pavese
you can see Dr. Crank’s books here: The Invisible Militia / Testament / Utopía poética, Impotencia amorosa e imaginación temporal
A few years ago, while wandering in the streets of Torino, I suddenly stopped by the frontispiece of the Hotel Roma, not far from the train station, which attracted my attention for its somewhat atypical architectural style. Italy is by far the country that I have explored the most, and having spent so much time in manifold hotels throughout Italy, the style of the balconies of the hotel remained in my memory as I made my way back to the place where I was staying in downtown Torino. A fast Google search revealed that Cesare Pavese, one of my favourite Italian authors, had died precisely at the Hotel Roma.
2020 marks the seventieth anniversary of the suicide of Cesare Pavese, on August 27, 1950, in the room 346 of the Hotel Roma. On the desk of the room, Pavese left his final poetry collection, Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi (Death will Come and (She) will Have Your Eyes) published posthumously in 1951. Pavese’s last diary entry declared, as a fatidic statement, “Non scriverò più” (“I will write no more”). Then his body surrendered to an overdose of barbiturates.
Leafing through the pages of Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi, one can fathom both the melancholy and the sense of hope that the poetry collection transmits. In the most popular poem of the collection, “Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi,” Pavese draws an image that evokes the nature of being alive while also containing a finite number of time within ourselves:
“questa morte che ci accompagna
dal mattino alla sera, insonne,
sorda, come un vecchio rimorso
o un vizio assurdo”
(“this dead life that lives within us
from sunrise to dawn, sleepless,
deaf, like an old remorse
or an absurd vice.”)[1]
The poem suggests that, right at the time of waking up, the whisper of death is right next to us as an inherent element of our human condition. The fact that Pavese creates an image of death that is sleepless and deaf remarks that even though we continuously attempt to bargain for more time in this life, the nature of death implies that ¾no matter how we try to extend our finitude¾ the only certainty we posses is that of dying. It further alludes that, “per tutti la morte ha uno sguardo” (“Death has a glance for everyone”), which is to say that once the inevitable end approaches the essence of what we are will belong to eternity. After all, we are to spend more time dead than alive, or at least that is what until the early decades of the third millennia we still know.
However, Pavese was not always hopeless about his understanding of life as in Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi. In Dialoghi con Leucò, published in 1947 by Einaudi, Pavese departs from a romantic vision of the human reality to compile a series of dialogues among Greek mythological characters and natural elements. In the first dialogue, between Ixion ¾the son of Ares¾ and Nephele ¾a cloud nymph¾ there is a glimpse of what has been labelled in recent years as the Anthropocene, a geological time period in which humans have irreversibly altered Earth’s biological systems. Nephele tells Ixion with an admonitory tone, “There is a law, Ixion, which we all must obey,” to which Ixion replies, “That law does not reach this realm, Nephele. Here the law is snow, gale, and shadows.” Later, Nephele states prophetically:
“The fate of humans has changed. There are monsters. They have imposed a limit to you, humans. Water, wind, stone and clouds are no longer yours, you can’t use them anymore by procreating and doing what you call living. Now different hands dominate the world. There is a law, Ixion.”
The divine law of nature appears as the new force that organizes human destiny. Human activities, as the theories behind the Anthropocene suggest, have enacted such an impact that humans have to be set apart from Gods for the sake of life. There is a glimpse of the complex relationship among nature, Gods, and humans in the dialogue “The Blind,” in which Oedipus and Tiresias engage in conversation. To Oedipus’ question of why are Gods useful, Tiresias replies:
“The world is older than them. Space was already everywhere, bleeding, enjoying, he was the only God – when Time hadn’t been born yet. The things themselves ruled back then. Things used to happen – now, under the rule of Gods, everything has become words, illusions, fear. But Gods can easily annoy, make things get close or push them away. They can’t touch them or change them. They – the Gods – arrived too late.”
Space and Time, as Pavese eloquently establishes, were ruling over the world even before divinity had captured the human imagination. In the same dialogue, Tiresias declares to Oedipus that for someone blind everything represents a crashing point, thus suggesting that both the natural laws and the divine are realms beyond the human comprehension. Nevertheless, the crashing effects of human actions have a transcendental impact in the development of those laws. Here Pavese echoes one of the main premises behind the Anthropocene, for human activities, like industrialization and its environmental consequences, have reached such intensity that we are living in a new era in which is inevitable not to consider human actions as a direct threat to nature.
In the dialogue “The Mares,” Hermes asks the centaur Chiron to raise the child of Coronis, who had died incinerated like an ear of wheat. Chiron, known as the wisest and most just of all the centaurs, tells the child with a sorrowful mood, as if this child had been born amidst the contemporary convulsion of global warming:
“Child, it would’ve been better that you stay among the flames. You did not inherit one single attribute from your mother, except your sad human form. You are the son of a blinding and cruel light, and you must live in a world of dying and desperate shadows, a world of corrupt flesh, of fever and sighs ¾everything comes from the Radiant. The same light that made you will search under every stone of the world, and with implacable hate will show you that everywhere there’s sadness, calamity, and the vilification of all the things made in this world. Only the serpents will take care of you.”
