Uncomfortable Questions

A story about the void left by culture

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The conference is on the first floor of a historic building downtown, one of those places they renovated and modernized to convert into a university hub. They keep it pretty well, it has to be said. I often hear people grumbling that "with all the taxes we pay," the chairs shouldn't creak and give way, and the projectors should work at the snap of a finger, but I'm fine with it as it is. There is an innate collaborative drive that spurs students, porters, and caretakers to do their best to guarantee that average level of squalor typical of all well-frequented and well-used Italian things. And this, I must admit, I like—meaning, it reassures me. At worst, it refines your taste; at best, it grounds you, it doesn't intimidate you.

Anyway, the building is historic, as I've already mentioned—on a March afternoon, it creates the illusion of continuity between you and those who studied right here a hundred years ago, which is perhaps the only implicit marketing strategy the university can invest in right now. But I, I'm sorry, don't buy it. My cynicism is foundational: the lack of roots in today's world terrifies me; it is the apathy of someone who, like me, has no fathers (nor mothers): neither cultural, nor intellectual, nor metaphysical. I feel sorry for myself and get depressed when I glimpse it within me; I recognize it as the root cause of my (our?) inadequacy. It is a generational trait that cannot be erased by the forced veneer of a good upbringing—when we grow up, will we ruin the world?

But none of this matters. The meeting with the writer is on the first floor, as I was saying, in a room I know very well, used as an auditorium despite there being much larger—if less sumptuous—halls. The room is packed, which I didn’t expect; the only available seat, in the middle row, is next to a guy with an iPad playing Block Blast, who gives me a blank, dazed look when I ask, "Is this taken?"

Naturally, I’ve been here many times, and not once have I failed to marvel—to put it bluntly—at its ugliness. It has nothing to do with the shabby look of the hallways, or the sobriety of the classrooms which, when hit by the sun at a certain angle through the (bacterial) accumulation of windows (filthy as they may be), actually become beautiful. In fact, the rest of the rooms, the ones most exposed to the daily crowds, depend on the outside; they breathe its air and are, after all, a part of it, because they function (that's just how it is) under the same laws: if the sky is a perfect blue (cloudless, marine and chlorinated at the same time), the squalor manages to redeem itself, it transfigures. In here, however, direct light does not penetrate. Don't go thinking it’s because of the concrete, which curls rhythmically in an intricate display of stucco, or the thick wooden doorways, or the medley of architectural elements (a sort of neoclassical pulpit juts out over the room, as if we were in a church). It’s because of the windows, or rather, the lack of them (from the "D'Annunzianly heavy curtains" I divine an '80s decadentism): a faint, reddish light reverberates everywhere without originating from any discernible spot, as if the walls were made of leather—yes, exactly like tough cowhide, but sherbet pink, its texture visible against the light. They have to turn on the artificial lamps, two ceiling fixtures (I think) and a spotlight; only barbarians mix yellow and white light, and here we are supposed to be at the pinnacle of civilization—yeah, right. Possessed by the god, they inspire lofty, pious, twilight thoughts in me. Only it, the box, exists, along with us inside it, as we magically recover—minus the migraine—our intrauterine vision: pressed against the mossy walls of the placenta, which is also something hard and soft at the same time, granting the mercy of meager light. Like the placenta, moreover, this room is built for two simultaneous and irreconcilable (and, therefore, tragic) reasons: to wound and not to wound, to delay forever our admission into the blue, and to expel you defenseless, when eternity ends, into its fullness.

It all started with a friendly delay; the writer is now in conversation with the professor and reading a few passages of poetry. The guest, who is not an academic, is highly self-deprecating. She peppers her speech with signs of humility, claiming to be almost embarrassed to have to speak about Dante in front of so many distinguished scholars; in reality, she is deeply cultured, perhaps the last offshoot of an old school whose background meant they truly read “tous les livres.”But no, I won’t let myself get discouraged, I try to be positive—sometimes, when I think of the declared death of our cultural world, when people tell me about the glorious humanism of the past that I never knew and that refuses to reincarnate, I feel guilty and ashamed. Guilt and shame: the feelings of the murderer, and of the one who emerged alive from the destruction against their will.

Having to read, having to educate oneself is painful; it is the experience of a laceration. It always, inevitably, forces you to confront non-being: what you don’t know, what you are not—what you are not yet and perhaps will never be. It is when the other is, and I must discover a lack of being within myself, that I suffer. It is the only pain I am capable of feeling to its very core.

Once the conference was over, back home, I found myself thinking back to the abrupt, out-of-context intervention by a guy I often see in class. It was about the tragic story of his mother, which I hadn't known: she has attempted suicide more than once, numerous involuntary psychiatric commitments, and now she wants to end her life through euthanasia. This sudden downpour of sharing had struck everyone dumb, including the writer, who, among other things, is known for her melancholia. It’s only natural: when your own absolute turns out to be relative, you short-circuit; you have to scramble for cover and admit that we are just like everyone else. My greatest pain is reckoning with the other—and yet, the other will have their hands full with me too. Woe to us when the pain of others stands right in front of yours and, while shattering you, protects you, compensates you as a victim in a way that is perhaps insufficient but final: for once, it grants you the role of the judge.

