
was this ambition? But Cassola says so:
and certainly Cassola is a respectable writer.
Oh, I am not here to disagree with Cassola,
but to say that which I know.
You all loved that style back in the days of hope:
and not without reason.
What reason keeps you now from mourning it?
Ah, Reason! lost again in the obscure
meandering of irrationality! Evasion,
reduction, stylistic choice: all acts
of surrender before reaction!
Excuse me ... my heart is there, in the casket,
with that style ... I would like to be quiet, that’s all.
Only yesterday, the vulgar dialogue
of mimetic and objective style
- the great ideology of the real -
astonished you ... And now there it is,
on the ground: and no-one now feels
so unworthy as to give it respect.
If I were to try to make you feel unworthy,
gentlemen, I would be doing a wrong
to Cassola and the other neo-purists,
all of whom, we know, are respectable writers.
No, I do not want to wrong them: better,
to wrong the one that was killed, me,
you, rather than upset
all these respectable writers.
But I have jotted down some notes on that style:
you may consider it a will.
If you really knew it - and wanted in fact
to finally understand it - you would kneel down
to kiss this corpse, wound by wound,
and dip your handkerchiefs in its blood!
But I worry about telling you of the value it holds:
maybe it’s best that you did not know
how much that style really expressed!
You are not made of wood, you are not made of stone:
you are men: and as men,
finally knowing what Realism was,
what it sought to be,
even if babelic and mimetic,
might anger you, you might even call for
a revolution ... It may be best if you did not know that
that style wanted to give you to history:
because if you did know you might burn down
your State and your Church ...
Ah, maybe I should not have given in and talked!
It is a disservice I do to respectable writers who,
with articles, conferences, and investigations
ended up restoring the language
and obtained that which they had wanted:
to reduce it to the grayness of the State.
But, if you wish to gather here,
around this corpse, I might dare describe it
to your eyes as they did not see ...
And, if you have tears, shed them!
You all know the form taken
by that great, if still uncertain, ideology.
I remember the first days
it came into use, still in the light of
the Resistance. Fascism had been won,
it seemed that Capital had also been defeated.
Instead, this form slashed by Tomasi’s knife,
then there was the angry tear of
the neo-experimentalists, then Cassola’s
cutting blow - who was a friend.
When he extracted the sacrilegious blade,
the blood followed it,
almost as to verify that it was he, Cassola,
to strike in such a manner, without shame ...
Because, as you know, Cassola is a Socialist:
he acted from the heart of the realist idea;
and his blow was the most brutal.
Realism lowered its head in surrender
to that ungratefulness, rather than to the wound.
And, unwanted within the great stylemes,
the great hypothesis staggered exhausted.
Ah, citizens, what a fall it was!
You and I, all of us, fell:
and the stylistic reaction that now levels
everything ... You grow pale now (or do I dream):
you feel the weight of complicity
on your conscience: you are not free of grace,
even if bourgeois or with the bourgeoisie ...
Therefore, sensitive souls, tremble:
and you have only seen the wound to the form:
look here, at him, Realism - the ideological body -
wounded to the heart, his great
structural heart.
Dear friends, sweet friends ... I do not want to turn you
against the official ideology:
those who serve its restoration
in their style, they are respectable writers.
I do not know what depraved rancours lead them
to such actions ... I only know that they are proper,
and respectable: and they will certainly have
an answer for you that will justify them.
I have not come, dear friends,
with the pretext of stealing away your heart.
I am not an orator, like Cassola:
I am - as everyone knows - compromised,
by passion, with that massacred style:
and those who have given me the opportunity
to speak of him in public know it well ...
I am not Tuscan, therefore I cannot warm the blood
of those who listen with my words:
I speak as I know how: and I show you
the tormented words of realist Ideology
- poor, poor dumb-struck lips! -
leaving them to speak for me:
but if I were Cassola, and Cassola Pasolini,
now you would have before you a Pasolini
capable of sweeping you away with his words,
and of moving even the stones to tears,
in this Rome re-taken by the Pope
against a State that is pure hypocrisy.
However, even though treacherously stabbed
and now defunct, that impure Realism
- sealed with partisan blood
and the passion of Marxists -
leaves to every single individual,
“seventy-five lire” of a renewed sense
of history: it isn’t much, nothing,
compared to the millions of meta-history
and of capital: but it’s something just the same.
In addition, it leaves you Gadda’s Pasticciaccio,
stupendous prefiguration of every
creative mimetism: it also leaves you
Moravia’s good and ruthless diagnosis,
Levi’s sociological sweetness,
Bassani’s golden history, the creatures of
Arthur’s Island, the odd youngster
who hopes in a non servile future,
and a small Officina in Bologna ...
And it leaves you Calvino. His prose,
more French than Tuscan,
his inspiration, more Volterrian than
compatriot: his non-gray simplicity,
his non-tedious measure,
his non-presumptuous clarity.
His splendid love for the world
leavened and contorted by fables.
The neo-purists, the white socialists
- well regarded by the Vatican - will never
be able to deprive you of this inheritance.
The works and the acts that Realism leaves you
will survive it. Such is its power ...
But may Heaven guard against this being
a bitter Shakespearean trick on my part ...
Pier Paolo Pasolini
translated by Pasquale Verdicchio
PASOLINI: CENSORING THE BODY OF IDEOLOGY
by Pasquale Verdicchio, UCSD
Pier Paolo Pasolini, writer, film-maker, and essayist, is possibly the most controversial figure in modern Italian culture. His debut in writing consisted of a slim volume of verses written in his mother's dialect of the Friuli (an economically depressed region of Northeastern Italy), previewing the author's subsequent interest in subaltern cultures. In the late ‘40s, as a teacher and active member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the Friuli, he began to suffer the animosity of conformist forces of the time. Pressed by a local priest to resign from the PCI or else, he refused. As a result of this he was denounced for making advances on his young male pupils. The ensuing scandal caused him to be relieved of his teaching position and to be expelled from the PCI in 1949. That incident brought into even greater conflict the already seemingly contradictory dimensions of Pasolini's life: homosexuality, Marxism, and Catholicism. This would colour Pasolini's artistic expression and his rapport with Italian society until his controversial death in 1975.
From 1949 to 1977, two years after his murder, Pier Paolo Pasolini was the subject of approximately 33 trials on various charges brought against him, his writings and films. These include: "offensiveness toward good customs and to the common sense of morality and decency" (for Mamma Roma, 1962); "contempt toward the state religion, under the pretext of cinematographic description, by mocking the figure and value of Christ through musical commentary, mimicry, dialogue etc." (for La Ricotta, 1963); "scenes offensive to the public decency in the depiction of intercourse between the guest and the maid, the woman of the house, and with the male components of the household, as well as the homosexual tendencies of the head of the household, the father, which are contrary to every moral value, social and familial." (for Teorema, 1968); "blasphemous, subversive, pornographic, indecent, etc." (for The Decameron, 1971); "a film full of obscenities ... nothing more than a series of vulgar exhibitions of sexual organs, all very clearly photographed." (for Arabian Nights, 1973).
