Traduzione del brano "Keats e Gramsci in Italia"

Gramsci and Keats. A poet and a politician discuss in a romantically anthropoligical cemetery

Today is a warm day here in Rome. Much warmer than usual. Sitting in my balcony, I'm looking at my plants, dead by now. Only the geraniums are standing this great heat. The view is the same: wonderful, broad on a part of my city that links architectonic elements of different historical periods, from which, come out, originating from a distant past, ancient walls, built to protect it from the Barbarians, opened by a still evocative entrance, a real door to come in Rome.

Aside, an eerie pyramid an ancient Roman, rich and kitsch, - Caio Cesio – wanted to be built for his memory, anticipating the post-modern style. No one of my friends, in particular foreigners who come and see me, can imagine this is a real pyramid. In other words, you can usually think that it was stolen from Egypt, like an obelisk, and brought here. Along the right boundary of the walls, there is a special cemetery. There, amongst others, is buried Antonio Gramsci together with John Keats. A poet and a politician.

We call it the English cemetery because there are buried non-catholic people, therefore, not only British protestants but also Greek Orthodox Christians, Roman Jews, and even members of the Humanism that somebody, very improperly, thanks to the monotheistic religions'influence, persists to define as atheists.

The metallic cylinders of two gasometers rise in the background, other ruins of an industrial Rome that are going to be transformed into a theatre and a botanical garden. Other friends of mine, generally Roman people, appreciate more these recent ruins than the classical ones: and, however, their panoramic assembly increase the impure and syncretic suggestion.

Thanks to this place, you can check the steps of this transition from the modern industrialist to the new communicational metropolis, when, becoming a nocturnal area, it changes its identity from gassed industrialist into musical industrial.

During the ““Long Night of Museums” of 2006, the gasometer became a bright and resounding work. Maybe, every ex-industrial location can become the right place for performances, seminaries and exibitions.

All is possible inside this strange cylindrical body. And it's amazing how in this body – the gazometer-one – can be born a fetishism that gives life to it, possesses it and makes it alive and flowing after a secular monofunctional carelessness.

A visual and sonic idolatry: strewn with neon trails, during the “Long Night of Museums” of 2006, even itself is grown white, enlightened by geometrical lightings that redesigned its body, like a makeup that restores a prematurely got old body making it young and agile again.

From its cylindrical interiorities were emitted floating industrial musics, as to accompany its resurrection: and so the gasometer danced, set to music and shone for a long night, becoming suddenly a scenic and compositive instrument of bright musics that astonished all those people who considered it only like a rusty iron to pension off.

At last, still from my endless view, the “Testaccio” comes out: for a long time formerly a working-class area - its name derives from the symbolic hill built with the fragments of the amphoras coming from the near port -, now through-way of the nocturnal life where, by night, you can't move on but on foot and with a huge effort.

This warmth hot and dry makes me think to the death, the death of things more than that of people. And I imagine what you can ever understand, in a distant future, of this strange fragment of Rome where so different styles and periods coexist and are superimposed one upon another. “The ashes of Gramsci” is a lyric by Pier Paolo Pasolini dedicated to the founder of the Italian Communist Party. And even if here the plants seem to be burnt to ashes, I'm catching myself thinking how archaeology can be linked to human beings. Archaeology and anthropology. Of course.

Gramsci was Sardinian, born in that wonderful and secluded isle; he was invalid, a body made hunchbacked and ravaged by a bones' disease. Yet, when he was very young, he went to Turin because he wanted to make something that, maybe, will seem eerie in the future. The “worker inquiry”. But not that of sociologists, those who make a job evalutation or apply the taylorism or the toyotism to the rhytms of the production; or those who understand the end of the industrial era without having never heard that the kind “industrial noise” supported and anticipated this process

long before and much better than these social scientists. Certainly not.

Gramsci's way was a method to understand the workers' point of view compared to the labour market, in order to change the “nature” and to develop the independence of every single maker. People able to make their own destiny, not only cars.

Yes, cars. Because Turin was for a long time the Capital of the cars: The “Fiat”. The most important industrial city had to be the starting-point of the revolution.

His grave is simple and some gentle hand always puts a rose on it. A red rose like his ideal. I usually go there and I often find absorbed and touched people. With solitary discretion. The emotion continues with Keats because poetry is a strategic element of every revolution. On his gravestone, maybe, in some century, you could read again: “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water”. The poetical writing moves the letters that gather and disperse amid the ripples of the waves.

