As a wish for this Christmas, the gift of an image from “Il canto dell’altalena” (published by Piédimosca and Al3viE), a precious book by Anna Maria Farabbi, who, as a poet, accompanies us on a journey “into origin of Western song, of Western poetry born in myth”. To enter the very depths…
How the image of the little girl who appears in the first pages enters the very depths.
Anna Maria Farabbi tells us about her meeting in the mountain town where she went as a young girl, Montelovesco, a stone’s throw from Gubbio, with a little girl, caught staring at the swing of an empty swing. She approached her asking if she wanted help, thinking that the little girl couldn’t get on, but…
“He signaled me to stay quiet. She pointed to her ears as if to understand that she was listening.”
(…)
“Elena explained to me that the little girl was crazy: she played that string all day. She listened to him. All of them had tried to listen to the sound, but none of them had been able to hear. Not even the hiss of the fiber rubbing against the bark. It wasn’t worth thinking about. That little girl was useless, she was lost. She was lost.
I’ve thought about it all these years. That little girl wasn’t lost. My companions were so poor that they declared it lost…”
“It’s easier to say she’s crazy, she’s out, let’s forget her, let’s delete her, rather than say out loud I’m not able to meet her.
“The little girl was concentrated, she supported a relational tension with the cord of the self in the two internalized figures, between those infinite harmonics of the oscillation arc: the push backwards, in an oblique flexion, not abandoned but held and the projection contracted by lever in the center of gravity of the belly, towards one’s future…
“I thought a lot about the bow acted by that string, about the precise face of the little girl immersed in a solitary and misunderstood acoustic reception, set in a mysterious relational fullness. With who? With what? She wasn’t crazy. She lived elsewhere, away from the nebulous (in the astronomical sense) community of others.
She was at the ringing swing, as I am at poetry. In the same dramatic tuning…”
Anna Maria Farabbi studied a lot, in centers such as the Community of Torre Certalda or the Sodalizio di San Martino, “among the sleeping and delirious guests”, and the little girl’s story is linked to these studies.
A story which, as an imprint, remains to lead us in the reading of the entire Canto dell’altalena, a very rich, complex and profound oscillation of the figure between play and myth.
We are giving it to you, the image of this little girl, as a Christmas thought. A wish that that gesture of hers, which invites us to leave space for listening, will be welcomed in us, to guide us in knowing the other in a communication that “does not ignore her language and her silence”