While all charges take aim at what may most obviously be offensive to a sector of any population, they hide a more insidious challenge to cultural and ideological diversity. As a cursory viewing of any Pasolini film will reveal, the author does not merely seek to shock for its own sake, but rather to present a world view that is ideologically conflictual and compromising for the dominant culture. In order to negate the presence of alternative cultures, the dominant takes refuge in catch-phrases such as "public decency" and "common sense of morality and decency." So as to expose this strategy, in the article "Pornography is boring," (1969) Pasolini presents his own view of pornography in order to differentiate his work from it, and qualifies his dislike for pornographic films as a matter of aesthetics. While he condemns the censors who take it upon themselves to protect the morality of others, rather than pornography, which he considers dangerous to him as author. Because of the possibilities for censorship that pornography allows, it also functions to justify restrictions in all forms of expression. As a result, Pasolini argues, pornography becomes the pretext by which ideological expression is attacked and silenced.
What exactly is subversive in Pasolini's work? What scandalizes? Simply, the effectiveness of this artist's production lies in what he portrays, "it is something that scandalizes for its being what it is. It scandalizes because of its nature: because for one reason or another it is a diverse nature.” Pasolini proposes and produces art "as an exploration of the unsaid in common and official ideological discourses;" of great importance to this art is the author's own concept of "diversity." "Diverso," which would literally translate to "different," carries with it the secondary meaning of "diverse," and is used in Italian as a colloquialism in reference to homosexuality. In order to diffuse the negative connotations of the word, Pasolini set himself the task of infusing it with a sense of cultural importance and militancy. While the concept was largely biographical at its inception, with time it acquired cultural and political dimensions by which the author sought to bridge various kinds of "diversity" (his homosexuality, the subproletariat, the Third World) in a common oppositional front against official cultures. As such, censorship, applied to a cultural expression not condoned by officialdom, becomes strictly a political exercise.
In Pasolini's view, the subjects of marginalized cultures, products of specific socio-economic conditions and/or a-historicity, represent their condition by their physicality, their bodies and sexual organs. And, since "the language of action or simply of offensive presence [is a] stage of pre-revolutionary contestation," official culture finds it necessary to silence and render these bodies invisible. The uninhibited display of subproletarian bodies present in most of Pasolini's films is offensive to societal norms because it offers a code of being that demystifies the ideal body of bourgeois representation. The "language of action," aside from signifying the potential for revolution represented by those bodies, is also, literally, the spoken language, the dialects, the modes of expression of those marginal masses; these too stand as infractions to accepted cultural codes of conduct.
For Pasolini, the diverse yet bourgeois intellectual, it becomes essential that he give up his own language and be initiated to a revolutionary one if he is to establish a bond with the groups he represents in his art. Initiation into language takes place twice for Pasolini: once into the language of Marxism, and then into the language of marginalized cultures (such as Friulano). The two are integrated and then restated in the author's own language of social critique which, through literary and filmic production, privileges specific sites (the body of the subproletariat, for example) to engender a discussion of marginality, exclusion, repression, and confrontation. Pasolini's works are an attempt to dissipate the officiality of particular discourses by juxtaposing them to disparate elements. For example, in Accattone (his first film), the verses of Dante or the music of Bach, very definitely representative of a dominant cultural code, are used as backgrounds to the actions and bodies of subproletarian characters. Such acts of transgression are not easily forgiven by the keepers of the code; as a result, the bodies scripted by Pasolini in his films, and the language that emanates from them, become the focus of the scrupulous defenders of the "common good."
Abjuration and Confrontation
The Decameron (1970), Canterbury Tales (1971), and Arabian Nights (1974) form Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life," a series of films in which the author's scope was to represent the revolutionary power of subproletarian bodies, and highlight their potential through the highly imaginative narratives of tales and fables. In his "Abjuration from The Trilogy of Life," Pasolini comes to deny these films as an error in judgment. But this abjuration was by no means a surprising turn for Pasolini. He had described the frustration of not being understood in these verses from "A Desperate Vitality"(1964):
Death lies not
in being unable to communicate
but in the failure to continue being understood.
(14)
This then developed into feigned adaptation and conformism, as in this "Communiqué to ANSA [stylistic choice]" (1971):
I have ceased to be an original poet, it costs
freedom: a stylistic system is too exclusive.
I have adopted accepted literary schemes
to be free. For practical reasons, of course.
In his renunciation, Pasolini takes a very cynical stance by which he claims that the bodies, meant to represent the last stand in opposition to the subculture of mass media and consumerism, were in fact doomed long before he made the film. The culprit was none other than the famed "economic boom" of the 60s, a phenomenon that threw Italy into the realm of post-industrialism and neo-capitalism, which Pasolini blamed for its cultural and anthropological deterioration.
However, criticism of his work, and accusations of a nostalgia for an irretrievable past, continued to be leveled against him. Pasolini's response to those who called for him to describe contemporary society, to show a conscience of the present, results in the rhetorical abjuration of the “Trilogy” that in effect comes to justify his last project: Salò (1975).
A loose adaptation of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, Salò was Pasolini's way to revive the last days of fascism during W.W.II, as an instrument by which to suggest a matrix for contemporary fascism's homogenization and objectification of the human body and being. The degradation of bodies, their use and abuse, torture, sadism, the corruption of eroticism and sexual relations, are the subjects of Salò. In effect, Pasolini believed that the fascism that had found fertile ground during the early to mid part of the century was never shed, it merely changed form. Consumerism, the new fascism, had, in his opinion, decimated the Italian subproletariat as it threatened to decimate the populations of the so-called Third World. Of course, Salò was no less susceptible to censorship than previous works. While Pasolini's early works had been threatening for their portrayal of the pre-revolutionary potential of the subproletariat, Salò is subversive in its out and out identification of the perverse power of fascism.
That fascism works its spell by insinuating itself as protector of accepted norms, order and clarity is addressed ironically by Pasolini in the previously quoted "Communiqué to ANSA." Freedom through "accepted ... schemes" is, of course, not at all freedom, but Pasolini succeeds in subverting this too in Salò. In fact, he gives prominence to the narrative of fascism by having each set of atrocities prefaced by the narrative voice of the captors. The scheme in Salò is much more direct than in other films and, as the fascist initiation of stories degenerates into the subjugation of the unsaid subjects, the "practical reasons" of Pasolini's rhetoric come to light.
Thus, one distinction between the "Trilogy" and Salò can be made at the level of communication. The works of the "Trilogy" still preserve a hope in the dialectic potential of the eroticism of subproletarian bodies, as communicative of their condition. Salò, on the contrary, dismisses any chance for communication through the total objectification of sexuality. The dialectic is wholly disrupted and interjected for the sole function of a system of consumption. Communication, or the lack thereof, defines eroticism and pornography respectively, and Salò becomes Pasolini's accusatory finger by which he links fascism, censorship, and pornography. The film elicited a negative reaction even from those who had been supportive of Pasolini. Italo Calvino, in "Sade is Within Us," suggests that
A "moral" effect can be drawn from Sade only if the "accusation" keeps its finger pointed not at the others but at ourselves. The "place of action" can only be in our conscience (111).
