Giacomo Leopardi, The Almost Nothing, The Extreme Hook – Prosa


 

 

“I don’t see you anymore…”

 

According to his friend and biographer Ranieri, in front of whom he was dying in Naples, these were the last words of the poet from Recanati.  A tremendous sentence, full of astonished pain, full of lostness.

 

As if to indicate that not even death is to be experienced alone, but with the hope of keeping a beloved face in view.

 

An experience facing this dominant “you” that absents itself. As it was always during his hard life and his violently beautiful poetry.

 

How many of his poems begin with “to see” and are based on “to gaze” or “to contemplate.”  The gaze is the threshold on which the I and the other meet.

 

And don’t touch.

 

Ever since he first felt, at a very young age, “the empire of beauty,” Leopardi understood that his life would be dominated by its allure.

 

I don’t see you anymore… even these last words are a grandiose, impossible gesture of love.

 

It is the heartache of an end that leaves traces of every possible beginning.  What is life, after all, if it is not seeing you, my love?

 

It’s important not to fall into an overly biographical reading of Leopardi. He himself worried that his philosophy and his poetry would be read in the light of his life (letter to De Simmel)

 

A different description of him appears in each of his three passports: “Short with black hair,” “average height,” “average height, brown hair.” The border-guards of literature often have the same problems as customs agents; when they try to say who we are, they end up seeing things. Even with the suffocating mass of study and analysis of his life and those of his loved ones, his poetry continues to illuminate our biographies more than his own.

 

In fact, instead of explaining or illustrating the life of the one who wrote it, poetry actually disturbs the life of the one who reads it.  While in 1938 Riccardo Dusi worked to amass the list of women loved by Leopardi, counting 17 of all different types in the manner of a kind of soccer team, De Benedetti’s warning about the beloved  years later was “look for her whoever she is, but you won’t find her.” It is not only the names with literary origins (Nerina, Aspasia) taken from the ancients or from Tasso that are signs of a generalization that surpasses any biographical limit. As Savoca has shown recently, the same poem dedicated to one of the eternal feminine figures, Silvia, conceals in reality one of the most important poetic problems of the late 1920’s.

 

Leopardi’s realm is that of the principle of non-contradiction.

 

His thought and his poetry diverge constantly from the fixed possibilities of Aristotle and any mechanistic philosophy. His works don’t trust progress.

 

The question isn’t fought between to be or not to be; it lives in being and non-being. It remains in the contradiction that motivates the “double gaze” of poetry, that causes the inevitable search for impossible happiness.

 

It is this contradictory movement that implies the same conception of man and of his discovery of his life.

 

Leopardi is the man of almost nothing.

 

But what is “almost nothing?” Man at the summit of his cognitive process could be “mistaken, almost, for nothing.” It is an epistemological problem tied up with an ontological problem. Even the verb “to mistake[1]” indicates an action (like drowning) in which knowledge and ontology merge.

 

In 1923 Leopardi jots down in his “Zibaldone” some thoughts on the lostness man feels in front of the multitude of stellar worlds when they appear to him at night in the universe: “No thing demonstrates more clearly the greatness and power of the human intellect, or man’s nobility than the power man has to understand, fully comprehend, and forcefully feel his smallness. When he considers the plurality of worlds, he feels himself to be an infinitesimal part of a globe which is a minimal part of one of the infinite systems that make up the world. And in this consideration, astonished by his smallness, feeling it profoundly and examining it intently, man almost mistakes himself for nothing. He almost loses himself in the thought of the immensity of things and he feels as if he has disappeared in the incomprehensible vastness of existence. It is with this act and this thought that he gives the highest proof of his nobility, of the force and immense capacity of his mind. This mind, closed as it is in his small, maimed being, is able to reach toward understanding things far superior to his nature. It can embrace and contain with thought the very immensity of the existence of all things.”

 

This is a very acute consideration: “man ends up almost mistaking himself for nothing.” In this feeling of being almost nothing, man disappears. Yet at the same time he understands that he is the sole point in the universe that has knowledge of everything that exists.

 

In order to be persuaded of what he captures with his mind, Leopardi’s man must also observe it and feel it intensely. To see a theorem clearly is not truth. Truth is not the discovery of an idea. To be persuaded by truth one must feel it. He indicates this clearly in one of his notebook-like meditations which implicates that without a sense of truth (a sense that, like the sense of beauty, can remain unrefined) one of man’s natural capacities dries up and loses influence in his life.

 

The font of every “sense,” of every felt attachment, of every movement of a human being, is traced, by Leopardi to self-love. Self-love for Leopardi in not the egotism of the vainglorious, but the continuous carrying of one’s own “I.”

 

A few years ago my friend Valentino Fossati and I compiled a curious and perhaps not altogether forgettable anthology of Leopardi’s writings on love. (Leopardi, l’amore. Garzanti).

 

What burns all through Leopardian thought is the problem of love, understood especially as love for oneself. From this whirling, dramatic center comes all the movement – the feverish, trembling, cultivated and risky movement – of Leopardi’s poetic thought.

 

The whole contradictory system of his poetic thought roots itself here, and stretches all the way out to the far reaches of his beliefs about history and society (which he sees as realms of unhappiness and injustice).

 

When he “gazes at” or “contemplates” himself in the blue suit given to him by his sister Paolina, what could he have been thinking of “the eternal mystery of our being?”

 

But away, enough of biography. For each one us the experience of being ourselves is the reason for love or scandal. Not the experience of “ourselves” as a given fact, an entity that we observe from some lost place inside of us feeling ourselves, analyzing ourselves, tormenting ourselves, spoiling ourselves… but ourselves understood as “destiny.”

