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GLANCING OVER THE NOTEBOOKS taken from Cosmo’s house, I almost immediately identified the last one compiled, in which he must have written until the disease silenced him, until, in other words, a few days before he died, or at least so I believe. Rummo told me that he had never seen him handle the notebooks. If Cosmo still did it, then he must have waited until he was alone or else he did it in the presence of the nurse, Jelena, with whom he must have been on more confidential terms.
The notebooks bear no dates or any chronological indication. I figured out which was last from the handwriting. It was very dense, with infrequent erasures and very few corrections. It contained more than four hundred annotations, each separated from the next with a dotted line. I copied them into my computer and numbered them in the order in which they had been written. In the following chapter, I cannot publish them all, for considerations of space, but I have included a fair number of the ones that struck me most forcefully or which might mean something in connection with these stories: even if he never speaks about them, Cosmo gives the impression that he might be referring to them, here and there.
In a more opportune context I will make public the entirety of this notebook, and if there is time and a chance to do so, and people interested in reading, I’ll try to do the same with the others.
In a few cases, I’ve added notes of my own.
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1. The readers of daily newspapers in Italy are not interested in learning what they don’t already know or don’t expect; they have no interest in being informed or kept abreast of events; they prefer, if anything, to have someone confirm the convictions they already hold. If a person hates someone, then they want the brilliant op-ed writer for the newspaper they buy every morning to prove to them how right they are to hate that person, want them to bring them fresh arguments daily in favor of hating them.
5. A practical man is driven either by self-interest or vanity, which in any case comes under the heading of self-interest, since it has to do with an ambition to increase one’s personal prestige and therefore, by reflection, that of one’s commercial or professional activity. While it may seem like a squandering of money, vanity is actually a sound investment.
6. It often happens at a dinner or a party where things are rather dull that there is someone who tries to liven things up with a bit of indignation in a conversation that is otherwise flat. At least by so doing, you can always be sure of standing out at a meal, and the situation in Italy, whatever the historical period (though now more than ever), offers opportunities for invective. People try to ward off boredom or things that have already been heard and already been said with virulent tirades or sacrosanct outbursts, ranging from A to Z. Often those who light into these rampages aren’t doing so for the first time, they’ve already tried them out, these same monologues, in the presence of different audiences, these are reruns, items from the repertoire, greatest hits and golden oldies that are trotted out when interest is waning and people are glancing at their watches. All that’s needed is a hook and a line, a fuse you can light and set off. You can improvise on the topic of the day. Intellectuals more than anyone else indulge in this sort of exercise, and the sheer love of words, enthusiasm for the squandering of words and rhetorical aggression outstrips the love of truth, it matters not at all whether what triumphs in the end is wrong or right. In fact, if what triumphs in the end is the most spectacularly mistaken point of view, in defiance of logic and common sense, then that just means that the speaker’s sheer prowess overpowered them. For that reason, great orators, truly great and magnificent orators generally uphold misguided arguments, which they are able to justify only with their sheer mastery. They pursue the wrong, they adore the wrong, they attain the wrong, the wrong is their point of pride, their permanent existential position, and if a concept is by any chance right, they manage to twist it so massively that it is useless for anyone who thinks straight, they give it a hunchback, they make sure it’s wrong. By making sure the wrong side of the argument triumphs, it is the speaker who triumphs, not his argument.
Transferred onto the verbal plane, it is the same exercise as that practiced by those who wish to break up the monotony of their evenings and therefore go out and set fire to Dumpsters or throw rocks off the overpass, the thrill is very similar and they’re convinced they’re actually not hurting anyone.
The defining characteristic of this kind of verbal extremism is in fact its total harmlessness.
7. Can there be a regeneration that has nothing to do with violence? How can anything be reborn if it hasn’t first been destroyed? Can you pass from one order to another without there being an interval of chaos? Those who point the way to salvation glimpse it through a wall of flames. The higher those flames leap, the sooner we will burn, and the sooner we will be restored. The field must burn so that it can be fertilized. The sole salvation from disaster is a still greater disaster.
8. Since only destruction allows transcendence, since only by passing through some catastrophe can one perceive the existence of more advanced stages of consciousness and sensitivity, and attain them, it is possible to persuade some that every destructive act facilitates an elevation. It is the mysticism of annihilation: of the raging bonfire, the cleansing massacre, the violence that transports man beyond himself, transfiguring him. It is a mistaken syllogism. Transcendence originates in a violent break, which alone however is not sufficient, it is a necessary condition but not sufficient alone to allow transcendence of the ordinary state of consciousness, indeed, most of the time it only dulls, it doesn’t elevate. Those who practice violence and those who suffer it are both dulled by it.
9. Where there is justice there is a struggle, where there is a struggle there is at least a hope of justice. But this hope is based on the possibility of destroying that which is unjust, he who is unjust. Justice, therefore, is nothing but conflict and struggle.
