Maurizio Ferrara [communist intellectual] says I am nostalgic for a “golden age,” you say I am nostalgic for the “little Italy of once upon a time” [l’Italietta]: everyone says I am nostalgic for something, and they speak of this nostalgia in negative tones, so as to make it an easy target.Is the adult the one who has achieved middle class comfort, or the one who has never known it? Is it the one who has made choices or the one who never had them in the first place? Is it the one who knows the pain and anxiety of deciding his own fate or the sorrow and light-heartedness of submitting to a fate that was given and unchangeable? And, most importantly, is it possible to discover, by relinquishing certain types of ambition and holding fast to others, that one never really did have any choices?
What I am nostalgic for (if we are going to use that word) [...] is [the] unlimited pre-State and preindustrial rural world, which survived up to just a few years ago – there is a reason why I spend as much time as possible in Third World countries [...]
The people in that universe did not live in a “golden age” [...] They lived in what Chilanti has called the “age of bread” – i.e. they were consumers of extremely necessary goods. It was this, perhaps, that rendered extremely necessary their poor and precarious lives. Whereas it is clear that superfluous goods make life superfluous [...]
Whether I am or am not nostalgic for this rural universe is in any case my business. It doesn’t prevent me from formulating a critique of the current world as it is – if anything, this critique is only more lucid the more I am estranged from the current world, the more I accept only stoically to live within it.
Friday, June 22, 2018
The Age of Bread (Adulthood 7)
Apropos of the previous crumb, I present the following excerpts from an open letter to Italo Calvino, written by Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1974 (the translation is not mine but also not published; the translator chooses not to identify themselves):
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Many of us in this benighted world of choices have been born into a particular trade, declined to follow it, found something else and now consider ourselves reasonably happy, or at least grateful for the freedom that permitted this alternative. Yet in your final sentence you seem to say that that freedom is an illusion. What is that you imagine really happened to those of us who think we chose?
That you did what, under the circumstances, you had to do. That you did not create your life and your self by an act of pure will but moved within a set of constraints, personal, societal, ideological. This is, of course, obvious, from a certain point of view. From another, it is not. My thinking took a turn as I wrote the above post. At first, I thought: all this freedom of choice renders life empty and arbitrary. Then I thought, maybe the freedom of choice is itself an illusion: it is only the nature of the constraints that have changed, the mechanism more difficult to decipher, the determining factors more numerous, their influence more subtle and complex. But realizing this, and rejecting the rubric whereby our "choices" are categorized good or bad, perhaps we can rediscover necessity and tragedy in our lives. I have been trying to develop this theme further in a separate post, but have struggled to separate the crumb from the loaf.
Yes, freedom is a terrible burden. The absence of a judging Deity renders life so empty and arbitrary that we must replace Him with another master, let's call it determinism, that takes over His job of sparing us the agony of freedom. In fact, it is God who has inflicted this freedom on us by creating a Universe in which there is something rather than nothing. Oh, if only we could go back to that dark, comforting Nothing. But we can't (except by refusing life) so why don't we just say, like the retiring magician, "Now my charms are all o'erthrown/And what strength I have's my own/Which is most faint..." But better than nothing.
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