 

The lucid and contradictory thought about the desire for an impossible happiness returns, perfects itself, becomes obscure, dives deep, and re-emerges throughout the whole corpus of Leopardi’s poetry.

 

His first experience of love is brought on by the visit of his cousin Gestrude Cassi. It causes him (as is duly noted by Riccardo Bacchelli) to examine over the course of a week every possible nuance of the experience of love. Already at the time, the event is understood by Leopardi to come from the empire of beauty. Not from that of love. And if beauty reigns but not love, life fills with wounds. With abysses. Poets know this, they live it, like everyone else.

 

In Leopardi from the beginning there is no certainty that a you exists which corresponds with the experience of love. An empire, not an embrace. “An unattainable carnality” (as a Leopardian like Pasolini describes the origin of his same poetic experience) is sung in the hymn “To His Lady.” (Alla Sua Donna) In the days of the cousin it was already like this: the empire of beauty, not a “you” to correspond with. The poem “To His Lady” is held, by critics and avid readers alike, both as a culmination and as a unique moment in Leopardi’s work. It is one of the most intense moments – both in terms of engagement and clarification – of Leopardi’s poetic imagination. It was conceived right at the same time that Leopardi wanted to begin the Operette, those ironic and bitter meditations against positivists and progressives of every type. It was not by accident that the Academy of Crusca did not award a prize to Leopardi’s Operette in 1931, but gave it instead to “The History of Italy” by Carlo Botta. The vanity of literary prizes…

 

In the poem “To His Lady” a wonderful and harrowing short circuit is constructed. It is a hymn from an “unknown lover” to a woman whose face, whose “dear beauty” remain unknown and unattainable. Like a voice calling from the dark into the dark. But from whom to whom? The whole poem – the very possibility of poetic speech – finds here one of its most spectacular settings and one of its most marvelous disasters. The text contains many of Leopardi’s typical motifs – antiplatonic thought, a defense of the body as central, and an anti-spiritualism. But it puts into effect an unusual falling of the voice into the dark. But then, no, the voice doesn’t fall. Or in falling it remains. A voice outside the principle of contradiction. What hymn can possibly move from an unknown lover to an unknown beloved? Is such a hymn, impossible and yet present, not a contradiction? A marvelous love poem that however is not love. Here is summoned such  a potency of pain, lostness, and amorous tension that it becomes an absolute disaster. But out of that disaster shines poetry and its inevitable strength. It is not medicine — as such it would be small and useless – it is anti-being. The poem is anti-being existing in nothingness. It happens here.

 

In an earlier version of the poem, Leopardi began with “Divine beauty…” Then he substituted the more emotional and therefore more hopeless “Dear.”  As if to increase the destruction. He isn’t addressing a divinity. He’s addressing someone dear, someone worthy of his heart, of his affection. But it is an unattainable carnality. It is the same experience of love that burns in the elegies of Rilke. His lovers touch each other – and how— but they feel at that very same moment caught between a promise of eternity and a disappearing instant. The swirling movement of each presence. They drink each other, Rilke’s lovers, they overcome one another with their desire for each other. They appear to achieve carnality but after that “feeling” there is only disappearance, the “quiet of us.” It is the scandal and the greatness of being human.  To stand on the threshold of this “almost” nothing into which we merge as we gaze on the infinite, the stars, and loving, too, embracing one’s woman, one’s children… Everything – even God – seems impossible and unattainable if it doesn’t have a face. Just a few years later, in fact there was another young poet who felt the bitterness of an imperious, disembodied beauty… Arthur Rimbaud gave his brilliant and sarcastic shout: “Through the mind we go to God – what a crippling misfortune!”

 

But God, on the other hand, that beauty of the abyss, came to us through flesh… Leopardi (and Rimbaud) had no experience of this. Their Christianity, or what they gave that name, was a system of thoughts and norms distant from daily life. Theirs was a system of beliefs and precepts. Notwithstanding some delicate expressions of infantile devotion, Leopardi fixed the name of Christ with the rhyme “sad.”[2] But he was never anti-Christian, our Giacomo. Instead he was a ferocious and bitter antispiritualist, the enemy of every evangelism that bowed to optimism.

 

That same rhyme, “Christo/tristo” vibrates inside a polemic against those “who to Christ were enemies until today,” and who yet feel offended by his “talking”  because “their life I call arid and sad.”

 

In “To His Lady,” Leopardi accomplishes an antiplatonic polemic in the most platonic of his texts. He negates the existence of the desired object while continuing to destroy himself for it. Whoever reads a poet like a philosopher and holds that the text of a poem can be read as a step to be surpassed by the next thought (and in Leopardi’s case towards a desolate negation of every trace of life if not for the extreme, ephemeral flower in a desert of lava) doesn’t recognize the substantial difference between the truth of poetry and the truth of philosophy. Philosophy, which by nature seeks its object in thought, proceeds by outstripping itself, swerving, then correcting itself. Poetry, by contrast, leaves gestures, leaves them by way of its texts. They are not the stages of a discourse, but unique pieces of truth that remain behind. As if each separate, disastrous step a poet takes is nothing if not the putting oneself by means of the text (as affirms the young Pascoli, admirer of Leopardi or Montale in his “Lemons”) “in the middle of a truth.”

 

As in “To Silvia,” in the poem “To His Lady” one finds not only a great homage to a figure (there fleeing, here absent), but the imprinting of those figures for posterity, with a shiver of light or shadow, on our imaginations. Something else is happening as well.  “To Silvia” comes five years after “To His Lady” at the end of an intense reflection on poetry and on its forms and origins. As the Professor Savoca has demonstrated “song”[3] returns in “To Silvia” as a presence and a voice coincident with the life that is being lost. Whereas it is in “To His Lady that that song understands itself to be impossible.

