For those who do not know him, I present the poet and filmmaker Pasolini:

It’s the 1950’s, he’s in his thirties, contemplating the grave of the Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), one of his great heroes. Pasolini strove to carry the torch of Gramsci—who had suggested that it’s possible to bring about social change by using the “forbidden voices” of the proletariat—by becoming a civil poet, making art (poems and movies) about the impoverished multitudes who lived a frustrating and neglected existence in the slums on the margins of cities like Rome and Naples, and spoke in dying dialects.

I will share a few fragments of my translation of his long poem, “The Ashes of Gramsci.” (Caveat: it’s work from the last few days: unfinished!) Pasolini’s diction is sometimes technical, sometimes in dialect, and is generally way above my head—but I’ve plunged into the deep end, with a cracked snorkel, a leaky mask, and one flipper. Translating makes me feel like a reckless, drunk Santa Claus, shoving my oversized green bag down a dirty chimney, which will not fit unless I toss away many of the glittering toys; then I find myself in a strange house with a sad skinny bag of gifts, many of which are dirty and broken.

OK here goes. Assuming that good poetry should hold without line breaks, I transcribe this as prose, though the original is written in irregular tercets. Keep the physical Pasolini in mind, in his raincoat, gazing at the grave. The “you” is, of course, Gramsci.

from The Ashes of Gramsci

…humble brother, with one thin hand you describe the ideal that brightens (but not for us: you are dead, and we equally dead, with you, in the wet garden) this silence. You can’t, you see?, be buried in this weird place, still confined. Boring aristocrats around you. Listen: a few strokes of the anvil from the machine shops of Testaccio, fading, the evening slumbering: between the wretched shelters, bare heaps of cans, scrap iron, where a shop boy sings a dirty song, finished his day, while outside it stops raining.

…………………………………..

Rough climate, sweet history, between these walls the ground oozes other ground; this wet remembers other wet; and resonates with familiars, of latitudes and horizons where English forests and lakes scatter across the sky, between green prairies like a phosphoric billiard table, or emeralds: “And O ye Fountains…”—the pious invocation…

…………………………………..

A red rag, like those rolled up on the necks of partisans and, close to the urn on the pale ground, different reds, two geraniums. There you are, outlaw, with enduring elegance, uncatholic, listed among dead strangers: The ashes of Gramsci… I approach you, trapped between hope and old mistrust, by chance in this thin greenhouse, before your grave, your spirit here among them, free. (Or is it something else, perhaps, more ecstatic and humble, drunk teen sex in symbiosis with death…)

…………………………………..

I attack myself like the poorest poor, with their humiliating hopes, like them I beat myself each day, in order to live. But in my distressing condition of desire, I possess: the most thrilling of the bourgeois states, the most absolute. But how can I possess history: it possesses me, it illuminates: but what good is the light?

When I ache for the ache of a woman, there is another ache inside the second. An ache for home, no matter where I am. A third ache. Sometimes, walking with my cigar along a cobblestone street, I feel another ache inside that one. This is for a home inside home, an archetypal place which I will call Rome. Many call it Paris, a central hope for a sacred locus which contains all the excess and adventure of the soul. An axis mundi that seems to crystallize our desire for being on earth. There is, I think, a fifth ache as well, a central stillness within that Rome of the heart. I imagine it’s silly to literally travel to Rome or Paris or Dharmsala in order to unpeel these layers. Surely it’s possible in a windless room in Musquodoboit Harbour. But I seem to need the displacement and trepidation of the physical journey, or else the first ache becomes torturous.

Walking alone the other night along the powerful Tiber river toward the Vatican, referring often to my cartoon tourist map of the city, watching the myriad couples and old ladies with groceries and priests stroll by, I heard the distinct notes of Lady Gaga’s “Poker Face.” Naturally I followed it along the river path. What would I find? A disco? A circus? A concert? Finally I came across a tent, and behind that a tiny skating rink, the size of a tennis court. Six or seven Italians were skating under floodlights. It was so nice. A father with two kids. One couple: the girl kept falling down and the boy helped her, laboriously, laughing. Everyone seemed to have weak ankles.

