Pubblications
Articoli
Editodame
A lot of the published Italian articles have recently been collected in a booklet by Editodame Publisher.
In this page you can read two articles in English. Other articles in Italian and in Russian are in the Italian and in the Russian page.
“Emily Dick”
published in Pro Natura, 1989
as she sometimes loved to sign her name[1]. A heterodox creature, an eccentric. Inebriating, if you get yourself hit; total. So that you have almost the impression that the word has no more reason to express itself further than Emily, because she has observed everything and communicated everything. Impression of a barrier, Miss Dickinson, of an extreme limit, of the last folly permitted before everything sank.
I have no intention, here, neither to draft a short guide to the New England poetess nor to imprison her lines in a critical speech. I only wish to propose some fragments of her exquisite naturalistic sensitivity in order to participate, with her and through her, in the hidden throb of things.
Participation which we too often omit to sink in everyday prosaicness while we should learn to re-emerge from it every time in a purifying fugue towards extension and perpetuity:
Inebriate of Air – am I –
And Debauchee of Dew –
Reeling – thro endless summer days –
From inns of Molten Blue –
While we should learn how not silence requests of love:
If I shouldn’t be alive
When the Robins come,
Give the one in Red Cravat,
A Memorial crumb!
and of sun:
Bring me the sunset in a cup
and of minutiae:
Write me… how many trips
The Tortoise makes
While we should shatter obviousness in order to re-create small and industrious worlds:
Bright Flowers slit a
Calyx
And soared upon a Stem
Like Hindered Flags –
Sweet hoistered
With Spices – in the Hem –
again:
The Grass… has…
Butterflies to broad
And Bees to entertain…
again:
A Spider sewed at Night
Without a Light
Upon an Arc of White
Operations – these which we should learn – that do not burn themselves out, but that mould us into a new way of feeling and that push us towards an availability to perceive the matters of the universe, to love them by making them deeply ours. And it is through this very brightness we must need ourselves in order to substitute the responsibility, the fight, the “strength of loving” to the aboulia.
As a conclusion let’s read Emily once again and feel at one with her meditation in order to be able to “set out leaving a clean place” behind us:
If I can stop one Heart
from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain
Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in vain.
About Vegetarianism
published in Pro Natura, 1987
When I found myself face to face with the great proposal of vegetarianism, I tried to agree to it several times but with no success. Yet I could not eat meat “with a sort of mysticism”, as Furio Allori proposes in his article on n. 133 of this Review, because I felt an unspeakable sense of guilt. Only after aver a year of a stubborn trying, time and time again, I achieved my objective: I have been completely vegetarian far seven months. This victory has conferred to me a decidedly less selfish view and has led me to the perception of myself as a more responsible citizen of the present age. I have found sometimes tacit and other times manifest encouragements to reach the aim I have set myself in the examples of the Gandhis and the Schweitzers, in contacts with those who have been vegetarians far a long time and in this Review which has featured articles about this very contemporary subject from a long while.
After achieving my goal I have wished to speak to as many people as possible about the subject in question. A sort of sampling without any pretence of casuistry just to know people’s attitudes towards the problem. From the more superficial and not interested people I have heard definitions such as: “Vegetarianism is a mere fashion” or “Vegetarianism is a diet to lose weight”. I have also met people who are more attentive to the question but who shift the terms of it: vegetarianism cannot concretely help to solve the problems which afflict our society. Some time ago, for example, a friend contended that in order to be less selfish you must do something real far the society (to work for the handicapped, the old, etc.). With visible work of this nature, one feels fulfilled, whilst vegetarianism would certainly not turn us into aware and active citizens of our time.
In my opinion doing one’s utmost for sick, handicapped, or old people gives more tangible and satisfying results because they are obtained in a short time. Yet being a vegetarian does not exclude becoming available under other labels. No, on the contrary, vegetarianism is one step on the ladder leading to the indiscriminate love far all creatures and consequently to sentiments of non-violence. Because if I feel tenderness for the lamb trotting still unsteady after his mother or far the bird flooding me with his songs, so I must be consistent. My love can not and must not remain a purely aesthetic love, but it needs to be realized in a proof: not to kill (just in consideration of the fact that man can live according to a vegetarian diet). Vegetarianism is a very slow path, a long-term help, an armless struggle which proposes an ambitious aim to itself: disarming man from selfishness and violence inherited from ancestors. I do not know if “we shall all be there” in the end. If it is not like that, perhaps we shall not be “satisfied”. Yet, we shall not have to question our right to proselytize. In fact trying to get to the root of man in order to extirpate violence and selfishness is a right cause. That is the point. The good never gets lost and the effort to discover the existence of the Idea (even if we could not attain it directly) will remain in the collective memory of the future prehistory which will be involved in our own self-destruction or which will start the journey towards the catharsis.
