Meta-worlds in Michael Mirolla´s Poetry. A Look at Three of his Poems in Light and Time (2010).
by Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias
In the poem “Naked Fifth” (in Startled Night, 2011, Guernica Editions) Elana Wolff calls light “the lip of time,” a metaphor suggesting there might be an entire entity – made of substance only poets can knead at will into some sort of corporeality – behind it breathing, even talking; or devouring anything standing in its way. The title under analysis today gives us that much and more. Michael Mirolla himself describes his writing as “a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction.” (Taken from his bio). Light and Time lives up to his characterization.
After reading Light and Time, I’d describe his style as Wow! poetry. Entering the book is entering a grid of images, those that may well hand you a key to a post-realm of words and syntax, a semiotic pathfinder I was challenged – and hooked – by. I see Mirolla´s poetry as a voyage to, I dare call, a “back-into-a-yesterday-future” experience. I also sense the novel and story writer in his poetry: his poems flow like dreamlike stories that need to be told.
A perusal of the poem “August: The Landscape Without You,” makes the reader think of an dream-inside-a-dream state where events and images happen in the poet´s head. From a sheer stylistic viewpoint, the use of epithets to boost such images and leave drill-deep impressions on the reader´s mind is called for, impressive and unavoidable.
Take “cruel light,” “dead afternoon,” “laser-blue petals,” “cryptic sky,” “choked meadows,” “emaciated mushrooms,” “insipid stream,” to mention a few. The reader will be confronted with personification/ technology/murky qualifying nouns all in once. The skein of epithetcharged realities bestows words with multi-dimensional portal-meanings.
The scenes´ “viscosities” limned by the poet seem to be “for a second… / for a splitsecond…” done away with; but such assumption collapses in the last two lines making the reader feel uneasy, wary and vertigo-trapped: “to swallow // himself.” Webbed in this state of self-swallowing, the previous hazy worlds return; foreboding cycles resumed in the poem and capturing the reader. One might pick loneliness leading to a supra-creative stupor-like state where the poet oozes lines away to startle the reader.
Another maelstrom piece is “February: Entropic Vistas on a Winter´s Day.” The very first line, “like a stutter in time,” is interplay of recurrence and fleetness, that is, repetition of an act conjugated with ethereal occurrence: two supposedly opposed realizations in time. The second line, “footsteps form themselves,” floods the atmosphere with eeriness and suspense. From lines four through nine the poet bombards the reader with no-verb sentences in a sheer free fall denoting multiple realities and forging them into convergence.
To me, the poem reverberates in static, stale, out-of-context immaterial instants, which in line ten shift dramatically when “A swan bursts” in and disrupts the metaphysical ambience. Factual reality, what is real and “normal,” is entropy in this parallel universe where “the skeleton of a ghost slips by… over the drone of atoms… cleansed of flesh.” I would ask Salvador Dali to paint some logic out of all this. The word cleansed implies purification, purging, thus hinting nuances of interpretation commingling with theological approaches in which flesh is deemed sullied and the spirit – the ghost? – needs to be rid of its material carcass so it can prevail.
Furthermore, is it an outer-space nature? A figment of a surrealist intense mind? Glimpses at a reeling, precipitous infinitesimal micro-cosmos anticipated in the film The incredible Shrinking Man? Another interesting perspective is the handling of nothingness related to motionlessness and to whether this is really happening. What is really spoiling the winter´s day?
One of my favorite pieces is “May: The Carelessness of Resurrection,” which peeks at a future that occurred in the probability of the past. The poem is an omen, deposited in flashbacks onto a series of pre-happening events. The last line, in simple present tense, “…walks with a swagger towards the deadliest stretch of highway” is premonitory and brings us back an imminent truth – to happen in the future...
The poem unfolds with precise description, a time-scalpel slitting the present in which the poem is told at a temporal divide when “Infinity goes both ways, from the fading moments of yesterday / to the endless days of tomorrow, / she slowly unfurls and settles; / but for a fleeting second, / in today.” (Taken from the poem “Infinity´s Stopover,” Hidden Brook Press, 2018, in the Bridges Series, Book IV, Where the Heart Lies).
Plenty of asyndeton to contribute to giddiness in orientation, generous input of epithets – a feat Mirolla excels at with conscious stylistic penmanship – coloring the moment down to the minutest poem-pixel, short sentence breaks, simple and dotted with periods to mark a change in time or perspective or even mood, stand out in the narrative.
The sentence “But the creek continues to flow beneath, fearful of confrontation. The trees disavow all knowledge. The birds croon and paint their nails,” is classic personification, which in this case unleashes a magic, unfathomable sweep overtaking the reader: realismsurrealism at its best. Dali, or René Magritte, would have loved to eternalize on canvas “The birds croon and paint their nails.”
Conrad DiDiodato stated that “Michael Mirolla looks into his art as into a language prism: light glances off many sides of the ´object´ at once, and time… is what attempts to hold it still.” (Taken from the book´s back-cover comment by Conrad DiDiodato). I have felt this overlapping mystique of light and time in Mirolla´s poetry. His meta-world creative writing floats in a crystal capsule that resists the test of time, and can be visualized thanks to the light he is able to deflect from black holes into his poems.
This is how he sees our reality, crisscrossed by that reality he generates –bubbling inside him – one we can neither see nor feel unless he unveils it for us. Thank you, Michael.
M.Sc. Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias
Associate Professor, Holguín University, Cuba
Cuban President of the Canada Cuba Literary Aliance (CCLA)
Editor-in-chief of the CCLA The Ambassador Magazine
Assistant Editor of the CCLA The Envoy newsletter
In the poem “Naked Fifth” (in Startled Night, 2011, Guernica Editions) Elana Wolff calls light “the lip of time,” a metaphor suggesting there might be an entire entity – made of substance only poets can knead at will into some sort of corporeality – behind it breathing, even talking; or devouring anything standing in its way. The title under analysis today gives us that much and more. Michael Mirolla himself describes his writing as “a mix of magic realism, surrealism, speculative fiction and meta-fiction.” (Taken from his bio). Light and Time lives up to his characterization.
After reading Light and Time, I’d describe his style as Wow! poetry. Entering the book is entering a grid of images, those that may well hand you a key to a post-realm of words and syntax, a semiotic pathfinder I was challenged – and hooked – by. I see Mirolla´s poetry as a voyage to, I dare call, a “back-into-a-yesterday-future” experience. I also sense the novel and story writer in his poetry: his poems flow like dreamlike stories that need to be told.
A perusal of the poem “August: The Landscape Without You,” makes the reader think of an dream-inside-a-dream state where events and images happen in the poet´s head. From a sheer stylistic viewpoint, the use of epithets to boost such images and leave drill-deep impressions on the reader´s mind is called for, impressive and unavoidable.
Take “cruel light,” “dead afternoon,” “laser-blue petals,” “cryptic sky,” “choked meadows,” “emaciated mushrooms,” “insipid stream,” to mention a few. The reader will be confronted with personification/ technology/murky qualifying nouns all in once. The skein of epithetcharged realities bestows words with multi-dimensional portal-meanings.
The scenes´ “viscosities” limned by the poet seem to be “for a second… / for a splitsecond…” done away with; but such assumption collapses in the last two lines making the reader feel uneasy, wary and vertigo-trapped: “to swallow // himself.” Webbed in this state of self-swallowing, the previous hazy worlds return; foreboding cycles resumed in the poem and capturing the reader. One might pick loneliness leading to a supra-creative stupor-like state where the poet oozes lines away to startle the reader.
Another maelstrom piece is “February: Entropic Vistas on a Winter´s Day.” The very first line, “like a stutter in time,” is interplay of recurrence and fleetness, that is, repetition of an act conjugated with ethereal occurrence: two supposedly opposed realizations in time. The second line, “footsteps form themselves,” floods the atmosphere with eeriness and suspense. From lines four through nine the poet bombards the reader with no-verb sentences in a sheer free fall denoting multiple realities and forging them into convergence.
To me, the poem reverberates in static, stale, out-of-context immaterial instants, which in line ten shift dramatically when “A swan bursts” in and disrupts the metaphysical ambience. Factual reality, what is real and “normal,” is entropy in this parallel universe where “the skeleton of a ghost slips by… over the drone of atoms… cleansed of flesh.” I would ask Salvador Dali to paint some logic out of all this. The word cleansed implies purification, purging, thus hinting nuances of interpretation commingling with theological approaches in which flesh is deemed sullied and the spirit – the ghost? – needs to be rid of its material carcass so it can prevail.
Furthermore, is it an outer-space nature? A figment of a surrealist intense mind? Glimpses at a reeling, precipitous infinitesimal micro-cosmos anticipated in the film The incredible Shrinking Man? Another interesting perspective is the handling of nothingness related to motionlessness and to whether this is really happening. What is really spoiling the winter´s day?
One of my favorite pieces is “May: The Carelessness of Resurrection,” which peeks at a future that occurred in the probability of the past. The poem is an omen, deposited in flashbacks onto a series of pre-happening events. The last line, in simple present tense, “…walks with a swagger towards the deadliest stretch of highway” is premonitory and brings us back an imminent truth – to happen in the future...
The poem unfolds with precise description, a time-scalpel slitting the present in which the poem is told at a temporal divide when “Infinity goes both ways, from the fading moments of yesterday / to the endless days of tomorrow, / she slowly unfurls and settles; / but for a fleeting second, / in today.” (Taken from the poem “Infinity´s Stopover,” Hidden Brook Press, 2018, in the Bridges Series, Book IV, Where the Heart Lies).
Plenty of asyndeton to contribute to giddiness in orientation, generous input of epithets – a feat Mirolla excels at with conscious stylistic penmanship – coloring the moment down to the minutest poem-pixel, short sentence breaks, simple and dotted with periods to mark a change in time or perspective or even mood, stand out in the narrative.
The sentence “But the creek continues to flow beneath, fearful of confrontation. The trees disavow all knowledge. The birds croon and paint their nails,” is classic personification, which in this case unleashes a magic, unfathomable sweep overtaking the reader: realismsurrealism at its best. Dali, or René Magritte, would have loved to eternalize on canvas “The birds croon and paint their nails.”
Conrad DiDiodato stated that “Michael Mirolla looks into his art as into a language prism: light glances off many sides of the ´object´ at once, and time… is what attempts to hold it still.” (Taken from the book´s back-cover comment by Conrad DiDiodato). I have felt this overlapping mystique of light and time in Mirolla´s poetry. His meta-world creative writing floats in a crystal capsule that resists the test of time, and can be visualized thanks to the light he is able to deflect from black holes into his poems.
This is how he sees our reality, crisscrossed by that reality he generates –bubbling inside him – one we can neither see nor feel unless he unveils it for us. Thank you, Michael.
M.Sc. Miguel Ángel Olivé Iglesias
Associate Professor, Holguín University, Cuba
Cuban President of the Canada Cuba Literary Aliance (CCLA)
Editor-in-chief of the CCLA The Ambassador Magazine
Assistant Editor of the CCLA The Envoy newsletter
A Question of Identity: The Proto-Giulio Characters in Michael Mirolla’s Formal Logic of Emotion and Their Relationship to Future Giulios
by Oswald Yuan-Chin Chang
Abstract
This paper examines the question of the connection between and among the various characters named Giulio in Canadian author Michael Mirolla’s fiction. The paper emphasizes the earliest proto-Giulio character to be found in the author’s first collection of short stories The Formal Logic of Emotion, and the relationship of that character with later Giulios, specifically those found in “Giulio Visits A Friend” and “Into Another Country.” The paper concludes that, while these characters are not the same character in terms of physical or even geographical description, they reflect the fluidity of identity as theorized by Mirolla and actualized in his writing — and can thus be called identical in metafictional terms.
Introduction
This article proposes to examine the connection (if any) and the implications of that connection or lack thereof between two characters, both named “Giulio,” in Canadian author Michael Mirolla’s 1992 short story collection The Formal Logic of Emotion. Specifically, the paper concentrates on two short stories in that collection: the opening one entitled “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence” and the closing one called “The Proper Country.” The two stories mark the first time that the “Giulio” character appeared in Mirolla’s writing, and serve as the introduction of what could be called the Ur- or Proto-Giulio from which other “Giulios” have cascaded down through the years.
While the two characters named “Giulio,” each serving as the focal point of a particular short story, do not seem to have much in common in terms of their physical make-up, actions, thought patterns and emotional setup, this article will argue that (a) they are in fact continuations of the same character, given Mirolla’s notions of the fluidity of identity; and (b) they fit under the umbrella of the author’s deconstruction of the meaning of human identity as something that is Lacanian rather than Cartesian. The paper attempts to achieve this through:
A. A look at some of the influences (literary and otherwise) that have led Mirolla to create such a character in the first place, and the theoretical basis upon
which the character exists.
B. A close examination and critique of the two stories in question (“A Theory” and “The Proper Country”) and this character as some type of Ur-Giulio, some type of representative of the author’s creator-creation-created complex; and
C. A linking of the two stories to Mirolla’s other, later writing (especially in a group of short stories published in various literary journals and magazines in which a character named Giulio continues to serve as the main creation, with emphasis on “Giulio Visits A Friend” and “Into Another Country”).
In the next section, the article looks at some general concepts having to do with fiction in the 21st century, and how and how well those concepts have been fitted into Mirolla’s writing. Please note: The author has granted the writer permission to access his unpublished manuscript The Giulio Metaphysics III, under which heading a grouping of “Giulio” stories have been gathered, including both published and unpublished short stories.
Metafiction and Identity: Some General Concepts
One of the major themes dealt with in serious literature in the late 20th and early 21st century is the question of identity and the connection between author and character. The underlying assumption in the majority of such literature is that the “self” is not a static object with some sort of essentialist nature. Rather, as Steven E. Alford stated, this self “is a textual construct, and subject to the difference and deferral inherent in language” (17).
The fluidity of identity within literature is a reflection of the indeterminacy of identity outside literature, “a social and linguistic construct, a nexus of meaning rather than an unchanging entity” (Kerby 34). In fact, an argument has been made that the self is nothing more or less than the very language in which descriptions of that self are couched. As Kerby put it: “[T]his identity … is not the persistence of an entity, a thing (a substance, subject, ego), but is a meaning constituted by a relation of figure to ground or part to whole. It is an identity in difference constituted by framing the flux of particular experiences by a broaderstory” (46).
At the same time, what this implies is that the notion of “knowing oneself” or of so called true self-knowledge is a contradictory one, one that can never be achieved. In the first place, it is understood that the “text” of that knowledge is a constantly revisionary one, one which is constantly being worked on: “We understand our self as the locus of our identity by telling ourselves stories, yet these stories’ criterion of correctness is not truth, but what we might call the adequacy of a meaningful narrative sequence” (Alford 22). In the second place, the argument leads to an unsolvable paradox: in the attempt to sever self from truth, we also sever our ability to know if that statement itself is true. As Linda Hutcheon has pointed out in talking about thinkers and literary critics such as Lyotard and Foucault: “These positions are typically paradoxical; they are the masterful denials of mastery, the cohesive attacks on cohesion, the essentializing challenges to essences, that characterize postmodern theory” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 20).
It is thus a double trap: there is the suggestion (only a suggestion as truth is no longer viable) that self-knowledge must always be deferred and pushed into a new place where we cannot go without altering that self and thus making it no longer self-knowledge; and there is the idea that, because we cannot prove categorically that self-knowledge is impossible, we will always continue to strive for it, hoping to find it over the next hill, as it were. As Paul Auster has his narrator say in The Locked Room, the third novel in his New York Trilogy:
We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another — for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself. (292)
Under these circumstances, defining a character’s autonomous nature, sense of freedom, and specific unique identity is not possible because these “are not pregiven or a priori characteristics but must be redefined within the context of the person’s appearance within the sociolinguistic arena” (Kerby 113-114).
At the same time, there is the strong inference that all identities are inter-connected in one way or another and, in some cases, contingent upon one another: “One cannot become ‘I’ without an implicit reference to another person, an auditor or narratee — which may be the same subject qua listener. ‘I’ functions in contrast to ‘you’ in much the same way as ‘here’ refers linguistically to ‘there’ rather than any fixed location” (Kerby 68). In the same way, attempts to stop or freeze an identity in order to examine it are futile and useless: “Interpretation, like understanding, is a continuous process with no precise starting point … interpretation has always already started” (Kerby 44). What takes place in these efforts to “pin down” a character’s identity is that simply another piece of writing is created, one which itself then needs examination and interpretation and which has in effect “created” a new identity. Rather than the modern split between self and other, there are multiple selves and others moving in and out of each other, forming, reforming, deforming.
According to Hutcheon: “The modernist concept of a single and alienated otherness is challenged by the postmodern questioning of binaries that conceal hierarchies (self/other)” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 61). This is similar to the notion of “difference” and how signifiers are grouped together (in Saussurian-Derridian terms), something that describes not just how a narrative might be put together but also how identities might be constructed and deconstructed: “Difference suggests multiplicity, heterogeneity, plurality, rather than binary opposition and exclusion” (Hutcheon 61).
Above and beyond this realization lies the notion of the ironic turn and the ability to manipulate a narrative and therefore characters within any such narrative in ways that create deliberate illusions and false trails. Once the notions of essential identity and truth are discarded, the playfulness takes on a life of its own. For example, as Allen Thiher said of Nabokov's writing:
Freud appears to be a quintessential modernist insofar as the unconscious, with its storehouse of time past, can be compared to the modernist domain of revelation,
waiting to be seized in the form of iconic symbols. By contrast Nabokov's selfconscious play with ironic doubles exults in the arbitrary relations that obtain between signs. There is, for Nabokov, no other discourse than this manifest play of autonomous language. There is nothing beneath this verbal surface. The novel's surface is all that the novel is: a self-enclosed structure of self-mirrorings, offered as so many language games, with only an occasional catastrophe to recall the void that waits on the other side. (100)
At the same time, one of the most obvious connections between one character and another, and between any set of characters and the author, can be found in the metafictional nature of much of the writing today. As Hutcheon stated: “What we tend to call postmodernism in literature today is usually characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overly parodic intertextuality” (“Historiographic Metafiction” 3). Metafiction itself has been defined as “fiction about fiction – that is, fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity” (Narcissistic Narrative 11).
This fits in well with the fluidity of identity and inability to pin a character down: designing a novel or short story around a Cartesian character is no longer possible. Rather, a postmodern writer “takes the inner division that results from self-consciousness and, by metaphoric extension, makes it a resource — namely, the subject of his fiction” (Westervelt 42). This, in turn, leads to a new approach to critical debate on metafiction, a debate that “substitutes a heroics of text and language for the older heroics of creative genius and imagination. The text … accepts the existentialist challenge to confront the lack of a center at the heart of language and to dwell in that void” (Woolley 460). In the next section, the paper examines in close detail some ideas behind Mirolla’s selection of a proto- or Ur-Giulio character in the two stories in The Formal Logic of Emotion that have a “Gulio” character as the main protagonist: “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence” and “The Proper Country”.
The Ur-Giulio Concept
The original character named Giulio first appears in Mirolla’s fiction in “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” a short story selected as part of The Journey Prize Anthology, comprising the 10 best short stories published in the previous year in Canadian literary journals. Later it formed the opening story in Mirolla’s first collection, The Formal Logic of Emotion (1992), and was listed under the sub-heading “The Giulio Metaphysics I,” thus implying that there would be more to come.
In the story, a young boy named Giulio undergoes an appendectomy and then the reader is given a whirlwind tour of his life — to the point where it loops once again back to just before he is about to have his operation. Thus, the reader does not know whether what has taken place actually happened to a person named Giulio or is something invented by him as he undergoes the operation, as he is being put under. The end of the story hints at something of the sort:
And he fell away, the vision of his friend an anomaly sitting there in that sun-speckled room, blowing his nose on blue toilet paper and holding a picture of himself in his hand. Now, where did he get that? But he fell away before the answer came to him. Perhaps never to awaken. Perhaps to dream forever. Perhaps to invent the rest of his life after all. (37)
Two elements that are explored much more fully in later stories appear here for the first time: (1) the notion that the attempt to pin things down, to analyze their components or to create some sort of formal system, is a doomed enterprise due to the self-reflexivity of human consciousness; and (2) that human identity is not as constant or uninterrupted or unbroken as we are usually led to believe or make ourselves believe.
The first hints of the inability of consciousness to self-examine itself in a logical or complete way comes early on in the story. Thus, after the nurse who has been taking care of him following the operation asks whether Giulio believes in God and then, after he nods, tells him he shouldn’t, Mirolla writes:
It was as if a blurred image had, for a moment at least, been pulled into razor-sharp focus. And then it was gone again — as if it wasn’t meant for him after all. For, when
everything else had been removed from that frame, what was left in the crystal-clear emptiness was simply his own confusion, a confusion that would hover over him, on and off, for the rest of his life. (11)
The title of the story provides the clue to the second part of Mirolla’s examination of postmodern existential experience: the fracturing of human identity. In a way that allows a mirroring back and forth of the concept (again in terms that resemble Lacan’s theories on the meaning of identity and self-consciousness), it is not Giulio himself but a friend he has known since grade school who proposes this idea: first that statues move when people are not looking (according to Baudrillard, the simulacra coming to life), and then that existence is not continuous (mocked by Giulio: “Discontinuous Existence, eh? That’s brilliant. Does it have anything to do with your theory of statues?” (The Formal Logic 21)).
