The Roar of Battle

What is the future anterior? Here is Scurati on Foucault’s ‘distant roar of battle’ from which his novel takes its name:

‘One doesn’t rage against the darkness but within it. The struggle is obscure and the person struggling lacks self knowledge and knowledge, above all, of the enemy… In the moment in which he fights man is sleeping. He actually lives the whole of his waking existence apparently at peace whilst in the heavy sleep that roots itself in him there continues always, echoing in the distance, the roar of battle.’
(Antonio Scurati: Il rumore sordo della battaglia) 

Here is Veronesi on much the same sort of thing:

‘Huge things happen in the world, terrible things, marvellous things, so close at hand that they mark our lives for ever. And yet, once they have passed, we become aware that they have merely brushed against us and we have to content ourselves with imagining them, as though, in fact, they hadn’t happened.’
(Sandro Veronesi: Gli sfiorati, my italics)

Now here is Scurati again, this time showing how technology intervenes between the past, the present and the future:

‘There remains the glimmer of an intelligence, ie mine, which isn’t entirely spent. An ironic intelligence which undergoes the fascination of reality only once this is frozen in some photographic image. A melancholy intelligence that’s seduced by the fascination of the present only once it appears in the form of a life anterior to this one. But in life as photographed this intelligence, having set off in search of the agony that only an unknown and unlived past can provide, ends up by flushing out the detail which renders vain any hope for a life to come and renders pointless any search.’
(Antonio Scurati: Il rumore sordo della battaglia) 

As in this description of a photograph of an anti Czarist demonstration:

‘The photo shows a dense crowd all packed together. Clearly it’s been taken from a position that’s deliberately higher up but not too distant from its subject. Probably the camera had been positioned on the balcony from which those demonstrating were expecting to hear at any moment what Lenin had to say. The particularly flattened perspective means that what’s shown is almost just the faces, whilst the foreshortening of the distance means that these faces, conscious of being portrayed, are looking fixedly at the lens. A multitude of turn of the century faces striking a pose. Faces that place their trust in the immortality conferred by the photographic image, in its prophetic capacity to hypothecate the future [...] Countenances and ways of looking that are the opposite of our fin-de-siècle ways of looking.’
(Antonio Scurati: Il rumore sordo della battaglia) 

And here finally is Antonelli Venditti on the ‘children of tomorrow’:

Don’t ask me too many questions
I wouldn’t know how to answer you
The veins run dry, and the memory’s stopped transmitting (x 6)

Father, what was this planet?
This was Earth
An open planet, always smiling (x 6)

This animal, Father, what is it?
This was a dog
And this, Father, what strange machine is this?
This was a man, a very strange machine, it never smiled  (x 3)

And us, where are we going?
Towards the Universe
And the images they’ve sent me, tell me: are they dead now?
Yes, dead, a million years ago
And this is only a shadow
Man has gone, he’s given up making errors
He’s gone away, there’s only us (x 7)

We’re perfect, we’re perfect human beings
We never play with the sun, and never weep, we never weep. (x 2)

(Antonello Venditti: Figli del domani)

Ivan Della Mea: the Personal is Political

Towards the end of the 50s I’d sent some of my songs to Cantacronache but they’d been rejected. However Gianni Bosio had learnt about these songs from my brother Luciano and he wanted to hear them. So one evening my brother fixed an appointment for me at Roberto Leydi’s house in via Cappuccio. I was hesitant. I didn’t want to go in and I wandered round the outside of the house for ages until a blonde woman came up to me, very courteous and attractive. This was Sandra Mantovani. ‘You must be Luciano’s brother. I’m Roberto Leydi’s wife. We’re still expecting you.’

So I decided to go up. Up there I found Roberto Leydi, Gianni Bosio and Umberto Eco. I was a bit embarrassed about my songs. I didn’t want to sing them. ‘My stuff’s a bit peculiar.’ Then I secreted myself round a corner, where there was a piano, and I sang (doing so was a liberation) these Ballads about Violence Great and Small, autobiographical material drawn in part from my brother’s experience and in part from my own. Even though I’d never thought of using them to present a representative sample of the great violence of fascism through the smaller violence of my father. It came to me more as an urgent need to liberate myself from my family by way of warding off misfortune and to shout out my availability to a thousand and more other families to seek out and to find.

Then I emerged from my corner with the air of a cat that’s wondering, ‘What the hell will happen to me now?’ and they began to argue. I remember only the initial verdicts of Roberto Leydi on the general import of my pieces: ‘This is a typically anarchico-syndacalist approach.’  And that of Umberto Eco: ‘Here we are faced with an archetype.’ Gianni Bosio, on the other hand, stayed silent.

