Theorem by Pier Paolo Pasolini

Author:Pier Paolo Pasolini
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2023-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

THE DESTRUCTION OF THE IDEA OF ONESELF

So you came into this house to destroy?

What did you destroy in me?

You simply destroyed—

along with all my past life—

the idea I have always had of myself.

So if for a long time

I had assumed the form I had to assume

and my figure was in some way perfect,

what now remains for me?

I can see nothing that can reintegrate me

in my identity. I look at you: you do not listen to me

impartially—because you do not divide yourself—

but with dedication, because you give all of yourself to everyone.

But how can your consoling presence

be so pure, so much as to display

almost a clear desire for detachment?

What is the use of consoling me if you, if you wished,

could postpone—perhaps for ever—

your departure? Instead you will leave;

of that there is not the least doubt.

So your pity is subordinated

to some other mysterious plan.

Are you, perhaps, trying to tell me (not by talking, but simply by the fact of being a boy),

that you could be replaced now

by my son or my daughter?

A completely mad proposal (preordained)

perhaps by some obscure desire of mine)

and yet accurate if, although realized

(my son’s naked member, my daughter’s naked vulva),

it were only a symbol; and if, through it,

you were to exhort me to the most total perdition,

to place life outside itself,

outside order and outside tomorrow,

making of all this the only normality.

Perhaps because whoever has loved you must

(like every man—who does not know it),

be able to recognize life at any cost,

at every moment? Recognize it and not only

know it or merely live it?

Are they—you say generously in my banal bourgeois language—

the most unthinkable exceptional cases,

the most intolerable ones, the most remote from the possibility

of being conceived and actually named,

those that present themselves as the most effective means of recognizing life?

Exceptional cases which however, can

only be symbols—

if in reality, like everything that is real,

they are made of nothing and destined to nothingness?

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