10. In the present-day triumph of the materialist culture of the body, the body is actually debased, maltreated, shaped to comply with the whims of fourth-class aesthetes as if it were an inert material, mere clay devoid of any original quality and form. Capriciously, its sex is changed, along with its features, size, even the color of its skin, blacks lighten theirs while whites tan theirs, in other words, it’s just a backdrop, a landscape to be carved and sculpted, where you can hang hooks or upon which you can scrawl any garbage, the way graffiti writers do on subway cars, in other words, an Italian garden to be clipped and sheared, forcing its plants to take on the desired shape, however artificial and absurd it may be. After all, what is to stop us? How can the body rebel against the dictatorship of the mind that demands it be remade in its image and semblance? The body cannot. It’s mute. A prisoner. A slave to manias. An unfortunate machine. It will patiently go on submitting to the whims of that idiot woman who’s decided to have her tits enlarged, that moron who guzzles steroids and then builds up his arms while he destroys his joints. His joints, the articulations of his body, which sits silent and suffers and is deformed. To say nothing of professional athletes: the true, authentic enemies of the body, which they massacre for money, until they’re finally stuck in a wheelchair. What exaltation of the body are they talking about! It’s not the triumph of the flesh, it’s the triumph over the flesh. Employed as a parade ground for symbolic maneuvers, military processions. Never so much in human history as today, crushed underfoot. Our flesh.
11. Systems of power can be understood best not at their high points, but rather in the phase of their deterioration, at their sunset. Morality, ideas, fashions, political regimes, religious principles, all reveal their true nature when they are on the verge of succumbing to the thrust of new things. Just before they are replaced, they unleash their essence into the twilight in the purest and most dramatic fashion, becoming wholly understandable, under the galloping onslaught of events that they could never have foreseen, and therefore all the more instructive. Since there is no real stimulus to understand that which is imagined to
be immutable, our understanding always sniffs around the proximity of destruction. A man’s character, a family’s actual economic resources, an army’s strength, the depth of a love can all be manifested in their entirety only in a state of crisis. When that crisis becomes irreversible, however, there is a further revelation: namely, that it is abuses and excesses which contribute more than anything else to the advancement, the evolution of the times. Only if extreme deterioration takes place, touching low points never before seen, only then can anything different and new come about. The excesses play an important role in evolution, they shatter the barriers between the sexes, between the classes, between individuals, making energy circulate. It is the excesses that cause the decline of an era, and it is the decline of an era that explains its excesses.
12. An indirect way of delighting in evil and harm, of enjoying harm by proxy, in a fantastic, and yet functional key, immersed in a sort of waking dream crowded with bloody images, witnessing the catastrophe of skyscrapers in flames or airplanes crashing or the devastation of entire cities, ravaged by enormous apes or implacable aliens or the living dead or freak waves or asteroids or nuclear contaminations, sucking greedily every day on the press and the TV, gobbling down an immense quantity of news having to do, for the most part, with murders, massacres, terror attacks, floods, hurricanes, epidemics, all of them typical of a society not only ready but in fact eager to savor its own annihilation; perhaps willing to forgive or even to assist those who are carrying out that destruction, and grateful to those who depict it in a spectacular manner, allowing them to enjoy it in advance, on a virtual field. Contemplating destruction while undergoing it provides an unexampled aesthetic pleasure.
13. In those bottlenecks where the recourse to violence is decisive in changing the direction of history, a certain kind of criminal henchman comes in handy. It’s not even necessary to recruit them: without any explicit request being made, those who have direct experience in subjugating and killing, and no inhibitions about doing so, spontaneously offer their willingness to enter into action. That explains why, alongside the noblest idealists or simple fanatics, you will almost always find a certain number of enterprising gallows birds.
14. It is never the situation in and of itself that creates ferocity, what it does is allow that ferocity to be unleashed.
17. Any state, once created, tends to place its men face-to-face with the choice between concealing, with some embarrassment, the episodes of violation of the law and sheer violence that attended its foundation (the collapse of the preceding regime, a revolution, a military campaign) or else vindicating those acts as heroic. In either case, whether hiding them or embellishing them with high-flown rhetoric, one mystifies them. The bloody side is praised and exalted, because it is too disgusting if described in a frank manner for what it actually is, and it is thus ill-suited to encourage the coherence of the new social structure. Volleys of rifle fire and executions by firing squad must vanish without an echo into silence or else be echoed in salvos of blanks at special ceremonies evocative of the past. Many years later, historic revisionism finds its place, often with a fairly ham-handed spirit of polemic, rectifying the picture of the past with stunning revelations that are touted as objective, but thus creating not a salutary effect of truth but rather an indiscriminate revulsion toward one’s own history, which suddenly reemerges, spangled with murders and infamy. But now it’s too late, the truth ought to have been told sooner.