Complaining about how Pasolini was wholly discounting of Sade's intentions in The 120 Days of Sodom, and of how poorly that text transfers as a vehicle for the recounting of the last days of fascism in war torn Italy, Calvino suggests that the film-maker was out of touch with the world in which he lived. But Pasolini was painfully aware of his inescapable situation as a privileged bourgeois intellectual in society, and the effect that the maintenance of the status quo has on those considered expendable. Calvino's suggestions may in fact be symptomatic of the very loss of diversity in contemporary society, and the conviction that pedagogically we are restricted to the lessons of the dominant culture.
In closing, I would like to suggest a reading strategy for Pasolini's films that undoes the accusations listed at the beginning of this piece. This strategy is dependent on an aspect of the filmic process itself, as outlined by Pasolini in "Observations on the Sequence Shot," where editing is described not merely for its practical function in putting together a film, but also as a descriptive concept for life, production, and death. In that 1967 article, Pasolini insists that the life of an individual, or a person's work, is comparable to the long sequence shot, that only takes on significance after its completion. Death becomes an important editorial component by giving a sequence its significatory start. In Pasolini's words: "Until I die, no one can guarantee to really know me, that is, to be able to give a meaning to my actions, which therefore, as a linguistic moment, can be deciphered only with difficulty ... Death effects an instantaneous montage of our lives." In concurrence with this definition, any attempt to edit an author's works before the end of his discursive reality is a premature act that can only be qualified as censorship. It is, in fact, as applied to works such as Pasolini's, a premeditated act meant to distort and question their worth and integrity. Partial or total censorship led to the removal of the films from theaters, to the cutting of scenes in some versions, or to the films being shown in porno theaters rather than regular run movie houses.
Salò, in conjunction with the author's death, provides a revelatory glance backward that gives Pasolini's works a strength that may escape if the films are viewed as individual moments of expression. This is not to diminish their value as singular pieces, merely a suggestion to provide yet another viewing angle for this complex corpus. By splicing together the parts that spurred official censorship one may in fact have, as an end result, Pasolini's ideology represented most clearly. A censorship in reverse which brings to the foreground that which we would ordinarily not be allowed to see would both legitimize the excerpts, and deny censorship. By focusing attention on something other than the forbidden, censorship diverts attention from the true subject of the work as well as from its own function. In fact, in acting upon selected portions of a film or a body of literature, it becomes an act of violence against the ideas that the work seeks to represent. What we are not meant to see or hear are the parts that are connected by the interstitial frames upon which the accusations are based.
What we have in conclusion is a correlation between censorship and pornography, both of which negate communication and deny presence. Eros, on the other hand, is the possibility of reaching outside of a given system, of reaching outside of the norm in order to savour alternative presences. Eros is the force that strains a system and foresees its death. The move to censor the revolutionary eroticism of Pasolini's subproletarian bodies is also aimed at disrupting their communicative power, the threat of their presence. In Pasolini's eyes, the subproletarian body represents a challenge to consumer society's advance; its test of society brings upon it charges of subversion, making it a most likely subject for censorship.
Pier Paolo Pasolini, writer, film-maker, and essayist, is possibly the most controversial figure in modern Italian culture. His debut in writing consisted of a slim volume of verses written in his mother's dialect of the Friuli (an economically depressed region of Northeastern Italy), previewing the author's subsequent interest in subaltern cultures. In the late ‘40s, as a teacher and active member of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) in the Friuli, he began to suffer the animosity of conformist forces of the time. Pressed by a local priest to resign from the PCI or else, he refused. As a result of this he was denounced for making advances on his young male pupils. The ensuing scandal caused him to be relieved of his teaching position and to be expelled from the PCI in 1949. That incident brought into even greater conflict the already seemingly contradictory dimensions of Pasolini's life: homosexuality, Marxism, and Catholicism. This would colour Pasolini's artistic expression and his rapport with Italian society until his controversial death in 1975.
From 1949 to 1977, two years after his murder, Pier Paolo Pasolini was the subject of approximately 33 trials on various charges brought against him, his writings and films. These include: "offensiveness toward good customs and to the common sense of morality and decency" (for Mamma Roma, 1962); "contempt toward the state religion, under the pretext of cinematographic description, by mocking the figure and value of Christ through musical commentary, mimicry, dialogue etc." (for La Ricotta, 1963); "scenes offensive to the public decency in the depiction of intercourse between the guest and the maid, the woman of the house, and with the male components of the household, as well as the homosexual tendencies of the head of the household, the father, which are contrary to every moral value, social and familial." (for Teorema, 1968); "blasphemous, subversive, pornographic, indecent, etc." (for The Decameron, 1971); "a film full of obscenities ... nothing more than a series of vulgar exhibitions of sexual organs, all very clearly photographed." (for Arabian Nights, 1973).
While all charges take aim at what may most obviously be offensive to a sector of any population, they hide a more insidious challenge to cultural and ideological diversity. As a cursory viewing of any Pasolini film will reveal, the author does not merely seek to shock for its own sake, but rather to present a world view that is ideologically conflictual and compromising for the dominant culture. In order to negate the presence of alternative cultures, the dominant takes refuge in catch-phrases such as "public decency" and "common sense of morality and decency." So as to expose this strategy, in the article "Pornography is boring," (1969) Pasolini presents his own view of pornography in order to differentiate his work from it, and qualifies his dislike for pornographic films as a matter of aesthetics. While he condemns the censors who take it upon themselves to protect the morality of others, rather than pornography, which he considers dangerous to him as author. Because of the possibilities for censorship that pornography allows, it also functions to justify restrictions in all forms of expression. As a result, Pasolini argues, pornography becomes the pretext by which ideological expression is attacked and silenced.
What exactly is subversive in Pasolini's work? What scandalizes? Simply, the effectiveness of this artist's production lies in what he portrays, "it is something that scandalizes for its being what it is. It scandalizes because of its nature: because for one reason or another it is a diverse nature.” Pasolini proposes and produces art "as an exploration of the unsaid in common and official ideological discourses;" of great importance to this art is the author's own concept of "diversity." "Diverso," which would literally translate to "different," carries with it the secondary meaning of "diverse," and is used in Italian as a colloquialism in reference to homosexuality. In order to diffuse the negative connotations of the word, Pasolini set himself the task of infusing it with a sense of cultural importance and militancy. While the concept was largely biographical at its inception, with time it acquired cultural and political dimensions by which the author sought to bridge various kinds of "diversity" (his homosexuality, the subproletariat, the Third World) in a common oppositional front against official cultures. As such, censorship, applied to a cultural expression not condoned by officialdom, becomes strictly a political exercise.
In Pasolini's view, the subjects of marginalized cultures, products of specific socio-economic conditions and/or a-historicity, represent their condition by their physicality, their bodies and sexual organs. And, since "the language of action or simply of offensive presence [is a] stage of pre-revolutionary contestation," official culture finds it necessary to silence and render these bodies invisible. The uninhibited display of subproletarian bodies present in most of Pasolini's films is offensive to societal norms because it offers a code of being that demystifies the ideal body of bourgeois representation. The "language of action," aside from signifying the potential for revolution represented by those bodies, is also, literally, the spoken language, the dialects, the modes of expression of those marginal masses; these too stand as infractions to accepted cultural codes of conduct.
