FOR AN APPENDIX TO A CORONA
to myself, to life (of all beings)
Incipit or Human Cosmogony
for a moment
– only the moment is eternal –
an incalculable silence was heard
and the sound of doubt shattering certainty
with bright light.
The sea for a moment
revealed its secrets
in sympathy of course
the sky gave up its arcana
for everyone – absolutely everyone – there was
boundless opportunity to experience
wandering. The migrants
a wise people of color and flesh
for some time had been shifting
size and boundaries bearing anger,
hope and chronic tenderness
for the future. The News
spoke of this dipping
of security with desperate ignorance
(which many mistook for shrewdness).
The cathedrals of Science
the hesitations of faith
the fiefdoms of the law
looked to the future with a frown
or frankly speaking – they shit in their pants
-they who without the illusions of Power are nothing.
But the flowers – strangely enough –
they kept blooming
in the seas, dolphins didn’t quit breathing
or herons flying in the sky.
Thus life open to uncertainty
continued to teach itself
with the subtle wisdom of sweat
or fresh dew.
Loneliness had – finally –
discovered itself to be multitude and sweet
even comic – at times – and indeed
they say that’s why
a Corona
(the Corona, a Corona!? what’s the appropriate article!)
severed itself from a head or a head
detached from the Corona and, at any rate- in short –
between muscle fiber and sparkle that it had continued
to tumble. Yet no one remembers
that thumping sound, the mighty noise
that demanded respect. Everyone – absolutely everyone – though
remembered the silence. Only silence.
I
Life turns out to be
like a small circle
with larger circles
around it
II
Missed opportunity
To turn anxiety
Into hope!
III
The I, but wait
which I!?
The body should we say
or the mind
no – for the moment – let’s be satisfied
with the person
embedded into infinity
IV
I basically
am always waiting for something
neither large nor small
but harmoniously just right!
V.
The world is whistling superbly
in your ears with full
summer anxiety
It has hatched tumors
large as grapefruits
either through careless or hazy misdeeds
to say it with that
convenient cynicism
every time it dies
of urban arrogance
… but really, it’s not my fault
– and so who gives a fuck! –
VI
Television has turned off
the rhymes of days
now a master warm
with sadistic fantasies
overflows the flesh
sweats and anxieties
someone says it’s just summer
– torrid and tropical –
while a cunningly
catastrophic mind
suggests that – perhaps – we are dealing
with collective atonement.
The hours are tinged with sporadic
reports about those who
do not get sick, nor die
while attempting daily life
but rather, with tragic insistence
attempt a robbery
a rape
a risky phrase about race
an act of insanity with a machine gun or a rifle
or, the more spirited ones, a simple
escape while the rest of the populace
– supinely human – stubbornly
and without too much noise
lives.
VII
My mother
alone for months
– alone with a dog –
mind you “with” and not “like”
rhymes space
with her octogenarian breath
which at each moment
eternally (of course!)
triumphs over time. I’m well aware
that other older women and older men
like her proliferate
in city gardens like nettles
leathery and slashing
like sabers of sun. About her, though
with rampant filial affection
(yes, I’m being a bit saccharine and overtly officious)
I wonder what the secret
of her existence is, that is, how she puts together
gestures, chores, body
and thoughts to produce this subtle sum
these infinite days. Obviously
I can’t answer, but I know the dog
tenderly wags its tail for her every time
to make her smile. A woman and a dog
can overcome the world’s anxieties
or simply live !?
VIII
WorldWitness
I confess I don’t know how to hate
I get intensely angry
sometimes I even get furious
but I can’t fathom how anyone could wish
ill for another person
without failing in love.
Someone says that loving
is the practice of families
the exclusivity of friendships
the psycho- erotic delicacies of couples
or those nationalist pantomimes
prickly with sour racist lace.
Like many other things, this I don’t know
but today as – I hope – tomorrow
I won’t be capable of hating or forgetting
the whites or the cops who – once again –
have killed George Floyd
IX
I look up to the sky every day
in the morning
in the afternoon
and every night.
A faint voice tells me
that perhaps – up there – is where I look for myself
while I smile knowing
that – there – right up there
is indeed where I get lost
X
Yet wars shall still go on
like grudges that don’t quit in the sun
blood alternating with words
not out of hunger or despair
but out of mere dullness turned into the banner of reason
yet the question to ask
is what space do we occupy inside love.
In fact, there is no question more trivial or basic than that
for those who – like me – demand to exist
XI
Beyond addiction
For Giulio
I still have a lot of joy left in my chest
in my lungs and nostrils
which then expands to the whole body
despite boredom, pain
the desire to give up
and self-esteem shattering away.
The world often seems
like a fiery circle
where you don’t die – really –
but you give up for (ridiculous) abstractions.
If the center of a thing
– any – is a point
with round parts and shades
tending towards infinity
I think I have found the corollary
of those who in gratitude gain eternity.
XII
They say “Per aspera ad astra “
The motionless air echoes eternity
no it’s not true
rather, it speaks of rent overdue
jobs that have been suppressed
the price of gasoline
children who have become alibis
disillusionment and fear
online communities
that have become iron horizons
it speaks of a small world
with vaunted virtues
waiting for air
for meager political consolation
that slams its undying
frustration into the border
waiting for the courage that is missing
– every time – from diversity
from the exception and secular solitude
waiting for everyday life
emptied of its sweetest seed
and sometimes even the syllogism
of a direction
of colored masks
– very pricy ones – that mix up
breathing with breath
for a narcotic, solipsistic
bedazzlement of the self
waiting, finally, for denied or rarefied contacts
that speak of distances
like tangible forms
of a social malaise that by now has
exceeded organic and psychological limits.
