Maurizio Cucchi beyond the opaque rigmarole of things

The 'oneiric machine' is the true place of belonging, the 'refuge', the 'provisional shell', the 'unknown figure that speaks': thus the expression of a universe where the 'I', childishly, is happy and protected from the 'ghosts' and fears awakening as a 'nightmare of the real'. Of the pleasure of this situation of detachment from the world we have precise evidence, for example, in the linguistic and poetic use of the word 'vision': 'Another time it seemed to me to see/ a whirling of sinister clouds' ... almost an account of magical ascensionality, a seeing of the 'incomprehensible' world from above, towards a longed-for paradise, towards a 'happy rebirth'. The 'machine', therefore, had the function of being a place of 'passages' and for a poet flâneur the dream appears, now, probably more fascinating than the earthly 'crossing'.

Dedications and Devotions: the title, another significant passage and hem, is a book of secular prayers, where the 'master', the 'dear friend', the 'new father' stands out in terms of affective importance. In this scale of values and affections with a climax that goes as far as paternity, the figure of Giovanni Raboni is delineated with intensity and emotion: his walks in the city, his 'sober music', his 'absolute ear', of one who knows how to read poetry as if it were a musical score ... now a shadow, but a very vivid shadow, still to be heard and dreamed of. And further on, we will find the anything but 'slender myth' of the figure of Vittorio Sereni, who helped many poets to face and read the 'opaque rigmarole of things'. And this is a point of arrival: Cucchi opposes the 'opacity', the beloved 'habit' of the everyday, that 'sweet and harmless' mediocrity of the world, the real, to that mysterious dimension of 'sky and matter', places that have been transfigured into stylistic and linguistic duels: realism and the fantastic, high style and humble style, the eternal problems of poetry and language.

With Sfiorando l'afasia, the story of Sabatino, who suffered from 'word mania', is told in verse and prose. The interest of this character lies in the search for etymologies, in the obsessive excavation that also leads to frightening crossroads, when a word investigated to the point of exhaustion arrives at the opposite of its own sense: at silence or at most at the 'primitive mumbling', staging a sort of investigative nightmare that almost reaches a paradoxical form of muteness: the edge-abyss of the impossibility of communicating. Almost as if Sabatino, who also arouses sympathy for his constant doubts and hesitations, were declaring our substance to be made up of a sort of affabulation in the deepest archaic, right up to the "homo ergaster" and the emergence of sounds from before the dialect, as a prodrome to language, before, in short, the state of nature reached the state of culture.

And here Cucchi introduces Sabatino (could he be a double of our poet?) to the figure of Umberto Saba with the quotation from Words, 'Parole, / dove il cuore dell'uomo si specchiava / - nudo e sorpreso-alle origini'. The surprise of those verses - one would like to think of it as the other face of Ungaretti's 'M'illumino d'immenso' - represents a sudden discovery that Sabatino re-proposes with an adherence to reality, to everyday life, which manages to transfigure itself in the 'humours, residual roots/ sucking experiences' in a drawing of the world expressed by dialectal words, written on the flap of a postcard: 'G'hoo famm, g'ho fregg/ voo a cà a dormì...'. He speaks, here, the voice of the body which, going back to its origins, is at one with the voice. Saba is also present in the motif of 'honesty': the -honest reader‖; the -honest spectator‖. It is, therefore, the 'honesty' of being a poet, which is the courage of poetry: truth and fidelity to one's own inner and world view. Here is a possible communicative line expressed between quiet song and dissonant verse.

L'immagine, la parola, a section dedicated to the art critic Flavio Caroli, ignites an interesting novelty for the reader, even though Cucchi is no stranger to descriptions/inventions of this kind as we recall, for example, in Ancient Beasts paragraph of Syndrome of Detachment and Truce dedicated to the artist Teresa Maresca. Image and word mirror each other, creating a 'pulsating tangle' of dark and light; immobility and movement (Calder); the 'essentiality and vacuity of being' (Giacometti); the 'quiet vertigo' of Rothko's white; the "formidable tangle" of matter and its "imaginary topography" of Pollock, up to the "sack" of Burri, "poor fabric [that] resembles us" or to the "sudden suggestions" that overcome the "pervasive darkness" of Kiefer's Sette palazzi or to those Radications of Nava, in which the "illustrious" and the "very humble" meet: here is a hem of another genealogy: ut pictura poïesis! 

Mind Sky Matter, not only iceberg terms of poetry: we see its emerged tip, but deep down lies a world of poetic civilisation. In the final section, the rhythm of the verses also changes, now sinuous and aerial like a lied rhythm, not alien to acute dissonances, the observation of an 'extreme landscape', something that 'stands outside' and that is the final edge, where the 'clumsy observer' finds the 'chromatic contrasts' and tries, in the 'moved line/ as limpid phrasing' to go 'beyond every flat norm' (a different relative of Zanzotto's 'Mother-Norm'?). Certainly the norm can counteract the 'free vital floating', which makes the 'vile traveller' discover that there is no comfort in 'habit', as one might believe. The face that is 'imagined' at the opening of the book ends, finally, in a 'small enclosure' to escape the 'terror of exhaustion'.

But the journey outside the city walls was not in vain.

Maurizio Cucchi

The dream box

Mondadori, pp. 152, euro 17091.