In the end, the friend is placed in a mental facility “not for wanting to blow up statues but for actually believing he himself had turned into one. He would stand in one spot for days on end, moving only imperceptibly, face covered with chalk to make it look like alabaster, eyes fixed forward or forced back into his skull, as if in a desperate attempt to see inside himself” (Mirolla, The Formal Logic 14). The friend also never revealed what he had meant by “discontinuous existence” and it haunts Giulio: “There were times when Giulio actually believed he had discovered on his own what his friend had meant. But he couldn’t be sure. And the moment he felt sure, the seed of doubt was planted. It was as if someone else had the key to Giulio’s self-knowledge” (The Formal Logic 21).
The story weaves back and forth in time, one moment relating events from Giulio’s childhood, the next showing the birth of his son. Just before the end, Giulio is an old man lying on his bed:
But I am me, now. Now! I am not what I was yesterday or the day before or the day before that. There is no connection between Giulio today and Giulio yesterday,
between Giulio-lying-on-the-bed-creaking and Giulio-leaning-under-the-statue-singing. You fool. There is a point in time when there is no point in time. He felt a pair of fists kneading his stomach, fists needing his stomach. Oh no, those weren’t fists and they didn’t knead/need his stomach. Oh no. Those were the gentle caressing hands of his mother, the gentle caressing touch of his wife, the gentle caressing motions of his nurse. (The Formal Logic 35-36)
And then a little further on, it seems as if once more the lifelong confusion starts to dissipate (ironically in the form of a “fog” that allows him to envision what is not there, at least not at the present moment:
He could hear a voice droning, a voice as far off as the stars, as near as his own mind. A warm wind from the South Seas blew open the curtains. There, in the daylight, it was suddenly summer, the morning after school vacation started. The streets were full of children, shouting and raising the dust, Giulio’s unmoving friend among them; full of the milkman making his rounds and proudly showing off his new van, the van that had replaced dapple-grey Boxer, now in chevaline heaven; full of the street cleaner, sending forth a gush of cold water and mud across the sidewalk. Out of nowhere, an ambulance careened into view. A small boy, all wrapped up in blankets, was hustled by stretcher down steep stairs. A distraught mother huddled beside him, tears streaming down her face as the entire street came to a halt. Statues one and all. (The Formal Logic 36)
Giulio in “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence” comes across as an exemplar of Mirolla’s future Giulios, a proto-character with many of the characteristics and traits of the protagonists in collections such as The Giulio Metaphysics III. He is a character in the lineage of Beckett’s narrators from his novels, characters whom Wolfgang Iser says find it “increasingly impossible to conceive themselves — i.e. to find their own identity; and yet at the same time it is precisely this impossibility that leads them actually to discover something of their own reality” (174). Giulio explores some of the side roads and holes missed by the lead characters in Beckett’s Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. As Richard Begam points out:
For Beckett there is noepic struggle to make the past and present cohere in a moment of self-revelation, no grand effort to “unite” the “hero and the narrator,” to confront the man who ultimately will become “the author of his own story.” In other words, what Beckett gives us is not an autobiographical novel but its critical construction. (6)
Similarly, the story (and other stories in the collection) exemplifies what Beckett himself says about the irrationality and impossibility of literature: “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (Beckett, “Three Dialogues” 139). In particular, the connection between Beckett’s Watt and the Giulio character comes across clearly in the split between the ability of language to “capture” things, events or objects in themselves, mirroring the split in humans between what has been labeled the rational versus the irrational. According to Jacqueline Hoeffer:
In Watt’s scientific and positivistic thought, to distinguish between what can be said about an event and what the event really means is sheer nonsense. Yet Watt
persistently makes this distinction: he is content with an “outer meaning” which he can observe and make formulations about. But there is another kind of meaning, nonsensory and non-rational, indefinable in his terms, of which he is aware, though he purports to ignore its significance. (169)
In “The Proper Country” (which is listed under the sub-section called “The Giulio Metaphysics II”), the malleability and inability to pin Giulio down becomes part of the main thrust of the story. Describing the return of this Giulio (who, if he is connected to the Giulio in “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence”, must have taken one of those unmarked vacant areas along the fractal landscape) to “his proper country” (The Formal Logic 144), the story seems to gather together segments and fragments of a whole series of characters, time sequences, impossibilities, and absurdities in three-dimensional time and space, while at the same time freezing these “at precisely the right moment and on the first tick of 3 a.m.” (The Formal Logic 144). Reviewer Susan Wasserman describes “The Proper Country” thus:
The story unfolds in dream logic. The situation is a perverse version of Alice in Wonderland, as our hero tries to find his way home, out of this maze which comes
complete with people walking through walls, dead birds coming to life, an evil baby sprouting flippers and whiskers, and a village idiot brandishing his ‘Priapus-sized
penis.’ The protagonist is Giulio, presumably of the first story, but not recognizable as such. But, then, identity here is discontinuous. He feels like a stranger and yet is constantly greeted by people who seem to know him. (He observes, ‘This is all very familiar.., all too familiar. I know this place from when it wasn’t this place. Or perhaps from when it won’t be this place any longer.’) Mirolla pulls out all the stops: chameleon-like, Giulio changes character to suit the situation: at one point he is a doctor delivering a baby, then an amorous young lover, then a priest. (123-124)
Right at the start of the story, Giulio is confronted by an old woman in black (fate? destiny? death?) who puts the paradox to him. While he seems lost, not quite sure of his directions or even that assured of his own identity, she tells him: “I remember you. That I do. Just as if it were yesterday. Well, maybe not yesterday. Maybe the day before. Or a few days before even that. It’s all in your features, all in the blood, as they say. You can’t escape from yourself” (The Formal Logic 147).
It appears that Giulio spends the rest of the story trying to escape from himself — or from what others are trying to tell him he is. For, in the next sequence, he is confronted by “a day-glo vision on a skateboard … a young girl with unwavering green eyes” (The Formal Logic 148-149) who says to him: “Doctor, doctor. Where the Christ have you been? Come quick! They’ve been looking for you all over town. They’ve even sent someone out to the new excavations, thinking you might have sneaked off to do a bit more digging” (p. 149).
At the same time, as he is undergoing all these transformations (the final one being as someone convinced he needs to get revenge for insults to his grandmother’s grave), Giulio is exploring the underworld. Ironically, he does not do this in a methodical or conscious manner but rather subconsciously, in keeping with the old ideas of the Id as the manufacturing plant for irrationality, as the source and fountain of those interstices in formal systems that cannot be captured — as proved by Kurt Gödel. Giulio is enticed into a basement by the coolness of the walls and the smoothness of the stone stairs:
Somewhere there is the sound of water trickling, a gurgle like a cut throat. Ahead, pitch-dipped torches provide a dim, unappetizing light. He steps into a vast cavern-like room, green around the edges. Along the walls, a line of thick bones dangles from the ceiling, picked clean, save for a light, grey covering that turns out to be mites; outsized barrels powder beneath his fingers, their metal hoops balancing like pendulums for a moment before the final collapse. The sound of water is nearer now and he makes out the source at last — a low, snaggle-toothed well, its sides caved in, out of which a furtive stream flows. Or rather pumps feebly and without conviction. Obvious efforts have been made to stem it, rubble piled in its path, rocks jammed into its eye, bigger and better barricades thrown up by each successive owner — earth, clay, cement, reenforced concrete. To no avail. (The Formal Logic 154-155)
In one of a series of climactic scenes (for they are all seemingly climactic scenes), Giulio is told to rush back to save a baby (the baby he helped give birth to as a doctor) from falling off an unfinished balcony. It is hinted that he is the baby and that its death would signal his disappearance from the scene. Instead, he finds a “slouching infant, fearless, sluglike, face smeared with watermelon and trailing a shitty, makeshift diaper. It measures the doorframe with its flippers, tentatively sniffs the air, whiskers twitching …” (The Formal Logic 168). But it is in no danger of falling: “The creature taunts him with arabesques and cartwheels, sudden feints and retreats” (168). Then, through this deformed infant, Giulio reads the thoughts of what can only be the warped and twisted mind of the creator of these impossibilities:
There is hunger in those thundercloud thoughts, a world-devouring hunger, stripmining the imagination to feed the fact of gravity … He sees then the cobblestoned
road, the caravanserai just off to the side, the village, the highways old and new all spinning out of the creature’s head, extensions of its shackled tongue. And out of the houses of the village is disgorged an endless line of secondary characters, characters that vanish on turning sideways … They’re dressed in their Sunday best with starched collars and polished boots, sun bonnets and stone-washed kerchiefs … They spill on to the road as if stunned for a moment, surprised to be there amid all the familiar, roughhewn faces. But they brush their too-short trousers, tug at their shredded shirt sleeves and soon forget the fact they’ve come out of a pulpy creature’s head, would laugh at the absurdity of such a suggestion … Giulio wants very much to warn them, to tell them to mind their tongues, to point out the tenuousness of the road on which they’ve embarked, how it buckles and lurches beneath them. But already the insight escapes him, becomes vapid and banal. What tenuousness? They’re as solid as they’ll ever be, skin drawn tight around their cheekbones, their skull and crossbones. I’m as solid as I’ll ever be, he says, thumping his chest just like the others. (The Formal Logic 169- 170)
But this feeling of solidity does not last very long. Giulio is soon caught in another state of confusion: in a church, dressed in priestly garb, and standing before a young couple looking to be married. Like all literate men, Giulio seeks the comfort of words in the belief they will help to make things solid:
Surprisingly, he knows their names: alb, amice, girdle, maniple, stole and chasuble. And those of the blessed linens. And the sacred vessels. But rather than freeing him, each bit of knowledge serves only to weigh him down even more. He feels himself literally sinking on the altar, literally melting away, liquefying, a sacrifice without a purpose being shaped for reasons not his own. (The Formal Logic 172)
Again, it is the vision on the skateboard who comes to the rescue, the girl out of place and out of time, in a sense, the deus ex machina of metafictional writing: “Her hair is sheared Mohawk-style and multicoloured; her make up in slashes across her cheekbones. He can’t be sure but it seems to be moving, shifting, as if alive” (The Formal Logic 173). This girl, who comes to him again at the end of the story to lead him out of the village, seems to exist in the interstices between what Hugh Culik would call the “rational numbers”: “Just as all the points on the number line are not named as ratios of whole numbers, so reality is not fully named …” (136-137).
Quite naturally, a wedding reception follows the church ceremony. Just as naturally, in this world, Giulio is called upon to defend the honor of his family and is taunted into a knife fight with another man. In the time-honored tradition of these fights, he kills the other man. But then, when he picks up the man’s knife and turns it on himself, he discovers it is springloaded and harmless.
At the end, he is back in the basement, only this time he descends deeper and deeper into the underworld, chasing after the always-glowing skateboarder: “There is movement along the damp walls. And voices, the soft, dangerous voices of the past. The voices are reciting. There is no beginning or end to their recital” (The Formal Logic 188). There follows a conversation with the skateboarder before she vanishes, an attempt to pin down the meaning of identity and identification:
They walk together in silence, guided only by the light from her eyes. The stairs turn into a low sloping tunnel. After a few minutes, they come out into a natural cave. There are primitive drawings and scrawls on its walls. Giulio stops before a pair of sandstone faces, symmetrical about each other. They are sad, as if on the verge of tears. Beneath them, the word “Tybicza”.
“What does it mean?” he asks, passing his hand over the upper face’s lips.
“It’s the ancient name of this town,” the skateboarder says. “But, wait a minute. You should know that. You were the one most responsible for uncovering these caves.”
“What are you talking about? I’ve never set foot in here before.”
“But the doctor has, hasn’t he? He was in here digging for archaeological goodies while his patients waited for the miracle cures that never came.”
“What’s that to do with me? I’m not any doctor, let alone the doctor.”
“No. Nor a young lover in an olive grove. Nor a shit-faced child. Nor a priest with a too-tight collar. And especially not an avenging angel, right? You don’t take responsibility for any of those things, right?”
“That’s right. I came here strictly for a visit. My visa forbids me taking responsibility.”
“And now you’re leaving, to live once more among strangers, the place where no one knows you.”
“Right again. I feel so much safer there.”
“I bet you do.” (The Formal Logic 189-190)
The final paragraph tries to present in visual terms what that moment must feel like when the self-reflexivity of human consciousness comes up against that immoveable force that we all must face at some point or other. Abandoned by the skateboarder, Giulio finds himself in absolute darkness, running, then crawling, then practically digging, within a tunnel that becomes smaller and smaller as he moves through it:
Dear God, don’t let me be stuck, wriggling in the dark — a parasitic worm unnoticed in the bowels of the earth. He scrambles forward on all fours. He can feel the walls
now closing in. He pounds at them, batters them till his knuckles are raw. But it doesn’t help. His breathing is shallow now and uneven, his heart threatening to leap out of his chest. It’s all over, he says. She tricked me. They tricked me. They led me here to my own grave, to this place where there is no moving, neither forward nor back. Best to curl up and let it all go. There is no breath left; the eyes bulge; the hands open and close; the legs spasm. Ah, death. (The Formal Logic 191)
But death does not come and it turns out to be a birth canal when “the tunnel convulses, constricts like a sphincter to expel him into the night air” (The Formal Logic 191). However, even now, Giulio is not sure of who he is or where he is:
For a moment, he imagines he’s still inside — an immense cave, perhaps — and those aren’t really stars up there but pinpricks in the ceiling. And the mountains behind him nothing but papier-maché. And the valleys a child’s diggings. And the highways giftwrapped ribbons. And the village a black cutout silhouette. (The Formal Logic 191)
In the next part of the paper, a further examination of the Giulio character and his development is made. This character has gone on to appear in a large number of Mirolla’s writings, including under different guises in published stories from The Giulio Metaphysics III collection, one of the lead characters in the novel Berlin, and the male lead character in the novel The Boarder. Here, only the Giulio of “Giulio Visits A Friend” and “Into Another Country” are examined.
The Multiplicity of Giulios
The use of a similar or in some cases identical name for a series of characters who may or may not have some obvious connection to one another is a metafictional gambit. It selfconsciously points out to the reader that these characters are a creation, one that at times can inhabit the same time and space (in the text, at least) and that they are thus not part of a threedimensional Cartesian axis. They bleed into one another, can be in two places at once, and, as Robert Kroetsch put it, “seek that timeless split-second in time when the one, in the processof becoming the other, was itself and the other” (593). Thus, what all these Giulios are doing is attempting to create a whole that is greater than its parts while at the same time not ever quite being all there. This is being done in a discursive area that is neither real nor unreal. To put it another way, one could argue that this set of characters neither fully exists nor does not exist and they are constantly moving towards something or becoming, always “escaping the constraints of self-presence” (Docherty 184).
The Giulio character is malleable, changeable and often carries on conversations with his creator. He vanishes into one textual hole and re-appears out of another. In Mirolla’s “Giulio Visits A Friend,” the character is goaded along and forced to do what he does not want to do — visit a friend who is dying of AIDS:
In fact, I [the creator speaking] practically have to drag him there, kicking and screaming, an invisible hand reaching in and pulling him by the scruff of the neck. He keeps coming up with all kinds of excuses: the neighbourhood makes him queasy with all its marble steps, red Camaros and bird-bath statues; the family hasn’t sent him an invitation; his friend doesn’t really want to see him; he lost the directions the last time he emptied out his pockets. (156-157)
At the same time, he cannot help but notice the drastic changes undergone by his friend:
“[T]he luminous quality of his friend’s eyes, beautiful, unnaturally large, almost bulbous and bulging like that of a stereotypical friendly alien − in direct contrast to the scarred and sunken cheeks, the open sores about the lips, the purplish splotches across the temple and forehead” (159).
But the creator is not done with Giulio yet, not done with the manipulation of identity, identification and classification. There is one more surprise at the end of the novel:
Nor do I allow him to look back once he has stepped outside. That’s strictly verboten. For, if he were to, he would surely notice the entire family — mother, father, sister, brother — standing at the front window. They are standing at the picture window, arm in arm, smiling. They are standing at the interior design picture window, arm in arm, smiling — and proud of themselves. So very proud of themselves. (162)
It is this Protean quality — in character, scene, conflict — that exemplifies Mirolla’s fiction, that makes it so slippery and ungraspable in its entirety. The reader may think he/she has a handle on what is happening and without notice the narrative rug is pulled out. It is pulled out not only from under the reader’s feet but often from under the character’s as well.
In “Into Another Kind of Country,” a first-person narrator Giulio awakes on a crosscountry bus to discover he cannot remember his name or where he came from or what his destination should be: “Toronto, I say to myself. Is there where I want to be?” (“Into Another Kind” par. 62) He only discovers his name when someone hands him a duffel bag:
She holds out one of the bags for me to take. It’s blue — one of those blue sport bags — and has a large white tag dangling from the zipper.
My bag? I say, scratching my head, not yet prepared to accept it as such. I don’t
remember --
Look, she says. You got a name, right?
I nod. Not that I’m sure, really. Does everyone have to have a name? I guess so. I guess it makes sense.
So, she says, there’s one freaking way to find out, isn’t there? She points at the name tag: Is that your name — or what?
I peer down at the tag. The word “G-I-U-L-I-O” is spelled out in large letters. In large block letters. With a felt pen of some sort. I try to pronounce it in my head. Soft “G”? Hard “G”? I’m not sure. Beneath the name, scribbled in much smaller writing, is an address. All I can read is the word “Montreal”. I can’t make the rest of it out, no
matter how hard I squint. A permanent blurring. (pars. 75-70)
This state of “permanent blurring” is another feature of the Giulio characters, a constant going in and out of focus. As Eva Darias-Beautell points out: “The appearance/disappearance play … self-consciously stresses the relation between figuration and absence. Since reality is always already a discursive construct, this strategy locates the possibility of articulating experience not in the real, but in discourse as constituted by that contradictory play of appearance (of reality) and disappearance (absence of the real)” (319). Rather than clearing up for the narrator in this story, things become more and more murky. The narrator seems to
move further and further away from discovering who he is “really”.
In his book on Proust, Beckett notes that the effects of time serve to alter the “subject … resulting in an unceasing modification of his personality, whose permanent reality, if any, can only be apprehended as a retrospective hypothesis” (4). Or as Linda Ben-Zvi puts it: “The ego is contingent; it does not exist apart from language” (192). Thus, as Giulio moves forward, he undergoes a series of states that can only define him for a split-second and then lose their value immediately afterwards: “The individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours” (Proust 4-5). Similarly, Martin Esslin states: “Being subject to
this process of time flowing through us and changing us in doing so, we are, at no single moment in our lives, identical with ourselves” (50).
At the end of “Into Another Country,” Giulio learns to accept the fact he cannot escape himself — or he learns it for a moment, at least, only to forget it again at some future point, the reader must assume. He tries to kill fellow bus traveler and unwanted companion, Norma, by pushing her in front of a speeding car. It is a direct hit: “Metal on flesh. A sack flying over a hood” (par. 117). However, it is not to be:
[B]efore I have a chance to turn away, I see a figure spring up. Almost as if it comes out of the ground itself. It’s Norma, brushing herself off and laughing. I stand rooted to the spot as she ambles towards me. Like a bear. Or maybe a wolverine.
You can’t freaking kill me, she says with a smile as she takes my arm. Do you wanna know why?
I stand there, shuffling my feet, not knowing what to do next. I stand there, staring at the ground, afraid to look at her.
She lifts my chin until our eyes meet: I’m already dead, she says. (pars. 119-122)
It is the only state of permanence and self-knowledge, she seems to be saying. It is the only time when language does not define. And it is the only time when one can be captured by a formal system, without being trapped in what Culik describes as “the esthetics of incompleteness” (131).
Concluding Remarks
The similarities between the two Giulios (he of “The Theory of Discontinuous Existence” and he of “The Proper Country) can be seen quite clearly on a metafictional level. If the two characters are not physically compatible, if they cannot be fitted into the same space and time line, if they do not interact on any three-dimensional Cartesian network, that says more about the fluidity of self and identity than any differences between them. The similarities come in the sense of confusion experienced, the lack of recognition of a stable and continuous identity, and the feeling that they lack control over their lives and actions (as if some mastermind-creator-godlike puppeteer is actually manipulating things). As well, the argument is made that no attempt to capture any particular or specific character on a page can succeed in its entirety or fullness. There will always be gaps in the formal system of character recognition and human identification. It is in those gaps that the further Giulios in Mirolla’s fiction can be fitted. These new Giulios are not so much extensions of the previous Ur- or proto-Giulio as found in “The Theory” and “The Proper
Country” but rather refracted images, deconstructed and then rebuilt, put together in different ways in the hope of one day completing the task that all are quick to say is impossible: filling the formal system so completely that it no longer has any gaps in it; so that the word is truly made flesh.
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Abstract
This paper examines the question of the connection between and among the various characters named Giulio in Canadian author Michael Mirolla’s fiction. The paper emphasizes the earliest proto-Giulio character to be found in the author’s first collection of short stories The Formal Logic of Emotion, and the relationship of that character with later Giulios, specifically those found in “Giulio Visits A Friend” and “Into Another Country.” The paper concludes that, while these characters are not the same character in terms of physical or even geographical description, they reflect the fluidity of identity as theorized by Mirolla and actualized in his writing — and can thus be called identical in metafictional terms.
Introduction
This article proposes to examine the connection (if any) and the implications of that connection or lack thereof between two characters, both named “Giulio,” in Canadian author Michael Mirolla’s 1992 short story collection The Formal Logic of Emotion. Specifically, the paper concentrates on two short stories in that collection: the opening one entitled “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence” and the closing one called “The Proper Country.” The two stories mark the first time that the “Giulio” character appeared in Mirolla’s writing, and serve as the introduction of what could be called the Ur- or Proto-Giulio from which other “Giulios” have cascaded down through the years.
