To understand the Mystery, we should also take a closer look at all those books that Pasolini read with frenzy, starting from the work by Freud mentioned earlier, which provided him with the most appropriate linguistic tool for saying the unsayable about his own death:
Jokes and Their Relation with the Unconscious. But Pasolini's "witticism," though it comes prepared by thoughts arising from the unconscious, is left to the workings of the unconscious only for a moment, and is then immediately delivered back to the conscious self in order to "take pleasure in it." But it would be necessary to write an entire book about Pasolini's irony, which in practice coincides with his witty work on jokes, for his irony subverts and makes ambiguous all his verbal language from
Poesia in forma di rosa (Poem in the Form of a Rose) onwards.
One should certainly also re-examine his acute investigations into such fields as psychoanalysis, ethnology, cultural and religious anthropology, linguistics, the history of myth, of gnosis, etc. Pasolini himself bears witness to the importance of such knowledge in the working out of his "Project and Mystery": "In my polemical clashes and discussions with my fellow
literati, it always comes out that they are systematically without any idea of ethnology and anthropology (which I have, neither as a professional, nor as an amateur, but simply as a man of letters who has for a good reason chosen to read such books)."
His encounter with Russian formalism, and in particular with Vladimir Propp, was decisive. Propp "injected" into Pasolini's linguistic-existential project a series of combininatory rules that make his mythical tale something that is narrationally "preordained from the beginning of time." This operation of Pasolini's, in the context of the structuralist investigations of the early 1960s, met with interesting developments (and possibilities for contamination) in the semiological perspectives of Roland Barthes, Bremond, Todorov, Genette (and to some extent also Umberto Eco). By the way, it was by making use of one of Barthes' formulas ("thriller of intelligibility") that the poet-director defined his own work (the mythical tale) as "a purely intellectual mystery story." By this, he meant to point out to us that the subject/object to be placed at the centre of the detective story that for more than twenty years has defied solution should be sought in "searching" and in the "coordination of clues."
Cryptic Language
At this point, in order to understand fully the linguistic-expressive strategy of Pasolini, we must face the problem of his cryptic language - indeed, his "cursus of cryptic language." These cursus - which are nothing but the formulas regarding the mystery repeated throughout his poems at almost regular intervals - have always been ignored ever since they appeared officially in La reazione stilistica (The Stylistic Reaction) in 1960. Pasolini wrote:
"They don't know that it is death itself/ (their alibi as Catholic servants)/ that undoes, corrodes, twists, distinguishes:/ even language./ Death is not order, proud/ monopolists of death,/ its silence is too different a language/ for you to be able to take advantage of it:/ right around it whirls/ life [...] And language [...] fulfills itself, let no one forget it,/ with what will be, but is not yet."
Therefore, the author's language, both spoken and written, "together with all the infinite non-sign languages," including the pure language of his natural living presence - the synthesis of all these languages, "which is above all an Example," "fulfills itself (this is Pasolini's meaning) with what will be, but is not yet": his martyrdom at Ostia, which is the language of action.
Ignoring his linguistic project, people have even passed over, and not seen, the passages in which Pasolini warns his readers that he is talking in a sort of personal jargon. They have done the same with those passages where he tells them, albeit with the duplicity of humour, not to let themselves be distracted by the "phoneme," but to follow the logical connections of the "semanteme."
But so it is: the translator of Una disperata vitalità (A Desperate Vitality) for the French publishing house Gallimard of Paris (and this is just one small example) eliminates from the text the introductory words placed between parentheses at the beginning of the first section in which Pasolini anticipates the real subject that lies at the heart of his writing: "...a first, true idea of death" (my italics).
Nor is this all. Some literary critics, who have not grasped the funereal nature of the verses in the eighth section of the same poem - the verses are arranged in an unusual manner around a central axis, as in an insciption for a tomb, because in them Pasolini is prophesying his own death at Ostia - have, in reading the adjective "Psicagogica" ("Psychagogic") (which obviously stands for a psychagogical ceremony), let themselves be carried away (as Pasolini says) "by the seduction of the music", that is, by the phonetic vortex of "Analogica", "Logica," and then again "Psicagogica." They have not noticed that the psychagogic ceremony that the author is speaking of is to be understood as a "placation ceremony," by which, in the ancient Mediterranean civilizations, the soul of the departed was led to the underworld. Indeed, Pasolini, when he solemnly states that "Now is the time of the Psychogogic" means that the time has come for him to think concretely about his death ("on the shores of the sea [of Ostia]/ where life begins anew").