“Water poetry”. A poetry that is liquid as it should be the working-class labour. And not only. Poetry and revolution. Then I imagine, from my balcony, the two of them, Gramsci and Keats meeting each other in the evening, towards sunset that, here, is often fiery red. They're meeting each other lonely and peaceful and they're discussing passionately about their death occurred in geographically near places: for the poet, at the beginning of the famous stairs in “Spain Square” where he had a beautiful house; for the politician in the gloomy jail.

“That brain doesn't have to work”, Mussolini said about Gramsci. The man who used this concept was a fierce dictator who invented the term “Fascism” usurping a great tradition of the Ancient Rome: the “fasces”, in fact, were the insignia of the political power that unified the “res publica”. This concept, born exactly in the Republican Rome, is stronger than that of “democracy”. Because “democracy”, and you should know it very well, dear archaeologist, keeps the term “power” (crazia) which I dislike even if it's popular.

“Republic”, instead, says that “the thing” belongs to everybody and this thing is a dream. “The dream of a thing”, Pasolini always used to call it speaking about Gramsci. And a public vision of this strange thing – not general! - was exactly a dreamt thing and a thing to dream. Be careful, dear archaeologist: “public” in the sense that involves and wraps up all the citizens with their diversities. And at this point anthropology plays its role.

Gramsci was used to dream and to discuss with Keats how to imagine this “public thing” he called “Communism”. Keats was used to listen to him very carefully and to dream women's bodies crossed by water letters. He was used to say that to write on the water is like to write on the loved woman's body. And Gramsci, hearing these words, with his tight lorgnettes on his nose, was used to be silent, smoking slowly, even if he hadn't lungs any more.

So, our two friends were used to keep silent for a long time, looking at each other: no one of them had had great and important love stories. Maybe poetry would like to be lived like politics. Maybe also vice versa. Or maybe they're both seeking only love.

Gramsci's brain stood for more than twenty years in a jail called “Regina Coeli”. Let's think about how the construcion of a jail could be absurd: it has got an architectonic structure that should lead those poor convicts to the queen of the heaven's arms. In other words its structure is ispired by the model of the “panoptic”.

By now, I think everybody knows, or should know, what this conception of a penitentiary-building means, with on its center the big warden's eye (he who looks) through which it was possible to control all the wings where the convicts were locked up. And these repentants didn't have neither a moment nor a little hole of freedom. Yet, in spite of a very strict surveillance, Gramsci was able to have some notebooks where he was used to write continuously in his thin and precise handwriting.

I'm thinking again about a fiery red thing, maybe because of the sunset: that, maybe, it's blasphemous to find a comparison between the Madonna, Queen of the Heaven and Bentham's “panoptic” that always observes you, even in the moments of the most exclusive privacy. And that, maybe, it's just this concept of “Sin” perversely linked to a supervisor-look, that joins “jail” and “heaven”.

I wish I had found out the plot that connects one-way these two worlds seemingly so far and opposite, indeed! I mean, it's heaven to be jail and, of course, not jail to be heaven.

The cemetery is a place of death: neither jail, nor heaven and you always come in very carefully as if its tenants could be disturbed. The death has to be respected, not feared. It's for this reason that around and inside this cemetery there are luxuriant trees, pines and cypresses. The're evergreen. And the diaphanous air flows like the water where you can write lyrics for a far love that you can reapproach thanks to the desire of the imagination.

Only crossed poetry and politics will be able to change something of this world, as cautious geologists will be able to verify here, in this little segment of land where our friends are living together. Gramsci used to write about Machiavelli. Be careful, the history books are often placards of the human foolishness. Machiavelli wasn't only the inventor of the political science, distinct from ethics, religion and metaphysics but even an important character that includes the powerlessness of intelligence.

He tought it was fundamental – we are in the Sixteenth century when the Italian Reinassance expressed the highest level of creativity in the cultural field – to carry the power of the culture into the politics and to make the unification of Italy instead of letting it fragmentized in foreign hand.

In conclusion, also Machiavelli wanted to join Leonardo. But he wasn't able to and Italy sank into decay (Dark centuries). And then, Gramsci was used to say, a new prince that no more redeems the nation (which by now is unified) but all the workers: this is his mission and this prince, for him, was the Party.

