“

Non recidere, forbice, quel volto,
solo nella memoria che si sfolla,
non far del grande suo viso in ascolto
la mia nebbia di sempre.

Un freddo cala… Duro il colpo svetta.
E l’acacia ferita da sé scrolla
il guscio di cicala
nella prima belletta di Novembre.

”

Eugenio Montale

ermetici squiLibrI

“ O voi ch’avete li intelletti sani

mirate la dottrina che s’asconde

sotto ‘l velame de li versi strani”

Commedia di Dante Alighieri, Inferno IX, 61-63

Verrà un tempo,

che è già polvere di mille memorie,

in cui Dei, Bardi ed Eroi

geleranno il loro frenetico fremere.

(Tam magis…magno fremito fit murmure!)

Oggi è un giorno di festa:

gli Dei si scambiano segni di pace

mentre in piazza

(Buco nero tra libertà e sangue!)

Gli Eroi si avventano sugli avanzi

Di una masticata cena divina.

I Bardi, avvolti dai fumi di questi tempi fragili,

piangono lacrime acide,

che scavano in volto trincee,

che conducono alla cecità:

(benedetta psicoanalisi)

Davvero non abbiamo il tempo

Per fissare gli autografi

Di questa primavera

Sui rami dei ciliegi?

Poi la radio:

while the shy guys,

with tired eyes,

eat screens with unwinged skies,

a poor man, young or child,

unearthing food from fragile

graves,

silently and pecefully dies.

                                                                                  A.J.Ayer

Benvenuti in Italia, paese di navigatori, inventori, letterati e lestofanti. Paese di Colombo, Galileo, Dante e Ariosto. Ma anche di Berlusconi.

Gramellini da Fazio ha fatto il confronto tra due grandi lestofanti e le loro dichiarazioni. Fabrizio Corona “cosa farai se ti condannano?” risposta encomiabile “Scappo!”. Silvio Berlusconi “cosa farai se ti condannano?” domanda l’insetto risponde il Re dell’alveare “Resto!”. Come delle mignatte attaccate alle poltrone i nostri politici non hanno una benché minima morale istituzionale. La differenza tra il senso istituzionale che vacilla in Italia è dato dal caso Marrazzo.

L’ormai ex-presidente della Regione Lazio beccato con le mani nella marmellata (diciamo così per non cadere nel volgare) in poco più di 24 ore si è dimesso. Dimesso pur non avendo commesso reato. Anzi, essendo vittima di un reato. Qualcuno fa irruzione in casa (violazione di domicilio), lo filma in compagnia di un/una trans che lo coccola (violazione di privacy) e lo ricatta (estorsione). Marrazzo, di cui tutti a gran voce (me compreso) hanno chiesto le dimissioni, si dimette. L’altro caso è quello dell’editore più liberale della storia. Coinvolto in processi come corruzione giudiziaria, tangenti alla guardia di finanza, beccato in rapporti “intimi” con una minorenne e con prostitute a cui avrebbe dato anche poltrone “che contano”, amico di mafiosi, corruzione di testimoni… e potremmo continuare per pagine e pagine, replica “Resto anche se mi condannano”.

Benvenuti in Italia, il paese del contrario. Dove se uno viene indagato, o rischia di essere condannato, non è colpa sua. Non è colpa dell’imputato che probabilmente non si è comportato come dovrebbe. No è colpa dei giudici. E’ colpa della Costituzione che è sbagliata. E’ colpa dei giornalisti che raccontano i fatti. E’ colpa dei giudici antimafia che dovrebbero non indagare sui suoi amici.

Nella vita reale, quella che viviamo tutti i santi giorni, uno che fa un ragionamento del genere viene di solito appellato come “buffone”. Isolato dal gruppo. Troppo inaffidabile per assegnargli incarichi di ogni tipo. Nel mondo del contrario, l’Italia delle poltrone, uno che ragiona in questo modo è diventato Presidente del Consiglio e da 15 anni è gioia e dolore per tutta una popolazione.

Benvenuti in Italia. Vi parrà strano, ma è lo stesso paese di Cavour e Mazzini. Di Machiavelli. Di Montale. Non è un sogno, è tutto vero… Vieni a trovarci. E portati un cavalletto. Potrebbe esserti utile!

Jeg har skrevet om noen av Montales dufter etter at jeg begynte å bestille prøver i sommer.  Boise fruite,  Wild aoud,   Louban,  Pure gold,  Sandal sliver, Amber & Spices og  Aoud leather.

I tillegg har jeg testet Aoud Lime, Aoud Rose petals, Red aoud og White aoud. Så vidt jeg husker…  Jeg har testet Montale med og uten oud/aoud en god del, kan du si.

Til å begynne med reagerte jeg mest negativtpå oud-en. Jeg opplevde den som voldsom og til dels påtrengende, og den medisinske åpningsnoten var nesten helt ubehagelig, men bare nesten, og jeg klarte ikke å slutte å tenke på disse duftene. Oud er “dragende”.

I andre Montaleprøvebestillingsomgang tok jeg for meg Red, White, Black, Rose petals og Lime.

For å gjøre meg ferdig med Lime først som sist; for meg var den “meh”. Ikke verst, men ikke mer.
Red og White og Rose petals må jeg ta egne omtaler av, tror jeg.

Men, Black aoud

Den åpner med skikkelig motstand; krast, kraftig, rått. Det er medisinsk og det er lakris av den ekte typen som gjør at munnen snurper som av vin med skikkelig garvesyre. Det er noe barskogsaktig som ikke er mose. Kvae, kanskje – men veldig flyktig.  Barsk, ikke en duft man får solgt i forbifarten på tax free.

Så stilner motstanden, og fram stiger en varm, sexy mørk, litt farlig rose på en seng av patchouly.  Duften varer og varer, og ettersom jeg tester den flere ganger, kjenner jeg at åpningsnotene, som jeg (som Bibap) til å begynne med fikk bakoversveis av, blir noe jeg vil ha mer av.

Aoud/oud er klart vanedannende.

Det er underlig med Black aoud, –det er vanskelig å definere akkurat hva som skiller den så klart fra de andre jeg har testet. Det er noe med at den liksom ikke forsøker å gjøre seg til og være “deilig”, tror jeg. Den er sånn: jeg er som jeg er, du får tilpasse deg.  Den er kompleks og komplisert samtidig som den er enkel.  Det er rose over patchouly, sandeltre og labdanum, og så den vanskelig beskrivbare oud-en, som ligger der og flyter gjennom de andre notene i alle de timene duften varer. Det er lenge.

Jeg har vært skråsikker før, men jeg tror faktisk at dette kan være en must have i stor størrelse. Kanskje. Det er så mange dufter der ute.