 

A hymn in contradiction. A song from unknown to unknown. A song in nothing. But can nothing therefore take form in a song? Can it sound out and be nothing? Or is something being presented that surpasses our imagination on every side?

 

The much worked-over manuscript and its connection, during the same period, with the Operette, make a premise out of the Leopardian hymn-non-hymn. Or rather, a paradoxical condition is created in which the song “To Silvia” can exist as well as that supreme demonstration of contradiction, the Wandering Shepherd. In this last the sublime construction of rhythmic prosody (and not quantitative as he desired following the path of a tradition that was expressly and with various swerves rebuilt from Dante to Homer to the ancients) raises his extreme song, his impossible psalm. It achieves this by means of volatile, extreme and contradictory rhymes ending in “ale” —  death/birth (mortale/natale).  It is another hymn to an unknown lover. In this song full of questioning and precipices a rhetorical figure occurs which I will call “the verdict of maybe.”

 

But what’s it about?

 

 

The Night Song of a Wandering Shepherd of Asia (Canto Notturno di un Pastore Errante dell’Asia) was composed in 1830. It is a kind of miracle, like all the great poems.

 

It is the psalm of modernity.

 

The inspiration came to the poet from reading in a magazine what we might call a reportage of a traveler in what is now known as Afghanistan. The story told of certain wandering shepherds who circulated in the infinitely far off territories of central Asia, singing doleful chants.

 

Leopardi imagined one of these shepherds as the example of man in his natural state. Into his voice he placed his own voice of a cultivated man of the 1800’s. And somehow he creates an immediate synthesis in order to express this judgment: I, the most cultivated man in the world, and the shepherd, the least cultivated, have at our core the same questions.

 

This is not indebted to Rousseau’s thought. The shepherd is not the noble savage. It can’t even be said that he is “good.” He doesn’t necessarily stand outside the corruption that Leopardi saw to be the constant of human history. He is instead universal man. His song is Ungaretti’s “unanimous cry.”

 

In 1924, Leopardi recorded that he had written few poems, and these short. This came six years later but it too was born from the same kind of “inspiration (or mania) during which I formed in two minutes the whole design and distribution of the thing. Having done this, I have to wait for it to come back to me at another time and when it does return (which usually doesn’t happen until several months later) I focus on composing, but so slowly that it isn’t possible to finish a poem, even a very short one, in less than two or three weeks.”

 

The composition method of Night Song is similar. But the nature of song in Leopardi – who used the term as the title of his collection, Songs – is both clarified and obscured by what happens in “To His Lady” and “To Silvia.” A song-non-song. A hymn of almost nothing. What are these songs in nothing?

 

It begins like this: “What are you doing, moon, up in the sky; /what are you doing, tell me, silent moon? /You rise at night and go, /observing the deserts. Then you set. /

Aren't you ever tired / of plying the eternal byways?/ Don't you get bored?”[4]  — You have desires, you moon like a person even if nothing yet is described in an anthropomorphic way, but desire yes – “Do you still want to look down on these valleys?/

The shepherd's life/ is like your life./ He rises at first light,/ moves his flock across the fields, and sees/ sheep, springs, and grass,/ then, weary, rests at evening,/ and hopes for nothing more./

Tell me, moon, what good/ is the shepherd's life to him/ or yours to you? Tell me: where is it heading,/my brief wandering,/ your immortal journey?”

 

The first verse establishes the general rhythm. The question is not only a question, but a repeated question. There’s a repetition throughout the song, like the return of a wave. For excess, for the lump in the throat, for urgency…

 

There’s that vocative “tell me” that indicates a repetitive movement.

 

Everywhere in the text we find this doubling movement, whether it be in the sense of growth and increase or in the sense of contradiction. It is not linear, even in its stupendous “musaic”[5] pathway. It’s a wave, almost an ellipse, like the very movement of life in the DNA or in the waves of the ocean.

 

We find therefore, in this beginning, the comparison between the short cycle of the shepherd’s day and the long cycle of the moon.

 

In the second stanza a metaphor appears which is borrowed from Petrarch’s “L” of the Canzoniere; Leopardi knew how to copy, like all the great authors:

 

“Little old white-haired man,/ weak, half-naked, barefoot,/ with an enormous burden on his back,/ up mountain and down valley,/ over sharp rocks, across deep sands and bracken,/ through wind and storm,/ when it's hot and later when it freezes,/ runs on, running till he's out of breath,/ fords rivers, wades through swamps,/ falls and rises and rushes on/ faster and faster, no rest or relief,/ battered, bloodied;” It is the metaphor of a man grown old, a man who has covered a lot of ground with a very heavy pack on his pack through mountains (sour moments) and valleys (sweet moments). This man lives a varied life, our own; there are beautiful moments, moments of hot and cold, sweet moments, sharp moments. First he asked the moon, where is it going, all this movement of yours? What is the point of doing your homework, getting a degree, studying abroad, falling in love, having children, spending money? What is the point of these various moments? He concludes with a terrible answer: “till at last he comes/ to where his way/ and all his effort led him:/ terrible, immense abyss/ into which he falls, forgetting everything.” Where does it lead, all this tiring movement? To a terrible abyss. All this effort, in the end, is for nothing. The horizon we are moving toward is, in the end, nothing.

 

And with great acumen he adds not only “nothing,” because the worst that can happen is not, as we know, “nothing.” The worst is forgetting – oblivion.

 

The one thing that is worse than the experience of nothing you have when, for example, your girlfriend leaves you is being forgotten by her. What man truly cannot bear is being forgotten. Oblivion is like nothing multiplied. Oblivion is nothing attacking something or someone. It is when nothing organizes itself in order to raze someone entirely, even in memory.