They discussed all this for ages and I went to sleep on the couch. When I woke at 4.00 they were still discussing it. So then I went home.

(Ivan Della Mea, taken from Cesare Bermani: Una storia cantata)

Ivan Della Mea 1940-2009

Here is a rough translation of Io so che un giorno, from the 1966 LP of that name and once said by him to have been his favourite. It anticipates, in its way, cognitive capitalism.

I know that one day
he’ll come to me
a white man
dressed in white
and he’ll say to me:
‘My dear chap, you’re exhausted’
and with a smile
he will offer me his hand.

He will lead me
amongst white houses
the walls will be white
the heavens will be white
he will dress me
in coarse material, harsh and white
and I will  have a room
a white bed for me as well.

Come that day
and all those people
including youths
dressed in white
will speak to me
about their dreams
as if this were
reality.

I will look at them
unblinkingly
and I will tell them
about freedom;
that same man will come
with all those others strong and white
and to my bed
they’ll tie me fast with straps.

‘Freedom,’
I will say, ‘is a fact,
though you may tie me
still it resists.’
And they will smile:
‘My dear chap, you are bonkers,
freedom
does not exist, not any more.’

And then I’ll laugh:
this world is great
here everything has got its price
even the brain.
‘Sell it, my friend
sell it with your freedom
and you can have a place
in this society.’

Three cheers for life
bought on the never never
along with the Fiat 600
the washing machine
three cheers for the system
which renders equal and makes happy
those who do have power
and those who on the contrary don’t have any.

(It’s probably worth mentioning, as a sort of footnote, that his brother Luciano, 16 years his senior, was interned in a German concentration camp in 1940 and in the ’70s worked with Franco Basaglia’s colleague Agostino Pirella in assisting those deprived of their freedom under Italy’s former mental health legislation.)

Freedom and Revolt

The 1909 Manifesto began a process whereby human beings, the collective organism, quickly became machines. This was the era which saw ‘a financial system based upon the futurizing of the entire economy, upon debt and economic promise. That future is now over.’ (Bifo’s introduction to his Post Futurist Manifesto 2009)

The Futurist Manifesto sings of aggression and speed against a literature of ‘painful immobility’: ‘We want to exalt aggressive movement …the route march, the leap in the dark … The world has now been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. We want to praise the man who holds the steering wheel, the column of whose lance crosses Earth, launched at a run, over the course of its orbit.’

In 1982 Francesco de Gregori sang of the Titanic’s Captain Smith, fused with his vessel along with ‘a million horses’: ‘Look at the muscles of the captain, all plastic and methane.’ ‘This ship does 2,000 knots… / and it has an engine made up of a million horses / and in place of hooves they have wings. / … / In this swift and electric night … / the future is a burning cannonball and we are almost about to reach it.’ The end comes ‘peacefully’ enough, as it were, to the strains of a much earlier song about the Sirio, whose wreck preceded that of the Titanic, with its own hundreds of dead, on 6 August 1906:

‘and amongst them was a bishop

who gave everyone his blessing.’

This is probably the fate of bishops (and commentators) everywhere: to gloss the inevitable even as they go under.

Anyway here is Francesco Guccini singing in 1972 of how on 20 July 1893 Pietro Rigosi, a railway fireman, deliberately drove train 3541 into the first class carriage of another train just outside Bologna. This was when the ‘Holy War’ of the anarchist pezzenti ‘was beginning’ and ‘the train too seemed a myth of progress / launched over the continents / …  a strange monster.’ This train is the generic train of strength and speed whose ‘dynamite’ power is controlled by hand and brain, formed by the transfer of imaginative energy from the natural world into that of the machine. But it becomes an image of luxury, velveteen and golden, parked in a dead end. Meanwhile, even as it ‘grips the rails with muscles of steel’, the generic iron horse status of the fireman’s train is transformed back, as though undoing a magic spell, first into a true ‘living thing’, into ‘a young colt that has just thrown off the reins’. And it is this ‘immense destructive force’ within the system itself, which ‘runs and runs and runs ever faster / and runs and runs and runs and runs towards its death’ which ‘nothing can now hold back’.

It is presumably not always the case that new horizons do not (potentially) exist out there or that they have been conceived of inappropriately. But when freedom itself is destroyed the ‘freedom of philosophy’ (this is Adorno, of course) becomes no more than ‘the capacity to lend a voice’ to that unfreedom’. Or else there is simply silence:  ‘To breathe the same air / as a warder doesn’t suit me / Therefore … I’ll give up / my hour of freedom.’ (Fabrizio de André: Nella mia ora di libertà, 1973)