This article is published in issue 12 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until March 23, 2022
When I was a girl, Pier Paolo Pasolini – who would have turned a hundred today and had recently died then – was the symbol of freedom from patterns. He hadn’t hidden his homosexuality about him, he was a communist, a Christian, he was a poet and an intellectual, a writer and a director, and he was never where you thought you would find him. Pasolini was the symbol of contradiction, and at the age of twenty we all felt proudly contradictory (even now, but less proudly).
Among the notes taped to the wall in front of my desk was his poem
The cry of the digger who said: «Only loving, only knowing counts, not having loved, not having known. The living of a consummate love gives anguish. The soul does not grow anymore », and I kept to this rule, easy to follow at that age. When he died like that violently I was only in the freshman year of high school, but I remember feeling vaguely robbed of our adolescent right to be contradictory, free and extreme. To my daughter, who asks me today «What do I read about yours? Where do I start? », I answer to first look at your film Birds and birds, played by Totò, sure that it will be conquered starting from the opening titles sung by Domenico Modugno. And to listen to the beautiful podcast by Walter Siti, the greatest connoisseur of her work. And then to read Dear Pier Paolo (Neri Pozza) by Dacia Maraini, so warm and authentic, which tells the story of man and friend. At that point I am sure that Pasolini’s works will be chosen by herself, in the order closest to her.
I, on the other hand, on the wall in front of the desk tonight I hung the sentence of PPP that Massimo Recalcati put in exergue from his essay:
«I have always fallen, and one of my feet got caught in the stirrup, so that my run is not a ride, but a being dragged away, with my head banging on the dust and on the foot. I can neither get back on the horse of the Jews and the Gentiles, nor fall forever on the land of God ».
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Source: Vanity Fair
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