Mud and stars
Giorgio Agamben,
Quodlibet, Jabuary 29, 2024
Everyone remembers the anecdote, narrated by
Socrates in
Theaetetus, of the Thracian servant girl, “witty and graceful”, who burst out laughing as she observed
Thales who, keeping his gaze fixed on the sky and the stars, does not see what is under his feet and falls into a well. In a note from
Quaderno genovese (
Genoese Notebook),
Montale somehow vindicates the philosopher’s gesture, writing: “He who drags his feet in the mud and his eyes in the stars; he is the only hero, he is the only
living one”. The fact that the twenty-one-year-old poet summarises and anticipates in this note the essence of his future poetics has not escaped the critics; but nevertheless important is that this poetics, like any true poetics, implies, so to say, a theology, albeit a negative one, which a careful scholar drastically summarised in the formula “theology of the crumb” (“Only the divine is total in the sip and the crumb” — one reads in
Rebecca, “Only death triumphs if you ask for the whole portion”).
The theology that is in question here, as is already evident in the “mud/stars” dualism of the youthful note and in the “dark forces of
Ahriman” evoked in a 1944 intervention, is certainly
Gnostic. As in all gnosis, the principles — or gods — are two, a good one and an evil one, one absolutely alien to the world and a demiurge who instead created it and rules over it. In the most radical Gnostic currents, the good god is so alien to the world that he cannot even be said to exist: according to the
Valentinians, he is not existent, but pre-existent (
proon), he is not the beginning, but pre-beginning (
proarche), not father, but pre-father (
propator). And just as he is alien to the world, he is also alien to language, comparable to an abyss (
bythos) intimately conjoined to silence (
sige): “Silence, mother of all things that have been emitted from the abyss, that which it is inexpressible, it was silent; that which it has understood, it has called incomprehensible”. Negative or apophatic theology, so dear to Montale already starting from
Ossi (Cuttlefish Bones) (“We can only tell you today, / what we are
not, what we do
not want”) is, in this sense, nothing else than the other side of gnosis. Indeed, according to all evidence, the pre-existing god nominates the stage prior to the revelation and the event of the language that defines the human condition (
anthropogenesis).
Christianity tries to sort Gnostic dualism out by identifiyng the good god, the Father, with the creator, but, to deal with the removed evil element, it must then suppose the incarnation in a son, who, like
Christ, i.e.
Messiah, has the task of saving and redeeming the world.
The great Gnostic theme, to the extent that it still certainly concerns us, shows that in man an element alien to the world and a mundane one live together, a good principle and an evil one, and that human life is therefore determined, from the beginning to the end, by conflict and by the possible conciliation of these two opposite elements. It is an arduous and onerous task, because the two principles — mud and stars — are so intimately tangled in earthly existence that it is practically impossible to untangle them. According to Gnostic theology, which Christianity inherits at least in part without the benefit of inventory, the world is the fruit of a dejection or a casting down (
katabolé or
probolé) from the superior
celestial sphere into the material and inferior one.
Origen, taking up Gnostic traditions, specifies that “in Greek
katabolé rather means throw (
deicere), i.e., throw down”. Souls were thrown, against their will, from the upper sphere to the lower one and “coated in ticker and harder bodies (
crassioribus et solidioribus)”, and for this reason “every creature groaneth, to delivered from corruption” (the reference is to Rom., 8, 20: “the creature was subjected to vanity, not willing it”... and waits and groans in the hope of being freed from corruption); but for the Gnostic, freeing oneself can only mean patiently picking up the sparks and parcels of divine light that have been confused in the darkness, separating them, one by one, from the mud, and leading them back to their celestial homeland.