Uno anda siempre sumido en la medianía, aturdido de estímulos que no sabe aprovechar, abrumado por la saturación de posibilidades. Siempre quise llegar a los libros por sus mejores poemas, prefiero una antología a unas obras completas. Y creo que sólo se aprovecha bien un libro de poemas si se degusta lentamente y varias veces poema por poema. Pero al leer dos o tres poemas que no nos dicen nada normalmente no seguimos. Por eso quería ir poniendo poema por poema versos que me interesaron, destellos. La idea es encontrar poemas interesantes de poesía escrita en español del 2000 hasta la fecha, para averiguar qué hay de bueno por ahí que yo mismo me estoy perdiendo. Sin cerrarse a grupos o a edades, sólo fijándose en el valor de cada poema. Sin embargo quería empezar con un poema de Montale que dice mejor todo esto. La edición es argentina, y la traducción es de Ricardo H. Herrera,

Mi vida, no te pido rasgos fijos,
rostros plausibles o fuera de sí.
En tu inquieto vaivén ya son iguales
el sabor de la miel y el del ajenjo.

Al corazón que juzga al cambio vil
rara vez lo sacude un sobresalto.
Así a veces resuena en el silencio
de los campos un tiro de fusil.

El libro que tengo gracias a Ezequiel Zaidenwerg, un magnífico poeta argentino, que dará mucho que hablar en el futuro, es un prodigio de sugerencia. Pero el caso es comentar verso a verso para que el poema salga ganando, no siendo reducido a una idea o una metáfora.
Escogí este poema porque la sensación con la que me suelo encontrar al navegar por internet en busca de buenos poemas es la de la primera estrofa. Los límites se difuminan y los sabores acaban confundiéndose, y uno acaba por conformarse. Me encanta que en este momento el poeta no se conforme con la sensación de los primeros versos y materialice la emoción con dos elementos tan concretos y con un sabor tan fuerte como el del asenjo y la miel, con olores y texturas tan diferentes. Acrecienta la terrible mixtura y la pérdida que se sufre al no distinguir, al confundir. Además la segunda estrofa conduce el problema al propio individuo, porque no es la realidad la que es igual e indiferente. El problema está en el hombre que no atiende al cambio, el que no quiere prestar atención a su tiempo, a lo que le rodea. Es el nada temí más que mis cuidados que inteligentemente enarbolara Góngora. Y yo mismo me he sentido así al dejar de lado tanto tiempo mi tiempo. Está bien y es necesario leer a los clásicos, permanecer en los clásicos, pero también lo es el make it new de Pound.
De todas formas, tenga la actitud que tenga, todo hombre acaba escuchando un tiro de fusil en el silencio. Incluso yo, y esa imagen en su sencillez me resulta aplastante. Es la efervescencia del destello desde su capacidad de ruptura. Es lo que me gustaría experimentar al leer un poema, el silencio de dejar de oír el murmullo indiferenciador, y el fusil que todo lo pone en suspenso, que asusta y deslumbra. No todos los poemas que subiré serán tan buenos, no todos podemos ser Montale, pero espero que al menos todos consigan sobrecogernos con un disparo cercano, al menos por unos instantes.

“La leggerezza non è una virtù, è destino e chi non l’ha si può impiccare se anche col suo peso sia più difficile”. L’imponderabile lezione di Eugenio Montale fa pensare. Che la leggerezza sia destino, non è legato ovviamente al fatto di avere un destino leggero, ma di vivere con leggerezza qualsiasi destino. Il mestiere di vivere – direbbe Alberti – va esercitato “colle mani e con’ piedi, con tutti e’ nervi, con ogni industria e consiglio”, con seria levità, con gaiezza. Affinchè la leggerezza ci accompagni, impedendoci di impiccarci col nostro stesso peso, basta invogliare il destino a stare dalla nostra parte. Affilate le armi. La più efficace è l’ironia. Valore abusatissimo. In realtà, un’arte della conoscenza procacciata attraverso continui cambi del punto di vista; provatela, non potrete più farne a meno. Ironia e leggerezza come destino, trovo che abbiano a coincidere. Ascoltate: “dovremo attendere un pezzo prima che la cronaca si camuffi in storia. Solo allora il volo di una formica (il solo che interessi) sarà d’aquila”. Dentro a questa frase, che ho scelto percorra con noi il filo, Montale coniuga di nuovo metallo e piuma, ironia lucianesca e leggerezza come final destination. C’è il senso stesso della Storia, della sua incapacità a tradurre gli eventi per ciò che sono, senza falsarne la visione. Ma solo nel “falsamento” della visione storica è possibile coglierne il senso profondo. Senza ironia sarebbe  impossibile, con buona pace  (e due) dei filologici integralisti. Parlando di Alberti, suo alter/ego, Manfredo Tafuri citò a lezione Storia vera di Luciano di Samosata (che a differenza dell’adorabile Luciano Ligabue, aveva il senso dell’ironia). La qual cosa mi rese curiosa assai (similmente a quando il medesimo Maestro della Crisi mi costrinse, pungolando la mia ignoranza abissale, a leggere passi da Sant’Ambrogio, forse meno noto di Sant’Agostino, ma vi assicuro un trip interstellare). Lessi il viaggio nel paradosso di Luciano, poi Erasmo e l’idea che mi ero fatta dell’ironia divenne una chiave per capire anche quell’incredibile manuale dell’architetto, che tutti gli architetti dovrebbero leggere almeno una volta nella vita loro, che è il De re aedificatoria. Dove Leon Battista ti spiega anche come liberarti dagli scarafaggi che t’infestano il cantiere. Non si fraintenda: non leggo queste cose divertendomi. Se devo divertirmi leggo Julia, le avventure di una criminologa (mio alter/ego cartaceo). Perchè l’esperienza della lettura a questo livello è talmente sublime e intensa che si può fare solo a piccolissime dosi. Esattamente come per la poesia, la più alta e più sintetica delle forme di scrittura (che vi consiglio, come modestissimo esperimento, di provare a esercitare), dove una parola può uccidere o salvare. Ma ciò che rimane è una meravigliosa sensazione di sazietà e di leggerezza.

Ho tanta fede in te
che durerà
(è la sciocchezza che ti dissi un giorno)
finché un lampo d’oltremondo distrugga
quell’immenso cascame in cui viviamo.
Ci troveremo allora in non so che punto
se ha un senso dire punto dove non è spazio
a discutere qualche verso controverso
del divino poema.

So che oltre il visibile e il tangibile
non è vita possibile ma l’oltrevita
è forse l’altra faccia della morte
che portammo rinchiusa in noi per anni e anni.

Ho tanta fede in me
e l’hai riaccesa tu senza volerlo
senza saperlo perché in ogni rottame
della vita di qui è un trabocchetto
di cui nulla sappiamo ed era forse
in attesa di noi spersi e incapaci
di dargli un senso.

Ho tanta fede che mi brucia; certo
chi mi vedrà dirà è un uomo di cenere
senz’accorgersi ch’era una rinascita.

Cred atat de tare in tine

Incat va dura

(asa cum ti-am spus o data intr-o doara)

Pana cand o strafulgerare de dincolo de lume va distruge

Acest ghemotoc de praf in care traim

Ne vom intalni atunci intr-un oarecare punct

Daca se poate numi punct ceva in afara spatiului

Pentru a discuta asupra unui vers controversat

din poemul divin.