But there was one chubby older man with a grey moustache and a tight sweater who was spinning madly, like an Ice Capades diva. He wasn’t a very good skater, but could spin like a demon. He twirled and twirled, slowed down, and then keep twirling. He tilted his head back and became a kind of blur. Just when you thought he would fall down from lightheadedness, he stopped briefly and then began spinning in the other direction. He would skate one lap around the small circuit, and then spin.

There was nothing normal about his spinning. It was beautiful. I thought, he is spinning for God. But then I knew in my heart that his wife had died and that he spun for her. Her name was Tiziana. She used to scratch his back before he fell asleep. Now he doesn’t even keep a cat. He is so lonely. Only in the dizzying centre of his spin can he forget her.

He was, I think, as he spun, the central ache in the Rome of the heart, a strange still point in the chaos of existence, with Michelangelo’s Vatican dome, the imposing Castel Sant’ Angelo, and the dark Tiber as dim backdrops. He waited out three or four forgettable songs, till everybody else drifted away. It was getting late. I thought he’d leave too, but then the Flashdance song (“What a feeeeling”) came on, and he drifted pensively toward the middle of the ice again.

you, the tarot card reader of Piazza Navona, whose hunger reminds passersby that catastrophe is always near; you, the woman, who has suffered a stroke violent as drowning, mind sinking like a palace in Venice, talking homicidally and slurred into your collar; you, Bangladeshi grocers, waving oranges and radios on the main arteries, locked outside the gates of empathy; you, lovers calling out to each other from cars, in earshot of the blind cats of Torre Argentina; you far-off groans of trains, and you, the madman leaning over your guitar like Picasso’s blue man; you, the Nigerian in the bus station line-up, longing for the touch of a friend, under a cloud of circling swifts; you, the sex-addict, eyes veiled, chain-smoking in the bare cold beauty of Campo Dei Fiori; you, the pantomime in gold skin-paint, utterly still but for your eyes, which follow a howling ambulance; you, the exhausted vacationer seated at an unmarked ruin, like a tomato on a porcelain washbasin, overripe, downright purple, sick with the desire to be cut; you, the bald man in a tight military jacket, thinking one immutable thought, Arbeit Macht Frei; you, the tall Icelandic woman busting the balls of your cowed boyfriend, in a market of flowering poinsettias; you, quiet swaggerer with a sad white imbecile beard; you, the drunk weaving your BMW past a busy schoolyard; you, the manqué in a silk scarf, whose enormous rage, forced to leave the body, must soon present itself somewhere else; you who suffer from vanity, pushing black strollers through Villa Borghese; you, the artist, with an epileptic impulse to reveal all, scratching out private ideograms in a dark cell which only the garbage man will ever see; you, the gum-chewing prostitute who knows of the body’s absolute contempt for the well-being of the spirit; you, the man whispering into a payphone, But I love you, Baby; you tone-deaf singers of the Tiber River; you impatient tourists in the churches of the heart; you passive leerers in this city of daughters; you childless fathers, ingenues, amnesiac heroes hunting for your stories in the gelaterias of Fellini; and you, Rome herself, like an old myopic librarian in gargantuan tattered skirts and bows, reading on Dewey decimal cards the names of books that might never have existed …

One month in Rome. Goal: translate Pasolini, gay Marxist poet / film director (Mama Roma; Salò; Accatone), murdered in 1975. I lived in Italy for a year and a half in the late 90’s, and have been back just once since. After getting a bus from the airport last night, I find a hotel room with one high window looking out onto clay rooftops and balconies. No TV. A little desk to work at. Lovely. I strike out: order a slice of pizza (con verdura), get computer fixed (neighboring Bangladeshis), buy food (Parmigiana cheese, olives, bread, from other Bangladeshis) and a grammar book (“di referimento dell’italiano contemporaneo”). Then take a long walk. On Via Paulina, the last place I lived with my ex-wife Inge, I look up and remember waving up to her on the balcony, from this same narrow cobblestoned lane. She lives in Vancouver now, but the last time I ever saw her was at Termini train station, a few blocks from here.

