..in no uncertain way suggest Signora Germana has returned
Stazione
For the New Railway Station in
Rome
Those who said God is praised
By hurt pillars, who loved to see our brazen lust
Lie down in rubble, and our vaunting arches
Conduce to dust;
Those who with short shadows
Poked through the stubbled forum pondering on decline,
And would not take the sun standing at noon
For a good sign;
Those pilgrims of defeat
Who brought their injured wills as to a soldiers’ home;
Dig them all up now, tell them there’s something new
To see in Rome.
See, from the travertine
Face of the office block, the roof of the booking-hall
Sails out into the air beside the ruined
Servian Wall,
Echoing in its light
And cantilevered swoop of reinforced concrete
The broken profile of these stones, defeating
That defeat
And straying the strummed mind,
By such a sudden chord as raised the town of Troy,
To where the least shard of the world sings out
In stubborn joy,
“What city is eternal
But that which prints itself within the groping head
Out of the blue unbroken reveries
Of the building dead?
“What is our praise or pride
But to imagine excellence, and try to make it?
What does it say over the door of Heaven
But homo fecit?”
- Richard Wilbur. Things of This World. Harcourt Brace, 1956.
Memory
(translation: 27 January – I lost my memory)
photos by Angelo Franceschi from roma.reppubblica.it
Some graffiti found on the Museum of Liberation in Via Tasso (the former site of the Gestapo’s headquarters in Rome) the morning after the International Day of Commemoration – similar in kind to other examples throughout the city. However, it must be stated that this type of graffiti (and even more odious forms) is by no means uncommon in Rome (we have even seen similar sentiments openly displayed on backpacks).
With which one shares the century
[The paper flower sequence, 1969]…is very simple: it consists of several long, dollying sequnce shots of Ninetto Davoli walking down the Via Nazionale on a summer’s day, a large red paper flower in his hand…However, Pasolini makes this footage strange by using the optical printer to overlay the long take of Ninetto with newsreel images that testify to the horrors of the twentieth century. It’s an exercise in montage…Toward the end a voice intones: “Innocence is guilt” repeatedly, following a long discourse on the subject of innocence and ignorance. The film is probably the closest Pasolini ever came to making an avant-garde film [...]
The film figures as kind of return and/or farewell to Rome…The location of Via Nazionale is particularly apposite, given that it was, in Manfredo Tafuri’s terms, “the first street of modern Rome” — a major thoroughfare that, in its late nineteenth-century attempt to graft onto Rome a half-digested urban modernity, inaugurated the misuse of Roman urban space…The film seems to suggest that now it is not so much the case that all roads lead to Rome, as Rome being the place from which the road to political engagement must leave, must depart
- John David Rhodes. Stupendous, Miserable City: Pasolini’s Rome. University of Minnesota Press, 2007
La lupa, i fratelli, ed Alexander Calder
Romulus and Remus (Romulus et Remus), 1928. Wood, steel wire and springs, 30 1/2 x 124 1/2 x 26 inches (77.5 x 316.2 x 66 cm). Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York 65.1738. © 2009 Calder Foundation, New York/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: David Heald
*
A wonderful exhibit at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni until February
Toward the middle of January
And then come to: a January afternoon, pale in–betweens of sky, on an overheated bus almost outside the walls, by a church you haven’t been to, in an outdated journal something about Victor Serge
In Santa Maria del Popolo
In Santa Maria del Popolo
Waiting for when the sun an hour or less
Conveniently oblique makes visible
The painting on one wall of this recess
By Caravaggio, of the Roman School,
I see how shadow in the painting brims
With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out
But a dim horse’s haunch and various limbs,
Until the very subject is in doubt.
But evening gives the act, beneath the horse
And one indifferent groom, I see him sprawl,
Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face,
Where he has fallen, Saul becoming Paul.
O wily painter, limiting the scene
From a cacophony of dusty forms
To the one convulsion, what is it you mean
In that wide gesture of the lifting arms?
No Ananias croons a mystery yet,
Casting the pain out under name of sin.
The painter saw what was, an alternate
Candour and secrecy inside the skin.
He painted, elsewhere, the firm insolent
Young whore in Venus’ clothes, those pudgy cheats,
Those sharpers; and was strangled, as things went,
For money, by one such picked off the streets.
I turn, hardly enlightened, from the chapel
To the dim interior of the church instead,
In which there kneel already several people,
Mostly old women: each head closeted
In tiny fists holds comfort as it can.
Their poor arms are too tired for more than this
– For the large gesture of solitary man,
Resisting, by embracing, nothingness.
- Thom Gunn. Collected Poems. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.