It should be also pointed out that one of those critics, in his preface to the American edition of some of Pasolini's poems (Pantheon, New York, 1982) - including "Una disperata vitalità" - endorses the translation of the term Treni (from the Greek Threnoi, funeral laments) in its first dictionary meaning, as "trains" (means of locomotion). In this way the poet's original verses "E' cosi che io posso scrivere Temi e Treni e anche Profezie" come out in English like this: And so I can write musical themes and trains (direct or local ones?) and also prophecies.
Now, since the same error was made also by the French and Spanish translators (who did not even understand the meaning of "Temi", which is "Examples" in the sense mentioned above, corresponding to the fourth meaning in the Italian dictionary), we must ask why this is so. The answer can only be: Pasolini's words were interpreted literally because none of the translators (or their consultants) had any inkling that the poet-director's discourse is based on the organization of his own death (understoood as the celebration of the myth of death and rebirth, on one side and on the other, but jointly, as a linguistic structure).
Organizzar il Trasumanar
Pasolini himself confirms this organization in one of his usual formulas, composed of two verbs joined by the conjunction "and": "Trasumanar e organizzar" ("Transhumanize and organize"). (Freud informs us that this is a technique of wit; being based on the tendency to save effort, it makes use of the maximum concision of expression.)
Asked by the French writer and journalist Jean Duflot about his activity as a director "attracted more by myths," Duflot says, "than by political engagement," the Friulian writer, in the above-mentioned interview of 1969, answered as follows: "...the more I study the mystics, the more I discover that the other side of mysticism is 'doing', 'acting', action. Moreover, the next collection of poems that I publish will be called Trasumanar e organizzar (Transhumanize and Organize). By this expression I mean that the other side of "transhumanizing," that is spiritual asceticism, is organization."
And, in his personal jargon, Pasolini asks the reader to read his formula in reverse, starting from the "other side" of the stylistic system, with "organizzar." In this way the expression becomes "organizzar e trasumanar." But here the co-ordination existing between the two verbs (which, as in every hendiadys, express the same concept) re-establishes the reality of things. The intransitive verb "trasumanar" (the word comes from Dante, and means to undertake an action beyond human capabilities) becomes a verbal noun, preceded by the article "il", and is subordinate to organizzar.
In the end, this is Pasolini's message: "organizzar il trasumanar" ("to organize the transhumanizing"); the author, summing up in a nutshell the program (or the project) for the second half of his life, addresses it to himself in the form of a "self-exhortation in the infinitive." This formula - announced, one should note, in Progetto di opere future (Plan for Future Works) - is a stylistic system in perfect semantic and formal (visual) harmony with the subtitle of Petrolio (Petroleum), "Progetto e Mistero" ("Project and Mystery"); this, in its turn, and for the same "reasons of chronological priority" governing the terms of the hendiadys, becomes "Progetto di un Mistero" ("Project of a Mystery").
However, after this longish but necessary digression, let us now return to the reasons that led the poet-director to make use of an ambiguous kind of language in talking about the project of his death.
Pasolini knew very well that the performance of the myth involves a long ritual. In the case of a "poet intent on his specific work," the ritual had to consist basically in the "prophecy" of what the poet himself calls (not by accident) the "movements of approach to the sacred enclosure": the first intuitions, the changes in strategy, the search for given conditions, and also - why not? - some second thoughts as to time and place. The time and the place are of capital importance. Mircea Eliade tells us that the performance of the myth can be carried out only in autumn or winter, on a holy festivity, at night. The writer is killed not only on a Sunday, not only in the night between All Saints' Day and All Souls' Day, but also at Ostia, a place that also means a sacrificial victim: the "host" that the priest consacrates (with his words) during mass.
Ostia, therefore, is a holy place par excellence;
the football field by the sea bounded by a paling and by a metal-wire fence;
the stick, or bar, or board (the mythical weapon used by Cain, the first farmer, to kill Abel, the old gatherer);
the crushing of the victim's breast (exemplified in Medea) as an operation similar to the crushing of wheat (Frazer):
a Sunday that coincides with the day of the dead;
the "Boy God with curls on his forehead [...] who comes to act as your mother" (to kill you and let you be born to another life);
all these aspects of the rite were announced by Pasolini in his works, and "summed up in symptoms that have meaning only for those in the know." As he said, for example, in Preghiera su commissione (Prayer on Commission): "I have a poetic idea of the grass. And I know the excess of poetry. That's why I have commissioned some verses for my consacration(!)"