This is because immovable eternity
obviously has its own laws
its cracks but – animula vagula blandula –
we need courage – in fact –
time and space
so we can destroy
the illusion of living
rc (night between 31 July and 1 August 2020, Belgioioso, Saman-Anteo )
Critical afterword: Literary space in the era of the global pandemic
Reading these beautiful poems, I cannot help but notice a paradox: the words lead me into an infinitely intimate space, where I picture myself, alongside the author, losing myself and finding myself in a vision of the sky at different times of the day, in in the midst of a crowded sort of silence. Yet, at the same time, I perceive that these poems are reaching me from such an infinite distance, on account of the fact that the world pandemic prevents me from any sort of closeness or contact. The author suggests to the reader that this vision of the sky is the space in which, in our present, restricted condition, we are forced to seek ourselves and in which, nevertheless, we keep on getting lost. My reading, thus, bears the markings of a paradox: this distant sort of intimacy is also a kind of search enabled only by its rediscovery as loss.
In these poems, my imagination is captured by this recurring image of a space that, on its surface, appears to be marked off and constrained yet reveals itself to be infinitely large, sublime, without measure. Thus life is imagined as a circle embraced by ever larger circles, each person is “embedded in infinity,” the center of everything, yet a point that tends towards infinity. Thus, for example, the poet’s anger against racism in its complicity with Power turns out to be the locus of a greater feeling of love and compassion. Similarly, eternity, whose echo seems to to resounding in the air, is contained by our daily miseries: the only possibility of transcendence is in the minutiae that disturb our everyday life. Love is precisely this space: an infinite magnitude wrapped inside a container that seems unable to contain it, sort of like a Möbius strip: the product of a peculiar twist in which inside and outside exchange places. I wonder if these poems can trigger a reflection on the issue of confinement, as a sort of answer to the question of whether it is possible to write a poem during a pandemic. They may perhaps lead to the rediscovery of a literary space that is not simply a chronicle of global malaise, but rather an actual heterotopic place, an ‘elsewhere’ that truly exists and is capable of opposing the harshness and determinations of reality.
In his masterpiece Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason, the French philosopher Michel Foucault describes the paradoxical condition of those who, in Renaissance Europe, were subjected to a regime of estrangement from society. While on the one hand, confinement meant exclusion and distancing, loneliness and denial of human contact, this condition opened an infinitely larger space for the confined subject, an infinite crossroads in a sublime space, open from all sides. This so-called “ship of fools” turned the excluded and “banished” into citizens of a transversal space, an immense interval beyond inhabited places. The boundary was not a dimensionless line but a space of uncertain and unlimited extension. Thus the condition of being being prisoners of this infinite openness seems to be the kernel of confinement rather than physical constriction, distancing or closure. Foucault describes this as being “prisoners of the passage.”
In the era of a global pandemic, these issues, can no longer be relegated to the margins and to the political unconscious of contemporary societies. The paradox of this “infinite crossroads,” of being “prisoners of the passage” now seems to have spread universally, between closures of borders and biopolitics of surveillance of movement and the human body. In this context, the differences produced by global capitalism and its logic of discrimination reduce our potential for unity. The immobility produced by the pandemic is not simply geographic, but appears to be a closure of the imagination: the struggles of the twenty-first century seem to be animated by a pessimism of the intellect, and defined by their enemy – racism, extinction and ecological destruction, gender discrimination. A larger narrative seems to be missing, a positive name for the alternative world that we want, an affirmative content and not only the just and inevitable fight against discrimination and exploitation.
The only possibility for rebuilding an idea of the future is contained in the paradoxical space that these poems seem to suggest, i.e., in rediscovering immensities in the details of everyday life, in discovering how this journey back in time through which we attempt to find ourselves is, at the end, the same infinite crossroads through which we repeatedly get lost. The author tells us that the potential for turning anxiety into hope is a missed opportunity. Perhaps, poetry can help build a solid principle of hope for this conflict and injustice ridden century we live in, precisely by functioning as an archive of that space and those tensions that animate our missed opportunities.
Reginaldo Cerolini, Master in anthropology from the University of Bologna with a specialization in Anthropology of Religion, and a thesis on racist trends in Italian anthropology, is both a poet and a critic as well as a founding members of Italian literary journal La Macchina Sognante. Born in 1981 in Brazil and adopted at a young age by Italian parents, he has pursued his interests in the cinema, music and theater with forays into playwriting and directing, radio hosting and screenwriting.
Filippo Menozzi, (Ph.D, Kent) is Lecturer in postcolonial and world literature at Liverpool John Moores University, UK. His most recent book is World Literature, Non-Synchronism and the Politics of Time, Palgrave 2020, he is also the author of Postcolonial Custodianship: Cultural and Literary Inheritance (2014), and his work has appeared in journals such as New Formations and Historical Materialism. In 2019, he was awarded a Teaching Excellence Award.
Cover image: Gaza beach, Spring 2021, photo by Ahmed Masoud.