 

And then the verdict that ends the stanza: “This, o virgin moon,/ is human life.” I remember that one of the last times I read this poem in public – I’ve done it various times – I was in Palermo, and as I read these verses I stopped and I thought to myself “terrible, immense abyss; what else is there? How could anything possibly be added?” And yet he begins again. There is a movement in this poem that is like the movement of life: Leopardi acts like he wants to end the poem and then he stays there and keeps talking to you. You know those people who say goodbye and then stay right where they are? “Bye, see ya.” And then they stand there. As if to say the parting is not the last word. And, in fact, he begins again and says: “Man is born by labor,/and birth itself means risking death.” To be born, we know, was especially risky at that time. “The first thing that he feels/is pain and torment, and from the outset/mother and father/seek to comfort him for being born.” Okay, here I don’t agree with Leopardi. When one reads an author, one has to interpret him by comparing him with one’s own experience. For example, I have four fairly young children, and I know very well that the first thing a parent does is not to console the baby for being born. It’s not true. The first thing – here it’s clear that Leopardi didn’t have children, that his intellect took precedence over his experience – the first thing you do in front of your new-born child is be astonished. You don’t know what to say. You think “what is this thing?” Besides, I don’t know if it’s happened to you, but to witness a birth is one of the most extraordinary experiences possible. It is both absolutely natural and absolutely exceptional; it’s the pinnacle of the ordinary and the pinnacle of the exceptional at the same time. It’s like being in a fierce current, to use a metaphor. Which is why I’m sure that it isn’t true: no parent ever, when a child is born, consoles the baby for being born. The first thing you do is say “who are you? Where do you come from?” Leopardi, a genius, every now and then allows his philosophical thought – a sort of philosophical pessimism – to take precedence over experience. “As he grows,/they nurture him,/and constantly by word and deed/seek to instill courage,/consoling him for being human./Parents can do no more loving thing/ for their offspring./But why bring to light,/why educate/someone we'll console for living later on? That is, why bring a child into the world if you then must console it? The lack of response to this question is the reason Italy’s birthrate is at zero. The fact that my compatriots have ceased having children is exactly why, faced with Leopardi’s acute observation, they remain speechless and don’t know what to say. Or, hiding a kind of selfishness they say “I don’t want to bring a child into the world to make him suffer.” In any case you live in the world and often enough it’s a hoot. So there’s an element of masked egotism, and that’s never nice. And then: “If life is misery,/why do we tolerate it?” Here the poet is entering into the real question, that is the fact that man inhabits a great contradiction. This is Leopardi’s point; like all artists, he puts it nakedly. Man is a problem that can’t solve itself and the final element of the problem is this: why be born if then you think life is a misfortune? Why bring a child into the world if you believe you must console it? Why this contradiction? He says: “This, unblemished moon,/is mortal nature.”, whereas before he said: “This, o virgin moon,/ is human life.” and he concludes by saying: “But you're not mortal,/and what I say may matter little to you.”– it doesn’t interest you much. So the relationship with the moon changes and the antithesis between man’s mortality and the moon’s immortality continues.

 

The next stanza is the longest and most moving: “Yet you, eternal solitary wanderer,/ you who are so pensive, it may be/ you understand this life on earth,/ what our suffering and sighing is,/ what this death is, this final/ paling of the face,/ and leaving earth behind, abandoning/ all familiar, loving company.” The poet lingers, pauses, on the theme of pain – our being born – and of death, but he is not satisfied by the word death. In order to speak of death, one has to have the face of the beloved in mind as it loses its color… otherwise it’s just a bit of philosophical chat.

 

Then he continues and writes “And certainly you comprehend/the why of things, and see the usefulness/of morning, evening,/and the silent, endless pace of time./Certainly you know for whose sweet love/spring smiles,/who enjoys the heat,/and what winter and its ice are for./You know and understand a thousand things/that are hidden to a simple shepherd.” Note the growing insistence of the verses: “it may be you understand” “And certainly you comprehend” – “Certainly you know” – “You know and understand a thousand things”….  It means that reason is not satisfied with the closing expressed by the earlier verses. What follows is that beautiful expression “Certainly you know for whose sweet love/spring smiles,” because in the spring we see things smile – the flowers, nature, it all seems to smile. And we know Leopardi lets himself be struck by things because he said so at the beginning. So he asks himself, but this smile of nature, is it a stupid smile? The smile of an idiot? A smile for nothing? Or do you know, moon, the love that causes the spring to laugh? I don’t know what makes nature laugh, but maybe you do. “Often, when I watch you/ standing so still above the empty plain/whose last horizon closes with the sky,/or follow, step by step,/as I wander with my flock,/and when I see the stars burn up in heaven,/I ask myself:/Why all these lights?/

What does the endless air do, and that deep/eternal blue? What does this enormous/solitude portend? And what am I?

 

 I remember going to the mountains one time with my oldest son, Bartolomeo. He was quite young at the time and at a certain point he asked me that question asked by all children: “Dad, what’s that?” “It’s a mountain, Bartolomeo!” He replied “What does the mountain do?” “Well” I said “The mountain is being a mountain, what do you think it’s doing?” And it’s the same as Leopardi’s question “What is the infinite air doing?” So the most erudite of poets is the same as a child who is just beginning to use reason because they are each open to reality. That is to say, they let themselves be struck by things and then they ask “But what does the air do?” The first question is not “What is it?” or “What is it made of?” It doesn’t aim to take apart reality by means of scientific analysis. A child and a truly thinking man ask themselves what reality does, what is the action, the movement, the scope – we could say – of reality, or of the mountain. What does the mountain do? What does the beauty of a woman do? What does the light do? What does the air do? What does my life do? What does this pain being born in me do? The love that is being born in me, what does it do? That is, to what end? What movement does it have? This is what the child asks, or the artist, or at any rate the truly open man, because he lets himself be struck by things. When man ceases to ask himself anything at this level, reality becomes at most something to pick at, to nibble at until you get bored, because a reality that’s only picked at becomes boring. The real problem is to understand the movement that there is in things, to understand where they go.

