Months after Pier Paolo Pasolini premiered its partial version of the Decamerón De Boccaccio, who won a Special Jury Prize in the 21st edition of the Berlin Festival (1971), the journalist and writer Enzo Biagi interviewed him in his RAI 1 program, Terza B, Facciamo l’Appello. At a certain moment, Pasolini said that the truth cannot be told on television and, when Biagi discussed it, this replied: “No, no, because they would accuse me of defamation, to denost the fascist Italian code.” After forty minutes of recording, the RAI stopped the program, replaced it with a repetition of a combat of Mohamed Ali and Jimmy Ellis and left it in the limbo of censorship until the murder of the great poet and filmmaker. Biagi himself would discover later that Pasolini was right, although in his case there would be no excuses as rimbombant and enlightening as that of a complaint for “instigation of disobedience and anti -numbing propaganda.”
Pasolini put his finger in the sore, and put it in the most unforgivable way possible, that of the Greek myth that Christo Wolf faced in 1983 (Casandra); But, despite the fact that this interview contained omens that time demonstrated and continues to demonstrate unfortunately (all associated with “the civilization of consumption, the authentic revolution of the bourgeoisie”), hinted an exit on the side of what resists its conversion into product, with its conception of poetry as a model.
“There are things that the system cannot assimilate, cannot digest,” said Giuseppe Cardillo in the well -known New York interview of 1969; “You can read thousands of times a poems and not consume it” (Pasolini Rilegge Pasolinilast translated into Spanish in Poetry is not consumed). From his point of view, the consumable is the book, the physical object; And, sometimes, in the right circumstances, the verses of that object rebel and consume the world or, at least, they shake it a few moments, as a sector of the British press corroborated a few days ago by celebrating the forty anniversary of the scandal of the scandal of Vby the English poet Tony Harrison: in 1985, the London Review of Books He decided to publish a poem that, he goes on to say, he read few people; It was only that, a poem in a magazine, things of four cats, and I would have had the underground and silent fate of most of the poems if in 1987 I had not found a television hole in Channel 4, which then served as an alternative to the main chains.
Of course, the format remains an interest to the matter; In the first place, because it has nothing particular than the mass media arrive in masses – the strange thing is that poetry interests them – and, secondly, because the spectators did not run into a poet reciting live, but with a short director of director Richard Eyre; But, discounted that factor, the truth is that a simple succession of braided rhyme and cryptic title (V) caused a ventolera that is still remembered in England.
The apparent reason, what the 121 members of the Parliament alleged that opposed their broadcast and the newspapers and moralists who began the protests, was the supposedly obscene character of the text, which included a few tacos of common use (Fuck, cunt, Wankeretc.) and many insults from which some are disclosed to others by the Calderonian crime of “being born”; the real reason, that the poem had done the same – to the small scale and saving the distances – than the Get Carter From Mike Hodges in British cinema: to represent the unrepated society and talk about it, what was happening, the way it was expressed, of what did not appear in the media or in the spaces of official culture, violence, exclusion and uprooting included. A man visits his parents in the cemetery of Beaston Hill and discovers that the ruinous tombstones are full of painted, with swastika, Uves of victory and crossed expletives to multiple bands: that is Vthe outraged and ironic response of a Loiner (Native of Leeds) to an absurd desecration at the time of the Miners and there is not alternative (There is no alternative) by Margaret Thatcher, who survived and grew. Nothing particularly incendiary; nothing particularly innovative; Unless the truth is always new in front of the old age of lies and, if it is hidden behind a curtain and someone ajar, “with its waves” dazzles (byron, Last regret).
The history of art is full of works and even loose poems that scandalized (Harrison) or contributed to changing societies and accelerating processes. In general, the western augusts of the 21st century do not banish the ovid for a Ars Autoraif he banished him for that reason and, in general, he also doesn’t end with Pasolini’s body in an Ostia field. However, and contrary to what fairy tales sell, it is not so much due to an advance of political customs and the fact that it is practically impossible for an ovid or a Pasolini to reach the necessary notoriety so that power considers it a danger; Exceptions apart, artistic creation has lost the influence that had well entered the twentieth century, crushed by the “means of control” that Marcuse said in The one -dimensional man (In essence, the media superstructure and the industrial machinery of the image) and, consequently, it has been reduced to adornment or marginal whim for social purposes, no matter how much the novel or cinema and its metagereos save appearances.
Look how you look, the problem of creation implies the public problem and, when the media and the educational system form it to want and value a brick more than a good poems – let’s get the evils to the margin – the catastrophe is assured. No author works for the void: he needs interlocutors, counterparts and, if the counterparts for which he spoke have been reduced to minority sectors or have ceased to exist, what Pasolini confessed to Biagi will be understood in the interview of the interview in the interview Terza b: “The word hope has been erased from my vocabulary.”
Fortunately, the systems stumble as much as the people who support or suffer, and sometimes they are stamped against cases such as that of the English poet; Unfortunately, no stumble ends up in the hurricane of the irruption of the punk movement or that of their literary parents (John Osborne, Arnold Wesker, Harold Pinter, Philip Larkin, etc.) in the absence of these and, if that is valid for culture, it is for politics, regardless of whether authorship is theoretically more plural. “The new type of language, the language of production and consumption,” Pasolini wrote in New linguistic issues (1964), «It is relentlessly deterministic: it is limited to communicating functionally; He does not want to advocate or exalt or convince: for that there are already advertising slogans ». Whoever wants to reverse the situation – he said – must start there.
Everything is language, and in the opinion of the unmatched author of Bologna, one cannot fight against the devaluation of culture without fighting an element that is the cause and effect of it: expressive uniformization, which globalization has runaway with its need to standardize from genres to languages, through the modest slang. Meanwhile, «I will die, my editor will die, we will die all of us, our whole society will die, capitalism will die; but poetry will remain unconsumable ».
#Pasolinis #hope
