Where does consciousness go when we sleep? In the most remote regions of the ego or, perhaps, of the you. Of a distant and irrecoverable you or close, as close as possible. The edge of the body is therefore able to speak and listen to us: with it – with the body of the other, silent – Niccolò Nisivoccia establishes a tight, intimate bridge in A nocturnal dialogue (preface by Luciana Castellina, Industria & Letteratura, pp. 104, euro 12), poem en prose of Jaccottetian workmanship which confirms the author’s meditative tension, already expressed in Variations on the void (The Butterflies, 2020).
Divided into forty stanzas interwoven with echoes from Groddeck to Char, from Camus to Betocchi, from Fitzgerald to Szymborska, the text is an interrogation of love and politics that combines truth, morality, concern, existentialism. «This relationship with others – observes Castellina –, this call to take care of them, which passes through the indispensable mediation of words, the author defines as politics. Rightly. But there is no correspondence between language and the world. And therefore there is a need for something more: to recognize the right of every human being to be different.”
THE NIGHT AND THE DAWN, the unconscious and awareness, the subject and the recipient, the private and public dimensions, the struggle and surrender: Nisivoccia proceeds through opposites, builds his lyrical reasoning on thesis-antithesis to reveal the antinomian inconsistencies, the cracks, the factual coincidence of feeling and commitment. «So no, in my opinion there is no difference between politics and love, between love and politics. Even poetry: it is political even when it is born as love poetry. Love as a political gesture, therefore; and politics as a form of love, as a form of care, as a concrete gesture.”
It is on the basis of this very strong ethos that Nisivoccia implants his notion of responsibility, probably Camusian, founded on the certainty of the unique essence of this world, and therefore tragic, unrepeatable. Time passes, utopias vanish into illusions, all that is held is the breathing of bodies, the obstinacy of moods. History hangs in the balance, but something resurfaces from sacrifices: as in Vocation of Saint Matthew by Caravaggio the hand of Jesus illuminates: «What illuminates our path, our choices? Perhaps the sense of an omen, or of a promise to be kept, to be fulfilled?”. “The courage to stay close” is thus the other side of not knowing if, beyond the blankets of life, just a little further on, we will still be able to see each other again.
CHOICE IS PLANNING all over again a dismantled reality, frayed at the edges: here is the dawn of the night, everything is still where it was, the body returns to its innocence, it wakes up. She can’t hear anymore. A scream of joy is enough, according to Nisivoccia, to start again. «And it is at the end of the day, every day, that we leave each other and meet again».
al.fra.
