The Crepuscular and Futurist cognitive paradigms share the same urge to redefine knowledge, beyond the boundaries of rational thought and scientific verifiability. Yet, by experiencing new cognitive approaches based on intuition and irrational impulses, they take divergent routes. Schematizing, Crepuscular poets conduct a war of attrition against the bourgeois system of knowledge, accepting even passive self-destruction, in order to show the inherent precariousness of the modern apparatus. By contrast, Futurism performs a frontal attack on a ground that has already been eroded, accelerating the pace of destruction through new, cognitive, war-like action.
130 Having the capacity to comprehend more, to seeing more, to feel more. To widen one’s orbit at least some
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Mocking the Positivist model of a “knowledge in progress”, which is continuously under a theoretical and practical process of formulation and verification, Crepuscularism proposes two complementary models of passive knowledge: contemplative mysticism and intellectual ataraxia. Combining these tendencies, Corazzini’s poetics of cognition focuses on showing that, as the most quotidian things are the most enigmatic, the ego accesses their mystery only when lingering in a status of passive osmosis with surrounding matter. Thus, reverting the traditional cognitive patterns, Crepuscular persona do not engage in the action of knowing, but are known by things and infused with their meaning. This process of “participative revelation” finds a linguistic reflection in the peculiar use of sapere in Roman Crepuscularism. The verb usually appears in negative utterances that deny the possibility of an active, positive cognition. Knowledge is, in a Socratic venue, awareness of not knowing. In the Crepuscular poetic parole, sapere strays from the semantic field of “to know”, or to have a certain practical know-how, and trespasses on semantics of the verb conoscere, meaning to be acquainted with somebody, usually within the field of human relationships. By blending the knowledge of people and things, Crepuscularism adds another shade, playing with the Latin root of sapere, the verb sapio, “to taste of” or “to have the flavor of” and only figuratively “to discern.” “To know” implies a direct assimilation of an external matter, which is tasted, swallowed, and absorbed by the body, while the brain simply detects its flavor. The external thing becomes the body, through a directly incarnated form of cognition, assimilated and secured into the body. This particular use is exemplified, for instance, in the poem “Dai «Soliloquî di un pazzo»” [From the soliloquies of a fool], in which, reversing the expected order of the ego-object cognitive process, Corazzini describes Christ’s cross as: “I chiodi terribili che sanno / le ossa dell’uomo e il legno della croce” [The terrible nails that know / the bones of the man and the wood of the cross] (O 136). The hermetic verse intertwines with all
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the shades of the verb sapere, as the cross never understood Jesus’s divine nature, yet physically penetrated his human flesh and soaked itself with Christ’s martyrdom, becoming a synecdoche of the passion itself. This model of incarnated revelation is the kernel of Corazzini’s gradual
elaboration of intuitive knowledge as messianic cognition. Crepuscular knowledge is a waiting for the final disclosure of a meaning that is unintelligible and only graspable through
instantaneous epiphanies, in which mind and body are pervaded by a vague sense of inexplicable plenitude.
In the last two collections, Piccolo libro inutile [Little useless book] and Libro per la sera della domenica [Book for Sunday Evening] Corazzini explores messianic cognition, illustrating a type of mystical knowledge that lies in what Giorgio Agamben defines as “the limit concept of religious experience in general, the point in which religious experience passes beyond itself and calls itself into question insofar as it is law” (Homo Sacer 39). Crepuscular mystic cognition is an annihilation of the rational will that allows for a totalizing experience, in which the ego projects itself in an over-dimension beyond life, death, and physical constrictions. In a letter to Antonello Caprino, dated August 1905, Corazzini expresses his desire to dissolve his human materiality in a suspension of his existence that signals a revelatory encounter with a mysterious
non se quoi, which he has always half-seen:
La dedizione del mio corpo al Nulla o al Tutto, secondo l’ora che passa, s’intensifica in un desiderio così folle e così enorme come se nella cessazione della mia esistenza io intravedessi ciò che tiene gli occhi del prigioniero, rimasto per un caso, privo di sorveglianza. (O 284)131
131 The dedication of my body to the Nothing or to the Everything depends on the time, intensifies in such a foolish
and enormous desire, as if in the end of my existence I glimpsed what captures the eyes of the prisoner who happened to remain without surveillance.