For Pasolini, the diverse yet bourgeois intellectual, it becomes essential that he give up his own language and be initiated to a revolutionary one if he is to establish a bond with the groups he represents in his art. Initiation into language takes place twice for Pasolini: once into the language of Marxism, and then into the language of marginalized cultures (such as Friulano). The two are integrated and then restated in the author's own language of social critique which, through literary and filmic production, privileges specific sites (the body of the subproletariat, for example) to engender a discussion of marginality, exclusion, repression, and confrontation. Pasolini's works are an attempt to dissipate the officiality of particular discourses by juxtaposing them to disparate elements. For example, in Accattone (his first film), the verses of Dante or the music of Bach, very definitely representative of a dominant cultural code, are used as backgrounds to the actions and bodies of subproletarian characters. Such acts of transgression are not easily forgiven by the keepers of the code; as a result, the bodies scripted by Pasolini in his films, and the language that emanates from them, become the focus of the scrupulous defenders of the "common good."
Abjuration and Confrontation
The Decameron (1970), Canterbury Tales (1971), and Arabian Nights (1974) form Pasolini's "Trilogy of Life," a series of films in which the author's scope was to represent the revolutionary power of subproletarian bodies, and highlight their potential through the highly imaginative narratives of tales and fables. In his "Abjuration from The Trilogy of Life," Pasolini comes to deny these films as an error in judgment. But this abjuration was by no means a surprising turn for Pasolini. He had described the frustration of not being understood in these verses from "A Desperate Vitality"(1964):
Death lies not
in being unable to communicate
but in the failure to continue being understood.
(14)
This then developed into feigned adaptation and conformism, as in this "Communiqué to ANSA [stylistic choice]" (1971):
I have ceased to be an original poet, it costs
freedom: a stylistic system is too exclusive.
I have adopted accepted literary schemes
to be free. For practical reasons, of course.
In his renunciation, Pasolini takes a very cynical stance by which he claims that the bodies, meant to represent the last stand in opposition to the subculture of mass media and consumerism, were in fact doomed long before he made the film. The culprit was none other than the famed "economic boom" of the 60s, a phenomenon that threw Italy into the realm of post-industrialism and neo-capitalism, which Pasolini blamed for its cultural and anthropological deterioration.
However, criticism of his work, and accusations of a nostalgia for an irretrievable past, continued to be leveled against him. Pasolini's response to those who called for him to describe contemporary society, to show a conscience of the present, results in the rhetorical abjuration of the “Trilogy” that in effect comes to justify his last project: Salò (1975).
A loose adaptation of Sade's 120 Days of Sodom, Salò was Pasolini's way to revive the last days of fascism during W.W.II, as an instrument by which to suggest a matrix for contemporary fascism's homogenization and objectification of the human body and being. The degradation of bodies, their use and abuse, torture, sadism, the corruption of eroticism and sexual relations, are the subjects of Salò. In effect, Pasolini believed that the fascism that had found fertile ground during the early to mid part of the century was never shed, it merely changed form. Consumerism, the new fascism, had, in his opinion, decimated the Italian subproletariat as it threatened to decimate the populations of the so-called Third World. Of course, Salò was no less susceptible to censorship than previous works. While Pasolini's early works had been threatening for their portrayal of the pre-revolutionary potential of the subproletariat, Salò is subversive in its out and out identification of the perverse power of fascism.
That fascism works its spell by insinuating itself as protector of accepted norms, order and clarity is addressed ironically by Pasolini in the previously quoted "Communiqué to ANSA." Freedom through "accepted ... schemes" is, of course, not at all freedom, but Pasolini succeeds in subverting this too in Salò. In fact, he gives prominence to the narrative of fascism by having each set of atrocities prefaced by the narrative voice of the captors. The scheme in Salò is much more direct than in other films and, as the fascist initiation of stories degenerates into the subjugation of the unsaid subjects, the "practical reasons" of Pasolini's rhetoric come to light.
Thus, one distinction between the "Trilogy" and Salò can be made at the level of communication. The works of the "Trilogy" still preserve a hope in the dialectic potential of the eroticism of subproletarian bodies, as communicative of their condition. Salò, on the contrary, dismisses any chance for communication through the total objectification of sexuality. The dialectic is wholly disrupted and interjected for the sole function of a system of consumption. Communication, or the lack thereof, defines eroticism and pornography respectively, and Salò becomes Pasolini's accusatory finger by which he links fascism, censorship, and pornography. The film elicited a negative reaction even from those who had been supportive of Pasolini. Italo Calvino, in "Sade is Within Us," suggests that
A "moral" effect can be drawn from Sade only if the "accusation" keeps its finger pointed not at the others but at ourselves. The "place of action" can only be in our conscience (111).
Complaining about how Pasolini was wholly discounting of Sade's intentions in The 120 Days of Sodom, and of how poorly that text transfers as a vehicle for the recounting of the last days of fascism in war torn Italy, Calvino suggests that the film-maker was out of touch with the world in which he lived. But Pasolini was painfully aware of his inescapable situation as a privileged bourgeois intellectual in society, and the effect that the maintenance of the status quo has on those considered expendable. Calvino's suggestions may in fact be symptomatic of the very loss of diversity in contemporary society, and the conviction that pedagogically we are restricted to the lessons of the dominant culture.
In closing, I would like to suggest a reading strategy for Pasolini's films that undoes the accusations listed at the beginning of this piece. This strategy is dependent on an aspect of the filmic process itself, as outlined by Pasolini in "Observations on the Sequence Shot," where editing is described not merely for its practical function in putting together a film, but also as a descriptive concept for life, production, and death. In that 1967 article, Pasolini insists that the life of an individual, or a person's work, is comparable to the long sequence shot, that only takes on significance after its completion. Death becomes an important editorial component by giving a sequence its significatory start. In Pasolini's words: "Until I die, no one can guarantee to really know me, that is, to be able to give a meaning to my actions, which therefore, as a linguistic moment, can be deciphered only with difficulty ... Death effects an instantaneous montage of our lives." In concurrence with this definition, any attempt to edit an author's works before the end of his discursive reality is a premature act that can only be qualified as censorship. It is, in fact, as applied to works such as Pasolini's, a premeditated act meant to distort and question their worth and integrity. Partial or total censorship led to the removal of the films from theaters, to the cutting of scenes in some versions, or to the films being shown in porno theaters rather than regular run movie houses.
Salò, in conjunction with the author's death, provides a revelatory glance backward that gives Pasolini's works a strength that may escape if the films are viewed as individual moments of expression. This is not to diminish their value as singular pieces, merely a suggestion to provide yet another viewing angle for this complex corpus. By splicing together the parts that spurred official censorship one may in fact have, as an end result, Pasolini's ideology represented most clearly. A censorship in reverse which brings to the foreground that which we would ordinarily not be allowed to see would both legitimize the excerpts, and deny censorship. By focusing attention on something other than the forbidden, censorship diverts attention from the true subject of the work as well as from its own function. In fact, in acting upon selected portions of a film or a body of literature, it becomes an act of violence against the ideas that the work seeks to represent. What we are not meant to see or hear are the parts that are connected by the interstitial frames upon which the accusations are based.
What we have in conclusion is a correlation between censorship and pornography, both of which negate communication and deny presence. Eros, on the other hand, is the possibility of reaching outside of a given system, of reaching outside of the norm in order to savour alternative presences. Eros is the force that strains a system and foresees its death. The move to censor the revolutionary eroticism of Pasolini's subproletarian bodies is also aimed at disrupting their communicative power, the threat of their presence. In Pasolini's eyes, the subproletarian body represents a challenge to consumer society's advance; its test of society brings upon it charges of subversion, making it a most likely subject for censorship.