Stiu ca dincolo de vizibil si tangibil

nu se afla o viata posibila ci ceva dincolo-de-viata

e poate cealalta fata a mortii

pe care am purtat-o in noi ani si ani

Am atata credinta in mine

si ai aprins-o tu fara sa vrei

fara s-o stii, pentru ca fiecare harb

a vietii de aici contine o ghicitoare

despre care nu stim nimic si care poate statea

si astepta ca noi cei rataciti si neputincioasi

sa-i dam un sens

Am atata credinta incat ma arde; cu siguranta cine ma vede va spune : iata un om de cenusa

Fara sa isi dea seama ca era o renastere.

Vedi, in questi silenzi in cui le cose
s’abbandonano e sembrano vicine
a tradire il loro ultimo segreto,
talora ci si aspetta
di scoprire uno sbaglio di Natura,
il punto morto del mondo, l’anello che non tiene,
il filo da disbrogliare che finalmente ci metta
nel mezzo di una verità.
Lo sguardo fruga d’intorno,
la mente indaga accorda disunisce
nel profumo che dilaga
quando il giorno più languisce.

Vezi tu, in tacerile acestea in care lucrurile

se daruiesc si par a fi pe punctul

de a-si trada taina lor ultima

te poti astepta sa

descoperi vreo eroare de-a Naturii

punctul mort al lumii, veriga slabita,

firul ce odata descurcat ne-ar plasa in sfarsit

in miezul unui adevar

Privirea cauta imprejur

Mintea cerceteaza, leaga, desparte

in parfumul ce inunda

cand ziua isi taraganeaza plecarea.

Spesso il male di vivere ho incontrato:
era il rivo strozzato che gorgoglia,
era l’incartocciarsi della foglia
riarsa, era il cavallo stramazzato.

Bene non seppi; fuori del prodigio
che schiude la divina Indifferenza:
era la statua nella sonnolenza
del meriggio, e la nuvola, e il falco alto levato.

Deseori m-am intalnit cu dezolarea vietii

era suvoi gatuit care galgaia

era frunza ce se chircea

uscata, era calul prabusit

Bine n-am cunoscut in afara miraculosului

Ce intredeschide divina Indiferenta

era statuia invaluita in somnolenta

a amiezii, si norul si soimul din inaltimi

Eugenio Montale

.

Tra chiaro e oscuro c’è un velo sottile
Tra buio e notte il velo si assottiglia.
Tra notte e nulla il velo è quasi impalpabile.
La nostra mente fa corporeo anche il nulla.
Ma è allora
che cominciano i grandi rovesciamenti,
la furiosa passione per il tangibile,
non quello elefantiaco, mostruoso
che nessuna mano può chiudere in sé,
ma la minugia, il fuscello che neppure
il più ostinato bricoleur può scorgere.
Il Leviatano uccide, non può crescere oltre
e scoppia,
ma quello che ci resta sotto le unghie
anche se usciamo appena dalla manicure,
quello è ancora la prova che siamo polvere
e torneremo polvere e tutto questo
è polvere di vita, il meglio e il tutto.

(“Tra chiaro e oscuro” Eugenio Montale. Diario del ‘72)

Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio, almeno milioni di scale
e ora che non ci sei è il vuoto ad ogni gradino.
Anche così è stato breve il nostro viaggio.
Il mio dura tuttora, né più mi occorrono
le coincidenze, le prenotazioni,
le trappole, gli scorni di chi crede
che la realtà sia quella che si vede.
Ho sceso milioni di scale dandoti il braccio
non già perché con quattr’occhi forse si vede di più.
Con te le ho scese perché sapevo che di noi due
le sole vere pupille, sebbene tanto offuscate,
erano le tue.

Dette er en av Montales dufter uten oud. Den er en floriental – hovedsakelig på den grønne siden, som skal gi en forfriskende vårfølelse – som i en blomstrende frukthage, og notene skal til sammen gi en opplevelse av liljekonvall.

Jeg tester denne i dag, etter å ha hatt prøven liggende i ammoboksen i et par måneder.

Noter iflg Lukcyscent:
Violet leaves, Italian bergamot, Mandarin tree leaves, Lime, Indonesian vetiver, Mysore Sandalwood.

På meg starter den sterkt sitrus-/blomsteraktig og helt klart earl grey, –helt etter oppskriften. Så kjenner jeg helt tydelig den lett bitre, men søte limeskallsyrligheten (ja, –søt,syrlig,bitter), veldig behagelig, før det hele samler seg i en litt pregløs, men absolutt ikke frastøtende, earl grey med melonaktig twist. Litt som e-godt, faktisk, eller Villa Farris.  Jeg kjenner ingen liljekonvall, og det virker som den kommer til å bli liggende der på godterinivå ganske lenge, uten å merkbart bevege seg i retning av vetiver eller sandeltre – i alle fall ikke den første timen.

Det blir nok med prøven for meg her. Søt og behagelig, og kjedelig er min dom.

“Oh, raga, dobbiamo buttare giù un dialogo per il prossimo episodio del podcast”.

“Già, ma di che parliamo?”.

“ Il prof. ha detto di trattare il rapporto tra poesia e canzone…”.

“Ti sembrasse facile!”.

“Datemi retta: partiamo dal fatto che le poesie siamo noi a leggerle e ad interpretarle, mentre la canzone è un tutt’uno col cantante”.

“Ti metti pure a parlar difficile?!”.

“Che testa dura che hai! Intendo dire che se prendi una canzone di Vasco, ad esempio, e la fai cantare ad un altro, cambierà totalmente”.

“Ora è tutto chiaro! Un qualsiasi brano del mitico Vasco, interpretato da Peppino di Capri, tanto per citarne uno a caso, verrebbe stravolto!”.

“Direi proprio di sì. Che poi, se ci pensi bene, il cantautore se la scrive la canzone, come un sarto si cuce addosso il vestito, insomma, la fa a sua misura perché la sente fortemente, la vive. Dietro uno scritto c’è sempre un gran lavoro di correzione, prove, ripensamenti. Jovanotti ha infatti affermato di avere impiegato due anni per scrivere le canzoni del suo ultimo album Safari: un anno di studio e uno di preparazione”.

“Cavoli! Non lo avrei mai detto. Io credevo che una canzone nascesse di getto, come una poesia. Ho sempre pensato che il poeta, colto da un’ispirazione divina, scrivesse i suoi versi di colpo. Invece il prof. ci ha fatto vedere una poesia di Leopardi piena zeppa di cancellature e correzioni”.

“Sembrava la brutta copia di un mio tema!”

“Pensa che Petrarca continuò per la bellezza di 40 anni ad aggiustare e modificare le poesie del suo Canzoniere!”.

“Di questo passo io impiegherò invece 40 anni prima d’imparare a scrivere senza errori ortografici!”.

“Ehehe, che scemo che sei! Comunque, tornando a noi. Ti sei mai chiesto cos’è quest’ispirazione?”.

“Certo, tutte le volte che ti guardo sento il cuore palpitare”.

“E smettila. Piuttosto, io ritengo che l’ispirazione vada aiutata a nascere, insomma, ciascuno di noi dovrebbe trovare il modo che gli è più consono per stimolarla”.

“Sono perfettamente d’accordo. Avvicinati e lasciamoci trasportare dall’ispirazione”.

