(Sorry, I am posting this in memory of my mother. I hope you do not mind.
I am trying to explain who is the 'self' in this dramatic monologue.
Beyond aiming at being lyrical, some of the poems I have published tend to
be – if not experimental – inquisitive from an ‘odd angle’. The title of
the my second collection is, in fact, Macchina (which can be translated as
machine, machinery or mechanism). The title, in itself, refers to the
mechanisms underlying, or else, explaining mental phenomena but in fact,
it mocks those mechanistic hypothesis which try to reduce the 'self' to a
series of functions that are to be understood by means of dismembering its
parts.
I often speak in the persona of an individual other than myself, at times
sized by linguistic aphasia, or dysphasia, say someone who speaks saying
one thing, but meaning something else, someone who might have experienced
a degree of linguistic impairment with oddly creative outcomes – but,
after all, this is, exactly what all poets do. I am indebted, I suppose,
to a kind of non-mechanistic materialism which goes back to Diderot's
antireductionism, allowing the brain and the body the same properties and
faculties once attributed only to the immaterial soul.
I say this to help limit a too close identification of these personas
which I let speak through my poems with me, as the author. I sometimes
even assume a masculine gender, or enter a character of an age
dramatically distant from mine, referring psychological and physiological
states and events which are intended to be utterly alien from what I
normally experience. I guess I have found this mode to step out of
that 'self' that is supposed to be my major concern, as a poet, and,
consequently, relate about other people’s feelings. The fact is that most
often, in my view, other people's feeling are closer to our own than we
wish to see. This is why the title of my first collection was Noi-Altri
(We-Others). The language and imagery I use are, therefore, not to be
interpreted literally, but as bridges to a discourse on life which
transcends mechanistic comprehension of poetry as a form of a content. Of
course, the spiritual elements that you will find in my poems are all
secured by a secular and anthropological interest in faith and religious
practices.
Macchina follows the action of a narrator who evolves - also from a
linguistic point of view - in different personas. My choice of structure
divides the book in sections, with the last ‘poemetto ’In Jugoslavia con I
piedi a terra, consistently sustaining an alternation of realist-
surrealist modes throughout its various sub-units. In this section,
metaphorical language takes precedence over any overt existentialist
discourse.
Through the use of ‘dramatic monologue’, I have tightened imagery by
selecting fractions of a woman’s speech which, altogether, reproduce the
leitmotif of the entire book: dysphasic language turning into creative
speech acts at the more radical level that I could obtain. We learn of the
extreme sensibility of the speaking 'self' - of the way she organizes her
life because of and around it, finding with unique correspondences between
mental entities and material ones. And, in spite of the fact that the
parts of this machinery, made of body and mind, seem to have reached a
state of obsolescence, although seemingly confined to pure anatomical
needs, they still bear the aura of functions developed for the sake of the
immaterial soul, condemned to interact with the material world.
In deciding the narrator as my super-Ego, I have falsified the supremacy
of the suffering body over the hyper-perceptive mind. The discourse is, in
fact, deceitfully governed by the overwhelming power of bodily mechanisms,
so to present a 'self' deprived of any effective role to explain - through
the psychological and physiological phenomena - her spiritual unease. The
narrator - my mother - struggles to prove that with the loss of the
voluntary mechanical coordination of her actions, she has not lost the
recognition of the surrounding world. I have, therefore, tried to
reproduce the exact moment in which she found herself - diseased -
standing on the threshold of her life, when the explanations of her
sentiments, perceptions and movements ended up seeming merely mechanical,
and the function of the seat of the soul only there to provide an
unreliable, obscure place for the soul to cope with the bodily mechanisms.
The elements of creativeness equal those of dissolution, while
the ‘narrator’ is, somehow, exposed to the effects of the world’s
spiritual disease. I have created a set of stimuli which create a circle
of sensations in respect of the perceiver. The spiritual 'self' who lies
behind the bodily and mental mechanism of the speaking persona is not able
to clarify in a straightforth fashion those stimuli, therefore it
receives and transmutes them as being simply caught in this self-
referential circle. In relation to the many scattered signs of such
disorder, I make the reader acoustically sense them in the title-
poem, ‘Macchina’ with noises or even smells produced by the wrecked
mechanism of the machine itself :
The say ‘Too many smells in this room!
I haven’t notice it
At the distance I keep…
Just sounds striking my ear,
Pains, noises that are produced
By the machine.
Strange vibrations producing
Doleful notes during the night duty:
The machine is broken.
My task is to let the reader learn that the ability to utter the
existential experience is not a spontaneous aptitude, but the product of
strenuous labour.