That modern culture, of which Montalian gnosis is here only an exemplary case, is permeated and interwoven by Gnostic motifs, is evident in the far from obvious fact that also the masterpiece of twentieth-century philosophy defines the human condition with the term
Geworfenheit (being thrown), which according to all evidence is nothing but a translation of the Origenian
katabolé and the Valentinian
probolé. But a Gnostic motif was somehow also present in
Platonic philosophy, not only in the image of the two different horses which make driving the soul’s chariot uncomfortable and painful in
Phaedrus, but also in the anecdote of
Theaetetus from which we began, and in the myth of the cave in the
Republic. The problem every time is for man to somehow reconcile incompatible elements, black and white, mud and stars, the darkness of the cave and the splendour of the sun. The good is, indeed, always intertwined with evil and can only give itself as a parcel, an interstice or a crumb of light confused in the darkness: like an iris in the mud, according to the perspicuous image of one of Montale’s supreme poems,
L’anguilla (
The Eel). Not only that, like
l’anguilla (which in Italian is, on the other hand, a perfect anagram of
“la lingua”, i.e., the tongue), the “spark” or the “brief rainbow” of good exists only “squirming through / stones interstices of slime”, through “drought and desolation”, but here the risk is that the Gnostic, who must separate the sparks of light that remained imprisoned in the slime, ends up, against his will, transforming the darkness from which he had to escape into an idol.
The fact is that, given originally together the dualism of good and evil and their confusion, neither of the two principles is capable to sort the other out. The spark of light has got so stuck in the mud that it cannot completely separate from it, nor does the mud know how to disjoin itself entirely from the iris that so affectionately surrounds it. In the Gnostic paradigm they form, as they say, a system, and the unwary who strives to return them to their supposed original separation can only be left empty-handed. Thus the poet with his feet in the mud, who heroically tries to keep his eyes fixed on the stars, is no longer able to separate them from the slime, of which they are just an iris or a glimmer. He is no longer capable of pulling himself out of the well into which, like Thales, he has slipped.
Zanzotto was rightly able to define Montale’s universe by writing that for him “human destiny is to ‘inter oneself’, to be reduced to sediment, to ‘less than what / the silted ditch took away from you’, it is discovering oneself as viscous and painful inertia... in the frightening matrix of a truth that is entirely and only earthly. Indeed, it should be called ‘earthy’, just as earthy is the man of Montale, made of a mud almost randomly springing up in life, but always tending to fall back into himself”. The angel who should redeem this interred life is now only, as in the eponymous poem of 1968, a “black angel”, “neither heavenly nor human”, “of ash and smoke” or, as in a later poem, just an “inexpungible typo”. And it is significant that the motivation of the
Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to the poet in 1975 explicitly mentions “a vision of life without illusions” — the illusion in question being that stars can ever be separated from slime. Perhaps it would have been better for the poet — as for every man — to reverse the youthful motto into keep feet in the stars and eyes in the mud.
The evocation of the “poor / bewildered Nestorian” in
Iride (
Iris), the poem that opens the section
Silvae of
La bufera (
The Storm), allows to specify the particular nature of Montalian “gnosis”, which we are interested in defining with greater precision here. The followers of
Nestorius, Patriarch of
Costantinopole from 428 to 432 and condemned as a heretic at the
Council of Ephesus (431), asserted the presence in Christ of two natures, the divine one and the human one, but deny that they were united hypostatically, i.e., ontologically in one only person (or
ypostasis). Unlike the
Monophysites, who recognised in Christ only the divine nature, Nestorius asserted, like his opponent
Cyril,
Patriarch of Alexandria,
diphysitism, but did not intend the union of the two natures, according to the model that Cyril managed to impose on
Rome,
kath’ypostasin, that is, ontologically in one only essence, but only in a moral sense, so to speak, through the person (
prosopon) of Christ, distinct from
ypostasis. Thus duality, in some way, prevails over unity, which, entrusted only to the moral person of Christ, is somehow weakened; and this is why Nestorians were accused, wrongly, of professing two people in Christ.
