POETICS OF THE HEIGHT
By Guido Garufi
Leopardi and the nobility, a difficult and too easy approach: the danger is in the simple observation, perhaps bringing out the number of “nuances” that concerns to the symbol that interests to us, the mountain – the mount, indeed. But before getting to this phase, which we aren’t going to approach, it’ll be better to clarify in what way the infinite poet is united indissolubly to a “poetic optic” and to a visibility that is translated to the “glance” and to “watching”. It isn’t easy then to take impulse from this element, starting off this point of view. In that great and powerful laboratory that opens definitively to the modern poetry that is the Zibaldone, is confirmed, the searching of a lexicon that tends “to indeterminate” and “to get out of focus”. Only in this way, according to the author, it had the sense of the infinite and the vastness; the sense that the own poetry lives and is authorized, perhaps at night, under the light of the “oil lamp” or the “nocturnal lamp” that’s, as it’s known, the “quiet moon”.
There are many theoretical studies (of aesthetic, theory of the perspective and symbolic critic, beginning with the irreplaceable Chevalier and a perfect couple like Eliade and Guenon) that guarantee how height is a metaphor even in poetry, mainly from the incipit or genesis of the poetic text or without more “prophetic” (Who doesn’t remember the Biblical Speech of the Mountain with the temptations and the seductions?; or the Sinai in which the first Code was written through Mosses, in the Golgota with his “scandalous” cross?; or a “hero” or a “figure” of the dawn and decline of the West, like Zarathustra, who had first to descend from a mountain “to be able to speak”, who does not evoke the Mountain of the seven rocks of Mertn, or some indications of Jung on the symmetry mount-father, with the object even to differentiate the height from the femininity and horizontality of the water?). It is so that we could say that the inhabitant of Marche, Leopardi, in a certain way, makes own such instances and reassumes the exigency of this “verticality in his theory of indetermination”, in his love, as he said, of the “vagueness”. A mount, the Tabor, gives the entrance to the infinite (apart from the obstacle of the “barriers”, that’s pure corollary and fictitious adding that “serves” to hide the total vision and the panic) and Recanati, placed in the hill, aids to the eye to perceive the turn of the horizon: “and there, the sea to the distant spot and here, the mount”. All this phenomenology of the perception from the heights allows a sweet shipwreck (“and to be shipwrecked is to me sweet”) that’s the one of the writing (“in this sea”) that’s either superior or it isn’t (or she’s diverse and another one: and I think about the prose, as much as to mention its own horizontal typesetter formalization that “doesn’t balance” as it requires the poetry, on the contrary, and on which Ungaretti, more ahead, will know something).
Leopardi needs a place from which contemplate (in form of monologue, song, memory, etc) but not any place, but one particular that allows the “vastness” either of the imagination or of the memory: the isolation, determined by the height, is a golden condition for the liberation of the fantastic and invested forces, since only the height “ “gets out of focus” and “indeterminates” the objects, almost destroying them or crushing them or dividing them in order to annul them to recover them later diversely (see the interesting indications on the subject of the “distance” and the “distant thing” contained in the already mentioned zibaldon treasury and, more in particular, the “mechanics” suggested by Leopardi to any writer, as a pedagogy, to exercise in this dynamics: in order to write good poetry it’s possible to start simply – he says- by observing some objects, a tower, for example, but later it’ll have to be annulled, imagining one second behind the first one, and one will have to write about this “second one”). The technique to which he alludes seems clear, and it’d have to be admitted that the Mountain that we speak about develops, accelerates and livens up by this “method”, and by, “distancing” itself from the objects that can be seen at a distance, taking as a point of reference a public notary placed in a high position of “reading” (also in physiology some “annoyances” are due to the dizziness).
But the Mountain, our mountains, more or less sibylline, also mean to Leopardi (in his texts the term that appears is “mount” and not mountain, mainly because of an "acoustic smoothness" and modular construction) I think a diverse sense, that only the present critic (from almost twenty years ago) has revealed: I talk mainly about “the philosophical" soundings, about certain principles of "symbolic" critic of Prete, but also of Galimberti, tending to make emerge a "poetic thought" and therefore, a whole new argumentative substance from "our" infinite author on one side. And on the other side, (if it’s this way, as I believe that it’s) a different and more complex "figure" that partly restitutes or enriches what we already knew of him and (in which to be referred to our monologue) puts the accent on the "visibility" like element of fundamental cognition of the world. The mountain, then, as height, as "natural top", isn’t the unique one in authorizing the poetic speech (even if it stays as the election place), but that enters into the "glance" of who writes about it and thinks about it, "together" with so many other fractions of the landscape (I speak of hills, plains and streams, small cities, “beaches” or - as he writes "sores") about a unicuum that determines how high is this "glance" and how its "eye" is mountaineer: or even, "higher" than the natural height of the mounts, even than those of the "rough Apennines" (see “The dominant thought”).
The circle of the poetry is opened (or closed) with the observation that such way "of seeing" is an endogenous structure of each writer; the bigger it is, the more its "glance" will be high and infinite, and the more it will perceive the relation between the "parts", between the segments of the landscape, discovering thus a relation of harmony (not in a diverse way from which that pre-Romantic of Kant had affirmed when speaking of the aesthetic). The solitary sparrow, then, isn’t on a mountain, but on its twin geometry, the tower; its song ("and the harmony roams by this valley") speaks long on the function of the poetry, on the glance of the poet, on his writing "destined to roaming and to the hope, like Ginestra, the flower of the desert (even “desert "of the life) that’s born and blooms in the edges and skirts of a vulcanic and strongly expressive mountain: the Vesuvius, even in the "back of the formidable mount".
This flower is born at a height from which only single verses are generated like those of that eye that perceived the great power of those "blue mounts". That are our dear Apennines that transfer us to a later quota of universal breathing: the praise of the Mount is therefore the praise of the poetry itself and its enviable altitude, of its flight that wanders as an albatross or over the small awning of some baudelerian interminable ship or throughout the "beautiful" and "smiling" countryside of Marche. |
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