While the two characters named “Giulio,” each serving as the focal point of a particular short story, do not seem to have much in common in terms of their physical make-up, actions, thought patterns and emotional setup, this article will argue that (a) they are in fact continuations of the same character, given Mirolla’s notions of the fluidity of identity; and (b) they fit under the umbrella of the author’s deconstruction of the meaning of human identity as something that is Lacanian rather than Cartesian. The paper attempts to achieve this through:
A. A look at some of the influences (literary and otherwise) that have led Mirolla to create such a character in the first place, and the theoretical basis upon
which the character exists.
B. A close examination and critique of the two stories in question (“A Theory” and “The Proper Country”) and this character as some type of Ur-Giulio, some type of representative of the author’s creator-creation-created complex; and
C. A linking of the two stories to Mirolla’s other, later writing (especially in a group of short stories published in various literary journals and magazines in which a character named Giulio continues to serve as the main creation, with emphasis on “Giulio Visits A Friend” and “Into Another Country”).
In the next section, the article looks at some general concepts having to do with fiction in the 21st century, and how and how well those concepts have been fitted into Mirolla’s writing. Please note: The author has granted the writer permission to access his unpublished manuscript The Giulio Metaphysics III, under which heading a grouping of “Giulio” stories have been gathered, including both published and unpublished short stories.
Metafiction and Identity: Some General Concepts
One of the major themes dealt with in serious literature in the late 20th and early 21st century is the question of identity and the connection between author and character. The underlying assumption in the majority of such literature is that the “self” is not a static object with some sort of essentialist nature. Rather, as Steven E. Alford stated, this self “is a textual construct, and subject to the difference and deferral inherent in language” (17).
The fluidity of identity within literature is a reflection of the indeterminacy of identity outside literature, “a social and linguistic construct, a nexus of meaning rather than an unchanging entity” (Kerby 34). In fact, an argument has been made that the self is nothing more or less than the very language in which descriptions of that self are couched. As Kerby put it: “[T]his identity … is not the persistence of an entity, a thing (a substance, subject, ego), but is a meaning constituted by a relation of figure to ground or part to whole. It is an identity in difference constituted by framing the flux of particular experiences by a broaderstory” (46).
At the same time, what this implies is that the notion of “knowing oneself” or of so called true self-knowledge is a contradictory one, one that can never be achieved. In the first place, it is understood that the “text” of that knowledge is a constantly revisionary one, one which is constantly being worked on: “We understand our self as the locus of our identity by telling ourselves stories, yet these stories’ criterion of correctness is not truth, but what we might call the adequacy of a meaningful narrative sequence” (Alford 22). In the second place, the argument leads to an unsolvable paradox: in the attempt to sever self from truth, we also sever our ability to know if that statement itself is true. As Linda Hutcheon has pointed out in talking about thinkers and literary critics such as Lyotard and Foucault: “These positions are typically paradoxical; they are the masterful denials of mastery, the cohesive attacks on cohesion, the essentializing challenges to essences, that characterize postmodern theory” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 20).
It is thus a double trap: there is the suggestion (only a suggestion as truth is no longer viable) that self-knowledge must always be deferred and pushed into a new place where we cannot go without altering that self and thus making it no longer self-knowledge; and there is the idea that, because we cannot prove categorically that self-knowledge is impossible, we will always continue to strive for it, hoping to find it over the next hill, as it were. As Paul Auster has his narrator say in The Locked Room, the third novel in his New York Trilogy:
We all want to be told stories, and we listen to them in the same way we did when we were young. We imagine the real story inside the words, and to do this we substitute ourselves for the person in the story, pretending that we can understand him because we understand ourselves. This is a deception. We exist for ourselves, perhaps, and at times we even have a glimmer of who we are, but in the end we can never be sure, and as our lives go on, we become more and more opaque to ourselves, more and more aware of our own incoherence. No one can cross the boundary into another — for the simple reason that no one can gain access to himself. (292)
Under these circumstances, defining a character’s autonomous nature, sense of freedom, and specific unique identity is not possible because these “are not pregiven or a priori characteristics but must be redefined within the context of the person’s appearance within the sociolinguistic arena” (Kerby 113-114).
At the same time, there is the strong inference that all identities are inter-connected in one way or another and, in some cases, contingent upon one another: “One cannot become ‘I’ without an implicit reference to another person, an auditor or narratee — which may be the same subject qua listener. ‘I’ functions in contrast to ‘you’ in much the same way as ‘here’ refers linguistically to ‘there’ rather than any fixed location” (Kerby 68). In the same way, attempts to stop or freeze an identity in order to examine it are futile and useless: “Interpretation, like understanding, is a continuous process with no precise starting point … interpretation has always already started” (Kerby 44). What takes place in these efforts to “pin down” a character’s identity is that simply another piece of writing is created, one which itself then needs examination and interpretation and which has in effect “created” a new identity. Rather than the modern split between self and other, there are multiple selves and others moving in and out of each other, forming, reforming, deforming.
According to Hutcheon: “The modernist concept of a single and alienated otherness is challenged by the postmodern questioning of binaries that conceal hierarchies (self/other)” (A Poetics of Postmodernism 61). This is similar to the notion of “difference” and how signifiers are grouped together (in Saussurian-Derridian terms), something that describes not just how a narrative might be put together but also how identities might be constructed and deconstructed: “Difference suggests multiplicity, heterogeneity, plurality, rather than binary opposition and exclusion” (Hutcheon 61).
Above and beyond this realization lies the notion of the ironic turn and the ability to manipulate a narrative and therefore characters within any such narrative in ways that create deliberate illusions and false trails. Once the notions of essential identity and truth are discarded, the playfulness takes on a life of its own. For example, as Allen Thiher said of Nabokov's writing:
Freud appears to be a quintessential modernist insofar as the unconscious, with its storehouse of time past, can be compared to the modernist domain of revelation,
waiting to be seized in the form of iconic symbols. By contrast Nabokov's selfconscious play with ironic doubles exults in the arbitrary relations that obtain between signs. There is, for Nabokov, no other discourse than this manifest play of autonomous language. There is nothing beneath this verbal surface. The novel's surface is all that the novel is: a self-enclosed structure of self-mirrorings, offered as so many language games, with only an occasional catastrophe to recall the void that waits on the other side. (100)
At the same time, one of the most obvious connections between one character and another, and between any set of characters and the author, can be found in the metafictional nature of much of the writing today. As Hutcheon stated: “What we tend to call postmodernism in literature today is usually characterized by intense self-reflexivity and overly parodic intertextuality” (“Historiographic Metafiction” 3). Metafiction itself has been defined as “fiction about fiction – that is, fiction that includes within itself a commentary on its own narrative and/or linguistic identity” (Narcissistic Narrative 11).
This fits in well with the fluidity of identity and inability to pin a character down: designing a novel or short story around a Cartesian character is no longer possible. Rather, a postmodern writer “takes the inner division that results from self-consciousness and, by metaphoric extension, makes it a resource — namely, the subject of his fiction” (Westervelt 42). This, in turn, leads to a new approach to critical debate on metafiction, a debate that “substitutes a heroics of text and language for the older heroics of creative genius and imagination. The text … accepts the existentialist challenge to confront the lack of a center at the heart of language and to dwell in that void” (Woolley 460). In the next section, the paper examines in close detail some ideas behind Mirolla’s selection of a proto- or Ur-Giulio character in the two stories in The Formal Logic of Emotion that have a “Gulio” character as the main protagonist: “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence” and “The Proper Country”.
The Ur-Giulio Concept
The original character named Giulio first appears in Mirolla’s fiction in “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence,” a short story selected as part of The Journey Prize Anthology, comprising the 10 best short stories published in the previous year in Canadian literary journals. Later it formed the opening story in Mirolla’s first collection, The Formal Logic of Emotion (1992), and was listed under the sub-heading “The Giulio Metaphysics I,” thus implying that there would be more to come.
In the story, a young boy named Giulio undergoes an appendectomy and then the reader is given a whirlwind tour of his life — to the point where it loops once again back to just before he is about to have his operation. Thus, the reader does not know whether what has taken place actually happened to a person named Giulio or is something invented by him as he undergoes the operation, as he is being put under. The end of the story hints at something of the sort:
And he fell away, the vision of his friend an anomaly sitting there in that sun-speckled room, blowing his nose on blue toilet paper and holding a picture of himself in his hand. Now, where did he get that? But he fell away before the answer came to him. Perhaps never to awaken. Perhaps to dream forever. Perhaps to invent the rest of his life after all. (37)
Two elements that are explored much more fully in later stories appear here for the first time: (1) the notion that the attempt to pin things down, to analyze their components or to create some sort of formal system, is a doomed enterprise due to the self-reflexivity of human consciousness; and (2) that human identity is not as constant or uninterrupted or unbroken as we are usually led to believe or make ourselves believe.
The first hints of the inability of consciousness to self-examine itself in a logical or complete way comes early on in the story. Thus, after the nurse who has been taking care of him following the operation asks whether Giulio believes in God and then, after he nods, tells him he shouldn’t, Mirolla writes:
It was as if a blurred image had, for a moment at least, been pulled into razor-sharp focus. And then it was gone again — as if it wasn’t meant for him after all. For, when
everything else had been removed from that frame, what was left in the crystal-clear emptiness was simply his own confusion, a confusion that would hover over him, on and off, for the rest of his life. (11)
The title of the story provides the clue to the second part of Mirolla’s examination of postmodern existential experience: the fracturing of human identity. In a way that allows a mirroring back and forth of the concept (again in terms that resemble Lacan’s theories on the meaning of identity and self-consciousness), it is not Giulio himself but a friend he has known since grade school who proposes this idea: first that statues move when people are not looking (according to Baudrillard, the simulacra coming to life), and then that existence is not continuous (mocked by Giulio: “Discontinuous Existence, eh? That’s brilliant. Does it have anything to do with your theory of statues?” (The Formal Logic 21)).
In the end, the friend is placed in a mental facility “not for wanting to blow up statues but for actually believing he himself had turned into one. He would stand in one spot for days on end, moving only imperceptibly, face covered with chalk to make it look like alabaster, eyes fixed forward or forced back into his skull, as if in a desperate attempt to see inside himself” (Mirolla, The Formal Logic 14). The friend also never revealed what he had meant by “discontinuous existence” and it haunts Giulio: “There were times when Giulio actually believed he had discovered on his own what his friend had meant. But he couldn’t be sure. And the moment he felt sure, the seed of doubt was planted. It was as if someone else had the key to Giulio’s self-knowledge” (The Formal Logic 21).
The story weaves back and forth in time, one moment relating events from Giulio’s childhood, the next showing the birth of his son. Just before the end, Giulio is an old man lying on his bed:
But I am me, now. Now! I am not what I was yesterday or the day before or the day before that. There is no connection between Giulio today and Giulio yesterday,
between Giulio-lying-on-the-bed-creaking and Giulio-leaning-under-the-statue-singing. You fool. There is a point in time when there is no point in time. He felt a pair of fists kneading his stomach, fists needing his stomach. Oh no, those weren’t fists and they didn’t knead/need his stomach. Oh no. Those were the gentle caressing hands of his mother, the gentle caressing touch of his wife, the gentle caressing motions of his nurse. (The Formal Logic 35-36)
And then a little further on, it seems as if once more the lifelong confusion starts to dissipate (ironically in the form of a “fog” that allows him to envision what is not there, at least not at the present moment:
He could hear a voice droning, a voice as far off as the stars, as near as his own mind. A warm wind from the South Seas blew open the curtains. There, in the daylight, it was suddenly summer, the morning after school vacation started. The streets were full of children, shouting and raising the dust, Giulio’s unmoving friend among them; full of the milkman making his rounds and proudly showing off his new van, the van that had replaced dapple-grey Boxer, now in chevaline heaven; full of the street cleaner, sending forth a gush of cold water and mud across the sidewalk. Out of nowhere, an ambulance careened into view. A small boy, all wrapped up in blankets, was hustled by stretcher down steep stairs. A distraught mother huddled beside him, tears streaming down her face as the entire street came to a halt. Statues one and all. (The Formal Logic 36)
Giulio in “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence” comes across as an exemplar of Mirolla’s future Giulios, a proto-character with many of the characteristics and traits of the protagonists in collections such as The Giulio Metaphysics III. He is a character in the lineage of Beckett’s narrators from his novels, characters whom Wolfgang Iser says find it “increasingly impossible to conceive themselves — i.e. to find their own identity; and yet at the same time it is precisely this impossibility that leads them actually to discover something of their own reality” (174). Giulio explores some of the side roads and holes missed by the lead characters in Beckett’s Murphy, Watt, Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnamable. As Richard Begam points out:
For Beckett there is noepic struggle to make the past and present cohere in a moment of self-revelation, no grand effort to “unite” the “hero and the narrator,” to confront the man who ultimately will become “the author of his own story.” In other words, what Beckett gives us is not an autobiographical novel but its critical construction. (6)
Similarly, the story (and other stories in the collection) exemplifies what Beckett himself says about the irrationality and impossibility of literature: “The expression that there is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, nothing from which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express” (Beckett, “Three Dialogues” 139). In particular, the connection between Beckett’s Watt and the Giulio character comes across clearly in the split between the ability of language to “capture” things, events or objects in themselves, mirroring the split in humans between what has been labeled the rational versus the irrational. According to Jacqueline Hoeffer:
In Watt’s scientific and positivistic thought, to distinguish between what can be said about an event and what the event really means is sheer nonsense. Yet Watt
persistently makes this distinction: he is content with an “outer meaning” which he can observe and make formulations about. But there is another kind of meaning, nonsensory and non-rational, indefinable in his terms, of which he is aware, though he purports to ignore its significance. (169)
In “The Proper Country” (which is listed under the sub-section called “The Giulio Metaphysics II”), the malleability and inability to pin Giulio down becomes part of the main thrust of the story. Describing the return of this Giulio (who, if he is connected to the Giulio in “A Theory of Discontinuous Existence”, must have taken one of those unmarked vacant areas along the fractal landscape) to “his proper country” (The Formal Logic 144), the story seems to gather together segments and fragments of a whole series of characters, time sequences, impossibilities, and absurdities in three-dimensional time and space, while at the same time freezing these “at precisely the right moment and on the first tick of 3 a.m.” (The Formal Logic 144). Reviewer Susan Wasserman describes “The Proper Country” thus:
The story unfolds in dream logic. The situation is a perverse version of Alice in Wonderland, as our hero tries to find his way home, out of this maze which comes
complete with people walking through walls, dead birds coming to life, an evil baby sprouting flippers and whiskers, and a village idiot brandishing his ‘Priapus-sized
penis.’ The protagonist is Giulio, presumably of the first story, but not recognizable as such. But, then, identity here is discontinuous. He feels like a stranger and yet is constantly greeted by people who seem to know him. (He observes, ‘This is all very familiar.., all too familiar. I know this place from when it wasn’t this place. Or perhaps from when it won’t be this place any longer.’) Mirolla pulls out all the stops: chameleon-like, Giulio changes character to suit the situation: at one point he is a doctor delivering a baby, then an amorous young lover, then a priest. (123-124)
Right at the start of the story, Giulio is confronted by an old woman in black (fate? destiny? death?) who puts the paradox to him. While he seems lost, not quite sure of his directions or even that assured of his own identity, she tells him: “I remember you. That I do. Just as if it were yesterday. Well, maybe not yesterday. Maybe the day before. Or a few days before even that. It’s all in your features, all in the blood, as they say. You can’t escape from yourself” (The Formal Logic 147).
It appears that Giulio spends the rest of the story trying to escape from himself — or from what others are trying to tell him he is. For, in the next sequence, he is confronted by “a day-glo vision on a skateboard … a young girl with unwavering green eyes” (The Formal Logic 148-149) who says to him: “Doctor, doctor. Where the Christ have you been? Come quick! They’ve been looking for you all over town. They’ve even sent someone out to the new excavations, thinking you might have sneaked off to do a bit more digging” (p. 149).
At the same time, as he is undergoing all these transformations (the final one being as someone convinced he needs to get revenge for insults to his grandmother’s grave), Giulio is exploring the underworld. Ironically, he does not do this in a methodical or conscious manner but rather subconsciously, in keeping with the old ideas of the Id as the manufacturing plant for irrationality, as the source and fountain of those interstices in formal systems that cannot be captured — as proved by Kurt Gödel. Giulio is enticed into a basement by the coolness of the walls and the smoothness of the stone stairs:
Somewhere there is the sound of water trickling, a gurgle like a cut throat. Ahead, pitch-dipped torches provide a dim, unappetizing light. He steps into a vast cavern-like room, green around the edges. Along the walls, a line of thick bones dangles from the ceiling, picked clean, save for a light, grey covering that turns out to be mites; outsized barrels powder beneath his fingers, their metal hoops balancing like pendulums for a moment before the final collapse. The sound of water is nearer now and he makes out the source at last — a low, snaggle-toothed well, its sides caved in, out of which a furtive stream flows. Or rather pumps feebly and without conviction. Obvious efforts have been made to stem it, rubble piled in its path, rocks jammed into its eye, bigger and better barricades thrown up by each successive owner — earth, clay, cement, reenforced concrete. To no avail. (The Formal Logic 154-155)
In one of a series of climactic scenes (for they are all seemingly climactic scenes), Giulio is told to rush back to save a baby (the baby he helped give birth to as a doctor) from falling off an unfinished balcony. It is hinted that he is the baby and that its death would signal his disappearance from the scene. Instead, he finds a “slouching infant, fearless, sluglike, face smeared with watermelon and trailing a shitty, makeshift diaper. It measures the doorframe with its flippers, tentatively sniffs the air, whiskers twitching …” (The Formal Logic 168). But it is in no danger of falling: “The creature taunts him with arabesques and cartwheels, sudden feints and retreats” (168). Then, through this deformed infant, Giulio reads the thoughts of what can only be the warped and twisted mind of the creator of these impossibilities:
There is hunger in those thundercloud thoughts, a world-devouring hunger, stripmining the imagination to feed the fact of gravity … He sees then the cobblestoned
road, the caravanserai just off to the side, the village, the highways old and new all spinning out of the creature’s head, extensions of its shackled tongue. And out of the houses of the village is disgorged an endless line of secondary characters, characters that vanish on turning sideways … They’re dressed in their Sunday best with starched collars and polished boots, sun bonnets and stone-washed kerchiefs … They spill on to the road as if stunned for a moment, surprised to be there amid all the familiar, roughhewn faces. But they brush their too-short trousers, tug at their shredded shirt sleeves and soon forget the fact they’ve come out of a pulpy creature’s head, would laugh at the absurdity of such a suggestion … Giulio wants very much to warn them, to tell them to mind their tongues, to point out the tenuousness of the road on which they’ve embarked, how it buckles and lurches beneath them. But already the insight escapes him, becomes vapid and banal. What tenuousness? They’re as solid as they’ll ever be, skin drawn tight around their cheekbones, their skull and crossbones. I’m as solid as I’ll ever be, he says, thumping his chest just like the others. (The Formal Logic 169- 170)
But this feeling of solidity does not last very long. Giulio is soon caught in another state of confusion: in a church, dressed in priestly garb, and standing before a young couple looking to be married. Like all literate men, Giulio seeks the comfort of words in the belief they will help to make things solid:
Surprisingly, he knows their names: alb, amice, girdle, maniple, stole and chasuble. And those of the blessed linens. And the sacred vessels. But rather than freeing him, each bit of knowledge serves only to weigh him down even more. He feels himself literally sinking on the altar, literally melting away, liquefying, a sacrifice without a purpose being shaped for reasons not his own. (The Formal Logic 172)
Again, it is the vision on the skateboard who comes to the rescue, the girl out of place and out of time, in a sense, the deus ex machina of metafictional writing: “Her hair is sheared Mohawk-style and multicoloured; her make up in slashes across her cheekbones. He can’t be sure but it seems to be moving, shifting, as if alive” (The Formal Logic 173). This girl, who comes to him again at the end of the story to lead him out of the village, seems to exist in the interstices between what Hugh Culik would call the “rational numbers”: “Just as all the points on the number line are not named as ratios of whole numbers, so reality is not fully named …” (136-137).
Quite naturally, a wedding reception follows the church ceremony. Just as naturally, in this world, Giulio is called upon to defend the honor of his family and is taunted into a knife fight with another man. In the time-honored tradition of these fights, he kills the other man. But then, when he picks up the man’s knife and turns it on himself, he discovers it is springloaded and harmless.
At the end, he is back in the basement, only this time he descends deeper and deeper into the underworld, chasing after the always-glowing skateboarder: “There is movement along the damp walls. And voices, the soft, dangerous voices of the past. The voices are reciting. There is no beginning or end to their recital” (The Formal Logic 188). There follows a conversation with the skateboarder before she vanishes, an attempt to pin down the meaning of identity and identification:
They walk together in silence, guided only by the light from her eyes. The stairs turn into a low sloping tunnel. After a few minutes, they come out into a natural cave. There are primitive drawings and scrawls on its walls. Giulio stops before a pair of sandstone faces, symmetrical about each other. They are sad, as if on the verge of tears. Beneath them, the word “Tybicza”.
“What does it mean?” he asks, passing his hand over the upper face’s lips.
“It’s the ancient name of this town,” the skateboarder says. “But, wait a minute. You should know that. You were the one most responsible for uncovering these caves.”
“What are you talking about? I’ve never set foot in here before.”
“But the doctor has, hasn’t he? He was in here digging for archaeological goodies while his patients waited for the miracle cures that never came.”
“What’s that to do with me? I’m not any doctor, let alone the doctor.”
