Articolo per "Passages"

http://www.prohelvetia.ch/Latest-issue.121.0.html?&L=4

Nervi ottici, ossimori e termometri

Londra, 6 del mattino, dall’alto. La città sale al ritmo lento della foschia che cala, o che si scioglie in suono, l’esteso vibrato che di notte gela. Una mattina di sole, primavera. Cosa scriverebbe qui il poeta? Sono nato e cresciuto nel diradarsi della nebbia. Le braccia inclinate delle gru gli accenti tonici. L’alternarsi di blocchi abitativi, macchie di alberi, grattacieli, ma anche cornicioni imbiancati, torrette, antenne, suggeriscono la metrica. Nella topografia caotica, anche a grande distanza edifici si guardano, le facciate allineate, da qui le rime. Ora sono sveglio e devo scrivere di un sogno, una visione. È questa: che non sia una comunità di scapoli (papa, clero) a pontificare sui valori della famiglia. Che non siano le agenzie immobiliari a progettare gli edifici. Che non siano gli altoparlanti a comporre la musica nei supermercati (eppure, non c’è altra spiegazione). Esempi con cui non intendo sottolineare la divergenza tra interesse privato e bene comune, ma l’impossibilità, o l’incongruenza, della visione. Quello che voglio dire, e innanzitutto a me stesso, è che deve essere l’allenamento del nervo ottico e non la montatura degli occhiali a qualificare le visioni. Questo vale anche per la politica culturale svizzera, gestita bene a livello di istituzioni e linee direttive, ma spesso miope in fase di realizzazione, di progetti effettivi. Negli ultimi mesi ho partecipato a uno scambio transoceanico tra scrittori, chi l’ha ideato non ha parlato di scrittura una sola volta; ho dato delle poesie per un’antologia di testi svizzeri tradotti in inglese, molto curata in ogni aspetto eccetto le traduzioni; ho preso parte a un workshop per lo sviluppo strategico di una regione, gestito da professionisti del marketing (cartoncini colorati e tortura linguistica) che non distinguevano arti figurative da arredamento di interni (ma che sollievo quando hanno giustificato la nostra esistenza confidandoci che è dimostrato, la cultura è un valore economico). Questi progetti, comunque interessanti e in qualche modo utili, sembrano promuovere la promozione culturale, non la cultura (tanto meno l’arte, la letteratura). Ripenso alla poesia di Brodskij con cui mi sono svegliato, gli ultimi versi, “A salvaguardare i cuori dal falso in questa piatta regione / è l’assenza di rifugi e l’ampio spazio per la visione. / Solo il suono ha bisogno d’eco e senza di esso è affranto, / lo sguardo non si aspetta uno sguardo di rimando”. Interpretandoli per i fini del discorso, la differenza può essere tra chi vive per mettere a fuoco un’immagine (la visione) e chi vive del ritorno di immagine. In fondo è un atto di partecipazione, il tentativo di superare la distanza tra soggetto e oggetto (chilometri di ego, schematismi, preconcetti); l’arte è un tentativo di perseguire quella partecipazione, la cultura è la volontà di preservarla: si propaga da un libro, un quadro, attraverso chi gli presta attenzione (“leggere è complicità nel processo creativo” scrive Cvetaeva), su su fino nelle maglie di un’iniziativa che promuove altri libri, altri quadri. Non credo, sebbene la tendenza planetaria della politica culturale mi contraddica, che un progetto valido possa nascere da manager culturali e simili creature mitol-ossimoriche. E non voglio dire che la promozione culturale debba essere gestita, per esempio, dai poeti (gesummaria), ma che nessuno, e men che meno i professionisti della visione politica, deve perdere di vista il senso dell’operazione: la cultura non è un valore statistico o economico, è qualcosa che avvicina uomo e mondo (e, quando il gelo buca i termometri, avvicinandoli li scalda). Per questo va promossa. Ci penso solo adesso: dirigo un festival letterario il cui comitato scientifico è composto quasi esclusivamente da poeti. È un bel festival. Ora che ho superato le battute a disposizione riguardo l’invito di Passages e scopro che il tema proposto non era proprio questo. Per fortuna ho già espresso le mie riserve anche sui poeti... Già che spero nell’indulgenza, torno alla finestra – bianco, rosso mattone, cemento scuro, ora i colori rimano; double-deckers e furgoni sono gli accenti dei versi ancora scorrevoli – la città è una poesia diversa.




Through a Glass brightly

London, 6 am, from up high. The city arises slowly, in time with the mist as it descends or melts into sound, an extended vibrato that freezes over at night. A sunny morning in spring. What would the poet write here? I was born and grew up in a break in the fog, where cranes distribute the stresses with their booms; housing estates interspersed among stands of trees and skyscrapers provide the scansion. In such a topographic helter-skelter, buildings confront one another no matter how far apart they are, their façades aligned. Hence, the rhymes.