The Eternal City is dimly familiar. Via Cavour, Coliseum at the edge of the eye. Am I impressed? I smoke my Toscano. Seagulls float, spotlit, at the corner of a palace. I have walked in an inadvertent circle. I collapse into bed. I wake, five a.m., bolt upright, tense. Shower. Read the Pasolini notes. Translating is what being blind must be like, the text an exotic city one touches but can’t see. Words are veiled enough in languages we know.

I wonder if I am becoming too separate. Do I even have the sense to look for love? I’ve never believed less in country or university or Great Thought. I adore being alone in a hotel room, that lonesomeness, an alien city roaring in the window at dawn. Il senso della vita mi ritorna, says Pasolini. “The feel of life returns to me / like it’s always been, the hurt blinder if breathtakingly // full of sweetness. Because, / to a boy it seems he’ll never have what he’s never had.”

This is V.S. Naipaul, not me. But I am a traveler, like him, and only now—after eighteen days, six beds, 7000 kilometres—does my heart laugh when I lay down to sleep, on an air mattress in a London flat in Pimlico. I have stayed four days with my great friend Derek, admiring the relationship he has with his wife Gaby and her daughter Jessica. In their tiny flat, they revolve around each other with grace and respect. With love. I have a great deal to learn.

Derek and I have taken some epic walks, as we used to in Halifax, pausing for coffee and galleries. Noteworthy art: the ugly new paintings of Damien Hirst, and the terrific eerie sculptures of Cornelia Parker: she suspends odd things like the charred remains of a forest fire, or steamrolled silverware, from high ceilings with wires: her recreations hover, very still. In my life I am rarely still. I’m impatient. But poems should live in a still house. So I search for quiet, in sculptures and street cats and breath on my neck. Maybe I’m learning. Recently, when I wake at night, I do not thrash against silence. Jack Gilbert describes waiting: “meaning / without things. Meaning love sometimes dying out, / Sometimes being taken away. Meaning that often he lives / silent in the middle of the world’s music.”

I have begun to ride the tube like a boy with an orchid in his lunchbox. Like I don’t believe in anything. My spine the frame of a paper kite. Smoking at night on Derek’s balcony, we hear Big Ben chime ten times. I am a bit of ash on my own cigar. The Sears tower and the Gherkin behind. The Himalayas ahead.

In high school, a pretty goth girl named Gina with dyed crow-black hair and buck teeth once took me under her wing for a week or so. We made out a few times, went for some walks. She thought I would be “cute” stoned, but the week ended before that happened. One night, as we wandered through the upper floors of a building under construction, she took my hand, said “Hold on,” and leaned back over the dark edge of the building, cement far below. I thought, “You are mad” and, after pulling her to safety, did not reciprocate in this trust game.

I remember her smile, as she leaned against the darkness. I sometimes wonder what would have happened if I’d dropped her. She falls backwards, very slowly. She reaches and is beyond reach.

At times I imagine that everything is falling away from me, that way. It’s all falling off the ledge, all the time. At the JFK airport in Queens, Gate 2 Terminal 7, awaiting my Reykjavik connection to London, these people fall away like ghost-Ginas: the chubby security guard, the little sulky Indian girl with a pony tail and Hello Kitty kitbag, the neat stewards lining up cooly to get on first. Likewise, at the Atlantic Bar & Lounge, a low-ceilinged cheap-rugged waiting room, these enormous TVs with the college football game, this mahogany bar, these computers, this luggage—it all falls away, backwards, like dominos, early memories, exfoliating, becoming, as Rimbaud said art should, relentlessly modern.