“No. Nor a young lover in an olive grove. Nor a shit-faced child. Nor a priest with a too-tight collar. And especially not an avenging angel, right? You don’t take responsibility for any of those things, right?”
“That’s right. I came here strictly for a visit. My visa forbids me taking responsibility.”
“And now you’re leaving, to live once more among strangers, the place where no one knows you.”
“Right again. I feel so much safer there.”
“I bet you do.” (The Formal Logic 189-190)
The final paragraph tries to present in visual terms what that moment must feel like when the self-reflexivity of human consciousness comes up against that immoveable force that we all must face at some point or other. Abandoned by the skateboarder, Giulio finds himself in absolute darkness, running, then crawling, then practically digging, within a tunnel that becomes smaller and smaller as he moves through it:
Dear God, don’t let me be stuck, wriggling in the dark — a parasitic worm unnoticed in the bowels of the earth. He scrambles forward on all fours. He can feel the walls
now closing in. He pounds at them, batters them till his knuckles are raw. But it doesn’t help. His breathing is shallow now and uneven, his heart threatening to leap out of his chest. It’s all over, he says. She tricked me. They tricked me. They led me here to my own grave, to this place where there is no moving, neither forward nor back. Best to curl up and let it all go. There is no breath left; the eyes bulge; the hands open and close; the legs spasm. Ah, death. (The Formal Logic 191)
But death does not come and it turns out to be a birth canal when “the tunnel convulses, constricts like a sphincter to expel him into the night air” (The Formal Logic 191). However, even now, Giulio is not sure of who he is or where he is:
For a moment, he imagines he’s still inside — an immense cave, perhaps — and those aren’t really stars up there but pinpricks in the ceiling. And the mountains behind him nothing but papier-maché. And the valleys a child’s diggings. And the highways giftwrapped ribbons. And the village a black cutout silhouette. (The Formal Logic 191)
In the next part of the paper, a further examination of the Giulio character and his development is made. This character has gone on to appear in a large number of Mirolla’s writings, including under different guises in published stories from The Giulio Metaphysics III collection, one of the lead characters in the novel Berlin, and the male lead character in the novel The Boarder. Here, only the Giulio of “Giulio Visits A Friend” and “Into Another Country” are examined.
The Multiplicity of Giulios
The use of a similar or in some cases identical name for a series of characters who may or may not have some obvious connection to one another is a metafictional gambit. It selfconsciously points out to the reader that these characters are a creation, one that at times can inhabit the same time and space (in the text, at least) and that they are thus not part of a threedimensional Cartesian axis. They bleed into one another, can be in two places at once, and, as Robert Kroetsch put it, “seek that timeless split-second in time when the one, in the processof becoming the other, was itself and the other” (593). Thus, what all these Giulios are doing is attempting to create a whole that is greater than its parts while at the same time not ever quite being all there. This is being done in a discursive area that is neither real nor unreal. To put it another way, one could argue that this set of characters neither fully exists nor does not exist and they are constantly moving towards something or becoming, always “escaping the constraints of self-presence” (Docherty 184).
The Giulio character is malleable, changeable and often carries on conversations with his creator. He vanishes into one textual hole and re-appears out of another. In Mirolla’s “Giulio Visits A Friend,” the character is goaded along and forced to do what he does not want to do — visit a friend who is dying of AIDS:
In fact, I [the creator speaking] practically have to drag him there, kicking and screaming, an invisible hand reaching in and pulling him by the scruff of the neck. He keeps coming up with all kinds of excuses: the neighbourhood makes him queasy with all its marble steps, red Camaros and bird-bath statues; the family hasn’t sent him an invitation; his friend doesn’t really want to see him; he lost the directions the last time he emptied out his pockets. (156-157)
At the same time, he cannot help but notice the drastic changes undergone by his friend:
“[T]he luminous quality of his friend’s eyes, beautiful, unnaturally large, almost bulbous and bulging like that of a stereotypical friendly alien − in direct contrast to the scarred and sunken cheeks, the open sores about the lips, the purplish splotches across the temple and forehead” (159).
But the creator is not done with Giulio yet, not done with the manipulation of identity, identification and classification. There is one more surprise at the end of the novel:
Nor do I allow him to look back once he has stepped outside. That’s strictly verboten. For, if he were to, he would surely notice the entire family — mother, father, sister, brother — standing at the front window. They are standing at the picture window, arm in arm, smiling. They are standing at the interior design picture window, arm in arm, smiling — and proud of themselves. So very proud of themselves. (162)
It is this Protean quality — in character, scene, conflict — that exemplifies Mirolla’s fiction, that makes it so slippery and ungraspable in its entirety. The reader may think he/she has a handle on what is happening and without notice the narrative rug is pulled out. It is pulled out not only from under the reader’s feet but often from under the character’s as well.
In “Into Another Kind of Country,” a first-person narrator Giulio awakes on a crosscountry bus to discover he cannot remember his name or where he came from or what his destination should be: “Toronto, I say to myself. Is there where I want to be?” (“Into Another Kind” par. 62) He only discovers his name when someone hands him a duffel bag:
She holds out one of the bags for me to take. It’s blue — one of those blue sport bags — and has a large white tag dangling from the zipper.
My bag? I say, scratching my head, not yet prepared to accept it as such. I don’t
remember --
Look, she says. You got a name, right?
I nod. Not that I’m sure, really. Does everyone have to have a name? I guess so. I guess it makes sense.
So, she says, there’s one freaking way to find out, isn’t there? She points at the name tag: Is that your name — or what?
I peer down at the tag. The word “G-I-U-L-I-O” is spelled out in large letters. In large block letters. With a felt pen of some sort. I try to pronounce it in my head. Soft “G”? Hard “G”? I’m not sure. Beneath the name, scribbled in much smaller writing, is an address. All I can read is the word “Montreal”. I can’t make the rest of it out, no
matter how hard I squint. A permanent blurring. (pars. 75-70)
This state of “permanent blurring” is another feature of the Giulio characters, a constant going in and out of focus. As Eva Darias-Beautell points out: “The appearance/disappearance play … self-consciously stresses the relation between figuration and absence. Since reality is always already a discursive construct, this strategy locates the possibility of articulating experience not in the real, but in discourse as constituted by that contradictory play of appearance (of reality) and disappearance (absence of the real)” (319). Rather than clearing up for the narrator in this story, things become more and more murky. The narrator seems to
move further and further away from discovering who he is “really”.
In his book on Proust, Beckett notes that the effects of time serve to alter the “subject … resulting in an unceasing modification of his personality, whose permanent reality, if any, can only be apprehended as a retrospective hypothesis” (4). Or as Linda Ben-Zvi puts it: “The ego is contingent; it does not exist apart from language” (192). Thus, as Giulio moves forward, he undergoes a series of states that can only define him for a split-second and then lose their value immediately afterwards: “The individual is the seat of a constant process of decantation, decantation from the vessel containing the fluid of future time, sluggish, pale and monochrome, to the vessel containing the fluid of past time, agitated and multicoloured by the phenomena of its hours” (Proust 4-5). Similarly, Martin Esslin states: “Being subject to
this process of time flowing through us and changing us in doing so, we are, at no single moment in our lives, identical with ourselves” (50).
At the end of “Into Another Country,” Giulio learns to accept the fact he cannot escape himself — or he learns it for a moment, at least, only to forget it again at some future point, the reader must assume. He tries to kill fellow bus traveler and unwanted companion, Norma, by pushing her in front of a speeding car. It is a direct hit: “Metal on flesh. A sack flying over a hood” (par. 117). However, it is not to be:
[B]efore I have a chance to turn away, I see a figure spring up. Almost as if it comes out of the ground itself. It’s Norma, brushing herself off and laughing. I stand rooted to the spot as she ambles towards me. Like a bear. Or maybe a wolverine.
You can’t freaking kill me, she says with a smile as she takes my arm. Do you wanna know why?
I stand there, shuffling my feet, not knowing what to do next. I stand there, staring at the ground, afraid to look at her.
She lifts my chin until our eyes meet: I’m already dead, she says. (pars. 119-122)
It is the only state of permanence and self-knowledge, she seems to be saying. It is the only time when language does not define. And it is the only time when one can be captured by a formal system, without being trapped in what Culik describes as “the esthetics of incompleteness” (131).
Concluding Remarks
The similarities between the two Giulios (he of “The Theory of Discontinuous Existence” and he of “The Proper Country) can be seen quite clearly on a metafictional level. If the two characters are not physically compatible, if they cannot be fitted into the same space and time line, if they do not interact on any three-dimensional Cartesian network, that says more about the fluidity of self and identity than any differences between them. The similarities come in the sense of confusion experienced, the lack of recognition of a stable and continuous identity, and the feeling that they lack control over their lives and actions (as if some mastermind-creator-godlike puppeteer is actually manipulating things). As well, the argument is made that no attempt to capture any particular or specific character on a page can succeed in its entirety or fullness. There will always be gaps in the formal system of character recognition and human identification. It is in those gaps that the further Giulios in Mirolla’s fiction can be fitted. These new Giulios are not so much extensions of the previous Ur- or proto-Giulio as found in “The Theory” and “The Proper
Country” but rather refracted images, deconstructed and then rebuilt, put together in different ways in the hope of one day completing the task that all are quick to say is impossible: filling the formal system so completely that it no longer has any gaps in it; so that the word is truly made flesh.
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Tecumseh Press, 1985. 97-104.
Mirolla, Michael. The Formal Logic of Emotion. Montreal, Canada: NuAge Editions, 1992.
---. “Giulio Visits a Friend.” Anthology of Italian-Canadian Writing. Ed. J. Pivato. Montreal: Guernica Editions, 1998.
---. “Into Another Kind of Country.” Arabesques Review Feb. 2007. 14 Apr. 2009.
<http://www.arabesques-editions.com/journal/michael_mirolla/0698011.html.>
---. Berlin. Teaticket, MA: Leapfrog Press, 2009.
---. The Boarder. Pittsburgh: Red Lead Press, 2007.
---. The Giulio Metaphysics III. n.p., n.d. Unpublished manuscript.
Thiher, Allen. Modern Language Theory and Postmodern Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Van Pelt, T. “Lacan in Context: An Introduction to Lacan for the English-Speaking Reader.” College Literature 24.2 (1997): 57-70.
Wasserman, Susan. Merlin Meets the Bladerunner. Event Magazine: The Douglas College Review 21.3 (1992): 121-124.
Waugh, Patricia. Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-conscious Fiction. London: Methuen, 1984.
Westervelt, Linda A. “Teller, Tale, Told: Relationships in John Barth’s Latest Fiction.” Journal of Narrative Technique 8 (1978): 42-55.
Woolley, Deborah A. “Empty ‘Text,’ Fecund Voice: Self-reflexivity in Barth’s ‘Lost in The Funhouse.’” Contemporary Literature 26.4 (1985): 460-481.
Michael Mirolla's Light and Time: imagery, language and mystery
by Conrad DiDiodato
“One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language." (Gaston Bachelard)
Michael Mirolla looks into his art as into a language prism: light glances off many sides of the 'object' at once and time, particularly time, is what attempts to hold it still. They seem to work as artistic principles, informing and revelatory: the condition and product of the work itself. But as time lets go, the poem is left not just as a brilliantly light-refracted piece; it is also, in Stevens’s parlance, that always perennially interesting “world [that] lives as you live/Speaks as you speak",[1] the demystified thing as it is. We are not left with just a lovely inscrutable artifact but an image, as Bachelard says, that “opens a future to language”. And as Mirolla says in Light and Time,[2] "One toss and th' impressions gone./Time is a vengeful puddle quick to dry/behind us." (“Descendings” 28); and a little further in the same poem, "And yes, th' impression's still there/where you left it/and, as you slip in, the sun/ rises on thick haunches".(32) Once seen the poem, thing, impression is changed forever, and always set afterwards to reveal more significant properties and depths.
Is this the Surrealist artist at work or word-dreamer of daring and verbal precision? A proponent for a radical Canadian nouveauté? Or perhaps a neo-classicist at heart, a respecter and proponent of culture, language and literary influences? Michael Mirolla is a well-respected member of the Canadian writing community. Born in Italy, and arriving in Canada at the age of five, he calls himself a Montreal-Toronto corridor writer (because he spends so much time travelling between the two cities). He’s a novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright. Publications include the recently-released novel Berlin (a finalist for the 2009 Indie Book and National Best Books Awards), and two short story collections--The Formal Logic of Emotion and Hothouse Loves & Other Tales. A collection of poetry, Light And Time, was recently published with an English-Italian bilingual collection of poetry Interstellar Distances/Distanze Interstellari due out later in 2009. An Italian translation of The Formal Logic of Emotion has been accepted for publication and also due out in late 2009.
So we certainly can't read Light and Time, or an author as multi-versed in literary genre as Michael Mirolla, with pre-set notions of the poem in mind. And it won't do either to restrict him to place, time or any particular literary influence. He’s a skilful practitioner of imagery but I won’t even call him an Imagist nor even uniquely Canadian poet. If we want to keep the true constructive impetus of the work alive before us, we must see novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright as open as any artist (and as any literary oeuvre) can be to a global or even indeed a cosmological interest. Robin Blaser, in one of his many insightful entrances into poetic process, exhorts poets to record both the music of the spheres and the “sound of the earth.”[3] Poetry not consciously subjected to prescribed style or content will be universal in Blaser’s unique sense.
Certainly poetry is here venerated as among the highest expressions of human sentience and sentiment. And very much as if first principles or basic constituents of a cosmological poetics were primary, Mirolla begins with ‘light’ and ‘time’.
Light and Time
Light
and time--
you know the two well
don't you?
The empty heart of the tunnel
that beats against you
photon by photon
and chips away at the edges
where you exist,
Given time
there'd soon be
nothing left
but light.
Light, time: light, every object of light and by metaphorical extension the idea of reflection as an enlightened seeing, are promising as literary premises. His is a unique type of impression-gathering that at first can reduce the object to a sum of pure visual (or imagistic) effects. The nature of poetry is to never lose sight of the object, writer glued to it sometimes with an irrepressible tenacity, for whatever light illumines will soon strike the reader as a vibrant living presence. To turn the poem one way, held high in front of you, is to look for delectation and brilliance (poem as aesthetic object) but to sense also that something's been transformed in the viewing, whether the poem, object or reader. Mirolla doesn't just aestheticize his objects in the hope of turning them into traditional vehicles for a personal lyricism: the object that's read also envelops and unfolds, offering a wealth of phenomenal details.
In the case of "Light and Time", the poem that frames the whole work, light is in the end an eerie sort of receptacle for darkness imaged as the "empty heart of the tunnel/that beats against you/photon by photon". The effect on the reader can be hard-edged, too, since light and time are envisaged as objects that literally chip away at you. A similar sort of falling into the thing's inscrutable heart after an extinction of metaphorical light appears in "Roman Sketch" where "Gravity sucks you down into/the tombs, the dry unlickable dust,/ a shimmer of molecule slipping/past molecule" (46). The entire poem is worth citing for the way both the dying light of imagery and allusion combine to bring the reader’s to its own lapse into a crazed memory of the past
The old Carthage rises like bile in the throat
(‘tis a pieta she’s a whore).
There where the salt fell on fallow
dreams now grow:
Monstrous hands in dislocation,
eyeless angels stripped of wings
straining for a glimpse
of paradiso-
still-life on the march,
repatriated.
City of eternal bilitis,
sacrifice on the alterings of history.
What Black Mass has kept you afloat,
moored in barbaric legions?
gravity sucks you down into
the tombs, the dry unlickable dust,
a shimmer of molecule slipping
past molecule.
But-
they keep digging you up again,
brushing back time
bit by bit
a spoonful a day
till you are all foundation
propped up,
your kinfolk sedimentary
numbers in catalogue:
till one asks not:
Can it survive?
But-
Is there enough cement
to keep the question from
being begged?
Describing Mirolla's poetry as mystery of illumined seeing is a necessary first step; content such as lakes, authors and paintings, seem to fall into the same void with reader.
Crane Lake 1
We all speak of depth
as if the water mirrored something
more profound than the dragon-fly
that lands non-chalantly on your arm;
or the snapping turtle that hovers near,
its craggy face blowing bubbles
thru the lattice of sunlight, the gleam
of an ancient presence that ignores
all around it...even our god himself.
We all speak of silence
as if the momentary glimpse
of loon should make us hush
in awe. Should make us forget the rivulets
of a dying lamp pointed
at the tight core of our betrayal.
We speak of memory
as if... as if...
The object of "Crane Lake 1" can't be just metaphor of "depth" and "ancient presences" as if that were enough nor is it a presentation of fragments of a landscape, "dragon-fly", "water", "rivulets" pieced together only and strictly in imagination. Speaking about Crane Lake as the poet's traditional lake divests it of its 'substantive', irreducibly real nature, that more vital something to "make us hush/in awe". The depth we've come to the poem for soon reduces to the empty "silence" of language or retreats into "memory", when all we've got is the stammering language of "as if": when instead of a lake, there’s only a sinister immersion into the "the tight core of our betrayal." Note the inadequacy of figurative language to get the memory exactly in line with the passing of a friend in "Snap: On The Death Of A Friend": "like bed-sheets stiff with starch/like the smell/like the smell/like the smell of me." (40)
How much can literary first principles help us really to understand Mirolla's treatment of other objects? Light and time are more limitations than ways to unpack the poem, or rather conditions that can only be impossibly met. As they should be. Mirolla seems to be trying to unpack a negative mystery so that the poetry becomes more self-reflexive in the same way contemporary Art turns the inscrutable eye on itself as much as it does on language, content and style.
So what, and where, is that essential poem we seem to be always anticipating and never getting? Its opalescence and timelessness, in fact? Light and time seem actually to unravel the more we rely on them for a sense of textual stability. Mirolla himself can pose the question as "What certainty? What dense core?" ("Between the Lines" 17) because I suspect that each poem is its own unique way into the elusive heart. And the heart seems to lie somewhere between "the ghost" and the "flaxen-haired body" ("Rational Thought" 16); the "green boat" and its occupant "who can't wave back" ("Is It Someone We Know" 77) words and flesh ("Between the Lines" 17); and also between road kill and all the signs in Nature that should have alerted you from the beginning: like a mourning dove's crucifix, or trees "strain[ing] against their leashes" ("The Art of Walking" 79)
In every poem an object, dancer, rower, road kill and then its lightless, denuded form as the poem that leaves us only with Rilkean mystery. Perhaps the poet's enjoined the reader "to play with words/like a whistler in the dark." ("Descendings III." 30), sensing the impossibility of giving the poem whole to us.
To Franz K.
Tubercular swimmer in the o'er-
brimming soup, let me throw you a line.
We have voyaged together in short bursts
like DNA but you've outstripped me
now, diving beneath the fetid waves
without cease, only to surface again
with the swollen worm firmly between your teeth.
Severed antenna from a long-lost sense,
you held it tight, held it accountable.
And it wasn't enough that it tugged at the human
in you - how could it have so misunderstood?
I, on the other hand, friend to the shattered
light, the crystal blossoming, have flown
towards a sky full of glass tinkle and
laughter, the intense magic of daily events.
There, I await you, dangling a thread
like a viral infection before your eyes.
Yes, it's a desperate re-creation--
lacking cruelty—but you will reach for it.
Won't you?
Gaunt scissors dipped in red
I suspect that the poem can only approximate to its object, imprisoned in the light of bewitching vision itself. A register not of synthesis but of the essential irreducibility of language to its object, as if the poem itself could only be "shattered/light" and nothing but that. Language can't connect to the subject, poet calling it "a desperate re-creation", and if it tries to the effect is as absurd as trying to throw a life line to a drowning Franz K: a Kafkaesque impulse to revel in the improbabilities (or absurdities) of making the poem a vehicle for meaning. Even at the close DNA level (and what can be closer?) kinship between poet and literary ideal is too impossibly irreal. Life lines, in Kafkaesque style, metamorphose into viral threads, and implements of writing into "Gaunt scissors dipped in red".
Its seems now light and time, stripped of purely metaphysical functions, are agents of a new opening to language, reconfigured on patterns of incongruities and asymmetrical viewing that mark the true experiences from which the poem arises. Looking at "Le Repos Du Vieillard" (19), is not to see rest but a portrait of imminent death, skillfully delineated in shade and tones as though we were looking a surrealist painting; a transformation of stillness and finality of life into ghastly insect body and of the place of death (“a house of cards”) itself into Tartarean hell.
The snow falls calmly on a house of cards.
All the windows sealed. Eyes of smoky marble
shutter the thoughts in the parapets like minds-
flakes drying as they tumble. Rest in the moment
neglected ghosts break down the narrow door
and the candles on the bedsides
put themselves out. They strain to move
each other on limp machinery and collapse
among the chairs that clutter the room.
When I was young, he says,
they nailed me to the floor
and watched me ripen.
Now, my movements are stares
through smoke-filled eyes.
Foreign hands have gripped her iris.
She crawls in the cellar dense with sand,
looks for the nipple of gas her breath can ignite.
Snow hisses in recoil. Like a sun-flower,
the house turns creaking on its joints.
Inside, they are busy stroking chairs.
Perhaps “figurative surrealism”, as the postmodern scholar Christopher Butler uses that term[4], best fits Mirolla’s portrait in verse. To read the poem “Le Repos du Vieillard” is to see that “Only that subject matter is valued which is tragic and timeless.” (Butler 17) Everything in the old man at rest and its delineation in language suggest that the last hope for a true representationalist piece may have been dissolving into nightmare of non-representational (modernist) art. But since the poem isn’t based on a real painting, the point’s conjectural only.
