Pier Paolo Pasolini’s poetry is the unstable and magmatic ground on which ideology – according to Fernando Bandini – gives way to a “personal psychomachy”, that is, an autobiography with “exemplary value valid for interpreting history too”: it is therefore an accomplished organism, a tout se tient within which conceptual horizons and stylistic experiences merge in the name of poetic truth, other than any political, civil position.
Unclassifiable
It is desirable that the celebrations for the centenary of the birth of the author of Casarsa have the “Pasolini poet” as a fixed point, although the mere description of his work in verse obviously does not give full reason for the “agglutinated and compact unicum” that is hidden behind the different genres, all of them very well cultivated (essays, novels, theater, cinema). Pasolini’s lyric itself lives on these simultaneously concentric and centrifugal thrusts: from the symbolic-liberty Friulian of the best of youth (1954) to Dante’s essayism of Gramsci’s Ashes (1957) and the liturgical dialogue of the Nightingale of the Catholic Church (1958), up to to the impoetic turning point of Trasumanar eorganar (1971), one gets the impression of being in the presence of an unclassifiable dictate in the twentieth-century literary experience, which in any case maintains its freshness intact even in the most experimental and difficult features. As Bandini writes in the introduction to Meridiano All poems (2003), “Pasolini thinks of poetic writing as a privileged writing, a place of the absolute, where every assertion becomes truth and the private can present itself as a universal”.
A primitive and peasant Christianity
A quick examination of the syllogs in question strikes the religious-Christological inspiration – of a primitive and peasant Christianity – which runs more or less karstically the entire parable: the “Crist al mi clama / MA SENSA LUS” (“Christ calls me / BUT WITHOUT LIGHT »), stigma and story of a soul, of the Domènia uliva; the Hungarian Christ “serene poet, / wounded brother” of the Passion; the Old Testament “God who makes me meek, rigid” of Poetry in the form of a rose; and even the candid “Dear God, / make us live like the birds of the sky and the lilies of the fields” of Prayer on commission.
Pasolini seems, in short, agitated lato sensu by the Capronian “pathotheology”, a real obsession for the spiritual universe, brought back to the binary distinction of grace-sin, purity-impurity (think, in particular, of the lacerating contrast in the Litany, dedicated to Our Lady: «Speculum Justitiae / Mirror of the sky! / In you the clouds / the walls the trees / fall motionless.// Spio upside down … / What a fearful peace! / There is not a sigh / in the sky, a breath”). The ideal tension to virginity, even to formal chastity, and the flagrant impracticability of this condition are some of the most consistent elements of PPP’s poetics, possessed by the circocervo of a continuous and derisive démesure of the nominalistic, antitraditional, unconventional elements in the filigree of a language that is sometimes overexposed to the chaos of the referents (in this direction Franco Cordelli sees in Trasumanar and organize the glaring example of Pasolini’s “explicit”, a sort of verbal intemperance). Yet, in the severe engagement of “Malvolio” – a Scespirian character approached by Pasolini in a text by Eugenio Montale of the Diary of ’71 and ’72 – it is possible to recognize one of the most sincere emotional impulses of the Italian poetic tradition, as happens in the first lines , immortals, of the Excavator’s Cry: “Only loving, only knowing / counts, not having loved, / not having known”.