“Ti becchi un ceffone se non la pianti. Prendi quei cd. Voglio ascoltare le intervista fatte a Jovanotti per capire com’è che riesce a dare vita ad una canzone. Tu intanto fai una ricerca sui poeti per trovare qualcosa di simile, ok?”.

“Ai suoi ordini!”.

“Hai capito?! Jovanotti, quando inventa una canzone, si mette di fronte ad un foglio bianco e butta giù le sue idee senza l’accompagnamento della chitarra, altrimenti parte da un titolo per poi creare il testo”.

“Hai fatto una grande scoperta. Io invece non sono riuscito a trovare nulla sui poeti”.

“Non importa, ti aiuto io. Prima però voglio approfondire un altro aspetto della questione. Il fatto che Jovanotti non segue la consecutio temporum nei testi delle sue canzoni, e fa uso di termini in dialetto toscano”.

“Proprio come il prof.!”.

“Già. Ma senti anche quest’altra cosa, perché è molto interessante. Nella canzone Ragazzo fortunato Jovanotti scrive: ‘non c’è niente che ho bisogno’, anziché non c’è niente di cui ho bisogno”.

“Magari ha scritto così perché gli piaceva di più. Come quando cantava ‘a me mi’…”.

“Può essere…”.

“Oppure siamo in presenza di licenze poetiche. Gli stessi poeti spesso utilizzano espressioni particolari”.

“Ehi, mi stai sorprendendo! Non  continuare così perché rischi di far nevicare. Scherzo, hai fatto una bella considerazione, bravo”.

“Grazie! Allora questo significa che mi merito un bacino”.

“Finiscila. Mettiamoci al lavoro, che di spunti da sviluppare ce ne sono a sufficienza. E poi devi ancora trovare le notizie sulla musa ispiratrice dei poeti, e tanto che ci sei cerca anche qualche esempio di licenza poetica, d’accordo?!”.

“Aveva ragione mio nonno: il mondo è delle donne!”.

Jeg leser en fin bok om dagen; Huset ved moskeen, av Kader Abdolah. En velskrevet beretning om livet og menneskene i et hus tilknyttet landsbyens moske. Levende, nydelige beskrivelser av folk og tepper og mat og frukt og sukkertøy og trær og fugler og politiske spørsmål i en “hverdagslig” kontekst, samtidig som man føler tyngden av framtida – det vi vet nå. Dette foregår i tida før sjahen flyktet og Khomeini tok makta.

Men altså, –det er en beskrivelse der, av en ung imam som kommer til huset for å be om hånden til datteren til stedets aldrende imam. Det beskrives at han har svart turban som står litt på snei, virker veldig selvsikker, og dufter av roser.

Hele stemningen i boka, og så denne roseduften som ung-imamen har parfymert seg med – får meg til å kjenne helt tydelig at jeg må finne fram Montale-duftprøvene.

Aoud og roser!

Aoud, eller oud, har denne underlige kvaliteten ved seg, at den både er ram og frastøtende, og dyp, varm, sensuell, spennende. På en gang. Blandet med rose blir det noe helt eksotisk og forlokkende noe. Jeg tror helt ærlig at jeg aldri har vært så lenket med nesa til håndleddet noen gang, som da jeg testet Montale-prøvene mine. Nå, som jeg leser denne boka, må de fram igjen.

Rosebildet har jeg lånt herfra.

Nichilismo borghese e nichilismo dionisiaco.

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewPicture&friendID=382479902&albumId=1136969

.

Antiguo, estoy embriagado por la voz
que brota de tus bocas cuando se abren
como verdes campanas y se repelen
hacia atrás, disolviéndose.
La casa de mis veranos juveniles
-lo sabes- estaba a tu lado
allá en la tierra donde el sol calcina
y oscurecen el aire los mosquitos.
Hoy como entonces ante ti permanezco
inmóvil, mar, mas no me creo
digno ya de la solemne admonición
de tu aliento. Me dijiste primero
que el pequeño fermento
de mi corazón no era sino un instante
del tuyo, que en el fondo de mí
estaba tu arriesgada ley: ser enorme y diverso
y fijo al mismo tiempo,
para librarme así de toda suciedad,
como tú cuando arrojas a tus playas
entre estrellas de mar, corchos y algas
las inútiles sobras de tu abismo.

.

Eugenio Montale
Mediterráneo
.

Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio

Ho sceso, dandoti il braccio, almeno un milione di scale

e ora che non ci sei è il vuoto ad ogni gradino.

Anche così è stato breve il nostro lungo viaggio.

Il mio dura tuttora, né più mi occorrono

le coincidenze, le prenotazioni,

le trappole, gli scorni di chi crede

che la realtà sia quella che si vede

Ho sceso milioni di scale dandoti il braccio

non già perché con quattr’occhi forse si vede di più.

Con te le ho scese perché sapevo che di noi due

le sole vere pupille, sebbene tanto offuscate,

erano le tue.

Questa bellissima poesia di Eugenio Montale racchiude diversi spunti di riflessione, nonchè tematiche molto interessanti. Vi consiglio a rileggerla più volte per comprenderla meglio. Infine, vi invito a leggere l’approfondimento alla poesia sul nostro sito, su questa pagina:

Poesia di Montale

Troverete spiegazioni e approfondimento sui versi.

.

Traeme el girasol para que lo transplante
a mi terreno ardido por la sal;
que muestre todo el día al azul espejado
del cielo la ansiedad de su rostro amarillo.

Tiende a la claridad todo lo oscuro
los cuerpos se resuelven en un fluir
de tinta, y ésta, en música. Esfumarse
es, entonces, la mayor de las dichas.

Alcanzame la planta que conduce
adonde crecen transparencias rubias
y como las esencias se evapora la vida:
traeme el girasol loco de luz.

,

Eugenio Montale

Tráeme el girasol para que lo transplante

.
.

.

Si el mundo tiene la estructura del lenguaje

y el lenguaje tiene la forma de la mente

la mente con sus llenos y sus vacíos

es nada o casi y no nos tranquiliza.

Así habló Papirio. Estaba ya oscuro

y llovía. Pongámonos al seguro

dijo y apuró el paso sin darse cuenta

que el suyo era el lenguaje del delirio.

.

Eugenio Montale. La forma del mundo

.

I

UNOs appear in Wu Ming I’s identification of the New Italian Epic. A UNO is part of the ‘aberrant development’ of the latter, which:

‘…at times abandons the orbit of the novel and enters the atmosphere from unpredictable directions. ‘What’s that? Is it a bird? No, it’s a plane. No, wait a moment. It’s Superman!’ Absolutely not. It’s an Unidentified Narrative Object.

‘Fiction and non fiction, prose and poetry, diary and investigation, literature and science, mythology and comedy. In the last 15 years many Italian authors have written books which cannot be labelled or pigeon holed in any way because they contain almost everything […] It’s not just a matter of ‘intra-literary’ hybridisation, within the genres of which literature is made up but rather the utilization of whatever will serve its purpose.’
(Wu Ming I: New Italian Epic 2.0, 2008)

The inside flap of the 1965 edition of Calvino’s Racconti: hints at something similar. On the one hand, La nuvola di smog is ‘a short story tempted continually to turn into something different: either a sociological essay or else a private diary’. On the other, these temptations are regularly subverted by Calvino; this allows the text ‘to remain suspended within the environment that suits him best, between symbolic transfiguration, topicality drawn from what is true, bursts of humour and prose poetry.’