And, of course, Mirolla’s poetry won't stop at just a slowly fading modernist hope. Not in this new transfiguring language of darkling meanings where light seems to give shape only to sinuous Kline bottles, and air itself "moans when invaded" ("Blind Alley" 42). Metaphor can empty itself out and leave the reader following the insect's trail to sense: for example, "The day is a slow beetle" in whose head a day of mortal living is reenacted ("The Day Is A Slow Beetle" 21). Mirolla also refers to similar "beetle dreams" in another poem ("Blind Alley" 42).
A classical author like Prudentius, known for purity and asceticism, can become a sort of foreground to the poet's portrait of the quintessential Etruscan garden ("The Garden" 23). Or the dying light of day "at the deep end/of the garden" can be imaged as "the silent dog...slashing across the moonbeam throat," surrealistic pairs of the same object if ever there were any. Again for the effect in Mirolla’s poetry of such wonderfully asymmetrical poetic elements as ‘garden’ and ‘silent dog’, a whole poem must be intuited.
In my garden, Prudentius might have
written, the fruits never ripen. Splotches
of pensees, swirls of non-meeting, girligigs
that spell Might-Have-Been. The tomatoes lust
for actuality, some mouth-like leech-like
appendage to suck their sweetness dry.
Instead, a world of infinity-minus-one.
The grapes bleed onto my forehead; roses
sway sentient – a moment of poetry? –
but no earthly grip can feel their prick.
Suffer, baby, suffer. In my garden.
Prudentius just might (possibly) have said,
the lukewarm breasts of a maybe woman
swelled for a second. Was it my fingers
or the telltale wind from a world I
imaged? Did it matter? No barbarians’
horses can trample this: my garden.
The still air has changed forever.
It’s interesting to note the many ways the poet tries to image the unimaginable, know the unknowable as if it were just a whisper to him from some ghostly outside place. ("Extinguishing" 35) Or even a lie's "essential geography", said to reside just below the heart, that turns into "the mauve outline of a lamb caught high in the gorse" ("When We Lie" 33). Light and time seem to have been tricked into authoritative roles they can’t handle, descrying the abject inability of even the world’s own most formidable supports to reveal things free from strangeness and parody. How else to account for the startling asymmetry of language and “the mauve lamb”?
Data De Facto
Only from the unbidden will 'things' come clear;
only from the margin will the centre be found;
only from re-vision will the spectacle unfold.
Reverse the prism to see the light;
undo the machine to regain your limbs.
But the opposite of complex is not the simple
and ill-logic won't cure what ails us.
The frozen fields just beyond our doors
aren't devoid of life. They're only waiting
for the right time.
What comes from the unbidden is the blackbird's wing;
all the margin tells you is: Yes, you are here;
the spectacle holds up its own mirror,
bloody at the edges.
Mirolla can now enumerate some of the 'givens' (data) of his work, in an attempt to save it perhaps from the ravages of poststructuralism. “Data de Facto” is a good place to end our entrance into Mirolla’s poetry because of what it acknowledges, namely, both the disparate world to which poetry must first approach and the essential mystery lying at its core. The unspoken references to Derrida ("margin") and Debord ("the spectacle"), this century’s leading intellectual polestars, are telling and well-timed. The reader cannot call forth 'things', for things are already there, already variously set in the intertextual weave that language has become. The complexity of the poem means envisaging the appearance of sudden (delightfully paradoxical) 'newness': how else to refer to the staleness of old friends as "Zeno upside-down" ("The Secret Place" 52) or even Los Angeles as an outmoded "parable of the world" (("L.A" 50).
And if we lose the centre to a too self-illumined spectacle (as is the effect of reading most experimentalist writing today), it's all the more reason to refocus or even shift perspectives a bit ("Reverse the prism to see the light"). Mirolla is perhaps leaving us with a view of the poem as at best a “de facto” product, not the mirror but the mirrored, and not so much surface reflection as depth undistracted by chimerical light. And as for time, it’s no longer to be resisted: as Jack Spicer says in After Lorca, “Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it.”[5]
Imagery and language, however valuable in themselves, really can't be seen as anything but limitations of the poetic craft. Approximations at best. But there's no mistaking the centrality of the object in Mirolla's poetry, its "Quint Essential (58)" lucidity and also depth and mystery. Unlike a lot of experimentalist writing in Canada, there's a traditional reverencing for object and narrative voice that can't ever be open to the charge of housing sexist or imperial sentiments (a rhetoric most Canadian 'academic' readers still employ).
Here poetry is not Pop collage nor the site of multiple discourses nor specimen of any of the experimentalist credos responsible for some disastrous writing within the past few decades. Has it ever become unfashionable then to speak with "God's Language" (76): has the impetus to that sort of poetic scope and intention been beaten out of the literary psyche? Perhaps nobody has dared as courageously as Michael Mirolla to restore the mystery of reading and the integrity of poetic experience itself?
Awakening: there are puddles
everywhere; images of time that reflect
for a moment and then evaporate
with the sun.
god's language only
is spoken here.
[1] Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1990: p, 268
[2] All poetry references are to Mirolla, Michael. Light and Time. Clinton, ON: SkyWing Press, 2008.
[3] Blaser, Robin. “The Fire” in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser. Ed. Miriam Nichols. Berkely: University of California Press, 2006: p. 4
[4] See Butler, Christopher. After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980 for an excellent typology of (post-)modernist art
[5] After Lorca in The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008: p. 122.
“One would say that the poetic image, in its newness, opens a future to language." (Gaston Bachelard)
Michael Mirolla looks into his art as into a language prism: light glances off many sides of the 'object' at once and time, particularly time, is what attempts to hold it still. They seem to work as artistic principles, informing and revelatory: the condition and product of the work itself. But as time lets go, the poem is left not just as a brilliantly light-refracted piece; it is also, in Stevens’s parlance, that always perennially interesting “world [that] lives as you live/Speaks as you speak",[1] the demystified thing as it is. We are not left with just a lovely inscrutable artifact but an image, as Bachelard says, that “opens a future to language”. And as Mirolla says in Light and Time,[2] "One toss and th' impressions gone./Time is a vengeful puddle quick to dry/behind us." (“Descendings” 28); and a little further in the same poem, "And yes, th' impression's still there/where you left it/and, as you slip in, the sun/ rises on thick haunches".(32) Once seen the poem, thing, impression is changed forever, and always set afterwards to reveal more significant properties and depths.
Is this the Surrealist artist at work or word-dreamer of daring and verbal precision? A proponent for a radical Canadian nouveauté? Or perhaps a neo-classicist at heart, a respecter and proponent of culture, language and literary influences? Michael Mirolla is a well-respected member of the Canadian writing community. Born in Italy, and arriving in Canada at the age of five, he calls himself a Montreal-Toronto corridor writer (because he spends so much time travelling between the two cities). He’s a novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright. Publications include the recently-released novel Berlin (a finalist for the 2009 Indie Book and National Best Books Awards), and two short story collections--The Formal Logic of Emotion and Hothouse Loves & Other Tales. A collection of poetry, Light And Time, was recently published with an English-Italian bilingual collection of poetry Interstellar Distances/Distanze Interstellari due out later in 2009. An Italian translation of The Formal Logic of Emotion has been accepted for publication and also due out in late 2009.
So we certainly can't read Light and Time, or an author as multi-versed in literary genre as Michael Mirolla, with pre-set notions of the poem in mind. And it won't do either to restrict him to place, time or any particular literary influence. He’s a skilful practitioner of imagery but I won’t even call him an Imagist nor even uniquely Canadian poet. If we want to keep the true constructive impetus of the work alive before us, we must see novelist, short story writer, poet and playwright as open as any artist (and as any literary oeuvre) can be to a global or even indeed a cosmological interest. Robin Blaser, in one of his many insightful entrances into poetic process, exhorts poets to record both the music of the spheres and the “sound of the earth.”[3] Poetry not consciously subjected to prescribed style or content will be universal in Blaser’s unique sense.
Certainly poetry is here venerated as among the highest expressions of human sentience and sentiment. And very much as if first principles or basic constituents of a cosmological poetics were primary, Mirolla begins with ‘light’ and ‘time’.
Light and Time
Light
and time--
you know the two well
don't you?
The empty heart of the tunnel
that beats against you
photon by photon
and chips away at the edges
where you exist,
Given time
there'd soon be
nothing left
but light.
Light, time: light, every object of light and by metaphorical extension the idea of reflection as an enlightened seeing, are promising as literary premises. His is a unique type of impression-gathering that at first can reduce the object to a sum of pure visual (or imagistic) effects. The nature of poetry is to never lose sight of the object, writer glued to it sometimes with an irrepressible tenacity, for whatever light illumines will soon strike the reader as a vibrant living presence. To turn the poem one way, held high in front of you, is to look for delectation and brilliance (poem as aesthetic object) but to sense also that something's been transformed in the viewing, whether the poem, object or reader. Mirolla doesn't just aestheticize his objects in the hope of turning them into traditional vehicles for a personal lyricism: the object that's read also envelops and unfolds, offering a wealth of phenomenal details.
In the case of "Light and Time", the poem that frames the whole work, light is in the end an eerie sort of receptacle for darkness imaged as the "empty heart of the tunnel/that beats against you/photon by photon". The effect on the reader can be hard-edged, too, since light and time are envisaged as objects that literally chip away at you. A similar sort of falling into the thing's inscrutable heart after an extinction of metaphorical light appears in "Roman Sketch" where "Gravity sucks you down into/the tombs, the dry unlickable dust,/ a shimmer of molecule slipping/past molecule" (46). The entire poem is worth citing for the way both the dying light of imagery and allusion combine to bring the reader’s to its own lapse into a crazed memory of the past
The old Carthage rises like bile in the throat
(‘tis a pieta she’s a whore).
There where the salt fell on fallow
dreams now grow:
Monstrous hands in dislocation,
eyeless angels stripped of wings
straining for a glimpse
of paradiso-
still-life on the march,
repatriated.
City of eternal bilitis,
sacrifice on the alterings of history.
What Black Mass has kept you afloat,
moored in barbaric legions?
gravity sucks you down into
the tombs, the dry unlickable dust,
a shimmer of molecule slipping
past molecule.
But-
they keep digging you up again,
brushing back time
bit by bit
a spoonful a day
till you are all foundation
propped up,
your kinfolk sedimentary
numbers in catalogue:
till one asks not:
Can it survive?
But-
Is there enough cement
to keep the question from
being begged?
Describing Mirolla's poetry as mystery of illumined seeing is a necessary first step; content such as lakes, authors and paintings, seem to fall into the same void with reader.
Crane Lake 1
We all speak of depth
as if the water mirrored something
more profound than the dragon-fly
that lands non-chalantly on your arm;
or the snapping turtle that hovers near,
its craggy face blowing bubbles
thru the lattice of sunlight, the gleam
of an ancient presence that ignores
all around it...even our god himself.
We all speak of silence
as if the momentary glimpse
of loon should make us hush
in awe. Should make us forget the rivulets
of a dying lamp pointed
at the tight core of our betrayal.
We speak of memory
as if... as if...
The object of "Crane Lake 1" can't be just metaphor of "depth" and "ancient presences" as if that were enough nor is it a presentation of fragments of a landscape, "dragon-fly", "water", "rivulets" pieced together only and strictly in imagination. Speaking about Crane Lake as the poet's traditional lake divests it of its 'substantive', irreducibly real nature, that more vital something to "make us hush/in awe". The depth we've come to the poem for soon reduces to the empty "silence" of language or retreats into "memory", when all we've got is the stammering language of "as if": when instead of a lake, there’s only a sinister immersion into the "the tight core of our betrayal." Note the inadequacy of figurative language to get the memory exactly in line with the passing of a friend in "Snap: On The Death Of A Friend": "like bed-sheets stiff with starch/like the smell/like the smell/like the smell of me." (40)
How much can literary first principles help us really to understand Mirolla's treatment of other objects? Light and time are more limitations than ways to unpack the poem, or rather conditions that can only be impossibly met. As they should be. Mirolla seems to be trying to unpack a negative mystery so that the poetry becomes more self-reflexive in the same way contemporary Art turns the inscrutable eye on itself as much as it does on language, content and style.
So what, and where, is that essential poem we seem to be always anticipating and never getting? Its opalescence and timelessness, in fact? Light and time seem actually to unravel the more we rely on them for a sense of textual stability. Mirolla himself can pose the question as "What certainty? What dense core?" ("Between the Lines" 17) because I suspect that each poem is its own unique way into the elusive heart. And the heart seems to lie somewhere between "the ghost" and the "flaxen-haired body" ("Rational Thought" 16); the "green boat" and its occupant "who can't wave back" ("Is It Someone We Know" 77) words and flesh ("Between the Lines" 17); and also between road kill and all the signs in Nature that should have alerted you from the beginning: like a mourning dove's crucifix, or trees "strain[ing] against their leashes" ("The Art of Walking" 79)
In every poem an object, dancer, rower, road kill and then its lightless, denuded form as the poem that leaves us only with Rilkean mystery. Perhaps the poet's enjoined the reader "to play with words/like a whistler in the dark." ("Descendings III." 30), sensing the impossibility of giving the poem whole to us.
To Franz K.
Tubercular swimmer in the o'er-
brimming soup, let me throw you a line.
We have voyaged together in short bursts
like DNA but you've outstripped me
now, diving beneath the fetid waves
without cease, only to surface again
with the swollen worm firmly between your teeth.
Severed antenna from a long-lost sense,
you held it tight, held it accountable.
And it wasn't enough that it tugged at the human
in you - how could it have so misunderstood?
I, on the other hand, friend to the shattered
light, the crystal blossoming, have flown
towards a sky full of glass tinkle and
laughter, the intense magic of daily events.
There, I await you, dangling a thread
like a viral infection before your eyes.
Yes, it's a desperate re-creation--
lacking cruelty—but you will reach for it.
Won't you?
Gaunt scissors dipped in red
I suspect that the poem can only approximate to its object, imprisoned in the light of bewitching vision itself. A register not of synthesis but of the essential irreducibility of language to its object, as if the poem itself could only be "shattered/light" and nothing but that. Language can't connect to the subject, poet calling it "a desperate re-creation", and if it tries to the effect is as absurd as trying to throw a life line to a drowning Franz K: a Kafkaesque impulse to revel in the improbabilities (or absurdities) of making the poem a vehicle for meaning. Even at the close DNA level (and what can be closer?) kinship between poet and literary ideal is too impossibly irreal. Life lines, in Kafkaesque style, metamorphose into viral threads, and implements of writing into "Gaunt scissors dipped in red".
Its seems now light and time, stripped of purely metaphysical functions, are agents of a new opening to language, reconfigured on patterns of incongruities and asymmetrical viewing that mark the true experiences from which the poem arises. Looking at "Le Repos Du Vieillard" (19), is not to see rest but a portrait of imminent death, skillfully delineated in shade and tones as though we were looking a surrealist painting; a transformation of stillness and finality of life into ghastly insect body and of the place of death (“a house of cards”) itself into Tartarean hell.
The snow falls calmly on a house of cards.
All the windows sealed. Eyes of smoky marble
shutter the thoughts in the parapets like minds-
flakes drying as they tumble. Rest in the moment
neglected ghosts break down the narrow door
and the candles on the bedsides
put themselves out. They strain to move
each other on limp machinery and collapse
among the chairs that clutter the room.
When I was young, he says,
they nailed me to the floor
and watched me ripen.
Now, my movements are stares
through smoke-filled eyes.
Foreign hands have gripped her iris.
She crawls in the cellar dense with sand,
looks for the nipple of gas her breath can ignite.
Snow hisses in recoil. Like a sun-flower,
the house turns creaking on its joints.
Inside, they are busy stroking chairs.
Perhaps “figurative surrealism”, as the postmodern scholar Christopher Butler uses that term[4], best fits Mirolla’s portrait in verse. To read the poem “Le Repos du Vieillard” is to see that “Only that subject matter is valued which is tragic and timeless.” (Butler 17) Everything in the old man at rest and its delineation in language suggest that the last hope for a true representationalist piece may have been dissolving into nightmare of non-representational (modernist) art. But since the poem isn’t based on a real painting, the point’s conjectural only.
And, of course, Mirolla’s poetry won't stop at just a slowly fading modernist hope. Not in this new transfiguring language of darkling meanings where light seems to give shape only to sinuous Kline bottles, and air itself "moans when invaded" ("Blind Alley" 42). Metaphor can empty itself out and leave the reader following the insect's trail to sense: for example, "The day is a slow beetle" in whose head a day of mortal living is reenacted ("The Day Is A Slow Beetle" 21). Mirolla also refers to similar "beetle dreams" in another poem ("Blind Alley" 42).
A classical author like Prudentius, known for purity and asceticism, can become a sort of foreground to the poet's portrait of the quintessential Etruscan garden ("The Garden" 23). Or the dying light of day "at the deep end/of the garden" can be imaged as "the silent dog...slashing across the moonbeam throat," surrealistic pairs of the same object if ever there were any. Again for the effect in Mirolla’s poetry of such wonderfully asymmetrical poetic elements as ‘garden’ and ‘silent dog’, a whole poem must be intuited.
In my garden, Prudentius might have
written, the fruits never ripen. Splotches
of pensees, swirls of non-meeting, girligigs
that spell Might-Have-Been. The tomatoes lust
for actuality, some mouth-like leech-like
appendage to suck their sweetness dry.
Instead, a world of infinity-minus-one.
The grapes bleed onto my forehead; roses
sway sentient – a moment of poetry? –
but no earthly grip can feel their prick.
Suffer, baby, suffer. In my garden.
Prudentius just might (possibly) have said,
the lukewarm breasts of a maybe woman
swelled for a second. Was it my fingers
or the telltale wind from a world I
imaged? Did it matter? No barbarians’
horses can trample this: my garden.
The still air has changed forever.
It’s interesting to note the many ways the poet tries to image the unimaginable, know the unknowable as if it were just a whisper to him from some ghostly outside place. ("Extinguishing" 35) Or even a lie's "essential geography", said to reside just below the heart, that turns into "the mauve outline of a lamb caught high in the gorse" ("When We Lie" 33). Light and time seem to have been tricked into authoritative roles they can’t handle, descrying the abject inability of even the world’s own most formidable supports to reveal things free from strangeness and parody. How else to account for the startling asymmetry of language and “the mauve lamb”?
Data De Facto
Only from the unbidden will 'things' come clear;
only from the margin will the centre be found;
only from re-vision will the spectacle unfold.
Reverse the prism to see the light;
undo the machine to regain your limbs.
But the opposite of complex is not the simple
and ill-logic won't cure what ails us.
The frozen fields just beyond our doors
aren't devoid of life. They're only waiting
for the right time.
What comes from the unbidden is the blackbird's wing;
all the margin tells you is: Yes, you are here;
the spectacle holds up its own mirror,
bloody at the edges.
Mirolla can now enumerate some of the 'givens' (data) of his work, in an attempt to save it perhaps from the ravages of poststructuralism. “Data de Facto” is a good place to end our entrance into Mirolla’s poetry because of what it acknowledges, namely, both the disparate world to which poetry must first approach and the essential mystery lying at its core. The unspoken references to Derrida ("margin") and Debord ("the spectacle"), this century’s leading intellectual polestars, are telling and well-timed. The reader cannot call forth 'things', for things are already there, already variously set in the intertextual weave that language has become. The complexity of the poem means envisaging the appearance of sudden (delightfully paradoxical) 'newness': how else to refer to the staleness of old friends as "Zeno upside-down" ("The Secret Place" 52) or even Los Angeles as an outmoded "parable of the world" (("L.A" 50).
And if we lose the centre to a too self-illumined spectacle (as is the effect of reading most experimentalist writing today), it's all the more reason to refocus or even shift perspectives a bit ("Reverse the prism to see the light"). Mirolla is perhaps leaving us with a view of the poem as at best a “de facto” product, not the mirror but the mirrored, and not so much surface reflection as depth undistracted by chimerical light. And as for time, it’s no longer to be resisted: as Jack Spicer says in After Lorca, “Objects, words must be led across time not preserved against it.”[5]
Imagery and language, however valuable in themselves, really can't be seen as anything but limitations of the poetic craft. Approximations at best. But there's no mistaking the centrality of the object in Mirolla's poetry, its "Quint Essential (58)" lucidity and also depth and mystery. Unlike a lot of experimentalist writing in Canada, there's a traditional reverencing for object and narrative voice that can't ever be open to the charge of housing sexist or imperial sentiments (a rhetoric most Canadian 'academic' readers still employ).
Here poetry is not Pop collage nor the site of multiple discourses nor specimen of any of the experimentalist credos responsible for some disastrous writing within the past few decades. Has it ever become unfashionable then to speak with "God's Language" (76): has the impetus to that sort of poetic scope and intention been beaten out of the literary psyche? Perhaps nobody has dared as courageously as Michael Mirolla to restore the mystery of reading and the integrity of poetic experience itself?
Awakening: there are puddles
everywhere; images of time that reflect
for a moment and then evaporate
with the sun.
god's language only
is spoken here.
[1] Stevens, Wallace. The Collected Poems. New York: Vintage Books, 1990: p, 268
[2] All poetry references are to Mirolla, Michael. Light and Time. Clinton, ON: SkyWing Press, 2008.
[3] Blaser, Robin. “The Fire” in The Fire: Collected Essays of Robin Blaser. Ed. Miriam Nichols. Berkely: University of California Press, 2006: p. 4
[4] See Butler, Christopher. After the Wake: An Essay on the Contemporary Avant-Garde. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980 for an excellent typology of (post-)modernist art
[5] After Lorca in The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer. Ed. Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian. Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008: p. 122.