It is not gratuitous that Hermes, messenger of the gods, brings this child ¾whose destiny is marked by sadness and calamity¾ into the human world, as if he was the symbol of the future generations that will inhabit the Earth. Depictions of the Anthropocene do not have to rely on future possible scenarios, the current effects of post-industrialization are more than visible all over the world. Images of poverty, environmental deterioration, aggressive emissions of toxins, intense drought, annihilation of animal species, overpopulation, and catastrophic natural phenomena compose altogether the symphony of the Anthropocene.[2] These images of collapse are present through mythological allusions in Dialoghi con Leucò, as if Pavese had envisioned – after experiencing the psychological effects of WWII – the world to come. Furthermore, in Dialoghi con Leucò each character aims at symbolizing a personality trait that plays a role against the natural world and the divine powers that ultimately control the destiny of humanity.
In Lavorare stanca, published in two editions between 1936-1943, Pavese frames the human fate focusing on solitude and masculinity’s lack of vision to establish a meaningful communication with society. Both self-absorption and negligence are at stake in the configuration of the postmodern global order that is currently in crisis as climate change exemplifies. In the poem “Paesaggio VIII,” Pavese creates an apocalyptic image in which memories begin at night with the sound of a river, then he adds that, “L’acqua / è la stessa, nel buio, degli anni morti” (“Water / is the same, in the darkness, of the years dying”), as if the water in its stagnation had been slowly decaying until the water’s death. The last stanza of the poem recovers the image of the water, this time in the form of a dark ocean, as if the river of the opening lines had finally arrived at its fateful destination. The poem ends with a sonic image, “Le voci morte / assomigliano al frangersi di quel mare” (“The dead voices / are similar to the breaking waves of that ocean”). Dead years and dead voices flow into the revolting, yet devastated waters of a dark ocean, as if Pavese had envisioned these catastrophic images as future scenarios.
In the poem “Lavorare stanca,” in one line Pavese condenses the maladies of both modernity and postmodernity, “Val la pena esser solo, per essere sempre più solo?” (“Is it worth it to be alone, only to be always more alone?”), as if the individualism cultivated by the modern man, suddenly deprived of its former romantic façade, had deepen after WWII to reconfigure individuality as an even more lonely condition. This series of Anthropocenic images acquire a more urgent tone in the poem “Rivolta.” The poem begins underlying the blindness inherent to spiritual death, “Quello morto è stravolto e non guarda le stelle” (“That dead man is deformed and does not look at the stars”), and ends emphasizing that along with spiritual death comes total destruction, “Pure, in strada le stelle hanno visto del sangue” (“Also, the stars have seen the blood in the streets”). In this poem, the stars are the final witness of humanity’s death, echoing the famous beginning lines of Pavese’s “Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi.”
“Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi
questa morte che ci accompagna
dal mattino alla sera, insonne,
sorda, come un vecchio rimorso
o un vizio assurdo. I tuoi occhi
saranno una vana parola,
un grido taciuto, un silenzio.”
(“Death will come and (she) will have your eyes
this dead life that lives within us
from sunrise to dawn, sleepless,
deaf, like an old remorse
or an absurd vice. Your eyes
will be an empty word,
a quiet cry, a silence.”)
The last dialogue of Dialoghi con Leucò, “The Gods,” is a conversation at the top of a sacred hill between two unnamed characters. As the conversation unravels, the natural elements become echoes of ancient primeval divinities, in a time when the air used to provoke shivering memories, nocturnal fears, mysterious threats. Through all the previous dialogues, Pavese establishes a broad conversation about the nature of divinity and the role it plays in the order of the world. The power of words appears as the essential bridge between humans and the divine, and if a human ever encountered or witnessed the existence of a Goddess or a God, it was thanks to the language of nature. The dialogue ends with a question that inquires into the possibility of rebuilding such encounters, “And do you believe in those monsters, in bodies with the appearance of beasts, in the living rocks, in the divine laughter, in the words that annihilated?” The reply is both eloquent and unveils a quandary of our times:
“I believe in what all men have suffered and desired. If in other times they climbed to these rocky heights or searched for deadly swamps under the sky, they did it because they were still able to find something that we ignore. It wasn’t the bread or pleasure or good health. We know where to find those things. Not in this place. And people like us that live far from here, near the ocean or the fields, we have lost that other thing.”
As we worry about the uncertain future that awaits future generations and the relationship that they will be able to establish with the natural forces, particularly considering the wide array of issues that the Anthropocene has placed over the table, one wonders if as Pavese suggests in Dialoghi con Leucò there was indeed a time in which humans wandered among divine entities. The last exchange of the dialogue engages these ideas:
“ – Name it, then, that thing we have lost.
– You already know it. The encounters they once had with them, the Gods.”
As the Earth has been dramatically altered by humans in the current geologic time period, the restoration and the healing of the biological systems of our planet will fall upon the people to come. Meanwhile, we are mere witnesses of a biological system in crisis that keeps bringing to the surface an overwhelming reality of fear and despair. Seventy years after Pavese’s death, a text like Dialoghi con Leucò offers to our imagination many reasons to believe that both the restoration and the healing of Earth’s biological systems are possible. And why not? Perhaps we would be able to also recover the organic communication that once we had with them, the Gods.
[1] All the translations from the Italian are mine (Verrà la morte e avrà i tuoi occhi, Lavorare stanca, and Dialoghi con Leucò).
[2] More visualizations of the Anthropocene can be found at www. anthropocene.info.
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