Can an archaeologist coming from a future period find out what a party is? I don't know. It seems difficult to me. Even because it's a long time, by now, that parties, as they were, are over. For this reason we have to take a look inside this political-poetical cemetery, always wavering between these two heights; between the politician's and the poet's graves. Gramsci was in a prison confinement; yet he wrote the most lucid things not only about Rome or Italy but, maybe, about the whole western area, another strange term.

Maybe it can be obvious now, but, for him, economy (that he studied carefully), wasn't able to determine culture, as a scholastic called “marxist” was used to say in that period – for Stalin's panoptic control over all the parties defined as “communist” - but, on the other hand, it had a powerful autonomy. On the contrary, culture, for him – imprisoned – , was becoming the main element to make politics and from this intuition derives his most celebrated concept: hegemony.

A party, in other words, is not a dictatorial or a bureaucratic or a taken at the top machinery: it has to involve and to persuade all people patiently, in particular unemployed ones who don't have to be excluded and so much the less censured. A party, for Gramsci, has to develop a cultural reflection in order to dominate just social or generational classes that today we'd call ethnical or genre, different from workers.

In other words, hegemony is poetry, the daily and subtle politics' poetry.

Now the external boundary is sheltered by the walls that Adrian the emperor ordered to be built. There are loopholes and turrets, wolf holes and moats. An unmetalled track leads it and there you can take a look at the view below that joines the pyramid that owes its name “Cestia” to the owner. This the most romantic view in Rome, for me. And even the most exquisitely anthropoligical one.

Maybe, nobody will believe it, but this evening, after the darkness replaced the sunset, I thought to walk lonely below the walls when I raised my eyes: well, I'm sure I met the two of them, just Grasmci and Keats, of course, that were discussing a bit in English a bit in Italian.

They were speaking vivaciously about poetry. It was strange because Gramsci knew very well Keats' lyrics while the latter couldn't know “The notebooks of the jail”.

“The notebooks of the jail” We know that in these notebooks Grasmci wrote about everything: from the popular culture to the “fordism” from the criticism of the democratic centralism, in force in that party, (and few people know that Gramsci was even expelled from the Party by the members of the cell – this was the name of the members of the same unit of the Party - to the American cinema. In other words, literature and economy were interlaced and you could go from the former to the latter with purity and spitefulness. But few people know something that can truly makes you dream. These notebooks were brought out of the jail by a little known person who is a name written on the water too: Piero Sraffa, a good economist that worked in England, just near the place where Keats had lived his short years, exile from the Fascist Italy but with the permit to go and see his friend. He who wrote “the production of goods by goods”.

So Sraffa, had undsterstood everything about the theory of value-job, that the archaeologists aren't able to find amid the remnants of amphoras or rotted goods: no more based on the plus-work and on the plus-value but on the machinery-goods that add value to other goods themselves and no more the factory-work. Almost immaterial goods. Clearly oversensible ones.

In the end, he distinctly heard that Gramsci asked a favour to his young friend: to teach him to write his name on the water. And Keats – already sad by himself – was desperate because there, in that cemetery, even if it was wonderful, there was no water. That's not all: the dead were not allowed to have water, the living men were used to think that they're not thirsty. But, then, the poet went forward and the politician followed him uspet by his friend's seriousness.

I climbed up the walls to see what was going on and I saw something, even if it wasn't all. Keats cautiously took a vase full of flowers that accompanied the stay of a russian emigrant, maybe a white anti-revolutionary russian, and as apologizing, he put the withered flowers on the borders of the grave. And he made the same thing with other vases moving quickly amid the well-known graves till he was able to fill a big container with water.

He returned near the politician and, he poet, showed him the contents keeping still for a second. Then, with an unexpected release, he tossed it up. Gramsci lifted his head and opened his eyes wide, losing his thin lorgnettes. But he saw.

The shelled water drew something like a liquid sheet in the air and, for a moment, remained in this way as uncertain if to keep still floating in the air or to cast down in the ground: in that suspended moment I saw Gramsci moving quickly his hands and the drops wrote something but not his name. I couldn't see well but I'm sure that the drops of water wrote: the dream of a thing will be writ in the water… And then they spread themselves on the astonished ground.

Testo di M. Canevacci. Traduzione a cura di Enzo Pizzolo