So this then is a precursor.

*

Another way to look not only at La nuvola but also at La formica argentina (its predecessor and not quite identical twin) is through the lens of anthropocentrism and at what the alternative to that might be.

‘Our society lives after the end of nature,’ according to Anthony Giddens. Along with Fukuyama he seems excited by the ending of some war. Between Man and Nature in this case. Apparently Man has won.

The ending of Kaputt involves a struggle against flies:

‘Oh here in Naples too we’ve struggled against the flies. Actually we’ve conducted an absolute war against the flies. For three years we have had a war against the flies.

‘In which case how come there are quite so many flies here in Naples?

‘Well that’s the thing. The flies won.’

(Curzio Malaparte: Kaputt)

Like Malaparte’s flies, Calvino’s ants and his smog ought to be in the background, mere phenomena, offering a quasi natural setting of some kind. But their activities, albeit compromised or potentiated by man, are what motivates the texts.

Wu Ming I comments as follows:

‘[A]nthropocentrism is alive and well, and it fights against us. Scientific discoveries, objective proofs, the crisis of the subject, the collapse of old ideologies… Nothing seems to have removed from humankind the absurd idea that we are at the centre of the universe.

[…]

‘Which is why the issue of looking at things obliquely is so vital and why (as Calvino had sensed) the literary ‘surrendering’ of viewpoints that are exterior to the human, that are non human, which can’t be identified with, will become even more so.’
(Wu Ming I: New Italian Epic 2.0, 2008)

*

Of course it’s true that Calvino’s protagonists are by no means always human. In, for example, Marcovaldo (II giardino dei gatti ostinati) or Cosmicomiche (notably Qfwfq). But this isn’t really the point. More relevant is his obliqueness. Hence this observation on the voice of the narrator in II visconte dimezzato:

‘[It’s] not the voice of a protagonist per se but rather that of a lateral or secondary character who has the role of narrator.’
(Gregory L. Lucente: An Interview with Italo Calvino; his translation, my italics)

Rather than a battle, some elemental struggle for supremacy or in the service of one viewpoint that’s supposedly more powerful than the others, there’s a rendering up to openness, a ‘surrender’.

And if that ‘surrender’ is important, which I think it is, then one clear example of it (albeit not from Calvino) would be the beginning of Genna’s Grande madre rossa, where the viewpoint (or perhaps the ‘gaze’) has become detached from whoever (or whatever) does the viewing.

*

One might, for example, creatively (mis)interpret the following:

‘Point of view and movement exclude one another.’
(Giuseppe Genna: Grande madre rossa, 2004)

The totalising stasis of historical achievement, of ‘truth’, of ideological hegemony (which all points of view have in common, even if only in embryo), of ending, is here set at odds with the endless dialectical process of which history is made up, as in Agamben’s view of time. (Benjamin hints at something similar in The Arcades Project when he draws an analogy between allegorical procedures and the relationship between commodity and price: ‘The allegorist rummages here and there for a particular piece, holds it next to some other piece and tests if they fit together … The result can never be known beforehand, for there is no natural mediation between the two. This is just how matters stand with commodity and price. How the price of goods in each case is arrived at can never quite be foreseen.’)

In fact, this is the second of two quotations which preface Genna’s book, from Ulrike Meinhof’s final letter to her Hamburg comrades dated 13 April 1976. The German uses ‘Standpunkt’, ‘point of view’. However, up until this moment Meinhof had actually been using the more explicitly political compound, ‘Klassenstandpunkt’, ‘class position’.

Meinhof insists that ‘this class position, with which you puff yourselves up [is] unbearable.’ (By 9 May she was dead.) The ‘class situation’ she perceives is within the ‘imperialist system, with its invasion of all relationships by the market and, as a given, the process of State control of society by the ideological and repressive State,’ outside of which ‘there is only illegality and liberated territory.’ (my italics)

The novel itself starts as follows:

‘The gaze is from 10,200 metres over Milan, inside the sky. It’s freezing blue and rarefied up here.

‘The gaze is towards on high, it sees the hemisphere of ozone and cobalt, going outwards from the planet. The luminous barrier of the atmosphere prevents the stars from passing through. The heavenly body absolute, ie the sun, is on the right, extremely white. The gaze swings free and circular in the pure blue void.’
(Giuseppe Genna: Grande madre rossa, 2004)

And one could go a lot further back. To this arresting paragraph from Deledda, for example:

‘A nightingale sang on the solitary tree, which was still suffused with mist. All the coolness of the evening, all the harmony of far away serenities, and the smile of the stars towards the flowers and of the flowers towards the stars, and the proud joy of the fine young shepherds and the closed in passion of the women with their red bodices, and all the melancholy of the poor who live waiting for what’s left over from the tables of the rich, and the sorrows far away and the hopes that are there, and the past, the lost fatherland, the love, the crime, the remorse, the prayer, the canticle of the pilgrim who goes further and still further and doesn’t know where he’ll spend the night but feels himself guided by God, and the green solitude of the smallholding down below, the voice of the river and of the alders down there, the smell of the euphorbias, the laughter and the weeping of Grixenda, the laughter and the weeping of Noemi, the laughter and the weeping of Efix, the laughter and the weeping of the entire world, trembled and vibrated in the notes of the nightingale above the solitary tree that seemed higher than the mountains, with its top scraping the heavens and the tip of its topmost leaf thrust inside a star.’
(Grazia Deledda: Canne al vento, 1913)

What happens here, albeit fleetingly, is exactly that sort of transfer of utterance to some ‘secondary’ voice to which Calvino later referred. The nightingale’s ‘sang’ is a sort of aorist. Not the imperfect of background information (‘cantava’) but the passato remoto (‘cantò’) of a discrete, protagonistic act. The nightingale isn’t subalternised into a soundscape for individualised human behaviours. Nor yet is she an echo. This isn’t pathetic fallacy. Rather the fact of her nightingalehood is extended and exceeded into something else. She becomes the owner of a positive act of her own, which (even though it has no purpose beyond itself) subsumes all human activity, present, past and future; all three are represented. And yet she too is exceeded. Whereas she sits on top of the tree (‘sull’albero’) her song rises above it (‘sopra l’albero’) like the tip of the topmost leaf as it pierces the heart of some star: her viewpoint has been surrendered to something-not-of-this-world.

So clearly there are precursors and successors.

*

Of course, the smog of Calvino’s La nuvola di smog (1958) is also a physical smog, a matter of grey particulates. The Argentine ants of La formica argentina (Linepithema Humile) do exist, and in Ligurian gardens. However, Calvino employs what he elsewhere called ‘the essayistic dimension’ to address irrationality with rationalistic precision. And it is this UNO disjuncture, this anomalousness, which enables Ovid and Lucretius (or maybe Cerveteri and Bensi, respectively the ‘poet’ and the ‘philosopher’ of La speculazione edilizia) to join together in his work.