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From a cognitive perspective, both the intensification of life through extreme forms of spiritualism and the anticipation of death, as the moment of access to a potentiated knowledge, imply a lingering in a cognitive limbo, suspended, waiting for the messianic revelation. While calling for his death and the advent of a new cognitive era, Corazzini subtly constructs a self- divinization through identification between his autobiographical, suffering poetic ego and the coming Messiah. Through a careful dissemination of biblical hints, the fanciullo poeta surpasses his terrestrial passion to elect the destiny of a divine figure, who syncretically intertwines
Dionysian and Christological themes of redemptive martyrdom and the copresence of the human and divine.132 This call for self-divinization also emerges in Corazzini’s private writing; in a letter to Giuseppe Caruso, from August 1906, he confesses his perverse dream of elevation:
Qualcosa di soprannaturale è in me. Io mi sento, oggi, buono e casto come Gesù. Potrei predicare alle turbe,
potrei salire al cielo come S. Francesco. Io credo essere divenuto anima. Ho un sorriso e una pietà per tutti. Vorrei baciare i moribondi di ogni ospedale. Io credo, inoltre, che tanta bontà non può essere che perversità camuffata. Oggi, come dice Maupassant, ho veramente l’impressione dello spuntare delle ali alle spalle. (O
292)133
Corazzini himself admits that extreme forms of agape and pietas could hide something wicked, alluding to the fact that under his pretense of self-debasement he is aspiring to the unlimited cognition of the übermensch. Heseeks to gain access to a superior form of life at an ontological level, namely to a life that represents the key to the divine dimension (Villa,
Introduction 52). The divinization of Corazzini’s poetic persona and the consequent acquisition
132 As Massimo Fusillo explains in his monograph Il dio ibrido. Dioniso e le “Baccanti” nel Novecento, the
association between Dyonisus and Christ had already been a motif in German Romanticism, which spread in Modernist culture with Nietzsche’s The birth of tragedy (9).
133 Something otherworldly is in me. I feel, today, good and chaste like Jesus. I could preach to the crowd, I could ascend to the sky like Saint Francis. I believe that I became soul. I have a smile and pity for everybody. I would like to kiss the moribund people in any hospital. I also believe that so much goodness cannot be anything other than concealed perversity. Today, as Maupassant says, I really have the impression that wings are coming out of my shoulders.
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of a new cognitive capacity shines through one of his final poems, not included in any collection, “Alberto, se, meravigliosamente” [Alberto, if marvellously]. The poem preannounces the ascent of the poetic ego to Heaven as an elected figure, splendidly appearing as a vision to a friend, “Alberto, se, meravigliosamente / io mi salissi a la celeste sfera / e intorno ai miei capelli una raggiera / lucesse e ti ridesse nella mente” [Alberto, if, marvellously, / I would ascend to the celestial sphere / and around my hair a halo / shined and smiled to you in your mind] (O 213).
Corazzini takes a further step in his literary testament, “La morte di Tantalo” [The death of Tantalus], which can be read as the manifesto of the Crepuscular cognitive rebellion. Retelling the Genesis’ myth, the poet combines the biblical banishment with the mythological punishment of Tantalus,134 the poem emphasizing the act of eating the “forbidden fruit” from the tree of knowledge—the grapes of the golden vineyard—as a moment of acquiring nonhuman cognitive power. When the man and the woman decide to nourish themselves with those grapes, they choose to impose their own judgment over traditional but senseless law:
Noi morivamo tutti i giorni cercando una causa divina […] Ma quel giorno già vanìa e la causa della nostra morte non era stata rinvenuta (O231)135
Only when they dare break that cognitive prohibition, eating the golden grapes and drinking the golden water, do they embrace self-divinizing life and disclose the revelation: Embracing knowledge as the creative, pure possibility of being, beyond laws and ontological
134 Tantalus was a demigod who killed his son Pelops during a banquet, as a sacrifice to the gods. The gods refused
the offer and Tantalus’s punishment for his act was to stand in a pool of water under a fruit tree with low branches, unable either to drink the water or to pick the fruit.