I don't remember the forced response that squeaked out; it was some botched platitude about the preciousness of life, which, in his right mind, perhaps not even he would subscribe to. But that isn't important. What matters is something else, which is that in that moment, I felt as though I were witnessing a brand-new phenomenon. It was the first time—not in an absolute sense, I think—that I had found myself so close to a pain like that, though I wouldn't even know how to describe it. I’ll use imprecise terms—schizoid, purely extroverted and barbaric, vastly different from the modulated, controlled pain I strive to make sense of within my writing. It had no business being in that room, that much was obvious. In that moment, truly suffering—it was plain to see—meant, more than anything, not realizing it, in the midst of people who instead, more or less, notice it all, by trade or by inclination. I, too, after all, always noticed it; I did nothing but notice it. And right then and there I was weighing my options: whether to slip out or try to stay, and comically slide under the chair in front of me.

There it is—a perhaps infantile urge, but one I cannot bring myself to feel ashamed of—is that, while I was there, I had felt a powerful urge to laugh. I admire those who seem endowed with infinitely greater self-control: to calm myself down, I have to reprimand myself with harsh, venomous words, I have to think about whatever depresses me most, aiming to sabotage my own pride. Perhaps I am nothing more than a child, but am I worse than the others? I wouldn't rule it out—nor would I rule out that the others are no better than me. I call myself by my name and I am just like everyone else. I am stupid, but not quite enough to not realize I am. I suffer, but is suffering from it amoral? I brush it aside; I have no sympathy even for those who ask themselves that question.

I know I should never find myself in these situations, because at best I end up looking insensitive, and at worst, a bully. I swear to God I’m not like that—it was a collateral tear, a sudden collision with a material so frank and unfamiliar that I felt its friction, and instinctively, it made me flinch. Yet, the more I try, the less I can manage to feel guilty. Perhaps if the tragedy is too glaring, the comedy stands out even more. Or maybe it was the fact that everyone, from first to last, pretended not to notice, though they absolutely did. Some were stiff as boards, completely frozen; they seemed (or were?) resentful. If you didn't want to burst out laughing in public, these people were the absolute worst. Like someone who, on principle, tries so hard not to laugh that in the end they actually get angry, and then they want to tear everything to shreds, bring down the curtains, pour gasoline, and set the whole theater on fire.

Once the awkwardness was bypassed, the emergency subsided. But shortly after that first intervention, another one follows. This time, a guy stands up and declares he has written two poems, accompanying them with a story about the circumstances of their composition. Once again, it's heartbreaking: more death, sick children, unspeakable things. To be completely honest, it felt like a pitiful drama straight out of a soap opera or a daytime talk show—yet here, there was no excuse of fiction, nor any dulling mediation from the unreality of television. Here, on the contrary, everything was real, everything was made of an obscene, sticky paste, without the plots and touch-ups used to feed it to us dipped in honey. But could we, who were listening so reluctantly, receive that tone-deaf tale in any other way? It was as if we were in front of a screen, as if he had gone to tell those awful things in some TV salon, on a show with Balivo or Toffanin. Perhaps if we had called for applause, we might have patched up some of the embarrassment.

But no, you see, I’m wrong. He is a pure soul; he has nothing holding him back, he knows nothing of our order of reality, and when he crashes into it, it hurts him, but then he forgets it—and what else do you call this if not subalternity, innocence, total innocence? The friction of the unexpected has worn off a bit, and holding back my laughter is easier now. Am I not allowed to laugh? One laughs in the face of sin when one knows what is incorrupt; one laughs nervously because one knows they will never even graze it. The guy recites his poems—he knows them by heart, which surprises me quite a bit; I wouldn't be able to recite a single thing I’ve written from memory. He wants feedback from the writer, she who, like him, has known Pain, and the result is a placating, somewhat perfunctory response. I don't know whether he walked away satisfied or disappointed, but perhaps those are categories that make no sense to deploy here. He is like the bodybuilder in Siti's novels, or—I can't quite decide—like Francesco Chiofalo, that half-bourgeois, half-streetwise character who went on Fagnani’s interview show on a Tuesday night, who I remember thinking bore an exceptional resemblance to Marcello. But I'm fine like this, without actually knowing them. Undisturbed, they transcend bodies, any body, while we just stand there watching them. It’s not the same thing.