Here, for example, is Gore Vidal on La formica:

‘[It is] as minatory and strange as anything by Kafka. It is also hideously funny. In some forty pages Calvino gives us […] the human condition today. Or the dilemma of modern man. Or the disrupted environment. Or nature’s revenge. Or allegory of grace. Whatever…’
(Gore Vidal: Calvino’s Novels, NYRB 1974)

Now clearly there’s a link between, on the one hand, what Vidal calls ‘nature’s revenge’ and, on the other, what Wu Ming I says about displacing anthropocentrism. Yet equally clearly something else is going on: the anomalousness that Vidal conjures up with ‘whatever’ emerges from two directions. On the one hand the ants provide an unexpected challenge to the psyche from outside: perhaps they are going to win. On the other they are an extrusion of the psyche (some sort of over-reaction coming from within; some interior disposition) into that outer world:

‘We didn’t know then about the ants when we came to settle here. […] Thinking it over, perhaps Uncle Augusto had mentioned them once – You should see the ants down there, not like the ants we have here – but it was a sidetrack from talking about something else…’
(Calvino: La formica argentina)

*

Calvino’s ants are hardly Deledda’s nightingale and cannot be read as such. But they are perhaps the McGuffin. They allow him to ‘surrender’ control over the narrative just as the narrator in turn ‘surrenders’ to their effects. As a result the text becomes an early ‘game of combinations, following through the possibilities implicit in the material from which it has been made.’ (Una pietra sopra) Which means in turn that whether or not these ants are (for example) either the anxiety from which one hoped to get away or the challenge which one really hoped one didn’t have to face in the first place it scarcely matters any more. They could have been avoided, excluded or suppressed either way. Were it not for the exterminator, Signor Baudino (who has come to resemble an ant, and who acts a sort of untore, the paranoid interpretation, spreading the pestilence in order to benefit from it, or maybe as a sort of stand-in for Calvino, the postmodernist interpretation) it is possible that there might not even have been such a problem in the first place.

But the ants are there nonetheless. Not quite foregrounded but endlessly, self-replicatingly there: an existential emblem of subversion:

The great oak, the emperor’s pride and joy
is collapsing!
Who’d have thought it!
It wasn’t the river, nor yet did some hurricane rip
that magnificent trunk from its roots,
rather it was the ants, thousands of ants
organized, working together day by day
year after year!
(Dario Fo: La grande quercia)

Except that Calvino rejects all such programmatic engagement of that sort.

*

‘The artist manages to communicate only through the sort of isolation which a political or propagandistic type of engagement cannot affect.’
(This is Montale countering Gramsci in La solitudine dell’artista)

In his 1964 preface to Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, though clearly speaking with hindsight Calvino writes as follows. His point is a little different:

‘Today when one speaks of the ‘literature of commitment’ one generally gets it wrong, as though speaking of a literature that serves to illustrate a theme that’s already been defined, that’s independent of poetical expression. On the contrary, that which one called ‘engagement’, commitment, can be found at every level…’ (my italics)

There’s an example of one sort of level in La speculazione edilizia. The protagonist sits listening to a dispute between his two friends, Bensi and Cerveteri. He ‘really doesn’t know which side he ought to take’:

‘Bensi was seized by one of his nervous laughs … as though to express his own pained amusement at witnessing his interlocutor getting lost in a labyrinth from which he alone knew the way out.

‘We have to proceed from the ideology to the dream, not from the dream to the ideology …  Ideology runs through all your dreams rather as butterflies are pierced through by pins.

‘Cerveteri looked at him, dumbfounded.

‘Butterflies? Why did you say butterflies?’

(Calvino: La speculazione edilizia, 1957)

Finally here is Calvino, this time in propria persona, speaking about a moment in Palomar:

‘In that brief story of mine I don’t take sides but instead I limit myself to representing both positions.’
(Gregory L. Lucente: An Interview with Italo Calvino)

II

La formica and La nuvola instantiate ways of speaking. They turn on the sort of social constructivism in which meaning lies (in both senses) in the telling rather than in what the telling is about. The differences, though, are profound.

The narrator of La formica, has moved out from the town into the country. The narrator of La nuvola has travelled the other way. He arrives in the town (‘for someone who has just got off the train, the city is one big station’) as though entering into a holding formation. He takes ‘some sort of a room’:

‘I took my overcoat, my scarf and my great illusion
I left home
to go to where to where to where to where to where…
the cold ends,
to the start of another ghetto.’
(Antonello Venditti: Dove)

Here’s how the piece begins:

‘It was a time when nothing much mattered to me, when I came to settle in this town. Settle’s not quite the right word. I didn’t have any desire to settle down, what I wanted was that everything should stay fluid and provisional around me and only in that way did it seem I’d be settled inside, even though I wouldn’t have been able to explain what that meant.’
(Calvino: La nuvola di smog)

*

The narrative of La formica tells of a broken idyll: the idealised state is not to suffer from ants. The world was clean to begin with but is now revealed as infested, so the watchword must be ‘response’. Only one question remains: How should one react? With ill suppressed hysteria, like the wife of the narrator? By soldiering on, like Mr and Mrs Reginaudo, keeping cheerful along the lines of the peasant in Ho visto un re? With endless, ineffectual ingenuity, like Captain Brauni, a sort of Italian Heath Robinson? By grandly ignoring the problem, as does Madam Mauro (just as the Pintor sisters ignore their own decline in Canne al vento)? And so on.

This is, of course, the ‘allegory’, to pick up a term from Vidal: how to make a moral choice? Responses vary. Attitudes may be brought in a priori or may arise through experience. Whether the ants are something natural or have been humanly induced remains uncertain. However, the principle of ‘commitment’ to one’s own reactions or to some chosen point of view is never in any doubt.

Until, that is, the narrative of La nuvola turns all this around. The pivot is political. Calvino had published La formica back in 1952. La nuvola was written in the summer of ’58. In July ’57 Calvino had published La gran bonaccia delle antille, satirising the Stalinist stagnation of the Italian Communist Party under Togliatti and provoking a response (Stalin as Captain Ahab and so forth) from Maurizio Ferrara, Giuliano Ferrara’s father. He had resigned from the Party one month later.

*

A figurative smog is what its narrator wants, at least at first. It’s something not quite settled:

‘…it had to be entirely provisional and I wanted this to be clear to myself as well.’

The ants embody a constant, undefeatable energy, the restlessness of invasion. The smog is undefined. It’s a depression, lethargy. It subsists as a transience which perpetuates itself through always leaving traces, an elective but threatened pessimism to be set against both the failing optimism of La formica and, for example, the energetic intrusions of the narrator’s girlfriend, Claudia:

‘How could she ever have understood this unhappiness of mine? There are those who condemn themselves to the greyness of a life of increased mediocrity because they have had a grief, a misfortune; but there are also those who do it because they’ve experienced more good fortune than what they felt they could cope with.’

