The Sleeping Beast

 

Alda Merini was one of the greatest Italian poetesses.

Died in 2009, she was nominated for the Nobel Prize in 2001.

She has published many collections of poems, but her aphorisms are also very beautiful, published by Rizzoli in 1999 with the title “Aphorisms and Magic”.

She is acute and often cynical intelligence, without filters, like someone who has lived through the experience of insanity and psychiatric institutions in which she has been locked up for 12 years for years.

There are very notable ones. Then the aphorisms, more than poems, can be chosen and enjoyed at any time: they are like short breaths.

One of the ones I like the most is this:

“Before talking

with the others

falls asleep

your beast

secret.”

It's always amazing how certain verses, like some songs, and any form of art in general, sometimes seem to have been conceived especially for us.

Arrows are hurled into the flesh of our souls; even if this is only an illusion of harmless self-centeredness.

I don't know if each of us has his own secret beast. It is impossible to know what lies deep in our hearts; it's fair to assume that there are no souls without gray areas – at least I think so.

 

The Beast was the title of one of the very first plays I wrote when I was still in high school.

Nothing had ever come out of those drawers, even if many have read what I wrote ravenously when I was a teenager.

As I have already written, for me writing, like pen drawing, has always been a form of eruption, of scratches that scrape the bottom of my darkness.

With Photography I have reached the perfect way because nothing more than light can illuminate the night.

And this is: a scalpel incision made of light on the dark background of the surface (or cave) of the camera.

Even if, as Joan Fontcubertan writes in his essay “The kiss of Judas - Photography and Truth” (Mimesis, 2022), photography always lies, it is a continuous lie masquerading as truth, from the very moment we focus our eye on the viewfinder.

In the end, my obsessive search for color and feeling can be the turn-up of my darkness.

As Alda Merini still beautifully writes:

“You are such a bright light

that you have become a shadow.”

Therefore it is good to learn how to put our secret beast to sleep when you are not alone.

But also in our solitude, because it is in those moments that it becomes even more ferocious and hurts.

 

One day I will be able to write about Antoine D'Agata.

The photographer who made his darkness his work of art.

Even if a lot of precaution is needed and I still don't feel ready.

Because, as Nietzsche wrote: “If you look into an abyss for a long time, the abyss will also begin to look inside you”.

Italian version