He was speaking out of true altruism; he kicked things off with "if it’s any consolation, I too..." and concluded with "to remind us that young people suffer as well" (though the closing line didn't have much to do with the rest of his speech, nor with his poems). The writer, I think to myself once I'm home, is truly obsessed with her trauma. It's as if, having escaped repression, she wants to do nothing but talk about it, seized by a euphoria of remembering. You see the kind of results the medicalization of psychoanalysis has led to. Running through my head, somewhat inappropriately, are Liliana Cavani’s words on Levi: "I got the impression that Levi could, or rather, managed to, speak only about that period of his life, as if he had always remained there despite everything."

I don’t believe linearity is valid; I think it’s a deception and I want it to rupture, everywhere. I’ve trained myself to hunt it down constantly, especially when I write and when I think, and if I find it, I erase it immediately. I think ambiguity is a fairer, more realistic parameter, and paradoxically it comforts me—whenever I have to take a definitive stance on something, I feel uncomfortable; I can’t bring myself to believe in anything completely, not even myself. For me, the ambiguous is both a poetic stance and an alibi, hypocrisy a form of exhibition—if a liar blatantly declares they are lying, are they telling the truth or are they lying? Linearity and truth move in opposite directions.

And yet, sometimes something doesn’t add up, even there. Even the ambiguous can be too linear; it slips into place mechanically, becomes cloying. That’s how everything ruptures all over again. Sometimes, it has happened to me, you find yourself facing a truly incorrupt existence and you don’t know what to do. You don’t know if you’re just fundamentally incapable of chronicling it—and no matter how much you practice, you never will be—or if deep down, like everything else, that too isn't real, doesn't exist. Perhaps that, too, is an excrescence of the imagination, a simulacrum, and the Capital-O Other I believe I have access to is nothing but a dream, a projection, just as everything always is for people like me.

Of this I am certain: that unclassifiable subject we watched moving freely through the world was not a victim—and his poems were too immediate, too virgin or unconscious to be literature. But if by chance it happens that the victim manages to self-constitute, to ennoble themselves, whether one likes what they write or not, they certainly do not become a saint, and when faced with pain, they reveal themselves to be perfectly inadequate, just like everyone else. The mechanism lays wide open before me, elementary, perhaps too much so; the obvious was a chewy candy, one of those that grows on trees, with a natural flavor. We too, soaked in humanistic culture, already educated or in the process of being so, were in practice exactly like everyone else, subject to repression. Culture is not moral; humanism does not redeem civic values, not even in "victims"—on the contrary, it forces us into repression or sublimating invention. And bad literature (though for me it isn’t easy to decide), just like the pathetic sentimentalism of television or images from war fronts, is nothing but an uncultivated, subcultural product of the aesthetic machine of trauma. That, too, deep down, is an excrescence of our own.

On analogies, however, I must change my mind; if they slip out of your hands, they become insidious. Between now and graduation—and it ought to be liberating—my only concern must be my cultural education, making it as broad and deep as possible. As for ethics and politics, who knows; it’s not my fault, nor Pasolini's, least of all Dostoevsky's, both of them dead and buried. Exactly: I said we have no fathers, we are uprooted. Literature has nothing to do with morals; it is a field that devastates at night while sleepwalking, it does so because it wants to do so, but it is not accountable for its actions. It’s true that it is liberating, and no, it isn't an alibi: it might be an old refrain, but I still believe in it, I have to believe in it.

But let’s set that aside. Let’s go back to analogies—do they really always hold up? Even now, at the very end, I still refrain from naming that boy (I dodge autofiction; too much modesty). And yet, he must have a name, even if only a symbolic one, even if temporary and uncertain: if a name means installing a meaning, he must have one, even though I know it won’t last long. I didn't believe it before, but it is the encounter with him—which, to tell the truth, happened from quite a distance—that forces upon me, just this once, the necessity of making sense. That is why I am writing these few pages: to understand if a return to experience, a return to the other and to the self, is truly possible today. If reality has vanished, if there really is no reality outside of the image—and I do believe that is the case—then I, in that torn and lacerated moment, in that room that was melting away, must have had an epiphany. Brutal, terrible reality on one side, the spectacle on the other. That boy's story, his appearance, and his stammering speech are more akin to the photographs from Gaza and Abu Ghraib, which remind us that reality proliferates anyway, beyond the mediations through which we are forced to receive it. And photographs from Vietnam, and videos of the Gulf War, and perhaps, today, even images of concentration camps, are not the same thing.

I must make amends. I attributed a generational quality to a disposition that, as it turns out, I now discover has always been mine alone—I’ve lagged behind, which is nothing new. But I take reality (that boy) as a symbol: within him lies both the comic and the tragic, the gloss of the media spectacle and the sweetish, unbearable stench of death.

When it’s all over, I feel numb and my temples have already been throbbing for half an hour. I’m hungry and thirsty, but first, I brace myself and stand up, going over to cordially greet a few professors. It doesn't even cross my mind to mention what happened, and I sincerely hope no one noticed my choking back laughter. Then again, it must be said, absolutely nothing had happened. Nothing, absolutely nothing that I would be capable of recounting exactly as it had occurred.

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Uncomfortable Questions