Corsair Writings – Pier Paolo Pasolini

Corsair Writings – Pier Paolo Pasolini Introductory Note The reconstruction of this book is entrusted to the reader. It is the reader who must reunite the fragments of a scattered and incomplete work. It is the reader who must piece together these widely dispersed parts that nonetheless constitute a whole. It is the reader who must organize their contradictory moments in search of their essential unity. It is the reader who must weed out the occasional inconsistencies (that is, tentative probes or abandoned hypotheses). It is the reader who must replace the repetitions with their sporadic variants (or else accept the repetitions as impassioned anaphors). The reader has before him two “series” of writings, which, arranged chronologically, correspond approximately to: 1) a “series” of primary writings; and 2) a “series” of more humble complementary, corroborative, documentary writings. The reader will obviously have to shift from one “series” to the other. Except for this book of journalistic writings, I have never demanded such a necessary degree of philological devotion from my readers. Such devotion is hardly common these days. Naturally, the reader is also invited to refer to other writings besides those contained in the “series” of writings in this book. For example, to the texts of the interlocutors with whom I engaged in polemical exchanges or to whom I replied or answered so stubbornly. In addition to the work that the reader must reconstruct, this book is totally lacking certain materials that are, however, essential. I am referring above all to Italo-Friulian poetry. During the period encompassed in the first “series” by the articles on the discourse of the “Jesus blue jeans” (May 17, 1973) and the anthropological transformation of the Italians (June 10, 1974), and in the parallel “series”, by the review of Sandro Penna’s Un pò di febbre [A Little Fever] (June 10, 1973) and the review of Ignazio Buttitta’s Io faccio il poeta [I Am a Poet] (January 11, 1974)—I published a collection of poetic texts in Paese Sera (January 5, 1974) written in the style of my new Italo-Friulian tradition inaugurated in La Stampa (December 16, 1973), which constitutes an essential nexus not only between the two “series” but also within the first “series” itself, that is, in the context of the most contemporary debates addressed in this book. I cannot include those verses here, as they are not “corsair” writings (or they are too “corsair”). The reader is therefore referred to them, in the books and articles cited above, or in the new, definitive collection, La nuova gioventú [The New Youth] (Einaudi, 1975). *** January 7, 1973 The “Discourse” of the Longhairs1 The first time I saw longhairs was in Prague. Two young foreigners, with hair hanging down over their shoulders, entered the lobby of the hotel where I was staying. They 1 Published in Corriere della Sera under the title, “Against the Longhairs”. walked across the lobby and sat down at a table in a secluded corner. They sat there for about half an hour, observed by the customers of the hotel, including myself, and then they left. The whole time they sat there, and as they walked through the crowded lobby of the hotel, neither of them said a single word (perhaps—although I don’t recall right now—they whispered a few words to each other: but I suppose if they did it was something strictly practical and pedestrian). In fact, in that particular situation—which was completely public or social, almost official, so to speak—they did not need to speak at all. Their silence was strictly functional. And it was functional simply because words were superfluous. Both of them, in effect, used a different language from the one that is composed of words to communicate with those who were present, with the observers—with their brothers of the moment. What replaced traditional verbal language, rendering it superfluous—and immediately finding its place in the broad domain of “signs”, in the domain of semiology—was the language of their hair. In a single sign—the length of their hair flowing down over their shoulders— all the possible signs of an articulate language were concentrated. What was the meaning of their unspoken and exclusively physical message? It was this: “We are two longhairs. We belong to a new human category that is now making its appearance in the world, which has its center in America and which is unknown in the provinces (for example—indeed, above all—here in Prague). We are therefore an apparition for you. We are performing our apostolic mission, filled with a knowledge that is both totally overwhelming and totally exhausting. We have nothing to add orally or rationally to what our hair says physically and ontologically. The knowledge that fills us, as we perform our apostolic mission, will belong to you some day, too. For the moment it is something New, a great Novelty, which generates, together with scandal, expectation in the world: it will not be betrayed. The bourgeoisie are right to look at us with hatred and terror, because the length of our hair constitutes an absolute contradiction of their ways. But don’t think of us as uneducated savages: we are well aware of our responsibility. We do not bother with you, we keep to ourselves. You should do the same and await the unfolding of events.” I was the recipient of this communication and I was immediately able to decipher it: this language that lacked a lexicon, grammar and syntax could be understood immediately, because, semiologically speaking, it was nothing but a form of that “language of physical presence” that men have always known how to use. I understood, and felt an immediate dislike for both of them. Later, I had to swallow my hostility and defend the longhairs from attacks by the police and the fascists: I was, of course, as a matter of principle, on the side of the Living Theatre, of the Beats, etc.; and the principle that caused me to side with them was a strictly democratic one. The longhairs multiplied—like the first Christians—but they remained mysteriously silent; their long hair was their only real language and they felt no need to supplement it with another. Their language coincided with their existence. Ineffability was the ars retorica of their protest. What did the longhairs say, with their inarticulate language that consisted of the monolithic sign of their hair, between 1966 and 1967? They said: “Consumer civilization nauseates us. We are protesting radically. We are creating an antibody against this civilization by way of our refusal. Everything seems to be going smoothly, right? Our generation is supposed to be integrated, right? But take a look at how things really stand. We refuse to accept the insane fate of becoming ‘executives’. We are creating new religious values within bourgeois entropy, precisely at the moment when it is turning secular and hedonistic. We are doing this loudly and with revolutionary violence (the violence of the nonviolent?) because our critique of today’s society is total and intransigent.” I don’t think that, if they were to be interrogated in accordance with the traditional system of verbal language, they would have been capable of expressing the meaning of their hair so articulately; but that is essentially what they said. As for me, although I have suspected ever since then that their “system of signs” was the product of a subculture of protest that was opposed to a subculture of power, and that their non-Marxist revolution was suspect, I still stood by their side for a while, finding a place for them at least in the anarchic element of my ideology. The language of these longhairs expressed, although ineffably, Leftist “themes”. Maybe those of the New Left, born within the world of the bourgeoisie (in a dialectic that was perhaps artificially created by the Mind that rules, beyond the consciousness of particular historical Powers, the fate of the Bourgeoisie). Then came 1968. The longhairs were absorbed by the Student Movement; they protested with red flags on the barricades. Their language expressed an increasing number of Leftist “themes”. (Che Guevara was a longhair, etc.) In 1969—with the Milan massacre, the Mafia, the emissaries of the Greek colonels, the complicity of the government Ministers, the trama nera,2 the provocateurs—the longhairs were everywhere: while they were not yet the majority from the numerical point of view, they were dominant in terms of their ideological impact. Now the longhairs were no longer silent: they no longer delegated the totality of their communicative and expressive capacity to the system of signs of their hair. To the contrary, the physical presence of the 2 “Black plot”: referring to the police hypothesis that the bomb attacks of 1969 in Italy were perpetrated by fascists. [American translator’s note]. longhairs was relegated, in a way, to a different function. They once again returned to the traditional use of verbal language. And I do not use the word, “verbal”, casually. In fact, I place special emphasis on it. They spoke so much between 1968 and 1970 that, for quite a while after that, they would no longer be able to speak at all: they devoted themselves to verbalism, and verbalism was the new ars retorica of the revolution (leftism, the verbal disorder of Marxism!). Although the longhairs—re-immersed in their verbal storm—no longer addressed their agitated listeners in their former nonverbal way, I somehow summoned the power to sharpen my decoding skills and, amidst all the noise, I tried to focus on the unspoken discourse, evidently uninterrupted, of their hair that was always getting longer.

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