that infinite part of the universe
that opens up to my mediocre eye,
I stretch my hand
to confetti of light,
frescoed on a plaster of darkness
in the wall of the immense.Perceiving in hands
its constant pulse
is comfort
to my immature sense,
removed, at random,
from the sack of consciousness.I feel hungry
for the fire
that gives birth to the Star my friend.I approach, wistful, a man of my crowd,
participating to the unique game,
that I still feel, but deprived of flame.
Commentary
Anassimandro, a 6th century BC philosopher, believed that fixed stars were nothing more than holes, that the light of the fire, located behind the sky, passed through. The poet Di Martino reminds us that every conception of the world, every idea, arouses, in our intimate, emotions that influence the meanings we identify in our existence.
The magnificence of the universe leads him to consider his own eye as a mediocre eye. We might perceive, in this feeling small, Psalm 8: “When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is mankind that you are mindful of them, human beings that you care for them?“.
The outstretched hand can be understood after reading the continuation of the poem, in which he considers the pulse of infinity like an affectionate nanny. This latter word lends itself to a double meaning. If we mean “to have as a nanny”, we have the concept of a universe that acts as a nanny to the poet. This allows us to understand the outstretched hand like the hand of a child, raised in an attempt to touch the stars. If, on the other hand, we intend to have “at the mercy”, we find the concept of a human being who acts as a star and then the outstretched hand is a hand that wants to caress the star, cradle it, and feels its pulse as if the star were a child of which, in cradling it, we perceive the throbbing of breath and heart.
The exact term used by the poet is not pulsation, but compulsion, which means push, impulse: the poet feels that the Star has within itself a push towards him: it’s a perception similar to that expressed in the poem on the Moon, by which he felt looked at.
The term “confetti” recalls the effect of an intermittent glint, a pulsing that makes us attribute the stars a vitality which is like a smile turned towards us.
Just as the moon was “painted in the dark“, the stars are confetti “frescoed on a plaster of darkness“. This background of darkness looks like a note of distant and hidden fear, it is the presence of death, which acts as a background at any moment of our life, even the most beautiful one. The poet does not hide this note which pollutes every human smile, but this, for him, doesn’t turn life to sadness.
In his relationship with the stars, the poet feels that a process of maturation, of growth, is taking place: this is the idea aroused by feeling immature; however, this growth is not only a necessary step forward: it is also the comfort of staying, stopping; in this sense the word “removed” can be applied to the comfort, rather than to “my immature sense”: it is the sense of deep comfort that is unfortunately often forgotten, due to the distractions of the crowd, to which the poet refers later.
This whole sentence contains two freudian terms, compulsion and repressed, as if to say that the contact with the stars recovers the poet’s contact with the depth of himself and of humanity in general, an intimate, hidden universe which is worth rediscovering and exploring, albeit with the necessary delicacy, prudence, respect, because it proves to be the source of intimate, sweet, profound experience of our human being and of the historical human community we are part of.
Removed can also refer to my immature sense and then immature does not mean non-mature, but primitive, primordial: daily worries lead us to remove from our consciousness certain primordial sensibilities, which wander, deep in our selves, until the contemplation of the stars recovers their right of citizenship and finally makes them feel comforted after the trauma of repression. In this sense “at random“, to which the poet makes reference, is the violence of this world, which, like a bulldozer, does not distinguish between beautiful and bad things, but it blindly removes all that is felt as an obstacle to the urgent needs of superficial daily living.
Consciousness is defined as a sac, which makes us think of an amniotic sac, a container in which our identity it is formed and develops. Then we can refer this sack to the collective consciousness, the others, who, with their being, help to define our identity, but also to hide what is considered an obstacle to banal social life. In this case the bulldozer is precisely the sack, the social sack, the sack of the banal social consciousness which each of us is immersed in.
Similarly to the previous poem on the Moon, in which the poet was always looking for scraps and on stealing, here he is hungry for the fire, a hunger aroused by the foretaste of the stellar beauty, but a healthy hunger than anyone should rediscover in himself.
In the last part we find what was a meaning of the sack of consciousness, that is, the sack of the only social game, here now called “crowd“. The man approached by the poet is the maximum anonymity, the mass man, a wheel of the game of gears that form the bulldozer that blindly invests and removes primordial sensibilities. Such a man makes him feel the pleasure of social play, but it is an empty game, deprived of the immeasurably deep and sweet pleasure that the poet’s soul had been able to enjoy while cradling the star and letting himself be cradled by it.
