Thanks Erminia.



Douglas Clark, Bath, England           mailto: [log in to unmask]
Lynx: Poetry from Bath  ..........  http://www.bath.ac.uk/~exxdgdc/lynx.html

On Wed, 1 May 2002, Erminia Passannanti wrote:

> (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...?
>