Unlike the world of La formica, whose supposedly ‘natural’ state is shown to have been corrupt through the original sin of having ants, La nuvola’s world is an already dirty, human infested place, one where ‘commitment’ (as it turns out) is also under threat, the commitment of performing a narrative that’s expected, which in this case is a narrative against pollution for a journal called Purification that’s owned by the same person (Cordà the engineer) who produces the pollution in the first place:

‘…it was he who wafted it without cessation over the town and APAUIC, the Agency for the Purification of the Atmosphere in Urban Industrial Centres, was a creation of the smog, born from a need to give to those who worked for the smog the hope of a life that would not be wholly smog but at the same time to celebrate its power.’

So obviously one could normalise this as an ‘allegory’ about following party lines, or indeed about the imprisonment of any ideology or orthodoxy whatsoever, about anything in which experience is greyed and reduced by being included in some sort of formulation.

But isn’t it in the nature of allegory that it resists such consistent readings?

Here is Benjamin, making precisely this point:

‘Where man is drawn towards the symbol, allegory emerges from the depths of being to intercept the intention, and to triumph over it […] If it is to hold its own against the tendency to absorption, the allegorical must constantly unfold in new and surprising ways. The symbol, on the other hand, … remains persistently the same’
(Walter Benjamin: The Origin of German Tragic Drama)

*

In the symbolism of one-to-one correspondence, according to De Michele in Carmilla, ‘the symbol is already inscribed in an interpretative dimension made rigid through the pretence of objectivity.’ (my italics) Likewise metaphor ‘risks operating as a translation of sense within some pre-determined cognitive environment.’ (again the italics are mine, as is the touch of Sperber.) Whereas ‘the allegorical is autonomous with respect to the overall context of antinomy, an autonomy which the symbolic is denied.’

And since de Michele pillages Benjamin who in turn pillages Creuzer, here is Creuzer himself, explaining what he calls the ‘difference between symbolic and allegorical representation’:

‘The latter signifies merely a general concept, or an idea which differs from itself, whereas the former is the very incarnation and embodiment of the idea. In the former a process of substitution happens … In the latter the concept itself has descended into our physical world and we see it directly in the image.’
(G F Creuzer: Symbolik und Mythologie der alten Völker, besonders der Griechen)

Which accounts for, say, allegorical objects such as the ice which tinkles in the glasses of the first class passengers travelling on de Gregori’s Titanic. Or for the complex relationship either between de Gregori’s mythical Titanic both with the (earlier) wreck of the Sirio and the fate of postwar Italy. Or the similarly complex relationship between the ‘wounded steinbock’, the historical Milanese fraudster Felice Riva and the issue of (failed) political violence in early ’70s Italy which Antonello Venditti explores in Lo stambecco ferito.

*

Allegory, ideology and memory are aspects of one another. Ideology is a sort of allegory reconfigured as memory. Thus the UK’s New Labour, freed from ideology, lost both its memory and its ability to envisage the future in the course of its coming to power: not just Agamben’s ‘means without ends’ but government by Alzheimer’s, reaching for absurd metaphorical fragments from elsewhere (Big Tent, New Deal etc) with which to remedy the lack.

For Calvino ideology presents a different problem. Here’s how he introduces it in La speculazione edilizia. First he describes the gloriously heterogeneous anomaly of a section of land owned by the protagonist’s mother. On it there’s a former chicken coop now doing service as a potting shed. It is said to have (Calvino’s parents were botanists and Calvino himself studied agriculture, albeit briefly) ‘a disharmonious aspect, between the agricultural, the scientific and the highly valued.’ It is, in short, a heterocosm. Some pages further on the protagonist’s two friends, Bensi and Cerveteri, decide to start a journal, although its title is still in doubt. According to Bensi:

‘…we have to let it be understood right from the very title that what we’re aiming for is a generalised phenomenology that brings back each separate form of knowledge into a single discourse.

‘It was on this point that the argument between Bensi and Cervetero started up … Since everything was to become part of a single discourse was the journal to bring in only what had already been incorporated into that general discourse or rather that which still lay outside?’

*

The key to La formica is the discovery of Inside. What happens when you find yourself on the inside of something else (or within an ideology) is that you lose a degree of autonomy: you live within a situation that persists beyond your control. The narrator visits the noble Madam Mauro in her house on the upper slopes. Is she troubled by ants? Is she external or internal to the situation, in other words? ‘We chase them away with a broom,’ is her response. But unfortunately:

‘at that very moment her expression of studied impassivity was traversed by something like a physical distress, and we saw that whilst remaining seated she shifted her weight quite firmly to one side, bending herself at the waist. If it hadn’t been inconsistent with the assurances that were issuing from her mouth I would have sworn that an Argentine ant, having got under her clothes, had nipped at her…’

The narrator and his wife go to the sea, which ought to be a figure of Outside, but find instead a sort of reprise of the ants. Whilst it appears as another idyll beneath the idyllic ‘calm’ of the surface there is an endless, minute activity:

‘The waters were calm, with just a continuous swapping about of colours, blue and black, getting denser as they got further away. I thought of the water stretching out in the distance like that, of the infinite, tiny grains of sand down at the bottom, where the current deposits the white husks of shells that have been polished by the waves.’

*

The key to La nuvola is the converse: the discovery of Outside. The narrator’s view of his landlady is a negative one. But though her kitchen is in chaos she maintains her public rooms like a ‘private work of art’, created through, as it were, subtraction or withdrawal of some ‘liberated territory’, producing an outside within. The cheery decisiveness of the narrator’s girlfriend, Claudia, is an intrusion into melancholia from outside. And so on.

The narrator brings Claudia to a lookout point in order to show her the view. But his own viewpoint is broken and ‘surrendered’ through what happens then. He shows her the whitish peaks of the Alps which emerge ‘from the sky’ but loses control of the narrative in a sort of Calvino sublime. He has the names but cannot name them because he doesn’t know which is which. ‘A sense of vastness had seized me. I don’t know if it was Claudia’s hat and her dress that did this or whether it was the view’:

‘We were there, looking out over the low wall. I was squeezing her waist. I was looking at countryside in all its multiple aspects, struck immediately by a need for analysis, already dissatisfied with myself because I didn’t have at my disposal an adequate nomenclature for places and for natural phenomena. She, on the other hand, was ready to transform these sensations into unexpected humorous impulses, effusions, into things she said that had nothing to do with it. And it was then that I saw that thing.’

*

‘That thing’ is actually the smog, at least as seen from outside. Whereas the ants’ greatest reality comes with the discomfort, actual or imagined, of Madam Mauro (La formica bids for totality, either the totality of solution or the unstoppable taking over of the ants) La nuvola works by limitation. Such as, in this instance, through conceiving the smog as a cloud. The narrator describes it as such, and this is the point of its greatest un-reality. But what Claudia either sees or chooses to see instead is a flock of birds.

‘And I remained there, looking out and watching for the first time from the outside the cloud that surrounded me all the time, that cloud I lived in, that lived in me and I knew that of all the variousness of the world with which I was surrounded this was the only thing that mattered to me.’