One should pay close attention to the exclamation point. It is put there to emphasize the scandalous revelation, but is kept suspended by the parentheses, because Pasolini, at the time of writing these words, was still alive; and his consacration as a poet who is "more modern than any modern" was still uncertain. What should instead be fully clarified - for otherwise the exclamation point would be merely a wishful presence - are the meanings of the expression "I commissioned" and of the noun "verses."
I have said above that, in the kind of cryptic language used by Pasolini, the word "verse" (as in poetry) essentially means "death," though it always combines two convergent meanings; so that when Pasolini, in his Poema per un verso di Shakespeare (Poem for a Verse by Shakespeare), prophesies to himself, "You will go off in a verse," he means, "You will die making poetry, you will express yourself with your death ("Either express oneself and die..." etc.).
This is confirmed - in a violent and sarcastic way, because it was addressed to all those who today cannot or do not want to understand - by the second section of Una disperata vitalità (A Desperate Vitality). In the expressions in italics placed between brackets, Pasolini announces: "...I represent myself in an act - without historical precedent - of 'cultural industry'". When deciphered, this means: "...I represent myself in a cultural rite (exclusive and very different from the cultural industry) which, on the linguistic-expressive plane, is without historical precedent." And then, coming down "with a clean cut," we find the verse that in an instant illumination could open and close the subject: "I, voluntarily martyred...". Here it seems to be just a clever remark; instead, it is a brutal and scandalous "Comuniqué to ANSA."
But then, to clarify matters, in replying to an ideal journalist who asks him what he is doing, he adds: "Verses, I write verses! verses/ (damned idiot [he thinks in silence to himself],/ verses that you don't understand since you have no/ notion of metrics! Verses!/ [and then out loud] verses but NO LONGER IN TERCETS!/ Do you understand?/ This is what matters: no longer in tercets!"
Here the verses (no longer in tercets) are the expression in the plural of the verse of Shakespeare that we have already met, as well as that of the self-prophecy, "...you will go off in a verse." The specification "no longer in tercets" (the ones written many years earlier in Le ceneri di Gramsci [Gramsci's Ashes]) aims both to point out the scandalous formal novelty of the event and to reinforce the meaning of the word "verse" as a metaphor for death.
Thus "verse" takes its place alongside the other metaphors scattered throughout his other works: words such as "editing," "shining nothing," "abjuration," "freedom," "free will," "alternative of libido and sanctity," "radical rejection," "glimpse into the future," "ugly bird sleeping" ("The Verse then placed its claws, and tore to pieces"); in every case the author's death/montage works first to coordinate and then to re-order them logically in accordance with the Teoria delle giunte (Theory of Linkages) expounded in Empirismo eretico (Heretical Empiricism). And it is precisely in his Empirismo that Pasolini defines and exemplifies with divine irony (never grasped by anyone, so far as I know) what he means by the true poet. Let's hear what he says:
"While a poet is recognized by a 'verse', it is not possible to recognize a director by a 'shot' or by a few shots: it is necessary to have at least an entire sequence." Here the shrewdness, which causes "wonder and enlightenment" (Heymans) in the reader, derives from the double meaning of the word "verse," which here, in a strict jargonish coherence, has the metaphorical meaning underlined by this brazen note: "It is a commonplace."
So much for the Verse. As regards the verb "to commission," it is sufficient to consult a dictionary. Its only meaning is "to order."
The Great Gamble
However, the point is that Pasolini could not be sure he would be able to carry out his sacrificial project in the times, places and ways he had "prophesied." In a long period of time anything could happen. And indeed, in the above-mentioned Progetto di opere future (Plan for Future Works), the author makes some serious considerations on the unforeseeable developments that may occur in a life. Alluding to the performance of the cosmogonic creation myth (since his death would have been in any case a creation ritual on the artistic and cultural plane), he makes this observation: "If miraculously Chaos approaches a plastic clarity [of the Cosmos, naturally]...". After which - I mean, after the usual, long cataysis - he concludes: "If instead I come down with cancer and have to die, it means that the reality of things will have won." He is therefore aware of "betting a lot to win a lot" in this diabolical game of roulette ("in the second half of my life I have planted the plant of gambling"); he experiences this situation with alternating moments of creative joy and terror. A symptom of this state of affairs was the ulcer attack he suffered from in 1966.