Sunday, January 7, 2007
Una disperata vitalità / A desperate vitality
translated by Pasquale Verdicchio
I
(Draft, in cursus, through the use of current jargon, on a previous occurrence: Fiumicino, the old castle, and a first insight into the reality of death.)
As in a film by Godard: alone
in a car moving along the highways
of Latin neo-capitalism - returning from the airport -
[that's where Moravia remained, pure among his luggage]
alone, "at the wheel of his Alfa Romeo"
beneath a sun so divine
indescribable in non-elegiac rhyme
- the most beautiful sun of the year -
as in a film by Godard:
beneath that unique sun that steadily bled,
the canal of Fiumicino's port
- a motorboat returning un-noticed
- Neapolitan sailors in their woolen rags
- a highway accident with only a small crowd ...
- as in a film by Godard -
rediscovered romanticism contained
in cynical neo-capitalism, and cruelty -
at the wheel
on the road to Fiumicino,
and there is the castle (sweet
mystery, for the French screenwriter,
in the troubled, infinite, secular sun,
this papal beast, with its battlements,
on the hedges and vine rows of the ugly
countryside of peasant serfs) ...
- I am like a cat burned alive,
run over by the wheels of a truck,
hung to a fig tree by boys,
but at least eight of
its nine lives intact;
like a snake reduced to bloody pulp,
a half-eaten eel
- sunken cheeks defining tired eyes,
hair horribly thinned out against the skull,
skinny arms, like those of a child
- Belmondo, a cat that never dies,
“at the wheel of his Alfa Romeo”
in the logic of narcissistic montage,
detaches himself from time, and inserts
Himself:
into images that have nothing to do with
the boredom of progressing hours ...
the slow dying glitter of evening ...
Death lies not
in being unable to communicate,
but in the failure to continue being understood.
And this papal beast, not lacking
grace, - the reminder
of rustic landlord concessions,
innocent, after all,
as was the serfs’ resignation -
in the sun that was,
in the centuries,
for thousands of afternoons,
here, the only guest,
this papal beast, with battlements
crouching amid marsh poplars,
melon fields, banks,
this papal beast protected
- by buttresses of the sweet orange colour
of Rome, ruined
like Roman or Etruscan buildings,
is at the point of no longer being understood.
II
(No fade-out, a clean break, I portray myself in an act - with no historic precedents - of “cultural industry”)
Me, voluntarily martyred ..., and
her across from me, on the soda:
flashes back and forth, between positions,
“You,” - I know what she’s thinking, looking at me,
and more domestic-Italian M.F.
always Godardic - “you, Tennessee type!”,
the cobra in the wool sweater
(with the subordinate cobra
skimming in magnesial silence).
Then loudly: “Will you tell me what you’re writing?”
Verses, verses, I am writing verses!
(damned fool,
verses she is in no position to understand,
having no knowledge of metrics! Verses!)
verses NO LONGER IN TRIPLETS!
Understand?
That is the important thing: no longer in triplets!
I have gone back tout court to magma!
Neo-capitalism has won, I am
out on the street
as a poet, ah [sob]
and as a citizen [another sob].”
And the man-cobra with the pen:
“The title of your work?” “I don’t know ...
[Then he talks in a low tone, fearful, resuming
the accepted role which the conversation imposes
on him: it takes nothing
to discolour
his face
into that of some poor fool condemned to die]
- maybe ... “The Persecution”
or ... “A New Pre-history” (or Pre-history)
or ...
[At this point he becomes angry, regains
the dignity of civil hate]
“Monologue on the Jews” ...
[The dialogue falls
like the weakness of the arsis
of mixed-up octosyllabic verses: magmatic!]
“And what is it about?”
“Well, about my ... His, death.
It is not in the inability to communicate, [death]
but in the inability to be understood ...
(If only the cobra knew
that it is a useless idea
thought up on the way back from Fiumicino!)
They are almost all lyric verses, of which
the composition in time and place
consists, oddly!, of a ride in a car ...
meditations from forty to eighty miles an hour ...
with fast pans and tracking shots
to follow or precede
on significant monuments, or groups
of people, which spurn
an objective love ... of citizen
(or street user) ...”
“Ah, ah - [the she-cobra with the pen laughing] - ...
who is it that does not understand?”
“Those who are no longer with us.”
III
Those who are no longer with us!
Taken, with their innocent youth, by a new breath
of history to other lives!
I remember it being ... for a love
that invaded my brown eyes and honest trousers,
house and countryside, the morning sun and
the evening sun ... during the good Saturdays
of the Friuli, during ... Sundays ... Ah!,
I can’t even pronounce this word
of virgin passions, of my death (seen
in a dry ditch full with primroses,
between vineyards rows stunned by gold, near
farmhouses, dark against a sublime blue).
I remember that in the midst of that monstrous love
I would scream in pain
for the Sundays when it would have to shine
“over the sons of the sons, the sun!”
I cried, on the cot in Casarsa,
in the room that smelled of urine and laundry
while those Sundays shone to their death ...
Incredible tears! Not only for
that which I was losing, in that moment
of wearing immobility of the splendour,
but for that which I would lose! When
other youngsters - of whom I couldn’t even think,
so similar to today’s
wearing white socks and windbreakers,
with flowers in their lapels - or dark material,
for weddings, treated with filial tenderness,
- would populate the Casarsa of the future,
unchanged, with its stones, and the sun
that covered it with a dying golden shower ...
With an epileptic impetus of homicidal pain
I protested,
like one condemned to life imprisonment,
by locking myself into
my room,
without anyone knowing it,
to scream, my mouth
blocked by sheets darkened
by the heat of an iron,
the sheets of my family,
on which I would brood over the flower
of my youth.
And once, after dinner, or maybe it was night,
I ran, screaming
through Sunday streets, after the game
to the old cemetery, behind the train tracks,
to carry out and repeat to the blood,
the sweetest act in life,
alone, or a pile of dirt
from two or three graves
of Italian or German soldiers
with no names on the wooden crosses
- buried there since the other war.
And, that night, amid dry tears,
the bloody bodies of those unknowns
dressed in green-gray rags
came to cluster on my bed,
where I slept naked and empty,
to stain me with blood, till dawn.
I was twenty, not even - eighteen,
nineteen ... and I had been alive for a century,
a whole lifetime
consumed by the pain of the fact
that I would never be able to give my love
if not to my hand, or to the grass of ditches
or maybe to the earth of an unguarded tomb ...
Twenty and, with its human history and its cycle
of poetry, a life had ended.
IV
(Resumption of the interview, and confused explanations on the function of Marxism, etc.)
(Ah, mine is but a visit to this world!)
But let’s get back to reality.
[She is here, face visibly preoccupied but camouflaged by good manners, waiting, in the “gray” frame, in accordance with the good rules of French classicism. A Leger.]
“According to you then - she says, reticent,
biting her pen - what is the function
of a Marxist?” And gets ready to write.