135 We were dying all our days / seeking a divine cause […] // But that day was already vanishing / and still the
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prescriptions. Theirs is a “story of superior individuals who have been able to create and to justify themselves on their own” (Vattimo 10), like primordial matter imposing its meaning on future human life.
In Gozzano’s poetry, there is a strong, contemplative attitude toward knowledge that ranges from the spiritualistic abandonment of the first collection (La via del rifugio) to the hyper- intellectualism of I colloqui. As with Corazzini, Gozzano’s poetic world reveals a rich
complexity beneath its quotidian and colloquial appearance. The problem of reading Gozzano lies primarily in the ironic tone of his poetry, which often creates a “cognitive barrier” for the reader, making it purposefully impossible to discern where parody ends and a more sympathetic voice arises. This trait is further accentuated in his first collection, as its episodic trend and the lack of a narrative development do not allow for an all-encompassing interpretation. The
embedded complexity of La via del rifugio casts doubts on recent interpretations of this work as a path toward the contemplative nirvana of Buddhism and a celebration of a new ideological conscience focused on Buddhism, egotism, and nihilism (Villa, Il Crepuscolarismo 123). In the introductory poem of the collection, the poetic persona exhibits a spiritual abandonment and declares his passive cognitive attitude towards the hustle and bustle of life: “Non agogno / cha la virtù del sogno: / l’inconsapevolezza.” [I don’t desire / anything else other than the virtue of dream / unawareness] (TP 70). Yet, this status of absence of any cognitive goad never achieves the mystical climax of Corazzini’s poetry. In Gozzano’s poetic reflection, the desire for spiritual annihilation is always contrasted with the lucid awareness of needing an answer that neither the dying Positivism of the nineteenth century nor the rising Mysticism can fully provide. At this fork, Gozzano’s poetry explores a third route: the dimension of doubt, as he suggests in this letter to Candida Bolognino dated Bombay [Mumbay], April 8 1912:
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Amo la religione buddista. Si polissi vivere qui, mi farei buddista, allora imparerei a disprezzare questo fragile corpo che solo vi dà delle noie e delle malinconie.
Oh, questa vita di pura contemplazione, questo solo sogno di vita ultraterrena, come deve essere dolce! Lei mi disse un giorno che era uno scettico! Ride ancora di me, del mio scetticismo? Ora vorrei farmi buddista. Sarebbe bello diventare asceta. Forse finirò la mia vita in completo ascetismo. Sara la religione di Budda che mi avrà portato a cio?136
Although exalting this contemplative lifestyle, the author interjects his yearning for asceticism with hypothetical constructions that sound far from an actual plan for conversion. Undoubtedly, Gozzano nourished certain interests in Eastern spiritualism, but other passages from Verso la cuna del mondo reveal a superficial adherence to Buddhist spirituality and a deep inability to let go of the occidental perspective. Commenting on the Silva-lingam, an apotropaic symbol seen in an Indian temple, Gozzano openly expresses the “doubts of his occidental, profane mind” (Journey 12) about a religion that uses an emblem of fertility, but regards not being born as the supreme good. Furthermore, in a passage from “Natale a Ceylon” (Christmas at Ceylon), the writer admits to being homesick and definitely removes his orientalist mask, stating that “one can deceive himself to be a Robison Crusoe, or a Buddhist cenobite” but it is
impossible to negate a European essence, based on “thousands of years of […] evolution and twenty centuries of Christianity” (Journey 49).
La via del rifugio’s references to concepts that recall the Buddhist cyclic cosmology of death and rebirth might be a visible influence of the poetry and lectures of Arturo Graf—a writer and professor of Italian Literature at the University of Turin, who exercised a great influence on Gozzano and other young intellectuals. His poetry, hung between Positivism and an ascendant
136 These excerpts from the letter to Mrs. Bolognino are quoted by Vincenzo Faraci (cfr. cit. article). I love Buddhist
religion. If I could live here, I would become Buddhist, I would then learn to despise this fragile body that only gives you annoyances and melancholies. Oh, this life of pure contemplation, this only dream of afterlife, how it must be sweet! One day you told me that I was a skeptic! Do you still laugh at me, at my skepticism? Now I would like to become Buddhist. It would be nice to become an ascetic. Maybe I will end my life in complete asceticism, and I believe that Buddha’s religion would lead me to that.
