Refusal has always been an essential gesture. Think only of the saints, the hermits, but also of the intellectuals. The few who have made history were the ones who said no, not the courtiers or the servants of the cardinals.
[Pier Paolo Pasolini | “We are all in danger”]

 

I.
5:11 in the afternoon:
the feeling that the mind, the consciousness,
is to explode like an explosive device
I swear :: the simplest movements
of the body can no longer be controlled
& the gaze begins to turn around itself –
consent is a trap.

Time & space nested in each other /
Valium Mantrax Tryptizol /
the body as a place of hell,
its inclinations & perverse dreams,
the whining Marx speaks of /
the fear that words are wrong
the stick beatings / the revenge grin
– how does violence work in a poem?

The time that escapes the brain /
while the crushed spirits
throw themselves into bright flames –
the boldest of all lusts / now I know
that behind the mask of the leftist fascist
there’s always a rightist fascist.

Katerina Gogou declinates Pasolini’s death
in the back row of a porn cinema in Egaleo
while she falls backwards /
pulled by an invisible hand
– any government in the world would have had Pasolini disappear /
the autopsy report drawn up by the Vatican
reminds one of the faint twitching of long-severed limbs,
the cat whose skin is peeled off.

Hölderlin declinates the dying of Empedocles,
& throws himself blindly into the much greater fire
of a sublime devastation :: no one can come close /
unsteady & suffering in its ultimate cause [[the DNA of the insult]] /
a moment of verbose confused complaint /
at a time of transition when the old disappears
& gradually the new emerges /
the amount of data stored, the algorithm streams
– the limit of the imagination is just shifting.

As if it were a short-term impulse
inhabiting the cracking of the brainshell /
outside the comfort zone, the moment
of the disintegration of his thoughts,
the irreducible coloring of the word,
– I say that as if the essence of poetry lay
not in their repetition.

In the meantime no more hieratic discourses /
you were a poet who didn’t want to write any more verses,
but dragged by the hair & trampled
the head carried through the city as a deterrent.
The story that turns to shit these days /
the brown mud running through underfoot,
a state of putrefaction.

Most of those wanted by full-page search calls
are denounced within a few days.
The silver clamp that holds the cavernoma in your head
disconnected, betrayed you.* The light strikes
daily on you,
marks & places you.
The renunciation of these extraordinary,
carbonated passions.

 

* In 1972, Ulrike Meinhof’s head was x-rayed against her will after a police raid. On the X-ray images, the officers recognize the silver clip & can thus identify it without any doubt.

 

---

 

For Pasolini, Paulus wanted to take a revolutionary approach
to the destruction of the model of society based on social inequality,
imperialism & slavery.
[Alain Badiou | “Paulus”]

II.

Tongues are defiant, are razor sharp, birds are singing deep in the night, one
mutated bacterium / signs carried by the wax / which refuse to
appear / are Nefas, what cannot be pronounced & what under their
face appears as yellow as a dead person.

Or ideologies smashed to rubble / textures lived motionless or folded /
are surfaces of imprecise repetition / curve or combination
:: how free-flowing flashes of thought appear & then go out again /
Paulus [[in Pasolini’s reading]] finds in Marx the construction of the future,
the ruthless criticism of everything that exists //
the body outlines sketched on the asphalt as a capitalist dummy
:: chaotic pictures on our tense retinae /
alternating [[hostile]] camps :: mobile cells are prosodic.

There’s reverence in Pasolini [[an historical affinity]] for Mayakovski’s
beautiful tail /
there are certainties shied at us / the cruel ceremonies of the living /
Charon who keeps our head just above water / there’s a system for not
decipherable facial signs / a grid in which one gets caught /
& a capital that breeds a new surplus proletariat
:: meanwhile everyone’s talking about democracy but nobody’s talking
about revolution.

Since hatred that is brought upon you / the proportion of aesthetic
rottenness / is racial hatred, a burned eye, is the silence they’ve exchanged,
is disinhibited
imagination, Outrage Porn, the circular cell called ‘Moby Dick’ /
Neutrality [[define that!]] is not an option.

