Paolo Benvegnù
Dell'odio dell'innocenza

The mare magnum of notes, woven by complex algorithms, overwhelms the listener. The legacy of the storm: Dell’odio dell’innocenza, Paolo Benvegnù, 2020.

It is said, I found an envelope inside the mailbox of the music school in the province of Perugia where I attend. An anonymous envelope, but addressed to me: on it was written For Paolo Benvegnù. Inside there was a CD with some pieces, I listened to them and decided to do them (1).

The melody plunges the listener into spleen, sometimes torn by the rage of the instruments: the groans of a man who hopes, spits, kicks, curses; and then, once again, the melancholic calm.

* * * *

Benvegnù tells of A. crossing a muddy expanse, with labored breathing and uncertain steps. He prefers stones to the chatter of men: silence is truth (2).

He flees. Here you can't think (3). Music from gorillas inside shopping malls. The surface animals are lined up. The surface animals are lined up (4).

Ah, you might say, the revolution! Even the philosophers want to die when the soldiers shoot in the courtyard (5). Everyone has their reasons. There is no good and there is no evil, that's all: the shitty expanse of mud.

The sorrowful figure camped; to the west the sun was setting in a holocaust from which rose an unbroken column of small desert bats, and to the north, along the shimmering edge of the world, dust blew into emptiness like smoke from distant armies. The mountains of crumpled butcher paper spread with angular shadows in the long blue twilight, and halfway there the glazed bed of a dried lake shimmered like the mare imbrium, and herds of deer moved north in the dying hour of the sunset, chased across the plain by wolves the same color as the desert (6). The wonder of the cosmos tore through the deadly mediocrity.

The next morning he returned to Her, it was not time to succumb to mad senselessness. Tell me that I am also in your hell. Tell me that I am also in your hell. Tell me that I am also in your hell (7). If not entirely right, almost nothing is wrong? It's not true, a faint hope.

* * * *

Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light (8).

Notes:

(1) G. Zanichelli, Paolo Benvegnù racconta Dell’odio dell’innocenza, in www.xl.repubblica.it, 25.02.2020.

(2) Track 2 – Pietre.

(3) Track 5 – Infinito 3.

(4) Track 8 – Animali di superficie.

(5) Track 8 – Animali di superficie.

(6) C. McCarthy, Blood Meridian, trans. it. R. Montanari, Einaudi, Torino, 2014, p. 96; original ed. Blood meridian, 1985.

(7) Track 11 – Infinitoalessandrofiori.

(8) D. Thomas, Do not go gentle into that good night, in Poems, Einaudi, Torino, 2016, p. 32; original ed. Do not go gentle into that good night, 1951.