 

This I ask myself: about this boundless,/ splendid space/ and its numberless inhabitants,/and all these works and all this movement/ of all heavenly and earthly things,/revolving without rest,/only to return to where they started./Any purpose, any usefulness/I cannot see.” I don’t know the answer, but I’m proposing the question. And then he says: “But surely you,/ immortal maiden, understand it all./ This is what I know and feel:/ that from the eternal motions,/ from my fragile being,/ others may derive/ some good or gladness; life for me is wrong..” It’s so irreducible, reason’s desire for the infinite, its desire to understand the nature of things. One ends up saying that if he himself can’t figure it out, someone else must be able to.

 

Then there’s a part where Leopardi draws comparisons between himself and the herd, himself and an animal. Thus he introduces the great theme of boredom and tedium. We think of this theme as typically modern – a preoccupation of the 1900’s, but actually Baudelaire and other poets of the 1800s were already touching on it.  Leopardi asks himself why the sheep lying down in the shade is calm and satisfied while the shepherd, even in that moment of rest, feels himself invaded by a sense of annoyance that almost stings him.  Why is man made of this strange anxiety and can never be content? Why this tedium?  What is this boredom? Boredom is simply the most extreme indication that what you have can’t be enough, that you aren’t made for what you have, that all the images – as Montale would say – have written on them “further away, further away” Another great poet, Rebora, says the same thing: when you take hold of  something, it’s like hearing a cry inside you that says “It’s not for this that you live, not for this.” So one has a career, graduates with honors, but all the while none of it is adequate to the size of his heart. “Enough” is not “sufficient.” In any case as an ancient book affirms (the bible) it’s true that man is “abyssus abyssum invocans” that is “man is an abyss that invokes an abyss.” He is made of something enormous, and he wants something as enormous.

 

At the end of Night Song Leopardi also intuits one of the greatest temptations of our time.

 

 In a few verses, that is, in a few seconds, he vaporizes one of the greatest idolatries of modernity: a blind belief in science. Not a belief in real science, but that ideology that presumes that man can resolve his own contradiction, thanks to the conquests of science and technology. A great poet like Auden speaks of it in his poem “The Age of Anxiety,” where he says that today a certain attitude has become widespread. This attitude dictates that thanks to the advances of science and technology, the problem of man’s contradiction has been reduced simply to a problem of time; in a little while we’ll understand how to resolve this question of what we are. This can be found in certain representatives of science, though more often among its idealogues: let us work in peace, don’t think about what it costs in dignity or in life, let us take care of it, we’re right here to find the solution to everything bad.

 

But Leopardi (like Auden and all the great poets) understands that this utopia is not real and, with an extraordinary image, ends the poem like this: “Maybe if I had wings/ to fly above the clouds/ and count the stars out, one by one,/ or, like thunder, graze from peak to peak,/ I'd be happier, my gentle flock,/ happier, bright moon./ Or maybe my mind's straying from the truth/ imagining the fate of others.”  Even if now we do quickly fly from one place to another, and we’ve counted each one of the stars, that is, we’ve made discoveries that Leopardi prefigured as absurd and unimaginable, we know very well that these aren’t really the answer to the questions we have about happiness, about liberty, or about beauty. It is not the acquisition of technologies and scientific advances that resolves our life for us – we’ve learned this right? Positivism was a grand illusion, and Leopardi already intuited that boredom is not resolved by technology.

 

In the last verses the negative option returns: “Maybe” – this wonderful “maybe”! “in whatever form or state,/whether in stall or cradle,/ the day we're born is cause for mourning.” And this is the pessimism of Leopardi, his pessimistic vision of life. It appears even in the percussive sound of the rhyme in “ale” in which throughout the text “natale” and “mortale” ring together.[6]

 

I’m struck, in Canto Notturno’s conclusion, by this “maybe” repeated all of three separate times. Like a verdict that doubts itself in the very moment it emerges. Like a hook on which is hung, as in certain Bacon paintings, the definitive break-down of existence, its empty mortal carcass… But what definitive thing can be expressed by such a grave sentence if it’s hanging on the hook of a maybe? What tragedy gets annulled in the very moment in which its sentence is pronounced. The “maybe doesn’t eliminate the weight, the gravity of the pessimistic abandonment of all hope. But at the same time, it is thrown into doubt in the exact moment in which it falls upon us. It is not simply a case, as some insist, that the beauty of the text and of poetry in general is to negate nothingness. It is not only that strange, supreme, violent test of strength between beauty and nihilism. It’s also, inside that same exhausted and final deposition of any hope, the presence of a hook, a maybe, the taking hold (or re-taking hold) of something that obligates us to keep our mouths and eyes open, and our heart. The poet is not a philosopher. The “maybe” doesn’t negate “nothing.” But it hooks it. It makes it tremble in front of our eyes in all of its vast fatality. But it also offers us this hook, like the “almost” in the thoughts of the “Zibaldone.”

