The Voice of Aletheia

Pasolini: a desperate vitality

Recently we wanted to go more deep into the Pasolini as a man, clearly not wanting to deprive him of his work, but concentrating more on the peculiarity of this personage who aroused so many discussions and critics, or was adored and praised.

So, we thought to face Pasolini with the eyes of Goethe. Like in the “Metamorphosis of Plants”. Trying not so much to catch the aspects that are fixed and immutable, but really to follow the process of metamorphosis throughout his hard life, like a bramble of the hill, that has flowers and thorns and makes sweet blackberries, but always with “desperate vitality”. 

Yes, his desperate vitality. It’s like if this man was transplanted by force into this world, created in an uncommon way and consequently in every way wanted to be extirpated. And therefore all of his behavioral, relational, expressional and artistic manifestations were moved and pushed by a vital and cruel force of survival that was absolutely extraordinary.

We all know the end of Pasolini. But maybe it is just a logical conclusion of a road that, if had had a different epilogue, it would have denied itself. Society and reality need, but at the same time have to reject people who are out of the norm. Especially if they are “too much” out of the norm.

Therefore we shouldn’t be that much impressed by the end of Pasolini. Going back to our Goethean analysis: in a certain point plants are being cut, because they impede passage. However they existed and their existence served to give life, and what a life, to the world.

As we said, a world in which Pasolini was “too much” out of the norm.  Almost 40 years have passed since then. Even the norm changes. Today, for certain aspects, a person like Pasolini would not make headline news and least of all scandal. But in this sense we cannot stop saying: but today everything has changed!!

It’s true. Maybe there is no more yelling in dialects in the poor outskirts of the city, at least not in our dialects, and maybe sex and love are being talked about too much, although as Pasolini  predicted, in a consumerist and superficial way. Homosexuality is already a theme that doesn’t make headline news.

But maybe what is lacking today is exactly love, pure and absolute love for life. Love that is force, courage, sacrifice, risk, desire for knowledge, for experience, for past. In a word, what makes one life… life.

And this time we can say that this doesn’t have to be done in the name of something bigger than us, of an ideal that transcends us. Art, Politics, Humanity. Words without sense if there is no soul in the one who says them. But we have to do it for ourselves. Just for ourselves. Like Pasolini. To be ourselves. 

“We will have a hard and poor silence, a painful dream, that doesn’t bring sweetness and peace, but nostalgy and reproach, sadness of the one who has died without living: if something pure and always clean remains, it will be your quiet world, your trust, your heroism: in the sweetness of mulberry and grapevine or of elder, in every high or poor sign of life, in every spring, will be you; in every place where one day they laughed, and laugh again, impure, the living ones, you will give pureness, the only judgment left for us, and it’s tremendous and sweet: because there is no desperation without a little bit of hope.”

(from the Religion of My Time – P.P.P)