MARIA MIRAGLIA
“Always dear to me was this lonely hill
and this edge that of a large part
of the farthest horizon
the sight excludes.
But sitting and gazing, endless
spaces beyond that and superhuman
silences, and a deepest quiet
in my thought I feign….”
from The Infinite by G. Leopardi
Giacomo Leopardi is the greatest Italian poet of the nineteen century as well as one of the most important figures in world literature. The Infinite is one of his idylls interpreted and commented over time in different ways.
I wanted to capture in the image of the edge all that is hidden from the sight and men’ minds. A physical and mental boundary that inhibits the ability to investigate, to go beyond time and space preventing to feed the desire to grasp, understand beyond the limits imposed by social conventions or perhaps by the divine will itself.
There are barriers which are insurmountable, for which the various branches of the human sciences have failed to open a passage through. So everything beyond stays blurred by the fume, the mist of mystery as the idea of life after death. Someone has also tried to investigate but it just remains the final destination we all shall reach one day.
A thought we can clearly infer from some verses by W.D. Yeats, the Irish poet, writer and dramatist who showed a deep interest in mysticism and spirituality throughout his life:
“I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above
……..
In balance with this life, this death”
From An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, 1919
Not less complex and in some ways inexplicable are the human barriers. Those that make us feel prisoners of ourselves, closed in our ideologies and convictions. The same for which anyone different from us becomes the enemy to fight, to win. And it’s then that the fear of diversity makes us build walls, not only ideal, to keep him away, to reject him.
The differences of faiths, of political ideologies, or races and skin colour have so many times lead to conflicts and wars depriving millions of people to the sacrosanct right to life.
History is the perennial witness of how much blood has been shed and you can just give a look around to get the bitter awareness of how much is still paid because of barriers that reason, a mutual acceptance or love could easily break down and in their place build bridges of human solidarity in the intimate conviction of living in a common home: the world.
And it can’t surprise anyone that within the same borders, within the same community there are distinctions for social classes that also create great distances.
The reasons that alienate men, creating unbridgeable spaces among them, are manifold each of them deserving a deepening apart to understand them and seek possible remedies. One of this is homosexuality which is seen differently depending on the level of the civil rights recognition achieved by the society you aim to examine.
For some time the issue of sexual diversity, which has forced man and women to live in silence their most intimate sufferings, has opened to social debate. in the meanwhile, in many areas of the world, those who do not fall into the gender categories recognized by the masses are still regarded as individuals apart who are not granted the right to a full social participation. Their pains can be easily elicited from the pages of Oscar Wile’s De Profundis. A letter written by the author during his imprisonment in Reading Gaol where he explains the reasons for ‘his conscious giving himself to the ruin’. They, he says, ‘are rooted in a noble motivation: love’.
But, in those days, that love was considered an offence to modesty to bee condemned. A barrier built by ignorance and hypocrisy that lead the dandy poet to forced labour, and isolation from the same society that had plaudit him in all the London theatres and world literary circles.
It is, therefore, necessary a careful reflection on the many obscure aspects of men’ choices, their fears, their individual and collective behaviors to try to understand. And I believe it is mainly the poet’s task to investigate further, to open new glimpses, to look far, over the visible to question and give answers.
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