In the restaurant just below where he lives the narrator shares a table with a worker. They read separate papers. The narrator, in David Riesman’s terms, is other directed: ‘mine was the one that everybody read, the most important paper in town; I certainly had no reason to get myself noticed as someone set apart from other people by reading a different paper.’ Whereas his paper is stylish but conformist, the worker’s paper is ‘grey, incredibly dense, monotonous’ but at the same time also critical:

‘[His] was so to speak the converse of mine, not just because the ideas it put forward were the opposite but because it concerned itself with things that for my one didn’t even exist: employees given the sack, machine workers who ended up with a hand trapped in the gears…’
(my italics; Dolce’s Inchiesta a Palermo was published in 1956)

The narrator’s conception of the worker is a negative one. He projects his own lack of openness onto his interlocutor:

‘I tried to give [my impression of his paper] to my tablemate … endeavouring at the same time (since he seemed to me to be the sort who didn’t care for criticism …) to play down my judgement’s more negative aspects.’

However, he is wrong in his assessment of the other’s supposed loyalty. Indeed he perceives his being wrong as the other’s resistance to his own judgemental hegemony, whereas:

‘[i]nstead [the worker] seemed to follow his own train of thought, in which my appraisal of his paper must have seemed superfluous, out of place.

‘You know, he said, there hasn’t yet been a paper that’s been put together as it should have been put together. Not as I would like to see it done.’

The worker has formed a study group ‘amongst the young people in our business’. (Montaldi founded the Gruppo di Unità Proletaria in 1957):

‘I didn’t follow what he was saying any more. I thought that someone like [him] wasn’t at all trying to escape from the smoky greyness around us but to transform it into a moral value, into an internal norm.

‘The smog, I said.

‘The smog? Yes, I know that Cordà wants to play the modern industrialist … To purify the atmosphere … Let him go and tell his workers that. Certainly it won’t be him that does the purifying. It’s a matter of social structure … If we do manage to change it, we’ll also solve the smog problem. Us, that is. Not them.

*

The sea at the end of La formica is another attempt at the natural, freed of pollution or entailments.

Towards the end La nuvola the narrator spots a side road. There’s a mule loaded up with laundry. He comes to see the process of laundry exchange (soiled for clean) as something festive, as a different and restorative human event:

‘Between the meadows, the hedges and the poplars my gaze continued to trace the water troughs, the words Steam Laundry written on certain low buildings … the fields where the women passed by with baskets as though they were harvesting grapes to take down the dry clothes from the line … It wasn’t much. But for me, who sought no more than images to keep in view, perhaps it was enough.’

Which is how the story ends.

Denne hadde jeg tenkt jeg bare skulle prøve uten å notere noe i dag, og så komme tilbake til den om noen dager og ta den opp igjen. Det går ikke. Jeg må fortelle nå, for jeg ble så overrasket.

Noter:
Bergamott, Egyptisk geranium (pelargonium graveolens), artemisia, Oud, teak, patchouli fra Sumatra, tobakk, amber.

Jeg stålsetter meg i forhold til forventningen, som skapes av navnet (jeg sjekket ikke notene før jeg tok den på),  om rå, skarp og brutal oud. Førstesniff er derimot – manneduft. Altså, mannecologne, noe mose og furunålsaktig, kamferaktig friskt og veldig tiltalende noe. Javel?

Akkurat, ja. Bergamott. Og geranium, som står for rosebiten her, selv om jeg ikke helt føler at jeg kjenner roseduft sånn til å begynne med. Og artemisia. Joda, jeg kjenner igjen artemisia fra hagen, selv om jeg har klart å beskjære livet av to flotte eksemplarer av arten.  Det er imidlertid et syn og en duft jeg liker svært godt, så den må innføres i hagen igjen.  Nuvel.

Også i denne duften ligger den skarpe noten som jeg forbinder med iris og noen patchouli’er, under der og “truer”, men i første omgang får den ikke brutt gjennom.

Den første halvtimen er denne simpelthen bare svalsøtbitterfrisk og deilig. Den holder seg tett til huden; selv om jeg vifter ganske livlig med håndleddet en halvmeter fra nesa, når duften ikke fram. Jeg må inntil, men da blir inntrykket til gjengjeld sittende i hodet en stund.

Mmmm! nydelig      Jeg har nettopp lest “Snømannen” av Jo Nesbø, hvor det er en karakter, Karianne Bratt (?), som dufter så godt av noe han beskriver som nesten maskulint, ikke søtt. Det kunne vært denne.  Jeg lurte så fælt på hvilken duft hun brukte at det forstyrret hele plottet for meg en stund.

Den stikker litt, men på en måte er det bare spennende med denne. Kan det ha noe med den artemisiabitterheten som er så særegen, og det at denne duften er veldig maskulin, å gjøre, tro?

Så forsvinner stikket nesten helt, og tydelig trenote/amber trer fram, samtidig som det meste av det furukamferfriske forsvinner. Vaniljeaktig, aromatisk, med et lett, svalt roseslør.  Kan en duft være varm og sval samtidig?  Tydeligvis.

Etter tre timer: Aromatisk. En anelse mer treaktig enn forrige notering – og en anelse tobakk, men furuskogen kommer og går. Min kjære snuste på håndleddet mitt for en liten halvtime siden, og reaksjonen var “Øhhhh-skog?Furu?”  Noe sier meg at denne kommer til å være merkbar i morra tidlig også.

Denne liker jeg virkelig.  Jeg har litt “min”-følelse.

Hos Sakecats duftprosjekt ser jeg at det testes i ulike temperaturer (riktignok på Aoud Damaskus, men dog). Det skal jeg jammen gjøre også. H*n skriver at den medisinske noten av oud ikke merkes i det hele tatt nesten når det er kaldere, og derfor har jeg bestemt meg for å teste alle Montalene jeg har til vinteren. Det blir spennende 

Sterk, metallisk rose. Nesten ubehagelig, men bare nesten.

Etter 10 min myk, deilig rose. Jeg kjenner igjen oud-følelsen fra de andre, og patchouli også, men de er mykere og lettere å forholde seg til her enn i de andre.

Noter: Fiolblader, tyrkisk rose, olibanum(frankinsence), oud, musk,   sandeltre, patchouli

Musk og sandeltre mykner opp det intense metalliske i rosen og den barske oud’en. Fiolbladene står for den grønne, florale noten, som nesten bikker over i iris-skarphet her – det er mulig at oud+fiolblader utgjør denne virkningen.

Etter en halv time synes imidlertid rose, musk, olibanum, og sandeltre å “vinne”, mens viol, oud og patchouli ligger under og utgjør dybde uten å slå helt gjennom.

Neste fase: rose og røyk. Nesten bålrøyk. Røykelse.  Legger seg til ro, og kommer tilbake med fornyet styrke. Mmmmmm!!!!!

Sanselig. Dyp.  Mystisk. Tørr. Myk. Ren. Mørk. Sexy. Denne liker jeg.  Jeg ser at de skikkelig garvede (eller i alle fall en av dem) usteder slaktkarakter på Basenotes, men jeg for min del er nå i alle fall fornøyd  :-).

Tidligere Montale-omtaler finner du her.

Oppdatering 10 timer etter at jeg tok den på: uforandret de siste 4-5 timene; mindre rose og mer sandeltre/musk nå, dog. Tegner til å bli en natta-over-duft.