Now I’m awake and should write about a dream, a vision – so here goes: let no community of the celibate (the Pope and his clerics) dictate family values. Let it not be estate agents to design buildings, nor loudspeakers to compose the music in the malls (and yet there can be no other explanation for it). My examples are not intended to stress the divide between private interest and public good, but rather demonstrate the impossibility, or the incongruity, of vision. What I am saying, speaking first and foremost to myself, is that vision is a function of the properly trained optic nerve, and not of one’s spectacles.

This goes for Swiss cultural policy as well, which as far as I can see is well managed at the level of institutional guidelines, but often myopic when it comes to actual projects. Over the past few months, I took part in an international writers’ exchange, the organizer of the project did not once speak about writing; I contributed some poems to an anthology of Swiss writers in English translation, which was meticulously prepared in every regard except for the English translations; I participated in a workshop on strategic regional development led by marketing professionals who did not distinguish between figurative art and interior design (but what a relief it was when they assured us that culture does indeed have economic value).

Nonetheless interesting and somehow useful, such projects seem to promote cultural promotion rather than culture (and still less art or literature). I am reminded once again of Brodsky’s poem I woke up with, its last lines: “What keeps hearts from falseness in this flat region / is that there is nowhere to hide and plenty of room for vision. / Only sound needs echo and dreads its lack. / A glance is accustomed to no glance back.” Interpreting them for my own purposes, I understand these lines to propose a difference between those who live to give focus to an image (their vision), and those who are sustained by seeing their own image confirmed.

In essence what is at stake is an act of participation, the attempt to overcome the distance dividing subject and object (miles of ego, stereotype and prejudice). Art is an attempt to foster such participation, while culture is the will to maintain it. It begins with a book, a painting, it expands through those who pay attention to such artefacts (“reading is complicity in the creative process,” writes Tsvetaeva), and keeps expanding even within an initiative that promotes other books, other paintings. For all that the global trend in cultural policy may contradict me, I do not believe that cultural managers and other oxy-morons can conceive such a project. And I am not advising that cultural policy be handled, for example, by poets (heavenforbid!), but rather that no one, least of all the professionals of the political vision, should forget that culture is neither a statistical nor an economic value, it’s something that brings man and world together. This is the reason why we promote it.

It’s only just occurred to me now: I am the director of a literary festival whose committee is composed nearly exclusively of poets. It’s a nice festival.

Now that I’ve written more than I was supposed to, I discover that I have wandered slightly off the mark. Luckily for me, I have already expressed my doubts about poets, among others... Hoping for indulgence, I return to the window – white, brick-red, dark concrete: now colours are rhyming; double-deckers and vans are the stresses of flowing verses – the city is a different poem.