Michael Mirolla, poeta trascendentale
by Egidio Marchese
Michael Mirolla si può definire un poeta trascendentale, nel senso che la sua principale caratteristica è quella di rappresentare cose, immagini e tutto un mondo, che esiste in uno spazio e un tempo suo proprio tra l’empirico e il trascendente, tra l’essere e il non essere, un mondo tra convenzionale e grottesco, reale come appare e un mondo surreale o come solo potrebbe essere. Il mondo come è veramente in sé, rimane sempre un mistero, un enigma che affascina il nostro poeta, di cui è permeata infatti tutta la sua poesia, tanto misteriosa ed enigmatica. Verificheremo questo nostro assunto nell’analisi delle seguenti quattro poesie.
*
Esaminiamo, per cominciare, la poesia “When first I glimpse...” L’inizio ha una magnifica apertura, più andiamo avanti e più restiamo conquistati dalla sua bellezza, fino a un certo punto, quando l’incanto viene interrotto momentaneamente..., per riprendere subito il suo impeto di alta ispirazione, poi ancora interrotto e infine cancellato. Mi viene in mente quella poesia di Pascoli apprezzata e criticata da Benedetto Croce, la poesia che inizia: “C’è qualcosa di nuovo oggi nell’aria,” un’apertura ad ampio respiro, subito contraddetta: “Anzi d’antico...” un “anzi” che fredda e annula lo slancio. Lo stesso in Mirolla:
When first I glimpse her poised on edge of sea,
with raven-winged tresses and arms outstretched
to face a crash of eddies (for welcoming?
for sacrifice? for me?), a novice priest perhaps
testing untamed, pre-dawn skills against the wind,
I can be forgiven for not recognizing
(even if the conjuring is strictly mine)
my mother.
I tre interrogative tra parentisi interrompono il magnifico slancio iniziale della poesia, ma aggiungono nuove brevissime prospettive accettabili, per continuare con una nuova attraente immagine “a novice priest perhaps...” fino a tagliare totalmente l’incanto che si era costruito, con la precisazione “the conjuring is strictly mine”! come dire: non è vero nulla, la bellissima immagine “...poised on edge of sea, / with raven-winged tresses and arms outstretched / to face a crash of eddies…” non è vera, me la sono inventata io, non esiste... Ma per fortuna segue: “my mother.” una forte impennata, un’altissimo nuovo senso dell’immagine che si svela: “my mother.”
Segue un cambiamento di tono. Dall’affascinante visione della figura sulla riva del mare, che affronta l’impeto dei turbini, che cerca di domare e vincere, si scende ad una nuova rappresentazione su un piano più basso, terreno, modesto e umile:
After all, I have only known her
with hair crimped in a bun and face refracted
in dish soap bubbles.
Ma l’impennata della parola “my mother” permane e si rinnova di seguito:
Now, young and taut again,
fiercely ablaze amid oily scum, she stands,
clad in purple chasuble, tiptoed and barefoot,
on a crag of gnarled cement that juts out
over brackish water.
Il forte “she stands” del secondo verso si ripete ancora nel seguito, tenendo alto il tono iniziale della poesia, e viene poi rafforzato poeticamente da “she is a mirage”:
She stands, leaning
at an impossible angle as the clouds whirl
about like metal filings, and beckons
the tides to close around her. She’s a mirage,
no doubt, this elemental who presides over
pools that house the most antediluvian thoughts.
Nella parola “mirage” si realizza immediatamente l’esaltazione dell’immagine meravigliosa e la sua distruzione quale semplice illusione. S’insinua il dubbio che si sviluppa in una sempre più chiara dissacrazione di questa figura. Essa diventa una figura elementare, primitiva, di pensieri antidiluviani, come una troglodita. La distruzione dell’immagine si completa nella stessa scomposizione dell’iniziale magnifica immagine marina in un relitto:
The result, I would suggest, of an amalgam
between primeval birth rites and fractal flotsam.
Dopo questa dissacrazione della figura della madre (che è e non è la madre, precisa il poeta) inizia la redenzione, si passa da un piano sentimentale ad uno razionale o ragionevolmente critico; si passa dalla distruzione a una rigenerazione o nuova creazione: “...a new-born creature who is / and is not my mother”. Il figlio vorrebbe mettere lo specchio davanti alla madre, mostrarle che lei ha delle scelte, che può scegliere chi essere:
I could hold up the mirror
that reflects her as both stormy vision
and tired matron, attractor of lightning
and stirrer of soup.
Il figlio insiste caparbio, perfino con una certa crudeltà:
In a cruel moment,
stamping my feet, I could force her to look
at herself as if she could really make
a choice […]
I could put before her
images of a life without sacrifice,
of absolute control, where she'd float forever
slightly above the ground and each movement
would actually come to mean something.
Si susseguono immagini potenti, suggestive e spietate. Il poeta dubita che la donna possa e voglia scegliere e cambiare: “But it is a silly conceit / on my part.” Quando abbiamo visto la donna magnificamente lottare contro l’uragano al mare, la sua lotta era solamente dettata dalla sua unica speranza di tornare alla sua normale vita familiare, ordinaria, “ancorata” in cucina (her customary anchor), alle sue faccende culinarie, alle sue “frittate” di formaggio.
But mirage or not, I have her pinioned
against the page, a new-born creature who is
and is not my mother, and who thrashes storm-wild
in the hope of getting back to a place
where a vanishing husband and the state
of cheese frittata are her main concerns.
Il suo mondo rimane quello ristretto, fisicamente e mentalmente (“pre-defined world / that restricts both movement and thought”) ristretto in cucina tra la stufa e la sedia (“a worn-out path from kitchen chair / to stove and back.”), dove lei ha solo queste visioni:
she sees
the lopsided remains of Big Boy tomatoes,
liturgies of burst broad bean pods, choruses
of spent onions, and the occasional snake eye or two
in the grimacing slant of the late-autumn sun.
È chiaro che la “crudele” dissacrazione che Mirolla fa della madre o/e di certe tradizionali donne in generale, è dettata dalla sua volontà di nobilitarle, di dar loro la piena dignità che è loro dovuta e la totale libertà di essere quello di cui sono capaci di essere. Vediamo perciò come l’apparente “crudeltà” del poeta si accopagni a una sua grande delicata tenerezza, quando egli prende per mano la madre e l’accompagna a scoprire nuove prospettive di una vita nobile e grande, di riscatto e catarsi:
I want to take her by the hand
and lead her through the shards of coloured glass
strewn about this unreconstructed field
where bulldozers daily fill more and more
of the spaces between shoreline and sea,
between earth and sky.
Egli accompagna la madre attraverso un campo sparso di cocci di vetro colorato, in un campo devastato dalla distruzione e non ricostruito, dove anzi lo spazio viene ristretto dalle ruspe (bulldozers). Qui la forza polemica del poeta si allarga, dalla critica denuncia della misera e degradata condizione della donna, alla devastazione e degrado del mondo naturale, nella nostra società dei bulldozers, un mondo dove lo spazio è sempre più ristretto tra il mare e la terra, e tra la terra e il cielo.
*
“Profumeria” è una poesia totalmente grottesca, solo apparentemente derisoria e dissacrante nei riguardi del padre. La figura del padre è sempre onorata nella nostra cultura, dove è universale la preghiera del “Padre nostro,” ed indelebile l’immagine del vecchio Anchise trasportato sulle spalle dal figlio Enea, e dove il maestoso mare Mediterraneo è chiamato “padre” da Eugenio Montale. Il grottesco del padre tuttavia esiste, talvolta, ma senza cattiveria. Per esempio, nel romanzo di Frank G. Paci, Black Madonna (12), colpisce il realismo grottesco del padre nella bara: “His face was powdered and made to look more like a street dandy than a factory worker. [...] looking like some aged gigolo instead of the bricklayer he was.” Anche in una poesia di Marisa De Franceschi rivolta al padre, “A Long Life,” si legge: “If he hadn’t lived past ninety, / He would have been remembered more fondly. / Age sure does a number on you.” In questi passi, anzicché la mancanza di rispetto o il diminuito amore, c’è piuttosto dolore e rabbia per il naturale degrado del padre nella vecchiaia. E infatti anche la poesia di Mirolla che stiamo esaminando si concluderà con una imprecazione.
La poesia “Profumeria,” dunque, è solo una bonaria e affettuosa presa in giro nei riguardi del padre che, alla bella età di novantacinque anni, decide di voler usare il profumo, una colonia per la sua faccia, il desiderio di soddisfare – come è definito ironicamente – un suo bisogno:
At the age of ninety-five, my father
decides on the need for cologne.
Questo desiderio del vecchio suscita il sorriso, propriamente, magari accompagnato dal rispettoso commento: “good for him!” Vediamo il vecchio che si trascina fino al banco dove sono in mostra i profumi, arrancando come se si tirasse dietro una carretta. Sosta a lungo a scegliere tra i vari prodotti: Fresh. Bracing. Effervescent. Eau de. “Perfetti,” per la sua pelle di pergamena danneggiata.
He splashes it on
in the space where parchment and spillage meet
each morning before a mirror image
he can barely see.
Il poeta commenta il comportamento grottesco e ridicolo del padre, i suoi movimenti e il suo stato d’animo, i suoi pensieri, la sua resistenza alla forza di attrazione gravitazionale verso la morte. Ha paura di morire, fearful of vanishing:
At the age of ninety-five, my father,
fearful of vanishing, gropes the universe
for something to do. His fingers ripple
against the waves of gravity before him,
less visible yet thicker each passing day.
Si tiene occupato, indaga sui moduli delle tasse da pagare, sui peperoncini piccanti nei vasi, spilluzzica l’uva, macchiandosi qua e là, si sovrappongono immagini di vecchie ferite:
He probes tax bills and hot pepper jars alike,
pokes at sweet grapes that trail a nasty stain
like ancient bruises. Like the purple marks
left by prison camp guards.
Infine, il poeta contempla la morte del padre nella polvere di una stanza inondata dal sole, vede il giorno in cui il padre scomparirà nella polvere. Un giorno... Ma intanto, il vecchio afferra cautamente la bottiglietta di profumo e se ne cosparge, sé e il mondo intorno, come in una profumata benedizione:
In the sunlight
that streams through the living-room window,
I see the dust that will carry him off
one day. One day. But, in the meantime,
he reaches gingerly for the blue-tinted bottle
and dabs himself (and the world around him)
with more than a hint of scented blessing.
Una canzone alla vita e una maledizione alla oscurità che ci attende avanti, è la conclusione di questa poesia.
I can but think of singing “the sun in flight”
and imprecations against an easy dark.
Ma c’è anche un’altra straordinaria conclusione da mettere in rilievo, una osservazione grottesca che fa il poeta sull’intero universo, osservazione racchiusa nella parola “entropy,” usata prima, a proposito della dentiera del nostro vecchietto, quando nel bagno si cospargeva di profumo davanti allo specchio che vedeva appena:
They [dentures] rattle inside his mouth,
click-clacking in their painful song to entropy.
La dentiera click-clacking in bocca ci porta a una dolorosa canzone all’entropia. Questa parola entropia ha un profondo significato devastante nel mondo della fisica, oltre che dell’economia e dell’espressione figurativa generale:
1 (fis.) grandezza termodinamica che caratterizza la tendenza dei sistemi chiusi e isolati a evolvere verso lo stato di massimo equilibrio, cioè che esprime l’irreversibilità dei fenomeni naturali in quanto indice della degradazione dell’energia (al crescere dell’entropia, diminuisce l’energia utilizzabile) | entropia dell’universo, nell’ipotesi dell’universo finito, indice della graduale degradazione di materia ed energia fino alla morte termica dell’universo stesso |
(econ.) indice che sottolinea l’irreversibilità dei processi economici, con conseguente esaurimento delle risorse naturali, contrapposta a una loro ipotetica circolarità
2 (fig.) misura dell’uniformità inerte, dell’assenza di forma, di gerarchia e di differenziazione; misura del livello di disordine, fino al caos | con riferimento a organizzazioni sociali o culturali, misura della tendenza, non appariscente ma costante e irreversibile, al livellamento, alla stasi; perdita di slancio, degradazione. (Garzanti)
Dal grottesco della dentiera del nostro vecchietto prossimo alla morte, il poeta ci porta, con geniale intuito, a contemplare scientificamente la morte dell’intero universo: l’“indice della graduale degradazione di materia ed energia fino alla morte termica dell’universo stesso.” Ci porta a considerare la “irreversibilità dei processi economici, con conseguente esaurimento delle risorse naturali.” Assistiamo, in modo figurativo generale, alla “misura del livello di disordine, fino al caos;” precisamente: alla “misura della tendenza, non appariscente ma costante e irreversibile, al livellamento, alla stasi; perdita di slancio, degradazione” universale!
*
Nell’analizzare le due poesie, particolarmente enigmatiche, “… a sister’s essential thoughts upon siblings now gone …” e “Machine time” di Michael Mirolla, applichiamo ad esse le osservazioni che egli stesso fa alle poesie di Desi Di Nardo, circa il rapporto tra cose e parole. Ci soffermeremo, poi, sul senso degli elementi “luce” e “tempo” fondamentali nella poetica di Mirolla, sull’enigma, e su alcune dimensioni particolari della sua poesia.
Desi Di Nardo's poetry - scrive Mirolla - deals with concrete objects and ‘things’ as they pass by the observer. In that, she struggles to find the connection between the words in the poems and the physical objects in the world itself, a struggle she puts down before the reader in both its anguish and its joy. / But what makes the poems more valuable still is how she is able to "translate" from the inner world of the poem to that outer world of objects. […] The other element of her poetry that stands out is the richness of the metaphors and similes.
Oltre alle ‘parole’ studiate in rapporto alle ‘cose,’ si possono considerare anche altri segni, come Carving pictures on the walls as Braille messages (“The Medium That Carries Us”) e perfino il new language we speak dell’amore sessuale (“White Rain”). Ma aggiungiamo anche delle nostre osservazioni generali fatte alla stessa poesia di Di Nardo, valide anche per la poesia di Mirolla:
Questa poesia [“Poetry on Lake Simcoe”], come altre di Desi Di Nardo e tanta altra poesia moderna, è tutta o in parte enigmatica, ermetica o ambigua. Ogni parola è in sé ambigua (albero può essere un abete o un acero o una betulla...), ma abbiamo nella letteratura speciali “tropi” intriganti, dove il significato proprio di una parola è traslato a un altro significato, come avviene nella metafora, la metonimia, la sineddoche, l'antifrasi, l'iperbole. Così spesso la poesia è enigmatica, e a volte si riduce anche a un gioco, un rebus o indovinello da risolvere. [...]
Nell’articolo di “Tracce freudiane” [...] il cui titolo è “Profeta è il sogno o il sembiante?” si discute dell’enigma, delle profezie e dei sogni (di cui è ricca la Bibbia), con accenni anche alle interpretazioni freudiane. Le prospettive oniriche sono particolarmente interessanti, in quanto la poesia è essa stessa un sogno. Nell’articolo si fa la distinzione dell’enigma dal semplice indovinello, in quanto la prima è e rimane avvolta nel mistero insolubile della vita (che ispira la vera poesia), mentre nel secondo si risolve solamente in un gioco di parole di poca importanza. “La soluzione dell’indovinello – si legge - non basta ad accordare soluzione alla vita. La vita è senza soluzione. [...] l’oggetto della parola richiede la persistenza dell’enigma e, dunque, la sua soluzione impossibile.” E ancora: “Le complesse figure del sogno, le innumerevoli composizioni fra parola e immagine delle quali Freud ci fornisce un ricco repertorio, sono precisamente e nient’altro che enigmi.” (Cfr. Marchese).
La poetica di Mirolla è enunciata nella stessa poesia “Light and Time,” che dà il titolo alla raccolta:
Light.
And Time.
You know the two well, don`t you?
An emptiness
in the tunnel. It beats against you
photon by photon. It chips away
at the edges where you exist.
Given enough time, there`d soon be
nothing left.
But light.
At the end
of the tunnel.
Nella recensione “Light and Time: imagery, language and mystery” la poetica degli elementi fondamentali della luce e del tempo è illustrata così:
Michael Mirolla looks into his art as into a language prism: light glances off many sides of the 'object' at once and time, particularly time, is what attempts to hold it still. They seem to work as artistic principles, informing and revelatory: the condition and product of the work itself. But as time lets go, the poem is left not just as a brilliantly light-refracted piece; it is also, in Stevens’s parlance, that always perennially interesting “world [that] lives as you live/Speaks as you speak", the demystified thing as it is. We are not left with just a lovely inscrutable artifact but an image, as Bachelard says, that “opens a future to language”. And as Mirolla says in Light and Time, "One toss and th' impressions gone./Time is a vengeful puddle quick to dry/behind us." (“Descendings” 28); and a little further in the same poem, "And yes, th' impression's still there/where you left it/and, as you slip in, the sun/ rises on thick haunches". (32) Once seen the poem, thing, impression is changed forever, and always set afterwards to reveal more significant properties and depths.
Nella poesia “… a sister’s essential thoughts upon siblings now gone …” è come se ci trovassimo fuori dal tempo e dallo spazio, tra l’essere e il non essere: lo stesso titolo appare sospeso, graficamente, senza una lettera maiuscola, con puntini prima e dopo, senza principio né fine. Tuttavia risaltano vividissime, fin dall’inizio, le immagini e ogni singola parola, illuminate e fisse nel tempo, secondo la poetica del poeta.
La poesia è composta da tre parti di prosa poetica, in cui si ripete l’andante “... in the sepia of,” con tre varianti: … in the sepia of photographs … , … in the sepia of persistence … , … in the sepia of memory … Questi andanti sono seguiti da un breve testo di prosa poetica, che si conclude con ancora l’andante iniziale, che si ripete con una cadenza come scandita da tocchi di campana a morto. Gli andanti “...in the sepia of ...” sono mesti e meditativi. Queste tre parti di prosa poetica sono intercalate da due strofe. Soggetto della poesia è la sorella che pensa ai fratelli/sorelle morti/e, “gone,” e ha pensieri “essenziali.”
Nella prima parte, ... in the sepia of photograph... appaiono in una antica patina di sepia sbiadita, giovani volti e immagini che svaniscono, sbiaditi allo scorrere del torrente-tempo, labbra risciacquate, dita di ossi bianchi, l’erba che cresce dalle zolle, carezze ai cari che non si vedranno mai più ... in the sepia of photograh... Domina qui la distruzione operata dal tempo.
… in the sepia of photographs … young faces fading away beneath time’s steady torrent the stones rubbing against the images the washed-out lips the bone-white fingers the first layer of grass tendrilling through the sod the paper-thin caress of never to be seen again … in the sepia of photographs …
Nella strofa che segue, vediamo come una celebrazione della vita, il motivo musicale può essere un allegro, i versi sono corti, dopo una presentazione del nascere della vita, da un ruscello e vari rivoletti d’acqua che si trasformano nell’immagine antica della spola e i rocchetti del filo della vita, seguono immagini saltellanti, con un quadro per ogni verso: scintillio di un momento, soffi di venti galattici, suoni di raganella o sonagli, chiara levigazione di ciottoli nell’acqua, balbettamento del codice del DNA che affonda decongestionato in un calderone di zuppa dove cuociono piccoli congegni di orologeria e ribollono sistemi stellari. Si susseguono, all’inizio di ogni verso, sei “that” come allegri salti di danza.
… riverrun roil of brown
through worn-out hollows
where open veins shepherd
the ganglion spools of life
into twitching nervous balls
that spark for a moment
that swirl before galactic winds
that rattle the great reeds
that scrub clean the pebbles
that stammer out the code
before sinking DNA depleted
into the soup … the prehensile soup
that swallows both petty clockwork
and the churning of star systems …
Nella seconda parte ... nella sepia della consistenza... vediamo ancora immagini di morti: fratello e sorella che lottano su una sporgenza spinosa, il cavo delle labbra di una giovane madre che sorride dalla tomba, un uomo rozzo con la falce in mano e te sull’anca, facce statiche sotto il cumulo di anni come su un tavolo da biliardo particelle sub-atomiche che ancora vibrano prossime a fermarsi in un brivido ... nella sepia della consistenza...
… in the sepia of persistence … brother and sister again poised to wrestle along that spiny ridge the rictus of a young mother’s smile from the grave a tough-hewn father scythe in hand and you on his hip the faces in stasis racking up the years as if on a pool table the last still vibrating subatomic particles shuddering to a stop … in the sepia of persistence …
Nella strofa che segue, sprofondiamo nell’abisso di un tempo remoto anteriore al big bang... prima della crudeltà del tempo, dove “essi” sorgono nuovamente, sull’orlo di superfici di dimensioni accidentali, irrompendo tra bollicine liriche di canzoni che riecheggiano il mondo di diluvio che colmava gli spacchi da allora aperti e prosciugati, con una urgente fretta di riconoscimento: occhi freschi e rotondi come valli primordiali, e nuovi pianeti nati, abili mani fatte per afferrare i sogni agli orli del villaggio montano, gambe scattanti per divorare le distanze tra un mondo e il successivo... Tutte immagini grandiose di fermento e gioia di un mondo che nasce o rinasce!