‘Machine’ (From In Jugoslavia with my feet on the ground')
She runs the trolley
along the track of madness.
Slowly follows the rail.
Who knows
What happens
At dead of night!
(the trolley
along the track of madness
keeps me aloft).
Things happen in the small hour,
One must stay alert.
Better to avoid too much know-how.
(Doctors come and go, they keep on causing scars,
while my arm is dripping).
The say ‘Too many smells in this room!’I haven’t notice itAt the distance
I keep…Just sounds striking my ear,Pains, noises that are produced
By the machine.
Strange vibrations producing
Doleful notes during the night duty:
The machine is broken.
Much better to do without it.
I’d prefer not to be bothered.They come and sabotage it on purpose.
There are those who
Sit and work at it
To stop those who owned the machine
Sitting and working.
Those who owned it struggle and despair.
They don’t want to baste linen any more.
I mourned life. Oh, yea, but now I laugh.
Because of it, that machine.
(Look how the scar meanders,
unnoticed, in the material).
I stood there, like a Lucifer,
My fair name cast by filthy suggestions.
Then they were erased.
I feel myself reborn.
If it vanishes, I can’t but weep. It it reappears,I start feeling a rag, a
beggar at my own door,
A mendicant in my own home,
My destiny instantly decided:
Trapped in the mechanism. Like this!
All of a sudden arose a noise that annoyed me,
An annoyance caused by someone
Who’d gone to the troubleOf releasing the spring.
At night, it would not proceed.
I wanted to see how far
It would perform its task,
To show it to those who use it to stake
The living being that every day
Functions (thanks to it).
We are talking of the machine, a black machine
That I cannot operate any more – since its toolsAre missing. The tools
useful to people like me.
And, tell me: if someone took
And used those them, to whom did she pass
The instruments essential to work that machine?
Did she pass them to someone without a machine?
Someone rampaging out of control,
Who is keeping my trolley without any right,
Flying off the handle while claiming, from me,
The hammer, the spring mechanism, everything
Required to get up with? Does it matter to anyone
My need of a pen, a pencil?
They keep me shut in this room
Together with a black contraption
That exploits my recourses.
The girl doesn’t know how to work itAnd has moved the device elsewhere:
A small sewing machine
That distracts her thoughts.
If she pays attention, she will learn to use it,
…while I lose my way after simple basting.
I can no longer manage to thread a needle,
Turning the handle,
To feel myself humiliated, annihilated. ‘Poor me!’,I said, ‘to feel myself
at zero degreeIn these irrelevant tasks
That anyone else can do and now I cannot.
No, I can’t see. I cannot.’ But I do know how to speak, express desires:
I’ll get a needle, take it by the window.I’ll make it work.I’ll make
thoseWho can’t read my thoughtsGulp it down
Those marching or sewing a hem.
My machine works
With all the beauty of winter,
With those who perfected my hearing.
I know the beauties of winter
And believe they may be those
Which exalt the weaving.
Let all of them leave my house.
I don’t want typewriters around.They come here pretending to be poets!
This annoying hammering
Reminds me of my broken window.
I think it might lead to the dissolution of my house.
Everywhere, works have began.
There’s no silence around here. No peace.Hammering. Clacking. Endlessly.
(translated by Peter Dale – amended by the author) 2002
Di notte
Se fossi stata
unicamente tua
quale infelice animale
avrebbe fatto incursione
nei tuoi sogni
disturbato i tuoi giorni
azzannandoti alla nuca
l'inquieta faina
il gatto selvatico
l'avida lupa?
Se sul tuo collo
e sul tuo petto esposto
- azzurro e lacrimante
come il corpo di Cristo
avessi lasciato il mio morso
se prima di sera
e prima della notte
con sospiro affannoso
- l’ origliare sommessoalla mia porta
t'avesse informato
senza possibilità d'errore
della mia vera natura
(questa ferita aperta)
a chi - altro da te -
non uomo, nè bestia,
avresti chiesto di porsi
disarmato all'ascolto…?
Oxford, 19. 4. 2002
At night
(Trans. Brian Cole)
If I had been
yours alone
what unhappy animal
would have made incursions
into your dreams
disturbed your days
sinking its fangs in the nape of your neck
the restless beech-marten
the wild cat
the greedy wolf?
If on your cheek
and on your exposed chest
- blue and tearful
like the body of Christ
I had left my bite
if before evening
and before nightfall
- with gasping breath -
the humble eavesdropper
at my door
had informed you
with no possibility of error
of my true nature
(that open wound)
who - except yourself -what man or beast
would you have asked to go
unarmed to listen...?
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