My paranoia falls away and I breathe. My joy falls away and I am alone in a forest of luggage and nervous tour groups. A few of my beloveds have been falling away for years, but are still vital with colour. They peel back like onions with many skins, whose centre seems infinitely veiled and dense. Others fall away three hundred times or twice and are gone, leaving no scent, as if they were never here.

This ache on the A-Train heading downtown, as I watch an old woman reading King Lear. What am I holding onto? I have no cause for worry on earth, honest, but my heart tells me I will die if this throb gets worse. Another brutally cold windy day. In Central Park I see a dove face down in the snow, flapping its wings pathetically. I climb a small fence, pick it up. It folds shut in my gloved hands, eyes gluey, yellow at tail-end, very large. Maybe it’s cold, I think, so I tuck it between my vest and coat, right hand holding it gently against my chest, left holding my coat shut, clumsily. I walk like this, very slow, aware of my precious package, a few feathers poking out but I don’t think anybody sees. Manhattan is used to men with possible broken arms drifting through the park with something under their coats. At a skating rink is a fenced area warmed by steam, a choice spot. I lower him down. After a sec he is flapping his wings helplessly, like before.

I stand in front of Edward Hopper’s “Early Sunday Morning.” Sad empty storefronts at dawn, fifth floor of the Whitney. The dove has reminded me of a very hurt sparrow in Piraus Greece, which I suffocated and dropped off a dock. Om ne padme hum. Terrible! I will not forget the piece of blue string she held in her right claw. A bit of her house. When she died, she dropped the string. Georgia O’Keeffe’s “Black Abstraction” (third floor) depicts a small white light in the elbow joint of the world, glowing fiercely. On the night subway, an impoverished guy sleeps holding the strap of his sad little kitbag. My heart, too, clings to its string. What string? Nothing. It clings to nothing.

Across from my loveable godfather, Uncle Mike. Everyone is speaking to everybody else. A man in a motorized wheelchair, the drawstring on his hoodie pulled so tight that his face looks a little bit like an asshole, screams at the woman next to him. Out of the bitter cold comes a lanky man who knocks fists with the chubby Hispanic couple in the booth behind us. A black cop in a moustache shovels mashed potatoes and gravy into his mouth out of a Styrofoam bucket, nods his head to the loud 80’s funk chimed in through cheap speakers.

I envy their openness and confidence. I’ve wanted it since I was a shy kid visiting Manhattan from Nova Scotia, dwarfed by my charismatic relatives. Now I’m 40, and not much has changed. I admire the audacious man in the wheelchair, with what I imagine is my Raskolnikovian frown. A long lineup at the drive-through. A mobile phone with a Lady Gaga ringtone. The windows to the street bright and cold are slashed with saliva and sweat and hands that grab and grab. Like lungs are the fans deep inside the KFC. This room-box a glass consciousness inside which we can agree that six (6) wings of domestic fowl cost $3.99, and that speaking and eating fearlessly and with heart is a cardinal virtue.

And how wonderful, the violence and warmheartedness and paranoia of the American people. Days before I caught a plane to come here, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, in an attempt to blow up a passenger jet to Detroit, concealed powder explosives in a condom strapped to his inner left thigh which he attempted to detonate using a small syringe of liquid chemicals (pentaerythritol tetranitrate), but ended up just scorching his own leg. Further alarmist security measures. Here, every news channel speaks to The Guilt: who shall be hanged, who spared. TV ads sell non-smoking pills and erection pills and sleeping pills that might cause the tongue to swell up or fatigue or maybe suicide. Everyone is awake and ON and magnetic as hell and very good at what they do, even if what they do is just act crazy.

My childhood memory of Uncle Mike is of a sprightly man giving out shiny shoes with buckles to local kids out of the back of his car. A great friend of my Dad’s. I haven’t seen him in 26 years. Six years ago, robbed in the financial district where he worked, he was clocked on the head with a gun butt. From this came a brain infection, and now the onset of Parkinson’s. His eyes have that same sparkle, but his fingers shake as he raises the fried breast to his lips.