… but then in a reaching back
beyond the big bang itself
before the cruelty of time
they rise again to the edge
between the surfaces
of accidental dimensions
bursting through in lyric bubbles
that sing of re-echoing the world
of flooding the gaps
long since cracked and sere
with a rush of recognition:
eyes as fresh and round
as primordial valleys
and new-born planets
clever hands made to grip
the splintered edges
of mountain-village dreams
legs twitching to eat up
the distances between
one word and the next …
Infine, nella terza ed ultima parte di prosa poetica, col martellante nuovo ritornello di … nella sepia della memoria ... scorgomo facce che si scoprono come scorza d’arancia nella fredda estensione di un sentiero di pietra attraverso il riflesso di un campo gravitazionale, labbra che ricordano il brivido di un nome, dita che raggiungono l’universo dei genitori, il familiare abbraccio in un momento d’incontro, un instabile momento in cui si fondono l’immagine appena apparsa e quella che sta per apparire ... nella sepia della memoria ...
… in the sepia of memory … faces unraveling like orange peels in the cold expanses the stone path across a reflection of gravitational fields the lips recalling the shudder of a name the fingers reaching into the parental universe the familiar embrace at the moment of meeting at the unstable moment just before the image of what came before and what is to come merges … in the sepia of memory …
Nella successive poesia che ci apprestiamo ad esaminare, domina ancora il tempo, fin dal titolo: “Machine time.” Si ripete anche qui la forza distruttrice del tempo, il sinonimo tempo-morte. E si assiste anche qui alla nascita di un nuovo mondo, ma con un differente senso e una nuova intensità.
Il binomio tempo-morte è antico, come in Petrarca:
Il tempo fugge e non s’arresta un’ora
e la morte vien dietro a gran giornate.
La forza distruttrice del tempo la vediamo, per esempio, nei “Sepolcri” di Foscolo:
Vero è ben, Pindemonte! Anche la Speme,
Ultima Dea, fugge i sepolcri; e involve
Tutte le cose l’oblio nella sua notte;
E una forza operosa le affatica
Di moto in moto; e l’uomo e le sue tombe
E l’estreme sembianze e le reliquie
Della terra e del ciel traveste il tempo.
A questi versi corrispondono quelli di questa poesia di Mirolla, dove vediamo riemergere oggetti e fossili, dalla travolgente distruzione del tempo:
It is thus – after countless cycles of gods
and cloned encodings, of lost forest
and foundry, of bombs and lacrimosity –
that there re-emerges … in the thin stale
coincidence of time … a duplicate string
of peasant farm implements. Steamship tickets.
Village nuptials serenaded by the ghosts
of glint-toothed gypsies. A child meandering
along the rim of rail-deficient balcony.
All’inizio di questa poesia vediamo riemergere oggetti da un mondo sotterraneo di immobilità e pietrificazione, di muto silenzio, di solitudine senza età, di anaerobica perfezione. Da sotto le pietre senza preoccupazioni, senza pensiero e senza vita, riemergono con sforzo oggetti che hanno ancora un battito:
a duplicate string
of peasant farm implements. Steamship tickets.
Village nuptials serenaded by the ghosts
of glint-toothed gypsies. A child meandering
along the rim of rail-deficient balcony.
Nascono forme che attendono di essere identificate:
they fast revert to form … a platonic
vessel wherein individual objects
become mere place holders, anxious bottles
on an assembly line waiting
to be filled, for the right instance to come
along and fix/make identification.
Siamo oltre ai margini del mondo. Voyages over the edge of earth. Un mondo minaccioso, dove la nebbia con artigli attenta a madri in fatalistici deliqui e bimbi potenzialmente perduti. Un uomo passa le notti davanti fornaci infocate, una donna porge pane di granturco, la neve è calpestata da passi militari, e poi si sente lo struggimento di un odore erogeno:
Ah, the head-strong erogenous odor
of honey and chickpea pocket pastry.
Si assiste alla creazione di un nuovo mondo. Siamo nel limbo tra l’essere e il non essere, dove due creature nude non ancora nate si tengono per mano, una stampa di un tempo perduto, time-lost. Siamo in un panorama Außenseite (esterno) inconcepibile, un giardino che non richiede cura, né luce, né implica crescita:
Exact in gemination, very much the couple
holding hands in a time-lost print, the two
stand naked yet unborn in the midst of a garden
that seeks no care. Demands no light. Implies
no growing. All around them, a landscape
so Außenseite they haven’t a word for it.
Siamo in un mondo totalmente artificiale, come quello creato nel romanzo di Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, dove le creature “(con gli occhi solo sempre verdi, e anche un poco fluorescenti nel buio) non hanno turbamenti, emozioni, ansietà come gli esseri umani, vivono solo di certezze in un ingenuo stupore, sono state programmate così, attraverso le opportune manipolazioni genetiche. Sono ingenue vittime tristemente affabili.” (Cfr. Marchese) Come pure in “Il giardino delle delizie” di Elettra Bedon, un giardino fabbrica di prodotti programmati (“Nei contenitori traslucidi i feti galleggiano.”) per la creazione di una migliore società. E anche qui Mirolla ci mostra un altro suo mondo sullo stesso metro. Non è un mondo ameno e gioioso, con valli e vita festosa, come quello che abbiamo visto nella precedente poesia, ma un mondo metallico, tagliente e mezzo arruginito:
He reaches up to probe a metallic “petal”
that glows its greenness. Humming, it retreats
from his fingers as if unused to warmth. More tuned
perhaps to the tickle of stone vibrations.
She cups a bird-thing clicking in circles
on the corroded surface, its “feathers” like barbs
adept at blood-letting. It springs from martyred hands,
explodes into a fireworks rainbow before
falling back to rust, rebirth and spinning.
Nello sfondo si profila una città con un profilo si pescecane:
Barely visible in the neon distance,
the reiteration of a city. Shark-like
against the sky, replicated to never-ending.
La gente, che alla fine si vede in una vasta veduta intenta a mietere il grano, in movimenti geometrici e meccanici, è priva di umanità, eccetto quando ciascuno taglia un pugno di spighe che offre in alto ad una dea assente, per poi riprendere il lavoro, come disumani automi: senza sosta, senza passione, senza pensiero, disumanizzati:
They look at each other … for the first time?
Yes, possibly for the first time … and ask
in chorus, while pointing: Do I know you?
Left as empty forms … in ellipses they turn …
in ever-widening parabolas …
scythes gripped with a hard-wired imagining,
the clockwork ballet cutting of pregnant wheat
in fields that whiff of pollen and ripe figs.
It is a remembered scent only … trained
from original childhood like the troops
of some arrogant dictator, trampling under
any memory that follows. They meet then
in passing along the edge of their trajectory …
almost but not quite touching … almost but not quite
seeing … before each stoops to cut one more
handful of grain … held up as an offering
to a goddess who may or may not put in
an appearance. They will continue to do this
in precisely the same way … without pause
or passion … without thought … without entropy …
until … until … some stone … or poet
decides to hug them down to kind darkness.
Con questa maestosa scena si conclude la poesia, dove, alla fine, prevale la pietosa conclusione di una spietata condizione umana: “to hug them down to kind darkness.”
*
Concludiamo come abbiamo premesso che Michael Mirolla è un poeta trascendentale. Questa caratterizzazione si riscontra in tanti dettagliati aspetti dei suoi lavori esaminati, che rappresentano tutti un mondo trascendentale, tra l’essere e il non essere. Infatti, nella prima poesia “When first I glimpse...” vediamo l’immagine della madre che appare e scompare, come indica il verbo “glimpe,” un’immagine appena intravista, istantanea e sfuggente, illusoria, un miraggio, una meravigliosa immagine che si contraddice e si nega, tra aerea e terrena. Nell’altra poesia “Profumeria,” vediamo la figura grottesca del padre 95enne prossimo alla morte, da cui si apre la prospettiva scientifico-fantastica di un mondo che si distrugge nell’entropia. Nella successiva poesia “… a sister’s essential thoughts upon siblings now gone …” già il titolo è senza principio né fine, ed appare un mondo fuori dal tempo e dallo spazio, un mondo di morti, cari familiari “now gone,” sbiaditi in un colore di sepia.... E vediamo poi anche la creazione di un nuovo mondo, surreale o trascendentale, dove in un calderone si mescolano DNA, piccoli meccanismi di orologeria e immensi sistemi astrali, e intorno soffiano venti galattici ecc. Anche nella successiva poesia “Machine time,” assistiamo alla creazione di un nuovo mondo, come dicevamo sopra: “Siamo nel limbo tra l’essere e il non essere, dove due creature nude non ancora nate si tengono per mano, una stampa di un tempo perduto, time-lost. Siamo in un panorama Außenseite (esterno) inconcepibile”
Nel mondo trascendentale della poesia di Mirolla, lo spazio è indefinito o indefinibile, come Außenseite they haven’t a word for it..... e spesso ci troviamo ai margini dello spazio: Voyages over the edge of earth..... e troviamo anche: the edge / between the surfaces / of accidental dimensions..... spiny ridge..... gravitational fields….. a city. Shark-like / against the sky..... primordial valleys / and new-born planets….. Pure il tempo è come inesistente: a time-lost print..... ageless solitude..... beyond the big bang itself / before the cruelty of time…..
Fondamentalmente la poesia di Mirolla è quella di un mondo misterioso e affascinante, enigmatico e pure avvincente, che seduce il lettore e lo stimola a partecipazione con la sua immaginazione anche alla creazione della stessa poesia. L’enigna è l’ultima frontiera del viaggio di ricerca verso la scoperta del senso della vita, destinato a rimanerer sempre un enigma, come si afferma nell’articolo delle “Tracce Freudiane,” che abbiamo citato prima. Ma l’ansia del mistero non cessa, per cui il poeta scruta il mondo com’è e come potrebbe essere. Su questo terreno dell’enigma si corre il pericolo di fare spesso astruse affabulazioni, gratuite e inutili costruzioni di parole semplicemente incomprensibili. Ma una delle qualità principale che troviamo nella poesia di Mirolla è proprio la sua congruità o la sua organicità. In ogni poesia si trova un centro d’ispirazione, un core, che illumina tutti i particolari della poesia, i quali a loro volta concorrono a definire quella ispirazione centrale, precisamente.
Opere citate
Michael Mirolla si può definire un poeta trascendentale, nel senso che la sua principale caratteristica è quella di rappresentare cose, immagini e tutto un mondo, che esiste in uno spazio e un tempo suo proprio tra l’empirico e il trascendente, tra l’essere e il non essere, un mondo tra convenzionale e grottesco, reale come appare e un mondo surreale o come solo potrebbe essere. Il mondo come è veramente in sé, rimane sempre un mistero, un enigma che affascina il nostro poeta, di cui è permeata infatti tutta la sua poesia, tanto misteriosa ed enigmatica. Verificheremo questo nostro assunto nell’analisi delle seguenti quattro poesie.
*
Esaminiamo, per cominciare, la poesia “When first I glimpse...” L’inizio ha una magnifica apertura, più andiamo avanti e più restiamo conquistati dalla sua bellezza, fino a un certo punto, quando l’incanto viene interrotto momentaneamente..., per riprendere subito il suo impeto di alta ispirazione, poi ancora interrotto e infine cancellato. Mi viene in mente quella poesia di Pascoli apprezzata e criticata da Benedetto Croce, la poesia che inizia: “C’è qualcosa di nuovo oggi nell’aria,” un’apertura ad ampio respiro, subito contraddetta: “Anzi d’antico...” un “anzi” che fredda e annula lo slancio. Lo stesso in Mirolla:
When first I glimpse her poised on edge of sea,
with raven-winged tresses and arms outstretched
to face a crash of eddies (for welcoming?
for sacrifice? for me?), a novice priest perhaps
testing untamed, pre-dawn skills against the wind,
I can be forgiven for not recognizing
(even if the conjuring is strictly mine)
my mother.
I tre interrogative tra parentisi interrompono il magnifico slancio iniziale della poesia, ma aggiungono nuove brevissime prospettive accettabili, per continuare con una nuova attraente immagine “a novice priest perhaps...” fino a tagliare totalmente l’incanto che si era costruito, con la precisazione “the conjuring is strictly mine”! come dire: non è vero nulla, la bellissima immagine “...poised on edge of sea, / with raven-winged tresses and arms outstretched / to face a crash of eddies…” non è vera, me la sono inventata io, non esiste... Ma per fortuna segue: “my mother.” una forte impennata, un’altissimo nuovo senso dell’immagine che si svela: “my mother.”
Segue un cambiamento di tono. Dall’affascinante visione della figura sulla riva del mare, che affronta l’impeto dei turbini, che cerca di domare e vincere, si scende ad una nuova rappresentazione su un piano più basso, terreno, modesto e umile:
After all, I have only known her
with hair crimped in a bun and face refracted
in dish soap bubbles.
Ma l’impennata della parola “my mother” permane e si rinnova di seguito:
Now, young and taut again,
fiercely ablaze amid oily scum, she stands,
clad in purple chasuble, tiptoed and barefoot,
on a crag of gnarled cement that juts out
over brackish water.
Il forte “she stands” del secondo verso si ripete ancora nel seguito, tenendo alto il tono iniziale della poesia, e viene poi rafforzato poeticamente da “she is a mirage”:
She stands, leaning
at an impossible angle as the clouds whirl
about like metal filings, and beckons
the tides to close around her. She’s a mirage,
no doubt, this elemental who presides over
pools that house the most antediluvian thoughts.
Nella parola “mirage” si realizza immediatamente l’esaltazione dell’immagine meravigliosa e la sua distruzione quale semplice illusione. S’insinua il dubbio che si sviluppa in una sempre più chiara dissacrazione di questa figura. Essa diventa una figura elementare, primitiva, di pensieri antidiluviani, come una troglodita. La distruzione dell’immagine si completa nella stessa scomposizione dell’iniziale magnifica immagine marina in un relitto:
The result, I would suggest, of an amalgam
between primeval birth rites and fractal flotsam.
Dopo questa dissacrazione della figura della madre (che è e non è la madre, precisa il poeta) inizia la redenzione, si passa da un piano sentimentale ad uno razionale o ragionevolmente critico; si passa dalla distruzione a una rigenerazione o nuova creazione: “...a new-born creature who is / and is not my mother”. Il figlio vorrebbe mettere lo specchio davanti alla madre, mostrarle che lei ha delle scelte, che può scegliere chi essere:
I could hold up the mirror
that reflects her as both stormy vision
and tired matron, attractor of lightning
and stirrer of soup.
Il figlio insiste caparbio, perfino con una certa crudeltà:
In a cruel moment,
stamping my feet, I could force her to look
at herself as if she could really make
a choice […]
I could put before her
images of a life without sacrifice,
of absolute control, where she'd float forever
slightly above the ground and each movement
would actually come to mean something.
Si susseguono immagini potenti, suggestive e spietate. Il poeta dubita che la donna possa e voglia scegliere e cambiare: “But it is a silly conceit / on my part.” Quando abbiamo visto la donna magnificamente lottare contro l’uragano al mare, la sua lotta era solamente dettata dalla sua unica speranza di tornare alla sua normale vita familiare, ordinaria, “ancorata” in cucina (her customary anchor), alle sue faccende culinarie, alle sue “frittate” di formaggio.
But mirage or not, I have her pinioned
against the page, a new-born creature who is
and is not my mother, and who thrashes storm-wild
in the hope of getting back to a place
where a vanishing husband and the state
of cheese frittata are her main concerns.
Il suo mondo rimane quello ristretto, fisicamente e mentalmente (“pre-defined world / that restricts both movement and thought”) ristretto in cucina tra la stufa e la sedia (“a worn-out path from kitchen chair / to stove and back.”), dove lei ha solo queste visioni:
she sees
the lopsided remains of Big Boy tomatoes,
liturgies of burst broad bean pods, choruses
of spent onions, and the occasional snake eye or two
in the grimacing slant of the late-autumn sun.
È chiaro che la “crudele” dissacrazione che Mirolla fa della madre o/e di certe tradizionali donne in generale, è dettata dalla sua volontà di nobilitarle, di dar loro la piena dignità che è loro dovuta e la totale libertà di essere quello di cui sono capaci di essere. Vediamo perciò come l’apparente “crudeltà” del poeta si accopagni a una sua grande delicata tenerezza, quando egli prende per mano la madre e l’accompagna a scoprire nuove prospettive di una vita nobile e grande, di riscatto e catarsi:
I want to take her by the hand
and lead her through the shards of coloured glass
strewn about this unreconstructed field
where bulldozers daily fill more and more
of the spaces between shoreline and sea,
between earth and sky.
Egli accompagna la madre attraverso un campo sparso di cocci di vetro colorato, in un campo devastato dalla distruzione e non ricostruito, dove anzi lo spazio viene ristretto dalle ruspe (bulldozers). Qui la forza polemica del poeta si allarga, dalla critica denuncia della misera e degradata condizione della donna, alla devastazione e degrado del mondo naturale, nella nostra società dei bulldozers, un mondo dove lo spazio è sempre più ristretto tra il mare e la terra, e tra la terra e il cielo.
*
“Profumeria” è una poesia totalmente grottesca, solo apparentemente derisoria e dissacrante nei riguardi del padre. La figura del padre è sempre onorata nella nostra cultura, dove è universale la preghiera del “Padre nostro,” ed indelebile l’immagine del vecchio Anchise trasportato sulle spalle dal figlio Enea, e dove il maestoso mare Mediterraneo è chiamato “padre” da Eugenio Montale. Il grottesco del padre tuttavia esiste, talvolta, ma senza cattiveria. Per esempio, nel romanzo di Frank G. Paci, Black Madonna (12), colpisce il realismo grottesco del padre nella bara: “His face was powdered and made to look more like a street dandy than a factory worker. [...] looking like some aged gigolo instead of the bricklayer he was.” Anche in una poesia di Marisa De Franceschi rivolta al padre, “A Long Life,” si legge: “If he hadn’t lived past ninety, / He would have been remembered more fondly. / Age sure does a number on you.” In questi passi, anzicché la mancanza di rispetto o il diminuito amore, c’è piuttosto dolore e rabbia per il naturale degrado del padre nella vecchiaia. E infatti anche la poesia di Mirolla che stiamo esaminando si concluderà con una imprecazione.
La poesia “Profumeria,” dunque, è solo una bonaria e affettuosa presa in giro nei riguardi del padre che, alla bella età di novantacinque anni, decide di voler usare il profumo, una colonia per la sua faccia, il desiderio di soddisfare – come è definito ironicamente – un suo bisogno:
At the age of ninety-five, my father
decides on the need for cologne.
Questo desiderio del vecchio suscita il sorriso, propriamente, magari accompagnato dal rispettoso commento: “good for him!” Vediamo il vecchio che si trascina fino al banco dove sono in mostra i profumi, arrancando come se si tirasse dietro una carretta. Sosta a lungo a scegliere tra i vari prodotti: Fresh. Bracing. Effervescent. Eau de. “Perfetti,” per la sua pelle di pergamena danneggiata.
He splashes it on
in the space where parchment and spillage meet
each morning before a mirror image
he can barely see.
Il poeta commenta il comportamento grottesco e ridicolo del padre, i suoi movimenti e il suo stato d’animo, i suoi pensieri, la sua resistenza alla forza di attrazione gravitazionale verso la morte. Ha paura di morire, fearful of vanishing:
At the age of ninety-five, my father,
fearful of vanishing, gropes the universe
for something to do. His fingers ripple
against the waves of gravity before him,
less visible yet thicker each passing day.
Si tiene occupato, indaga sui moduli delle tasse da pagare, sui peperoncini piccanti nei vasi, spilluzzica l’uva, macchiandosi qua e là, si sovrappongono immagini di vecchie ferite:
He probes tax bills and hot pepper jars alike,
pokes at sweet grapes that trail a nasty stain
like ancient bruises. Like the purple marks
left by prison camp guards.
Infine, il poeta contempla la morte del padre nella polvere di una stanza inondata dal sole, vede il giorno in cui il padre scomparirà nella polvere. Un giorno... Ma intanto, il vecchio afferra cautamente la bottiglietta di profumo e se ne cosparge, sé e il mondo intorno, come in una profumata benedizione:
In the sunlight
that streams through the living-room window,
I see the dust that will carry him off
one day. One day. But, in the meantime,
he reaches gingerly for the blue-tinted bottle
and dabs himself (and the world around him)
with more than a hint of scented blessing.
Una canzone alla vita e una maledizione alla oscurità che ci attende avanti, è la conclusione di questa poesia.
I can but think of singing “the sun in flight”
and imprecations against an easy dark.
Ma c’è anche un’altra straordinaria conclusione da mettere in rilievo, una osservazione grottesca che fa il poeta sull’intero universo, osservazione racchiusa nella parola “entropy,” usata prima, a proposito della dentiera del nostro vecchietto, quando nel bagno si cospargeva di profumo davanti allo specchio che vedeva appena:
They [dentures] rattle inside his mouth,
click-clacking in their painful song to entropy.
La dentiera click-clacking in bocca ci porta a una dolorosa canzone all’entropia. Questa parola entropia ha un profondo significato devastante nel mondo della fisica, oltre che dell’economia e dell’espressione figurativa generale:
1 (fis.) grandezza termodinamica che caratterizza la tendenza dei sistemi chiusi e isolati a evolvere verso lo stato di massimo equilibrio, cioè che esprime l’irreversibilità dei fenomeni naturali in quanto indice della degradazione dell’energia (al crescere dell’entropia, diminuisce l’energia utilizzabile) | entropia dell’universo, nell’ipotesi dell’universo finito, indice della graduale degradazione di materia ed energia fino alla morte termica dell’universo stesso |
(econ.) indice che sottolinea l’irreversibilità dei processi economici, con conseguente esaurimento delle risorse naturali, contrapposta a una loro ipotetica circolarità
2 (fig.) misura dell’uniformità inerte, dell’assenza di forma, di gerarchia e di differenziazione; misura del livello di disordine, fino al caos | con riferimento a organizzazioni sociali o culturali, misura della tendenza, non appariscente ma costante e irreversibile, al livellamento, alla stasi; perdita di slancio, degradazione. (Garzanti)
Dal grottesco della dentiera del nostro vecchietto prossimo alla morte, il poeta ci porta, con geniale intuito, a contemplare scientificamente la morte dell’intero universo: l’“indice della graduale degradazione di materia ed energia fino alla morte termica dell’universo stesso.” Ci porta a considerare la “irreversibilità dei processi economici, con conseguente esaurimento delle risorse naturali.” Assistiamo, in modo figurativo generale, alla “misura del livello di disordine, fino al caos;” precisamente: alla “misura della tendenza, non appariscente ma costante e irreversibile, al livellamento, alla stasi; perdita di slancio, degradazione” universale!