During the night shortness of breath & sweats, a burning sensation behind
the breastbone :: Nitroglycerin & Clenbuterol / I get upset, note traumas &
memory traces because I don’t
let go you like an ingrown nail / but everyone knows the commissioners
who had Pasolini killed: the Andreottis, the Berlusconis & Salvinis / coherence
means making enemies, distorting reality around a twist /
as if prophecy weren’t a corrupt bunch :: the image of the policeman
who urinates on the prisoner, a yellowish “cockroach” on the wall.

 

---

 

It is not enough to mock reality – it must be changed.
[Sergei Tretyakov | Faces of the avant-garde]

III.

This is a sketch about Dante. About Dantism by Peter Weiss & Pasolini. About Dantism by Peter Weiss & Pasolini after Fredric Jameson. About Dante, who was released from psychiatry into emigration & sentenced to death in absentia. About Weiss & Pasolini & their obsessive fixation on the Divina Commedia. About insurgent workers in 1919/2019. About a factory owner’s act of self-extinguishment. Liberation from the shackles of the Capitalocene. About the black desert landscape in Teorema’s last pictures. About drama as poetry of action. About a dream outside of reason. The ethereal dark horizon & over the red of Pontormo. Inferno is the name of the place where we live. About the discovery of François Villon [[Pasolini in the mask of the French vagante & bailiff]], the first human remains, a corpse in tatters, the blackish eye of a delinquent near a half-crumbled wall. About the two policemen kneeling in front of Pasolini’s dead body. About their disgusting grin & the satisfaction that disfigures their faces. About the statement of a Maria Teresa Lollobrigida, the first to discover the dead poet: Look at these sons of bitches, throwing their garbage in front of our house [[Il Messaggero, Monday, November 3, 1975]].

Pasolini’s sketch of the planned tragedy Monument, in which the Lenin of 1905/1917 explains his prophetic visions to the Lenin of 1968 during the breaks in the fighting in an adjacent wood [[fôret de symboles]] / in the background you can see Stalin standing in front of the Lenin Monument relieving himself. Obsessed with death, or with fighting it off [[that is, realigning life]] / the always hallucinating eye that does not recognize itself :: so he says, he has in front of the photos, the wanted posters of those sentenced to death in absentia. Not being able to hold back tears [[As a man of letters who makes literature, I declare my solidarity with Potere Operaio & all other groupuscules of the extreme left]] / not the simple superimposition or the obvious forms of connection but rather a certain resistance to an intrusive sense or an overly one-dimensional readability :: his last book Trasumanar e organizzar remains largely unnoticed by the critics / because he writes Marxist poems? because he is a nuisance to the world? [[as he thinks]] & the world just doesn’t know yet? / The title of the work refers to a passage in the Divina Commedia [[Paradiso I, 70]] which speaks of the need to go beyond the mere human :: Trasumanar significa per verba non si poria :: organizzar [[a transitive Verb]] means the organization of the transgression.

In Patmos [[a text from the volume Trasumanar e organizzar]] Pasolini deals with the bombing of the Banca dell’Agricoltura in Piazza Fontana on December 12, 1969 [[he wrote it on the night of 13-14 December after he’d learned about it together with Michelangelo Antonioni & Alberto Moravia from TV]]. Pasolini uses a collage technique from the Neoavanguardia, in which he combines the apocalyptic horrors of John with a list of the victims, the perfidious declarations of the politicians :: in the style of fascist Saturdays / the dead are called / & by means of parentheses [[stylistic device according to Yuri Tynyanov, author of the Dictionary of Lenin the Polemicist]] lists the living dead / while one drives the personages from one circle of hell to the next / Pasolini in Salò convicts fascism of perversion & Dante, who is afflicted by depression, desperately completes his knowledge of pharmacology / figures that lead to their logical [[physical]] end :: clusters of fixed intervals / tear gas & funeral procession / sources of black bubbling anger :: these are the new peripheries, the wasteland of the suburbs / are walls made of glass & numbers / constellations of the wasteland in one Flood of rubbish & lies. Like someone who dreams of their misfortune […] & by dreaming, it would happen in a dream.

translated by David Vichnar & Louis Armand

 

From
Peter Bouscheljong | A Small Poetics of Insurrection
ALIENIST magazine 2021