“With ...the delicacy of a bacteriologist ... I would say [overcome by the impetus of death, I stutter] to move masses the size of Napoleonic and Stalinist armies ...
with millions of extensions ...
in such a manner that ...
the masses which consider themselves conservative
[of the past] would lose it:
revolutionary masses would acquire it,
rebuild it through the act of defeating it..
I am a Communist as a result of
the instinct of Preservation!
A shift
on which depend life and death:
in the centuries of the centuries.
To do it very carefully, like when
a bomb-squad captain undoes the safety
from a live bomb and, for a moment
his existence (in a world of modern buildings
in the sun) remains undecided:
an inconceivable disproportion
between the horns!
A shift
to be made slowly, stretching the neck,
bending, tightening one’s stomach,
biting one’s lips or closing one’s eyes
like a lawn bowler
who, when bowling, tried to dominate
the course of his shot, to rectify it
toward a solution
that will designate life through the centuries.”
V
Life, through the centuries ...
That is what it was getting at
last night ...
benumbed in the briefness of its wail -
that distant train ...
That train that wailed
discouraged; as if astonished at its existence,
(and, at the same time, resigned - because every act
of life is a segment extant in a line
that is life itself, clear only in dreams)
that train wailed and its wailing
- unimaginably far, passed the Appias
and the Centocelle of the world -
united itself to another act:
casual union, monstrous, odd
and very privated
that only beyond the line of my perhaps closed eyes
is it possible to know it ...
Mine was an act of love. But lost in the misery
of a body granted by a miracle,
in the exhaustion of hiding, panting
along a dim railroad, stepping in the mud
of a countryside cultivated by giants ...
Life through the centuries ...
like a falling star
beyond the sky of gigantic ruins,
beyond the properties of the Caetani or the Torlonia,
beyond the Tuscolane and the Capannelle of the world -
that mechanical wail said:
life through the centuries ...
And my senses were there, listening.
I was caressing a ruffled and dusty head,
blond, like the colour one needs in life,
of the design of destiny,
and a colt’s body, tender and agile,
with rough canvas clothes knowing of a mother’s care:
I was making love,
but my senses were listening to:
life through the centuries ...
The blond head of destiny disappeared
through a hole,
in the hole was the night sky,
until, against that edge of sky, appeared
another head of hair,
black, or maybe dark brown: and I,
in the cave lost in the heart of the estates
of the Caetani or the Torlonia
among ruins built by giants of the 1600s
during immense carnival days, I,
with my senses, was listening to ...
life through the centuries ...
Again and again, in the hole, against the white
of night losing itself
beyond the Casiline of the world,
the head of destiny appeared and disappeared,
now with the sweetness of a southern mother,
now of an alcoholic father, always the same head,
ruffled and dusty, or already set
in the vanity of everyday youth:
and I,
I was listening with my senses to
the voice of another love
- life through the centuries -
that was rising pure in the sky.
VI
(A fascist victory)
She looks at me in pity.
“And ... but then you ... - [mundane smile, greedy,
conscious of the greed and captivating
obstentatiousness - flaming eyes and teeth -
of a slightly hesitant childish contempt
toward herself] - but then you are very unhappy!”
“Well, Miss, (I have to admit it)
I’m in a state of confusion.
Re-reading my typewritten book
of poetry (this, the one we are talking about)
I had a vision ... oh, if only
just a chaos of contradictions - reassuring
contradictions ... No, it is the vision
of a confused soul ...
Every false sentiment
produces the absolute security of having it.
My false sentiment was that ...
of health. Strange! By telling her
- unsympathetic by definition,
with that lipless doll’s face -
I verified with clinical clarity
the fact
that I had never possessed any clarity.
It is true that at times it is enough
to be sane (and clear)
to believe it ... Nevertheless
(write, write!) my actual confusion
is a consequence
of a fascist victory.
[new, uncontrolled, loyal
death impetii]
A small, secondary victory.
Easy, then. I was alone:
with my bones, a shy frightened
mother, and my will.
The objective was to humiliate one who was
humiliated. I must tell you that they succeeded,
and without much effort. Maybe
if they had known how easy it was they would
not have tried as hard, and in lesser numbers!
(Ah, you see, I talk in a generic plural: They!
with the beckoning love the madman has for his sickness.)
The results of this victory, they too,
then, count very little: one less
authoritative signature in the appeals for peace.
Well, a parte objecti, it is not much.
A parte subjecti ... But let us forget it:
I have described too much,
and never orally,
my pains of squashed worm
that holds up its little head and debates
with repugnant ingenuity, etc.
A fascist victory!
Write, write: they should know that I know:
with the conscience of a wounded bird
that, meekly dying, does not forgive.”
VII
Does not forgive!
There was a soul, among those
that were to descend into life
- many, and all similar, poor souls -
a soul, in whose brown eyes of light,
in the modest wave of hair combed
by a mother’s idea of masculine beauty,
burned the desire to die.
It was instantly seen,
by he who does not forgive.
He took it, called it to his side,
and, like an artisan,
up in the worlds that precede life,
placed his hands on its head
and pronounced the curse.
It was a candid and clean soul,
like a child at his first communion,
wise to the wisdom of his ten years,
dressed in white, of a material
chosen by a mother’s idea of manly grace,
with eyes warm with the desire to die.
Oh, it was instantly seen,
by he who does not forgive.
He was the infinite capacity to obey
and the infinite capacity to rebel
he called it, and worked on it
- while it looked at him with trust
like a lamb looks up at his butcher -
a reverse consecration,
while the light fell from his eyes
and a shadow of pity filled the space.
You shall go into the world,
you shall be candid and gentle, stable and faithful
you shall have an infinite capacity to obey
and an infinite capacity to rebel.
You shall be pure.
Therefore, I curse you.”
I can still see his eyes full of pity
and of the slight horror one feels
for the one who inspires it,
- the stare that follows
one who goes unknowingly to his death
and, out of a necessity which dominates
those who know and those who do not,
says nothing. I still see his stare,
as I moved away - from Eternity -
toward my cradle.
VIII
(Funereal conclusion: with synoptic table - for use by the writer of the “piece” - of my career as poet, and a prophetic look at the sea of future millennia.)
I came into the world at the time
of the Analogic.
Worked
in that field as apprentice.
Then there was the Resistance
and I
fought using poetry as a weapon.
I restored Logic,
and became a civic poet.
Now is the time
of Psychagogy.
I can only write prophecies
within the rapture of Music
resulting from an excess of either sperm or pity.
*
“If now the Analogic survives
and Logic is out of style
(and I with it:
there is no call for my poetry).
Psychagogy
exists
(in spite of Demagogy’s
constant control
of the situation)
And thus
I am able to write Themes and Threnodies
and even Prophecies;
oh, yes, always as a civil poet!
*
“As to the future, listen:
its fascist sons
will sail
toward the worlds of the New Prehistory.
I will be there
like one dreaming of his own damnation,
at the edge of the sea
in which life begins again.
Alone, or almost, on the ancient shore
among the remains of ancient civilizations.
Ravenna
Ostia, or Bombay - it is all the same -
with Gods picking their scabs of old problems
- such as class struggle -
which
dissolve ...
Like a partisan
dead before May 1945,
I will slowly decompose
in the tormenting light of that sea,
a forgotten poet and citizen.”