*
Nell’analizzare le due poesie, particolarmente enigmatiche, “… a sister’s essential thoughts upon siblings now gone …” e “Machine time” di Michael Mirolla, applichiamo ad esse le osservazioni che egli stesso fa alle poesie di Desi Di Nardo, circa il rapporto tra cose e parole. Ci soffermeremo, poi, sul senso degli elementi “luce” e “tempo” fondamentali nella poetica di Mirolla, sull’enigma, e su alcune dimensioni particolari della sua poesia.
Desi Di Nardo's poetry - scrive Mirolla - deals with concrete objects and ‘things’ as they pass by the observer. In that, she struggles to find the connection between the words in the poems and the physical objects in the world itself, a struggle she puts down before the reader in both its anguish and its joy. / But what makes the poems more valuable still is how she is able to "translate" from the inner world of the poem to that outer world of objects. […] The other element of her poetry that stands out is the richness of the metaphors and similes.
Oltre alle ‘parole’ studiate in rapporto alle ‘cose,’ si possono considerare anche altri segni, come Carving pictures on the walls as Braille messages (“The Medium That Carries Us”) e perfino il new language we speak dell’amore sessuale (“White Rain”). Ma aggiungiamo anche delle nostre osservazioni generali fatte alla stessa poesia di Di Nardo, valide anche per la poesia di Mirolla:
Questa poesia [“Poetry on Lake Simcoe”], come altre di Desi Di Nardo e tanta altra poesia moderna, è tutta o in parte enigmatica, ermetica o ambigua. Ogni parola è in sé ambigua (albero può essere un abete o un acero o una betulla...), ma abbiamo nella letteratura speciali “tropi” intriganti, dove il significato proprio di una parola è traslato a un altro significato, come avviene nella metafora, la metonimia, la sineddoche, l'antifrasi, l'iperbole. Così spesso la poesia è enigmatica, e a volte si riduce anche a un gioco, un rebus o indovinello da risolvere. [...]
Nell’articolo di “Tracce freudiane” [...] il cui titolo è “Profeta è il sogno o il sembiante?” si discute dell’enigma, delle profezie e dei sogni (di cui è ricca la Bibbia), con accenni anche alle interpretazioni freudiane. Le prospettive oniriche sono particolarmente interessanti, in quanto la poesia è essa stessa un sogno. Nell’articolo si fa la distinzione dell’enigma dal semplice indovinello, in quanto la prima è e rimane avvolta nel mistero insolubile della vita (che ispira la vera poesia), mentre nel secondo si risolve solamente in un gioco di parole di poca importanza. “La soluzione dell’indovinello – si legge - non basta ad accordare soluzione alla vita. La vita è senza soluzione. [...] l’oggetto della parola richiede la persistenza dell’enigma e, dunque, la sua soluzione impossibile.” E ancora: “Le complesse figure del sogno, le innumerevoli composizioni fra parola e immagine delle quali Freud ci fornisce un ricco repertorio, sono precisamente e nient’altro che enigmi.” (Cfr. Marchese).
La poetica di Mirolla è enunciata nella stessa poesia “Light and Time,” che dà il titolo alla raccolta:
Light.
And Time.
You know the two well, don`t you?
An emptiness
in the tunnel. It beats against you
photon by photon. It chips away
at the edges where you exist.
Given enough time, there`d soon be
nothing left.
But light.
At the end
of the tunnel.
Nella recensione “Light and Time: imagery, language and mystery” la poetica degli elementi fondamentali della luce e del tempo è illustrata così:
Michael Mirolla looks into his art as into a language prism: light glances off many sides of the 'object' at once and time, particularly time, is what attempts to hold it still. They seem to work as artistic principles, informing and revelatory: the condition and product of the work itself. But as time lets go, the poem is left not just as a brilliantly light-refracted piece; it is also, in Stevens’s parlance, that always perennially interesting “world [that] lives as you live/Speaks as you speak", the demystified thing as it is. We are not left with just a lovely inscrutable artifact but an image, as Bachelard says, that “opens a future to language”. And as Mirolla says in Light and Time, "One toss and th' impressions gone./Time is a vengeful puddle quick to dry/behind us." (“Descendings” 28); and a little further in the same poem, "And yes, th' impression's still there/where you left it/and, as you slip in, the sun/ rises on thick haunches". (32) Once seen the poem, thing, impression is changed forever, and always set afterwards to reveal more significant properties and depths.
Nella poesia “… a sister’s essential thoughts upon siblings now gone …” è come se ci trovassimo fuori dal tempo e dallo spazio, tra l’essere e il non essere: lo stesso titolo appare sospeso, graficamente, senza una lettera maiuscola, con puntini prima e dopo, senza principio né fine. Tuttavia risaltano vividissime, fin dall’inizio, le immagini e ogni singola parola, illuminate e fisse nel tempo, secondo la poetica del poeta.
La poesia è composta da tre parti di prosa poetica, in cui si ripete l’andante “... in the sepia of,” con tre varianti: … in the sepia of photographs … , … in the sepia of persistence … , … in the sepia of memory … Questi andanti sono seguiti da un breve testo di prosa poetica, che si conclude con ancora l’andante iniziale, che si ripete con una cadenza come scandita da tocchi di campana a morto. Gli andanti “...in the sepia of ...” sono mesti e meditativi. Queste tre parti di prosa poetica sono intercalate da due strofe. Soggetto della poesia è la sorella che pensa ai fratelli/sorelle morti/e, “gone,” e ha pensieri “essenziali.”
Nella prima parte, ... in the sepia of photograph... appaiono in una antica patina di sepia sbiadita, giovani volti e immagini che svaniscono, sbiaditi allo scorrere del torrente-tempo, labbra risciacquate, dita di ossi bianchi, l’erba che cresce dalle zolle, carezze ai cari che non si vedranno mai più ... in the sepia of photograh... Domina qui la distruzione operata dal tempo.
… in the sepia of photographs … young faces fading away beneath time’s steady torrent the stones rubbing against the images the washed-out lips the bone-white fingers the first layer of grass tendrilling through the sod the paper-thin caress of never to be seen again … in the sepia of photographs …
Nella strofa che segue, vediamo come una celebrazione della vita, il motivo musicale può essere un allegro, i versi sono corti, dopo una presentazione del nascere della vita, da un ruscello e vari rivoletti d’acqua che si trasformano nell’immagine antica della spola e i rocchetti del filo della vita, seguono immagini saltellanti, con un quadro per ogni verso: scintillio di un momento, soffi di venti galattici, suoni di raganella o sonagli, chiara levigazione di ciottoli nell’acqua, balbettamento del codice del DNA che affonda decongestionato in un calderone di zuppa dove cuociono piccoli congegni di orologeria e ribollono sistemi stellari. Si susseguono, all’inizio di ogni verso, sei “that” come allegri salti di danza.
… riverrun roil of brown
through worn-out hollows
where open veins shepherd
the ganglion spools of life
into twitching nervous balls
that spark for a moment
that swirl before galactic winds
that rattle the great reeds
that scrub clean the pebbles
that stammer out the code
before sinking DNA depleted
into the soup … the prehensile soup
that swallows both petty clockwork
and the churning of star systems …
Nella seconda parte ... nella sepia della consistenza... vediamo ancora immagini di morti: fratello e sorella che lottano su una sporgenza spinosa, il cavo delle labbra di una giovane madre che sorride dalla tomba, un uomo rozzo con la falce in mano e te sull’anca, facce statiche sotto il cumulo di anni come su un tavolo da biliardo particelle sub-atomiche che ancora vibrano prossime a fermarsi in un brivido ... nella sepia della consistenza...
… in the sepia of persistence … brother and sister again poised to wrestle along that spiny ridge the rictus of a young mother’s smile from the grave a tough-hewn father scythe in hand and you on his hip the faces in stasis racking up the years as if on a pool table the last still vibrating subatomic particles shuddering to a stop … in the sepia of persistence …
Nella strofa che segue, sprofondiamo nell’abisso di un tempo remoto anteriore al big bang... prima della crudeltà del tempo, dove “essi” sorgono nuovamente, sull’orlo di superfici di dimensioni accidentali, irrompendo tra bollicine liriche di canzoni che riecheggiano il mondo di diluvio che colmava gli spacchi da allora aperti e prosciugati, con una urgente fretta di riconoscimento: occhi freschi e rotondi come valli primordiali, e nuovi pianeti nati, abili mani fatte per afferrare i sogni agli orli del villaggio montano, gambe scattanti per divorare le distanze tra un mondo e il successivo... Tutte immagini grandiose di fermento e gioia di un mondo che nasce o rinasce!
… but then in a reaching back
beyond the big bang itself
before the cruelty of time
they rise again to the edge
between the surfaces
of accidental dimensions
bursting through in lyric bubbles
that sing of re-echoing the world
of flooding the gaps
long since cracked and sere
with a rush of recognition:
eyes as fresh and round
as primordial valleys
and new-born planets
clever hands made to grip
the splintered edges
of mountain-village dreams
legs twitching to eat up
the distances between
one word and the next …
Infine, nella terza ed ultima parte di prosa poetica, col martellante nuovo ritornello di … nella sepia della memoria ... scorgomo facce che si scoprono come scorza d’arancia nella fredda estensione di un sentiero di pietra attraverso il riflesso di un campo gravitazionale, labbra che ricordano il brivido di un nome, dita che raggiungono l’universo dei genitori, il familiare abbraccio in un momento d’incontro, un instabile momento in cui si fondono l’immagine appena apparsa e quella che sta per apparire ... nella sepia della memoria ...
… in the sepia of memory … faces unraveling like orange peels in the cold expanses the stone path across a reflection of gravitational fields the lips recalling the shudder of a name the fingers reaching into the parental universe the familiar embrace at the moment of meeting at the unstable moment just before the image of what came before and what is to come merges … in the sepia of memory …
Nella successive poesia che ci apprestiamo ad esaminare, domina ancora il tempo, fin dal titolo: “Machine time.” Si ripete anche qui la forza distruttrice del tempo, il sinonimo tempo-morte. E si assiste anche qui alla nascita di un nuovo mondo, ma con un differente senso e una nuova intensità.
Il binomio tempo-morte è antico, come in Petrarca:
Il tempo fugge e non s’arresta un’ora
e la morte vien dietro a gran giornate.
La forza distruttrice del tempo la vediamo, per esempio, nei “Sepolcri” di Foscolo:
Vero è ben, Pindemonte! Anche la Speme,
Ultima Dea, fugge i sepolcri; e involve
Tutte le cose l’oblio nella sua notte;
E una forza operosa le affatica
Di moto in moto; e l’uomo e le sue tombe
E l’estreme sembianze e le reliquie
Della terra e del ciel traveste il tempo.
A questi versi corrispondono quelli di questa poesia di Mirolla, dove vediamo riemergere oggetti e fossili, dalla travolgente distruzione del tempo:
It is thus – after countless cycles of gods
and cloned encodings, of lost forest
and foundry, of bombs and lacrimosity –
that there re-emerges … in the thin stale
coincidence of time … a duplicate string
of peasant farm implements. Steamship tickets.
Village nuptials serenaded by the ghosts
of glint-toothed gypsies. A child meandering
along the rim of rail-deficient balcony.
All’inizio di questa poesia vediamo riemergere oggetti da un mondo sotterraneo di immobilità e pietrificazione, di muto silenzio, di solitudine senza età, di anaerobica perfezione. Da sotto le pietre senza preoccupazioni, senza pensiero e senza vita, riemergono con sforzo oggetti che hanno ancora un battito:
a duplicate string
of peasant farm implements. Steamship tickets.
Village nuptials serenaded by the ghosts
of glint-toothed gypsies. A child meandering
along the rim of rail-deficient balcony.
Nascono forme che attendono di essere identificate:
they fast revert to form … a platonic
vessel wherein individual objects
become mere place holders, anxious bottles
on an assembly line waiting
to be filled, for the right instance to come
along and fix/make identification.
Siamo oltre ai margini del mondo. Voyages over the edge of earth. Un mondo minaccioso, dove la nebbia con artigli attenta a madri in fatalistici deliqui e bimbi potenzialmente perduti. Un uomo passa le notti davanti fornaci infocate, una donna porge pane di granturco, la neve è calpestata da passi militari, e poi si sente lo struggimento di un odore erogeno:
Ah, the head-strong erogenous odor
of honey and chickpea pocket pastry.
Si assiste alla creazione di un nuovo mondo. Siamo nel limbo tra l’essere e il non essere, dove due creature nude non ancora nate si tengono per mano, una stampa di un tempo perduto, time-lost. Siamo in un panorama Außenseite (esterno) inconcepibile, un giardino che non richiede cura, né luce, né implica crescita:
Exact in gemination, very much the couple
holding hands in a time-lost print, the two
stand naked yet unborn in the midst of a garden
that seeks no care. Demands no light. Implies
no growing. All around them, a landscape
so Außenseite they haven’t a word for it.
Siamo in un mondo totalmente artificiale, come quello creato nel romanzo di Margaret Atwood, Oryx and Crake, dove le creature “(con gli occhi solo sempre verdi, e anche un poco fluorescenti nel buio) non hanno turbamenti, emozioni, ansietà come gli esseri umani, vivono solo di certezze in un ingenuo stupore, sono state programmate così, attraverso le opportune manipolazioni genetiche. Sono ingenue vittime tristemente affabili.” (Cfr. Marchese) Come pure in “Il giardino delle delizie” di Elettra Bedon, un giardino fabbrica di prodotti programmati (“Nei contenitori traslucidi i feti galleggiano.”) per la creazione di una migliore società. E anche qui Mirolla ci mostra un altro suo mondo sullo stesso metro. Non è un mondo ameno e gioioso, con valli e vita festosa, come quello che abbiamo visto nella precedente poesia, ma un mondo metallico, tagliente e mezzo arruginito:
He reaches up to probe a metallic “petal”
that glows its greenness. Humming, it retreats
from his fingers as if unused to warmth. More tuned
perhaps to the tickle of stone vibrations.
She cups a bird-thing clicking in circles
on the corroded surface, its “feathers” like barbs
adept at blood-letting. It springs from martyred hands,
explodes into a fireworks rainbow before
falling back to rust, rebirth and spinning.
Nello sfondo si profila una città con un profilo si pescecane:
Barely visible in the neon distance,
the reiteration of a city. Shark-like
against the sky, replicated to never-ending.
La gente, che alla fine si vede in una vasta veduta intenta a mietere il grano, in movimenti geometrici e meccanici, è priva di umanità, eccetto quando ciascuno taglia un pugno di spighe che offre in alto ad una dea assente, per poi riprendere il lavoro, come disumani automi: senza sosta, senza passione, senza pensiero, disumanizzati:
They look at each other … for the first time?
Yes, possibly for the first time … and ask
in chorus, while pointing: Do I know you?
Left as empty forms … in ellipses they turn …
in ever-widening parabolas …
scythes gripped with a hard-wired imagining,
the clockwork ballet cutting of pregnant wheat
in fields that whiff of pollen and ripe figs.
It is a remembered scent only … trained
from original childhood like the troops
of some arrogant dictator, trampling under
any memory that follows. They meet then
in passing along the edge of their trajectory …
almost but not quite touching … almost but not quite
seeing … before each stoops to cut one more
handful of grain … held up as an offering
to a goddess who may or may not put in
an appearance. They will continue to do this
in precisely the same way … without pause
or passion … without thought … without entropy …
until … until … some stone … or poet
decides to hug them down to kind darkness.
Con questa maestosa scena si conclude la poesia, dove, alla fine, prevale la pietosa conclusione di una spietata condizione umana: “to hug them down to kind darkness.”
*
Concludiamo come abbiamo premesso che Michael Mirolla è un poeta trascendentale. Questa caratterizzazione si riscontra in tanti dettagliati aspetti dei suoi lavori esaminati, che rappresentano tutti un mondo trascendentale, tra l’essere e il non essere. Infatti, nella prima poesia “When first I glimpse...” vediamo l’immagine della madre che appare e scompare, come indica il verbo “glimpe,” un’immagine appena intravista, istantanea e sfuggente, illusoria, un miraggio, una meravigliosa immagine che si contraddice e si nega, tra aerea e terrena. Nell’altra poesia “Profumeria,” vediamo la figura grottesca del padre 95enne prossimo alla morte, da cui si apre la prospettiva scientifico-fantastica di un mondo che si distrugge nell’entropia. Nella successiva poesia “… a sister’s essential thoughts upon siblings now gone …” già il titolo è senza principio né fine, ed appare un mondo fuori dal tempo e dallo spazio, un mondo di morti, cari familiari “now gone,” sbiaditi in un colore di sepia.... E vediamo poi anche la creazione di un nuovo mondo, surreale o trascendentale, dove in un calderone si mescolano DNA, piccoli meccanismi di orologeria e immensi sistemi astrali, e intorno soffiano venti galattici ecc. Anche nella successiva poesia “Machine time,” assistiamo alla creazione di un nuovo mondo, come dicevamo sopra: “Siamo nel limbo tra l’essere e il non essere, dove due creature nude non ancora nate si tengono per mano, una stampa di un tempo perduto, time-lost. Siamo in un panorama Außenseite (esterno) inconcepibile”
Nel mondo trascendentale della poesia di Mirolla, lo spazio è indefinito o indefinibile, come Außenseite they haven’t a word for it..... e spesso ci troviamo ai margini dello spazio: Voyages over the edge of earth..... e troviamo anche: the edge / between the surfaces / of accidental dimensions..... spiny ridge..... gravitational fields….. a city. Shark-like / against the sky..... primordial valleys / and new-born planets….. Pure il tempo è come inesistente: a time-lost print..... ageless solitude..... beyond the big bang itself / before the cruelty of time…..
Fondamentalmente la poesia di Mirolla è quella di un mondo misterioso e affascinante, enigmatico e pure avvincente, che seduce il lettore e lo stimola a partecipazione con la sua immaginazione anche alla creazione della stessa poesia. L’enigna è l’ultima frontiera del viaggio di ricerca verso la scoperta del senso della vita, destinato a rimanerer sempre un enigma, come si afferma nell’articolo delle “Tracce Freudiane,” che abbiamo citato prima. Ma l’ansia del mistero non cessa, per cui il poeta scruta il mondo com’è e come potrebbe essere. Su questo terreno dell’enigma si corre il pericolo di fare spesso astruse affabulazioni, gratuite e inutili costruzioni di parole semplicemente incomprensibili. Ma una delle qualità principale che troviamo nella poesia di Mirolla è proprio la sua congruità o la sua organicità. In ogni poesia si trova un centro d’ispirazione, un core, che illumina tutti i particolari della poesia, i quali a loro volta concorrono a definire quella ispirazione centrale, precisamente.
Opere citate
- Associazione Culturale Tracce Freudiane di Torino, Profeta è il sogno o il sembiante?, Seminario del 13.11.2008 a cura di Gabriele Lodari, http://traccefreudiane.com/wp/archives/133 .
- Atwood, Margaret, Oryx and Crake. Random House of Canada Limited, 2004. E anche in “Bibliosofia/Canada” n. 3. (recensione) http://www.bibliosofia.net/files/atwood.htm
- Bedon, Elettra, “Il giardino delle delizie,” Storie di Eglia e altre storie (racconti), Montford & Villeroy Inc, Montreal 1998, pp. 201-223. E anche in “Bibliosofia/Canada2” n. 67 http://www.bibliosofia.net/Elettra__Il_giardino_delle_delizie.pdf
- De Franceschi, Marisa. “A long life” in “Bibliosofia/Canada” n. 3 (inedito), “Bibliosofia/Canada” n. 82 http://www.bibliosofia.net/files/marisa___poems_i.htm
- Marchese, Egidio, La pazzia in Margaret Atwood, “Bibliosofia/Canada” n. 3. (recensione) http://www.bibliosofia.net/files/atwood.htm
- __________ Moralità, realismo e ironia di Frank G. Paci, in “Bibliosofia/Canada” n. 41, http://www.bibliosofia.net/files/frank__g._paci___riveduto.htm
- __________ Poesie di Desi Di Manno tradotte da Renzo Ricchi, in “Bibliosofia/Canada2” n. 80.
- Mirolla, Michael. Desi Di Nardo – Altri commenti, in “Bibliosofia/Canada2” n. 81.
- __________ Light and Time. Clinton, ON: SkyWing Press, 2008.
- __________ Light and Time.
- __________ “Machine Time”
- __________ “Profumeria”
- __________ “When first I glimpse...”
- __________ “… a sister’s essential thoughts upon siblings now gone …”
- Paci, Frank G. Black Madonna. Ottawa: Oberon Press, 1982.
- La Bio-Bibliografia di Michael Mirolla, in Bibliosofia http://www.bibliosofia.net/Collaboratori_-_Contributors__II.pdf
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