One understands, then, why Montale was fascinated by the “poor Nestorian”: the union between human and divine, mud and stars, is never accomplished once and for all, but only, instantaneous and imperfect, “in the sip and the crumb”. In
Imaginary interview of 1946, Montale asserts it without reticence, when commenting on the female figure in
Iride (
Iris), “continuer and symbol of eternal Christian sacrifice”: “He who recognises her is the Nestorian, the man who knows best the affinities that bind God to incarnated beings, not the silly spiritualist or the rigid and abstract monophysite”. The affinity is not a hypostatic union, by essence and nature, but a difficult and never definitive affinity “in the night of the world”, “
because — finishes the poem, defined in the interview as “key to it all, terribly so” —
His work (which into yours / is transformed)
must be kept up”. The redemption, recognition and tracing back to the origin of the sparks of light mixed in the mud never ends, it must be constantly resumed. At least until, from
Satura onwards, the poet abandons his Gnostic theology and confesses himself openly skeptical, if not desperate. If there is a God, it is a God “who doesn't lead one to salvation for he knows / nothing about us and obviously / nothing about himself”.
For this reason theologians carefully postpone, but not without a good dose of hypocrisy, their ultimate detachment from the paradise to come, when the resurrected body, having become spiritual, will show its glory and the iris will no longer be more than a halo around what was once the slime of the flesh. It is not a question here of a lack of faith, with respect to which men are always at fault. If faith is, indeed, according to the apostle, “the existence of things hoped for”, the poet, like perhaps every man, does not believe enough in the things that do not seem to exist and are instead more real than those that seem to exist and, as theologians suggest, must defer the things hoped for in another world.
Against this impossibility of gnosis to sort its own irreducible dualism out, one must first raise a political objection. And if the strategy must be political, a first tactical move will be to move here and now all that theologians refer to the future paradise. If the glorious body will exhibit all its organs in paradise, including those of reproduction and defecation, then it will be better to snatch this hypothetical glory from the future to bring it back to its only possible place: our body, here and now. The glorious body is not another body, it is the same body, freed from the spell that separates it from itself, splitting mud from stars, light from dark. Everything, as
Chassidim teaches, can be a spark of divinity and, as the crude, sneering language of the
Talmud suggests, “Three things are akin to the world to come, and they are as follows: the sun, the
Sabbath, and
tashmish”, a word that means both sexual intercourse and defecation.
If good is mixed with evil, if the iris cannot be separated from the mud, this does not mean that they exist only negatively. On the contrary, iris and mud are both modes or modifications of God, each expression — differently, but on the same footing — of his substance. Gnostic dualism falls and cancels itself out in the formula
Deus sive natura, in which
sive does not cancel the difference, but transforms it into a political task, so to say.
Sive is etymologically connected to the conjunction
sic, which means “so” (hence the Italian “sì” as an expression of assent). The ways are the “so” of the divine substance, its simple giving itself, its consent to itself. But the place of this
sive, of this “so” and of this assent, is in each man, who alone can confer existence here and now to the things hoped for. God is nature, the stars are mud not because of an absurd, impossible identity, but because man offers them the place of their mutual consent, of their arduous but simple coming together. Darkness – as has been suggested by another poet – is the work of the light and nothing of what happens in the world can do without their collaboration, of which each man is a guest and middleman. In this sense, we need to reread the precious
Piccolo testamento (
Little Testament) which concludes
La bufera and contains perhaps the least elusive, even if contradictory, testimony of Montalian political creed. If the iris is here the “testimony / of a faith too often fought for, / of a hope that burned slower / than a green log on a fire”, then it cannot be true, as yet the poet immediately seems to suggest, that “a story doesn’t last / except in ashes and persistence / is only extinction”. In the verses that conclude the
Testament, Montale indeed finds, for the first, and perhaps last time, the core of an explicitly political assertion: “Each knows his own: his pride / was not an escape, nor was humility / mean, and the tenuous ray that glimmered down / there was not a spark from a match”.