IX
(Clause)
“My God, but then what assets
do you have? ...”
“Me? - [nefariously stammering,
not having taken my medication,
my sickly boy’s voice trembles] -
Me? A desperate vitality.”
I
(Draft, in cursus, through the use of current jargon, on a previous occurrence: Fiumicino, the old castle, and a first insight into the reality of death.)
As in a film by Godard: alone
in a car moving along the highways
of Latin neo-capitalism - returning from the airport -
[that's where Moravia remained, pure among his luggage]
alone, "at the wheel of his Alfa Romeo"
beneath a sun so divine
indescribable in non-elegiac rhyme
- the most beautiful sun of the year -
as in a film by Godard:
beneath that unique sun that steadily bled,
the canal of Fiumicino's port
- a motorboat returning un-noticed
- Neapolitan sailors in their woolen rags
- a highway accident with only a small crowd ...
- as in a film by Godard -
rediscovered romanticism contained
in cynical neo-capitalism, and cruelty -
at the wheel
on the road to Fiumicino,
and there is the castle (sweet
mystery, for the French screenwriter,
in the troubled, infinite, secular sun,
this papal beast, with its battlements,
on the hedges and vine rows of the ugly
countryside of peasant serfs) ...
- I am like a cat burned alive,
run over by the wheels of a truck,
hung to a fig tree by boys,
but at least eight of
its nine lives intact;
like a snake reduced to bloody pulp,
a half-eaten eel
- sunken cheeks defining tired eyes,
hair horribly thinned out against the skull,
skinny arms, like those of a child
- Belmondo, a cat that never dies,
“at the wheel of his Alfa Romeo”
in the logic of narcissistic montage,
detaches himself from time, and inserts
Himself:
into images that have nothing to do with
the boredom of progressing hours ...
the slow dying glitter of evening ...
Death lies not
in being unable to communicate,
but in the failure to continue being understood.
And this papal beast, not lacking
grace, - the reminder
of rustic landlord concessions,
innocent, after all,
as was the serfs’ resignation -
in the sun that was,
in the centuries,
for thousands of afternoons,
here, the only guest,
this papal beast, with battlements
crouching amid marsh poplars,
melon fields, banks,
this papal beast protected
- by buttresses of the sweet orange colour
of Rome, ruined
like Roman or Etruscan buildings,
is at the point of no longer being understood.
II
(No fade-out, a clean break, I portray myself in an act - with no historic precedents - of “cultural industry”)
Me, voluntarily martyred ..., and
her across from me, on the soda:
flashes back and forth, between positions,
“You,” - I know what she’s thinking, looking at me,
and more domestic-Italian M.F.
always Godardic - “you, Tennessee type!”,
the cobra in the wool sweater
(with the subordinate cobra
skimming in magnesial silence).
Then loudly: “Will you tell me what you’re writing?”
Verses, verses, I am writing verses!
(damned fool,
verses she is in no position to understand,
having no knowledge of metrics! Verses!)
verses NO LONGER IN TRIPLETS!
Understand?
That is the important thing: no longer in triplets!
I have gone back tout court to magma!
Neo-capitalism has won, I am
out on the street
as a poet, ah [sob]
and as a citizen [another sob].”
And the man-cobra with the pen:
“The title of your work?” “I don’t know ...
[Then he talks in a low tone, fearful, resuming
the accepted role which the conversation imposes
on him: it takes nothing
to discolour
his face
into that of some poor fool condemned to die]
- maybe ... “The Persecution”
or ... “A New Pre-history” (or Pre-history)
or ...
[At this point he becomes angry, regains
the dignity of civil hate]
“Monologue on the Jews” ...
[The dialogue falls
like the weakness of the arsis
of mixed-up octosyllabic verses: magmatic!]
“And what is it about?”
“Well, about my ... His, death.
It is not in the inability to communicate, [death]
but in the inability to be understood ...
(If only the cobra knew
that it is a useless idea
thought up on the way back from Fiumicino!)
They are almost all lyric verses, of which
the composition in time and place
consists, oddly!, of a ride in a car ...
meditations from forty to eighty miles an hour ...
with fast pans and tracking shots
to follow or precede
on significant monuments, or groups
of people, which spurn
an objective love ... of citizen
(or street user) ...”
“Ah, ah - [the she-cobra with the pen laughing] - ...
who is it that does not understand?”
“Those who are no longer with us.”
III
Those who are no longer with us!
Taken, with their innocent youth, by a new breath
of history to other lives!
I remember it being ... for a love
that invaded my brown eyes and honest trousers,
house and countryside, the morning sun and
the evening sun ... during the good Saturdays
of the Friuli, during ... Sundays ... Ah!,
I can’t even pronounce this word
of virgin passions, of my death (seen
in a dry ditch full with primroses,
between vineyards rows stunned by gold, near
farmhouses, dark against a sublime blue).
I remember that in the midst of that monstrous love
I would scream in pain
for the Sundays when it would have to shine
“over the sons of the sons, the sun!”
I cried, on the cot in Casarsa,
in the room that smelled of urine and laundry
while those Sundays shone to their death ...
Incredible tears! Not only for
that which I was losing, in that moment
of wearing immobility of the splendour,
but for that which I would lose! When
other youngsters - of whom I couldn’t even think,
so similar to today’s
wearing white socks and windbreakers,
with flowers in their lapels - or dark material,
for weddings, treated with filial tenderness,
- would populate the Casarsa of the future,
unchanged, with its stones, and the sun
that covered it with a dying golden shower ...
With an epileptic impetus of homicidal pain
I protested,
like one condemned to life imprisonment,
by locking myself into
my room,
without anyone knowing it,
to scream, my mouth
blocked by sheets darkened
by the heat of an iron,
the sheets of my family,
on which I would brood over the flower
of my youth.
And once, after dinner, or maybe it was night,
I ran, screaming
through Sunday streets, after the game
to the old cemetery, behind the train tracks,
to carry out and repeat to the blood,
the sweetest act in life,
alone, or a pile of dirt
from two or three graves
of Italian or German soldiers
with no names on the wooden crosses
- buried there since the other war.
And, that night, amid dry tears,
the bloody bodies of those unknowns
dressed in green-gray rags
came to cluster on my bed,
where I slept naked and empty,
to stain me with blood, till dawn.
I was twenty, not even - eighteen,
nineteen ... and I had been alive for a century,
a whole lifetime
consumed by the pain of the fact
that I would never be able to give my love
if not to my hand, or to the grass of ditches
or maybe to the earth of an unguarded tomb ...
Twenty and, with its human history and its cycle
of poetry, a life had ended.
IV
(Resumption of the interview, and confused explanations on the function of Marxism, etc.)
(Ah, mine is but a visit to this world!)
But let’s get back to reality.
[She is here, face visibly preoccupied but camouflaged by good manners, waiting, in the “gray” frame, in accordance with the good rules of French classicism. A Leger.]
“According to you then - she says, reticent,
biting her pen - what is the function
of a Marxist?” And gets ready to write.
“With ...the delicacy of a bacteriologist ... I would say [overcome by the impetus of death, I stutter] to move masses the size of Napoleonic and Stalinist armies ...
with millions of extensions ...
in such a manner that ...
the masses which consider themselves conservative
[of the past] would lose it:
revolutionary masses would acquire it,
rebuild it through the act of defeating it..