Faced with the problem of "making manifest," of communicating to the world his "movements of approaching to the sacred enclosure," Pasolini had two possibilities: either to keep his Project secret, or else to communicate it to the world in the clearest way possible. Instead, he chose a middle way and, as he ironically explains in Appunto 43 (Note 43) to Petrolio (Petroleum) , he mixes the Project with the Mystery, "cancelling them out pedagogically." By this he meant that in planning the Mystery the actions of his life - those regarding the Project - would be communicated in a special language, whose meaning would remain suspended until the miraculous fulfillment of his death at Ostia ("To organize meaning cannot be done in words, but only in formulas").
By choosing this strategy, he is forced not only to use, sometimes, an "outlaw and obsolete lexicon," but also a jargonish and highly ambiguous language, which simultaneously follows two opposing but parallel tracks of meaning. In his poem Comunicato all'ANSA (Propositi) [Comuniqué to ANSA (Resolutions)], he sanctions his stylistic choice as follows: "Ambiguity matters as long as the Ambiguous One is alive." Here the Ambiguous One (Pasolini), endowing his death with the function of logically re-ordering his discourse, implicitly states that after his death ambiguity would have to be replaced by the greatest clarity: "The perspective of my "knowing as being" [of my life-work] can not be reproduced in the exegete unless it is heuristic." After his death, however, a commentary on his works of the traditional or usual type would not be sufficient; a well-aimed scientific research would be necessary. Therefore, someone, "once he grasps the truth," would always "be able to coordinate scrupulously the clues [left by the author] in order to arrange them in their real order of succession."
Thus, in the end, the ambiguous language used by Pasolini proved to be a necessary precaution. If he managed to carry out his Project and Mystery - as in fact happened - his works would be read (albeit only by a small élite of "spectators") with the additional meaning given to them by the gesture of death; if, instead, his earthly life were to be concluded without winning the existential and linguistic-expressive battle against "Conservation," his works would be in any case the object of an ordinary kind of exegesis.
The unimpassioned awareness of his situation as a poet is expressed in these verses from the first section of Una disperata vitalità (A Desperate Vitality): "Death does not lie in not being able to communicate but in no longer being able to be understood." Here Pasolini, although he is aware of the fact that, in adopting a very exclusive language, he is running the mortal risk of not being understood, nonetheless shows he is confident that he can communicate, in one way or another, with the "chosen few" that his esoteric pedagogy postulated. Death - his true death as a poet - would occur only if not even one of his spectators were able: 1) to enjoy on the esthetic plane his freedom to choose death (to express himself completely); 2) to objectivize his own enjoyment by reinserting the author's works into the realm of discourse - in short, by becoming their narrator. All this is expressed by Pasolini - but I say this as if en passant, in a note - by means of the prophecy that the Eumenides (the archaic divinities that defended the order of nature) address to Pilades in the tragedy of the same name: "And in the end, know, in the very moment/ when all will be clear [after you have expressed yourself with your death]/ TIME WILL HAVE WORKED AGAINST YOU./ You will be left with no recompense but the awareness/ that someone else will have to begin all over again/ on your stupendous but aging revelations."
And Pilades, as we know, is a stand-in for Pasolini.
Death as a Discriminating Factor
After what I have tried up to now to summarize, Pasolini's death at Ostia becomes a discriminating factor between two opposing interpretations of his work. Those who insist on reading Pasolini with the tools of traditional criticism are forced to consider his death devoid of value, or even - negatively - as the traumatic interruption of a frenetic literary and film career. But if a spectator manages to grasp the fact that all the "immense work" done by Pasolini contains within itself, as a linguistic structure, "the will to be another structure," and that this "will for form is the same revolutionary will of the author to create an individual stylistic system that contradicts the existing grammatical and literary-jargonish system"; if such an enlightened spectator understands all this, he will also understand that Pasolini, in his works, did not limit himself to describing ("in words," as the saying goes) his death, but he made the mimetic representation of it coincide with the reality - that is, he lived his mythical story in actuality, in the spilling of blood; if such a spectator is aware of this linguistic scandal, then he cannot help but put the death of the poet-director at the apex of his works, as a sort of lighthouse that illumines and gives unity to his life and thought.
If, therefore, there is today a fact that needs to be brought to attention, it is this: whereas for traditional literary criticism the death of Pasolini (whether it is a political crime or the tragic end of a homosexual) is totally insignificant with respect to his works; for the writer of these lines, instead - as for the "spectator who understands, who sympathizes, who loves and feels rapture" - it is the only key to the interpretation of Pasolini.