In these last verses there is a repetition of assonances between man, game (specially written in this more archaic form) and flame: the poet is hungry for fire and thinks he finds this fire in man, since it has a similar sound and even more similar is found in the game created by man; but it is a deception, in the end he must conclude that it is not so: flame, despite the similarity of the sound, is unfortunately not found in man, nor in game, but it is a completely different thing, which he unfortunately could only find by looking at the Star.
Additional notes
Contemplation of darkness with stars reminds me when I was in pleasant moments of solitude, contemplation of darkness, or of the sea, or of beautiful
countryside landscapes. I had the perception that, in those environments,
thinking of listening to music would have been like a blasphemy, a sacrilege,
because I perceived, that that environment, that sky, that sea, was speaking to me so intensely that I couldn’t ruin it, pollute it, with a piece of music, even classical music.
However, there is a kind of intimate conflict in this experience, because I look at the sea, the stars, the countryside, the trees, they fascinate me, touch me, they tell me something intimate in their calm silence, and yet my critical sense, my reason, tells me that, if I was ill, suffered or died, that landscape, those stars, that sea, wouldn’t have given a damn. I was nobody to them. Here is this conflict: the landscape touches me deeply, but I can’t help but also not accept it, because it doesn’t look at me, it doesn’t consider me. This can be connected to the poet’s feeling like orphan of fire. In the history of world culture, we have been fascinated by many things, even transforming our feelings into religion, but then we killed God. We killed him because, as with landscapes, we saw that he abandons us in suffering, we feel neglected, both God and the world don’t care about our being, our suffering. So we killed God, we killed the stars. Here is the conflict: where is the fire, which nevertheless touches our soul while looking at the stars?
The stars can fascinate us because slowly, as if they were walking, both with that trembling and because after a few hours they are in a slightly different position, with their touching us intimately, it is as if they were inviting us to forgive the fact that, if we died at that moment, they would not be able to do anything, they would not be interested.
But how can one forgive, what can be the sense of this forgiving? I have dedicated a specific post to forgiving and the conclusion was that forgiving essentially means walking. As the star walks and touches my soul, it touches it because it invites me as well to walk and, if I accept that invitation to walk, it means that I am forgiving the fact that in that environment in which I am there is noone who cares about me, I could die, no one would help me.
That way I accept the invitation of the star to feel myself as a subject, because, in the relation between subjectivity and objectivity, objectivity is the one that tells me “You can die, here no one would care”, subjectivity, on the other hand, is feeling touched by the charm of the landscape and the star. In that sense, subjectivity is like a pressing invitation to forgive objectivity and I can forgive it because, in this relationship, I pursue, I carry forward, a journey that is made of listening to subjectivity, which talks to objectivity.
This can make everything different. It is therefore not a question of neglecting or ignoring the evil found in the universe which fascinates us, but of transforming it into a dialogue between our subjectivity and objectivity. Transforming it into a dialogue already means exercising forgiveness, because dialogue means journey.
At this point we can understand why we can say that Jesus died while walking: because from the cross he said “Forgive them”. That means “I want to walk in understanding them, because they are killing me and here nobody is helping me, not even God (“My God, why have you abandoned me?), however forgive them”. “Forgive them” cannot come from an objective reasoning, but from subjectivity, from the touched heart which, in dialogue with objectivity, thinks “Everything here is lost, but I prefer the dialogue with subjectivity, so I say “Forgive them”. If and when this forgiveness is able to have a start, then we are no longer orphans of fire. We killed God, because God does not respond to the problem of evil, but, even after killing him, we can forgive him, or, possibly, especially in the perspective of believers, ask him for forgiveness again.
When we experience this, we are working to create peace in the relationship, the dialectic, between subjectivity and objectivity, which becomes a mutual education. Between subjectivity and objectivity no stable synthesis can be achieved, but it will be a continuous dialectic. Forgiveness is like this, there is never an arrival point. Forgiveness is a journey, a continuous reinterpretation, because the past, the offense, is not forgotten, but we work continuously, so that there can be an improvement in life, in relationships. All this is possible and is capable of attracting our “I”, our subject, our subjectivity, and then it can make us become fire.
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