.:. Alessandro Baricco remembers Carmelo Bene .:.
I had imagined him definitively swallowed up by an unimaginable daily life, ground down by his own genius, taken away on galaxies of his own, dubbing planets only he knew.
Lost, in short.
Then he started touring with this unusual show of his, a reading of the "Canti Orfici" by Dino Campana.
I nearly missed him countless times, and in the end, I managed to find a seat in a theater, right in front of Him.
In Naples, at the Augusteo.
Dark stage, just a lectern.
Him, there, with a headband like McEnroe, and white greasepaint under his eyes.
A microphone in front of his mouth, and a light on him.
Fifty minutes, no more.
I don’t know about others: but I will remember those minutes for as long as I live.
It’s not something that can be put into words what I felt.
Nor what, precisely, he does with his voice and those words that aren’t his own.
To say that he reads is ridiculous.
He becomes those words, and those words are no longer words, but voice, and sound that happens becomes that-which-happens, and thus everything, and the rest is nothing.
When I left, I couldn't say what those texts meant.
The fact is that in the moment Carmelo Bene pronounces a word, in that moment, you know what it means: an instant later, you don’t know anymore.
So the meaning of the text is something you perceive, yes, but in the airy form of a disappearance, you feel the flapping of wings, but you don’t see the bird: flown away, so, continuously, obsessively, with each word.
And so I don’t know about others, but I understood what I had never understood, namely that meaning, in poetry, is an appearance that disappears.
When you hear Carmelo Bene, you realize that sound is not something different from meaning, but its extreme season, its last piece, its necessary eclipse.
I have always instinctively hated poems in which nothing is understood, not even what they are about.
What one should know how to write are words that have a perceivable meaning until the moment you pronounce them, and then they become sound, and then, only then, the meaning disappears.
You hear Carmelo Bene and the poet disappears, expresses and communicates nothing, the actor disappears, expresses and communicates nothing: they are the banks of a billiard table where the ball of language traces trajectories that draw sound figures: and those figures are icons of the human.
Carmelo Bene explains almost nothing during the performance.
And when he does, it leaves a mark.
He says: to read is a way of forgetting.
I had heard it before: but it’s there that I understood it. Writing and reading tightly bound in a single gesture of disappearance, of farewell.
Then I thought that one writes many things in life, and many are normal: they tell or explain, and that’s fine, it's still a beautiful thing, to write.
But it would be wonderful, at least once, to manage to write something, even a p a