I am a Communist as a result of
the instinct of Preservation!
A shift
on which depend life and death:
in the centuries of the centuries.
To do it very carefully, like when
a bomb-squad captain undoes the safety
from a live bomb and, for a moment
his existence (in a world of modern buildings
in the sun) remains undecided:
an inconceivable disproportion
between the horns!
A shift
to be made slowly, stretching the neck,
bending, tightening one’s stomach,
biting one’s lips or closing one’s eyes
like a lawn bowler
who, when bowling, tried to dominate
the course of his shot, to rectify it
toward a solution
that will designate life through the centuries.”
V
Life, through the centuries ...
That is what it was getting at
last night ...
benumbed in the briefness of its wail -
that distant train ...
That train that wailed
discouraged; as if astonished at its existence,
(and, at the same time, resigned - because every act
of life is a segment extant in a line
that is life itself, clear only in dreams)
that train wailed and its wailing
- unimaginably far, passed the Appias
and the Centocelle of the world -
united itself to another act:
casual union, monstrous, odd
and very privated
that only beyond the line of my perhaps closed eyes
is it possible to know it ...
Mine was an act of love. But lost in the misery
of a body granted by a miracle,
in the exhaustion of hiding, panting
along a dim railroad, stepping in the mud
of a countryside cultivated by giants ...
Life through the centuries ...
like a falling star
beyond the sky of gigantic ruins,
beyond the properties of the Caetani or the Torlonia,
beyond the Tuscolane and the Capannelle of the world -
that mechanical wail said:
life through the centuries ...
And my senses were there, listening.
I was caressing a ruffled and dusty head,
blond, like the colour one needs in life,
of the design of destiny,
and a colt’s body, tender and agile,
with rough canvas clothes knowing of a mother’s care:
I was making love,
but my senses were listening to:
life through the centuries ...
The blond head of destiny disappeared
through a hole,
in the hole was the night sky,
until, against that edge of sky, appeared
another head of hair,
black, or maybe dark brown: and I,
in the cave lost in the heart of the estates
of the Caetani or the Torlonia
among ruins built by giants of the 1600s
during immense carnival days, I,
with my senses, was listening to ...
life through the centuries ...
Again and again, in the hole, against the white
of night losing itself
beyond the Casiline of the world,
the head of destiny appeared and disappeared,
now with the sweetness of a southern mother,
now of an alcoholic father, always the same head,
ruffled and dusty, or already set
in the vanity of everyday youth:
and I,
I was listening with my senses to
the voice of another love
- life through the centuries -
that was rising pure in the sky.
VI
(A fascist victory)
She looks at me in pity.
“And ... but then you ... - [mundane smile, greedy,
conscious of the greed and captivating
obstentatiousness - flaming eyes and teeth -
of a slightly hesitant childish contempt
toward herself] - but then you are very unhappy!”
“Well, Miss, (I have to admit it)
I’m in a state of confusion.
Re-reading my typewritten book
of poetry (this, the one we are talking about)
I had a vision ... oh, if only
just a chaos of contradictions - reassuring
contradictions ... No, it is the vision
of a confused soul ...
Every false sentiment
produces the absolute security of having it.
My false sentiment was that ...
of health. Strange! By telling her
- unsympathetic by definition,
with that lipless doll’s face -
I verified with clinical clarity
the fact
that I had never possessed any clarity.
It is true that at times it is enough
to be sane (and clear)
to believe it ... Nevertheless
(write, write!) my actual confusion
is a consequence
of a fascist victory.
[new, uncontrolled, loyal
death impetii]
A small, secondary victory.
Easy, then. I was alone:
with my bones, a shy frightened
mother, and my will.
The objective was to humiliate one who was
humiliated. I must tell you that they succeeded,
and without much effort. Maybe
if they had known how easy it was they would
not have tried as hard, and in lesser numbers!
(Ah, you see, I talk in a generic plural: They!
with the beckoning love the madman has for his sickness.)
The results of this victory, they too,
then, count very little: one less
authoritative signature in the appeals for peace.
Well, a parte objecti, it is not much.
A parte subjecti ... But let us forget it:
I have described too much,
and never orally,
my pains of squashed worm
that holds up its little head and debates
with repugnant ingenuity, etc.
A fascist victory!
Write, write: they should know that I know:
with the conscience of a wounded bird
that, meekly dying, does not forgive.”
VII
Does not forgive!
There was a soul, among those
that were to descend into life
- many, and all similar, poor souls -
a soul, in whose brown eyes of light,
in the modest wave of hair combed
by a mother’s idea of masculine beauty,
burned the desire to die.
It was instantly seen,
by he who does not forgive.
He took it, called it to his side,
and, like an artisan,
up in the worlds that precede life,
placed his hands on its head
and pronounced the curse.
It was a candid and clean soul,
like a child at his first communion,
wise to the wisdom of his ten years,
dressed in white, of a material
chosen by a mother’s idea of manly grace,
with eyes warm with the desire to die.
Oh, it was instantly seen,
by he who does not forgive.
He was the infinite capacity to obey
and the infinite capacity to rebel
he called it, and worked on it
- while it looked at him with trust
like a lamb looks up at his butcher -
a reverse consecration,
while the light fell from his eyes
and a shadow of pity filled the space.
You shall go into the world,
you shall be candid and gentle, stable and faithful
you shall have an infinite capacity to obey
and an infinite capacity to rebel.
You shall be pure.
Therefore, I curse you.”
I can still see his eyes full of pity
and of the slight horror one feels
for the one who inspires it,
- the stare that follows
one who goes unknowingly to his death
and, out of a necessity which dominates
those who know and those who do not,
says nothing. I still see his stare,
as I moved away - from Eternity -
toward my cradle.
VIII
(Funereal conclusion: with synoptic table - for use by the writer of the “piece” - of my career as poet, and a prophetic look at the sea of future millennia.)
I came into the world at the time
of the Analogic.
Worked
in that field as apprentice.
Then there was the Resistance
and I
fought using poetry as a weapon.
I restored Logic,
and became a civic poet.
Now is the time
of Psychagogy.
I can only write prophecies
within the rapture of Music
resulting from an excess of either sperm or pity.
*
“If now the Analogic survives
and Logic is out of style
(and I with it:
there is no call for my poetry).
Psychagogy
exists
(in spite of Demagogy’s
constant control
of the situation)
And thus
I am able to write Themes and Threnodies
and even Prophecies;
oh, yes, always as a civil poet!
*
“As to the future, listen:
its fascist sons
will sail
toward the worlds of the New Prehistory.
I will be there
like one dreaming of his own damnation,
at the edge of the sea
in which life begins again.
Alone, or almost, on the ancient shore
among the remains of ancient civilizations.
Ravenna
Ostia, or Bombay - it is all the same -
with Gods picking their scabs of old problems
- such as class struggle -
which
dissolve ...
Like a partisan
dead before May 1945,
I will slowly decompose
in the tormenting light of that sea,
a forgotten poet and citizen.”
IX
(Clause)
“My God, but then what assets
do you have? ...”
“Me? - [nefariously stammering,
not having taken my medication,
my sickly boy’s voice trembles] -
Me? A desperate vitality.”
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