 

A verdict of maybe, a single movement with an echoing question. And with that expression from 1923: what does it mean that the man amazed with the plurality and vastness of worlds, observing the starry sky can almost be mistaken for nothing? Try saying to a girl “you’re almost pretty!” She’ll get angry because when it comes down to it, you’re either pretty or you’re almost pretty. Being almost beautiful – in literature it would be an oxymoron – is a contradiction, because either something is beautiful or it almost is. In the same way we have “maybe it’s cause for mourning”: either it’s cause for morning, or it’s maybe. Why? It isn’t that Leopardi is playing with words, it’s that Leopardi understands – and here lies his greatness and that of other authors already cited (Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Eliot and many other contemporaries) – that human nature is structured in an unresolvable manner, with an inherent contradiction. A thing that cannot solve itself by itself, a thing that can’t find its destiny. An oxymoron is a phrase in which elements contradict each other, but they don’t eliminate one another. To say almost nothing certainly indicates the presence of nothing, but that same presence is almost cancelled. Leopardi returns continually to this problem which is a reason for scandal in the mentality of all times, both his own epoch and our own. He shows us that man’s presumption that he can solve himself is always destined to end in a kind of impasse, a tragic play. He re-proposes this scandal for the consideration of our poets with his “Canti.” Not with the petty ease of discourse or prose poetry, but with his wandering, marvelous songs. He bring that almost nothing into the very aching nature of man’s song. It’s gorgeous: almost perfect.


[1] The Italian verb used here is “confondersi”

[2] In Italian the word for sad, “tristo,” rhymes with “Christo”, or Christ.

[3] il “canto”

[4] Translation by Jonathan Galassi

[5] Italian “musaica” – the word Dante used to denote the “musical art” of poetry

[6] “natale” means birth, beginning, native, “mortale” means mortal, fatal, deadly.

Conversation with Roberto Benigni – Prosa

 

 

 

Rondoni: And you, Roberto, you’ve never written a poem?

 

Benigni: I’ve written millions for my beautiful love! But I would never dare to publish or even recite one.

 

Rondoni: During your first, extraordinary television broadcasts reciting Dante, Mario Luzi, who was still alive at the time, said to me “You can tell he loves what he’s reading.” Now millions share the same opinion. But it’s not like you just got into poetry recently – there’s a scene in Down by Law where you quote Robert Frost… Reading poetry might seem like a strange thing but actually….

 

Benigni: Nabokov said it. When we’re little we identify with the author, which is the youngest way of reading. Then there’s the adolescent who reads “in order to find a message,” a road to follow. Then there’s the student who reads academically. Finally there’s the mature way of reading in which you retrace the steps of the author.

 

Rondoni: And as you’ve been retracing Dante, you’ve brought us all along…

 

Benigni: Poets are the most profound of the philsophers, the things they put inside you won’t come back out. Poetry is not a passing thought. It makes the everyday…

 

Rondoni: memorable. It makes it memorable…

 

Benigni: Hey, look at you finding the words, yes, poetry makes the everyday memorable and powerful thoughts as well.

 

Rondoni: You’ve experienced this Italy that is rediscovering Dante and recognizing that there’s something good to hold onto inside it… this is a strange hunger, a profound one. But often this sort of phenomenon is regarded with skepticism. It gets derided by people who say it’s a show or a fad. I believe that from a cultural point of view we are living in a very difficult time. Only 5 students out of 100 choose to do their college entrance exams on Dante and Francesco. Because these two are the pillars of our culture, it means that there is a crisis both of the tradition and of the future. Often institutions and intellectuals don’t pay attention to this fact, they just look after themselves. But there is this hunger I was mentioning… Having made this journey, what idea of Italy has come forward for you?

 

Benigni: The beautiful sensation of a big hug that can actually, physically be felt. I decided to make this journey, and I did it seriously. Each night there’s an average of 6/7000 people who leave loving Dante. They say that the Divine Comedy is beautiful, that poetry might interest them. I saw his Italy, because Dante went everywhere. Each time I went somewhere, I studied that place, its dialect, the history of the city, and finally what Dante did when he was there. It’s a mystery for me, too… in Palermo there was a full stadium, you’d have thought it was a Palermo-Rome soccer match.

 

Rondoni: How do you read this kind of hunger?

 

Benigni: The show could have been called “Dante, Berlusconi and Prodi: Hell” and certainly it would have filled the house. With “Tutto Dante,”[1] I had said we’d lose half the spectators. But actually it’s the second half of the show that gets to people the most. The part that’s just Dante. There’s not even nostalgia anymore for the funny part. The surprise was people’s reaction, their desire to be led into it so they could rediscover it and return to see what he’s really like. Sometimes the applause is for silence, for sensations instead of concepts. Last time in one of the southern cities there were at least 15 applauses for a scene opening with nothing, a nothing that means everything…

 

Rondoni:  Because poetry is using words to say, to give voice to what can’t be known, to mystery, the the silence that speaks to us in what’s real…

 

Benigni: Right! I say things like a child who holds up what he’s just found. Dante did the same thing: he went to the very bottom of the ocean holding his breath, and then he came back up, almost suffocating, and then dived back under, saying continually “you’re all disgusting,” and then he immersed himself again and came back saying that we’re God. It’s moving. Dante saves us from the dullness of habit because he’s infantile himself, he shows how much fun he’s having with these dead people who are more alive than the living. Like Saba said. Dante touches you where you’ve never been touched. He’s high and low and gets to the bottom of things like an elevator that won’t stop. It’s a mystery, when you get to those verses that you can’t understand anymore, I don’t know how to explain them even to myself so I try to transmit this thing that can’t be known and is the most beautiful of all. Sometimes it’s happened that there’s a silence at the end of a canto as if at the end of a piece of classical music. For example when he says “And I fell to earth as a body falls dead”[2] It’s understood that Dante sees Paolo and Francesca crying as they embrace each other and he faints. Moreover, God made the wind and the noises stop so that the poet could hear, even God remains suspended for a moment. God himself wonders if this rule is just.