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religious inspiration, offers a model for Gozzano’s split attitude between atheism and visceral attachment to a mysterious otherness. Graf’s poetry testifies to the collapse of the Positivist pillars and the emergence of a new, doubtful cognitive approach towards existence that the young generation inherited. Gozzano borrows the attitude of “trapping” very broad concepts of human and cosmic life—“il Tutto e il Niente”, “il Tempo e lo Spazio” [the Whole and the Nothing, the Time and the Space]—in easy verses (Guglielminetti, Introduzione xv) from his master. Contemplating these notions, Gozzano remains at the threshold of the “too human fable of a God” (TP 79) and the irrational need to find an answer beyond that fable. “Corrupting” Positivism with his spiritualist search, Gozzano envisions the natural cyclical transformation of energies as a form of metempsychosis. Thus, even the Positivist evolutionary model expressed by the old housekeeper of “L’analfabeta” [The illiterate] opens the space for a syncretic
conception of knowledge as a continuous migration of energies from one form of life to another. Cognition passively moves and regenerates, as in a retelling of the phoenix myth, which is far from a poetic expression of Positivist positions, although the protagonist of the poems is the spokesman for a rustic pseudo-Positivism, learnt from direct contact with Nature:137
Dice: «Ritorna il fiore e la bisavola. Tutto ritorna vita e vita in polve: ritorneremo, poiché tutto evolve
nella vicenda d’un’eterna favola». (TP 78-79)138
137 It is possible to see Graf’s influence when comparing Gozzano’s verses with this text from Le rime della selva:
“Niente dura o soggiorna / Tutto in brev’ora è distrutto; / Ma nulla s’annulla, e tutto, / O prima o dopo, ritorna.” [Nothing lasts or stays; / Everything in a little is destroyed; / But anything nullifies, and everything, Sooner or later, returns] (“Tutto? Niente.” 19).
138 The flower and the ancestor are able / to come back. All come back, all turn to dust. / We’ll come back.
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It is also fundamental that Gozzano uses an old, illiterate man to explain the principles of conservation of mass and energy, as if, in a general crisis of “faiths”, even scientific laws were a faith among other fairy tales and myths in which Gozzano’s generation no longer believes but have yet to be completely replaced. To the eyes of the young man, who speaks with the eighty- year-old servant, this old atheist becomes the symbol of a solemn and mystical wisdom. Thus, at the end of the poem, through a flashback that carries the poetic I back to his childhood, Positivist wisdom, which was firmly anchored in reality and the Risorgimento history, is merged with infantile, exotic images and mythopoeic reconstructions: wars and alien lands vividly fire up a child’s mind.
In La via del rifugio, Gozzano symbolically burns the Positivist faith, but still passively accepts that literature and love can provide reassuring certainties, or at least “sheltering” illusions that protect from a real cognition of life. In I colloqui Gozzano retells the cognitive crisis of La via del rifugio, adopting the voice of an ironic and lonely sophist who exhibits a certain
detachment from any Idealist or Positivist position. This practical wisdom is a form of passive contemplation of the life that has passed by, never understood or lived, but only “read” and filtered through books. In his second collection, Gozzano develops the awareness of having lived in a proto-Truman Show, in which his life and cognition has always been projected on an
imaginary screen; it has always been meta-life and cognition. As he admits in the opening poem of the collection, that was not life:
Ma un bel romanzo che non fu vissuto da me che io vidi vivere da quello
che mi seguì, dal mio fratello muto. (TP138)139
139 But a lovely novel I could never be / the hero of: I looked on while another / lived it, my silent brother following
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He has been his own cognitive spectator, watching life exhaust its meaning, while being known, lived, and cannibalized by his own literary projection. Unlike Corazzini, Gozzano’s provocative cognitive passivity never evolves into mystic nihilism. It turns into an ironically debased, skeptic pragmatism of a “petty and bourgeois life”, which is finally embraced in its quotidian and elusive banality. Although feigning intellectual detachment and acceptance of