English translation by vb and Rafael Newman

Chinese box

for Sheldon Leader, Christmas 2008 in Ambrì

He had just been staying in Macao. A few days of being told about the ancient and disparate traditions brought in by the Portuguese: African, Balinese, Indian, all somehow surviving underneath the imperative pulse of the city. He was there on a Cultural trip and appreciated past and heritage, a topic generally dismissed by the people met in the other Southern Chinese cities. Not that he hadn’t enquired, but receiving peremptory answers. “Well we just don’t believe”, “For the Chinese people now it’s the future that matters”, “I still consider religion as superstition”, “To reform is to re-shape”; “We aim to utter the Chinese spirit through a Western narration”. And everywhere around him these answers had found clear confirmations.
In Macao, instead, people responded enthusiastically, but their answers dissolved in the glasses of hot water. He even had some difficulties detecting the alleged city pulse, which seemed smothered beneath the bi-dimensional ministry of casinos. (Massive building sites were everywhere, yet all the exertion only left behind these slender schemes of light, the resulting infrastructure a billboard for some general statement, delimiting the road and intimately addressing the driver). And to observe space itself mutilated doesn’t inspire much hope for time past.
The clearest heritage was the Venetian one, seemingly told with Vegas narration: the Venetian is a casino, among the biggest palaces ever built, its king a benevolent one who avoids imposing his verb, or is only an abstraction – in any case with plenty of devoted subjects. So to the Venetian he went, with the other Swiss writer sent on that Cultural trip, and they gambled together. Their opposite attitudes worked out smoothly and they multiplied the mock initial capital. The following evening they both agreed that if they had played again that wouldn’t happen. They were right. (They could have tried to drag conclusions on probability, but didn’t, possibly due to the overbearing presence of statistics in those Chinese days).
They had just been staying in Macao and were now back in Hong Kong for the last day of the Cultural trip. After the other cities, Hong Kong was like an old friend sometimes suffering from fits of fever, melancholy, madness, and a little amnesia. (Precisely an old friend). Walking on the steep streets groping among the steeper skyscrapers and the slanted market stands he ran into a large clay Buddha. Not particularly beautiful, its charm consisted mainly in excessive weight, large cracks along the back, a removable head. All elements not too unfamiliar after the short but intense immersion in Contemporary China, which would end that night after having dragged around the overweight luggage for eight hours more. He pondered. Then to the side he saw a Chinese box, red, decorated with tiny carved figures, their round heads part of an equation involving round lamps and perhaps a few moons. For the rest, bridges, trees, pagodas, clouds. Most of the women were bowing to men, as were some men, while a few appeared to be simply bowing to no one. The other guy, patiently unimpressed by the Buddha, also liked it. They tossed a Macao Pataca, the verdict was clear, the other didn’t change his opinion about the Buddha and bought nothing, he got the red box for a worryingly low price.
The program of their trip consisted mainly of tripe plus other delicacies such as duck tongue, chicken feet, fish jaw, shark fin – apparently food is of the utmost importance for Chinese culture, in a way substituting other kinds of traditions nearly lost and mostly ignored. And meeting writers who were told to talk about food (in a way, a topic substituting more controversial ones). That afternoon being no exception, after making the purchase they set out for the cultural lunch where the box created an immediate diversion, if only because he looked odd carrying it under his arm. For once, they had their meal without discussing the food – not knowing what they were eating didn’t bother them either; the box was dated anywhere between two and one-hundred-and-something years old; everybody agreed that here and there it was losing paint (sign of age), and that you could see clear wood beneath (sign of youth); he claimed it contained eight cats just to use the two words he had learned (ba, mao), obtained condescending laughter, was corrected on both words. To keep talking about language, though carefully avoiding the Mandarin-Cantonese issue, they risked further embarrassment and asked what the sound of the names of their girlfriends might mean in Chinese: his, “peaceful beauty”; the other’s, “hot thunder”.
A box is a space to be filled with things, the things in the box are dispensed from the present time. It is also for this reason that we aren’t quite sure if they are actually there when the box is closed, anyway confident that they might enjoy themselves wherever else they are. We suspect that this place could have something to do with the box’s decoration, or instead the decoration is where the present time sits for as long as the box is closed. He was thinking these things while, at the post-prandial meeting, someone was specifying undisturbed what he considered to be the most substantial differences between Mandarin and Cantonese, often using edible examples; hence, perhaps, the concern about being dispensed from the present time. But his thoughts, once in the box, were dislocated in a place surprisingly unappealing, one of the cities he had visited which, alongside others simultaneously, was built to propel the post-reform economy at maximum speed. In twenty years, millions of people from all the regions of China found themselves delocalized there, apparently without carrying any trace of those homelands, no idol no flag no curtain or flower at the window. If Macao was a fancy facade this was a vector, a straight line exclusively expressing purpose and strength. An undecorated box in which to be both alive and dead, a factory with a dormitory in which to spend a day that lasts years before returning to the countryside to sleep. Hopefully a bit wealthier, in any case having taken part in the construction of a colossal box where the future alone can dwell. The future will tell.
But then he didn’t really know much about Western conditions during industrialization, he thought, opening the box. It creaked a five-tone noise, Mandarin!, he suggested. Only the other Swiss guy laughed.
After the meeting, they bid farewell and rushed to Kowloon jade market to enjoy the distance-forming pleasures of tourism. The box under his arm was once again an attraction. The sellers, more interested in the box than in their own merchandise, wanted to know its price, denied it was possible, guessed its age, passed it on from hand to hand; he felt a little jealous. The two of them went through the crowd, even more conspicuously because of the box. When the sellers did bargain for their jade, the box would sit on the blankets they used as stalls. After that, in a cab, a bus, an x-ray machine, through customs and, finally, in the airplane closet. When it woke up it was in Switzerland, now filled with duty-free, and still a little Chinese air.
The Swiss German customs clerk, not quite the antonomasia for a jolly fellow, laughed through his mustache asking whether it was the “Schatzkasse”. The “treasure box”. His poor understanding of German nearly translated it into “cat box” and, if only for the consistency of his ignorance, he was happy with it.
He and the other parted, they came from opposite ends of the country. They had enjoyed each-other’s company. The Chinese box sat with him on a train. He pondered. Just as the first syllable of the word “future” belongs to the past and contradicts itself before the whole word is pronounced, a train erases its own surface through speed, hurrying towards a destination (is the present time allowed to sit inside the train?). Or, didn’t the Chinese calligraphers use to write ideograms with a long spongy pencil dipped in plain water, so that a symbol wouldn’t last to see the following one? Or, Chinese characters are still partly the same as they were thousands of years ago... So, while in his memory the Chinese skyscrapers started to look like hi-speed trains heading vertically towards a set goal, ready to let the next building take their place as soon as they got there, he couldn’t help feeling that he had just been in a country whose name is perhaps writ in water, but by such a number of hands that it remains visible. Though, for him at least, hardly readable.
He felt like praising the Chinese box sitting next to him, its light globes, its figures, so dedicated in expressing their respect that they didn’t seem to be repeating their act, nor frozen in it, but just performing it as slowly as a man grows or as the present takes its seat. The box sat with him on the train. The horizontal train, that took him back to the past he had left three weeks before and now was about to be the present.


First published, with Chinese translation, in: Foodscape, a Swiss-Chinese Intercultural Encounter about the Culture of Food
食事風景–瑞士與中國飲食文化觸碰, MCCM Creations Hong Kong