 

Rondoni:  Our epoch is marked by two things that were very out of fashion for the culture of the second half of the twentieth century: God and liberty. The relationship between these two things is an urgent problem both for believers and non-believers. Dante had something to say because he decided to take his own life seriously. For him God is an active protagonist and liberty is what man makes and what he couldn’t live without. The Comedy is the Christian poem, that is, it is about liberty – both God’s and our own. Like in that supreme point, in the hymn to the virgin, when it’s understood that in order to save man in liberty God falls in love with Mary and waits for her forever.

 

Benigni: And he is the only one who really knows what it means to say– I’ve been waiting for you forever!  That section is stupendous – you dedicated some beautiful pages to it that I use… it’s both exalted and a story for the fireside. There really are things that are meant for the hearth. The beauty of Dante, and it’s here in the canto of the virgin as well,  and what fascinates me about him, is how much simple stuff there is. There’s superstition, not just theology. Like Stravinsky used folk music Dante goes from St. Augustine to St. Thomas, from St. Bernard to superstitions. In the Divine Comedy the sense of liberty is not just the mere “I want to do as I please” it’s the innate liberty within us, inalienable. Even if we are reduced to chains no one can take it away from us. That same liberty that disturbed even the church: the contrast between the divine omnipotence and human life, for which even God pauses.

 

Rondoni: That’s the reason I’m calling the Dante 09 festival ‘the meeting of Dante-esque people’ that is people who feel the adventure of the journey with both playfulness and seriousness, dizzy and humorous, vision and folk wisdom…

 

Benigni: His greatness is that there’s always both child and adult inside him. He makes you feel that even in humanity’s most horrendous situations, man is capable of goodness, there’s this liberty that nothing can crush. The liberty of saying no to God, to the divine part of ourselves. Man’s irreducibility, greatness… his magnificence can’t fail, it’s inherent. This is why I try, in simple language, to help people understand that an ethics based on religion is not more profound or different than an ethics without a religious base. This is an important thing, otherwise there can be no dialogue. The same profundity, the same attention to sadness, the same height.

 

Rondoni: I think ethics are a product of the depth with which one feels life, a product of aesthetics, of how beauty is perceived, its mystery… And what are poets good for? To help everyone remember and feel again that life is an irreducible event.

 

Benigni: An epiphany. Like falling in love. How does anyone bear what happens to us the first times? Thank goodness God gave us a way of dealing with it, otherwise we’d all end up in an insane asylum, we wouldn’t survive at all. It also happens with the astonishment of living. Dante makes us feel that even if our days and nights do not seem exceptional to anyone, each of us is the protagonist of an epic, irreplaceable, unique drama. He makes you feel that each one of us is here to complicate and complete the fresco. And there’s also the impression that there’s someone continually watching you, always, because they care for you deeply. That everything is working towards something. He even makes you feel that no one is too strange to be understood. We are all less strange and less hostile afterwards. The world is less foreign.

 

Rondoni: Did you ever expect to do a show like this?

 

Benigni: I didn’t even imagine it! Now however, I’m very happy with what I can manage to do. I make mistakes; sometimes I mess up wildly, but they feel how I love it to death, that part gets through and there remains in them a spark of this love. The result is just that, to show that you love something. A man who loves something is a show. So I already had a show because I love Dante himself. Every now and then my family used to talk about it. My parents are farmers and one of the things I remember that my father told me when I was little, when at 13 or 14 years old you look at life fearfully, was this: We were digging potatoes together and he noticed that I made a mistake every shovel-ful. He stopped and said to me “Boy, try to find a woman that you love, and nothing in the world will ever scare you again.” He dug the potatoes so that they came out like gold nuggets, he didn’t mess up a single one of them. I thought to myself, anyone who can dig potatoes like that must know a thing or two, I’ll listen to him! He spoke about Dante, even if he was someone who didn’t talk a lot, he was cheerful. My mother was illiterate, but like the “Madonna of the Cardellino” by Rafael, she was always holding the Gospel. She would get next to something warm and would open the book without knowing how to read. And I’d say to her “But mom, you don’t know how to read…” and she would look at me with this look and smile and say nothing but it seemed like she was saying “I know how to read better than you do.”

 

Rondoni: In Dante you see that the secret of art is obedience. Dante is one who “when Love breathes in me, takes note; what he, within, dicatates, I, in that way, without, would speak and shape.”[3]

 

Benigni: What a verse, once again! He obeys. I hadn’t thought about it but it’s really true, the secret of art is obedience. Since now I do it every evening, it’s become like a piece of music that I recognize like in a song-book… It’s incredible how he is able to hold it together technically. When you read the Convivio or the De Vulgari you understand the laboratory. He was a real scholar. He even invented editing and production. When it’s time for me to edit a movie, I remember the 10th Canto of the Inferno that begins with a scene in which the production is extraordinary. Before him it wasn’t even possible…

 

Rondoni: You must have seen all kinds of people on this trip…

 

Benigni: You know what, in Veneto even Baggio came to the show. I really love Baggio. He said to me “Do you know that you helped me to better understand Buddhism?” I said to him “Hang on, where are you going? You’ve got Christ, I mean, not to tell you what to do, but we’ve already got that guy… like your grandfather had him and the grandfather of your grandfather…”

 

Rondoni: That’s the same response they say Totti gave “Pardon, but are you Catholic?” “And whaddya want me to be?”