19. While only elected politicians can enter the Palace, the halls of power, anyone can venture out into the street. It is foolish therefore to ask oneself with irony as abundant as it is futile why major protest rallies and demonstrations continue to be held, with marches and processions. Those who do so clearly fail to understand or at least underestimate their aspect, at once festive and menacing. In order to understand certain community rituals, it is necessary to recognize the way that they blend till there is no distinguishing between enthusiasm and furor, obligation and hypocrisy, the spirit of adherence and the spirit of sharing, nonconformism but also conformism, excitement hope and fear. It is every bit as much a mistake to take them for innocuous and salutary exercises of democracy, healthful processions with copies of the Constitution in hand, an error due perhaps to mere naïveté. The individual vanishes if he seriously believes that “he has a say in the matter,” by his rights as an individual. What most fascinates about street demonstrations is the grandiose and quivering spectacle of anonymity, laid out in the nude viscerality of its components, as pure life without specifications, and therefore fearsome, too. Those enormous glistening clouds of fish that spin wheeling away from the hand of the scuba diver, only to become compact again, are certainly not what I think of when I utter the adjective “democratic.”
20. Techniques of insurrection have been theorized, preached, and wargamed by the left; and then almost invariably put into action by the right. The left readies the subversive laboratory with all its tools and instruments, but the Fascists are the ones who actually use it. They quickly and eagerly learned the lesson about how to mobilize crowds, how to overwhelm strongpoints of control, prefectures, police stations, barracks, tossing in their own extra pinch of military training and the mental habitus of war.
21. The Fascists perform experiments on life and in history with the same spirit of curiosity and cruelty that can be found in children vivisecting a lizard with a pocket knife. They want to know what it looks like “inside,” whether it can walk with its little paws cut off, how long it will go on living with its guts spewed on the ground. It’s not even wickedness in the strict sense of the term, but rather a brutal and crude experimental method, like in the times of Sir Francis Bacon, who throttled chickens and then froze them (and thus caught the pneumonia that killed him).
24. The ideal narrative figure to intertwine the threads of different and contradictory stories, so as to unify them, is the renegade.
25. Two canonical approaches of Italian intellectuals to the relationship with power: homage or outrage, sometimes both things together, since any outrage against a political faction serves as an homage to another one.
26. However blind or ridiculous or unpleasant they may seem, those who cultivate a boundless dedication to an idea always inspire a certain respect, I repeat, even in cases where their idea may seem absurd or even repugnant, the fact that they pursue it with all their might, willingly taking on any and all sacrifice, still stirs admiration. Martyrdom loses none of its splendor and transcends the ideals in the name of which one immolates oneself. Let us say, then, that it has a dark splendor.
28. It is pointless to invoke common sense, the spirit of justice, or sentiments of equity when what is acting on men are forces that appeal to the unfathomable depths of the soul, sidestepping entirely the virtuous and tortuous circuit of reason in favor of an emotional shortcut. The first victim of these forces is, in fact, logic, consequentiality, the link between cause and effect, the deductive capacity and, most particularly, the inductive capacity: it all collapses. That which is, that which could or should be, and that which is not all become the same thing. Error rises to the rank of supreme proof of what is just, if you are convinced in advance that what is just is superior to any error, in fact, feeds on errors in order to grow. Mistakes, lies, misdeeds, and patent injustices all serve to confirm the goodness of an idea if it is able to outlive the negative consequences that that idea itself has unleashed. It is the paradoxical truth of Boccaccio’s novella where the Jew converts to Catholicism after seeing with his own eyes that the Vatican is an open cellar and all priests misbegotten scoundrels—because if a religion can tolerate such a miscarriage of morality and still endure through the millennia, then surely it must be true! That is the same faith that invites Abraham to commit the most odious crime there is: it doesn’t matter whether or not he commits it, only that he be willing. A man of true faith “must always be ready to sacrifice himself or to kill,” or at the very least to allow himself to be killed, if that is what his fa
ith tells him. Between killing (sacrifice) and allowing himself to be killed (martyrdom) there isn’t really all that much of a difference, there is always someone who is brutally deprived of life in obedience to a supreme will, more or less the same thing that is demanded of a soldier in wartime. Faith cannot be anything other than obedience to a diktat: the minute you begin to examine the reasonable basis of that order, whether or not it corresponds to exterior criteria of justice or logic, well, by that point faith has already fled.
30. Ideological oversimplification is used by the learned specifically to feed to the ignorant.
31. The profane is the setting in which our lives unfold, the sacred is the very source of life. If life aspired to remain in the sacred where it originates, it would perish; if life depended exclusively upon the profane, it would never be born at all.
32. Goodness is concentrated, evil is diffuse.
33. If you take a given point or moment at random, on average you will find more bad than good; but if you choose certain areas, or individuals, or eras, or instants of life, or customs, or actions, or places, you will find there boundless deposits of goodness.
34. Some textbooks about war and books of history tell us that, in battle, the first ones to turn and run from the enemy are almost always the soldiers in the rear ranks, not the men in the front lines, who, for that matter, would be killed on the spot by the enemy if they did turn to run. The paradoxical corollaries of this observation, applicable to many fields and situations, are that the first to flee are the ones in the least immediate danger; and that the courage that circulates in the front lines is the fruit of the same spirit of self-preservation that guides the footsteps of the cowards in the rear lines.
The Catholic School Page 143
