Other art of poetry

It exists, in poetry, a possibility
that, if once it has hurted
who writes or who reads it, will give
no respite, as a half modulated
half betrayed tune
can torment a memory. And i who write
know that a different sense
can be given to different things
know that here inside the verse
the word you hear or read
either keeps still and flies away
where you are no more, where you can’t even
think you may reach, and other mountains begin,
instead, anxious plains, rivers
like the ones you saw travelling from tormented aircrafts.
Impetuous cities here, under the motioness
written words of yours.

Franco Fortini, 1957

Many things Pasolini knows how. But not the most important for him, that is to shut up for a while. When he complains in verse and in prose about the young people’s lack of understanding for poetry he dosn’t realize that he’s doing, as they say, worst than hail. Pasolini, author of some very beautiful lyrics and prose works, is the same person of a very known protagonist of literary, political and mundane affairs; in order to listen to his sermon, to his invitation to values, young people should forget that identity. That’s why many of them think: if poetry is that thing a people’s enemy such as Pasolini suggests, then it’s better to have nothing to do with poets; they should go and work the land, as soon as possible.
Those people are wrong.
Not because Pasolini is not a people’s enemy1. (I don’t put the words enemy and people in quotes, for faith in the reader’s intelligence). He certainly is; more unfriendly than almost the italian living poets put together and more seriously than the most conservative italian living poets - who are quite a lot - because he’s probably the only one who knows deeply what being a people’s enemy means. The only one who sells the sacred things knowing that they are sacred. In fact, he gives us to believe that he makes them even more sacred and venerable by selling them and turning them into convenience goods. Actually, he worships them; and he fights, by hundred tongues of iron, against every moralism; and he plays, not without skill, the contradiction’s play.
Those people are wrong: because there are not interlocutors (no matter how pure or how corrupt they may be) who could’t bring a precious truth. We must remember it, against our moralism.
Moralism is not what Pasolini believes it is and speak about all the time. He mistakes moralism with morality. Morality is tension to a coherence between values and behaviour; and consciousness of the disagreement. It becomes policy, it is its private name. Moralism is the mistake of who denies existence to other values and behaviours differing from those that morality aknowledges in a given moment; and believes that contradictions stop, even for a while, in the individual’s formal unity. To a moralist, no people’s enemy can bring a precious truth; no devotee of a good cause can be a dumb and a scoundrel; no love for poetry can pretend coldness or show itself differently from reading what the publishers call poets. All the Pasolini’s lot of talk against moralism comes from the split - which is a social and class split, not psychologic - between his morality an his moralism. In him, the first one is defence of his willingness and his pleasure, it’s the difficult and hard fought assumption of a certain indipendence and a certain servitude. The second one, which is parasitic of the first one, is not incapacity to tolerate different behaviours, but to imagine - as the existence of an invisible planet that only the astronomic calculus can reveal - dissimilar and irreducible values to his knowledge’s instruments. It’s not a matter of lack of liberalism. Quite the opposite. Pasolini believes he has, Christ aux outrages, so much suffered for his and others’ freedom that he hardly realizes how he’s much less similar to the young man he had been once and much more to a tolerant and traditional european man of letters. His morality ends up to be a policy we won’t precise or criticize here; but his moralism protects him from the others’ policies, from the danger and the possibility that the others’ truth may give him death2. Each writer’s good and bad is often defined by this type of contradiction. What’s, then, the truth behind the Pasolini’s speech on the admirable things the youth would miss in vain by ignoring or hating poetry? This one: no society’s transformation - even more the whole society or the whole man’s transformation - can be given without really choosing an order of quality, the symbols, the models. The bourgeois-capitalistic societies’ last century has handed down the order of quality of art and poetry as supreme symbol. There is someone who thinks it has replaced or it is bound to replace the order of religion completely. It has hard struggled, even inside the same bougeois society, for primacy. It had to outrun sanctity, wisdom; it had to pick up their spoils. If he were not a such people’s enemy, this is what Pasolini should say today: not only that model is fighted, as everybody knows, but all models in the world - that one day could be again, or already are, sanctity and wisdom - are so only if they are expressions, orders, structures of quality; they exist only in the merciless aristocraticity of works, behaviours and institutions. So much the worse for us if we just can see their most clumsy and rough officiants. That qualitative order, in short, confutes and bewilders them; especially Pasolini. So that his complaints became true, they should not celebrate the quality of poetry, but remind the existence of quality,
Nevertheless, the existece of quality, its affirmation or evocation has a striking force: for a while - which is not possible to measure with the time of clocks - it doesn’t leave stone over stone in our speeches. It is their measurement; so it begins with making them shut up. The first testimony of what Pasolini wants to say, if he really had the quality at heart, would be the silence. My opening words weren’t a joke. That silence is not esteemed by the time of clocks: the critic reader will feel its presence and absence behind a verse or a prose work. It’s not the Phytagorean myth of all hermeticism, it doesn’t guarantee any outcome, it’s not necessarely a religious silence but rather the condition of a more accurate tone, the acceptance of a periodic verification by one of those instruments the precision mechanics call “judges”. I too who write had to be silent so that i receive the truth there was, despite him, in Pasolini’s words; and, generally speaking, in those apologists of poetry. But until he doesn’t agree to be silent as regards to a order of quality, to a system of values different from the one that gives him leave to speak, we won’t read him but as a mere pretext. We must separate from his buzz the truth beyond him.

Franco Fortini, 1972
translated in english by Tj Locatelli

1 While writing this note, i know very well that Pasolini, among other newsmen and workers, is awaiting trial for having been the “Lotta Continua” editor. Right for this reason, which may seem an extraordinary sense of inopportunity, i keep on thinking proper to distinguish and to make everybody distinguish. I don’t care about the field where some comrades mean to use Pasolini, or he them; it is a servile field anyway. I do care about other comrades; who, for too much nobility, award poets the trust they should give to poetry and don’t expect the poets to do their duties that would prevent them from being uselessly different.

2 He’s been given death by the inhabitants of that world he contributed so much to establish with his violent desire. The others’ policy i was talking about, the “other truth”, was the better part of the young people insurrection at the end of the Sixties; it was the sense of the Cultural Revolution Pasolini left out. This “other policy” would have certainly denied his way to talk politics; it would have “killed” him but as any of us would like to be killed. (1976)