THE PROVOCATIVE WITNESS
(I am the spirit of love. P.P.P)
Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922 in Bologna. He well known as a poet, novelist, communist,Marxist intellectual & filmmaker. he was first and always a poet the most important civil poet, according to Alberto Moravia, in Italy in the second half of this century. he wrote novels, poetry, and social and cultural criticism. his poems were at once deeply personal and passionately engaged in the political turmoil of his country. In 1949, after his homosexuality led the Italian Communist Party to expel him on charges of "moral and political unworthiness," Pasolini fled to Rome. This selection of poems from his early impoverished days on the outskirts of Rome to his last is at the center of his poetic and filmic vision of modern Italian life as an Inferno. In Danger is the first anthology in English devoted to his political and literary essays, and includes a generous selection of his poetry. Against the backdrop of post-war Italy. Pasolini has brave lyricism and critical insight. the controversial & openly gay Pasolini was murdered in 1975 by a young man, but he had been murdered for political reasons. 'Pier Paolo Pasolini stopped existing, and in his friends, enemies and friends-enemies’. he has often been called a "Provocative Witness" but this sublime malediction has not been directed by a narcissism of the poet and by the advertising fancy of an editor; in this sort of slogan there was an instinctive, immediate, almost skin-deep but deep, implacable truth.
( 'I always paid, I desperately was at the forefront of everything. I made a lot of mistakes, but surely I have no regrets. [...] I am insatiable of our life / because that is the one and only thing in the world that cannot be worn out, During all my life I have never exerted an act of violence, neither physical nor moral. Not because I am fanatically for no-violence. If this is a form of ideological, self-pressure, it is violence too. In my life I have never exerted any violence, neither physical nor moral, simply because I trusted to my nature, that is my culture'. P.P.P)
(Pier Paolo Pasolini in the graveyard of Antonio Gramsci,
Rome, 1961)
Rome, 1961)
All politics is Realpolitik," warring!
****
soul, with your delicate anger!
You do not recognize a soul other than this one
which has all the prose of the clever man,
of the revolutionary devoted to the honest
common man (even the complicity
with the assassins of the Bitter Years graftedonto protector classicism, which makes
the communist respectable): you do not recognize the heart
that becomes slave to its enemy, and goes
where the enemy goes, led by a history
that is the history of both, and makes them, deep down,
perversely, brothers; you do not recognize the fears
of a consciousness that, by struggling with the world,
shares the rules of the struggle over the centuries,
as through a pessimism into which hopes
drown to become more virile. Joyous
with a joy that knows no hidden agenda,
this army-blind in the blind
sunlight-of dead young men comes
and waits. If their father, their leader, absorbed
in a mysterious debate with Power and bound
by its dialectics, which history renews ceaselessly-
if he abandons them,
in the white mountains, on the serene plains,
little by little in the barbaric breasts
of the sons, hate becomes love of hate,
burning only in them, the few, the chosen.
Ah, Desperation that knows no laws!
Ah, Anarchy, free love
of Holiness, with your valiant songs!
soul, with your delicate anger!
You do not recognize a soul other than this one
which has all the prose of the clever man,
of the revolutionary devoted to the honest
common man (even the complicity
with the assassins of the Bitter Years graftedonto protector classicism, which makes
the communist respectable): you do not recognize the heart
that becomes slave to its enemy, and goes
where the enemy goes, led by a history
that is the history of both, and makes them, deep down,
perversely, brothers; you do not recognize the fears
of a consciousness that, by struggling with the world,
shares the rules of the struggle over the centuries,
as through a pessimism into which hopes
drown to become more virile. Joyous
with a joy that knows no hidden agenda,
this army-blind in the blind
sunlight-of dead young men comes
and waits. If their father, their leader, absorbed
in a mysterious debate with Power and bound
by its dialectics, which history renews ceaselessly-
if he abandons them,
in the white mountains, on the serene plains,
little by little in the barbaric breasts
of the sons, hate becomes love of hate,
burning only in them, the few, the chosen.
Ah, Desperation that knows no laws!
Ah, Anarchy, free love
of Holiness, with your valiant songs!
Daring to lift my eyes
towards the dry treetops,
I don't see God, but his light
is immensely shining.
Of all the things I know
my heart feels only this:
I'm young, alive, alone,
my body consuming itself.
I briefly rest in the tall grasses
of a river bank, under bare
trees, then move along beneath
clouds to live out my young days.
(Salo, or the 120 Days of Sodom film director Pier Paolo Pasolini sitting with modernist poet Ezra Pound. Pound & Pasolini discuss the linguistically experimental Italian literary movement 'Neoavanguardia",)
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