 

Benigni: That’s the exact answer I give when people ask me the same question “And what should I be?!” Except unfortunately I say it in Italian.[4] In the diaries of Gandhi, when Hinduism was in fashion and everyone was going to India after ’68, he wrote that he had discovered Christianity via Tolstoy. And he told the people coming to him “You’ve got Christ and you come to me?” But one can’t be facetious about these things because they’re so profound…

 

Rondoni: These days on the other hand we tend to simplify and turn this hunger for greatness into a banality, we throw away what is big in life, often with the excuse that it’s difficult…

 

Benigni: But difficulty is so beautiful, blessed… it’s a blessing from heaven that you don’t know what to do, because that’s when you become a man, you discover the world, life, you discover you’re alive. If you took a pill to eliminate this struggle it would dry up all emotion, you would be alive anymore.  Worse than the slothful; it would be a new circle: the ones who didn’t want to live. Not just that they didn’t live, but they said “Nah, living doesn’t interest me.” That’s a kind of slothfulness Dante never encountered.

 

Rondoni: So listen, after Dante are you going to go back to making movies?

 

Benigni:  Are you kidding? Of course!


[1] “All Dante”

[2] Inferno, Canto V, line 142

[3] Purgatory, Canto XXIV, lines 52-54

[4] Totti’s response is in dialect.

Di lui i migliori dicevano che fosse il migliore

Di lui i migliori dicevano che fosse il migliore. Dante lo vede come pupilla dell’aquila celestiale. Petrarca, dormiva con il suo libro –regalatogli da Boccaccio- sotto al guanciale. Il migliore, il re dei poeti, Davide, l’autore dei Salmi. Tanti nei decenni scorsi hanno provato a ritradurre quel libro, o a scrivere altri salmi a volte sconvolti. Come Celan, o La Tour du Pin. Ancora lo fanno. Vertice dei Salmi è il “Miserere”, il lamento che cerca la misericordia. Dante pronuncia proprio quella come prima parola nella Selva. E il Miserere come poesia e supplica risuona in questo tempo che precede la pasqua cristiana. E’ la supplica dell’uomo che è re ed è sperduto. Risuona ad esempio nella notte di Sessa Aurunca, canto che lascia attoniti, di bellezza straziante, cantato dagli uomini del paese, nel buio dei venerdì di Quaresima. Per tutta la notte lo cantano. Miserere che si alza dal centro dell’Italia, per tutti, per chi crede o per chi vuole credere, come ha detto Giovanna Marini l’altro giorno proprio a Sessa Aurunca chiamata con Ambrogio Sparagna, Tommaso Ricci e il sottoscritto a commentare il millenario misterioso canto di questa poesia. E’ passata di bocca in bocca, da quella del Re dei poeti e d’Israele a quelle di miliardi di uomini, ognuno un re sperduto. La storia di questi giorni ci consegna di noi uomini l’immagine di un re fragile. Attraversato e capace di essere attirato dal male. Di fronte al mistero del male il re sperduto, il migliore poeta, si sbilancia verso la misericordia del Dio che si è sbilanciato verso il suo popolo. Nel centro d’Italia uomini cantano e custodiscono questo sbilanciamento, questa poesia, le danno la loro voce potente e dolcissima. La loro violenta e irrefutabile forza e il dolce affidamento. Poesia belato, alta e umile. Come è sempre la poesia quando è grande. In questo nostro tempo, spesso la poesia sembra ridotta a un genere letterario laterale. Così lo considerano spesso gli editori, gli insegnanti, i media. Ma lei torna nelle notti degli uomini. E trova parole millenarie e future. Le uniche veramente adeguate per noi re bambini, sperduti nel mistero dell’esistenza: “miserere mei, Dominum, secundum magnam misericordiam tuam…”

Siamo in giorni in cui la catena umana sembra disgregarsi

Siamo in giorni in cui la catena umana sembra disgregarsi. Guerre, caos, faziosità. Forse non del tutto casuale che la poesia si occupi di questo, ma a un altro livello dal frastuono di bombe e polemiche. “Catena umana” si intitola il nuovo libro di Seamus Heaney. Con coraggio Mondadori ha inaugurato una serie de Lo Specchio (grafica nuova) affiancando al grande irlandese, quattro libercoli di poeti italiani nati negli anni ’70. La piccola collezione –sponsorizzata da un noto marchio di penne- è segnale di apertura. Bernini, Pellagatta, Ponso, Carabba confermano l’esistenza di una parte di poesia recente abitata da un notevole governo della lingua (forse pure troppo), da un sentimento del tempo come già concluso o privo di fertilità vitale e da una curiosità febbrile verso la propria biografia e l’orizzonte consueto della esistenza. Il grande irlandese, che conclude la sua opera ben tradotta da Gianluca Guerneri con una poesia omaggio agli aquiloni di Pascoli. si conferma un poeta “sposato alla vita” e capace di visioni. Questi scelti tra i tanti bravi nuovi poeti che ci sono, annotano un disagio, un senso di blocco da cui si fatica ad uscire. Generalizzare non si può e su ognuno torneremo, se si dà il caso. Ma un senso di vita cristallizzata li accomuna. Una narrazione del minimo vitale. La maggiore tensione si trova nel quaderno di Andrea Ponso, impegnato con “I ferri del mestiere” a auscultare la vita nelle ossa, a mostrare l’amputazione delle “potature” –parola che torna e chiude il libro- come  segni di una dura lotta per non soccombere alle forme del male. Ci sono qui ancora le sorprese: essere pur in una cucina livida  come “angeli muti/ che per la prima volta abbiano visto/ il proprio viso e il proprio corpo”. Una attenzione all’essenziale, una disponibilità alla privazione di quanto impedisce la rinascita delle ossa. Al centro –in una mandorla di testimonianza – il poeta annota: “guardo ora il viso dolce di mia madre/ seppellire quello assorto e immobile / di mio padre, senza cedere luce,/ senza perderne tracce.” La catena umana può avvenire nel segno della perdita, del cedimento. O le dolenti potature essere gesti in cui la luce non cede. Si rigenera, si tramanda.